Chris Fitzsimon The death penalty was front-and- center at the General Assembly Tuesday, as lawmakers debated proposals to prohibit the execution of people with a severe mental illness and to provide safeguards to make it less likely that race will play a role in capital cases. After a heated and emotional debate, the House passed…
Category: Opinion
Letter: Support Penny Rich
Penny Rich is participating in Voter Owned Elections not simply because she believes that campaign spending should be reigned in, but because she wants to help put government back into the hands of the public. Voter Owned Elections help to ensure that politicians are accountable to the voters and not to well-funded special interest groups…
Some friendly advice
Those of you about to run, we salute you — well, I do anyway. After covering local races for most of the last two decades, I haven’t found anyone whose candidacy brought nothing to the table. Even some candidates dismissed as running for loopy reasons, or those who just signed up and were rarely heard…
On murals and a life in the arts
Alice Griffin Standing on the sidewalk next to the 14×60-foot wall in Carrboro that’s getting a new Community Rose Garden mural, I realized that I’m allowed the most fun of all, painting roses. Chapel Hill artist Emily Weinstein designed the mural, funded by Strowd Roses and the Orange County Arts Council, and when I came…
The long struggle
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a special message to congress regarding health care sent by the president of the United States. . . . The American people are the most insurance-minded people in the world. They will not be frightened off from health insurance because some people have misnamed it “socialized medicine.â€
Who’s Minding the School?
By Steve Peha Do you ever wonder who really runs a given school or district? I do. And I’m in them all the time. For all the sound and fury of testing and standards, what we have achieved is an ineffective accountability system that is at best a pale form of collective wrist slapping, where…
Letter: Spray paint inappropriate, unattractive
I generally enjoy my walk to and from work in Chapel Hill, particularly this time of year. However, over the last month or so I’ve noticed an increasing amount of public and private property marred by large blotches of brown or black spray paint. Upon closer inspection, I found that each of these ugly paint…
Letter: Tobacco tax works
With all of the recent discussions of smoking bans, FDA regulations and “sin†taxes, it is important to examine the effects of tobacco on the youth of North Carolina and the benefits of a higher cigarette tax. Studies show that an increase in cigarette prices would discourage more young people from starting smoking and encourage…
The crux of the debate
By Chris Fitzsimon It is no secret that the debate over taxes is holding up the passage of a state budget and threatens to prolong the legislative session well into July and maybe beyond. There are really two tax debates raging in the legislative halls, or the Republicans would like there to be, as they…
Hagan’s challenge
About 16 years ago, the state of Florida passed health care reforms that promised at least a beginning for universal coverage offering both public and private options. Pushing through those reforms, which were touted at the time as a possible model for national reform, was Gov. Lawton Chiles. Chiles grew up in agri-industrial Polk County,…
Memo to the president: What you must do to save universal health care
Robert Reich Mr. President: Momentum for universal health care is slowing dramatically on Capitol Hill. Moderates are worried, Republicans are digging in and the medical-industrial complex is firing up its lobbying and propaganda machine. But, as you know, the worst news came days ago when the Congressional Budget Office weighed in with awful projections about…
The summer of our cynical discontent
Chris Fitzsimon This still may end up as the year of change the majority of people in North Carolina and across the country voted for last November, but it feels like much of the optimism and hope are wilting in the Washington summer heat under pressure from the well-heeled lobbyists for business as usual.
End of an era
Beth Mechum It’s been a week since the UNC baseball team lost its elimination game in Omaha, and from all accounts the team is handling it well. I’m not.
Clarification
Some readers have written us about a recent “A Thousand Words†photo column that referenced concerns about violence among black youth. The author did not intend to imply that concern should be applied to all black youth, or exclusively to black youth, and we could have done a better job of editing to make that…
For the record: Lessons unlearned
Ten more years (well, maybe 20) — that’s all the people’s representatives of Orange County and Chapel Hill ask of the historically black neighborhood saddled with a landfill some 37 years ago. Ten years was all they were asked back then, after all. But by golly, through recycling and composting and making that landfill bigger…