Politics
There are 1,056 posts filed in Politics (this is page 70 of 106).
East Raleigh got pummelled by the tornado
My favorite hyper-local news source, the Raleigh Public Record, has a Google Map showing the damage in Raleigh from last week’s tornado. My initial conclusion that no area was hit harder in Raleigh than East Raleigh’s Lockwood neighborhood are confirmed here, with whole strings of homes completely destroyed by the storm.
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Why is it whenever I think up something cool to create, Steve Wozniak’s already beaten me to it?
This is from his open letter to the FCC defending Net Neutrality. Like me, Woz knows the value of open networks.
In the earliest days of satellite TV to homes, you would buy a receiver and pay a fee to get all the common cable channels. I had a large family (two adults, six kids) and felt like making every room a lot easier to wire for TV. Rather than place a satellite receiver in each room, I’d provide all the common channels on a normal cable, like cable companies do. In my garage, I set up three racks of satellite receivers. I paid for one receiver to access CNN. I paid for another to access TNT. I paid for others to access HBO and other such networks. I had about 30 or 40 channels done this way. I had modulators to put each of these channels onto standard cable TV channels on one cable, which was distributed throughout my home. I could buy any TV I liked and plug it in anywhere in the home and it immediately watch everything without having to install another satellite receiver in that room. I literally had my own cable TV ‘company’ in the garage, which I called Woz TV, except that I even kept signals in stereo, a quality step that virtually every cable company skipped.
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Our political leaders like to brag about protecting us from terrorists, yet yesterday an actual terrorist walked away a free man yet again. Luis Posada Carriles, who carried out multiple bombings through his past work as a CIA agent, was acquitted of immigration fraud in court yesterday.
The feds have no trouble locking up people who pose no threat to anyone, like Bradley Manning, but can’t seem to keep the cuffs on actual terrorists like Carriles, a man who boasts about the blood on his hands.
The Republican party motto: We want government out
of our lives … and into everyone else’s!
A bill being discussed in the House could require applicants for unemployment benefits to submit to periodic drug testing.
HB 735 requires “periodic drug testing” for unemployment benefit applicants “to ensure that recipients are able and available to work.”
If the applicant’s former employer agrees to pay for the drug testing, the bill says, “Upon the initial filing of a claim for unemployment benefits, the individual must submit to and pass a drug test to establish that the individual is able and available for work.”
via Bill would require unemployment benefit applicants to submit to drug testing | NBC17.com.
I was not a fan of the City of Raleigh’s move to remove free on-street parking from downtown streets. The move was designed to boost revenue for the parking decks downtown, but now a city report says that parking revenue is down and officials are looking again for ways to boost revenue.
One way being considered is to make the parking decks into paid spaces 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This has drawn the ire of some downtown businesses which depend on convenient parking for their customers.
I’ve considered affordable parking to be a key to Raleigh’s downtown renaissance. Should the city press too hard in its money collection, it risks putting the brakes on downtown redevelopment. I hope officials will instead wait until the economic fortunes improve before making any move to squeeze our more parking revenue.
I have often taken issue with his political views, but I was sorry to hear Tom Fetzer is fighting cancer.
From an idiot blogger: get well soon, Tom.
Tom Fetzer, the well-known North Carolina Republican and former mayor of Raleigh, is fighting cancer.
Fetzer, who will turn 56 this month, said Friday that he began feeling sick and run down about six weeks ago. After a CT scan found a mass in his abdomen, he was diagnosed two weeks ago with a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
He recently began chemotherapy treatments at Rex Cancer Center.
“Cancer is a random and unpredictable monster,” he said. “My doctors have given me great confidence I will be able to overcome this. They tell me this form of cancer responds well to chemotherapy.&”
via Former Raleigh mayor Fetzer is fighting cancer – State – NewsObserver.com.
I’ve never understood how some people who’ve made their living serving in the military can turn around and proclaim that government is bad. Especially when they continue to enjoy government-paid health care and other benefits.
It makes me glad that I made it out of the military with my ability to think intact.
The News and Observer ran my opinion piece on municipal broadband today:
Don’t block broadband
BY MARK TURNER
Published in: Other ViewsRALEIGH While farm life has never been easy, at one time it was significantly harder. In the mid-1930s, over 97 percent of North Carolina farms had no electricity, many because private electric companies couldn’t make enough money from them to justify running the lines.
Aware of the transformational effect of electrification and recognizing the need to do something, visionary North Carolina leaders created rural electric cooperatives, beating passage of FDR’s Rural Electrification Act by one month. Through the state’s granting local communities the power to provide for their own needs where others would not, over 98 percent of farms had electricity by 1963, and our state has prospered.
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I was quoted again in the N&O, this time during Thursday’s marathon Parks and Rec Board meeting. We were debating the Moore Square Master Plan and discussed a letter presented by the State Property Office [PDF] objecting to including restrooms and a kiosk on the square. I thought it was ridiculous not to add restrooms to a park anticipated to attract young families:
“I find it a little surprising that the state prefers a line of Porta-Johns,” said Mark Turner. “I don’t know if I could support this [plan] without the structures.”
I’m still mystified at how the state could object to this. The letter signed by Moses Carey, Jr. states that there are public restrooms at the Moore Square Transfer Station and at Marbles Kids Museum. That may be true for the bus station but if Marbles’s restrooms are public it is certainly news to them.
The state cites the historic nature of the square in their objection to structures, yet for over 70 years there were structures on the square: a school and a church. The facilities in the plan are minor by comparison and in the case of the restrooms, tucked underneath the proposed slope. What’s even more ironic is that the state itself obliterated the other two original public squares, building the State Capitol and the Executive Mansion on them.
I think the state should either go along with the proposed plan or put forth one of its own. Better yet, perhaps the city should outright purchase Moore Square from the state. For the last century, the City of Raleigh has been a faithful steward of the square for the state. The city has earned the right to have a greater say in its use!
Moore Square could be such a wonderful gathering place for the folks who visit downtown. It could be a delightful escape from the skyscrapers and asphalt. The Moore Square Master Plan respects the history of the square and adds to it, bringing it into the 21st century. It’s time the state got on board with this centerpiece component of Raleigh’s downtown revitalization.
At some point, legislators — Republicans and Democrats — might want to wake up to the fact that an ongoing battle over high-speed Internet has nothing to do with party, political ideology, or being pro- or anti-business.
It has everything to do with the urban-rural divide in North Carolina.
Any legislator from a rural community who favors a bill that would restrict municipal-owned Internet systems is voting against his or her constituents and against the ability of his or her community to recruit and retain business.
via The Daily Reflector.
