Politics
There are 1,058 posts filed in Politics (this is page 70 of 106).
Nancy McFarlane
Today, District A city councilor Nancy McFarlane announced her bid to be mayor of Raleigh. Her decision comes a day after Mayor Charles Meeker announced he would not be seeking a second term.
I’ve known Nancy for a while now and expected this decision. She’s smart, funny, and deeply dedicated to serving the citizens of Raleigh. I believe she will serve Raleigh well as its next mayor!
Charles Meeker in 2004
Charles made some very good calls during his tenure as mayor, such as demolishing that butt-ugly old convention center in favor of the new one. This attracted business from out of down and opened up the beautiful Fayetteville Street for traffic and business, returning it to its rightful place as Raleigh’s “Main Street.” He guided the city through two droughts, a huge recession, and numerous storms. He led efforts to implement sustainability throughout the city projects, saving money in the long run. Accolades for our city piled up during his tenure.
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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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