America has reached its school choice moment. The decades-long fight to create and expand school choice programs accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and finally played out politically as the eyes of the nation watched the gubernatorial race in Virginia on Nov. 2.
In places where governments are smaller, taxes are lower, regulations are lighter, and property rights are more secure, people tend to be more generous, trustful, and tolerant. Although progressives may find this proposition hard to accept, there’s an ever-increasing stack of empirical evidence to support it.
Can I let you in on a not-so-little secret? The Democrats in Washington don’t really mean it. The Republicans don’t, either.
Read more for a few stories that caught my attention this week. A few of them made me chuckle and some are just plain sad.
At one time, if you were to reach for a shortcut to all things American, you might reach for Mom, Apple Pie, the Flag, all caps because they represented some almost sacrosanct ideals. In some cases, you might even throw in Libraries, because nothing said freedom like the ability to walk into a public library and read about all things American.
When then-Congressman Jim Martin ran for governor in 1984, he sought to combine Reagan-era thinking about free markets with the practical approach to government he’d learned two decades earlier as commission chairman of North Carolina’s most-populous county, Mecklenburg.
The N.C. Court of Appeals has thrown out a retired trial judge's order forcing state officials to transfer $1.7 billion out of the state treasury for education-related spending.
The $1 trillion infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed into law on November 15 attracted the votes of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Washington and has attracted praise from many North Carolina leaders, as well — once more illustrating the fact that bad ideas can also be popular ideas.
While presidents before Abraham Lincoln often delivered Thanksgiving proclamations, he made it a national holiday in 1863. It might seem odd to some modern readers that Thanksgiving reached a pinnacle during America’s bloodiest conflict, but those that are the most in need understand. Trials, affliction, and humility remind us of our dependence on the grace of God.
It was a bombshell that has yet to explode.An attorney arguing recently before North Carolina’s highest court made a startling accusation. He accused the state’s attorney general of working with the governor’s budget officials to bypass government rules for spending taxpayer money.
It was a warm late spring afternoon in 1968 when Faye Nelson, my seventh-grade teacher, decided to take an impromptu, after lunch, field trip to the Carteret County Courthouse. It was a short walk from Beaufort Central Middle School, down Queen Street and then a right on Cedar, with 25 pre-delinquents in tow. I am not sure it was announced, or if she had a shred of parental permission, but there we were, filling the back three rows of a session of open court.
When Carolina Journal first reported first-term U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s intention to abandon his current district next year to run in an adjacent one, CJ quoted Cawthorn as saying his decision was part of “a strategy to increase conservativism in North Carolina.”
