Jack Betts

It may have begun way back with Samuel Minor, a feisty editor on my mother's side of the family who edited a Jacksonian Democratic paper in the 19th century.

Patrick McHenry, reformer. Who knew? The four-term Republican congressman from Cherryville set off a blaze in the political world the other day when he related in an interview how Republicans would use race in remapping political districts to help his party pick up at least two N.C. seats now held by Democrats.

A bill allowing more rock jetties on the N.C. coastline was sidetracked the other day in the state Senate, but it's not because legislators don't want to permit more of them. It's just that legislators disagree on how many more should be allowed.

Here's some good advice for the Republican majority running the legislature: Don't blow it.

Charles Kuralt, the Charlotte newsman who became one of CBS News' most respected reporters, once observed, "If the acid haze of the Blue Ridge ever clears, it will be because Hugh Morton got mad."

A few longtime readers of these pages may not immediately recognize the picture at the bottom of this column.

A Tweet from my great grandfather appeared on my screen the other day while I was looking up something else. I hadn't known he was using social media. He had been dead for 93 years, or so his headstone in Greensboro's Green Hill Cemetery attested.

After two months of the 2011 legislative session, the trend is pretty clear.

When Gov. Dan K. Moore appointed 31-year old lawyer Jim Exum to a newly created Superior Court judgeship in 1967, Exum thought he was giving up politics forever.

If you think politics is a rough business now - and many of us do - it's worth taking a look at what happened 140 years ago next Tuesday.