The abysmal voter turnout at my East Charlotte voting place was evident when I entered the lobby at 11 a.m. Tuesday. I was the only voter in the room. The poll worker who gave me the slip of paper to write my name and address on said I was voter No. 107.
For the last 10 years, I have pushed for a long-term community action plan for education. But last week while in Dayton, Ohio, for a discussion about closing the achievement gap, I discovered I was thinking too small.
A few years ago I was sitting in a Georgia elementary school class reading to a rapt and engaged group of students when my school teacher sister stopped me. "Wait a minute, let me go next door and see what's happening," she said.
The signs and placards at Tuesday's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board meeting well illustrated the truth of chairwoman Molly Griffin's words: "This has been an incredibly divisive issue to our community." So divisive, noted at-large member Trent Merchant, that it has pitted brother against brother.
On Wednesday as 61 S.C. House
Republicans clamored for the resignation of South Carolina's loverboy, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do and damn-the-expense GOP governor, GOP Rep. Joe Wilson mistook the chambers of Congress for a barroom – or a health-care town hall – and heckled the president.
It's been 41 years since the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, 40 since Seymour Hersh's reporting revealed to the world what happened. But I was still stunned to read that William Calley, the former Army lieutenant convicted on 22 counts of murder in the infamous massacre, spoke out on the matter and apologized.
Saturday morning, the city of New Orleans will ring a bell signifying the first breach in the levees in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina landed. If the now traditional ringing follows the findings of a U.S. Senate investigative report, it will take place by 8:30 a.m. – when the regional office of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, got the first reports that “a twenty-foot tidal surge … came up and breached the levee system.”
Like the cavalry, N.C. lawmakers finally galloped to the rescue of many laid-off teachers statewide. Given the time it took, they seemed to be astride an old, loaded down mule.
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