It seems like about a week ago that we were putting out issue number one for this year, and here we are with issue number 52. Time flies when your having fun, so we must be having a blast.
Happy New Year to all our readers, and we can’t wait to see you next year.
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We are introducing a new column on page 25 this week called Street Level. It will run every other week and is a series of columns about actual events written by a Greensboro police officer. Names and identifying details have been changed but the events are real and so is the cop, who, for obvious reasons, will remain anonymous.
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It’s really unfair that the Democrats have a much easier time getting protestors together than Republicans.
The Republicans need to recruit more people to the party that don’t have a lot to do during the day, so they can protest.
All the hoopla down in Raleigh about the changes made by the legislature is just that – hoopla. When the Democrats controlled the legislature and we had a Republican governor, the legislature took even more power away from the governor. When Jim Hunt was elected governor for the very first time in 1976, replacing Republican Gov. Jim Holshouser, the legislature passed a law allowing Hunt to fire any state employee who had been hired in the past five years. More or less any employee hired by Holshouser.
What the current Republican legislature did is not unprecedented, and it’s not even surprising to those who follow politics.
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If this is global warming then I love it. The weather this final week of the year has been beautiful. With highs in the 60s and lows in the 40s or 50s, that’s hard to beat – although it’s not setting any records.
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I promise not to write about dental floss every week, but after making fun of the travel size dispenser of dental floss last week, I had to laugh at myself when, on a trip over Christmas, I pulled out my full-sized container of dental floss only to find that, of that 120 yards listed on the label, only about six inches was left. So I guess one reason to buy a travel size dental floss dispenser would be to make certain that you were actually taking dental floss on the trip and not just an almost empty dispenser.
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It’s kind of odd, but flying home on Christmas Day was fun. Just about everyone, including all the people who had to work, were in good moods and went out of their way to be nice, as if Santa Claus was still watching. I have to say I really admire people who can go to work on Christmas Day and be cheerful about it.
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One of my favorite scenes from that trip was seeing a redheaded girl, about 3 years old, running as fast as she could down the concourse in the Charlotte airport. A few yards behind her, but losing ground, was a young woman running and pushing a stroller as fast as she could, and then strung out behind the woman were two more little girls about 4 or 5 years old who were running and laughing up a storm.
The mother couldn’t move through the crowd pushing a stroller nearly as fast as a nimble 3-year-old who could turn on a dime, but evidently persistence paid off because I saw the whole family back together at baggage claim, hugging a man I presume to be the children’s grandfather.
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Next week we kick off the New Year with the Carolina Journal and its articles on politics, education, health care, crime and everything you need to know about our government in Raleigh. The Carolina Journal has broken stories exposing corruption, conflicts of interest and misuse of public funds.
The Carolina Journal is the source for news about government in North Carolina, and we run 16 pages of the Carolina Journal in the first issue of every month.
