BCN – Columns

“I’m going to put the entire U.S. budget on blockchain,” presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says, “so that any American — every American — can look at every budget item in the entire budget anytime they want 24 hours a day.” That’s a great idea, regardless of whether or not Kennedy is a good candidate or has any chance […]

This month, my office announced a milestone that has been more than six years in the making: North Carolina has ended the backlog of older sexual assault kits.  This achievement is a testament to the hard work, dedication and collaboration of so many people. Survivors and victim advocates, law enforcement agencies, the scientists and administrators at the State Crime Lab, […]

In the middle of the night on Easter Sunday, April 22, 1984, eight people — all religious pacifists — got out of two cars on a dark Orlando road ready to commit a sensational crime to make a faith-based statement against the dangers of nuclear weapons. Having previously been to this spot to case our route, and despite intense fear, […]

I’ve never been more delighted to be mistaken. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column observing that over the first eight months of the 2023-24 fiscal year, the state’s General Fund revenue was down slightly from what was collected during the first eight months of the previous fiscal year. North Carolina faced no “fiscal emergency,” I wrote, but […]

The average house payment in America today is $2,883 on a 30-year mortgage. The average payment on a fixed-rate mortgage is about $3,759. (January stats from businessfinder.com). The average car payment in America is $732 a month for new cars and $532 a month for used cars. (Nerdwallet.com) The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, […]

If Earth Day’s founders were alive to see the tattered remains of their noble mission, they would shake their heads in dismay.  The essential requirement for a sound environment is a stable population, a basic guideline that President Joe Biden’s administration has trampled on in its quest to destroy sovereign America. For three years, Americans have been lectured to about […]

Who is North Carolina’s most famous person? If you go by who got featured in a front-page article in The New York Times last week, the answer is easy: Virginia Foxx. Who is Foxx? She is a U.S. congressional representative from North Carolina who is chair of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce. She and her committee led […]

The phrase “American democracy” once resounded as ringingly on the conservative side of the political divide as it did among the country’s liberals. When Bill Clinton declared America the “world’s greatest democracy,” both Republicans and Democrats nodded their assent. North Carolina, too, seemed to have reckoned with its history of disenfranchisement and committed to a more democratic future. But it […]

An Associated Press story that three of its leading reporters contributed to is a grand example of journalists not seeing the forest for the trees. Colleen Long, Zeke Miller and Seung Min Kim, whose titles respectively are White House law enforcement and legal affairs correspondent, chief White House correspondent and White House reporter, teamed up to write “Biden Determined to […]

“Absent a directed, sustained and articulated policy of no daylight between the United States and Israel,” Matthew Continetti wrote in the Washington Free Beacon on March 29, “the rift between America and her ally will widen and the world will grow more dangerous.” Proof that Continetti had things completely bass-ackward arrived on April 1, when Israeli aircraft attacked an Iranian […]

Maybe there won’t be a copycat mass shooting to grotesquely mark the 25th anniversary of the Columbine massacre on April 20, 1999. But just as we can be certain there will be another solar eclipse, it’s only a matter of time before a hail of bullets will block out the sun for another community somewhere in America. What’s also true? […]

Walking home one evening, I came to an intersection. A family and a couple were waiting for the light, the family bantering about crossing against the light. “My knees won’t let me go that fast!” the grandma warned. “Ma’am, I’m with you!” the man from the couple called out with a laugh. “My wife doesn’t understand the knee thing either.”  […]

The American job market just seems to keep rolling on. The recently released March labor market report showing 300,000 net additional jobs in the country was significantly above economists’ expectations. Employers seem to be ignoring concerns about high interest rates, continuing inflation, recession, foreign wars and domestic political uncertainty — instead, they just keep hiring. The key questions are “Why?” […]

“It is difficult to look at the state of American civic life right now and conclude higher education is doing all we can to prepare our graduates for our democratic republic,” UNC President Peter Hans said during a January meeting of the UNC Board of Governors. His remarks were likely prompted in part by proposed legislation from last year’s General […]

I’ve long been bullish on North Carolina’s community colleges. In the past, I’ve praised the system’s cost-effectiveness, its capacity to serve nontraditional students and the impressive labor market returns for associate degrees and other certificates in such fields as industrial technology, home repair, computer sciences and health care. Today, I’ll offer you three pieces of good news about our colleges […]

The story of a new trend should have women who lived through the feminist revolution and efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment up in arms. If not in arms, at least paying attention. The editorial recounts the story of a young Harvard female undergraduate trolling MBA students “hoping to bag a more established male before her fiercest advantage — […]

As most Americans know, the Internal Revenue Service’s deadline for filing 2023 federal income tax returns fell on April 15 this year. Millions of Americans probably waited until the last minute to file those returns, in part because nobody likes doing the paperwork (even if it’s done on a computer with expert assistance) and in part because they dreaded the […]

Good that defensive anti-missile systems worked against Iran’s barrage. Still, two elements were more suited to the playground than to international politics: face and revenge.  One side bombs the other, and the other thinks that without revenge, it will lose face. The Oct. 7 Hamas attack was vengeful, but so was the Israeli government’s doubling down reaction. Where does “an […]

In just the past year, chemical industries 3M, Dupont, Chemours and Corteva paid out billions of dollars to settle lawsuits over the PFAS chemicals used in their products.  PFAS is an umbrella term that includes Teflon, Gen-X, PFOA and other synthetic fluorinated chemicals, mostly unregulated. You can expect more lawsuits, given that these persistent industrial substances have been linked to […]

A few days ago, with my wife and family, I drove along Interstate 77 up into Virginia and turned west on I-81 driving alongside large, luscious, spring-green pastures toward historic Abingdon, home of the Barter Theater.  From there, we made our way to the Washington Springs United Methodist Church in Glade Spring, where my late brother Mike made his home […]