news and observer

Unless I missed something, it looks like my metro daily newspaper has featured 15 op-eds over the past week — all written by men.

Of all the missteps the News and Observer has made in recent years, the inclusion of Rick Martinez on their op-ed page is among the saddest. Week after week, N&O executives allow the right-wing zealot to spew Puppetshow talking points across their pages without regard for the damage he inflicts. This week, Martinez heralds the discovery of a supply of oil in North Dakota, which he believes should be cause for "dancing in the streets."

I'm a full-time mom of two little boys under the age of four and I'm voting for Barack Obama. It's time we got past the divisions that have been laid out for us as a nation.

My friends are sick of me talking and writing about the lottery. And when one of my fellow front-pagers recently won a thousand bucks on a $20 ticket, I confess to thinking, "awwww, maybe it's not so terrible." But the truth is, the lottery IS so terrible, as Steve Ford, the editorial page editor at the N&O. wrote today.

To pirate a line from "All the King's Men," North Carolina's state lottery was conceived in sin and born of corruption. We may never learn all the gory details surrounding its passage, but to say that its supporters in the General Assembly finagled it through by hook and by crook pretty much conveys the spirit of the thing.

Lovely day again here in Carolina—at least it was until I read this headline on the front page of the N&O:

Report details civilians' deaths in Marine raids.

The story, from the Washington Post's Saturday edition, opens with this:

WASHINGTON - U.S. Marines gunned down five unarmed Iraqis who stumbled onto the scene of a 2005 roadside bombing in Haditha, Iraq, according to eyewitness accounts that are part of a lengthy investigative report obtained by The Washington Post.

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the squad's leader, shot the men one by one after Marines ordered them out of a white taxi in the moments after the explosion, which killed one Marine and injured two others, witnesses told investigators. Another Marine fired rounds into their bodies as they lay on the ground.