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Columns by Steve Ford (2005)

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Steve Ford

Steve Ford has been The News & Observer's editorial page editor since 1989. He grew up in Virginia and lives in Cary. He and his wife, Jeanne, have three sons. Steve can be reached at 829-4512 or sford@newsobserver.com



Tone-deaf on songs, snooping

What we have here is a case of a country's chief executive swollen with power and barreling out of control.

Updated: Dec. 25, 2005 4:16 AM | Full story

Happy if he had a Hammer

Why should the president of the United States be immune from an all-too-familiar weakness? We're thinking here of the occasional urge to shoot off one's mouth.

Updated: Dec. 18, 2005 4:16 AM | Full story

Popularity, power bring a jackpot

There went House Speaker Jim Black, boasting about his continued success as a campaign fund raiser. Bless his heart.

Updated: Dec. 11, 2005 4:32 AM | Full story

The killer who took a number

It was an honor Kenneth Lee Boyd would have much preferred to decline. And we can figure that Gov. Mike Easley would rather not have been saddled with the duty of deciding whether Boyd would become the star injectee at the country's 1,000th execution.

Updated: Apr. 15, 2006 6:28 AM | Full story

Scaling a city's mount of troubles

Despite its name, hinting at sublime vistas of granite crags, the topography of this small city off I-95 will never trick visitors into thinking they were in, say, the Grand Tetons.

Updated: Nov. 20, 2005 5:16 AM | Full story

Have a conflict? Do you have to tell?

There is of course a charitable, and not implausible, explanation as to why North Carolina has never seen fit to go the whole nine yards, order the full Monty, in attempting to keep its governmental rosters free of the ethically impaired.

Updated: Nov. 13, 2005 3:21 AM | Full story

A judge's deep roots in tradition

Samuel Alito Jr. may have studied law amid the gothic spires and paneled parlors at Yale. He may have done his undergraduate work at Princeton, where F. Scott Fitzgerald no doubt formed some of his impressions about the monied class.

Updated: Nov. 6, 2005 3:19 AM | Full story

In the closet and under the bed

If there's dirty laundry piled up somewhere around the office of state House Speaker Jim Black, it's about to get a good washing. Courtesy of the FBI.

Updated: Oct. 30, 2005 1:47 AM | Full story

Flattery will get you somewhere

Maybe our president can't be really happy unless he's trying to make a tough sell, to win an argument against strong opposition, to prove that he has the clout and the smarts to get his way.

Updated: Oct. 25, 2005 6:08 PM | Full story

Slippery floors and flying knives

Many people work hard. Many people work hard for not a whole lot of money. Many people work hard, for not a whole lot of money, at disagreeable tasks.

Updated: Oct. 25, 2005 4:42 PM | Full story

A call that resonates after the storms

North Carolina's homegrown White House contender, John Edwards, is deeply into the moving around phase.

Updated: Oct. 25, 2005 3:51 PM | Full story

Lottery 'games' for money and clout

It seems more like three months, but it really was just three weeks ago that North Carolina's legislative chiefs finally managed to deliver a state lottery into the loving arms of its daddy, otherwise known as Gov. Mike Easley. Not that we haven't be

Updated: Oct. 25, 2005 3:04 PM | Full story

September trials that test a nation

Shakespeare called them "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." So are those slings and arrows the little devils responsible when our lives are turned upside down and stomped upon by fate?

Updated: Oct. 25, 2005 2:21 PM | Full story

Hitting the road? It's pump and pay

Talk about a guilty pleasure. You fire up your favorite buggy -- even if it's an SUV with 300 horses and wheels as big as an earth mover's -- and convince yourself that you just absolutely must travel rapidly east out of Raleigh.

Updated: Oct. 23, 2005 5:06 PM | Full story

More to this war than killing

As President Bush's oft-heard formulation has it, the United States is engaged in a "global war on terror."

Updated: Oct. 23, 2005 12:37 PM | Full story

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