When the Greensboro City Council named Tony Wilkins as the replacement for District 5 Councilwoman Trudy Wade, who will go on in January to become the state’s District 27 senator, it put into place another member of the “Dream Team,” conceived in the YES! Weekly.

They said it was too soon, but really, it was too late. It’s too late to take the Bushmaster semi-automatic weapon, capable of firing five rounds per second, out of the hands of the madman who sprayed bullets through a school and murdered 20 children and seven adults.

weighed in quickly on the proposed Greensboro downtown performing arts center when the news broke. “The performing arts center can wait,” we said in this space in April. In May, we conceded that the GPAC would be a certainty, but lamented the process and the will to get it done ahead of other, more practical projects.

Forget death panels, which aren’t real. Forget the mantle of “socialized medicine,” which Obamacare most certainly is not. Forget cuts to Medicare, which are not happening, and the path to bankruptcy for small business, which is not part of the plan..

The point of urban living is that lots of people live, work and play within close proximity to each other. That requires a higher level of tolerance for people who are interested in different pursuits — sleeping, partying and transacting commerce, for example — and a more delicate balancing of the scale, again, particularly downtown.

If it had been left up solely to voters in Forsyth, Democrat Elisabeth Motsinger would have eked out a narrow victory. But the flipside of the equation is that the Forsyth electorate makes up only 40.7 percent of the district, with more conservative voters in almost a dozen rural counties offsetting the progressive balance.

The Guilford County Commission receives three new Republican representatives: Hank Henning, who takes over District 6; Jerry Alan Branson, who ousted longtime District 4 rep Kirk Perkins; and Jeff Phillips, a tea-party favorite who bested Paul Gibson in District 5.

It was a long time ago, in more ways than one. Atwood wrote of a dystopian United States, where a feigned terrorist attack blamed on Islamic extremists ushers in an era of theocracy, where fertile women — handmaids — are regarded as property. Sex is officially regarded as for reproduction only.

Word got out pretty quick on the internet last week after a Guilford County voter, Sharon “Sher” Coromilas, reported to Fox 8 that the vote she cast for Mitt Romney during early voting had registered for Barack Obama on the county’s touch-screen voting machine at the Bur-Mil site.

This next salvo holds these same nightclubs responsible for the existence of violence in our city’s borders, requiring all clubs with a capacity above 150 to adhere to a security-plan manual that stipulates, among other things, that all security...

Maybe you got the e-mail, laden with exclamation points and a breathless, all-caps warning: “VOTING STRAIGHT TICKET WHETHER DEMO/REP YOUR VOTE WILL GO FOR OBAMA.”Like a lot of chain e-mail

Their symbol was an upraised, clenched black fist. Members wore black berets in paramilitary style. And in the late 1960s, the mere mention of the group’s name struck terror and outrage among white establishment and law-enforcement figures around the nation.

If you were there last Sunday — and if you’re one of the people in Greensboro who actually goes out and interacts with the city you live in, you likely were — then you know that the food truck festival on Spring Garden Street was one of the biggest and best-attended outdoor events in Greensboro this year.

That’s part of the High Point conundrum. The city has pockets of great wealth along with corridors of alarming poverty,  and a middle class that seems to be disappearing along with the fur- niture industry that put the place on the map.

It’s the kind of work that’s becoming all too infrequent in newspapers these days: investigative journalism with a long arc that affects entire communities and holds those in power accountable for their actions.

You can’t really blame Woodhouse for sounding bullish about his party’s prospects in this year’s election at their own convention, any more than you can blame his brother, Dallas, who is the North Carolina director for the right-wing group Americans...

Take a look at national election map. All but nine states have already been colored in, though Election Day is months away. The West Coast is going blue, as is the Northeast. The South, Midwest and, with the exception of blue New Mexico and wild card Colorado, interior western states have already been washed in red.

It sounded too good to be true. For a small investment, anywhere from a hundreds bucks up to $10,000, you could buy into the penny-auction business known as ZeekRewards, which would spin off a piece of its daily profits directly into your account. And if you recruited some friends to the party, your share would increase exponentially.

We can say that he was active in his duties in Raleigh, sponsoring scores of bills — many of which we disagreed with but a few of which we approved. He was an ardent foe of annexation, as befits a man from Kernersville, a small town stuck between the biggest cities of the Triad.

Smith, of course, is the Winston-Salem resident currently behind bars after being convicted almost 15 years ago for the brutal beating of Jill Marker in the Silk Plant Forest store, in a trial that looks more and more like a farce.