Are U.S. tax dollars being used to support al-Qaida in Syria? Would anyone be surprised if they were?

As former Republican and Democratic governors, we often disagree. But here’s one area where we agree:  North Carolina’s courts must be protected from the corrosive influence of special-interest campaign money.

I began writing this column 15 years ago because I wanted you, the general public, to gain a better understanding of what it’s like to be a teacher.  We don’t live at school, as some of my youngest students think.  We are everyday people who happen to love children and young adults.  We love learning new things.  We love teaching a concept and seeing that “light bulb” experience happen for students as they “get it.”

I was raised as a creationist. I’d come home from school with a brain full of evolution and an enthusiasm for T-Rex and my mother saw it as her mission to put an end to it. To counter my indoctrination she’d say, “Dinosaurs and people were alive at the same time.”

THUMBS UP to 90-year-old Mattie Clyburn Rice of Archdale and her longtime search for information about her father and her persistence in getting for him the recognition he deserved. The story of her father, that she pieced together over five decades of research, is truly one of the enigmatic stories of the American Civil War.

Someone called politics “the art of the possible.” But, in the era of the modern welfare state, politics is largely the art of the impossible.

Because of the Boston bombings, the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, says that our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution have to change. I disagree. Many people think that more surveillance cameras, and police spying, are needed.

Maybe you could say that University of North Carolina system President Tom Ross has his heart in the right place. He believes his crusade against part of a bill in the N.C. Legislature is an effort to safeguard students on university campuses.

Was President Obama really joking at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner? Or was he showing, as I suspect, early signs of the second-term blues?

 Why did our Justice Department choose to Marandize Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? In my opinion, he gave up his right to be treated as an American citizen when he placed a bomb in the crowd at the Boston Marathon.

The city of High Point is getting a few steps closer to having a new avenue for dealing with substandard, blighted housing that has infiltrated some neighborhoods around the city. It’s a trail city officials have been walking for several years.

The events in Boston and in West, Texas, were similar in timing, loss of life and total injuries.  But there was no comparison in terms of media attention.  For every minute of coverage from West, Boston got an hour.  For every Boston column, West got an inch.

New York City’s Stuyvesant High School is one of those all too rare public schools for intellectually outstanding students. Such students are often bored to death in schools where the work is geared to the lowest common denominator, and it is by no means uncommon for very bright students to become behavior problems.

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing, government officials on both the state and federal levels quickly began issuing their usual statements promising a quick resolution and vowing to prevent this thing from ever happening again. Unlike the embassy attack in Benghazi, the incident has been resolved quickly, due in some measure to help from a citizen, but our ability to prevent such occurrences is impossible to attain.