Reporting for Hire

In North Carolina, corporations are people, my friend

2012-01-21T11:03:00.012-05:00

Reading the N.C. public records law the other day I saw a reference to this definition:

"Person" means an individual, corporation, government, governmental subdivision or agency, business trust, estate, trust, partnership, association, joint venture, or any other legal or commercial entity.

That's N.C. 66-152(2), part of the Commerce and Business Chapter in state law. It seems to have been written in 1981 under Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt and a Democratically controlled state legislature.

Something to remember this year when/if North Carolina Democrats bash Mitt Romney for an off-hand remark the state codified 30 years ago.

Update: Some have noted other sections in NC and federal law identifying corporations as people, including Gerry Cohen, the NC General Assembly's head of legislative drafting. It was not my intent to portray this post as a comprehensive review of this issue, nor was I looking to assign blame.

My point is simply that Democrats have signed off on the idea that the law should treat a corporation like a person, much as Republicans have.

For Google AdSense, competition

2012-01-19T19:56:00.014-05:00

Google's stock took a 9 percent hit in after hours trading today because the company committed the gravest of sins: Generating $8.13 billion in net revenue over 3 months when Wall Street analysts wanted them to generate $8.4 billion.

In the aftermath analysts remained fairly bullish on Google, but cited a few chinks in the Internet's behemoth's armor. But something they didn't cite sticks out to me: There has been a sizeable increase recently in the number of companies offering online ad services to small and medium-sized Web sites, a la Google AdSense.

Granted that's just one part of Google's revenue stream. Their search engine dominates the paid-search ad business. They're behind Android phones and apps. They own YouTube, and who knows what Google+ will turn into.

But I run a family of SEC-focused college sports Web sites, including the UGA version, The Dawgbone. We've been contacted over the last few months by three different entities offering the same services as Google AdSense - user-targeted advertising, paid-by-impression revenue sharing and ad performance tracking.

It used to be that Google, and only Google, offered this service, as best I could tell. Believe me, I looked.

Yahoo! has had their own ad service and a partnership with newspapers for years, but they don't work with amateur and semi-amateur content providers. This recent proliferation of companies that do creates competition in a segment Google didn't just dominate, they essentially owned in full.

Is this micro analysis of a macro issue? Granted. A small piece of Google's pie? Maybe. Worth noting that Google saw total ad clicks rise 34 percent last quarter anyway? Absolutely. But the point is, when you're an innovator you have to keep innovating, or the pack starts to catch up.

And it ain't easy.

Conrad Fink, UGA and AP great

2012-01-14T20:07:00.024-05:00

Conrad C. Fink, the foreign correspondent, Associated Press vice president and newspaper executive who taught journalism at the University of Georgia for 28 years, died Saturday, according to numerous media outlets and the university's Grady College.

He was something else. He had bushy eyebrows that inspired a range of emotions most easily categorized as "fear." He was quick to the point, usually with a red pen.

He taught generations of reporters and editors the right way to do it, and his lessons will live on, not just through his students, but through theirs.

I was told as an undergraduate that Fink was the only professor at the University of Georgia without a masters or doctorate. He once pointed to a column in The Wall Street Journal's stock listings and told me, "See that? I told them to put that in."

He was a U.S. Marine in the 1950s. He was, as Barry Hollander told The Red & Black, "old school in all the good ways about what journalists should do, and how they should act, and the way they should pursue a story."

Fink, 80, died of prostate cancer, according to the Associated Press. The college said his family plans a funeral in New York state, where Fink had a farm and summered with his wife.

Fink worked 20 years for the Associated Press as a foreign and war correspondent, bureau chief, editor and executive on desks including Chicago, New York, New Delhi and London. Eventually he became a vice president of the venerated worldwide news organization.

Fink used to say, of his years as a foreign correspondent, that if the day ended with 5 facts in hand, that was a good day. In those younger days, he looked a lot like James Bond.

After leaving the Associated Press, Fink became a newspaper executive specializing in acquisitions. He came to the University of Georgia in 1983 and over three decades became synonymous with Grady College, the university's journalism school.

He always kept a typewriter on his desk, but embraced the Internet's power for news. He also worried that young people confused social networking "with being informed."

As he said, "You don't learn much about Iraq when you Twitter about somebody washing their dog, do you?"

Fink called students and former students only by their last names. Once when I called and said, "This is Travis," he asked why I hadn't identified myself.

He called undergraduates "rascals." He called people "pal," which he could use across a spectrum of insinuations. He had that sparkle in his eye, the "it" that special people so often possess.

He used to write fantastic things on student's papers. Like the one most cutting, hilarious and useful thing you'd say if you were a teacher, and he doled those out several times a week. His Facebook page today is a testament to his effectiveness.

"The best teachers don't tell you how great you are," Charlotte Observer columnist Tommy Tomlinson wrote. "The best teachers show you what you need to learn to be as great as you can be. Fink, thanks for showing us, and thanks for caring."

That may have been Fink's greatest strength as a teacher. He cared. His office at the university was a windowless cinder block closet. But it felt worldly in ways I can't describe.

"Finksters" are assembling a Google map showing his reach as a teacher. If completed, I expect it will show influence across the world.

Because I believe in journalism, because I believe in the power of an informed electorate, I am grateful today for Conrad Fink. Of all the people I've known in my life, I believe he will have the largest impact on the world.

Note: I believe the picture of Fink above, at his typewriter, was taken by a newspaper photographer some years ago. I apologize for not knowing who. I got it from Fink's Twitter account. It's a great shot.

Trouble a Brewin'

2011-10-25T09:02:00.002-04:00

You can say, "don't worry," or you can say, "we don't know what's happening." You can't say both. From Our Amazing Planet, about a rapidly expanding volcano in Bolivia:

"It's one of the fastest uplifting volcanic areas on Earth," de Silva told OurAmazingPlanet."What we're trying to do is understand why there is this rapid inflation, and from there we'll try to understand what it's going to lead to."

The peak is perched like a party hat at the center of the inflating area. "It's very circular. It's like a big bull's-eye," said Jonathan Perkins, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who recently presented work on the mountain at this year's Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis.

Scientists figured out from the inflation rate that the pocket of magma beneath the volcano was growing by about 27 cubic feet (1 cubic meter) per second.

"That's about 10 times faster than the standard rate of magma chamber growth you see for large volcanic systems," Perkins told OurAmazingPlanet.

However, no need to flee just yet, the scientists said.

"It's not a volcano that we think is going to erupt at any moment, but it certainly is interesting, because the area was thought to be essentially dead," de Silva said.

Uturuncu is surrounded by one of the most dense concentrations of supervolcanoes on the planet, all of which fell silent some 1 million years ago.

Supervolcanoes get their name because they erupt with such power that they typically spew out 1,000 times more material, in sheer volume, than a volcano like Mount St. Helens. Modern human civilization has never witnessed such an event.

Borrowed Lewis

2011-10-20T22:14:00.004-04:00

Let's move heaven, earth for this angel
BYLINE: By Lewis Grizzard
SECTION: LIVING; Section C; Page 1

Melissa Segars is a doll, a pretty little doll with a face taken from an angel.

She sits there across from me, the 70 or so pounds of her, and she breathes from a tube that is attached to an oxygen tank sitting on the floor.

We talk shop, Melissa and I. We both were born with what doctors called heart murmurs. Melissa, in 1968. Me, an eon earlier.

We've both had teams of doctors do a great deal of carving upon us. Melissa, 25, has had heart surgery and has had a lung removed. She's even had gall bladder surgery.

I've had three heart surgeries.

Melissa is a transplant candidate. I was one, too, for an awful week back in March when my own heart decided it wouldn't beat anymore after my third surgery.

That's where our similarities end. My heart started doing its job again, and I was taken off the transplant list.

Melissa still needs a new heart and a new lung. If she doesn't get them, a doctor has been quoted as saying, she is "at great risk of dying."

A call came as early as last week. Melissa was at a movie.

Her mother explained the call came from the St. Louis Children's Hospital. They said they might have a heart and a lung for Melissa.

Why are there always catches in life? The one here was there was another young person in the hospital with a higher priority than Melissa. If that child could use the heart and lung, they would go to that child.

If not, Melissa would get them.

Melissa Segars speaks in a soft little squeak.

"Mama got me on the phone and told me to come home quick," she said. "I kept asking her, 'Is this it? Is this it?' She just said, 'Get home quick.' "

The jet was ready for the trip from Atlanta to St. Louis.

Then the hospital called back. The heart and lung went to the other patient. The wait continues.

Insurance won't pay for Melissa's surgery when it comes. (And too many people have worked and prayed too hard for it not to come.) That's because her surgery is classified as experimental. Don't you just know some bureaucrat-type is responsible for that?

So, for months now the Fayette County community, where Melissa and her family live, has been trying to raise the money to pay for what it will cost to try to save the young woman's life.

Soaring health care costs? How's the fact the surgery and post-op care will cost a million?

Helluva thing. The Fayette County community, which used to be dirt roads before it soared to metro Atlanta status, has come forward with $ 550,000.

There have been auctions, rallies, barbecues, concerts, pancake breakfasts, and Tommy Lasorda of the Los Angeles Dodgers is coming this fall for a fund-raiser.

And there has been the flood of printed pleas for help for Melissa. And, you guessed it, here's another. Hey, we're brothers and sisters in the scalpel.

Melissa used to want to be a veterinarian. Now, she says, "I guess I'm too old to go to all that school now."

A friend says, "You've got your whole life ahead of you. You can do what you want to."

If she can get that million. If she can get and survive that surgery.

I wish you could all see her. I wish you could look upon that little face and see those eyes. I wish you could sense the courage in her as I have.

Make checks payable to "COTA for Melissa." Mail to Fayette County Bank, 150 West Lanier Ave., Fayetteville, Ga. 30214.

We don't have enough angels as it is.

For my money, that's the best column Lewis Grizzard ever wrote. Happy Birthday, sir.

I've borrowed one of your columns from The AJC to mark it. Hope you don't mind.

A good read: The W-S Journal

2011-09-21T21:08:00.007-04:00

People may not think much of the newspaper industry, but individual newspapers are still pretty good. You really can't beat the medium yet, it's just that you can come close enough to really, really mess it up.

These stories were all in the Winston-Salem Journal today:

PETA plans porn site

Iraq: 40,000 more U.S. troops home this month

4.2 million have classified security clearance. That's nearly the population of metropolitan Washington, D.C.

Bomber kills leader of Afghan Peace Council; Karzai cuts U.S. trip short.

Hell, I didn't even know Karzai was in the states. That's pretty good story selection.

Google: World's most "gets it" company

2011-09-21T20:28:00.008-04:00

From Google Adsense, via email:

"In the next month, we'll introduce the +1 button and personal recommendations to display ads. ... Soon, your users will be able to endorse specific ads and make the ads more likely to appear to their social connections."

Continued brilliance.

For random comparison's sake, I went to Harris Teeter tonight. Their "application" for one of those savings cards lists your drivers license number as "required information."

It didn't make me want to shop at Harris Teeter.

Ashley Henderson-Huff: A soldier 5 years gone

2011-09-19T22:42:00.010-04:00

Even though I wrote myself a note, even though the University of Georgia honored her last week, I almost forgot today was the anniversary of my friend Ashley's death in Iraq.

I saw a reminder on Facebook, through a friend of mine that I didn't know knew her.

That is how life is.

Forbes Rankings: From Worthless to Worth Quoting

2011-09-13T16:25:00.007-04:00

Since I showed up in North Carolina last year, I've been fascinated by the adamance state GOP leaders have displayed in arguing that the state is, in fact, a terrible place that hates capitalism and lies in ruin solely due to decades of Democratic control of the state government.

And I kept saying, "Then how come you and 9 million other people live here? How is it the state does so well each year in Forbes' ranking of best states to do business? How have all these America-hating North Carolina commies managed to fool Site Selection Magazine into naming the state No. 1 in business climate 9 out of the last 10 years?"

And I learned that Forbes was just "some magazine." That taxes are far too high. That outsiders don't fully understand the problems Democrats have created for North Carolina businesses.

Which is why I was surprised today when I came to the fourth paragraph in House Majority Leader Paul Stam's press release on the General Assembly move to prohibit gay marriage:

"According to Forbes Magazine ranking of best business climates, eight out of the top 10 states have defined marriage in their state constitution."

Interestingly, of the other two states in the Forbes' top 10, 50 percent of them are North Carolina.

Gay marriage: You sure we need a law?

2011-09-12T07:58:00.004-04:00

California Gov. Jerry Brown put out a quotable veto message last week, rejecting fines for kids who won't wear a helmet while snowboarding:

The measure would impose criminal penalties on a child under the age of 18 and his or her parents if the child skis or snowboards without a helmet.

While I appreciate the value of wearing a ski helmet, I am concerned about the continuing and seemingly inexorable transfer of authority from parents to the state. Not every human problem deserves a law.

While the specifics of this particular issue are fairly ... specific, the theory Gov. Brown worked from put me in mind of the gay marriage question before the N.C. General Assembly during the special legislative session starting today.

Does the disagreement over gay marriage deserve a law? And not just a law, but a place in your state constitution?

Note: I'm not labeling marriage or sexuality of any kind as a "human problem," beyond the fact that it's something we don't all agree on.

May Flights of Angels

2011-09-11T20:50:00.008-04:00

The University of Georgia honored Ashley Henderson-Huff and Noah Harris during half time of Saturday's South Carolina game. Both died serving their country, and their families were given framed University of Georgia jerseys.

I'm very proud to say Ashley was a friend of mine, and my thoughts this weekend are with the people whose lives have been so horribly changed by the events of Sept. 11.

Post Office double dealing with employees on leases, contracts

2011-09-08T10:49:00.007-04:00

This was my last freelance story before moving to Winston-Salem. Basically, the U.S. Postal Service has all these longstanding relationships with local postmasters, who make extra money by renting space to the post office, particularly in rural areas.

The USPS also contracts with former, and in some cases current, employees to handle rural mail delivery routes. It's not clear whether any of this is really costing the post office which has major financial problems, more money. In some cases it seems to save money, because the rent hasn't gone up that much in 40 years.

The Post Office Inspector General's Office breaks much of this down in a report you can download here. Auditors determined federal and postal regulations were violated. They also questioned the wisdom of renting from and contracting with employees, particularly since, in some cases, postmasters helped make the decision to rent their own building.

Also, the names of the contractors are being kept secret for reasons that don't sound like good reasons to me.

At any rate, read the story. I also have databases of the leases and contracts that weren't included in the Inspector General's report. If you want them, let me know and I'll email them, save you a FOIA request.

Reporter, Hired

2011-09-06T09:24:00.003-04:00

I started a full-time job with the Winston-Salem Journal today.

I suspect the blog "Lucid Idiocy (Politics)" will continue here, but it's url will almost certainly change from www.reportingforhire.com.

Aah, accuracy. You've hassled me yet again.

Lawyers: Dotting t's in 'not a contract'

2011-09-01T21:36:00.014-04:00

Just finished signing a 13-page lease that required my wife and I to initial the bottom of nearly every page. About halfway through, the lease noted that it "shall not be strictly construed against either the landlord or the tenant."

Then I can't help but think it could have been condensed.

Update:
To be fair, the phrase "this is not a contract" appeared only once in 13 pages, on a document from the state REALTORS (TM) Association. It's got a real "required by state law" feel to it, but I do not see a code sight.

Voting Mitt Romney's pocket book

2011-09-01T17:38:00.015-04:00

Click image to enlarge.

Turned out this car belongs to a young man (19) who was home schooled and listens to Rush Limbaugh while he delivers pizza. So, while the car inspired my headline, it wasn't the example I might have hoped for.

It still reminds me of something my dad says, which has been a political truism for many years: People vote their wallet.

But I don't think that's true for a lot of people right now. Many vote their philosophy. Some are so frustrated by the size of social welfare programs and the evident impossibility of slowing government spending that they've said, "Enough, period."

Others, I don't think they know when they're screwing themselves. Manipulated correctly, they'll do it with a passion.

Wake schools spokesman: $126K a year

2011-08-15T21:42:00.009-04:00

My goodness: The chief communications officer for the Wake County public school system, who resigned Friday, made $126,000 a year.

That's about 3 years salary for me in my last full-time newspaper job. It's three starting teacher jobs, with enough left over for a teacher's assistant.

It's $40,000 more than a high school principal with 34 years experience makes. It's double what teacher with a masters degree, national board certification and 20 years experience makes.

Buffet in the NY Times

2011-08-15T10:30:00.002-04:00

If you haven't seen it yet, you should read Warren Buffet's piece this morning in The New York Times. He calls for spending cuts, but also an increased tax rate on income above $1 million a year, including income from dividends and capital gains.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Georgia redistricting: Senate map aids Macon-Bibb consolidation effort

2011-08-13T10:52:00.016-04:00

The Georgia General Assembly released proposed new House and Senate district maps Friday, which you can download here.

The AJC picked up on a clear stacked deck in Fulton County, where the new map would give Republicans a good shot at breaking off the northern end to recreate Milton County, something that's been discussed for years.

Something of the opposite strategy is at play in Macon and Bibb County, where city-county consolidation has been blocked in the Senate because there were only two Bibb senators in the body. Such local legislation generally needs a majority vote from local legislators to pass.

With only two senators of opposing parties, that's difficult to come by. The proposed new map would solve that by drawing a third district into a northern sliver of Bibb, as seen in this closeup:

Based on the demographics of the 18th, 25th and 26th Senate districts, you're likely to see** two Republicans and one Democrat (from the 26th - Robert Brown's old seat) in Bibb's local Senate delegation. That doesn't guarantee a successful vote to put city-county consolidation before local voters in a referendum, because local Republicans have their own issues with consolidation.

But it helps, particularly as state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, continues to push the issue from his north Bibb County House seat. More broadly, the new map would do away with a fundamental difficulty in the way the districts have been drawn: That one man could block local legislation in the Senate.

**Update: After talking to Bill Knowles, a Republican activist/writer/operative in Bibb County, "likely" may have been too strong a word when it comes to the 26th remaining a Democratic district. Bill says a couple of highly Republican precincts shifted to the 26th. Enough to move the district? Hard to say.

An honest newspaper job posting

2011-08-12T12:49:00.028-04:00

In the year I spent as a freelance reporter looking for full-time work, I learned to translate the optimism of newspaper job postings into the likely truth on the ground at the paper. Then I threw in some hyperbole for fun.

To readers who aren't journalists: This post might not be for you. To my fellow reporters: I feel your pain. To newspaper companies: I kid because you're driving me insane.

AWARD-WINNING DAILY SEEKS BULLDOG REPORTER FOR THE BEST BEAT IN (INSERT STATE)!!!

Are you looking for a journalism job you're massively over qualified for? One that will force your kids to eat government cheese? If so, we've got the gig for you, because we have no intention of paying what this job's worth. Our corporate executives need that cash for themselves on the off chance shareholders realize we don't have a plan for "The Internet."

We're an award winning daily in (INSERT CITY), though if you visit us you might not see any actual awards dated later than 2007. We can't really afford to frame them anymore, or to send someone to the ceremony and pick them up. But we're a great place to work, particularly if you like covering 2-3 beats at once, staring at empty desks, multi-week furloughs announced at the last possible second and various other soul-crushing moral killers that pop up every two-to-three weeks.

We need a bulldog reporter - someone who's familiar with open records law, investigative techniques and computer assisted reporting. Someone who doesn't just go to meetings and wait for press releases, but really develops sources, breaks stories and balances daily coverage with longer-term reporting.

Now you might think, "that sounds like what any good reporter should be able to do." Far from it, my friend. Roughly translated to the hire we'll actually make it means, "we want someone who thinks he/she is too good for this job and who'll end up just sitting on his or her ass all day, selling their worthless crap on eBay and talking about how they've never been given time to do that five-part series on sack-lunch theft at City Hall."

Or a minority. Then we'll have diversity in our newsroom for the 3 months it takes a larger paper to hire that reporter away, leading us to freeze the job and spread the work among the four reporters we have left.

We'd like someone with 4-6 years experience. Any more and we'd have to pay too much. At least two years of that experience should be at The Wall Street Journal or, in a pinch, The New York Times.

Please send a cover letter, resume, references and 5 clips to (INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS). Better yet, use our automated system, which will ask you to input the exact same information two or three times, repeatedly reject your clip packet as too large or improperly formatted, then time out and force you to start over.

We can't be bothered to let you know we've received your application, and please don't call to check. We're also not going to give you anyone's name, so you may feel like an jackass writing this letter to no one, or combing around on our poorly designed web site in a vain attempt to match an email address with an actual human being.

You shouldn't worry about that too much, though. Chances are good corporate will force us to eliminate this job by the time you apply.

When applying, mention you saw this opening listed at JournalismJobs.com.

Aug. 24 update: Nothing here should reflect on my new employers at the Winston-Salem Journal. There are still people in this wonderful, frustrating, dying industry who do things the right way.

Beer in a bag: No such law

2011-08-08T09:18:00.010-04:00

I turned the North Carolina portion of this post into a piece for the Winston-Salem Journal. The Georgia section remains below.

In Georgia, where I lived 10 years before moving to North Carolina, the state Department of Revenue oversees alcohol sales through its Alcohol and Tobacco Division.

"There is no State law or regulation requiring merchants to put alcohol in any kind of bag," Carter Leverette, the division's assistant chief of operations, said in an e-mail. "Cities and counties may have local ordinances that require that alcohol be bagged."

There are 159 counties and more than 500 municipalities in Georgia, and I only checked with Bibb County, where I used to live. No such law, according to Bibb County Sheriff's Office Spokesman Sgt. Sean DeFoe.

Maybe it's a small thing. Probably just a silly custom, born of the notion that it's OK to drink, as long as you hide it. But think of all those wasted plastic and paper bags, used simply because someone thinks they have to.

FCC Commissioner Copps: Newspapers need saving

2011-08-05T22:39:00.013-04:00

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps spoke to the National Newspaper Association last month and hinted several times that government action may be needed to fix our broken model of journalism.

That would be a shame.

But his speech is worth reading for anyone concerned about the future of journalism. I've excerpted from it below and interspersed that with my own comments, most of which come from a paper I wrote in 2009.

You as journalists have the lead role here. But you should also realize there are millions of Americans in communities from coast-to-coast who know that something is not quite right, who understand the consequences of fewer voices and less news, and who are looking for solutions. I have met them everywhere I go. I have seen citizen action at work, even in this day when so few special interests wield so much outrageous power.

So I know Americans can still be agents of change in their own country. My point is there is support out there to tackle this problem. It needs to be harnessed; it needs to be engaged. ...

If you read a newspaper regularly, please buy a subscription. If the paper you prefer won't deliver to you and doesn't charge for online access, please click on its ads and frequent its advertisers. Please throw some money at The New York Times. They are leading the push to charge for content, and the better that works, the better off the industry will be.

Also, Id like to see a partnership between newspaper / media companies to jointly fund a new marketing campaign and remind people that they need newspapers. Gannett has started something like this for its own brand, but I'm thinking of a broader effort akin to the "Got Milk" campaign the dairy industry put together a few years back.

Beyond that, I have long advocated for the news industry to aggregate itself. I do not understand why we'd waste years complaining about aggregators without trying to compete with them. Why can't newspapers come together and establish the world's premier news database?

The New York Times and other partners have moved this way half-heartedly with www.ongo.com, but they charge for the product, divorced it from advertising and don't appear to market it in any serious national way.

Meanwhile Google, which already makes more on online advertising than all U.S. newspapers combined, according this piece in the New York Review of Books, is beginning to offer a journalist-vetted version of Google news.

That was our edge when it came to aggregation, and we let it sit on a shelf.

Back to Mr. Copps' speech:

The irony in the (government) "hands-off" approach is, of course, that the more government abdicates its responsibility to enforce the rules on the books or to provide our citizens with different viewpoints, the stronger government becomes. In a society where watchdog journalism is essential, more than two dozen states don't have a single reporter accredited to Capitol Hill. How's that for holding the powerful accountable? At the state level, legions of lobbyists outnumber professional journalists by orders of magnitude. At last count, PR professionals outnumber journalists 3-to-1 and I'm certain the gap is widening. ...

A license to broadcast is a privilege, not a God-given right, and the privilege of keeping the license depends--at least in theory--upon the quality of stewardship a station delivers. We have not revoked a license in more than 30 years. Last month the FCC released a long awaited report entitled "The Information Needs of Communities" which chronicled the great upheaval that many of you have lived through and which highlighted a worrisome lack of local accountability journalism. I agreed with many of the report findings, but I was seriously disappointed at the lack of specific, hard-hitting recommendations to confront these problems. The report detailed many instances of FCC shortcomings. A third of commercial broadcasters do little to no news. Media companies routinely game the ownership rules through clever stratagems like shared service agreements, leaving lots of people the option of watching the same exact news program on three different channels. ...

So I wasn't really surprised when an Annenberg study last year looked at the evening news in Los Angeles and found an average of just 22 seconds of hard local civic news per half hour broadcast. ...

It sounds as if the government has abdicated its responsibility in these matters. But I can break the problem government is enabling down on more of a micro level.

Once a television station funds the staff for one newscast, it's relatively cheap to program multiple newscasts. So you've got reporters editing two, three, even four different versions of the same story for various news casts throughout the day. There's not a lot of time left to report when you spend all day repackaging the same information.

This problem also affects the newspaper industry. The majority of newspapers in America have fewer reporters than they used to, and they're told to file multiple versions of a story throughout the day to meet online obligations. Reporters aren't paid more for this. In many cases they're paid less than 5 years ago.

Of course the product has been degraded. Back to Mr. Copps:

The analogy of a bucket brigade is a good one: more and more buckets (the millions of websites) but less and less water (original reporting) to go around. Meanwhile the fires rage. So everywhere around us are telling signs that the news and information journalism we relied on for so long is dwindling and the Internet cannot fulfill its democratic potential without sustainable journalism.

Consider this: According to a recently-released study for the Commission, written by
Professor Matthew Hindman, local news online accounts for less than one-half of one
percent of page views and, staggeringly, almost 98% of local news originates from
traditional news outlets. ...

Obviously, we have to find a better way to pay for that. I'm an advocate of Russell Neuman's "upstream strategy." That is, moving the bottleneck in the flow of information - the moment you charge for it - upstream.

Usually this means building the charge into the infrastructure by partnering with cable and other broadband companies to tack on a fee for journalism. But what I'd really like to do is develop a way to charge bloggers and aggregators for content, starting with video and photos.

But that's difficult to enforce. At the bottom line, people need to take it upon themselves to subscribe to a newspaper.

Actually, at the bottom line, I think we're just screwed. We've taken a difficult situation and made it a terrible one by failing to leverage natural advantages. We may also find ourselves dependent on government mandates Mr. Copps hints at supporting throughout his speech.

The FCC's National Broadband Plan firmly advocated for new forms of literacy, but we need to get past the point of merely promoting awareness and take real steps to incentivize increased news literacy programming in our schools and communities. A worthy down-payment toward building this into our educational system would be a K-12 online news media literacy curriculum. There's something here for every grade level and every age.

I would encourage every local newspaper to approach school boards in their coverage area and suggest they build a few minutes of current events curriculum, utilizing local online news coverage, into each school day.

'Super Congress' recalls failed Georgia tax reforms

2011-08-02T09:38:00.006-04:00

The poorly, I fear, dubbed "Super Congress" that will recommend spending cuts and tax reform as part of Washington's debt ceiling deal reminds me of a proposal that went down in slow-burning flames earlier this year in Georgia.

In 2010, outgoing Gov. Sonny Perdue and the state legislature shelved a number of tax overhaul proposals and established a committee to study the issue. That committee would make recommendations to a House-Senate leadership committee, which would send a bill directly to the House and Senate floors for up-or-down votes, no amendments.

But legislators, not to mention lobbyists, have a funny way of wanting to be involved in the tax code. They ended up amending the bill repeatedly, then declined to vote on it.

Who could have foreseen this as soon as the straight-to-the-floor strategy was divulged? Much of the capitol press corps, as I recall. So it doesn't take a genius to guess that Congress' strategy might not work.

The debt ceiling bill the U.S. House passed Monday, and the Senate is likely to approve today (full text, via New York Times) includes a litany of repeated admonitions to make it clear that this 12-member committee is supposed to meet and make its recommendations to the full Congress by November.

That recommendation will go through committee, but committees can't change it. Then it's to the floor for an up-or-down vote.

Now, at least this all happens within the current election cycle. Georgia's leaders figured they could wait until a new governor was elected and after the full House and Senate had stood for election, and all the new guys would just be cool with what the old guys had planned.

But elected representatives have a funny way of tinkering with things. So when you change the process, the folks who used to be involved have a way of inserting themselves right back in.

Newt Gingrich's Twitter followers

2011-08-02T01:25:00.023-04:00

I don't plan to fully sniff this one out, but let me say, "this one ain't hard to sniff out."

From Jim Galloway Monday:

This afternoon, gawker.com is suggesting that many of Gingrich’s Twitter followers may be manufactured. The post includes this explanation from a former – and, keep in mind, anonymous – Gingrich campaign worker. ...

Read on, but it's easy enough to scroll through some of @NewtGingrich's 1.3 million Twitter followers.

Images: Obvioustown.

For comparison, Gingrich had 142,720 Facebook "friends" late Monday night. I counted 100 Twitter "followers" still using the default egg avatar in his first 300 or so on Twitter.

Click on some of them. Scroll through the list. Skip a few thousand, then see whether accounts seem like real people.

You'll find a lot of "people" with 0-3 followers themselves. Some only follow a few folks.

Now, there are certainly folks who just use Twitter just for headlines - they have no interest in commenting themselves. It's entirely possible this type of person LOVES NEWT GINGRICH. Or they could be made up.

Either way, "Gingrigh 2012."

Update: The Gingrich campaign has denied any shenanigans. As Galloway quotes them (4th item):

At no time has the campaign or Gingrich Communications employed an outside group to inflate the number of followers of @newtgingrich. Any accusation of the kind is a lie, a smear and unsubstantiated.

You have to wonder, how does a campaign confirm that, beyond taking the word of the consultant charged with increasing it's Twitter base?

Staggering wealth disparity btw races

2011-07-26T19:48:00.004-04:00

I doubt anyone would be surprised to learn there is a significant difference between the average net worth of a white person and that of a black person, or a Latino. But just how significant left me momentarily breathless.

From The Washington Post:

Between 2005 and 2009, the median net worth of black families fell to $5,677 from $12,124, and that of Hispanic families fell to $6,325 from $18,359. In the same period, the median net worth of white households dropped to $113,149 from $134,992.

Boehner: Obama walked from non-existent debt ceiling deal

2011-07-22T19:38:00.011-04:00

Earlier this evening, after breaking off debt ceiling talks with the White House, Speaker John Boehner sent a letter to his caucus that said, in part:

"A deal was never reached, and was never really close."

But during his 7:15 p.m. press conference, Speaker Boehner said the president walked away from a deal "at the last minute."

How can both of those things be true?

Georgia Open Records: Coggin v. Davey

2011-07-20T14:35:00.005-04:00

According to the Georgia Supreme Court, the Georgia legislature is not subject to state open records laws because it's not a state agency.

From Coggin v. Davey (1974):

"We think that the statute is applicable to the departments, agencies, boards, bureaus, etc. of this state and its political subdivisions. It is not applicable to the General Assembly. ...

We concur in the holding that the General Assembly is not a "state department, agency, board, bureau, commission or political subdivision" and that the statute is therefore inapplicable to the General Assembly."

I don't have much to add to that. It just came up kind of randomly today.

Reagan raised taxes 11 times

2011-07-18T23:10:00.009-04:00

“Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinksmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the Federal deficit would soar.”

- Ronald Reagan

I'm not saying raise taxes. I'm not saying who's right and who's wrong in this debt ceiling argument. I'm saying Reagan raised taxes 11 times.

Taxes were still lower when he left office than when he came in, due to a major cut shortly after his first election. But I think it's fair to equate that initial cut with the Bush tax cuts, and President Obama's agreement to re-up them.

The point is, this idea that there is never a right time to raise any taxes (see Grover Norquist's comment starting at 5:18), is just as foolish as that kind of always-say-never philosophy generally is.

And the abdication of the responsibility to compromise that comes with being a member of Congress is really starting to upset me. U.S. corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash and certainty seems to be what everybody wants.

So give us some certainty. Pass a debt ceiling deal. Like we did 17 (or 18 - I've seen both figures) times under President Reagan. Include significant spending cuts and tax reform if you can, but at the very least, please stop driving the economy down over an arbitrary line in the sand.

Update: The GOP put this video out recently in a push back against Democrats trying to co-opt Reagan's reputation. I include it in the interest of representing different views, but it doesn't change the fact that smart and reasonable people do what needs to be done based on reality.

Maybe it's not Caylee's law. Maybe it's Jadon's.

2011-07-18T17:51:00.015-04:00

It is sad the way society turns some crimes into spectacles, and largely ignores others.

A child's death is tragic, always. Yet so few capture national attention. And I fear state legislatures around the country are about to reinforce our selective calls for justice by naming new laws after Caylee Anthony, a little girl killed in Florida.

Nearly 30 states are considering some version of "Caylee's Law," which would generally make it a felony to fail to report a child missing in a timely manner. In North Carolina state reps. Kelly Hastings and Tim Moore have discussed such a law.

But what about Jadon Higganbothan, the 4-year-old boy killed last fall in Durham? Jadon's mother has been charged in his death, which was allegedly committed by an enraged cult leader named Peter Moses.

Where's Jadon's law? Where's the national outrage over the senseless death of this little boy? Is it lacking simply because he was black?

And if we're going name a law in North Carolina, isn't it right to name it after a North Carolinian?

Rep. Hastings, R-Gaston, said late last week that he and Moore "have not officially named the bill," but they've gotten "hundreds" of requests to name it after Caylee.

"You are correct there a lot of victims here in NC that we can use," Hastings said. "Frankly it could be that we just amend the current law. So I hear what your concerns are. ... But I can tell you that constituents and people in general society right now are using 'Caylee's Law' as a term ... fairly commonly."

Of course they are. Nancy Grace told them to, right after 30 second spots for Dove soap and Hotels.com.

Elusive brainpower

2011-07-12T12:08:00.006-04:00

I don't know much about @elusivepatriot, except that he has 717 Twitter followers, and Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Karl Rove are among them. Also, I doubt he actually thinks Barack Obama is lying to everyone about being a barterer of communists.

Is the debt ceiling unconstitutional?

2011-07-11T10:48:00.005-04:00

I've never understood the U.S. debt ceiling, because it's not really tied to spending. It's more like your credit card bill. You spend the money, then a bill shows up and you say, "Wait - this is more spending than I'm comfortable with."

The time for that conversation was at the checkout counter, my friend.

At any rate, this Washington Post "5 myths" piece, written by a former Reagan and G.W. Bush adviser who has turned on Reaganomics in more recent years, brought up a point I had not seen elsewhere:

Republicans believe they have the president over a barrel. But their hand may be weaker than they think. A number of legal scholars point to Section 4of the 14th Amendment, which says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned.”

Some scholars, including Michael Abramowicz of George Washington University Law Schooland Garrett Epps of the University of Baltimore Law School, think this passage may make the debt limit unconstitutional because by definition, the limit calls into question the validity of the public debt. Thus Treasury may be able to just ignore the debt limit.

Other scholars, such as Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, say the 14th Amendment will force Obama to prioritize debt payments and unilaterally slash spending to pay bondholders. But this would involve the violation of laws requiring government spending.

Either way, a failure to raise the debt limit would force the president to break the law. The only question is which one.

Who knows. Like I said, the concept doesn't make sense to me. What rational entity caps its borrowing, but not its spending?

Map: state unemployment rates compared to legislative control

2011-07-10T11:51:00.020-04:00

During the recent N.C. legislative session former N.C. Speaker and current House Appropriations Chairman Harold Brubaker insisted that Democrats were solely responsible for North Carolina's nearly 10 percent unemployment rate.

He said it a couple of times in an impromptu conversation with reporters, despite the fact that, say, Georgia, a state completely run by Republicans, had a nearly identical jobless rate at the time.

I asked, isn't the national economy largely to blame for unemployment here?

"No," Brubaker said. "Mismanagement. We have seen departments that have grown by 50 percent. ... If we'd of had the TABOR, we wouldn't be here."

Colorado appears to be the only state with a "TAxpayer Bill Of Rights," which strictly limits state spending growth. Unemployment in Colorado right now is nearly 8.7 percent, a percentage point lower than in North Carolina.

I wondered, could I find any correlation between party control of state legislatures and unemployment rates? Using figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and maps from the National Conference of State Legislatures I compared party control to unemployment rates. I used May employment rates and compared them legislative control in 2008 and 2010, though the 2008 political situation seemed much more relevant.

So here you have the state-by-state May 2011 unemployment figures super-imposed on this pre-2010 party control map for state legislatures. Red = Republican control, blue Democrats, purple non-partisan and the orange divided control.

Click image for a clearer version.

The national average for unemployment is 9.1 percent. If you draw a line there, 32 states are below 9.1 percent and 18 are at or above it.

Of the states below that line, the legislatures of 53 percent of them were controlled by Democrats before the 2010 elections. After, that dropped to 28 percent.

Of the states at or above that line (meaning they have the worst current unemployment rates), 55 percent were controlled by Democrats prior to 2010. Post 2010 elections, that drops to 38 percent. Republicans actually controlled a slightly larger percentage of legislatures pre-2010 in these worse-off states, 33 percent compared to 25 percent for states with better-than-average current unemployment.

But that's all roughly in line with the national splits of legislative control regardless of employment situation. Pre-2010, Democrats controlled 54 percent of state legislatures and Republicans 28 percent.

So what can we conclude from all this? Not much. But I did make a map. The life of an under-employed journalist is truly a rich one.

And, if you focus on the south, you see Republicans can screw up an economy just as well as Democrats, if not better. Out west, no one blows it like the Democrats.

Unless you consider that, just maybe, state governments don't have a ton of control over the vast interplay that molds an economy.

Note: Any aspiring or actual statisticians who want to take issue with something in this post, feel free to do so in the comments. I readily acknowledge that this is just a small set of information.

A truly scary unemployment trend

2011-07-08T15:11:00.013-04:00

To call today's lackluster jobs report "shocking" is fairly ridiculous, given the long-discussed expectation that there would be some level of a double-dip to this recession.

That's just the way recoveries often go when the initial fall off is a deep one.

But the chart below, which CNBC called "the scariest jobs chart ever" a few moments ago, is indeed frightening. Particularly for someone like me: young(ish), underemployed for a year and in an industry that shows no signs of improving, ever.

The chart comes from the Federal Reserve's research wing in St. Louis. Folks, that is what charts look like when the upper boundary is labelled "to infinity." It's what it looks like when the jobs simply don't come back.

That doesn't mean that's what will happen. Like the collector coins advertised on late night television, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. But that is long-term, white-knuckle, truly-scared-for-the-first-time stuff.

N.C. Redistricting

2011-07-01T17:11:00.011-04:00

Man, you have just got to love the things race still makes us do.

Note the proposed North Carolina 12th and 4th districts. The 12th connects Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Greensboro, spanning more than 90 miles. The 4th runs from Durham down to Fayetteville, but around Spring Lake and Fort Bragg.

A piece of the economy

2011-07-01T00:02:00.011-04:00

I accept that there's a certain amount of bullshit to any public company CEO's appearance on CNBC. But there is insight to our jobs-fewer economic recovery in this brief interview with the Italian head of Luxottica, an eyeglasses company that owns the Oakley and Ray-Ban brands, as well as LensCrafters.

First, who the hell bets $100 that the CEO of an Italian eyeglasses maker is going to appear on U.S. national television, for the 50th anniversary of his company, not wearing glasses?

Second, did you hear the reporter say, "strong demand for luxury goods helped Luxottica rake in record sales last year?"

What, would you say, is the best tax policy to encourage the highest employment rate? Would it, in any way, discourage consumption of high-end fashionable eyeglasses?

Or private jets, if you prefer?

Your answer may not fail to account for human greed.

Reporter: You have a good handle on the high-end consumer. ... How is that consumer doing right now?"

Luxottica CEO: Not bad at all.

Well, they didn't fail for everyone

2011-06-28T10:38:00.009-04:00

If Congressional Republicans believe the 2009 stimulus program was a failure because it didn't create enough jobs, how did the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts become a hill to die on? Didn't those also fail to create jobs, for more than half a decade longer?

From The Washington Post:

From Mother Jones:

From 60 Minutes:

Nationwide, 14 million children were in poverty before the Great Recession. Now, the U.S. Census tells us its 16 million - up two million in two years. That is the fastest fall for the middle class since the government started counting 51 years ago.

One of the areas suffering the most is otherwise advertised as "The Happiest Place on Earth," the counties around Disney World and Orlando. Just on Highway 192, the road to Disney World, 67 motels house about 500 homeless kids. ...

Ashley Rhea raised her hand to add something that we didn't expect: "I kind of feel like it's my fault that we don't have enough money. I feel like it's my fault that they have to pay for me. And the clothes that they buy for me."

Slavery: More illegal than drugs?

2011-06-26T19:57:00.007-04:00

In the promo a few minutes ago for tonight's installment of CNN's series on human trafficking, Mira Sorvino said the United States government has spent "in 10 years on human trafficking what we spend in a month on the war on drugs."

"Let's wage a war on slavery," she said.

I'd actually like to hear the argument against reworking those two budgets.

My wife tells me that Sorvino, an actress, has been working against human trafficking for a while. "I'm sure she has her facts straight," Marilyn says.

Gallup: Little trust for Congress, church influence on a 40-year wane

2011-06-24T11:30:00.005-04:00

Gallup put out some interesting, if unsurprising, poll numbers yesterday: Americans Most Confident in Military, Least in Congress.

A little more surprising is the nearly continual wane in confidence in churches, given that something like 80 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians.

Column: Govt. apologies cost money

2011-06-23T10:54:00.012-04:00

My employers over the years have thanked me for my hard work. And there's a value to that. It means something.

But I always thought, "You know how businesses say thank you? With money."

How does government declare intent? Through tax policy and spending.

If I'm the N.C. GOP, I budget $105 million next year for a eugenics apology. That's $35,000 for every living victim, which I'd split over two years.** I'd seriously consider a joint hearing, go quickly to the floor concurrently in the House and Senate and ask the governor to join in from the beginning.

I'm fighting a Democratic argument that I'm callous, and that I'm for the rich. This sounds like a bargain $52.5 million answer to that problem, and North Carolina would be the first state to do it.

I'd also argue this will produce a positive, if small, economic effect. Many of these North Carolinians were targeted for sterilization because they were poor and considered "feeble minded." How much of that money, do you figure, would be spent on food, medicine and medical care in North Carolina?

And that's all beside the fact that the state of North Carolina had these folks cut open and sterilized to improve the human race.

** I must admit not knowing enough about the state's budget rules, but I suspect this General Assembly cannot easily commit money for the 2013-14 budget, because there's an election before then. Something to work around, perhaps.

Update: I didn't know it when I wrote this column, but writers for the John Locke Foundation, a fairly conservative think tank, have argued in favor of sterilization compensation for years. They published a fresh paper on it July 6.

Said John Hood, the Foundation's president:

"I don't understand, honestly, what the contrary argument is. These were state actions taken on behalf of the stat of North Carolina ... that for decades violated the basic rights of nc citizens."

NC & Ga., shameful eugenics records

2011-06-22T20:09:00.025-04:00

From the Winston-Salem Journal:

"My grandmother and great aunt were victims of the North Carolina eugenics. For years they lived inside the mirrored walls of shame and guilt erected by this state. But here's the irony. Those walls the state built? They don't reflect on my grandmother, or my great aunt. Those walls reflect only on the state of North Carolina."

Image: Charles Holt, sterilized as an N.C. teenager, with ex-wife Janice Hedgecock.

North Carolina and Georgia: The two U.S. states that sanctioned eugenics the longest. You thieving, callous, arrogant fools.

An estimated 7,600 sterilized by the government in North Carolina alone, and as late as 1974. Yet the most enduring thing at today's hearing for North Carolina victims wasn't the sheer, shocking existence of these programs. It wasn't that each victim had such a similar story of lies, depression and difficulty finding a spouse.

It was that the children they did have were such obvious proof that man does not get to decide these things.

Victim testimony excerpts from the hearing:

"That's the only thing I hated about being operated on is I couldn't have kids. ... It's always been in the back of my mind."
- Willie Lynch, sterilized at 14, now 77.

"I couldn't get along well with others because I was hungry. I was cold. ... I was a victim of rape. ... My body was too young for what they did to me."
- Elaine Riddick, labelled difficult, promiscuous and feeble-minded, then sterilized after a Caesarean delivery at age 14.

"You harmed my mother and you killed her womb. Quite frankly, North Carolina, it's premeditated murder. ... You deserve to be punished."
- Elaine Riddick's only child, Tony.

"My momma could read. She could think. She loved her children. She taught school in the neighborhood. ... She was not feeble minded. She was not crazy. She was none of the things that people want to say. ... But she was sick. She was disabled by postpartum and depression. ... She was a victim of domestic abuse, and as she was taken to Cherry Hospital she was welcomed, because they needed a guinea pig. ... We took care of the shell that they sent back to us."
- Australia Clay, daughter of a woman sterilized at 40.

"Dottie and Flossie were just kids. They were people just like you and me and everyone else. They were little girls who would have played mommy if they'd had dolls. ... They were poor people judged unfit to reproduce. ... In a way my family is lucky. My grandmother's rape produced my mother, who grew up ... married my father and gave birth to four children. We are my grandmother's legacy."
- Karen Beck, whose grandmother and great aunt were sterilized.

"The state needs to reward us. 'Cause we got to carry on."
- Lela Dunston, sterilized after "somebody else signed my name."

"You have told these people that they mean nothing. ... It's still being said to my mother 47 years later. ... (My mother) taught me that no matter what was going on in my life, she always had my back. I have never been arrested, I don't use drugs and I have never been on public assistance. I purchased a house and I bought my mother a car and myself one as well. I pay my taxes and I love my family. My mother has everything to do with what I am."
- Deborah Chesson

From an NC writer on Twitter:

Give the survivors ALL the lotto revenue for the next 12 mnths. Deal? Cuz I prefer full Nuremberg for any surviving perps #ncga

I must admit, that sounds more like justice than an apology.

Perdue: A veto, because NC is better

2011-06-12T19:53:00.024-04:00

Gov. Bev Perdue vetoed the N.C. state budget today. From the tone of her press conference she may not think very much of you, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee. Mississippi? North Carolina Democrats are constantly saying, let's don't be like Mississippi.

The governor:

"For generations, we North Carolinians have distinguished ourselves from other southern states as a place of opportunity, and a place that understands the value of investing in our people.

Education has been our hallmark – the one area that set us apart from our neighbors and it's propelled our economic success. ...

By extending less than a penny of your sales tax, North Carolina could have avoided these severe cuts. ... I believe (legislators) chose to risk our children's future and our state's brand, around the country and the world, for less than a penny. ...

Folks are saying, quite simply, this is North Carolina, what in the world is going on? That's generational damage. This kind of discussion about North Carolina, who we are as a people, will last long after this budget."

Some of that is from the governor's statement, some from her q&a period. North Carolina's brand came up twice.

Full emailed statements from Senate Pro Tem Phil Berger and Speaker of the House Thom Tills are below. They've both talked this session about bringing North Carolina taxes in line with its southern neighbors, emulating solid GOP states, to a certain extent.

Spkr Tillis:

“We’re disappointed in the Governor’s veto today. Gov. Perdue has had access to this budget for almost two weeks, and she should have made this decision days ago to help provide certainty to counties and school boards across the state. She has shown no leadership on this issue and no willingness to work with the legislature, choosing instead to veto a budget that protects education and creates jobs. We look forward to overriding the Governor’s last-minute veto very soon.”

Sen. Berger:

“The same governor who claims to champion job creation and public education has vetoed a bipartisan budget that does more for both causes than her own proposal. The only explanation for this veto and her statewide media campaign is that the governor believes it is more important to energize her liberal base than to govern responsibly. By placing politics ahead of the public interest, she engages in obstruction of the worst kind, and we will act quickly to move North Carolina forward.”

Macon: Alone in thinking

2011-06-12T13:22:00.008-04:00

I'd forgotten this until a friend of mine running for the Macon City Council, Chris Horne, reminded me that the voter registration deadline for the Macon's July 19 elections is a week from Monday.

This surprised me, again, because qualifying closed Wednesday. Then I remembered: That's because Macon is the only city in Georgia with partisan City Council elections.

At least, as of May 2007 it was:

Of Georgia's 534 municipalities, only Macon holds partisan city elections, according to the secretary of state's office.

A six week campaign left after qualifying — without counting early voting. That is brisk.

Some times you need to ask yourselves: Is everyone else really wrong about this?

Note: The article linked above is an Associated Press rewrite of a piece I did for The Macon Telegraph. I pulled the quoted from the original.

On not believing the hype

2011-06-08T11:11:00.007-04:00

Boy, it really did not take long to go from this:

Great meeting with Speaker Tillis & Rep Holloway - thoughtful & honest conversation. Met w NCAE Char/Meck for nearly 2 hours.

To this:

"(NCAE stafers) don't care about kids, they don't care about classrooms, they only care about their jobs and their pensions," Speaker of the House Thom Tillis said.

How did that relationship sour so fast? Apparently talking the talk is different than walking the walk. Who knew.

From Brian Lewis, the NCAE's chief lobbyist, via email this week:

The turning point seemed to be when teachers and educators began pointing out that (Tillis') budget does not protect the classroom. When we pointed out in private to his office they ignored us. When we began telling the story to parents, as we are doing now, that started the vendettas and the pettiness.

When I get a chance, I'll ask Speaker Tillis the same question and update, but it's safe to say he disagrees.

Update: I spoke to the Speaker's chief of staff, Charles Thomas this evening. Yes, they disagree. And they don't think much of the NCAE.

Big change for NC's E-verify bill

2011-06-01T13:49:00.005-04:00

From a series of bill blurbs I'm working on for The Indy:

House Bill 36: This bill used to crack down on illegal immigration by requiring government agencies and their contractors to use e-verify, a federal program that tracks the citizenship of would be workers.

But a new version of the bill, introduced Wednesday morning, would expand that requirement to every large business in the state, whether it works with the government or not.

Businesses with fewer than 25 employees would be exempt — unless they get a government contract. There's also an exemption for businesses that employ seasonal workers for 90 days or less, which would give farms an out. Beyond that, employers would have to use the system to make sure they don't hire illegal immigrants.

The new bill got a hearing Wednesday morning, but not a vote at the request of the speaker's office, sponsoring state Rep. Harry Warren. Warren said he expects plenty of amendment suggestions between now and Friday, when he predicts a committee vote.

"Everything seems fluid," he said.

Rapture practice

2011-05-22T18:07:00.005-04:00

I remember as a kid going to some church camp, and there was a band or a group of some kind that had us lift our hands in the air, jump up and yell, "rapture practice!"

We did. But later that night, in a motel room with my friends, we made fun of it. Laying there to go to sleep, we slapped the headboards and said "horizontal rapture practice!" I don't remember the other jokes, but there were lots.

It was interesting to watch people yesterday on twitter, the newest way to show how clever you are. The rapture jokes flew so fast that you could not read them all, and that I got my camera to record it.

I know people were making fun of a silly, prideful and probably disingenuous proclamation: The world was going to end at 6 p.m. But there was more to it than that.

Because we're human, and we were just a little bit scared.

Thankfully we have a wonderful ability to laugh in the face of death and fear. Here's hoping we never lose it. I have a feeling it's crucial.

The making us stupid ship already sailed

2011-05-19T21:36:00.012-04:00

I find it hilarious that New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller discovered the Internet recently, and he's a little worried about it.

Yeah, Twitter. That's what's gonna get us.

Pacino and Steve Martin at DPAC

2011-05-19T14:46:00.007-04:00

Al Pacino will hold a Q&A session at the Durham Performing Arts Center Friday evening, and Steve Martin will play a bluegrass concert with "The Steep Canyon Rangers" Saturday.

Pacino image via DPAC.

Tell me that wouldn't be the greatest double interview in Hollywood history. Also, per yesterday's Indy, Steve Martin tickets are sold out, with some left for Pacino.

Gay marriage, Jesus, divorce, hypocrisy

2011-05-18T09:49:00.010-04:00

I wrote a trio of stories yesterday about North Carolina's "Defense of Marriage" act, and the rally for it, and the press conference against it, at the state capitol.

It has always seemed to me that, if you want to limit someone else's rights, no matter how odd the exercise of that right seems to you, you need to have a really good reason.

Are we the kind of society where "God says it's wrong" is reason enough? Maybe. But you better be sure God says it's wrong.

I do not pretend to know God's will. He seems to leave us mysteries, and let us figure them out as best we can. And I'm no scholar, but I've yet to find Jesus condemning homosexuality in the Bible.

Pastors at yesterday's rally pointed to Matthew 19: 4-5, in which the pharisees are trying to trick Jesus into contradicting himself on holy law:

3 The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?

4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5 And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

6 Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

As ralliers said, here we have an affirmation of marriage between a man and woman, which is what the bill in question would put into North Carolina's constitution. But read three sentences further:

7 They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?

8 He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.

9 And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

Here you have not just a positive affirmation of marriage, but a specific condemnation of most divorces.

So I guess my question is, how come 2,000 people didn't show up at the state capitol yesterday asking for a constitutional amendment outlawing divorce? For that matter, how come no one asks their government to turn the other cheek?

We don't even dip our flag to other nations. Remind me, was pride one of the virtues Jesus preached, or is it possible that we are a nation of many hypocrites?

FEMA grants are secret, but not loans

2011-05-16T11:30:00.011-04:00

As the recovery process continues across the south for people devastated by recent tornadoes, I'd like to highlight something odd about the way the federal government distributes recovery money.

If you get a grant to help you rebuild your home, the federal government protects your name and address from public information requests. If you get a loan, it doesn't.

I wrote about this last year in Georgia. Despite the fact that a federal appeals court has ordered FEMA to release the addresses of disaster grant recipients, the agency refused to do so. But the Small Business Administration, which operates a disaster loan program closely tied to FEMA, provided a database of its loans within a matter of days.

So grant money comes with privacy. A loan you have to pay back doesn't. And that's despite the fact that a federal court has specifically told FEMA it's in the public interest to release enough information so that others can determine whether the right people are getting grants.

Foolishness.

So far in North Carolina, FEMA/SBA have given out $4.4 million in grants and $2.1 million in loans, the Associated Press reported late last week.

There's another $10 million or so coming to offset costs local governments incur afte a storm. Cleaning up debris, for example, and paying police officers overtime. That money is also a matter of public record, as it should be.

Scotty McCreery at the Garner Lowes

2011-05-14T16:44:00.020-04:00

I went down to the neighborhood grocery store today to see American Idol Scotty McCreery, largely because my wife was covering it for NBC 17.

The kid's got a great voice, but even more impressive is what a pro he is, particularly considering he's 17, and he wasn't famous four months ago.

Pictures below. Hiring editors take note: I was absolutely willing to elbow little girls in the face to get these shots through the crowd. Ultimately that proved unnecessary.

For the record, I would not elbow any little girls in the face for pictures, except maybe in New York. And I got permission to photograph these kids from the adults accompanying them, though I did not ask their names.

"We" didn't do much at all

2011-05-06T22:34:00.004-04:00

From The New York Times:

I made tuna casseroles, lasagnas and brownies to take to the tender new war widows, always feeling inadequate, awkward and guilty about my own good fortune. I handed over my flimsy foil pans and stood before these women in stupid silence. I kept my funeral dress freshly dry-cleaned and hanging in my closet, never knowing when I’d need it next. Halfway through the second Afghanistan deployment, I had to buy a new funeral dress, so picked and worn was the old one. ...

For nearly a decade of war, it hasn’t felt much like “we.” During this, the longest war in our nation’s history, a war fought by less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of the country has seemed mostly to ignore those of us in the military community, tuning in only for our scandals or deaths. And so “we,” in the context of victory, most accurately applies only to the very small number of men and women who have given more than any of us had a right to ask.

- Rebekah Sanderlin, Fort Bragg, N.C.

Perdue: No worries on those 5 Dems

2011-05-04T14:37:00.007-04:00

During a visit to a local high school this afternoon, Gov. Bev Perdue said she's not worried about the five Democrats who voted for the Republican House budget last night, giving it a veto-proof margin.

Perdue said she spoke to these Democrats beforehand, and knew how they planned to vote. Obviously Republican Speaker of the House Thom Tillis did, too, because his office put out a press release lauding the "bipartisan" budget within moments of the vote.

Said Perdue:

"In no way does it affect my ability (to negotiate). ... They will be with me when the going gets tough. If we have to make hard decisions I can take that to the bank."

We'll see. The budget moves to the Senate now. Long way to go before the governor vetoes this budget and things get real.

Perdue: What me worry?

Three on the state budget

2011-05-02T10:53:00.003-04:00

Hard to be interested in North Carolina's budget on a day like today.

For the Winston-Salem Journal.

For The Independent Weekly.

For Carolina Public Press.

Let's get further away

2011-04-26T22:27:00.016-04:00

The House budget proposal, which WRAL's Laura Leslie describes here, strikes me as a major move away from governor's bargaining position in a more detailed, matter-of-fact and tangible way than even the recent acrimony has portrayed.

There's also quite a bit of legislating from within the budget. No wonder Republicans wanted a continuing resolution in place.

From Laura:

The bill, H200, weighs in at 333 pages, 63 of which are devoted to basically dismantling the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. ...

(Among other things it) institutes strict new curbs on the Governor’s power to manage the budget when lawmakers are not in session. Perdue would have to call an interim committee back to add so much as one position in the executive branch. Grant money would also be subject to new oversight.

Yeah, she'll probably sign that. It also raids Golden Leaf.

Particularly when it comes to DENR, it would seem (LIBERAL!) watchdog Chris Fitzsimon was right yesterday when he said the GOP is "using the budget crisis to remake state government philosophically."

Or, to put it in Speaker of the House Thom Tillis' words, doing "what we said we were going to do" last year.

Gary Robertson did a good piece for the Associated Press on the new fees in this budget. He also touches on the $230 million set aside in the budget bill for a "tax package":

The budget bill released late Tuesday sets aside $230 million in reserve for the separate tax package, of which about $130 million would be used to lower the corporate income tax rate, said Rep. Harold Brubaker, R-Randolph, senior co-chairman of the full Appropriations Committee.

Tillis said this morning that the rest of that package will "relate to job creation, most likely tax relief for small businesses, maybe some for corporate filers."

Update: According to Jordan Shaw, the speaker's spokesman, the 2 percent corporate tax rate cut in the governor's budget, which Brubaker and, in a vaguer sense, Tillis allude to above is not assumed in the House budget. Basically, they're still working on a tax package that may include it. Tillis said Friday it may also include a personal income tax rate cut.

Tillis: Probably not holding his breath.

Image: File. December, 2010.

Heights of the storm

2011-04-19T23:40:00.008-04:00

From preliminary National Weather Service reports describing tornadoes and other storms this weekend in a large swath of North Carolina:

In the Lemon Springs / Sanford area, before heading into Raleigh:

TORNADO CONTINUED TO INTENSIFY TO EF3 ALONG LEMON SPRINGS ROAD STRIKING THE ST ANDREWS SUBDIVISION. ONE FATALITY OCCURRED IN A VEHICLE ALONG LEMON SPRINGS ROAD. NUMEROUS HOMES WERE COMPLETELY DESTROYED AND SEVERAL TWO STORY HOMES HAD THEIR UPPER FLOORS REMOVED. WIND SPEEDS WERE ESTIMATED AT 140 MPH WITH A PATH LENGTH OF OVER A QUARTER MILE. ADDITIONAL HOMES WERE BLOWN OFF THEIR FOUNDATION ON CEMETERY DRIVE.

CONTINUING NORTHEAST ALONG CAMERON DRIVE...THE UPPER FLOOR WAS BLOWN OFF TWO APARTMENT BUILDINGS. THE TORNADO THEN ENTERED AN INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ALONG INDUSTRIAL DR WHERE IT MULTIPLE STEEL CONSTRUCTED RETAIL BUILDINGS WERE DESTROYED IN ADDITION TO AT LEAST THREE LARGE WAREHOUSES AT THE STATIC CONTROL FACILITY. WINDS IN THIS AREA LIKELY EXCEEDED 160 MPH. THE TORNADO THEN DESTROYED THE TRACTOR SUPPLY COMPANY... BIG LOTS... AND LOWES HOME IMPROVEMENT STORE ALONG HIGHWAY 421.

In Dunn:

ONE FATALITY OCCURRED WITH THIS DAMAGE. ANOTHER BRIEF BREAK IN THE DAMAGE OCCURRED NEAR THE CAPE FEAR RIVER...THEN DAMAGE BEGAN AGAIN JUST SOUTH OF DUNN. IN DUNN...EF1 DAMAGE WAS COMMON...WITH AREAS OF EF2 DAMAGE (WIND SPEEDS TO 130 MPH) WHERE MOBILE HOMES WERE COMPLETELY WIPED OFF OF THEIR FOUNDATIONS AND TREES WERE DEBARKED. A SECOND FATALITY OCCURRED HERE. THE TORNADO DAMAGE PATH WAS ABOUT ONE THIRD TO ONE HALF MILE WIDE.

God bless us, everyone.

I did a short piece for The Indy, about a cross that — apparently — didn't blow down, despite being in the path of the storm.

People said it was a nice symbol.

Gov to Legis: Boom

2011-04-17T03:18:00.005-04:00

There's really only one answer to "check," if you want the game to keep going.

Republicans to Perdue: check

2011-04-15T12:24:00.024-04:00

It was interesting to watch the new GOP leadership yesterday plan and respond to Gov. Bev Perdue's vetoes (see Wednesday's column), and to maneuver on the more immediately important issue of unemployment checks for 37,000 people. Legislators have smartly / jerkily? tied that to a continuing resolution with a 13 percent cut on a budget that doesn't start until July.

It would indeed seem a checkmate, unless Perdue can prevail upon the federal government not to require the legislative change, which surely a president can do if he can bomb Libya. Or Perdue may veto the bill, and try to win the public relations war that follows.

After House Bill 383 passed yesterday, Speaker of the House Thom Tillis said Republicans had offered Democrats a 4 month continuing resolution with a 13 percent spending cut, instead of the full year that passed. He did not tell reporters this deal would have required Gov. Perdue's promise not to veto the bill, but surely that was expected.

The speaker also said Gov. Perdue called him Thursday morning and "I made it clear I'm open to meeting with her." He told reporters he would
hope to see a member at the governor's staff at all important public legislative meetings.

Tillis with reporters Thursday evening.

On charter schools, Tillis said Democrats walked away from negotiations, "we didn't." He said he expects to reach a deal on the employee health care plan, which Perdue one of two bills Perdue vetoed Wednesday evening.

If Democrats rejected the four-month compromise, you have to think Perdue is willing to veto this conjoined bill Republicans sent her. Tillis had some tortured-logic story about the CR and the benefit extension being connected because both give people "certainty" about the future, but rationalizations are largely irrelevant at this point.

The ball is in the governor's court.

A few other pictures from yesterday after the jump. They're not particularly technically proficient (potential employers), but they give a sense of the controlled tension often on display Thursday at the General Assembly.

(1) Sen. Approp. Chair Richard Stevens and President Pro Tem Phil Berger.

(2) Leadership team: Stevens, Berger and sens. Bob Rucho, Pete Brunstetter and Tom Apodaca head out together during a Senate recess.

(3) Apodaca in the House, talking to speaker's chief of staff Charles Thomas.

(4) Tillis from the speaker's dais, with Thomas and principal clerk Denise Weeks.

(5) Tills, talking to reporters after the House adjourned Thursday.

The adults in the room

2011-04-13T22:44:00.028-04:00

With today's GOP maneuvering, and the governor's subsequent vetoes, it has become clear that this legislative session may well devolve to a series of plots, insults and vetoes, and it is difficult to predict what you lose when that happens.

Obviously the governor and legislative leaders have legitimate philosophical differences.

But how much are they really listening to each other, and talking to each other reasonably? Barry Smith reports they met today, but how many decisions are based on doing what's right, as opposed to winning political battles?

Republicans are churning out bills. But they're turning conservative-minded ideas into mediocre legislation because of an over-aggressive style.

Look at the Charter Schools bill, Senate Bill 8. It is a Christmas tree of lowered requirements for new schools. They'd have to serve students lunch, but not necessarily nutritious ones. They'd have to provide transportation, but only for a three mile radius. Schools couldn't discriminate against children based on race or disabilities, but they're also not required to accept every nearby student that asks for enrollment.

No wonder Democrats cry out and say these changes will simply drain the best students out of traditional schools, leaving the poor kids condensed together. Of course, the Democratic Party has had more than a century of rule to make North Carolina's schools better on their own, but that's another column.

Look at House Bill 7, which the governor vetoed today. Is there really any reason to allow community colleges to opt out of federal loan programs, other than it will help banks who don't want to compete with the federal government? Is there any evidence that a college has ever been held liable for student defaults, as some college presidents say they are concerned will happen?

If so, no one ever brought it up on the House floor, and yet the GOP moved that thing merrily along.

As for the governor, she's been keeping quiet, publicly, about most legislation until it's approved, which is not unusual. But last Thursday she spoke at Winston-Salem State University, and an excerpt was posted to her YouTube channel. Said Perdue:

"I'm smart enough going into it not to try to pick a fight in the school yard. Because at the end of the day, I am the adult. And when push comes to shove. I'm going to do what we need to do. Let me tell you a funny story. ... You know I've been governor two years ... I've vetoed one bill and that's just because they were messing with me and I got mad. I vetoed it and I didn't even know where the veto stamp was. ... After some of this mess started happening (a staffer) came in my office and he had this brown bag and it was swishing. You could hear the liquid swishing and I thought, "Holy no, he didn't bring me beer or a glass of wine. I mean, this is state property." ... And I pulled the bag out and it's like a quart jar of red ink. Because the law says I've got to veto the, veto stamp, in red ink. And, so, I'm right with you brother. I'm right with you. I'm prepared and ready to go."

That's a great story. But I'm not sure it's one "the adult" throws out there, baiting the other side, picking a fight in the school yard just as you say you won't.

Speaker Thom Tillis mentioned Perdue's comments during a Tuesday press conference. I got the feeling he marked her words.

One day later, the House and Senate majorities threw an end-around at the governor on next year's budget, tying it to an extension of unemployment benefits. The legislature has to make a formula change, or 37,000 people won't get their federal unemployment checks. Tillis and Berger said the state's Employment Security Commission took its sweet, incompetent time telling them this. Everybody's accusing everybody of playing politics, and they're all right.

Later in the day, Perdue told reporters that the GOP move amounted to "extortion ... dereliction of duty, all those words." She reminded legislators they "were sworn to take an oath, I mean they took it themselves on the Bible."

"It's tough being a leader," she said, "and sometimes I guess they're overwhelmed."

So we may be done here.

Perhaps more legislation will be crafted to put the governor in a hard place. Perhaps more legislation will be vetoed, in some cases for the wrong reasons. You look at the state health plan bill, Senate Bill 265, which Perdue also vetoed today. Is asking teachers and other employees to pay a monthly fee for personal insurance truly unfair in this climate? Did the House and Senate really take just "60 seconds in front of a committee" to hear from retired workers and teacher's groups, as the governor says?

If the governor is serious about negotiating a solution, will she work toward one with the House and Senate, without insulting their leadership? Will they let her?

That would seem the adult thing to do, for both sides. Or instead of making North Carolina better now, they can fight, and we'll talk about who deserves the blame. And maybe someone will make it better in 2012.

Blasphemy in the U.S. Capitol

2011-04-08T11:49:00.018-04:00

In the United States we often refer to ourselves as a Christian nation, even if we seldom seem to govern by the values laid out in the Sermon on the Mount.

But I was in Washington, D.C., this week and toured the inside of the U.S. Capitol for the first time. The Capitol rotunda is an awesome sight, and I was surprised to see a painting called "The Apotheosis of Washington" gracing the domed ceiling.

Apotheosis basically means to become a god. And the painting depicts George Washington rising into Heaven.

So what does it say about this Christian nation that, for the last 146 years, we've had a fresco of one our earliest leaders "rising to the heavens in glory" painted onto the highest indoor point of our most important building?

Image: Architect of the Capitol.gov.

Med Mal torts: $$ and the Constitution

2011-03-24T13:16:00.012-04:00

I'd like to highlight something from a broader story on North Carolina medical malpractice reform, which I wrote this week for The Indy.

The GOP's medical malpractice tort reform bill in North Carolina has primarily been pitched as a way to save money on health care.

Some say it will also help the state recruit doctors, ideally to rural areas with shortages. But I've looked at several studies on these issues, and the likelihood that all kinds of doctors will relocate to Hendersonville, NC, because the General Assembly beefed up its tort laws is questionable.

Those studies do agree, though, that reforms in Senate Bill 33 save money. It may be less than a percentage point of total health care costs, and the savings may never trickle down to patients, but it does save money.

The problem is, it's really the award caps that save money. According to a Harvard synthesis of several medical malpractice studies, only the caps are effective. From that study:

Caps on damages reduce average awards and have modest effects on premium growth and physician supply. Other reforms have little impact.

The problem is these caps are constitutionally vulnerable.

In fact, SB 33 specifically contemplates the cap section of the bill — and only that section — being declared unconstitutional. Georgia's Supreme Court found a very similar cap unconstitutional last year in a unanimous decision that you can download here: Click on S09A1432. ATLANTA OCULOPLASTIC SURGERY, P.C., d/b/a OCULUS v. NESTLEHUTT et al.

Georgia Justices decided that "the very existence of the caps, in any amount, is violative of the right to trial by jury."

Now, as Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger noted Tuesday, North Carolina justices will be looking at North Carolina's constitution when/if they decide this, not Georgia's.

But the N.C. Constitution's right to trial by jury (Article 1, Sect. 25) is not much different from Georgia's (Article 1, Sect. 1, paragraph XI).

Georgia's says the right "shall remain inviolate" and North Carolina's says it "shall remain sacred and inviolable." And, of course, the right to trial by jury in civil and criminal matters is in the U.S. Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights.

So unless North Carolina's Supreme Court reads constitutions a whole lot differently than Georgia's, the caps would be declared unconstitutional. Two retired N.C. Supreme Court Justices have predicted this, though a third has said he believes the caps are constitutional.

But here's my point: The bill's meant to save money. It includes caps and several other reforms, including a new "gross negligence" standard and other changes that will make it harder to sue doctors. Studies show that cap reforms save money, and that other tort reforms probably don't.

So if this bill passes and the cap is declared unconstitutional you end up with new tort laws that don't fulfill the stated purpose of saving money, but do make it harder for people seriously injured by malpractice to sue.

That is, if they pass at all. Republicans hold majorities in the House and Senate, but Gov. Bev Perdue has been giving her veto stamp a work out so far this session.

Suspected killer skips on $1,500 bond

2011-03-23T19:10:00.012-04:00

Peter Moses is suspected of shooting his girlfriend's 5-year-old son, putting the body in a suitcase and putting it in an attic.

He also may be part of the Black Hebrews, or as The N&O puts it, "a black supremacist wing of the Hebrew Israelite movement believes Jesus Christ will soon return and kill whites, Jews, homosexuals and others, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The boy has apparently been missing since October. Moses got picked up Feb. 18 at a house where Durham police were investigating "suspicious activity." They found him hiding in a cabinet and arrested him on old warrants, firing a gun within the city limits and writing a worthless check.

Moses had to put up a $1,500 bond to get out of jail. He didn't show up for court today, according to NBC 17's 7 p.m. newscast. The missing boy's mother skipped her own court appearance earlier this month.

It is unclear, to me at least, when police developed the informant that told them Moses killed this child. Or when it became common knowledge that Moses, allegedly, manipulates women into moving around with him, and into supporting him because Moses "didn't work."

But doesn't $1,500 seem like a low bond for a suspected murderer and cult leader?

In lieu of flowers, please, for the love of God, buy a newspaper

2011-03-17T23:18:00.007-04:00

The weekly paper in my town closed this week and ran its own obituary:

The Garner Citizen was preceded in death by the appreciation of quality print journalism. It leaves behind an entire community and numerous struggling writers, editors and designers.

In lieu of flowers, please, for the love of God, buy a newspaper.

Amen. And I hope you will do as I plan to March 28, when The New York Times launches a very reasonable online subscription plan: Buy a newspaper again.

Wait. What? Feds charge banks less interest than states

2011-03-16T22:37:00.005-04:00

Not only did the federal government make $9 trillion in previously undisclosed loans to various banks to get through the financial crisis a few years ago, but it gave those banks a significantly better interest rate than it's giving state governments borrowing money to pay unemployment benefit payments.

According to CNN the interest rate on the bank loans was .5 to 3.5 percent. Loans to the states carry rates higher than 4 percent.

Voter I.D., an effective red herring

2011-03-16T02:31:00.023-04:00

Voter I.D., I don't think I could hate you more as an issue.

You seek to stop people who aren't stealing elections from stealing them, while pandering to racists, and borderline racists.

Meanwhile, opponents argue that it's too difficult to get a photo I.D., or unreasonable to expect some people to have them, even when the state offers them for free.

There seem to be conservatives worried that Mexicans, hiding from authorities so they can get jobs in the U.S. and send money home to their families, are simultaneously prioritizing election fraud, possibly while speaking only Spanish.

Meanwhile Democrats are basically saying, a bunch of our voters are too old, black, Hispanic, poor or infirmed to have picture I.D. What great confidence that displays in people.

They say private school college kids and people who move a lot might have trouble voting. But bill drafting and a primary bill sponsor said Tuesday (paragraph 19) that I.D.s don't even have to have an accurate or in-precinct address to work on election day.

"As long as it's your picture that's on it," said Gerry Cohen, director of the Legislative Drafting Division.

Absentee voting — that becomes easier in the bill, which may well explode the "this hurts old people in nursing homes" argument while seeking to prevent fraud, based on the logic that people are more likely to attempt fraud in person.

Laws like the ones proposed in House Bill 351 have been upheld repeatedly by the courts, but of course the reason people talk about the constitutionality of requiring photo I.D. to vote is because race is deeply part of the debate.

The NAACP's state president left a copy of the 15th Amendment for legislators after Tuesday's public hearing on H 351. He called the bill "nuanced Jim Crow voter suppression of the 21st century."

So it's a great issue. Anything that reminds everyone that, 46 years ago, the Federal government had to decree that white people in the South damn well better start letting black people vote — yeah, let's talk about that for a while.

In fact, let's talk a whole bunch more about that for a few weeks instead of, say, the state budget. Or education. Or creating jobs. Because our elections are being stolen.**

I won't guess at the motives of Republicans pushing, successfully, for photo ID here and in other states. But it does seem an odd strategy to follow if you don't think the end game is that fewer people will vote for Democrats.

And as little as I care for covering and reading about this issue, voter I.D. was a GOP campaign promise here in North Carolina, and the GOP won big. So let's see it passed. Let's see if the governor vetoes it, and whether Democrats block another Republican overturn try. Then we'll see who's running North Carolina.

And if you really want to prevent in-person voter fraud, start by making voters dip their fingers in ink, which just looks cool.

And, if you're saying current boards of election aren't running clean elections, and that's why fraud is much more common than the relatively low numbers reported (paragraph 10), then argue to do something about the appointment process. It leans heavily in favor of the governor (scroll down), and clearly lends itself to one-party control of local three-member boards.

Or we can chase boogeymen. All of us. Leaders on both sides, the media, the voting public. We can chase boogeymen, and run around in circles.

** Sarcasm not meant for sheriff's elections, which you just expect to be stolen. Probably by Latinos and Democrats.

Fukushima Nuclear: Chin to the ocean

2011-03-14T18:57:00.010-04:00

The "A" marks Fukushima 1 / Daiichi nuclear plant on the coast of Japan, the northern of two Fukushima coastal plants where a building exploded and meltdown concerns precipitated a massive evacuation of the surrounding area.

Image: Google.

Where do plant workers go when a Tsunami hits? Do they have time to shutdown the plant and make it to higher ground, then come back? Do they ride it out there?

Time: Nat. Guard suicide rate up 450 %

2011-03-11T22:36:00.009-05:00

From Time Magazine:

The first shots killed his 26-year-old wife April and their 13-month-old daughter Lila, who was in her playpen. April's sunglasses remained perched atop her head, a pacifier stuffed into her back pocket. Lila, in pink socks, was wearing a T-shirt that read SPANK GRANDMA--SHE SPOILED ME. Magdzas, 23, next turned his gun on the family's three dogs, killing them all. Then he put the pistol to his right temple and fired his 14th, and last, shot.

There was one other victim that rainy summer day: the Magdzases' second daughter, Annah, who was in her mother's womb and due to be delivered by cesarean section the next day. ...

Matt Magdzas' final acts may be the worst spasm of violence committed by a combat veteran since the U.S. launched two wars in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. But in taking his own life, he joined an all-too-common group: Magdzas was one of 113 National Guard members who killed themselves in 2010. The Guard's skyrocketing suicide rate, up 82% from 2009 and 450% from 2004, now exceeds that of active-duty soldiers. This fact underscores the plight of Guardsmen, who--unlike their full-time Army buddies--lack the jobs, support and camaraderie found on military bases after they return home from war. Instead, Guard troops go in the span of a week or two from fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan to living among civilians who have no idea what they've just gone through.

Debt points to business tax increase

2011-03-10T09:46:00.009-05:00

If I own a business in North Carolina, or in any of the other 30 states that owe the federal government money for unemployment benefits paid out the last couple of years, this chart scares me.

Click image to enlarge.

Morgan Stanley produced this for the state of North Carolina, which is trying to figure out how to pay back what it borrowed from the feds. I added the big red circle, to highlight the fear. You can read more about this here and, in a broader sense, here.

But a couple of things I'll highlight:

The N.C. Employment Security Commission, which manages the state's unemployment benefit system and showed itself to be a brilliantly run government organization last year, wouldn't answer my questions about this over three days.
The federal government loaned North Carolina money at more than 4 percent interest. If the state uses bonds to pay off that debt, it's likely to pay about 2.35 percent. Why would the federal government charge other governments more interest than a private bank?

Pennies and Nickels: Seriously, why?

2011-03-06T13:27:00.006-05:00

Perhaps you've seen coverage of last week's GAO report that concluded doing away with dollar bills in favor of dollar coins would save the U.S. $5.5 billion over 30 years.

And perhaps you've also seen "the best anti-penny rant ever." But if not:

In the interest of equal time, here are some of the arguments for keeping the penny.

The rich: More phones than people

2011-03-05T22:41:00.012-05:00

The print version is even better (you remember magazines, right? subscribe today), but National Geographic has got some interesting graphics illustrating a range of human demographics worldwide.

This map shows income distribution, fertility rates, education, etc.

Click image to enlarge.

I have to think this is accurate, because National Geographic is pretty top flight. Let's hope those things don't really give you cancer.

Dear Newt: Good luck.

2011-03-03T22:21:00.015-05:00

Dear Newt Gingrich,

You and me, we're Smyrna boys.

I know you're from Pennsylvania, and moved around a lot. But you were my congressman growing up, and that connects us well enough.

I remember when you came to my high school, Campbell High School, well known as the world's best high school, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Some hippie sophomore asked you a leading question, and you destroyed her. Oh, it was total. I remember that clearly more than 16 years later.

We've met a couple of times since, and you haven't erased that first impression.

Mr. Speaker, you won't be president. I know it. And you either know it, or should.

But that doesn't mean you can't run. Even extraordinary men have few chances to garner that much of their country's attention.

So if you have something to say, run. Or don't. But quit with this, and your 1,500 Facebook likes.

Or don't. Because you were an asshole when I was in high school.

Sincerely,

Travis Fain
CHS class of 1994

Update: As of Friday at 2 p.m., newtexplore2012.com is up to 1,847 Facebook likes. If he gets 1.4 million more he'll beat out the movement to abolish Croc sandals.

CORRECTION: L.I. general counsel in Florida, Erajh Panditaratne, CHS 1993, says this wasn't so much a "hippie sophomore" as a "moderately liberal senior." I stand corrected.

Bargain! $287K for inconclusive study

2011-03-02T19:54:00.024-05:00

I'm nearly certain "terminal groins" are such a big story from time to time because editors know putting "groin" in a headline is going to grab readers.

This is what a Terminal Groin looks like:

That's Captiva Island, Fla., (zoomable) a terminal groin example from a 2009 / 2010 N.C. legislative study on groins.

You can look at that and probably feel comfortable the groin is keeping sand in right behind it, even if some sand was trucked in.

Harder to predict is what that wall does, say, half a mile away. And sand along the N.C. coast is kind of a zero-sum issue, since people's houses are surrounded with sandbags and will probably fall into the ocean soon.

A House legislative committee ordered a study on groins in 2009, hoping to determine whether lifting N.C.'s ban on them is a good idea. From the Winston-Salem Journal:

Six months later the study was done. It was 530 pages long, cost more than $287,000 to produce and determined that it's "difficult to draw conclusions" on whether terminal groins work.

Now, parts of that story were cut for space.

For example, one of the legislators who sponsored the bill requiring this study, state Rep. Lucy Allen, said it was "appropriately funded," then said she didn't read "any part of it."

Allen chaired the House Environment and Natural Resources Committee in 2009, but about the time the study was complete Gov. Bev Perdue appointed her to the state utility commission. That's why Allen didn't look at the study, she said.

The bill's other primary sponsor was state Rep. Pryor Gibson. Rep. Gibson said he wasn't happy the study didn't provide definite answers, but said groins were "way too big of an issue not to have the data collected."

But "organized" may be a better word than "collected" here. Given until April Fool's Day 2010 to finish the study, researchers reported back that due to "schedule and budget constraints ... no new data collection efforts were undertaken."

From study team's final recommendations:

Rather, available data (shoreline changes, nourishment and dredging activities, natural resources, etc.) were collected from as many sources as possible. Additionally, most of the data originally were collected for purposes other than determining the potential impact of a terminal groin. ...

The Commission has concluded that the general impacts of the groins, as reported in this study, tend to be lost in the “noise” of other inlet management activities. ...

"Based on the results, the (study) commission cannot make a determination that terminal groins would or would not cause adverse impacts on the environment or adjacent properties."

My questions to you: Do you think the state got a good price for this information? And was it reasonable to expect an answer to "take six months and tell us how these walls are likely to affect where the ocean puts sand?"

Senate GOP: Med reform will save you money on treatment

2011-03-02T18:49:00.008-05:00

It's funny, when I wrote about medical malpractice caps last week I couldn't find anyone who would promise me the change would lower medical costs for the consumer

There was some vague idea that the caps would cut down on defensive medicine, thus saving money. But certainly neither of the two Winston-Salem hospitals I spoke to would commit to lowering rates, or say they expected to pay less for malpractice insurance.

But now that the bill has passed the Senate, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger is promising just that. From his office today:

Raleigh, N.C. -- The North Carolina Senate on Wednesday passed a bi-partisan bill reforming the state’s medical malpractice laws, a move that will attract quality doctors, bring new jobs and make health care more affordable and accessible for all North Carolinians. ...

Got that? This bill is going to make health care more affordable and accessible for more than 9.5 million people. I look forward to trusting insurance companies to lower their malpractice rates to help make that happen.

The rest Sen. Berger's release should be posted here shortly.

Perdue protecting teaching jobs? Maybe, but not yet.

2011-02-18T10:35:00.007-05:00

In her effort to keep 75 percent of a temporary sales tax increase in place to balance the state budget, Gov. Bev Perdue is boiling the budget fight down to a choice between that relatively small tax and massive teacher layoffs.

Perdue's budget, the governor said repeatedly yesterday, funds every existing state-funded teacher and teacher's assistant position. But it seems clear that other cuts the governor proposed to K-12 schools could threaten teaching jobs, even if the GOP-led legislature doesn't specifically cut teachers.

For example, Perdue recommends eliminating state funding for new school buses, for technology and for training. She cuts a number of other funding pots, including school custodians and bus drivers.

Less obvious is another issue, which WRAL's Laura Leslie wrote about last night:

Perdue's budget chief Charlie Perusse said today that in figuring the cost for “enrollment growth" students next year, the governor decided to make a change: The state would pay only for the classroom portion of the per-pupil money.

In other words:

Public schools would get only 75 percent of the per-pupil money they were expecting for their 5,300 additional students.

Laura also breaks down various position cuts (bus drivers, custodians, administrators) by district, figuring that they amounts to 38 non-classroom positions per school system.

School systems have some flexibility when it comes to absorbing cuts. But class size maximums are set by the state, which limits a system's ability to layoff teachers and shift money to other parts of their budget. But, systems can apply for a class size waiver, and in the past the state has simply OK'd mass waivers to remove size restrictions statewide for 4th through 12th grades.

But, according to the state Department of Public Instruction, that mass waiver is contained in the current year budget (the second section 7.8.(b) of this bill, if you'd like to read it). That means it's only good for this budget year, which ends June 30.

So, as we talk about protecting teaching jobs, one the key factors – if not the key factor — is what language legislators and the governor put into the final 2011-12 budget about class size restrictions.

Balance N.C.'s budget yourself

2011-02-15T17:51:00.007-05:00

I expect the intent of this interactive budget exercise from the governor's office is to show people how difficult it can be to make budgetary decisions when you need to cut a couple of billion from the budget.

But then there are jerks like me who go through the steps in under 5 minutes, end with a $370 million surplus and think "well that wasn't difficult."

Hard to believe that allowing people to cut 20,000 state jobs with a few clicks of the mouse would somehow dehumanize the process.

Tax cuts, teachers and scholarships

2011-02-14T22:56:00.006-05:00

No idea how you pay for all that and cut $3.7 ... wait, $2.7 ... no, $2.4 billion from the budget.

Plenty of coverage out there of Gov. Bev Perdue's state-of-the-state speech tonight. Here's my own initial shot at it.

Tillis: State $$ not always easy to find

2011-02-10T19:28:00.008-05:00

Senate Bill 13, which scrapes a bunch of money out of various state accounts this year to help balance next year's budget, depends on a number of reserve accounts. You take money out of those accounts — or plan to put less in them at the end of this year — and there's a little more for the regular budget.

In reporting one of several budget stories in recent weeks I tried to determine how much the state had in all reserve accounts, and it took several phone calls to three state departments to understand, with really only limited certainty, how much the accounts they were responsible for had in reserve. There doesn't seem to be a place the public can find this information all gathered together, and yet "how much money does North Carolina have in the bank," seems a reasonable question.

Speaker of the House Thom Tillis said today that the process with S13 has been a similar experience, showing that it's not an easy question to answer, even if you're speaker of the house. Said Tillis:

"No, its not. And that's why we're going to keep on hammering it. Sometimes we have to ask the same people the same question more than once."

Update: Just for the record, that's like rule two of journalism.

Hyperbole on the NC budget

2011-02-10T08:30:00.008-05:00

I imagine you've seen the news that North Carolina's expected budget deficit next year is no longer $3.7 billion, but $2.7 billion. But did you actually watch Gov. Bev Perdue's YouTube announcement on this?

It includes this line:

"And now, because of my administration's tireless commitment to defending North Carolina's business friendly climate, we are really seeing an improved economic outlook."

Gov. Perdue's administration fixed the economy. That is impressive. There's also this:

"I'm happy. But happy isn't strong enough. I'm over the top happy to announce that our estimated budget shortfall for this biennium has dropped by 30 percent."

As Greensboro's Mark Binker noted on Twitter, it's 27 percent, not 30. And "over the top happy," is dangerously close to car salesman commercial language. I've saved you so much money, IT's INSANE!

While effective management is certainly part of spending less money, the real lesson here is that budget projections always depend on the people making them, the assumptions they make, and what they want you to know.

So $3.7 billion is seldom $3.7 billion, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is some times people want things seem worse than they are.

At any rate, it's (said to be) $2.7 billion now, for reasons Binker breaks down here. Throw in $800 million in further current year savings the governor and legislature will probably get together on eventually, and nearly $600 million from a "quarterly assessment ... levied on all licensed N.C. hospitals," which is AN ASSESSMENT NOT A TAX DON'T CALL IT A TAX, and suddenly you're down to $1.3 billion or so without breaking a sweat.

Following the governor's announcement yesterday, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger put out a short statement:

“We are pleased the economy is showing signs of life. But we are alarmed Governor Perdue is declaring ‘mission accomplished’ before the real work is done.”

But Perdue never said "Mission Accomplished" in her announcement. In fact, she makes it clear there's still work to be done, saying:

"But let me be very direct, we still have a very steep budget hole to overcome."

Finally, the governors office said Perdue announced the change on YouTube rather than to the press so everyone could get the news at the same time.

The video has 840 views as of today. That's not everyone, and you can't ask an Internet video follow up questions.

N.C. Medicaid budget cuts: How much can you hit the helpless?

2011-02-07T23:47:00.011-05:00

I'm working on a piece about Medicaid and potential Dept. of Health and Human Services budget cuts in N.C., and one paragraph from a conversation with Dept. Secretary Lanier Cansler says quite a bit.

EPSDT stands for Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment, a federal law requiring Medicaid to "provide all medically necessary health care services to Medicaid-eligible children."

EPSDT - that's not optional, and if a child needs a dental service we have to provide it, period. So any of these cuts would be adults, and we don't cover adults from 19-65 unless they are disabled or pregnant women. We have categorical eligibility. We serve kids up to 19, and seniors above 65. But between that, you have to be disabled, pregnant or "medically needy" where every dime you have gets eaten up by medical costs. But health care reform would change that, saying anyone under 138 percent poverty is covered by medicaid. that's why expect 200,000 new enrollees in 2014 due to health care reform

Get that? He says the only people you can really hit with cuts to optional Medicaid programs are pregnant women, people who've been disabled and senior citizens.

Unfortunately the full article will be much longer than this. Also, if you've ever been not sure why state governments are complaining about how much "Obamacare" will cost them (it's OK, friend, if you don't fully understand Medicaid), the last sentence from Secretary Cansler explains it.

New hospital "assessment" pitched to help balance NC Medicaid budget

2011-02-04T15:42:00.015-05:00

It looks like North Carolina hospitals are willing to tax themselves to generate new money that can be used to draw down more federal funding and boost Medicaid payments.

It would be done through a fee described in S 32, which calls for an "assessment" of an undefined percentage on "total hospital costs." It's not clear how much this would generate. Hugh Tilson, a senior v.p. for the N.C. Hospital Association, said those figures are being worked out.

Update: The associations' working figures assume this would raise about $216 million, with $43 million available to help the state balance its general fund and the rest to draw down federal Medicaid funding at slightly higher than a 2-1 match,** as opposed to the 3-1 match that has been paid in the recent past.

That would help hospitals avoid Medicaid reimbursement cuts, though there's no guarantee to hospitals or doctors that passing this bill will keep the state from going that route, too.

"Provider cuts are still on the table, even with this," said state Sen. Pete Brunstetter, R-Forsyth and one of the bill's primary sponsors.

Sen. Brunstetter also said the North Carolina Hospital Association requested the bill, which he doesn't consider a new tax.

"It's a voluntary assessment," Brunstetter said. "It's been requested by the hospitals. ... A tax is an involuntary payment to government."

Even so, this would represent a new pot of revenue as the state deals with an expected $3.7 billion budget deficit for the coming year. And this "assessment" sounds very much like something Gov. Sonny Perdue proposed in Georgia last year and called a "provider fee."

Others called it a hospital "bed tax," and its passage was one of the biggest controversies of the 2010 legislative session. The difference here may be that the N.C. Hospital Association supports the assessment/tax/fee as a way to increase Medicaid provider fees, whereas Georgia hospitals fought it until Perdue threatened them with massive provider fee cuts.

With that support here in N.C. and Senate Appropriations Co-Chairman Brunstetter and seven-term Democratic Sen. Daniel Clodfelter as its primary sponsors, this bill would seem primed to move.

Just which hospitals stand to gain the most from the assessment and subsequent re-investment of federal dollars is not clear. In Georgia the money essentially flowed from wealthier hospitals to those that served a higher percentage of Medicaid recipients. The fee was also apparently much higher in Georgia, with the 1.6 percent tax expected to generate nearly $400 million a year in state funds alone.

The N.C. bill would charge the fee to many hospitals, but exempt public teaching hospitals,** rural "critical access" hospitals, state-owned hospitals and several types of smaller, specialty facilities, such as rehabilitation centers. Whether any of those exempt facilities would be eligible for higher payments funded by the fee is something I'm working to confirm, but I understand the critical access facilities would benefit.

** CORRECTIONS: A couple of changes from the original post here - according to Don Dalton with the NC Hospital Association, only public teaching hospitals would be exempt, not private ones. Mr. Dalton also said the federal matching rate has changed, and is now a bit more than 2-1, not 3-1 as I initially noted these rates have been.

Rucho: We'll fix "100 years of disaster"

2011-02-03T14:47:00.010-05:00

Plenty of politicians excel at hyperbole and condescension. But there's always one guy in the room who takes it to a whole other level. These are excerpts from a speech state Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, gave today on the Senate floor during a Senate debate on cutting business development incentives:

"I'm overwhelmed by the passion from our colleagues in the back row about their interest in jobs. Where were you last time when we debated this during the budget? ... Here we are, a situation where we've got double-digit unemployment ... and, yet, last debate, where were you? You said, "We just gotta keep spending." ...

I want you to take responsibility for the way you've all led this state in the past 10 and 12 years because of the fact that you spent us to death. And now, when we have to make some tough decisions, you're crying about $75 million. ... What this is, is the first step to a pathway that the majority party in this senate is going to show you and the rest of the state in the business environment which way we're going so you really understand how to put an economy back together again.

Pay attention, this is what y'all should have done when you had the turn. And unfortunately you didn't, and the people are distressed about it. And they were distressed in the election ... Now do you take full blame for the recession? No. But you sure aggravated it. When you added, what, a billion dollars in new taxes? ... You punished the people that are working. OK? You made it harder for the businesses to expand and grow and maybe even survive for that matter. You also used $1.6 billion in stimulus money. One-time money for ongoing expenses. How many of you said no to that?

Let's put the blame where it needs to be. Don't come back now and (be) crying about jobs. ... You will see over the next period of time a continuation of a policy Sen. Berger, Sen. Apodaca and all the leaders in this Senate will bring forward that will put this state on the pathway to prosperity.

Hang on, it's going to take us a little time to recover from 100 years of disaster. But guess what? We're going to go ahead and we're going to show you how to do it. You're welcome to join us, or you can cry about it.

Friendly guy, huh? But he leaves me with questions.

Why would someone live in a state that he believes has been a disaster for a century? How has North Carolina managed to do so well in Forbes and Site Selection rankings for business friendly states? Why does Georgia, where the Republican-run legislature didn't implement a $1 billion tax increase to help balance the budget, have an even higher unemployment rate than North Carolina?

And since Sen. Rucho is chairing the Senate Redistricting Committee, should we expect a man who clearly feels Democrats are very bad for North Carolina to oversee the "fair" redistricting process Republican leaders have promised?

Update: WRAL has video of Rucho's speech on its @NCCapitol site. And WRAL reporter Laura Leslie, a veteran at the state capitol, notes this:

(Rucho's) comments tend to be fairly pointed, but I’ve never heard him go off on a tirade like he did today. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone in that chamber go off like that.

Can sales tax increase surf GOP wave?

2011-02-01T23:27:00.014-05:00

It will be interesting to see whether a sales tax expansion, to tax services, can pass in North Carolina over the next two years. It died in Georgia, at least in part, because it was tied to the elimination of property taxes.

Tillis: Toll roads likely in NC's future

2011-01-26T20:24:00.007-05:00

Actual new news is rare the first day of a legislative session, but I think this qualifies. For those seeking broader coverage of the first day, try here.

In his first speech today to House members, Speaker of the House Thom Tillis said North Carolina needs "new ways to fund improvement to our aging infrastructure."

He moved from that into a discussion of public-private partnerships, and other privatization models to lower the cost of general government. He did not give specifics but, presumably, some of that dovetails with Gov. Bev Perdue's plan to privatize the state's IT functions.

But in a press conference later in the day, Tillis confirmed that, when it comes to new ways to fund infrastructure, he was talking about toll roads.

"I think we have to look at tolling. ..." he said. "And any other things that exist out there."

Time will tell, but it sounds like he's nodding toward the private toll road model (or public-private partnership, or the concession model, if you prefer those terms) used in Texas, and discussed repeatedly in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Basically, private companies pitch road projects to the state and, if chosen, build them and charge drivers a toll.

The point is, someone other than the state puts up the construction capital, but you have to build profit into the toll; not just enough money to build and maintain the road.

Change of Power: GOP takes the House

2011-01-26T19:08:00.010-05:00

Pictures from the first day of the 2011 session in the N.C. House of Representatives.

From top to bottom, Speaker of the House Thom Tillis just before his election, Speaker Pro Tem Dale Folwell a moment after his election, the House's only female freshman representative, Rayne Brown, being sworn in, and immediate former Speaker Joe Hackney, House Clerk Denise Weeks and Tillis.

Update: That third picture, of Rep. Brown, ran in The Winston-Salem Journal. And just to be clear - unless otherwise noted, I took all the pictures published on this blog.

2011: Tea leaves say, "read The Indy."

2011-01-25T16:52:00.026-05:00

I tell you, North Carolina, I'm excited about this legislative session starting tomorrow.

Legislative building in Campeche, Mexico, Jan. 2011.

The GOP has taken over the N.C. legislature, and it seems to me there's been a good public dialogue between the highest-ranking elected officials. More so, I would say, than I was used to in Georgia leading up to a session.

Here Republican leaders in the House and Senate have said what they want on a wide range of issues. The governor has publicly addressed nearly all of those issues, and the two sides don't seem far off on budget philosophy.

But you just know it's not going to be that easy. Some things we probably know, but trust little as certain about a legislative body.

So these predictions for The Independent Weekly come with no guarantees, and a caution that there are better people to tell you about North Carolina state government than me, but I'm learning fast.

I'll be stringing for The Indy this session, as well as The Winston-Salem Journal, which I also wrote for part time during last years "short" session.

The picture above? From my honeymoon. For the record, those lights change colors.

Perdue softening on temporary taxes

2011-01-25T16:27:00.004-05:00

I thought I detected a softening yesterday from the governor's office on the temporary tax increases North Carolina put in place two years ago to help balance the budget.

Those taxes – an extra penny sales tax and income tax surcharges on people making more than $100,000 a year — raise more than a billion a year. They're set to expire June 30, and Gov. Perdue said last month she wouldn't include them in her budget.

But yesterday one of her press officers said the governor would "prefer" not to extend the sales tax. And today The News & Observer spoke to Gov. Perdue herself:

While Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue has ruled out a tax rate increase, she said Tuesday that she is still giving some thought to proposing in her budget the extension of the $1.3 billion in temporary taxes passed by the legislature in 2009.

Perdue has in recent months given mixed signals about her willingness to propose extending the temporary tax increases, which is strongly opposed by the new Republican legislature.

But at a news conference Tuesday, Perdue said she might be willing to consider it, if the alternative is massive cuts to public education.

New codes would increase energy efficiency, but at the cost of safety?

2011-01-23T11:15:00.006-05:00

Back in December the N.C. Building Code Council approved new energy efficiency guidelines, which still have several steps to go before they get final approval. The council is also considering other code changes meant to offset the additional construction costs that come with increasing efficiency.

The N.C. Home Builders Association pushed for these offsets, and Gov. Bev Perdue backed the concept to protect the industry as it recovers from the housing bust. But some of these offsets look like red flags.

For example: Fewer apartment buildings would have to have fire sprinkler systems.

If all this passes as is, there would be a moderate increase in mandated efficiency — 15 percent instead of the 30 percent environmentalists pushed for. But several builders I spoke to said they already build past that standard. And, as a tradeoff, companies that build only to the minimum code would be set free from a number of safety and other standards.

My full story on this ran in The Triad Business Journal, though you'll need to subscribe to read it. The issue is something to watch, to be sure. To me, the story isn't the new energy standards. It's what gets compromised away to help builders pay for those new standards, and how it affects public safety, particularly in low-end construction.

Legis preview: Govt. getting smaller

2011-01-23T11:06:00.004-05:00

I'm back in the United States and a married man for 12 days now.

A piece written before I left ran today in The Winston-Salem Journal. There's not a lot of new news in it, but if you need a primer on the coming legislative session, which starts Wednesday, it will do.

Also, incoming Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger will have a press conference tomorrow afternoon, so look for coverage of that to start popping up some time after the 3 p.m. start.

honeymooning

2011-01-11T16:56:00.002-05:00

I keep the personal announcements to a minimum here, but some moments deserve an exception: I got married this afternoon.

We'll be traveling for the next 10 days. If you run across any full-time statehouse reporting gigs, or a newspaper job of any kind in the Raleigh area, hold on to it until Jan. 23, please.

Bev Perdue: Double EduGator

2011-01-11T10:15:00.006-05:00

In an example of the over-writing typical of entities with an inflated sense of worth, The University of Florida put out a news release today honoring two-degree graduate, N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — It’s a long, arduous journey from the University of Florida campus and Norman Hall (home of UF’s College of Education) to the North Carolina Executive Mansion, the governor’s official residence in Raleigh, N.C. Especially for a woman. But Beverly (call me “Bev”) Perdue, holder of two UF education degrees, traveled that road over the past three-plus decades before her election in 2008 as the Tar Heel state’s first woman governor. ...

Beverly Eaves Perdue is a “double EduGator” with two education degrees from UF. She earned a master’s degree in community college administration in 1974 and a doctorate in educational administration two years later. She also has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Kentucky.

Perdue, a genuine coal miner’s daughter from Southwest Virginia, says she figured she was heading for a career in academics while pursuing her doctorate. But fate led her down a different path.

It goes on like that for some time.

I don't know what to say. Except that one day, maybe in a decade or two, the University of Georgia's going to put Florida back in its place.

Rucho, Hartsell to chair Senate finance

2011-01-03T11:38:00.003-05:00

State Sen. Bob Rucho is already heading the Senate's redistricting effort. Looks like he's going to be a busy and influential man this session.

From Senate President Pro Tem to be Phil Berger's office:

Raleigh, N.C. – Senate Republican Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) announced today that upon convening the 2011-2012 session of the General Assembly he will name Sen. Bob Rucho (R-Mecklenburg) and Sen. Fletcher Hartsell (R-Cabarrus) as Co-Chairmen of the Senate Finance Committee. The Finance Committee oversees the state’s tax system and controls the way in which state government collects revenue.

Words are important, some particularly

2010-12-30T17:46:00.027-05:00

When I was in Greenville N.C. in 1999, starting my career as a full-time newspaper reporter, we ran a letter to the editor comparing the city police chief's tactics to the Nazi Gestapo.

We ran a second letter a few days later, saying that, until the Greenville Police Department started lining people up along the Tar River and putting bullets in their heads, let's lay off the Nazi comparisons.

That is what reasonable people do. Because some things in our history were so awful that just using the words associated with them hurts. It inflames. It lowers the level of political discourse.

Which is why Georgia state Sen. Robert Brown, D-Macon and the Senate minority leader, was foolish Tuesday to infer that Georgia's most recent round of Democratic Party defectors are members of the Ku Klux Klan.

I mean, read that sentence out loud. Does it sound like a smart thing to do?

If you watch this video, you'll see Sen. Brown chuckling after he makes this reference. Having covered Brown for several years, I will just about guarantee you he wrote that line before hand. He thought it was clever, it made him smile, so he used it.

But the KKK isn't funny. It's legacy is as a band of marauding racist murderers disguising themselves in white sheets. Until the latest crop of legislative party switchers starts lynching people in downtown Macon, senator, let's lay off the Ku Klux Klan references.

Because when you don't, things get inflamed. The real racists and message board idiots come out in droves. They call you names. Other people call them names. Pretty soon hundreds of people are involved in a public debate that amounts to nothing more than petty insults shouted across cyberspace.

And then someone jostles someone. Someone pushes someone down. And now one of your supporters is likely to face criminal charges.

Let this serve as a reminder to all of us who should already know better: When you use too much hyperbole, when you call people names, when you compare political enemies to the worst humanity has to offer, you err. You lead us places we ought not go.

Jon Stewart said this brilliantly:

If we amplify everything, we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the resume.

Hear, hear.

Brown in March 2009, making another point about Georgia Republican legislators, with the visual aides of a noose, a dead Chinese Dictator and Pres. Barack Obama.

Update: Per The Telegraph and WMAZ in Macon, Sen. Brown says he wasn't making a reference to the KKK when he said a defecting Democrat's wife, while changing out the blue Democrat bed sheets for the red GOP ones, would need to save a white sheet for a "midnight meeting." From WMAZ:

(Brown) cited alleged sex scandals involving Georgia Republicans as the inspiration for his "white sheets" remark. "I was thinking of the many sexual trysts many Republicans have been found guilty of or alleged to have participated in." He said Republicans display an image of "Christian purity until they reach the white sheets in their meetings at hotels." ... Brown said, "most reasonable observers will see that I made no direct or indirect mention of the KKK."

So, in Brown's metaphor, the wife is saving white sheets at the family home so the husband can use them to sleep with lobbyists in a hotel.

Does that sound like the truth to you?

N.C. speaker-elect test drives gavel

2010-12-29T14:09:00.017-05:00

Yesterday at the N.C. State Capitol, Speaker of the House to be Thom Tillis and a few of his lieutenants ran through some of the protocol they'll face Jan. 26, when the new legislative session opens.

There are a lot of rules governing the flow of business on the House floor, and you don't want to look dumb on your first day because you don't know the proper way to do all the little things that go with chairing debates, overseeing motions, referring things to committee, etc.

So Principal Clerk Denise Weeks writes up a script - with specifics built in to test the new speaker - and he practices. It was interesting ... in that mildly interesting way these things so often are. Any way, pictures from yesterday below.

Former legislator Charles Thomas, who is on Tillis' transition team, and Freshman Republican Leader Justin Burr, R-Stanly Co., also participated.

Images: Speaker-elect Tillis, Tillis with Weeks, Tillis with Speaker Pro Tem elect Dale Folwell, Folwell on the House floor.

Sonny Perdue and Ga. 96

2010-12-28T17:07:00.005-05:00

One story stuck with me from Joe Kovac's "Sonny Day" story on Sunday:

“Mr. Ervin,” or Ernie, as many called him, died in 1998, a decade and a half after Perdue’s mother, Miss Ophie, died. In the late 1960s, as neighbors recall, Miss Ophie would sometimes halt traffic out on Ga. 96 in front of the Perdue homestead so her Sonny, returning home from the University of Georgia in a single-engine plane, could land and taxi into their driveway.

Perhaps I'm making too much of a single story, but that feels like a window into the governor's mindset. There have been several instances the past eight years where it looked like Perdue was using state resources to better his situation, or his friends, or his businesses.

There was Oaky Woods, the retroactive tax break, the unexplained and generous loan one of his businesses received, this situation with the port in Savannah, the time he had a second control stick installed in a state helicopter so he could fly it and the way the governor inserted himself into the widening of Ga. 96 through his native Houston County — the very road where his mom used to stop traffic so he could land his plane.

To a certain extent, every governor sees the state's resources as his to use. How can you not? You are everyone's boss. You've got a state trooper to drive you around. You were elected to manage these resources. Most people around you act like they're yours, so in a way they are.

But if you learn, at an early age, to land your plane on a state highway and taxi right into your family driveway ... I don't know. That seems like a lesson that sticks.

Sonny Perdue: A still murky legacy on transportation

2010-12-26T14:17:00.008-05:00

It's legacy time for Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, who leaves office next month.

I did a piece for The Telegraph examining his 8 years in office and another looking to the future and asking whether the governor enriched himself while in office. The Telegraph's Joe Kovac did a more personal piece, about the governor's last days in office, and going home to Bonaire.

Oddly, I left the best quote I gathered, over more than two weeks reporting, completely out of both stories:

"What we've seen for 8 years is a failure to move this state forward on the crucial issues of water and transportation. Eight years of nothing to break up the gridlock in metro Atlanta with mass transit. ... The state has borrowed billions of dollars and wasted it on four lanes to nowhere, in case you haven't driven through south Georgia lately. I mean, I can get to Albany real fast now, but who cares? ... I don't go for this argument that there was no money. What money there was (for transportation) was wasted."

- Mark Woodall, chapter chairman, Georgia Sierra Club

I think that's directionally fair. I left it out because I cut the entire section on transportation and the environment for space, and because of the nuance I'm going get into here.

To be sure, Sonny Perdue was governor the last 8 years, and traffic's as bad in metro Atlanta now as it was when he started, if not worse. And there are certainly four lane roads in middle and south Georgia that seem out of place.

But as Perdue himself noted when I asked him about Woodall's line, GRIP, a program that focuses on connecting Georgia cities with major roads through Georgia's rural expanse, began in 1989.

Some people — certainly more than Mr. Woodall — see Perdue's Fast Forward program as a major culprit in the DOT's cash flow problem and subsequent political melt down the last two years.

But Perdue said more than half that spending was for metro Atlanta. And responsibility at the DOT is a wonderfully murky thing, with politically charged bureaucrats, engineers, a controlling board elected by secret vote among district legislators, all having various influence.

Like most governor's, Perdue's had his public fights with the DOT's controlling board. He noted they do not always do what a governor wants.

"I think Mark Woodall is absolutely wrong," Perdue said.

To me, transportation is probably the most interesting issue within Perdue's legacy. With the exception of education, transportation probably has the greatest effect on a state's future, and the benefits of one strategy over another often take time to reveal themselves.

Most of the transportation debate during Perdue's second term didn't center on specific projects, but on the need for more money, and who would control it. In the end, Perdue got a planning director position in place that will give future governor's more power to decide what gets built. And areas across the state will vote next year on whether to charge a new penny tax for transportation projects.

But Perdue didn't make mass transit a priority at all. Atlanta continues to have traffic issues due to its recent explosive growth. Truck routes through rural Georgia, though, are at their all-time best. And, though I think widening Ga. 300 to Albany was decided before Perdue took office, you can in fact get to Albany real fast these days.

I guess the question is, do you care?

Perdue: K-3 the priority as I cut

2010-12-22T19:51:00.006-05:00

For The Winston-Salem Journal:

Protecting funding for kindergarten through third grade classes will be a top priority for Gov. Bev Perdue as she puts together an austere budget for the coming year, the governor said Wednesday.

But higher grades — as well as all state departments — are going to see significant funding cuts to make up for the loss of federal stimulus revenue running out in the next two years, as well as the end to temporary tax increases that have helped the state shore up its budget during the recession.

Extending those tax cuts is not realistic, the governor said Wednesday, during a roundtable with reporters. Republican leaders in the General Assembly, which turned to GOP control in November for the first time since the 1800s, have said much the same.

The cuts it will take to offset this $3.5 billion or so loss of revenue are well underway, but far from finalized, Perdue said Wednesday.

"In my mind, I've got about $900 million left to find," she said.

Perdue on Alcoa: "Tell them not to call me. ... It's beyond that."

2010-12-20T22:38:00.008-05:00

Where "that" = compromising with former alluminum smelting works, and current multinational corporation with four power generating dams in North Carolina, Alcoa.

Gov. Bev Perdue did a roundtable with reporters last week, and Mark Binker at The Greensboro News-Record cut up video snippets of her comments and organized them by issue. It's pretty damn convenient if you need the governor's thoughts on 11 fairly pressing issues.

But I found her comments about Alcoa, possible massive environmental polluter and alleged liar to the State of North Carolina's environmental arm, the strongest.

"Why do you want to let a company own your water? And why do you want to let a company ... tell you that the're going to use you rwater to make a ter profit and that there's nothing in i t for North Carolina. It's the same way I feel about offshore oil and gas. Why would we want to license it, if it's there, if the feds aren't going to let us have a piece of the profit. why take the risk?

I don't believe that that river basin was made to have Alcoa own it, control it. ... Tell them not to call me. And I would bet the Secretary of Commerce won’t be real eager to compromise. It’s beyond that."

I'll let you go to Mark's blog to watch and listen to her saying this. I don't think she's kidding.

Civitas: Cut taxes / Justice Center: No, definitely don't do that

2010-12-20T22:14:00.011-05:00

Once you see one of these studies, you almost know the other one exists.

From N.C. Policy Watch this morning on North Carolina's budget woes:

With unemployment already close to 10 percent, a new study finds that state budget cuts could result over 21,000 more unemployed, hampering economic growth and thwarting North Carolina's recovery. ...
The budget cuts from state agencies ... under a 15 percent scenario for all departments and a 10 percent scenario for education, will result in the elimination of more than 21,000 positions, which represents 7.4 percent of the state government workforce in 2010.

And from Civitas, a few hours later:

Raleigh, N.C. – As North Carolina’s unemployment numbers remain high, 77 percent of voters support cutting taxes to boost job creation, according to a new poll released today by the Civitas Institute.

According to the live caller poll of 600 likely voters, 77 percent said they would support cutting taxes to encourage job creation even if it may require additional cuts in government spending in the short run. Nineteen percent of voters said they do not support cutting taxes.

This budget is going to get ugly.

The Cheddar Bo: King fast food biscuits

2010-12-17T11:33:00.005-05:00

When you get past the fact that it all revolves around a cheese biscuit, this is pretty solid reporting, combined with new media capability.

One day, some lucky newspaper is gonna snatch those capabilities up, full time. Or I'll end up working at Bojangles.

Sanders: People, think, country, going

2010-12-14T21:11:00.006-05:00

Like many people, I watched with some wonder Friday evening as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, entered his seventh, and then eighth hour of speaking from the Senate floor against the Obama-GOP tax cut / unemployment extension deal.

Sen. Sanders speech seems to have had little effect, beyond winning him a lot of new followers on Twitter. This is perhaps not surprising, given that Sen. Sanders is the junior senator from Vermont, the only Independent in the United States Senate and quite possibly a socialist, though whether that is indeed the dirty term so many Americans assume it to be is open to debate.

But it was a good speech, if monstrously repetitive. His office has the full text from the congressional record here, all 71,926 words of it. I've used that text to create the "wordle" below, and I've excerpted his main point here.

"I think it is grossly unfair to ask my kids and grandchildren and the children all over this country to be paying higher taxes in order to provide tax breaks for billionaires because we have driven up the national debt. That is plain wrong. I think the vast majority of the American people, whether they are progressives like myself or whether they are conservatives, perceive that concept of giving tax breaks to billionaires when we have such a high national debt makes no sense at all.

"Furthermore, it is important to point out that extending income tax breaks to the top 2 percent is not the only unfair tax proposal in this agreement. This agreement between the President and the Republican leadership also calls for a continuation of the Bush era 15-percent tax rate on capital gains and dividends, meaning that those people who make their living off their investments will continue to pay a substantially lower tax rate than firemen, teachers, nurses, carpenters, and virtually all the other working people of this country. I do not think that is fair. That is wrong."

Liquor taxes: It's on the bag

2010-12-09T11:08:00.012-05:00

I was at my local liquor store the other day to ... purchase a snifter of port for the approaching Christmas time, and I noticed the Wake County ABC board is printing tax receipts on some of its brown paper bags.

For those not living in North Carolina, the state controls hard liquor sales here through a state commission and local Alcoholic Beverage Control boards. So only the government can sell you whiskey, and the taxes get split up between area governments. In Wake County, for example:

This seemed to me a smart piece of public relations. The ABC system in North Carolina has taken some hits with revelations of corruption over the last two years. There's also a chance - if I'm handicapping, it's an outside chance - that the system will be privatized. Mark Binker in Greensboro did a good piece on these issues a few days ago.

The bags seemed to me a good way to combat that publicity. But according to Wake County ABC General Manager Craig Pleasants, this isn't a new thing.

From Mr. Pleasants:

I'm not sure how common this is across the State, but we've been doing the print on bags for over 15 years. It's a nominal cost. We want our customers to know that the profits are being distributed back into the community for substance abuse education and treatment and local taxes are reduced because of the funds distributed to the county government and local municipalities.

Smart politics.

Perdue rolling out re-org: Watch it live

2010-12-09T10:55:00.003-05:00

The governor will be in Pinehurst today to roll out her plan to re-organize state government and save money. It will be interesting to see whether she proposes something grandiose, or just small changes.

She's scheduled to speak at 1:20, and News 14 Carolina is promising to broadcast her remarks live. I'm willing to bet Greensboro's Mark Binker will tweet out the details, too, if you'd like to follow along.

Update: Sounds like she's pushing for major changes. From Mr. Binker:

Gov. Bev Perdue unveiled the first outlines of her plan to “remake” state government in Pinehurst today, calling for the consolidation of 14 state agencies into eight and the privatization of several functions, including information technology. ...

However, there aren’t any firm numbers attached. Perdue says she’ll affix specific savings numbers when she rolls out her budget in the spring.