News-Record.com

I'm still watching the news from afar, but have a few notes to offer:

• John Edwards came to campaign in Greensboro Tuesday, paying a visit to the civil rights museum. That's pretty fitting because Edwards has framed much of his anti-poverty message as a civil rights issue, particularly when speaking of the minimum wage and collective bargaining rights.

  Of course, not everyone digs Edwards.

• Lot's of people have been writing about the Thomas Wright issue, but Wilmington's Mark Schreiner, whose paper covers Wright's home district, is pretty much authoritative on the topic.

• Laura Leslie says the honorables are looking at moving our primary dates to make North Carolina, what's the word...oh, yeah, RELEVANT in at least some stage of a presidential contest. I dig the caucus idea, if for no other reason than it would something different for us scruff media types to write about.

• Gov. Easley wants fellow hunters to help shoot down the OLF.

• Elizabeth Dole's 2008 campaignis circulating poll numbers they say show she is still popular in N.C. Without knowing more about the poll questions and methodology, it's hard to say what it means. And polls this early are probably pretty darned meaningless anyway. But the analysis is interesting, showing what the GOP is preparing to go up against:

  Democrats have their own problems in North Carolina. As charted above, Hillary Clinton-the likely Democratic presidential nominee-has a net image of -10 and a majority (53%) of North Carolina voters view her unfavorably. In addition, the Democrat-controlled state government is viewed as corrupt by an overwhelming majority of voters (87%). Forty-eight percent (48%) of North Carolina voters say corruption in state government is a "major" problem, followed by 39% who say it's a "minor" problem. Just 6% say corruption in state government is not a problem.

  This unfavorable view of the likely top of the Democratic ticket, coupled with a Democrat-led state government viewed as corrupt, creates serious challenges for Democrat candidates in 2008.

  This strikes me as more "Ra-Ra" than sober analysis, and those numbers are way off from anything else I've seen from nonpartisan polls. Plus, I don't buy Sen. Clinton as the likely Democratic nominee. She's the one with the most money and name recognition at the moment, but that can change over the next nine months.

• Editorial writer Doug Clark has been writing about a bill that would allow judges to carry weapons in the court room. This isn't a new idea. Back in 2005, I wrote about the same measure sponsored by Sen. Tom Apodaca. The link to the newspaper story is from two servers ago, so it no longer works but what I wrote then included:

  Apodaca said he was approached by several judges in his district asking for the change to existing law.

  "There are a couple already doing it, but after Atlanta and what happened in Chicago, they want it to be legal," Apodaca said.

  In March, a suspect overpowered a sheriff's deputy in an Atlanta courtroom, using the deputy's gun to kill a judge and three others. That same month, a federal judge's husband and mother were killed by a disgruntled plaintiff in Chicago.

  Those slayings raised courthouse security concerns for courtrooms across the nation. Similar bills that would allow judges to carry firearms to court have been drafted and discussed in Illinois, New Mexico and Texas.

  North Carolina's proposal is in its initial stages, with a hearing pending before a Senate judiciary committee this week or next.

  "It wouldn't be a Wyatt Earp thing," said Guilford County Superior Court Judge W. Douglas Albright, who has a concealed weapons permit. Judges have to go through the same training everyone else does to obtain a permit, Albright said.

  "There will be those who say 'yes,' and those who say 'no.' But it would clarify the law for judges who are caught in a never-never land of being able to carry a concealed weapon but not being able to carry it when it counted the most," Albright said.

• Calendar notes: Americans for Prosperity will hold a news conference tomorrow to call on members of congress and state legislators from taking NCAA basketball tournament tickets. Those who can take a break from filling out their brackets are sure to attend...Meanwhile, the House Democrats are scheduled to roll out their legislative agenda for the session. This will be something to watch. The House Dems did this for the first time in 2006 to help navigate the Jim Black scandal.

  Now, you could make the argument that they're doing it this year to distract from Wright, but his problems really haven't achieved the notoriety that Black's had by that time. And after the 2006 session, several House Democrats said they felt like laying out their plans helped them focus and get several items done, scandal or no.

  Plus, if you look at what was on their agenda and what got done that year, there were some pretty strong correlations. So it's worth paying attention to what they'll have to say.

• Technical note: Firefox users and others with browsers that aren't Microsoft IE or Avant may notice some funky coding where punctuation marks like apostrophes are supposed to be on prior post. Chalk it up to something we fixed a while ago that got un-fixed in the server transition. Sorry.

Alright, back to diapers and bottles for me.