News-Record.com

From my contribution to today's paper:

Even as issues of energy supplies and conservation have gained national and international importance, a legislative oversight committee responsible for keeping watch over the state’s utility regulators and power companies has met just once during the past six years.

The Joint Legislative Utility Review Committee has been dormant even as the state has enacted new and sometimes controversial laws to encourage conservation and new energy technologies.

Although the committee’s mission may be more important now than when it was formed in 1985, advocates and other legislators complain its co-chairmen have passed on exercising their oversight powers. And, they note, both chairmen are beneficiaries of campaign donations from the power industry and one of them now works for a power cooperative.

"There's never been a more important time to be thoughtful about energy policy," said Rep. Pricey Harrison , a Greensboro Democrat and one of the panel’s 10 members. "This committee is precisely situated to engage in that kind of discussion and oversight, and it’s very frustrating to me we’re not engaging in that."

Click here for the story.

Other good stuff:

• * My colleague (and fantasy football commissioner) Jason Hardin writes about the life of undocumented immigrants here in North Carolina. One anecdote:

  Moises Campos Palencia was on his way to realizing the American dream — a wife, a young daughter, a business he started from scratch.

  Until it all fell apart at a traffic light in High Point a few months ago.

  A police officer pulled him over, saying he’d turned left on red. The next thing Palencia knew, he was in a detention center in Georgia, awaiting deportation.

  Although he had lived in the United States since he was a boy, brought here by his parents, Palencia hadn’t been able to attain citizenship, despite his efforts.

• * The N+O revisits the probation and parole office in force:

  Since the start of 2000, 580 people have killed in North Carolina while under the watch of state probation officers -- 17 percent of all convictions for intentional killings.

  The high profile killing of UNC student Eve Carson is part of this story, as are hundreds of other cases. The killer line in the story is the quote from Corrections Secretary Theodis Beck:

  "This is not something we would have expected to deal with," Beck said. "We're here because of the failure of two cases out of 117,000."

  Granted this is something that three reporters and a team of others at the N+O spent a year on. But if a group of outsiders can figure out this stuff, surely the people who own the data and actually manage the system can...right?

  The N+O has two more parts to this series coming, and I wouldn't expect them to be warm and fuzzy follow-ups.

That's the early take this morning. Let me know what you're reading.

Update: This came to me by way of a Facebook link posted by an acquaintance of mine at the Inky: Smoke and Mirrors: The Subversion of the EPA. It's worth a read and listen.