News-Record.com

My web folks just put me on notice: Capital Beat is moving. Well, the URL isn't, so don’t change your bookmarks.

But the paper is scrapping the Movable Type blogging platform that the we’ve used since firing up the Inside Scoop blog in 2004.

For those wondering, we're moving to a Drupal-based platform, which is the same system that runs our main web page.

The move is supposed to happen Thursday morning and I have been told "There may be times when it is temporarily unavailable, and it may take some of the morning for me to go through and clean up your blogrolls, bio, etc."

So pardon our dust on Thursday as we get things moved over to the new system. Once the move is done, you'll see some changes to the page's format, although nothing overly dramatic. And I think you'll find the commenting function works a bit better.

Nothing from me this Sunday, but my colleagues in Greensboro and around the state have plenty of good stuff on tap. First and foremost, this comes from Taft Wireback:

GREENSBORO — State highway builders plan to buy and demolish part of a new neighborhood in northeast Greensboro, displacing about 15 families and adding millions of dollars to the cost of Greensboro’s Urban Loop.

Meanwhile, agents for the marketer of Quail Oaks subdivision — Keystone Group Inc. — are not telling interested home buyers that they sit squarely in the Urban Loop’s bull’s-eye. In fact, at least one company representative continues to offer lots directly in the new interstate’s path.

“They (Keystone Group) told us it would be coming, but it wouldn’t affect us,” said home owner Janice Chapman , whose three-year-old house is within feet of an Urban Loop exit ramp planned by the state Department of Transportation.

“They were like, it’s been a thought for 15 years, but nothing’s ever been done with it,” said Rachel Wilson, who bought in Quail Oaks in June. “We’re royally screwed.”

As recently as last weekend, one Keystone sales aide told a pair of prospective buyers she knew of no highway — even when asked point blank about any in the works nearby.

The story, by the way, was helped along by a former N+R staffer who did some undercover work for Taft.

Click here for the whole story.

-=-=-=-=-=

Fayetteville's Paul Woolverton uses a Sunday blog post to write through the Cary Allred saga thus far.

-=-=-=-=-=

The N+O's Mandy Locke tracks down the investigation into former Presidential candidate and U.S. Senator John Edwards:

John Edwards marched toward the White House in 2006 seeking an arsenal of millions collected a little at a time.

He also gathered more ammunition, about $11 million, collected in larger chunks by nonprofit groups conceived and operated to further his aspirations. He also courted a girlfriend.

Federal investigators are trying to connect those dots, sifting through Edwards' financial records to probe whether he used any donations solicited for his campaign to keep quiet his affair with Rielle Hunter.

Click here for the whole story.

-=-=-=-=-=

Asheville's Jordan Schrader writes through the latest news on the state's video poker laws.

RALEIGH – State lawmakers could soon return to their pursuit of an elusive goal: wiping out video gambling in North Carolina.

First, they want to figure out how to avoid inflicting collateral damage on businesses from Pepsi to McDonald's to Food Lion.

The General Assembly banned video poker in 2006, heeding arguments that it invites corruption and preys on the poor. But a Guilford County judge has blocked law enforcement from weeding out the Internet-based games that have popped up in many convenience stores since the ban, even after the Legislature intervened again last year.

Legislation under consideration this year threatens a more blanket ban on games of chance, but even the lawmakers who introduced the bills call them overly broad.

Worries about hurting retailers have led Rep. Ray Rapp, a Mars Hill Democrat, to shelve his bill for now and Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand to try to rework his.

Click here for the whole story.

-=-=-=-=-=

On this next one, I came for the headline, stayed for the story:

Headline: Why is Ronald Adrin Gray still alive?

-=-=-=

Twenty-three years ago, Linda Jean Coats made a fatal mistake.

She opened her door.

The 22-year-old Campbell University student had been lying on her sofa when a neighbor came to her home in Fairlane Acres Mobile Home Park.

Army Spc. Ronald Adrin Gray asked to use the phone.

Coats had likely seen Gray many times. He lived a few streets away with his wife and stepdaughter. He jogged through the neighborhood almost every day, lifted weights in his yard and listened to rock music on his front steps.

That night — April 27, 1986 — Gray became a murderer.

Coats let him in.

In the nine months to follow, Gray would rape eight women and murder three of them.

In those months, Gray sent terror through Fairlane Acres and Fayetteville.

By the end of 1986, people were fleeing the mobile home park, off Bragg Boulevard, by the dozens.

During a five-day stretch that December, Fairlane Acres resident Tammy Wilson was raped and fatally shot in the head. Another resident, Pfc. Laura Lee Vickery Clay, disappeared; her home was burned and her car found parked a block away.

Click here for the whole story from the Fayetteville Observer.

-=-=-=-=-=

Finally, Charlotte's Mark Johnson writes a profile of Rick Killian, a legislator I didn't know much about until this morning:

Rep. Ric Killian, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, had already scoped out the unfriendly terrain.

He was proposing a bill that would tighten the driver's license regulations on older drivers, frequent voters whom politicians alienate at their peril. And the opposing party, Democrats, controlled the committee hearing the bill.

Killian, a Republican from Charlotte, anticipated hefty opposition. So he delivered an extensive presentation on accident statistics and the potential benefit of older drivers taking a driver's license test more often. Then he got outflanked, not by a Democrat, but by a fellow Republican. Rep. Bill McGee, a 73-year-old from Forsyth County, gutted Killian's bill.

Call it legislative lesson No. 52 for Killian. He has made himself a walking case study for what a junior member of the minority party in the legislature can accomplish, what he can get passed into law and what gets shot down, often along party lines, but not always.

Click here for the whole story.

Rep. Earl Jones, a Greensboro Democrat, would like to return video poker to a place among the state's legal amusements. From a story in today's paper:

RALEIGH — Rep. Earl Jones said he plans to introduce a bill this week to legalize video poker, a form of gambling outlawed amid accusations of political corruption and operators skirting rules.

The Greensboro Democrat said it is “hypocritical” for the state to run a lottery but outlaw another form of gambling that some people enjoy.

“I think it’s very unfortunate that you have some folks who are very paternalistic,” Jones said Monday. “Some people can’t pay $200 or $300 to play golf or $100 to go to a Panthers game. This is their entertainment.”

Click here for the whole thing.

Update: When asked about Jones' bill, Rep. Paul "Skip" Stam, the Republican leader in the House, said: "That's the bad bill of the week."

Also in the paper today:

• The Washington Watch column update's the Alcoa fight and looks at some recent bill filings from the federal honorables.

• The Libertarian and Green parties had their day before the Court of Appeals, arguing that the state's ballot access laws are too strict.

From this morning's paper:

RALEIGH — It’s too soon to say the battle lines are being drawn for the 2010 U.S. Senate campaign, but troops are mustering.

U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican, is winding up his first term as a senator — he served five terms in the House — and preparing to defend his seat in a political landscape much changed from his previous statewide run.

In 2008, a Democrat won North Carolina’s electoral votes for the first time since 1976. And Democrats wrested the seat once held by Republican icon Jesse Helms from the hands of Elizabeth Dole, a GOP luminary in her own right.

“When you look at what happened here in 2008, it turned upside-down what everybody thought they knew about North Carolina politics,” said Steven Greene, a political science professor at N.C. State.

Click here for the whole story.

For a slightly different view of the same topic, check out the N+O's Rob Christensen's story. And yes, as my boss notes, it's weird that we're writing about the same thing at the same time.

Also from me this Sunday:

Sen. Phil Berger can find plenty to criticize about the Senate version of the budget passed last week. He says it spends too much money, hurts counties and paves the way for unwise tax increases.

But what irks the Eden Republican and the GOP leader in the Senate the most is this: He wasn’t really sure what he was voting against. The budget passed the Senate 30-16 Thursday and now goes to the House.

The budget, Berger said, was written mainly behind closed doors and Republicans had little say in its crafting.

“That is the way under the leadership of the Democrats that business is conducted in the Senate,” Berger said. “There’s a certain amount of arrogance to it.”

Click here for the whole story.

From elsewhere:

• * Winston-Salem's James Romoser profiles Sen. Linda Garrou. The Winston-Salem Democrat is in the spotlight this year as the Senate's lead budget writer.

• * Taft Wireback continues what is sure to be a long-running series: how stimulus money is being used in Greensboro. Today is the Greenway edition.

• * Also a continuing series: the N.C. tax man explaining why refunds are slow.

• * My colleague Ryan Seals reminds you that it is nearly tax day for those who might owe the government a little something.

I passed my friend Frosty here on the way in to the Legislative Building this morning. He was standing in front of the historic state Capitol building and looked rather relaxed for a snowman about to face temps in the low 70s. I'm sure there's a parable in there for state leaders about getting too smug in the face of impending crisis, but it's too early in the morning for half-baked snark so just enjoy the pictures. (Click on the picture to enlarge.)

Stories and posts from the weekend:

• The Stimulus and North Carolina: Newspaper story // Blog post with more info.

• Sex Ed Bill: Newspaper story // Blog post with more info.

• Tuition Exemption repeal for full-ride athletes: Newspaper story // Blog post with more info.

Finally, do you have a question for the Guilford County legislative delegation? Click here to pass it on.

So while I've been wandering about D.C., there have been happenings at home.

Governor-elect Bev Perdue completed her cabinet Tuesday.

(By the way: thanks to my colleague Gerald Witt for picking up my slack on Perdue's Commerce and cultural resources appointments.)

The head-scratching pick of the day might be Lanier Cansler as HHS secretary. There's two ways to view this appointment:

The guy is a consultant knowledgeable about the health care, has served in the agency so knows the lay of the land and is a Republican to boot - giving Perdue some bipartisan cred. (Lanier is a former legislator and gave advice to state Sen. Fred Smith during the campaign, according to a March 17 story in the Asheville Citizen Times.)

Then again ...

The guy was a consultant in the knowledgeable about the health care field: Specifically, Dome reports he is a registered lobbyist for a company that has sold the state a Medicaid bill-paying system. (Perdue told reporters in the state that Cansler is detached from his private industry dealings.)

He has served in the agency so knows the lay of the land: Specifically, he was deputy secretary from 2001 to 2005, right about when the mental health system started its rock-sled ride to perdition. And fixing mental health will be one of the DHHS secretary's most high profile tasks.

He is a Republican - okay, that's not a potential failing, is it?

-=-=-=-=-=-=

Both the North Carolina Democratic Party and North Carolina Republican Party will be looking for new leadership in the new year.

In a statement, GOP Chairman Linda Daves:

"Serving as the Chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party has been a great honor. The ability to serve the interests of the people of North Carolina has been one of the great privileges of my life. The best part of this job has been the ability to meet the many diverse people who make up the fabric of our state. I have spent many years working alongside dedicated, hardworking Republicans in North Carolina as a grassroots activist. It is these good people who make up the heart and soul of our party. Having the ability to see their commitment to making our state the best that it can be has given me renewed hope for our future each day.

There was also the small matter of the state GOP getting a butt-whoopin' last fall. A gain of one seat in the state senate is far outweighed by losing the state auditor's office, losing the state's presidential electors for the first time since 1976 and losing a senate seat held by a well-known incumbent.

One prominent North Carolina Republican told me this week "the party is in shambles," referring both to its national standing and its operations in state. Rebuilding it will fall to the next chairman.

There doesn't seem to be a line out the door for the job. State Sen. Fred Smith doesn't seem to be going hard at it.

Former Guilford County GOP Chairman Marcus Kindley has been stumping for the job. Four years ago, he drew a lot of support from rural areas of the state.

-=-=-=-=-=-=

On the Democratic side, many folks have seemingly expressed interest in the job - if not said they were running outright. The most widely known name being floated might be Jim Neal, who ran against Sen. Kay Hagan in the Democratic primaries. He wrote this in an e-mail Tuesday:

Many members of the State Executive Committee (NCDP SEC) have been urging me to run for Chair of the NCDP which Jerry is vacating. Some I got to know during the primary campaign; others I'm talking to for the first time. They've got my ear and I am considering in earnest.

Initially, I was approached over the summer about seeking the office at which time I passed. Six months later.....I'm willing to listen as my life has settled since the aftermath of the elections. I'm intrigued and have no doubt that I would be an effective representative and leader. The sheer cross-section of folks across the SEC who've been calling is telling and exciting. Whomever is elected as the next Chair will have to continue to build upon the impressive coalition of traditional and newer party activists whom Jerry did such an effective job of uniting during this past election cycle.

I have not declared my candidacy as such but I am seriously considering doing so. I simply have not made a decision as yet. I have not been in contact with legislative leaders; it is premature to do so and they've all got a lot on their plates at this time. I certainly will do so should I decide to run.

According to news reports: Luke Hyde, the 11th district Democratic chairman, is actively running for the job. There are at least three other names in the mix according to Dome.

Whoever inherits the State Party Chairman Jerry Meek's job will have the opposite problem of their Republican counterpart. Rather than rebuilding, they'll be at the reins of an organization that just won big - so the bar will be pretty high.

I put out the audio earlier, but click here for my Q+A with Gov. Easley. Commentary on the interview has come already from Doug Clark on our editorial page and James at BlueNC.

My other story this weekend is something all us scruffy media types tend to write a dozen times over: what's coming up next year during the General Assembly session. This year's story, no matter who has been writing it, pretty much focuses on the gap between what the state wants to pay for and the money it can raise.

Elsewhere in the big wide media world, the N+O's Rob Christensen demonstrates the perils of political prognostication, but goes ahead and forecasts for 2009 anyway.

Winston Salem's James Romoser explores the fact that only one NC inmate was sentenced to death in 2008.

Charlotte's Lew Powell offers his year in review, worth clicking on if only for the graphic.

And by way of confession, seeing this cover from Vanity Fair in the local Target prompted me to surf to the site for the first time in a while:

If you go, this profile of Tina Fey is worth reading, even if it was written by Maureen Dowd.

Now, as I've said to my oldest child this morning, go play outside - it looks like a nice day out.

Ordinarily, I'd either be back at work this week now that the elections are done, or taking a little time off to recharge.

But the Barkeep and I are running a conference later this week and have to prepare for - at last count - political reporters from at least 26 states, a U.S. territory and Japan to hit town.

Capitolbeat is the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors. We've been around for roughly a decade (since being organized in Denver at the site of a former brothel, natch) and our conference travels from state to state ever year.

This year, it's coming to Raleigh.

You can find more information about the conference and our group by clicking here. If you're interested in coming, drop me a line.

Oh, and I'll see you back on the internets next week.

I'm down at the home office today and participated in a newly launched gab-fest. Also in the studio were columnists Ed Cone and Charles Davenport, and editorial writers Doug Clark, Allen Johnson and Elma Sabo. You can tell me because I'm the one who doesn't know how to shut the heck up.

Listen here:

I'm on vacation until Aug. 25. Talk amongst yourselves.

Four items:

• * Big money is placing its bet on Guilford County legislative races. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but incumbents and those who enjoy a registration advantage in their districts are getting most of the bucks.

• * I'll see your registration advantage and raise you an historic pattern of apathy and an historically unpredictable election cycle.

• * Not one of mine, but hands down the best election piece out there this weekend: Asheboro is wrastlin' over whether to remain dry or to let folks wet their whistles with something stronger than sarsaparilla. Apparently, the polar bears want them some polar beer, because the zoo society is a big contributor to the cause.

• * Not a news item, but by way of answering some questions that have come my way: No, the end of the legislative session didn't melt my brain...my computer, that's another story. The bosses are getting me the hook-up with some new technology this week and I should be back to making with the multi-media and blogging and whatnot.

For those craving another source of state government news, go get "In the Loop," the blog from Freedom Newspaper's Barry Smith.

Back in the 1970s, former White House spokesman Tony Snow worked for one of the two papers that merged to become the News & Record. He died Saturday.

Click here for the wire story, and here for my boss's thoughts.

(President Bush and Tony Snow in September. Credit: Associated Press)

My paper rode in the layoff rodeo last year and it wasn't a bit of fun. So my heart goes out to friends and colleagues in Raleigh and Charlotte who are doing it today.

Normally, I would not post business and industry news on a political blog. But I mention this here because the McClatchy papers generate a lot of the political and government content that comes out of Raleigh and is used by papers across the state. So the merging of their two state operations is of interest to just about anyone who follows politics. From the N+O's story:

The newspaper will begin a closer relationship with The Charlotte Observer, also owned by McClatchy. The two newspapers will combine their political, sports and research departments. The features departments also will produce sections jointly.

For those wanting more detail on the political operation, this comes from a memo circulated to N&O employees today:

A new McClatchy capital bureau will serve both newspapers with coverage of state government and other topics of statewide concern. Initially, this bureau will be comprised of five reporters from the N&O and two reporters from the Observer, all of whom now cover state government. Other reporters with beats that have statewide focus could join this team later. The bureau will be headed by Bill Krueger, who is now the N&O's government editor. Krueger will report jointly to N&O Senior Editor Linda Williams and Observer Deputy Managing Editor Glenn Burkins. This bureau will be based in the N&O's building, but will operate separately from its newsroom.

I'm hoping my math is correct and that means the political reporting teams for both papers will be deposited in full to the new bureau.

Update: Click here for a repasted copy of the full memo sent to newsroom employees.

As I sit here listening to the honorables read their budget out loud to their colleagues, I can catch up on some things that have gone untended. Among them: linking up to a blog that was new something like a year ago.

Go check out Talk Politics by UNC's Leroy Towns and Anne Johnston.

D'oh! Hopkins lost to Syracuse, a team that can't be bothered to come up with a proper mascot.

Still...it's better than loosing to Duke. And the Jays had an unexpectedly brilliant end to their season.

We now return you to your normal wonky programming.

No weekender story from me this week. But here are some bits and pieces to keep you occupied.

• * Barry Smith at the Freedom chain wrote about the dueling bills on community colleges and illegal immigration. Rep. Pricey Harrison takes the view that the community college system should admit everyone.

  My bet: both bills get stuck in legislative limbo.

• * An anonymous e-mailer asked if I planned on writing anything about the conversation that the barkeep (second item in the post) and I had with Earl Jones about his medical marijuana bill. Well I did a post ealier, with video, earlier this week and a story (not by me) in the works for the paper. The item kind of got buried under Earl's other story of the day.

• *Dome comments on my comments about Dome's comments on Hagan's sponsorship and co-sponsorship of spending bills.

  And predictably I got an e-mail accusing me of being "in the tank" for "big spender" Hagan from one of my Republican correspondents.

  Look, all I'm asking for is a little context. Dome says they're going to look at all appropriations bills filed by folks running statewide this year so that's fair enough. Although, it's noteworthy that the preponderance of folks running statewide don't serve in the legislature.

  As for being "in the tank," no not really. I'm all for criticism of candidates, it's a good thing if its fair and accurate. And my suspicion is Hagan is going to get blasted for real before her Senate campaign is out. But criticism is usually more effective if it's on point.

  For example, my favorite misfire of the Senate campaign came from the N.C. GOP, that said Hagan and Sen. Walter Dalton (who is running for Lt. Gov.) were trying to "distance themselves from the budget writing process this year."

  The idea that Hagan is running from her record as an appropriator is, um, wrong. She plays it up in her campaign bio.

  Darned facts…always getting in the way of a good story.

Duke falls. The Johns Hopkins Blue Jays beat the li'l devils 10-9.

The Jays will meet Syracuse in the finals on Monday.

I know this is basketball country and I know some of y'all might feel some in-state allegiance to Duke ... although I can't imagine why... but:

Let me just note that Johns Hopkins did, in fact, beat Navy and will next take on Duke in the big Lacrosse tourney. I'll be pulling for the Blue Jays to beat the li'l devils.

We now return you to your regular wonky programming.

Apropos of nothing 'round here, but:

Go Jays! Beat Navy!

Still chewing over the primary? You can listen to editorial writers Doug Clark and Allen Johnson, columnist Jeri Rowe and staff writer Mark Binker chew over Guilford County and national primary results by clicking right here.

The podcast starts with a couple voices from election night: State Sen. Kay Hagan and Sheriff BJ Barnes. We get to talking after those clips and it takes us about 2 minutes to get really warmed up.

From today's paper: the race for the Democratic presidential nominations is affecting races lower down on both the Dem and GOP ballots.

Also: more hot air over the gas tax.

Meanwhile, early voting ended in Guilford County Saturday and Lorraine Ahearn ponders race and politics.

And in case you missed it, Obama and Clinton chatted up Dems in Raleigh on Friday night.

Cross-posted from D-2008, where I've been spending way too much time:

From today's paper: a look at the Democratic primary for governor. Previously: the Republicans.

Here's more on the the tv ad by the GOP. You know the one. It'll begin airing Monday.

The bad news, you're behind in the polls and fundraising in the U.S. Senate race. The good news: you have the money for a heck of a party. Our editorial page has made an endorsement in the race.

Coming this week: Presidential candidates are back in town. Hillary Clinton will be at a fundraiser in Greensboro Monday. and Barack Obama will be in Winston-Salem Tuesday.

Welcome to those of you following a link from Sunday's Q+A with Gov. Mike Easley. (Link here.) We posted some audio from the interview earlier this week. You can hear him opine on this year's elections here and his thoughts on gas taxes here.

One of the first things I asked him about was the failure of Skybus, the discount airline that North Carolina offered a gob of money to locate a hub here less than a year before the carrier went belly-up. We also discussed RF Micro, a company that has gotten state incentives but has also sent jobs over-seas.
Click here to listen to his answers.

If you're not digging the Easley interview, you might want to catch up on some other non-presidential political news:

• * Republican candidates for governor debated in Greensboro Friday night.
• * Afterward, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole offered a few thoughts.
• * Democrats running to replace Dole talked to our editorial board last week.

Obama Wednesday. Clinton Thursday. Profiles of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate race on Sunday.

So there's not a lot of time for legislative or other government news this week. But if you're interested in those lining up to take on Howard Coble this fall, here's a quick and dirty summary of a debate held Tuesday night.

Over at D-2008, I've been busy with debate coverage (click here and here for summaries, audio and links to more posts).

I thought it was interesting to hear Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory talk about "good trends" in mental health care and the smack down that followed from the other three Republican candidates. McCrory struck me as unprepared on that particular issue.

Also, I spoke with Jim Neal about the Village Voice story, as conversations continued at the original post.

Oh, and Rep. Howard Coble says he has no regrets about his Romney endorsement coming just days before Romney dropped out.

Is anyone local to Greensboro planning to watch tonight's debate among the candidates for governor? If so, drop me a line at mark.binker@news-record.com.

Meanwhile, on the N+R's other platforms:

• * The paper: New Hampshire's presidential primary results will affect John Edwards' strategy going forward.

• * Scoop: Gee, anyone know where there might be a large, new water supply the Triad might tap if local officials could play nice?

• * Decision 2008: Edwards gets neither big endorsement announced in Nevada today.

Where have all the politics gone?

Just a reminder, I'm posting more campaign-oriented posts at Decision 2008, although I'll continue to cross-post here from time-to-time. (And really, trying to separate politics from government is like trying to separate the white from library paste.) Oh, and there is a handy feed of the top posts from Decision 2008 (as well as Inside Scoop and your comments on this blog) over in the right-hand bar.

On the agenda

Coming up this week:

• *The House committee looking at whether the criminal charges lodged against Rep. Thomas Wright (D-New Hanover) are sufficient to boot him from the legislature meets. 1 p.m. in LOB Room 643. (You can catch up on the latest here.)

• *The State Board of Education meets Tuesday through Thursday this week. Agenda here. Looks like the board will road trip to the General Assembly on Wednesday to talk about testing, accountability and charter schools. BOE members are due to hold a press on Thursday at 11:15 a.m.

From those not on the campaign trail...

You may notice that your mix of state government and politics stories is running a bit thin in recent weeks. That's because a lot of the folks who write those are either on the road with the presidential hopefuls or writing about the campaign from back here in the NC.

That said, there were some folks holding forth on state issues this weekend (or a little before):

• * I have yet to slog all the way through the NY Times Magazine piece on voting machines. The gist of it is that voting machines, particularly the touch screen variety used in Guilford County, could give us another 2004-Florida-presidential-recount (or 2004-North-Carolina-Ag-Commissioner-recount) situation. (Previously.) Columnist Scott Mooneyham says we shouldn't get our knickers in a bunch, too much anyway.

• *Winston-Salem's Paul O'Connor has a few books to add to your reading list.

• *A passel of new laws went into effect Jan. 1, including one that requires motorcycle riders to wear helmets, or, more exactly, requires them to wear helmets that offer some sort of meaningful protection. There are bikers who pledge to try to repeal this coming session of the General Assembly. The Burlington Times-News wrote about the controversy here. The Shelby paper opined in favor of the bikers here while my paper took the opposing view.

The latest entry in North Carolina's blogging universe is ATP Mecklenburg, which seems to be a bit right-of-center with a focus, as you might expect, on the Charlotte area.

UNC-TV is promoting an upcoming documentary on Jesse Helms titled "Senator No: Jesse Helms."

The 90-minute film is due to premier Tuesday, Jan. 15 at 9 p.m.

More info at a website put up for the show. Among those interviewed other than North Carolina luminaries: Bono.

As we start the new year, Columnist Scott Mooneyham isn't about to let anyone forget the scandals and screw ups of 2007.

But the usually cantankerous Wilmington Star News editorial writers let it be known that not everyone in government is a crook.

Meanwhile D.G. Martin pokes a few holes in the "Charlotte Mayors can't get elected statewide" theory.

One more blog maintenance note. I have added back and updated contact information that was deleted in one of our many blog redesigns during 2007. Basically, if you don't want to leave a comment, there are other ways to reach out and you can find them at the top of the green column to the right.

Of those, the newest gee-wiz gizmo is a Twitter Feed, which I would describe and an interesting syndication and social networking tool and then be roundly criticized for describing it inadequately by Twitter enthusiasts.

At any rate if you're interested or if you're already a Twitterite (Twitterfile, a Twit?) check out the News & Record Politics Feed on Twitter, which unifies the RSS feed for this blog as well as Decision 2008 and Inside Scoop.

The feed is automated and will check for updates on all three blogs about every half hour. That's not anything you couldn't do yourself with the existing RSS feeds and a good news reader, but some folks really like the Twitter format - I think because they have the option of getting it on their IM client or on their phone.

Happy New Year.

We had some server problems over the weekend that prevented any News & Record blog from posting new entries or recording new comments that were offered on existing ones. If one of your comments got zapped, I apologize. The issue seems to have been repaired.

Okay, if you're logging onto a political blog the day before Christmas, you're either: a) killing time before your boss lets you leave the office, b) need some serious, serious help, c) punched the wrong bookmark.

Now, what it says about me that I'm plugging in an entry the day before Christmas, we'll just leave that alone right now.

At any rate, for your reading pleasure:

• * Need a last minute gift? Here are my only somewhat tongue in cheek suggestions.

• * Congrats to the ECU Football Pirates for winning something called the Hawaii Bowl.

• * Gov. Mike Easley has issued his annual proclamation allowing flying reindeer in North Carolina. Not for nothing, but if anyone has any anti-aircraft munitions hanging about I'd love to try out some of these recipes.

• * Decision 2008 rounds up recent news coverage on presidential hopeful John Edwards.

• * Yes, Congressman Howard Coble is old, but he can still ring your bell.
  
  Credit: Jerry Wolford/News & Record

As I mention during my previous meandering mess of a post, when I first came to Raleigh I was a bit of an oddball among the capital press corps because I blogged. While I'm still an oddball, it has nothing to do anymore with online presence.

There have been new additions even since Winston-Salem's Paul O'Conner wrote his excellent column back in October. For those who may not know the bloggy haunts of us mainstream media wretches who cover the capital, here's the list as far as I know it:

• * WUNC's Laura Leslie is the barkeep over at Isaac Hunter's Tavern. She typically does one comprehensive post a day and it's always well worth the read.

• * James Romoser is the gorp-master over at Trail Mix, Winston-Salem's new campaign blog. As late, he's been in Iowa.

• * WNC stands for Western North Carolina over at Capital Letters by Asheville's Jordan Schrader.

• * Charlotte's Jim Morrill isn't a full-time Raleigh denizen, but he's here often enough. His Campaign Tracker blog is worth a look.

• * When Charlotte's Jack Betts talks over at This Old State, you should listen.

• * News 14's Tim Boyum works his own camera, thankyouverymuch. He also writes a good blog at Political Connections, where he sometimes posts video of his work.

• Last but certainly not least, there's Under the Dome, or the Legion of Dome as I like to call them. Ryan Teague Beckwith leads the blogging here, with contributions from a cast of thousands from the News & Observer's political staff. This is where you go if you just can't read enough about the topic/scandal/dead horse of the day.

That list leaves off folks like the Insider, who while very blog like and part of the press corps requires you to get past a pay wall for most all its stuff. And it doesn't count Gary Robertson, the capitol reporter for the Associate Press without whom all us other MSM types would be lost. (Without him, none of our papers could afford to have us blog.)

And left off are the various blogs produced by think tanks, individuals and other folks - which actually might make for a post of its own on another day.

So have I missed any Raleigh-based MSM types? Who are you reading these days?

Every so often I'm given to some navel-gazing, and here in the run up to Christmas and New Years seems like a good time to indulge. And frankly, I've begun to hear a little voice partly comprised of readers, partly of bosses, partly of my own imagining, that's been saying something like:

"Dude, where's the bloggy goodness?"

More after the jump.

Please extend a cordial "howdy" to James Romoser of the Winston-Salem Journal as he joins the blogsphere with Trail Mix.

This week, James finds himself in beautiful Iowa, where candidates are trying to hitch a ride in on Santa's sleigh.

Lately the ol' e-mail bag has been overflowing with more junk than I can shake an electron at, so here's a quick round up of some of the stuff I've been ignoring:

• * Perdue has started fact-checking Moore. More has already been fact-checking Perdue. Perdue's fact-check site features a slickster with his fingers crossed behind his back, Moore' fact-check site features a weather vein.

  If I a smart-alec journalist I might use and image of Punch and Judy when writing about the Democratic contenders from here on out. Oh, wait:

  

  What do I mean "if?"

• * Democracy NC says Congressional Campaigns are getting more expensive. In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

• * Various officials with state of North Carolina remind you not to eat stuff that will kill you or buy toys that will kill your kids. Darned nice of them.

• * Your toys may poison you, that bird may be undercooked, but dag-nab-it some of us won't be able to watch the big game.

• * Rep. Grier Martin is among those veterans suggesting to Congress that it might be a good idea to conserve some oil since many of the places oil comes from tend to be regions where people are shooting one another.

• * Wake Forest is a back-up site for debates, I guess that's in case one of the primary sites has a rail strike or has its picture published in Playboy or something.

• * From the Associated Press: "A five-term Republican legislator from Transylvania County says she won't run for re-election to the state House. Representative Trudi Walend said in a news release Monday that she wants to spend more time with her family, including her five grandchildren. She says she plans to retire when her term expires December 31, 2008."

• * Hackney has appointed a gang of legislators to talk about, well, gangs. Locally, Reps. Nelson Cole, Alma Adams and Earl Jones are on board. All three are Democrats.

This is not funny...much.

Good Sunday morning. Here are a couple of quick updates:

• *Here's my story on immigration as an issue in the U.S. Senate race. From the lede:

  Tar Heel voters have been telling pollsters that immigration will be an issue they weigh in choosing their next U.S. senator. That suits incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole just fine, say campaign consultants and others who study elections.

  "Not only is it going to play in her favor, she knows it's going to present a problem for any Democratic challenger," said Hunter Bacot, a political science professor at Elon University and director of the Elon University Poll.

• * Also on immigration, a story from the New York Times:

  THE Republican presidential candidates talk about illegal immigration as if they were in an arms race on toughness. The Democratic candidates have begun to tread more warily on the issue, as their debate last week in Las Vegas showed, but they still favor the language of accommodation over alarm.

  Each approach, political strategists and officials warn, could have costs next November. Pollsters on both sides agree there is widespread anxiety, even anger, about the impact of illegal immigration. But an increasingly influential Hispanic electorate could be turned off by a hard line from the party they turned to in increasing numbers in the last two presidential elections.

  Much will depend, strategists say, on how the candidates balance their statements.

• * Mark Johnson at the Charlotte Observer looks at what role Jim Neal's sexual orientation has played in the Senate campaign thus far. From the story:

  Schumer and the national Democrats, who boast of their party's inclusiveness, effectively ignored Neal, who is openly gay. After he announced his campaign in October, he telephoned Schumer. The call wasn't returned. Neal was the first Democrat to step up to challenge Republican U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

• * And the N.C. GOP held their annual Hall of Fame awards banquet. In District 6, former Randolph County Sheriff Litchard Hurley was named to the hall, edging out other luminaries like Rep. John Blust.

  Also from the banquet: In a straw poll among the three GOP candidates for governor Sen. Fred Smith placed first, former N.C. Supreme Court Justice Robert Orr placed second and lawyer Bill Graham placed third.

Good morning and happy municipal Election Day, if you live in a part of the state where such things are going on. I'll be hanging out over at the paper's Election 2007 blog this afternoon to help with coverage of mayoral and city council races.

Also in Greensboro today, a debate among the governor-want-to-bes at the Koury Center. I'll swing by that if I can and I know some of my colleagues will be on hand, so there will be reports on the web and in the paper a-plenty.

Don't let your franchise get all flabby...go exercise it today if you can.

Winston-Salem Journal Columnist Paul O'Connor used his column to give a shout out to various bits of the blogsphere over the weekend, including to yours truly. From his column:

But the Raleigh reporter for the N&R writes the first blog I read regularly. I don't know where he gets the time to write for both their print and Web versions.

As evidence by my scanty posting lately, I don't.

There have been a couple of work-related things that have kept me away from the blog as of late, one of which might actually show up in the paper later this fall if I close my eyes and wish really hard upon a star. And with the Legion of Dome posting every thing that comes across the transom, I'm looking to do fewer but more off-the-beaten-track sorts of posts here, at least until the honorable saunter back into town.

By the way, if you missed it from this weekend, I had a short story on the confusion in one slice of the Medicaid program.

You know what's great about getting a new blog template every other month?

You know where to check for things that are going awry. I know of two formatting issues: bullet points aren't rendering right (hence the use of dopey asterisks in the last two posts) and something bad has gone on with the monthly archives. Our web jockeys have been alerted and are working on the problem.

Update:Archives problem fixed.

While the boys and girls in Raleigh fight over how best to give public money to private industry, stuff is happening in our nation's capital:

• For Greensboro, it's meet the new judge, same as the old judge, as William Osteen Jr. replaces his father.

• Meanwhile, Greensboro's congressional delegation is split on what exactly all these Iraq reports mean.

I'm not talented enough to be two places at once, so at least one of these things is going to drop. But on today's calendar:

Gov. Mike Easley says he has an announcement about HB 1761, which would create a grant payment especially for Goodyear down in Fayetteville. Pretty much any reading of the tea leaves says this is going to be a big ol' veto. More from the Tavern and Dome.
• Robert Orr, a former Supreme Court justice and current Republican candidate for governor, will lay out why he thinks the economic development grant Easley proposes instead of the one in that bill is a bad idea. That's 2 p.m. at GOP headquarters on Hillsborough Street.

• Richard Moore, state treasurer and Democratic candidate for governor, will be making a stop in High Point today. Catch him at noon during the High Point Business Expo at Showplace. I don't know about the speech, but if you're in High Point and haven't seen the building, it's worth a stop.

I have to make a pilgrimage to the home office on Wednesday and then I'm off for vacation. We'll see you back here toward the end of the month. Nobody go and get indicted while I'm out, okay?

Our annual Discover the Triad book recently hit the streets.

My contribution concerns why the state isn't a hot spot for presidential candidates.

Legislative Week in Review will air its end-of-session wrap-up show this weekend. During the end-of-show analysis segment, host Eszter Vajda did her best to corral Scott Mooneyham of the Insider and three guys named Mark: Johnson of the Charlotte Observer, Schreiner of the Wilmington Star News and myself.

We talked about the year that was down on Jones Street, former Speaker Jim Black (of course) and what was left undone.

I don't know if we made a lick of sense but I'm told it was fun to watch. Check your local listings, or wait until Monday and watch it online.

If you've been logging onto this blog over the past 18 hours, you'll have noticed formatting and templates going amok. The story is this:

Capital Beat was created on the News & Record's first generation blog template. It was sturdy but lacked certain things. In particular, it didn't have tags which you see at the bottom of the stories now.

So I asked web guru and all around good egg Mike Grossman to hook me up with the second generation template, which he has been kind enough to do but the transition process has not been an easy one.

We're getting there but there are still a few outstanding issues. The most pressing is that the blockquote style on the blog doesn't seem to function right anymore. I'm not sure whether that's a permanent issue or not.

As for the tags, they're something I've been lusting after for a while now. No, I'm not going to go back and tag the first thousand or so posts. (If you're looking for something, the handy search function on the upper right works just fine.) But from here on out, I should be able to give y'all a quicker, cleaner way to find background on a topic.

So bear with me a little bit here as we get things squared away.

Capital Beat is going through some maitenance this afternoon in order to add at least one new feature. So things may look a bit screwy if you visit this afternoon. Things should shake out soon.

No need to adjust your radio or call the FCC...Laura Leslie and I will be yacking about things legislative on WUNC's The State of Things program today but we promise to behave...mostly.

Happy Flag Day everyone.

More fun facts than you can wave a flag at here and here and here and here.

Rep. Thomas Wright, the embattled New Hanover Democrat, gave one of the great Alfred E. Newman-like quotes of late to AP Reporter Gary Robertson in a story running over the weekend:

A defiant Wright remains in the chamber, casting votes from the same front-row desk that reflects his senior and, until recently, influential status at the General Assembly. Asked if he plans to quit, Wright offered an exasperated response.

"I was elected by the people of my district and I'm here to serve them," Wright said. "I'm voting and doing what I'm supposed to do, so what are you talking about?"

Yeah, no idea what could be the matter.

More from around the state.

• Meanwhile, Rep. Mary McAllister's troubles don't seem to be going away any time soon. More here.

• Honk if you're ready to pay more taxes for that new car or truck.

• My colleagues Taft Wireback and Lanita Withers continue looking into the A&T fiasco:

  The program director allegedly forged her superiors' signatures on documents that cost taxpayers thousands of dollars in inflated charges.

  She allegedly approved scholarship money for her husband at a rate three times higher than any other student in the N.C. A&T program she ran: $66,733.33 from Uncle Sam for a year's tuition and expenses.

  She spent $13,478 on her own travel accommodations at what auditors called "high-priced hotels," averaging $328 a night traveling for the Future Engineering Faculty Fellowship , or FEFF, program.

  And all that's before auditors got to questionable taxpayer-financed travel that former FEFF director Anita Huff allegedly approved for her daughters, computer and electronic equipment missing from the program, and the supervisors who should have caught these apparent missteps.

• Home cooking is great, but sometimes you get a hankering for a meal on the road. Charlotte's Mark Johnson explains:

  In North Carolina, the lobbyists for Rent-A-Center, Time Warner Cable and other companies are prohibited from contributing to campaigns, such as Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue's expected bid for governor.

  Friday night, at a Washington lobbying firm, lobbyists who represent some of those same companies at the federal level held a fundraiser for Perdue.

  The donations and libations affair is an example of what some reformers believe are continued efforts to get around last year's sweeping reform legislation in North Carolina. At a minimum, they say, the episode highlights the law's limits.

• Look: Laura is as much of a work-junkie as I am.

• Chris Fitzsimon is watching House-Senate budget negotiations.

• Great line from Gary Pearce: "In other words, memo to the next judge: Throw the book at this guy. And the next judge apparently will be Terry Boyle. Who Democrats blocked from the U.S. Court of Appeals."

Coming this week: Budget negotiations will continue. The House and Senate will continue clearing out smaller bills while work continues on the big monsters like H 77, the renewable energy portfolio standards one.

And if you're interested in whether billboard companies should be able to cut down trees around their signs, the Senate version is in committee Tuesday.

Finally, yes, last week stunk - big time. Yes, I'm still here in Raleigh. Any lapses in blogging have to do with time spent on projects or other work for that funny rolled-up-paper-thingy we throw in the driveway every morning.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Senate budget this week. Whatever. Now for the really important news:

The Hopkins men's lacrosse team took the national title today in a hotly contested match against the Duke Blue Devils today in Baltimore. The Blue Jays had an early lead but nearly lost it in the second half, narrowly winning the game 12-11.

More here. Please forgive alums for being extra chipper today, especially those who attended the school during the national championship drought years.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled political wonkery.

This coming Thursday was to be the "crossover" deadline, the point at which all bills that don't raise or spend money would have had to pass one House or the other. It's an important marker in the legislative calendar, not withstanding the fact that there have been a few ways engineered to get around the deadline.

But it turns out that the members spent so much time drafting 4,000-plus bills they've neglected to pass them, or at least enough of them not to cause problems.

So the House and Senate have reset crossover to next week, May 24 to be exact. Still, you should expect a pretty frenetic couple of weeks as the boys and girls down on Jones Street aim to make sure all their good ideas don't fall victim to a procedural deadline.

Also coming this week: The State Board of Elections will hold hearings into the campaign fund raising practices of Reps. Thomas Wright, D-New Hanover, and Mary McAllister, D-Cumberland. The festivities start Tuesday (at the downtown Raleigh Clarion if you're inclined to come and spectate) and I imagine might throw a bit of distraction into the legislative mix.

But before we move ahead, let me catch up on the week that was as told by the press releases in my e-mail box, RSS feeder and my colleagues:

• If you visited this blog last week, you probably noticed the House was drafting up a budget. Click here to find the thing as it was passed last week following all the various amendments on the House floor.

• Apparently, a lot of folks have $20 to spend on a raffle ticket.

• Laura Leslie is having visions about Delta Visions:

  In Wednesday's House Approps meeting, Forsyth Dem Earline Parmon attempted to earmark $250,000 of the $5,000,000 budgeted for the NC Community Development Initiative. Parmon wanted to set the money aside for Delta Visions, which she described as a group seeking to provide low and moderate income housing in a run-down neighborhood in Winston Salem.

  Go onnnnnn....

  The president of Delta Visions, Doris Herrell, has been Parmon's campaign treasurer for the past five years. In that capacity, Herrell has loaned Parmon's campaign more than $10,000 since 2002.

  Parmon seems to have paid it back, mostly in late 2005 and early 2006. You can find her campaign records here. Hint: Search under both Herrell and Harrell - her name shows up both ways.

  Go read her whole post.

• Good news / bad news: Treasurer Moore says your kids don't know how to manage credit cards.

  State Treasurer Richard Moore announced today that North Carolina students scored an average of 47.7 percent - less than half the questions answered correctly - on a statewide test of financial knowledge and skills. Moore released the students' scores and complete results from $kill $et, the statewide financial literacy survey to measure North Carolina students' knowledge of saving, credit, debt and other financial issues.

  Click here for the full release.

• Know your rehtoric: Land Transfer Tax = NC Home Tax.

• From the strangest political story of the week Dept:

  A former campaign worker for Rep. Patrick McHenry of Cherryville has been indicted on an election law violation, the Gaston County district attorney said Saturday.

  McHenry's office, alluding to the Duke lacrosse scandal, accused District Attorney Locke Bell of going after the young aide to politically undermine the Republican congressman.

• I was feeling bad about having to be elsewhere for one of the first real meetings of the new state ethics commission. Dome covered the closed door.

Gosh almighty, I'm going to be on the television box tonight, courtesy of Legislative Week in Review. Charlotte's David Ingram, host Eszter Vajda and I talked a little budget, a little smoking and look forward to what's shaping to be a busy month here in Cap City. With any luck we didn't cuss or look too terribly silly during the taping.

I somehow missed this item in my weekend reading:

The N.C. State Board of Elections will schedule a public hearing on the campaign finances of Rep. Thomas Wright, a Wilmington Democrat under investigation by the board since early March.

Board Chairman Larry Leake said Friday that he expects to hold a hearing by mid-May.

Update: And with remarkable (for them) alacrity, the state GOP weighs in, only a day or so behind the news:

It is becoming widely believed that it is just a matter of time before the North Carolina State Board of Elections will call for hearings into Rep. Wright's suspect activities. Rep. Wright, a close ally with former Democrat Speaker of the House Jim Black, may be one more in the long list of Democrat cronies who has broken North Carolina's law for personal gain and power.

For those of you who know the N+O's "Under the Dome" column, it now comes in blog form.

Elsewhere from around the state, here's what we scruffy press types have been up to:

• Charlotte Raleigh reporter Mark Johnson apologizes:

  I'll step up. I apologize for being a newspaper reporter, the kind of person George W. Bush once described as a "major league" unprintable word. Come to think of it, HE didn't apologize.

  I'd apologize too, except I'm so obnoxious newspapering is the only thing I'm fit to do.

• It's official, reports Jim Morrill: the Edwards campaign is now officially Dean 2004 Redux. Except, Dean's hair never came close to looking $400 worth of good.

• Scott Mooneyham writes a column worth reading for this line alone: "And with about as little fanfare, House Speaker Joe Hackney might as well have been Tony Soprano sending a message to Uncle Junior about moving in on the family business: fuhgetaboutit."

• Carter Wrenn says the GOP is lacking for killer instinct.

• Winston-Salem's Paul O'Connor: the accidental environmentalist.

• And Laura reveals that once you become a blogger, you will blog even on your off hours. It's a sickness. I'm thinking of starting a support group.

So this is what a Capital Beat podcast might sound like.

As an esteemed former editor of mine used to say, "Needs more beer."

So the State Ethics Commission has collected ethics forms from legislators, members of the council of state and other folks who hold positions of public trust. The forms detail things like real estate holdings and stocks in one's portfolio and such.

After getting them, the commission promptly filed those away in the basement office of the state administration building here in Raleigh where no one can see them.

Well, gosh darned it, I think paperwork like that is made to be perused. So at least for our local (Guilford County) honorables, some statewide folks and a few other hangers on, we've put their ethics forms on the internets.

Click right here to go to the page where they've been collected. And if you find the link useful or have suggestions for more folks we should put up, comment below or send me an e-mail: mbinker@news-record.com

A few tidbits and thoughts to end last week and begin the new one:

• Monday will be slow even for a Monday around Cap City this week. The honorables gave everyone a good long time for Easter weekend.

• The Senate held a skeleton session Friday and won't even be pretending to work until Tuesday. When they do get back, Senate Commerce is going to take a look at the bill to make alcohol inhalers illegal.

• The House looks like it will have some sort of session on Monday, but it looks like a complete snoozer. On Tuesday, the House ABC Committee will be looking at a new type of liquor license for inns on purty roads...because really, the state's ABC system isn't quite Byzantine enough.

Pollsters at Public Policy Polling put out their latest release on Friday (click) that showed 67 percent of those polled supported the comprehensive smoking ban floated by Rep. Hugh Holliman. One wonders where those 67 percent were in recent weeks as a hodge-podge of tobacco groups, property rights types and other did their best to kill the thing, forcing it to be retooled into a much less stringent bill.

If you remember the transfer tax fuss that kicked up a week or two ago, Scott Mooneyhamprovides some political analysis.

Regarding Joe Sinsheimer's latest missive on anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists, two points of clean up:

• Bob Hall of Democracy NC sent along this chart (click) and a note:

  There's a fair amount of attention on the nurse anesthetists, Thomas Wright, etc. and it's important to put another side of the equation into the picture -- the money from the anesthesiologists. I know the nurses certainly would like to see a tad more balance in news coverage, and I certainly agree that the substantial sums of money anesthesiologists have poured into state legislative races is directly relevant.

  Indeed, the desire to offset the huge financial advantage of the anesthesiologists underlies my earlier statement to a reporter about the nurses, quoted in yesterday's letter to Speaker Hackney from Joe Sinsheimer: "This is a case where a group has been told, or has internalized a message, that they need to pay to play and pay a lot more if they expect to prevail."

  Below (and attached) is a chart that shows the dramatic rise in giving by PACs of the anesthesiologists and the nurse anesthetists. Of particularly interest is the proliferation of PACs sponsored by local practices of anesthesiologists. This tactic allows the profession to circumvent the normal $4,000-per-election limit imposed on a single PAC.

  My research of contributions to legislative campaigns (i.e., excluding donations to parties, statewide candidates, etc.) shows that the profession jumped from 4 PACs giving $204,250 in the 2002 election period to 15 PACs giving $504,827 in 2006 legislative elections -- a leap of $300,000 in four years. Meanwhile, the nurse anesthetists PAC soared from giving $3,500 in the 2002 legislative elections to $103,500 in 2006.

  As more attention is rightly given to what I call the "wannabe" players, including pay-day lenders, video-poker operators, chiropractors, nurses, and S & M brands, it's also important to note the money their "opponents" are putting into politics because that sets an important part of the context for "follow the money" stories.

• Meanwhile, Speaker Pro Tempore Wainwright sent out this note:

  Let me start by saying unequivocally I have done nothing legally or morally wrong.

  I took a position on anesthesia legislation based solely on my belief that the system we had in place was working and working well based on information in the administrative code that was agreed upon by the North Carolina Medical Board and the state Board of Nursing. In turn, nurse anesthetists chose to legally provide financial support for my campaign based on the belief that I am an effective legislator and would be a strong advocate for their cause. It was not the other way around – they did not pay me in an effort to win my support and I did not solicit any donations from them.

  I was only one member of the Health Care Committee and not in a leadership position on that committee. My opposition was not enough to stop the bill from being approved by that committee and I played no part in preventing the bill from reaching the Finance Committee or the full House.

  I in no way played any improper role in the handling of this legislation. I fully reported all of my donations from nurse anesthetists and from anesthesiologists with an interest in this matter.

  I reject the notion that I have somehow played a role in corrupting the process and I look forward to the time when everyone realizes that this claim is baseless.

As for me, I'll be spending a few days at my paper’s mother ship in Greensboro learning more about these new-fangled computin' machines, but I'll still be keeping tabs on the honorables from afar. E-mail me with items of interest: mbinker@news-record.com

Hello folks. There have been some folks who regularly comment here who have had their comments delayed or not posted here because of our anti-spam efforts. I've had to fish one or two of my own comments out of my software's junk comment folder.

Avoiding this is simple - I think. After you fill out your comment and whatever personal information you're leaving, there is a final question that lately has been asking for the name of our current president in all lower case letters. If you fill that out, your comment should sail right through.

If anyone has further problems or this doesn't fix their wagon, please contact me at mbinker@news-record.com.

I know this is a pain in the hind parts, but it keeps the 200-plus (no, I'm not exaggerating) spam messages this site can attract in a given day from showing up.

Two stories from me in today's paper:

• The state Realtors group is pushing back against proposed transfer taxes.

• This story outlined Sen. Hagan's
  bill on data center tax breaks.

Stories that I contributed to yesterday:

• The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but at least there will be rest stops along the way.

• So it turns out if you take gobs of public money, distribute it in process closed to the public to private companies, people get all critical.

  Click here to read the report detailed in the story.

  And click here to listen to me ask Commerce Sec. Jim Fain's about the report. Commerce Dept. General Counsel Don Hobart chimes in as well.

  Bonus: click here to listen to us rap a little more about why the state shields the process by which we give large sums of public money from public scrutiny.

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.

So, let’s handle some questions I’ve gotten via e-mail over the past week:

• Did the server transition thingy happen? Yes. What’s more, it appears to have worked like expected.
• What’s with the spam? Good question. Apparently when they transitioned us over to the new server and new version of Moveable Type, they nuked something that was keeping the spam at bay. We’re in the process of redeploying whatever those countermeasures were.
• Are you going to get your lazy butt back to work at some point? Yes, but not this week. I have a new project at home keeping me from loitering about Jones Street for the moment.

Of course, all that doesn’t mean I’m completely tuned out. A few notes before I go back to mixing formula:

I was wondering when I saw this bill (similar bill here) why exactly Guilford County was on the list. Jonathan Jones got my answer. Allen had more to say about the idea.
• My Friend and colleague Kerra Bolton, late of the Asheville Citizen Times, is going off to flac for the state Democratic Party.

• A visitor from Raleigh is coming to town later this week. Sen. Jujla Boseman is the keynote speaker for the Triad Business and Professional Guld Dinner this Thursday, March 15.The event will be held at the PTI Airport Marriott. For more information www.triadguild.com.

• Presidential candidate John Edwards will be rallying on Tuesday at Bennett College.

• The NCTA is holding a news conference tomorrow at 11 a.m. concerning “A Declaration By The MEMBERS Of The North Carolina Technology Association, The 21st Century Student.” (That was all done up in fancy script in the e-mail.) Whatever it turns out to be, I’m sure there will be no over-wrought hyperbole. (Reminder: Audio links for listening to things at the legislature live, including the news conference room, can be found here.

Okay, talk amongst yourselves. I’ll check back in later.

Posting here is going to be lighter than typical for the next couple weeks for a couple reasons. One of those has to do with something that will keep me away from Jones Street and the rest of state government for a while.

The other is one of those rascally technical issues that come with the territory here in cyberspace. From our newsroom online guru Michael Grossman:

“We will be moving our News & Record blogs to a new hosting environment on Wednesday afternoon. During the move, the blogs will not be accessible. The blogs should look the same after the move and you won’t need to change your bookmarks.”

When tech guys say “new hosting environment” they get as skittish as a lobbyist in the “new ethics environment,” so I expect a few bumps along the way. After the switch, nothing much will change for you on the user end and all your links (I hope) should stay the same.

This here is funny . . . to me anyway.

• David Broder calls our system of presidential primaries “insane,” saying what any right-minded political junkie ought to be thinking.

• Now that they can’t be wined and dined so much, legislators might need some tips on what to do with themselves. Scott Mooneyham has some suggestions.

• I know this will come as a shock, but the Charlotte paper says that the winning candidates raised and spent a lot of money during the 2006 campaign. In other news, Generalísimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

For those who remember the dispatches from Washington earlier this month, the newsprint package will run this Sunday.

Those stories include:

• "The Hill: Your politicians at work", the main story.
  
• "Congress looks for answers on Iraq dilemma"
  
• "On their list", a run down of our local honorables priorities.
  
• "Working for a living," which was written for newsprint but didn't make it in the paper.

And you can click here to check out this fine example of why I should stick to writing rather than reading the news. If you turn down the sound, you still get Jerry Wolford's excellent photos.

I recorded scads of audio on the trip, some of which has already been posted. Some more can be found at these links:

• Mel Watt talks about his time as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a host of other things during and extended interview.
• Richard Burr talks about the minimum wage.
• Howard Coble talks about his views on Iraq.
• Elizabeth Dole talks about life in the Senate.

For those who missed them, here are links to the blog posts I did while in Washington. You can see reader questions that we answered, hear more audio and check out some snippets of life on the Hill:

• Tuesday.
• Wednesday.
• Thursday.
• Friday.

Also prepared for the print package was what we call a quote rail, basically little outtakes from interviews we don't have anything to do with. We ran out of room in the paper, so you get them here:

• "There are two sports seasons that I follow: college basketball and college basketball recruiting," says Rep. Brad Miller, looking at a framed picture on his office wall in which he can pick out where he was sitting during the 2005 NCAA championship game won by the University of North Carolina Tar Heels.

• Rep. Howard Coble, 75, is a famously confirmed bachelor. Why?
  "A girl I used to date asked me the same question," he says, "and I said to her, 'This is going to sound like a bachelor copout, but I've never had time.' And she thought for a minute, and she said, 'It sounds like a bachelor copout, but knowing you, it's believable.'...I guess maybe the best way to say this is, I've dated a lot of women, liked all of them, sometimes I liked them more than they liked me, sometimes they liked me more than I liked them. And I just never did seem to find a fit. And as I told a constituent, I'm not an unhappy bachelor."

• The Volkswagen Thing, a Mexican variant of a European jeep from the late 1960s and early 1970s, is about as ugly a mod of transportation as one might find. Sen. Richard Burr has two.
  "As most would tell you up here, rarely if ever does the top go up," he says. "I leave the top down because the weather is pretty good most of the time and I can ride from here to the White House and kind of forget that I'm in Washington. It's as much therapy as anything else."

• Sen. Elizabeth Dole recently underwent hip surgery.
  "I'm doing very well, really am," she says. "This is something I could have postponed for several years but I'm one of these folks who OK, if you feel you're going to need to do it sooner or later, just get it done. It's behind me, it takes a little while of course going through rehabilitation."

• "Interestingly enough, we’re now into the second week and I've yet to speak on any of the legislation," said Rep. Mel Watt.
  Is that unusual?
  "In some years it would have been unusual. Nobody has asked me 'Where you've been?' yet."

Credits for all this goes to Jerry Wolford, who did the photos and some of the sound recording; Michael Grossman who helped with sound editing and compiled parts of our online package; Eddie Wooten, Betsi Robinson and Ann Morris, who let me go play for a week and edited the stories; and designer Jennifer Burton, who made it look pretty in newsprint.

N.C. Policy Watch, which already has a number of online features, has started The Progressive Pulse. They list five contributors, so it should be a pretty lively site.

Fellow capital reporter Laura Leslie went and got herself a blog. Laura works for WUNC, the Raleigh public radio station. Aside from being smarter that 95 percent of the people you wander into during the average day, she works in radio, which means her bosses give her lots of cool toys to play with. Expect good things out of her.

I’m just happy not to be the only denizen of the press room (aside from Mr. Betts, who no one would dare make fun of) with a blog anymore.

Before 2006 can slip away, a few things in the ol’ mailbag to note:

Update (12/31): For those finding their way here from
This story on creating an state-level earned income tax, welcome. For prior posts on this topic: click here.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

• This purports to be a new website to keep an eye on a certain friendly local presidential candidate. (Click here.) We’ll keep a watch on it.
• Gov. Mike Easley has appointed Mary Lou Andrews Blakeney of High Point to the North Carolina Council on Sickle Cell Syndrome. From the news release:

  Blakeney is a retired nurse. She is a member of the Grand Conclave of Nurses, Inc., a board member at the Department of Public Health in Guilford County and board member at the United Way of Greater High Point. Blackeney received her nursing certificate from Grand Memorial Hospital in Georgia.

  Click here for the release.

• The legislative black caucus has apparently made its pick for Speaker. From an e-mail sent out this afternoon:

  The African American Members of the NC House of Representatives met on December 20, 2006 to decide the impact they wanted to have on key leadership roles in the House. During the meeting, they voted to be ruled by a unit vote. After the discussion, the members voted on the nominees for Speaker of the House and Speaker Pro Tem. Representative Dan Blue (Wake County) received the majority votes for Speaker of the House and Representative William Wainwright (Craven County) received the majority votes for Speaker Pro Tem.

  This by no means guarantees Blue the speakership, but it certainly gives him a big block of votes going into the Jan. 10 Democratic caucus meeting.

Okay, that’s it. I’m taking the rest of the year off. Barring necessary updates to this post, an outbreak of mammoth news – mammoth as in big and breaking, not as in actual mammoths running amok, although that would probably qualify as mammoth news itself – I’ll see you back here first thing next year with the return of the Raleigh Dispatch column.

Happy New Year.

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas, or at least a pleasant break from the daily grind for those who don’t celebrate the holiday. In this week between the arrivals of Saint Nick and Baby New Year, you can expect not a whole heck of a lot to get done here in Cap City. The walk into the office this morning was quite lonely. Still, here are a few things to catch up on as the eggnog wears off:

• In case you missed it, Inside Scoop offered up its annual Scoopie Awards.
• The new state innocence commission is hard at work.
• The hardest working man in journalism takes a look at the 2008 state political contests.
• Season’s greetings from the nation’s governors.
• Apparently, North Carolina has scratched its lottery itch.
• Kerra Bolton considers the Bubba Buddha of Easley. You think Buddha liked racin’?
• Scott Mooneyham considers Easley’s push for an adoption tax credit.

Other things to ponder this week: North Carolina’s minimum wage rises to $6.15 an hour on January 1; new lobbying laws go into full effect on the same day; if rumors can be believed John Edwards will official announce a run for President this week; and we are now just under a month away from the start of the 2007 legislative session.

News from other corners of the Internets:

• Chris Fitzsimon says the House Speaker race is still a toss up. The House Dems will get together on Jan. 10 to make their picks, but as legislators keep reminding me, nothing is done until Jan. 24 when the gavel comes down. Local note: Rep. Hugh Holliman says he’s out of the race for Speaker.
  
• Edwards…John Edwards…is he expected to say something or something?
  
• House pages are kind of expendable but we should probably at least feed them.
  
• Run for governor Orr else?
  
• Kerra Bolton: Black had his good points.

She turned us into a newt . . . but we got better.

If you’re in downtown Raleigh today and feel like being all festive, here’s something from the governor’s office:

RALEIGH – Gov. Mike Easley and First Lady Mary Easley will participate in the annual Christmas Tree Lighting at 6 p.m. TODAY (Dec. 5) on the west side of the Capitol grounds (off Salisbury Street).

The festivities begin at 5 p.m. with musical performances by the Saint Mary’s Chorale and the Raleigh Concert Band. The Governor and First Lady will hang wreaths on the Capitol’s west doors to begin the official tree lighting ceremony at 6:15 p.m.

Following the ceremony, the Junior Woman’s Club of Raleigh will host a holiday festival featuring music and children’s activities on the Capitol Square, Bicentennial Plaza and in the Museum of Natural Sciences and the Museum of History.

One thing that clutching your pillow asking the fates to have someone come and lop your head off so the sinus headaches will stop keeps you from doing is checking the ol’ e-mail bag. So let’s do that now:

• The state’s sales tax rate goes down by a quarter percent on Friday. (click here for release) That’s a savings of 25-cents per $100. Don’t spend it all in one place.
• The NAACP is organizing “direction action” this weekend (click here for release) in support of the workers at the Smithfield plant.
• Roy Cooper is just tickled pink that meth lab busts are going down, (click here for release), which really, probably is a good thing even if it does make the decongestants that really work a pain to buy.
• Those whacky kids at the state GOP are burning their mortgage tonight. (click here for release)
• From the office of the Banking Commissioner: “Mortgage lenders and mortgage brokers will have new guidelines for so-called “non-traditional” or “exotic” mortgage loan products under proposed guidance issued today by the North Carolina Office of the Commissioner of Banks (NCCOB).” (click here for the full release)

Hate mail, after the jump.

A couple housekeeping notes:

• You may have noticed the N+R blogs have been kind of slow to load as of late, depending on when you tried to log in. I’m told we’ve had some intermittent problems but the appropriate beatings have been administered and things are (mostly) back on track.

• You may have noticed that posting has gotten right spotty on this page. That has to do not only with the first item but a nasty little cold that has kept me working at half speed. (Things are clearing up, I think, thank you for asking.)

In the mean time, if there’s something you think I ought to be getting to, let me know: mbinker@news-record.com

Good Sunday morning. Here are a couple stories that ran in today’s paper:

• Former N.C. Sen. John Edwards is widely expected to be a candidate for President in 2008, not that he’s saying quite yet. What was really striking to me is how pretty much everyone I talked to for this story had an opinion about Edwards’ run. At least a few people refuse to chat because they don’t know enough about the subject of a story. If nothing else, Edwards has got some big time name recognition working.
• Legislators around the state are lining up for the chance to be Speaker, although why they want the job is beyond me.

As always, the comment lines are open. Capital Beat will return to regular blogging this week.

It’s just about Thanksgiving and I’m finishing up a few items for the print edition before jetting out of here for the holiday. I may check in if news breaks out. Otherwise, consider this an open thread until I get back next week. And everyone out there please have a happy Turkey Day.

Good morning. It's Election Day, and after casting my ballot I’m heading down to Greensboro to poke around. Then I'll be firing up our coverage over at Inside Scoop for the afternoon and evening. Come visit me there as I try to fake being a pundit.

This blog will return to its normally scheduled nonsense on Wednesday.

I'll be busy with the President coming to Greensboro today. Y'all play nice and no one else get indicted while we're districtact, ok?

So, there was a little blogging/new media/etc… conference today in Greensboro. It seems all had a good time.

During the opening session, Red State (conservative blog) founder Mike Krempasky said that he thought Brad Miller, a Democratic congressman, should be re-elected.

This caused a great laugh in the room and I could see people instantly begin to punch away at their keyboards. Later in the day, my boss asked if it was news – as in news we should write in the newspaper rather than deal with in an online space (like here).

I will be at as much of Converge South Saturday as work allows. There are a couple of Congressional candidates that I’m writing about who are scheduled to be in the area at the same time and I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to chat with them out on the stump.

If nothing else, I’m very much looking forward to dinner.

If you happen to see me wandering about aimlessly, please introduce yourself. And if I don’t run into you, have a good time and be nice to my boss.

Being a blogger, I guess I would be remiss in not instantly offering some thoughts on John Locke’s blog conference, held in Greensboro this morning. (You can find other views from Ed, Fec, and Guarino.)

In no particular order:

• Scott Johnson of the Powerline blog, famous for the post that debunked the CBS story on Bush’s national guard service, spoke as the keynote. What struck me about how he compiled the information in that post is that it was really a great experiment in distributed reporting like Jay Rosen is attempting.
  
• Johnson told the audience several times that he the national media serve as an arm of the Democratic Party. That sense of mistrust was shared by many members of the audience. Interesting to me about this is that you could hear the flip side of that argument – the press as a tool of the GOP – if you get a group of liberal-leaning bloggers together. I obviously have a dog in this fight, but I don’t think either view is healthy or accurate. It’s what happens when very serious and very real screw-ups on my industry part mix with natural suspicions and complaints about press coverage.
  
• Fec wrote in his review of the session “They came to GSO, but didn’t know anything about us.” I would say you might quibble with that because Sam Hieb lives here and was on a panel. But the panelists were very much focused on national politics, both in terms of their interests and the scope of their writing. It did not seem many of them know about the Greensboro blogging scene or that any of them have much of a sense what a locally-focused civic blogging scene looks like. That’s kind of weird, as Mary Katherin Ham observed, since conservatives believe in smaller federal government and more power at the local level.

As a final note, I’ll wonder out loud whether hold a “conservative” blogging conference doesn’t feed the balkanization of our media market and information stream. If conservatives only trust conservative blogs, liberals the liberal and few folks mistrust everyone, how the heck is anyone going to be able to talk to one another?

All in all, it was an interesting morning. And even though I was one of those MSM guys everyone was griping about, I didn’t feel too despised.

Now for Converge South next weekend.

From today’s paper, my colleague Jason Hardin and I report on the results of a poll that says North Carolinians would back a law banning smoking in public places.

Some linkage:

• A press release from the poll.
  
• The poll data itslef.
  
• The Surgeon General’s report on second hand smoke mentioned in the story.
  
• Americans for Non-Smokers Rights.
  
• Lorillard Tobacco, which is based in GSO.

From my desk this weekend:

• The two campaigns are on the phone, and may be dialing you before election day.
  
• More on the Miller-Robinson campaign: ads and debates.
  
• Immigration is among the top 5 issues for voters, says the Elon Poll. So you all can stop looking at me like I’m crazy now.

The John Locke Foundation has founded a beachhead in the triad blogspace. The new site will be headed up by Sam Hieb, who has been on the GSO blog scene for a while now.

Locke is also hosting a blog conference on Oct. 7 in Greensboro. Yes, that’s the weekend before Converge South.

I may be crazy, but maybe next year these two crazy kids should get together. Sure there are cultural conflicts (Locke charges for its events, Converge is free), but they’re talking about basically the same stuff.

Just a thought.

Good on Jay. Now he can start leaking me all the deep dark inner secrets of the GC Dems I’ve been dying to know for years.

Ah, the beach. A great place to go, relax, and feel that impending sense of doom as you figure reams of work is piling up on your virtual desk as the ocean sweeps your three-year-old off into the gulf stream, bound for parts unknown.

Anyway, now that the whole family is back – and all the sand is out of parts that shouldn’t be known – here are some of the things I’ve been negligent about:

• Apparently, this story I wrote a while ago on IMPAC ran. Prior post on the group here.
• North Carolina lottery chairman Charles Sanders has decided to step away from the lottery commission. He wrote in an e-mail this week:

  I am writing to tell you I am stepping down from the Commission as of my appointment expiration date of August 31, 2006. When I accepted Governor Easley’s invitation to join the Commission, I told him I would do it for one year. During this time together we as a Commission have brought a smoothly functioning lottery into being, directed by an outstanding leader in Tom Shaheen and his dedicated, energetic, and professional staff. I am proud of what we have been able to do. I am proud the funds generated by the lottery are adding to the existing commitment of North Carolina to the education of its students – a commitment the people of North Carolina must guard to insure that these funds are truly additive and not supplanting existing funds in the years ahead. And I am particularly proud to have served with each of you who reflect the best to be found in our citizenry, for each of you has brought expertise and common sense to the work of the Commission.

• (Update on this below). The state auditor checked out finances over at the General Assembly. He found some problems, like lax accounting for office supplies, which the GA folks basically said “Yup, we’ll get right on that.” He also pointed out that the Speaker and Senate President Pro Tempore gave out larger than normal raises without much by way of paper work. The answer was sort of the same, just with a different inflection. (sarcasm)“Yup, we’ll get right on that.”(/sarcasm) Ok, what they really said was “The Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate are authorized by statute to approve expenditures for their respective chamber. The increases in question were properly approved. Your findings and recommendations will be forwarded to the Speaker and President Pro Tempore.”
• Gov. Easley was named to the National Governor’s Association Public Safety Taskforce. From the “Nothing like a prompt response” file, the press release announcing this starts: “On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on America, the National Governors Association (NGA) has announced the creation of a Public Safety Task Force in recognition of governors’ evolving role and responsibility in enhancing the safety of their states’ residents.” I feel safer already.
• Oh, and the House Republicans have set the tune that they’re all supposed to march in lock step for this fall's elections. (Remember, House Democrats sort of did the same thing before the legislative session.) Click here for the GOP release.

Alright, I’ve got to dig out my calendar and see what it is I’m supposed to be doing today. More later.

Update:
Re: the audit of state legislative salaries, Julie Robinson in the Speaker's office sent me this:

On Sept. 22, 2005, the Speaker and the President Pro Tempore requested that the State Auditor conduct a fiscal audit of the General Assembly. The audit released on Sept. 12, 2006 is the result of this request.

This request was made because an audit had not been conducted since the fiscal year ending June 30, 1999. In addition to this specific audit, the Speaker and President Pro Tempore have requested that in the future, audits be conducted no less than every two to three years.

The finding regarding House and Senate salary increases is not regarding salaries for the Speaker and Pro Tempore staff members. As the Auditor's review notes, the General Assembly Personnel Manual and state statute authorize the Pro Tempore and Speaker to address personnel issues within their respective chambers. This finding involves salary adjustments for House and Senate staff in general who had received raises in excess of 10%. There are currently 315 total House and Senate employees; the audit refers to 15 employees who had received raise above these amounts.

Six of the 15 employees received salary increases above 10% because their status changed from being interns to being hired as staff members after their internships ended. The remaining employees had seen increased workloads due to significant increases in legislative activity. For example, the number of bills filed in 2005-2006 was 50.2% greater than the number of bills introduced during the 2003-2004 legislative session (4,929 bills in 2005-2006 compared to 3,281 during 2003-2004). Salary adjustments for all 15 employees were made in writing, based on additional workload or position reclassifications, as is standard practice for all compensation adjustments.

I got an e-mail this morning promoting a new website for PEFNC, Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina. Basically, this is a group that pushes for school choice – both charter schools and the like but public funding of slots in private schools.

The group is lead by a Darrell Allison, who also has a bio here.

I contributed this story on N.C. politics to the News and Record’s annual “Discover the Triad” magazine.

The premise was that a lot of folks reading the DTT would be newcomers to the area trying to figure out the lay of the land. So I figured that if you were coming from somewhere else, and all you knew of N.C. politics were Liddy Dole, Richard Burr, Jesse Helms and a solidly red chunk of the electoral map on presidential election night, having Democrats control a lot of the organs of state governance might be confusing. The story was an attempt to sort out that presumed confusion.

Now, if you’ve been around North Carolina for any length of time, you probably know what the deal is and the question seems a bit odd. At any rate, I filed my story months ago and had forgotten about it.

Flash back to my little vacation a couple weeks ago, when I spent some time at the Capital Beat conference in Columbus. One of our speakers there was Ferrel Guillory, who I spoke to for the Discover the Triad story.

Now, Guillory, who is a heck of a nice guy, was going through a couple questions he had gotten from journalists that were a little – let’s say – peculiar.

Yes, mine was one of the two. Yes, mine was the weirder of the two.

No matter. In fact, I’m taking it as a challenge. I want to hold down the title of asking the most bare-end backward political question every year. Feel free to contribute your contenders.

I’m back from my travels…raise your hand if you’ve been indicted so I can get a quick count.

No one?

So what is the big news from the past couple weeks? Let’s see: the Republicans are stilling hammering away at Jim Black and the various ethics campaigns for the fall elections (complete with a campaign style attack ad – very Washington), the Democrats are doing their best to ignore the Republicans and rolling out policy ideas, and Gov. Easley is continuing his annual ritual of signing bills one at a time now that the legislature has left town.

Glad I didn’t miss any parties.

If I were actually doing anything useful today – other than sitting in meetings and deleting the spam jamming my e-mail – here’s what would be on the agenda:

• Gov. Easley is getting ready to sign SB 353, the landfill moratorium. This is the bill meant to curb the construction of mega-landfills while the state figures out if and how the permit them in the long run. If you’re in the Wilmington area, check him out at 11:30 a.m. in room L228 of the Cape Fear Community College Health Science Building (415 North 2d Street) in Wilmington.
• Joe Sinsheimer, the Democratic strategist of www.jimblackmustgo.com fame is holding a presser at 304 East Jones Street (Corner of Person and Jones Street) in Raleigh. Does he have some new tidbit on Black or is going to complain that Sen. Andrew Brock’s www.STOPJimBlack.com website is a knock of his?
• It’s not today, but I’m in a bulleting mood: State Treasure Richard Moore will hold a presser on Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. to hammer H&R Block for offering those short-term tax anticipation loans. The State of N.C. holds a bunch of H & R Block stock.

Y’all be good while I get back to filling out paperwork.

Into every life, a little vacation must fall. Mine starts in a couple hours - sort of.

First, I'm off to hang with my colleagues at the big shin dig in Columbus.

In the mean time, if you need your local politics fix, head on over to the blog that spawned this one, Inside Scoop.

Capital Beat will return on Monday, Aug. 14.

From the weekend papers:

• Click here for my quick and dirt wrap up of the legislative session.
• Crack intern Sanhita Sen once again does my dirty work and writes this story about the end of two freshmen legislator's first terms in office.

Coming Monday:

• My Raleigh Dispatch column (only online) gives some suggestions for some more ethics reforms that might really shake up the system.
• My colleague Jennifer Fernandez and I look at how a quirk of the state fire code almost threw a major wrench in the works of the state’s middle college – or what Gov. Easley’ calls “learn and earn” – high schools.
• I'll take a look at what other scrubby media types like myself were writing about the end of the legislative session.

I have two sets of appointments of local folks to various state boards and commissions to report.

First up are items from the “appointments bill,” one of those pesky end-of-session packages of omnibus stuff that gets run every year. In this case, the bill makes a bunch of appointments:

• Berkley Blanks, the Democratic sheriff’s candidate for Guilford County, is appointed to the Private Protective Services Board until June 30, 2009.
• Sen. Stand Bingham, a Davidson County Republican, is appointed to the North Carolina Professional Employer Organization Advisory Council until Dec. 31, 2009.
• Lillie M. Brown-Doggett of Guilford County is appointed to the North Carolina Housing Partnership until Aug. 31, 2009.
• Ellen S. Holliman of Davidson County is appointed to the Commission for Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services until June 30, 2009.
• Joseph M. Bryan Jr. is appointed to the Roanoke Island commission until June 30, 2008.
• Rep. Harold Brubaker, a Randolph County Republican, is appointed to the Southern Diary Compact Commission until June 30, 2010.
• Rep. Nelson Cole, a Rockingham County Democrat, is appointed to the Virginia-North Carolina Interstate High Speed Rail Compact until Dec. 31, 2008.

Next up, Gov. Mike Easley has made a bunch of appointments involving local folks, including:

• Edward W. Kelly III of Greensboro to the North Carolina Workforce Development Commission. Kelly is a continuing education instructor at Guilford Technical Community College. Board duties are to enhance and develop strategies that produce a skilled and competitive workforce through various powers and duties. The commission has 38 members, each serving a four-year term.
  
• Art Winstead of Greensboro to the North Carolina State Board of Certified Public Accountants. Winstead is a partner at Davenport, Marvin, Joyce & Co. law firm. He is a member of the UNC at Greensboro Excellence Foundation, the African American Atelier and the Startmount Forest Country Club Board of Directors. The board is responsible for granting and annually renewing certificates of qualification to CPAs and CPA firms who meet legal requirements.
  
• Beth Parrott of Lexington to the Davidson County Community College Board of Trustees. Parrott is the owner of Parrott Insurance & Benefits in Lexington. She is chair of the Lexington Area Chamber of Commerce Board. Board duties are to elect the president, employ personnel, purchase land necessary for the operation of the college, apply standards for admission and graduation, receive gifts and donations, provide for the administration of all educational and occupational services and to establish or enter into public or private partnerships for the support of the institution.
  

Greensboro blogger and fixer of winders David Hoggard says you get more responses to posts when you don’t ask for any. Well, here I go breaking Hoggard’s law . . . again.

With the General Assembly session now over, I have time to catch up on a list of things a mile long that has been put off. Here are two items from that list for all of you out there on the Internets:

• Are there any lingering questions from the legislative session that are plaguing you? Any bills that you heard about but don’t know their end of session status? I’ll be in an updating mood for a few days, so let me know if there’s something I need to update.
  
• I’m planning on making some additions to my blogroll and other links. What’s not there that should be?

Drop me an e-mail at mbinker@news-record.com or via the comments link below.

Thanks.

From today’s paper:

• How Bush’s stem cell veto is the latest move at the federal level to send and issue back to the states.
• Why some are pleased with the renewal of the voting rights act, and some are not.

Via The Thicket’s post on the topic, here’s an idea causing a stir in Arizona because of it’s conflating of money and politics, but not for the typical reasons:

Osterloh's initiative, the first initiative to be certified by Arizona election officials for the November general election ballot, would use unclaimed Arizona Lottery prize money to provide a $1 million reward to one randomly selected voter after each general election. A voter would get one entry in the drawing for voting in either the primary or general election or two if voting both times.

Read the AP story.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m almost certain that someone said at the birth of this idea: “It’s just so crazy, it might work.”

My question is if the Arizona folks get away with it, how quickly the idea will spread to other places.

From today’s paper: An update on two stories from earlier this year. Bills to change the entry date for Kindergarten and close a gun law loophole are likely going to have to wait until next year.

Also, if you haven't read the mental health reform stories written this Sunday by Nate DeGraff, go do it now. It's one of those issues where the advocates fight it out at the state level, but folks have to deal with the consequences at home.

Gov. Mike Easley will sign the bill raising the state’s minimum wage by $1 at 11 a.m. today.

Meanwhile, the legislators will continue to thresh through bills in hopes of leaving town next week.

From today’s paper:

• Finding information on long term care homes might get easier, but maybe not as easy as it could be. My friend and coworker Eric Townsend has been doing a lot of good work on long term care homes. Click here to read more.
• Yes, everyone agrees the ferry thing was a bad idea. What I can’t figure out is how anyone either believed it wouldn’t come out and/or was thought it was good idea in the first place.

From today’s News & Record:

• I chatted with Browns Summit farmer and Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler.
  
• Lanita Withers talks to Matt Hill Comer about his ambitions for a creating a political action committee.
  
• My colleague Eric Townsend spent at least part of his Saturday talking to folks about the pending minimum wage hike. For those who need it, click here for background.

Around the state, here’s what some other papers and bloggers were up to:

• Reporters? Cynical? Sat it ain't so, Scott! Ok, it really is so, and you should read his column as to why.
• NC Policy Watch’s Christ Fitzsimon writes So much for all the talk about the integrity of the budget process. The Insider reports in its Friday edition that the final budget agreement includes a special provision pushed by Governor Mike Easley that allows car racing teams to receive a sales tax rebate for car parts bought in North Carolina. But you might have know something about that already.
• Diane Davis is disappointed at the death of the landfill moratorium.
• Oooo…$10 lottery tickets.(Reg. could be required) Nope, I still don’t get the appeal of the whole scratch-off thing, but that’s okay.
• Charlotte’s Jack Betts writes about ethics efforts in the legislature and why the public just might be skeptical about the whole lot of ‘em.(Reg. req.)

I was hanging out at the Democratic state convention in High Point today (Saturday). There will be a story in Sunday’s paper. For all of you finding you ways here to chat about that, welcome. The comment thread it yours.

Update - Linkage:

• Click here for my story on the convention.
  
• The N+O’s Rob Christensen was also skulking about in High Point Saturday. (Reg. required)
  
• At least one of the folks at Blue NC was there. Update: And there again.
  
• I spied Matt Hill there too (although I didn’t get a chance to say hello). Update: Here he is again.
  
• The Dems say they had a fine time.

Items not necessarily related to one another:

• Charlotte Observer Columnist Jack Betts is writing a blog. Betts, for those of you who don’t know, worked for the News & Record once upon a time. (There are a surprising number of folks wandering about Cap City who can say that.)

• Update:(3:35 p.m.) Click here for audio of House Speaker Jim Black saying his thank yous after the House budget passed Thursday.

• This shin dig should be a fascinating(PDF) way to start the week.

• TREBIC, the Greensboro-area builders lobby, will be down here lobbying the Guilford delegation on Wednesday afternoon as part of a wider lobby day on behalf of real estate interests.

• Legislative leaders are expected to appoint members to the budget conference committee Monday morning. What I’ll be watching: whether any of the Republicans who voted for the budget in either chamber get appointed to the conference group. Locally, that would include Rep. Harold Brubaker from Randolph County and Sen. Stan Bingham from Davidson County.

If none of that strikes your fancy, drop me a line at the comments link below and let me know what’s on your mind.

The boss is bragging on our new RSS Feeds page. And for those of you who don’t know about this stuff already, it’s worth a look.

RSS is a handy tool, feeding news readers that can keep up with stuff you like to monitor on a daily (or more frequent) basis. Click here and you can find feeds for all the paper’s blogs as well as news stories by content.

Click here for this blog’s feed.

Can blogger and reporter co-exist in the same body? Read on, after the jump.

Two stories from me ran today:

• This one concerns the give and take of the state budget process and how it may affect funding for the High Point Furniture Market.
• Parents of young children, like me, will want to check out this one about a proposed change in the rules for kids entering kindergarten.

The comment link is open.

Here are some links to go along with today's (Sunday's) story on HIV drug funding and the state budget:

• Click here for the story itself.
• Click here for Triad Health Project, the local group that assists folks living with HIV and AIDS.
• Click here for a fact sheet on North Carolina's ADAP program.(It's a PDF)
• More links here, here, and here.

And as always, click the link below to offer your own comments.

From the readers may know more than I do department, does anyone out there have any ideas about this:

RALEIGH -- An unexpected increase in the number of children taking an alternative end-of-grade test for special-needs students forced state officials to push back testing dates, created administrative hassles in larger school districts like Guilford County and has educators baffled as to what exactly happened.

The state expected to print 10,000 copies of the Extend2 test, given to third- through eighth-grade students with certain learning and physical disabilities in place of the standard end-of-grade test. Local testing officials say it would be used for nearly all students with disabilities except those with severe impairments.

But when final orders were tallied from across the state, North Carolina needed about 78,000 copies of the test, said Mildred Bazemore, the chief of North Carolina's test development section.

Click here for the whole story, or at least the story as far as I could write it.

What I still lack is a good explanation as to why the DPI was over-whelmed with test requests. Drop your suggestions for where to go looking for the answer at the comments link below.

Nothing fancy, just links to my stories from the past few days:

• The Senate puts a bill to ban video poker on the fast track. Expect a Senate vote on this today (Thursday) and to see the bill land in the House's lap next week. (And a big thank you to my colleague Taft Wireback for helping me to churn this one out.)
• Local arts folks come to talk to Guilford County legislators. They were there as part of a statewide lobbying day on behalf of the arts.
• Gov. Easley released his budget recommendations Tuesday. Think of them as suggestions that the legislature will try to follow but not, you know, all that closely.
• Some local legislators were front and center on the first day of session.

And for good measure, here's one from our friends at the Associated Press that I get asked about a lot: That lawsuit to try and stop the Dell incentives was thrown out.

From the N+R this weekend:

• Click here for my legislative preview in six notes. It doesn't cover everything, but it should give you an idea of the big issues on the radar.
  
• Click here for a story on the upcoming debate over the minimum wage. There seems to be a good deal of momentum for the wage this year, but it's not a done deal yet.
  
• As mentioned before, Rockingham's Nelson Cole has a new job for the short session.

And from other ink-stained wretches and pixil-stained bloggers around the state:

• The N+O's Rob Christensen the future of bi-partisan cooperation in the legislature. Hint: don't look for much cooperation.
  
• The Asheville paper's Kerra Bolton offers up her own legislative preview.
  
• Talking About Politics' Carter Wren has done a short encyclical on the Richard Morgan saga as good as any summary I've read. Click here for Part I /// Part II /// Part III /// Part IV /// Part V.
  
• The W-S Journal writes about the debate over a key ethics measure.

More fun to come this week as the honorables return to Raleigh.

I'm hanging over at the other blog today.

That's right people, after the lawn is mowed, I'm getting all grilly with a whole chicken this afternoon.

Meanwhile, for those interested in politics and stuff:

• My colleague Jeri Rowe writes about the potential sale of portions of the Uwharrie National Forest.
• Click here for my story on the NC General Assembly being a middle of the road sort of place, at least compared to some other state legislatures we could name. If the news gods were kind, it will have been paired in the print edition with this story from the NY Times, otherwise it just won't make a whole lot of sense.

That's it. Now go play outside. We'll see you back here on Monday.

I'm taking the family on a short trip, so don't expect any bloggy goodness out of me until Tuesday, April 11. Before I leave, here are some bits and pieces of news:

• Gov. Mike Easley Thursday is expected to address a big confab of legislators in Durham about his 2006 education agenda. You think he'll make mention of how the state should spend it's new-found lottery revenue?
• In case you didn't see, Greensboro Electrologist Trudy Brown has resigned as head of the state board of electrologist examiners following an unfavorable ruling by the state ethics board.
• If you're looking to wonk out in a really serious way and have a conservative streak, you may want to stop in on the Conservative Leadership Conference in Durham on Friday and Saturday. Click here for info on that event. The conference will feature speakers such as U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) and U.S. Senator George Allen (R-Va), and "Polling data that verifies North Carolina is a conservative state that favors conservative government."
• A new group has formed to push the minimum wage bill through the General Assembly this summer. The bill they're backing is now a co-production of Rep. Alma Adams, a Greensboro House member who has been pushing for a minimum wage hike for years, and Rep. Hugh Holliman, a Lexington representative who drafted language in the bill related to small business tax credits. It has passed the House and now rests in the Senate's hands. Adams and Sen. Kay Hagan say they expect to see stand-along minimum wage efforts launched in May.
• Peggy Schaefer, 47, has been named to head the North Carolina Justice Academy. According to AG Roy Cooper's new release, "The Justice Academy provides training for thousands of law enforcement officers from across North Carolina each year." Schaefer is a veteran of both the Guilford County sheriff’s office and the Greensboro Police Department.

That's it for now. Play nice while I'm away. And as always, the comment link is open.

You ever get the feeling that you're writing and reading about the same thing over and over and over...

In case you missed prior links from yours truly:

• A Sunday story from me rounding up the rumblings calling for Speaker Jim Black to step aside.
  
• A story from Saturday on Rep. Pricey Harrison calling for Black to step aside.
  
• Also in that vein, I chat with Hugh Holliman re: Black.

Items of interest on Black from around the neighborhood and around state:

• In case you wanted a second source, Charlotte's Mark Johns write about Pricey Harrison and Black.
  
• Ed Cone asks "How is it that Pricey Harrison, a freshman rep from Greensboro, is the second Democratic legislator to call for Jim Black to step aside?"
  
• The W-S Journal's Paul O'Connor plays guess the next Speaker.
  
• N+R Editorial Board member Doug Clark gets in on the act: "It's going to take a little longer, but Jim Black will resign as speaker of the N.C. House of Representatives."
  
• I'm a little late in posting a link to this, but here are the Green Dog's take on Jim Black.

Oh, and just in case you thought we had all figured out how the money from North Carolina's new state lottery was going to be spent, this story from Asheville’s Kerra Bolton says think again. And the N+O's Jim Nesbitt writes about legislators becoming stone cold lottery revenue junkies.

There, that ought to be more than enough to chew up your lunch hour.

One thing that has been blown up but good by the great server transition has been my links to audio files.

Those searching for the latest Easley on Black take can find that by clicking here.

According to a big red box on the News & Record homepage, our great server migration has begun. Think of this as a sort of electronic cattle drive, with the cowpokes trying to herd thousands of individual pages and pieces of content from one place to another.

The good news, I’m told, is that our new servers will allow us to do some kind of spiffy stuff. The bad news, of course, is that things can get messy during the transition.

I expect the main problem most of our readers will face will be broken links. If you run into issues, drop me a line via the comments section of at mbinker@news-record.com.

Thanks.

Update:For the next couple days, if you're trying to follow old links (from here or anywhere else) to N+R stories, well, you're out of luck. But come Thursday morning, I'm told the links should magically work again. Ain't technology fun?

Two stories from me over the weekend:

• The lottery's long strange trip to reality nears completion.
• The ethics board rules against a Greensboro electrologist.

By the way, for more stuff on the lottery: click here. Later on this week I'll be posting a list of local folks who will be selling lottery tickets on opening day.

Some other items from around the state that may interest you:

• I've seen stories that say North Carolina's lottery won't make as much money as South Carolina's. Here's one that says SC will lose money to NC.
  
• More on the lottery from the Charlotte paper.

And finally, some items about our favorite House Speaker:

• Carter Wren weighs in on Jim Black. "But even if Black wins – and survives – I think one thing is certain. He cannot continue to do business as usual in the State House. This is not a scandal where he can keep his head down and in six months go back to doing what he’s always done."
• Guarino weighs in on the same topic: "For local Democrats in the state legislature tied to Black-- Pricey Harrison, Earl Jones, Alma Adams-- a campaign issue has been handed to any opponents they may face in the future."(Link fixed, 3/27/06 9 a.m.)
• Green dog dems on the same topic: "Ask the Speaker to step down now; elect a real reformer to the chair; and fight for the strongest ethics, lobbying, and campaign finance reform legislation possible."
• Charlotte's Jim Morrill and Mark Johnson on the same topic: "Black is the first sitting N.C. House speaker faced with possible criminal prosecution and the state's highest-ranking official sanctioned by the elections board since then-Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps, also a Democrat, in 2002."
• Prior posts re: Jim Black from me here.

A couple stories from me that may interest you state-government wonks this weekend:

• No, I really can't sell you a lottery ticket. But these people would be happy to come March 30. Among the retailers hoping to sell for the state gambling enterprise: beauty supply stores, a paint ball supply shop and one place that has named itself "The Lotto Shop."
  
• House Speaker Jim Black's latest fund raising problems involve two local legislators. Reps. Alma Adams and Earl Jones, both Greensboro Democrats, took too much money from the Speaker during the 2004 primary period.

This week coming up in Raleigh is going to be a busy one. A few of the coming attractions: the lawsuit seeking to derail the lottery is scheduled to be back in court Monday, the State Board of Elections continues its hearings into Black's fund raising practices on Tuesday and the lottery commission is scheduled to meet by phone on Tuesday morning to, among other things, name a vice chairman.

Come to think of it, with a bunch legislative committees scheduled to meet, Tuesday is shaping up to be just a ridiculous kind of busy for us scrubby media types here in Raleigh.

Have a good rest of your weekend everyone.

You hear the one about a reporter who wasn't allowed into a press conference because he showed up late?

Really.

I've been delinquent in posting about this. Luckily, my colleagues in the press corps have:

• Charlotte Observer editorial.
• Asheville's Kerra Bolton.
• Winston-Salem's Paul O'Connor.

For those too lazy to follow the links, the O'Conner summarizes thusly:

Reporter Scott Mooneyham was running late for Gov. Mike Easley's press conference Thursday morning a week ago. He went through two security checkpoints in the Capitol and then opened the door to the governor's office.

Seth Effron, the governor's newest press aide, was standing inside, and when Mooneyham entered, the two made contact. Mooneyham says that Effron fairly aggressively tried to push him out the door, backing into him as a basketball player would to position for a rebound.

For those enticed to follow the links, there's little that I can add to all that wit and wisdom, other than to say I wish any of that surprised me.

A round up of stuff you may have missed while you were hopelessly glued to the ACC tournament or catching up on work this morning:

• My interview with Rep. Howard Coble’s challenger Rory Blake is here. An interview with Coble should be forthcoming later today.

• "Talking About Politics" talks about Richard Morgan and the primaries.

• The Washington Post's "The Fix" blog interviews John Edwards.

  An excerpt:

  Are you running for president or not?

  You waited this long to ask that question? I have not decided anything about that. I'm trying to make sure Elizabeth is well. I'm trying to do everything I can about poverty in the country and that's where my focus is. I'll figure that out later.

  
  You know, I've seen or heard at least four or five pretty lengthy interviews with Edwards since the New Year. In all of them, he strikes me as tackling policy issues much more head on than he did during the 2004 presidential campaign. (Maybe that's a freedom that comes from not being a Senator any more?)

  So his answer to the "are you running" question has had me scratching my head every time. He sure acts like he's running, or at least is trying to position himself to run. He's maintaining a deliberately high profile to keep his name in the national news. Heck, this latest interview with "The Fix" was even done with the premise of him being a potential contender in 2008.

  So why beat around the bush?

That's it for now. As always, the comment link is open.

Want to gripe, cajole, coax, praise or plead with your friendly local state legislator in person? Guilford County residents will have two chances to do so this spring.

• March 30, 6 p.m., in Greensboro at the Melvin Municipal Building – the place most folks would call city hall. Directions here.
• April 13, 6 p.m., at High Point City Hall, , 211 S. Hamilton Street.

The shindigs are being organized by Rep. Maggie Jeffus, who this year is the chairman of the Guilford County delegation in the General Assembly. A release announcing the forums reads:

“This hearing titled, Take It To Raleigh, will provide an opportunity for the delegation to receive input from citizens about their concerns and issues, as well as provide opportunities to receive input from local municipalities and other entities representing Guilford County”, said Representative Maggie Jeffus, Delegation Chair.

…

Citizens are encouraged to come to either location to share their thoughts with the Guilford County elected members of the North Carolina General Assembly. Speakers will be given a limited time and are asked to call (919) 733-5191 to sign up. Organizations and individuals who need additional information are asked to contact Representative Jeffus’ office.

Having attended a number of these things over the years, expect a pretty packed house, although not over-flowing. Various groups will organize legions of presenters to get around the time limits imposed (usually in the 3-to-5 minute range) and to try and impress with numbers.

Some local government types will come out as part of a pro-forma thank you and to offer gentle nudges on certain issues. And there will be the odd assortment of folks who wanted to get something off their chest and saw the opportunity to do it.

All in all, short of shelling out for a spot at a fund raiser (or stalking the delegation like I do for my day job), this is one of the public’s best opportunities to get face-to-face with those who represent them in Raleigh.

From the in-case-you-missed it files:

• Did you come to chat about the lottery? Click here to talk about whether pawn shops ought to be able to sell lottery tickets... or head over to Doug's joint.
• Local candidates are raising money to run for office. Incumbents have a big lead in the money chase. In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
• N+O writes about religion and politics here and here. More here.
• John Ross Hendrix, a Republican candidate for the 13th Congressional district, dropped by this old blog to share his thoughts on former Winston-Salem council member Vernon Robinson jumping into the race. Among them:

  Neither I nor anyone else living in the 13th district want this kind of "courage" and "practicality" in the face of heavy odds representing us. I will never be accused of "cherry picking" a contest to enter and I will always chose to represent the people of the district where I LIVE. "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my" have invaded my turf. I will defend it to my last dime, even if I have to pawn the computer from which this message is sent.

• If you missed my colleague Nate DeGraff's story on racism preserved in deeds, go read it now. And be sure to check out the multimedia presentation.

Pawn shops and check cashing operations will be among the businesses that will be licensed to sell lottery tickets in North Carolina.

So?

That was the start of a conversation I had with myself earlier this week. Are these two types of businesses all that much different from the convenience stores and groceries that would be the bulk of lottery retailers?

After asking around for a story scheduled to run Sunday, (Update: Click here for the story) there are at least two schools of thoughts on the matter.

One is that because pawn shops and check cashing operations - in general - cater to the poor, and lottery advocates have pledged the state game won't market to the poor, having the lottery sold in those locations is an inherent conflict.

That view is summed up by Bill Rowe of the N.C. Justice Center. From the story:

“I think it’s unfortunate because there was a great deal of debate about not marketing the lottery to poor people,” said Bill Rowe, general counsel for the N.C. Justice Center, a progressive think tank that lobbies state government. “It doesn’t take much to connect the dots. If you’re pawning your possessions for money or don’t have enough money to have a bank account, it’s probably not a great idea to spend your money on lottery tickets.”

Others have a different view. Why should the state discriminate against any sort of business? From the story.

Jim Greene, the owner of Coins & Stuff on Lexington Avenue in High Point, describes his business as mainly a jewelry store. But he does hold a pawnbroker’s license and makes small loans by holding jewelry and coins as collateral.

Greene said he saw no reason he shouldn’t have a lottery terminal. When asked whether he would sell a lottery ticket to someone who had just pawned an item or taken out a loan, he said he would.

“If they’ve got the merchandise and want to pawn it, what they do with the money is their business, not mine,” Greene said. “If they don’t play here, they’ll play somewhere else.”

If you have a chance, read the story. And then discuss below.

Odds and ends, some election related, from over the weekend and this morning:

• From the "this just in" Department, Kerra Bolton at the Ashville paper reports Rep. Wilma Sherrill, a Buncombe County Republican, will not seek re-election. Sherrill is a legislative ally of Rep. Richard Morgan, a Republican who is none to popular with his own party.

• For those who remember the story about the NC GOP collecting church directories, here's one cartoonists’ take on the issue. Via Cone.

• More on Saturday's Blust story here.

• From the Letters to the Editor column (which I have nothing to do with), NC GOP Chairman Ferrell Blount takes aim at Pricey Harrison for her support of Black.

  It's enough to make one wonder whether the GOP is going to make a serious try at unseating the first-term incumbent. Last election, Harrison unseated long-time incumbent Joanne Bowie, a Republican.

  So far, the registered opposition is Republican Joseph Rahenkamp, a retired fire fighter and very nice man who has run for just about every public office he could over the past decade or so, including City Council and the state house. None of his campaigns have been successful.

  Rahenkamp's campaigns have historically been pretty laid back affairs. To unseat Harrison, an opponent is going to have to get into the political equivalent of a knife fight, something that Rahenkamp hasn't been including to do so far in his political career.

• On Friday, Gov. Easley appointed Michelle C. Collins of Greensboro and reappointed Sampson Buie Jr. of Greensboro to the N.C. Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service. Collins is a resource development specialist with the United Way of Greater Greensboro. Buie is a retired deputy secretary with the N.C. Department of Administration.

• The N+O's Rob Christensen tells us graft was worse back in the day.

• Finally, check out this column by the AP's Gary Robertson, the hardest working man in show business around the state legislative building. It's worth the read if only for this reality check:

One thing no one contests is that the cost of running a successful campaign for office has risen dramatically. In 1992, legislative candidates spent $3.9 million, a total that soared to $15 million in 2000 and around $18 million in 2004.

A few tidbits from the weekend papers and beyond:

• If you logged on to talk about the minimum wage hike or see the survey results, Click here
• The church directory story goes national in its own way.(reg. required)
• The N+O's Rob Christensen uses his Sunday column to detail how the Speaker of the House became a position of over-arching influence.
• Filing for the May primary and November general election runs through noon on Feb. 28. Check our updated nightly list of candidates who have filed for Guilford and Rockingham races here. If you're a glutton for punishment, the SBOE has posted a PDF for all races across the state here.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

I have a story that should run Monday regarding how to get in contact with the legislators who represent you in Raleigh in Washington. In summary, the legislators and folks who help them handle their mail say:

• Keep it short. If you're writing more than a page, you may be writing too much.
• Get to the point. A line summarizing the opinion you're trying to pass on or the help you're looking for will help your legislator respond.
• Do ask for help. Whether they are federal or state representatives, a big part of their jobs is helping constituents navigate whatever bureaucracy they may be having problems with.
• Want a response? Include your address and phone number, even if you're writing e-mail.
• Yes, include a phone number. Many state legislators and some of the feds would rather pick up the phone than type send a type-written reply.
• The feds get snail-mail extra crispy. Due to security procedures, mail to U.S. Senators and Reps is inspected 7 ways from Sunday and irradiated. Which means it takes a long time to get there and often damaged. For federal reps it's often more efficient to send e-mail or a fax.

Now, if you're not sure who represents you in either capital, this link will be useful. The zip-code function (third option) takes a little patience, but I've tried it on a couple of my former addresses and appears to work really well.

The feds

You will notice that some federal representatives (in this case, Dole and Burr) don't publish a direct e-mail address. Instead, they offer a web page where you can type your message and send it on. You can find snail-mail, phone and fax numbers on these pages as well.

• Sen. Elizabeth Dole
• Sen. Richard Burr
• Rep. Howard Coble
• Rep. Brad Miller
• Rep. Mel Watt

They person you want to write not on the list? Find other U.S. Senate pages here and U.S. representative pages here.

The state

Rather than give you a bunch of links, just know that you can find a link to your state House member here and your state senator here.

In case you missed some news amongst all the Super Bowl hype this weekend:

• I had a story in Saturday's paper about the Lottery choosing locations for its state headquarters and regional offices.

  I've noted this before, but no matter how much you folks want it to be so, I'm not the guy to call if you're looking for a job or a contract. A fastfax that ran with the story gives the lottery web address and phone number (http://lottery.nc.gov/ and 919/715-6886).

• Gov. Easley and the family are back in the governor's mansion after the state shelled out $4 million to get rid of mold. They moved out last year because the air inside the house wasn't healthy to breath.

• More from the things Jim Black has done in office file from the N+O. And from the Charlotte paper, more on Black and strip clubs.

First some preliminary business: if you sent me an e-mail over the weekend send it again. Apparently we did not make the correct sacrifice to the e-mail gods again last week and, well, bad things happened.

But life goes on. Here' a round up of what did make it into the ol' e-mail box and what other enterprising members of the fourth estate were up to this weekend:

• From the Friday appointments file, "Gov. Mike Easley has reappointed Carolyn S. Turner of Greensboro to the N.C. Advanced Energy Corporation (AEC). Turner is the associate dean for research at the N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University School of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences... The duties of the corporation are to guide the AEC in developing projects to promote energy efficiency and investigate alternative means of using and producing power."
• Rep. Alma Adams, a Greensboro Democrat, apparently conducted the Greensboro symphony on Friday. I also hear tell she was supposed to sing. Anyone who was there, I'd welcome a review.
• The N+O's Rob Christensen wrote a pretty profile of Art Pope (along with a companion piece) in that paper's Sunday editions. Pope is one of those folks who are very important in the state's political circles - particularly Republicans ones - that most folks probably have never hear much about.
• Based on my conversations with folks who don't focus on politics professionally, a good deal of the population would be hard pressed to name the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. So why is Jim Black's name becoming a household word in North Carolina? Jim Morrill of the Charlotte O took a pretty good swipe telling us why the state House Speaker has become the focus of such attention.

You go read up while I get back to work.

Raleigh is back up at work after the 3-day weekend. Here are a few items to catch you up on things around town and beyond:

• I was going to include a brief explanation of my Sunday story on accounting for lottery money but ran on at the keyboard too long. Click here for a separate post on the topic.

• Mark Johnson of the Charlotte paper writes that Democrats are standing by Black,(mini reg. required) even in the face of the speaker's troubles. If that sounds like a familiar theme, it should.

• In one of their "Under the Dome" columns this weekend, the Raleigh N+O reported this nugget:

  A member of the N.C. Board of Ethics suggested last week that its efforts to develop recommendations for a proposed ethics law should be done in closed session.

  Mittie Smith, a High Point lawyer who has served on the board since 1993, said she didn't know whether the board could come up with the best recommendations "if we are being watched by the press."

  "I think we would probably be better to do it without the press looking over our shoulder," Smith said.

  Yeah, you'd hate to have those discussions about making sure government is transparent and that people are fair-minded and not improperly influenced by arm-twisting or bribes out in the open. (To their credit, the rest of the ethics board seemed to ignore the suggestion.)

• If Earl Jones is listening, Earl you might want to have a talk with one or two of your colleagues.

  Why?

  Well, the N+O's Dome also reported this tid-bit in the last few days:

  Amid all the ethics reform talk in the state House, Rep. Deborah Ross, a Raleigh Democrat, wants to do something about lawmakers who use campaign contributions for personal use. She has asked that a special House ethics committee take up the issue and, ultimately, recommend a ban on the practice.

  "It needs to be changed because when people give money to someone's political campaign, they give it to advance the public policy that the person might affect," said Ross, who is a co-chairwoman of the House election committee. "They don't give it for that person's personal expenses."

  Rep. Grier Martin, also a Raleigh Democrat, said the current law also could allow someone to legally bribe lawmakers by giving them campaign money that they can pocket.

  This idea apparently came up in the context of discussing former Rep. Mike Decker, a Republican who got some healthy campaign contributions at just about the same time he sent the House all higgly-piggly and forced the now-infamous power-sharing agreement between the GOP and the Dems.

  But that kind of restriction would pretty well crimp Jones' style as well. He recently told our editorial board that legislators' pay is so low, they should be able to reimburse themselves for some expenses. (For more editorial ire, click here.)

• She's not a state legislative contender, but an e-mail from Ada Fisher's Congressional campaign address seems to indicate that the Charlotte Republican will be challenging Mel Watt in the 12th Congressional District again. The e-mail was publicizing her talk during an MLK Day celebration and called Fisher "a likely candidate for the 2006 12th District US Congressional race."

  Fisher took about a third of the vote in 2004, which isn't bad considering she was outspent 5-1 and registered Democrats only make up 26 percent of the district that defines gerrymandering in the tar heel state.

• In honor of my trip to visit the parents over the weekend and my home state of Maryland, check out this story on the Maryland legislator over-riding the governor's and forcing Wal*Mart to pony up money for health insurance. I don't know if that could or would happen here, but if it ever got going the fight would be epic.
  

Good Tuesday morning and welcome to another year in Tar Heel politics. After completing a year where we talked a lot about the lottery, voting machines, ethics and taxes it looks like we're going to spend a new one talking about much of the same. Plus, we have legislative elections this year! (Okay, strange things excite me.)

Just so I don't leave any business from the end of the year uncovered, here's what you might have missed while swilling egg nogg, spinning derides or doing whatever it is you do to commemorate the passing of the year:

• The General Assembly is powering up a new committee to look at energy and fuel costs. Its first get together is Thursday morning at 10 a.m.

  I wrote a story that mentioned this in Saturday's paper.

  The bullet here is this: Republican legislators have been railing for a freeze in the gas tax since September or so. Democratic leaders have largely brushed them off. But the state gas tax went up 2.8-cents Sunday, the biggest one-time jump in the tax's history, giving the GOP more fuel for their fire. And in recent months, rank-in-file Dems have hopped on the lower-the-gas-tax band wagon, especially folks with lower income constituents who are taking it in the hip-pocket over commuting costs.

  There's now a significant movement afoot to call a special session to cap or at least temporarily freeze the gas tax. Thursday's meeting can either be a seen as a first step in that direction or a show-piece meant to demonstrate the legislature is taking action while putting off indefinitely any sort of special session.

  By the way, home-heating prices sometimes get thrown into the mix, but they're actually expected to decline this week.

• I was going to spend some time musing on a series of eat-you-vegetable sort of news releases from the governor's office, but Kera Bolton of the Ashville paper beat me to it.

• The Lottery Commission has scheduled its first meeting of the new year for Thursday, Jan. 6, at 10:30 a.m. (In the ABC Commission Room of the Admin building downtown for those of you who are local.)

  Meanwhile, for extra credit, lottery watchers could review this story that ran in the Washington Post by Charlotte's Mark Johnson and the Newark paper's story that says folks who live in lower-income zip codes tend to buy more lottery tickets. (That last story is sort of old and I may have posted it before.)

• The North Carolina Association of County Commissioners has gotten all down in the dumps over the voting machine deadlines, saying there's not enough time to get new equipment in place. One county, Catawba, has even gone so far as to sue the state.

  Some see a connection between Catawba's suit, the fact that Catawba Commissioner Kitty Barnes is president of the NCACC and the fact that NCACC is fighting the state's new voting rules and regulations. I can't verify that as fact, but boy did they make the line easy to draw.

  Just by the way, there has been subdued chatter of potentially delaying the scheduled May primary since November in elections circles and the murmur has been getting louder as of late. The thinking is there just isn't enough time between now and the end of March (when things really need to be in place) to get all that needs to be done, done. Since the 2004 and 2002 primaries were also delayed (for unrelated reasons) this really wouldn't be a new thing...annoying and problematic for political parties, but not new.

  And lest you think it's just a liberal thing to T-off on voting machine companies and what not, the state's conservative elements are also in on this act.

• Lillian’s List of North Carolina has hired its first executive director according to an e-mail from uber-lobbyist Paula Wolf, although there's no mention on the group's website. For those of you who don't know, Lillian's List describes itself as "an independent political action committee dedicated to electing pro-choice, Democratic women to the North Carolina General Assembly."

  Their new, and I think first full time director is Carol J. Teal, a veteran of Democratic political causes including the Kerry-Edwards campaign.

Before getting to the heavy lifting, let me take a minute to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and/or Happy Chanukah (we celebrate both in my house) or whatever it is that you happen to be celebrating this time of year.

Now on to business:

From Sunday's paper, I had a couple of stories (or a story and a sidebar if you want get all newsy on me) about lessons learned from other states that have had lotteries. Update:I have links to the stories now. I'd post links to them here, but apparently our web site had a little too much virtual eggnog last night and hasn’t updated with new stuff yet. I'll post links when I get 'em. (In the mean time, consider running out to pick up that old fashion paper thingy that comes with all the glossy after Christmas sale ads inside.)

• One outlines the big state budget shell game that lotteries can become. It also points out how one state – Georgia – did things at least pretty much right. Click here for that one.
• The sidebar looks at a potential side effect of having a lottery, one that worries local school districts. If people hear the lottery is taking care of educational needs enough, they may stop backing local school bond referenda. Click here for that one.

A big note on both those stories is that they have almost nothing to do with the conduct of the lottery itself. Rather, they look at the consequences of what people do with the lottery money once it’s raked in.

The background for this story fills a couple of accordion file folders. But here are some of the best selections from the read-it-yourself department:

• This is the New York State auditor's report from 1998 that I mention in the story. (It's a PDF, kind of big.) The best quote in the whole thing comes from the transmittal letter: "Even today, a new lottery advertising campaign perpetuates the myth that schools receive additional resources from the lottery. The truth is that the Legislature and Governor decide how much state aid will go to local schools and the amount from the lottery is just a small part of that total. Lottery money has never supplemented state aid; it doesn’t today and it likely never will."
• There are a lot of academic studies out there on lotteries. Some are pretty clear, while others are down right obtuse. Rodney Stanley, of Tennessee State University (and a Greensboro-area native) has done some of what I think is the most straight-forward work on his subject. In this paper, he argues "state operated lotteries are failing to offer substantial benefits to students due to the issue of fungibility, and the small portion of actual dollars generated by the lottery for education."
• Just to provide a counter-weight, this paper from Stanford suggests dedicating lottery spending for education does drive up over-all education spending (another PDF) concluding: "While the political motivation for earmarking legislation may revolve around gaining and maintaining political support for operating a lottery, this paper suggests that earmarking profits will in fact have real implications for educational spending in states." This conclusion seems to be the minority report on the topic.
• More locally, Charlotte Advocates for Education has done some work that that cleaves closely to Stanley's conclusions. This group is keen on seeing the legislature pass a constitutional amendment to safeguard the lottery’s proceeds.

If you have questions about any of that source material, or where you can find more, drop me a line in the comments section below.

The big disappointment for me in this story is not landing one interview: Zell Miller. Before he was a U.S. Senator and an - um - well known political convention speaker, he was governor of Georgia when that state's lottery came about. Since Georgia keeps getting cited for doing things right, I would have really liked to have gotten his insight on the topic. Alas, it was not to be.

As for what the rest of the state was talking about this weekend:

• Sharif Durhams at the Charlotte paper writes about some western legislators call for a special session to consider dropping the rate on the state's gas tax. Sharif writes that Gov. Easley's office was cool to that idea. This idea will have a hard time getting traction because the cost-benefit equation doesn't look that good in the harsh light of day. Most figures I've seen say an average family might get somewhere between $15 and - being generous - $50 back a year, but the account that pays for state road construction would lose millions of dollars. Still, it's a proposed tax cut on what has become a high-dollar item, so look for this idea to get a lot of chatter in coming months. Click here for AP's story on the topic.
• From the world’s smallest fiddle section, our friends south of the border seem to think that NC’s new lottery will cut into their sales.

Right, that's enough of that. It's time for me to help my boy play with his new train set see what Santa left in my stocking.

Gov. Mike Easley has appointed:

• Jo Ann Currie of Jamestown to the N.C. Interagency Coordinating Council for Children from Birth to Five with Disabilities and their Families. Currie is a program administrator for preschool children with disabilities with Guilford County Schools. Currie is also a board member of the Association for Retarded Citizens (ARC) of Greensboro and was named ARC of Greensboro Teacher of the Year in 1997.

From today's paper, my story on the pending lawsuit against the lottery.

Now, looking abroad:

Do you remember the Sparta Teapot Museum? This was the place that got a $400,000 grant in the state budget and instantly became everyone's favorite piece of pork. Republicans made great rhetorical use of it during the budget debate, alternately using the phrase "teapot museum" as punch lines and something akin to curse words.

Mark Johnson of the Charlotte Observer points to - wait for it -
a connection between the teapots and House Speaker Jim Black's political fund raising in an article today.(Reg. Req.)

And finally, local Greensblogger and celestial center of our solar system Mr. Sun gets a mention on the site hosted by the bawdy doyenne of national political humor, Wonkette, for his satire of the war on Christmas.

For our loyal Rockingham reader(s): the SBOE has ordered that Stoneville will have itself a new election.

Good Sunday morning. Here are a few updates from the world of state government. First from me:

• There is this story on local Democratic House members saying they still support Speaker Jim Black, despite his recent publicity problems. And let’s be real: as the story details, there’s so much of a paper trail between Black and local Democratic pols that they couldn’t really hide their ties even if they wanted.
• And the folks at ALE, the agency responsible for enforcing the lottery laws on retailers, say they can't hire all the folks they think they'll need to do the job by April 5, when the game is supposed to get going.

But wait there's more from our friends at the state's other newspapers:

• Raleigh's N+O had this story about retired pols using their left over campaign accounts for, um, non-political expenses.(Registration required if you haven't already.) It leads with former Guilford County legislator Joanne Bowie who bought herself a new car and new computer with the proceeds. Find the actual campaign finance report by clicking here.(PDF) (She also paid some taxes and invested some in a retirement account.)
• Okay, it's not from this weekend, but this Charlotte Observer story about a planned protest against Black in Ashville by former Democrats is interesting anyway.(Yeah, registration required there too.)

And finally, if you're a fan of our Inside Scoop column that runs in the newspaper, you'll want to know it's moving.

See you back here on Monday.

Good afternoon folks. A slightly delayed weekend update brings you these two stories from yours truely if you missed them:

• New laws are going into effect Dec. 1. Read my story on them (from today) here. Read the whole list for yourself here.(Caution, it's a PDF file that has links to html pages in it.)
• Beer and politics...a combination that I've long enjoyed, were the subjects (sort of) of a story I wrote for Sunday. Basically, this story covers the influence that beer wholesalers in North Carolin have, or try to have, over the legislative process.

Also, via our friends at the Associated Press, I'd encourage you to check out this story on the number of registered voters in North Carolina going down.

If you missed this Sunday's paper (how could you!), you missed this story, which follows up on the state raising the limit on the percentage of alcohol allowed in beer.

Commonly known as the "Pop the Cap" campaign, beer activists were successful in changing state law to allow malt beverages (beers and other alcoholic drinks that are brewed rather than fermented or distilled) to have 15 percent alcohol. The prior limit was 6 percent, which beer enthusiasts said excluded lots of styles of beers.

For extra fun:

• Check out this website hosted by the NC Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, which lets you search for whether a certain brand or wine or beer has label approval in North Carolina. For more information on related topics, click here.
• To do my story, I needed to get at more data than was available on the web. The nice folks at the commission sent me this Microsoft Excel workbook that contains data on all the brews with more than 6 percent alcohol approved for sale in North Carolina since Aug. 4, when the cap was popped. Data includes name of the beverage, the brewery that makes it and alcohol by volume.

More to come on beer and state laws next weekend.

Howdy folks. We're once again in catch-up mode here at Capital Beat due to illness. (My two-year-old made the wife sick; the wife gave me a cold; and the cold kept me from talking much above a croak on Thursday and Friday. Fun for the whole family.)

Now onto business:

• In case you didn't wade through the scattering of press releases I posted Friday, Shirley Frye of Greensboro was appointed to the lottery commission but declined the honor. That leaves the commission down one commissioner.

  If she had accepted the post, it would have been one of the few times I can think of when Greensboro had more members on an influential state board than Charlotte did.

• Have you heard about the drought? Yeah, you're probably living with water restrictions of some ilk if you live in a big enough community. Well, Gov. Easley says state workers should live with those restrictions too. I'll check and see if the sprinklers are on today when I wander by the old capital building.

• I blogged a bit ago about some ongoing consternation over the NAACP state elections. A couple phone calls that I couldn't answer on Friday said that the dispute was over. Skip Alston, who lost his post as state president, confirmed this morning that the national office had dismissed the complaint. (Side note: That also appears to be the Wilmington Journal's assessment of things, if you read through this whole article. It's a little surreal to see this blog quoted in the story, but there you go.)

• My colleagues over at Inside Scoop post this year's endorsement letter from the Simkins Pac.(PDF) (For those of you who don't know, the PAC is a group of influential African American political and business leaders.)

  Check the signatures. Alma Adams, a representative in the NC House, signs as chairman. I'm not sure if she is the first ever, but she's the first woman I've seen in the past five years listed as chairman of the PAC. In any event, the post seems like a pretty big mark of approval for the Greensboro Democrat from the venerable political group.

Well, it’s time for me to go get into some new trouble. As always, drop me a line with what’s on your mind at mbinker@news-record.com . And if you’re hanging about Greensboro for the City Council elections tomorrow night, I’ll see you there.

From today's paper, this story tells how the state will reimburse school systems for teach pay increases, even if those teachers are locally paid.

This is a big deal for the school districts, especially ones like Guilford. Although the state pays the salaries for the bulk of teachers, some salaries are covered by local tax dollars. When state-paid teachers get a raise, which usually means the taxpayers are ponying up more money for local teachers.

School superintendents are very reluctant to have teachers on two different pay scale systems. But finding a lot of cash - almost $400,000 in Guilford County's case - in the middle of the fiscal year is no mean feat.

More education fun, including the latest on paper supply shortages in Guilford County, over at The Chalkboard.

Only one story from me over the weekend: this one on whether the lottery and video poker can co-exist.

Oh, and I don't know how many folks are out on their "personal watercraft," which I grew up calling a jet ski, this time of year, but the rules on those things are about to change.

You still have to be 16 to pilot one by yourself. But the minimum age for young riders to pilot with adult accompaniment has risen from 12-years-old to 14-years-old.

Click here to read the new law, which goes into effect Tuesday, Nov. 1. Unless folks are into cold-weather water sports, it'll probably affect more vacation plans next summer.

This is not the lottery story I wanted to work on.

The News & Record has been running a lot of wire copy on the lottery shenanigans. Basically, the three big points boil down to this:

• Lobbyists with a pretty strong connection to at least one lottery vendor submitted legal language to the General Assembly that was used in the final draft of the lottery law.
• At least one lottery commission member has pretty strong ties to that same company. Although, to be fair, he knows a lot of different lottery folks.
• At least one person in the House Speaker’s office may have had a legal duty to publicly disclose her lobbying work on behalf of the same lottery company, but didn’t.

As I said, I have other fish to fry (granted, some of them are leaving little IOU notes on my hook, but that’s another story), but there's been enough of a ruckus now that some local perspective is needed.

So here's the question that I’ve been asking some folks today: Given all that, if you are a lottery backer, is your faith in the lottery, or the state's ability to run a lottery, shaken? Even if you’re a lottery opponent, can the game still be redeemed? Or is all this a tempest in a teapot, Raleigh business as usual getting blown out of proportion because it’s related to the lottery?

Send your answers via the comment link below or e-mail: mbinker@news-record.com or ring me up: 919/832-5549.

Thanks.

Update:
If you are curious as to what a grilled cheese eating contest looks like, well, it looks like this:

Click for a larger image.

Yeah, yeah, yeah ... local elections heating up - relatively speaking - skullduggery in the lottery, John Edwards acting like, well, John Edwards ... all of it important I'm sure.

But today I've been dispatched to the State Fair to cover the big grilled cheese eating contest.

Folks, I took the family to the fair over the weekend and I'm forced to wonder if the grilled cheese eaters (you know the guys and gals who shove as many sandwiches down their gullets during a set period of time) will even rate in the land of giant turkey legs and fried candy bars.

If you're going to be out there today, drop me an e-mail at mbinker@news-record.com or just look for the guy holding a notebook and wearing a slightly bemused look on his face.

Where I should be: Hanging about the legislature today as all the honorables come back to town not to veto a bill.

Where I will be: Sitting in an ugly room listening to some corporate trainer tell me stuff I probably should already know.

Check www.news-record.com for updates. And I've asked my colleague Bruce over at The Chalkboard to keep an eye on the fun and games surrounding HB 706.

If you haven't seen the paper yet, these stories concern topics you've been reading about here:

• The North Carolina NAACP has a new president following a vote Saturday night. The Rev. William Barber of Goldsboro replaces Melvin "Skip" Alston of Greensboro. More on this in a second.

• I know this will shock, just shock, all you hard bitten political types, but it turns out that the folks who tend to give to state political campaigns also have issues they are pursuing before the General Assembly.

• My colleague Tafe Wireback wieghs in on the lottery and what agencies are doing to prepare to police the game and deal with gambling addiction issues.

-----

A couple bits of after-matter on the NAACP election:

• There will still be a Guilford County Commissioner in a statewide position for the NAACP, even though Alston is now off the board. Carolyn Coleman is now the group's first vice president.

• Coleman had served on the state executive board before. But, she told me last night, when she tried to file to run two years ago Coleman was told that her application was late...by then-President Alston.

• Coleman was running against the current first vice presidnet, Gladys Shipman. Shipman is president of the Greensboro NAACP chapter.

• NAACP candidates do not run in slates, but I was told that Shipman and Alston are seen as closely allied. And indeed, it seems that people carrying around Alston for president fliers yesterday also had a re-elect Shipman flier in the same hand.

• Both Alston and Barber were concearned yesterday afternoon about irregularities surrounding the voting. The issue, as far as I understood it, involved whether some delegates were properly registered and should be allowed to vote.

  The issue was serious enough that it delayed the start of the election and the final result for a few hours. Both men were prepared to lodge a challenge against the results with the national NAACP.

  However, Alston said last night that Barber's margin of victory was sufficient that the issue at hand had not made a difference.

• Alston said that he will remain on the state board of president emeritus.

• In case a discussion breaks out there, I've also posted on this topic at Inside Scoop.

• More comments from Floyd, Sue, and Jerry.

• Barber's own blog here.

I've had on my editing hat today (Friday) and will again Saturday.
That basically means I'v been moving copy rather than writing it.

But if you're yearning for my somewhat scatterbrained take on state politics and such, find WNCU 90.7 in Raleigh on your radio dial Saturday at 10:30 a.m.

I'll be on with Kerra Bolton on her last NC Capital Review show. Kerra's leaving the program to pursue other things and I filled in as her last guest this week. (The show is taped in advance.) Topics included the lottery and Gov. Mike Easley's veto of HB 706.

If you haven't already, please go and read the series on economic development incentives by my colleagues Taft Wireback and Richard Barron.

Taft leads off the series with this graph from his Sunday story:

North Carolina's job-recruitment policies have developed significant flaws that threaten to squander millions of taxpayer dollars, a News & Record investigation has found.

If that's not enough to get you interested, nothing will. This is a pretty thorough look at how incentives work, and when they don't deliver on promises.

Their series started Sunday and continues through tomorrow. Go read it now.

Why do print reporters write rather than go all broadcast? Because we're too ugly for TV and too slow-witted for radio.

Want proof?

Check out the podcast I did for with Herb Everett for "The Beat."

Good Tuesday morning. I hope everybody had a pretty good Labor Day.

As I mentioned Friday, the General Assembly has booked out of town and doesn't plan to be back until May. That means I'm left with only two of the three branches of government operating full time up here in Cap City - the judicial and executive for all you remedial civics scholars out there.

(Although, given the number of statewide offices and quasi-independent bureaucracies we have here, I often think we should change executive branch singular to executive branches plural, but that's another blog post.)

Thanks to the lottery (speaking of quasi-independent bureaucracies) I have a new off-season obsession to feed. And as election season approaches I'll be ramping up political coverage. And I've got a pretty good story list going of things that I ought to get to between now and the New Year.

But I'm not above a little procrastination taking a few good suggestions.

So what's on your mind? Are there any burning state issues on your mind that a mischievous reporter might want to put on his coverage calendar. Is there anything you've ever wondered about that might make a good story?

Send me a shout via the comment link below or via e-mail at mbinker@news-record.com. I make no promises other than I'll read and consider every suggestion sent my way.

Not that the lottery was on anyone's mind this weekend, but in case you're curious:

• This story ran Saturday and explains why it might be a while before you'll actually be scratching your lottery itch in North Carolina.

• Somewhere around 50 readers sent me questions about the lottery. I did my best to answer them with this Q and A.

It's Friday, which means my e-mail box is flowing with all the stuff that government types forgot to send out earlier in the week. From that pile we learn:

Gov. Mike Easley has appointed:

• Christine Joyner Greene of High Point to the N.C. Board of Licensed Professional Counselors. Greene is a private licensed professional counselor in High Point.

• Jack Cipriani of Summerfield to the N.C. Employment Security Commission. He is also vice president of the National American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations and the N.C. American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations. Cipriani attended New York City Community College.

• James Keith McCollum of Rockingham to the N.C. Forestry Council. McCollum is a forester and procurement manager for Edwards Wood Products. He is a charter member of the National Wild Turkey Federation, a member of the Society of American Foresters, the Council on Forestry Engineering and the safety, logging and transportation committee of the N.C. Forestry Association.

And if that wasn't news enough, we learn that Rep. Pricey Harrison recently sponsored the folks as pages for the House:

• Jill Russell, a student at Western Guilford High School. She is the daughter of Jim and Julie Russell of Greensboro.

• Samuel Heroy, a student at Northwest Guilford High School. He is the son of William and Anna Heroy of Summerfield.

• Jill Russell, a student at Western Guilford High School. She is the daughter of Jim and Julie Russell of Greensboro.

  According to the blurb that comes with those page announcements, "For decades, the State House has relied on the service of pages, who help deliver bills and amendments for Representatives during daily House sessions and committee meetings, offer assistance in individual Representatives’ offices, and run errands around the Legislature. Pages spend a week at the General Assembly assisting members and their staff and learning about the structure of North Carolina government."
  

I'm heading out on a long-planned vacation starting July 29 and coming back the week of Aug. 8.

And yes, I have really bad timing.

The honorables were supposed to have a state budget done by July 1. They've taken their sweet time and now are a month over-due.

However, chances appear about even that the General Assembly could actually get a budget done during the week of Aug. 1, just in time for me to miss all the fun.

The honorables desperately want to finish the state's tax and spending bills by Aug. 5, which is when the current continuing resolution runs out. If they don't have a deal, they'll need to pass a third continuing resolution, something that most agree will make constituents cranky.

Now don't get me wrong. There's still enough money, hubris and special interests in play to derail the budget train. But assuming the last big questions can be answered by early next week - how much to raise the cigarette tax, how much to pay state workers and how to go about passing a state lottery - then a deal could get done.

If a budget does get done by the first week in August, there's pretty robust speculation around these parts that the General Assembly will end their session before Labor Day, perhaps well before.

While I'm gone, the paper is going to largely be relying on the Associate Press to follow the budget process. When I get back, we'll clean up any budget details specific to the Triad that others miss.

As for this here blog, I will attempt to update a few times while I'm away, but my net access will be somewhat limited. Feel free to use this or any other comment thread to kvetch in my absence.

Couple of quick links for you this morning:

Now that I have those Madonna lyrics stuck in your head...

I was going to put up a short post on the upcoming sales tax holiday in this space.

But my colleague Mike Fuchs had beaten me to it over at his
Bargain Blog.

If you remember from last week, the governor came out of his office for a bill signing ceremony and saw his shadow. According to local superstition up Cap City way, that means at least two more weeks of budget negotiations.

If you're burned out on prognostications from the oracles of Jones Street, here are some stories from this weekend:

Update, from Monday:

Update: This next had been coming Monday, but apparently you get it Tuesday:

My colleague Lex Alexander announces "we will be launching our redesigned site sometime Monday morning." That's Monday, July 11. There's a couple reasons I'm telling you this:

Just a few notes to get you through your Friday:

Howdy folks. I was off the radar on Friday, but that doesn't mean we didn't have state government news. Oh no. From the Sunday paper:

Good morning. Neither the House nor the Senate have very full agendas tonight. As for me, I'm spending the day working on something that won't show up in print for a while.

My six or seven loyal readers here at the blog will know most of what's in this story, which ran over the weekend, but in case you need to catch up on last week there it is.

So what's on your mind this Monday morning? Is there anything you've heard about and want more on? Is there anything you've not seen in the paper that you think we ought to be paying more attention to?

Sorry kids, there will most likely be no bloggy goodness today. I'm headed to a journalism seminar for the day. The comments feature is open if you want to chat among yourselves.

You need a topic? Fine. Pick one from:

Monday's House calendar

or

Monday's Senate calendar.

If you see something that you want to know more about, let me know.