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The Guilford County Board of Education includes taxing authority on its wish list. So do many other school boards.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg board has received a big boost from Commissioner Parks Helms, who says most of his board supports giving school leaders the power to raise their own property tax revenues. The idea also requires legislative approval.

What do you think about the idea for Guilford County?

I'm against it because ...

Don't miss Robert Bell's story about the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate report.

You also can check out the scores for your favorite school directly from the NCAA here.

Just some observations:

My column today:

Just wondering how Gov. Mike Easley and his advisers came up with their proposed budget...

Here's an appeal to the North Carolina High School Athletic Association: Change the location of Saturday's 3A East Regional girls' basketball final between Dudley and High Point Central.

The game is set for Rose High School in Greenville. How about playing it on a neutral court in the Triad instead?

The same goes for a possible Dudley-Glenn boys rematch, if those teams win their semifinal games at East Carolina University in Greenville tonight. Their final would tip off at the same location Saturday.

The reasons for shifting these games are obvious ...

I agree with the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling prohibiting the death penalty for murderers who were younger than 18 when they committed their crimes.

I don't agree with all the reasons cited in Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion ...

Dan Brown's best-selling "The Da Vinci Code" is a work of fiction.

But is it based on historical fact? Many readers seem to think so.

For another view, I recommend "The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in the Da Vinci Code" by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel.

You can find more information here.

Alamance-Burlington School System, which made news last year by allowing undercover drug operations on its campuses, is considering a different approach now:

As if raising $20 mil before he'd been in office a month wasn't amazing enough, now High Point University President Nido Qubein has lined up Rudy Giuliani to be the first graduation speaker of HPU's NQ era.

That will shine more national attention on High Point.

You know, it wouldn't surprise me if Nido talked Rudy into making a donation to the school while he's here.

By the way, this breaks a long tradition of HPU's president delivering the commencement address. Yet Nido, who made a fortune with his gift of gab, passes up the gig in order to bring in a huge star like Giuliani.

What next?

Does it occur to anyone else that the poker bust at Ham's on High Point Road Wednesday might signal an effort by the state to scare off the competition before the legislature approves a lottery?

Teddy Kennedy and Patrick Leahy roughed up Terrence Boyle a bit in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing the other day.

No surprise: The New England liberals regard Boyle, a North Carolina Republican nominated by President Bush for a seat on the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, as an extreme right-winger.

Want proof? Horrors! Boyle worked briefly as a legislative assistant for Jesse Helms 32 years ago. ...

Marcus Kindley, chairman of the Guilford County Republican Party, took the press to task in an N&R op-ed Sunday for making little noise as Democrats in Raleigh circumvent the state constitution.

I think Marcus misstated the facts...

Some state legislators, including Greensboro's Pricey Harrison, want to fiddle around with the way North Carolina apportions its presidential electoral votes.

Here's their bill.

The sponsors just happen to be Democrats. Gee, I wonder why ...

I like Chris Paul and think the Wake Forest point guard is a fine young man. But he made an awful mistake in Sunday night's game against State and, despite his suspension from Wake's ACC tourney game Friday and contrite statement today, he and his team got off easy ...

Are you for a state lottery?

Which one? Three bills have been introduced so far during the 2005 General Assembly session. All allocate the anticipated windfall in different ways ...

My column today:

Every time I hear about a fatal auto accident involving teenagers, I think, "There but for the grace of God ..."

Michael Crichton writes a darn good novel almost every time out. I just finished his latest best-seller, "State of Fear."

It's not one of his best, but I have to admit to taking some satisfaction as he bashes the excesses of the environmental movement.

Even there, Crichton probably goes too far ...

I used to have a deal with my wife: I go to a concert with you, you go to a baseball game with me. It was a nice arrangement ... until we went to an opera. It was "Aida," with the lead role sung by a soprano on steroids. Man, I thought I deserved a hundred baseball games for that. Margaret disagreed (she insisted she suffered at least as much by sitting through most of a twi-night doubleheader in Cincinnati), but I told her no more operas for me! I'll bet the "Aida" disaster was 20 years ago. When she's gone to the opera since then, it's been without me.

But now, I'm giving in. I'll go to the opera - "The Mighty Casey" at First Horizon Park, playing next Wednesday and Thursday.

Thanks to UNCG for the brilliant idea of staging an opera based on Ernest Lawrence Thayer's stirring poem in Greensboro's beautiful new baseball stadium.

Just one thing: Who gets to count it, me or Margaret?

How much money do schools need to get the job done?

Always more than they're going to get ...

With St. Patrick's Day just around the corner, it's time to plan the celebrations...

Walking up Polk County's White Oak Mountain isn't a wilderness experience. The road is paved and passes many homes along the way. A condo complex greets you at the ridge line near the peak.

Still, mountains offer surprises. Mine Saturday was a close encounter with a peregrine falcon ...

We're almost two years into the Iraq war. Has it been worth it?

What war has been?

John Rhodes, a Mecklenburg County legislator, says he plans to introduce a school system deconsolidation bill soon.

I have a feeling that might interest a lot of people in High Point ...

If you love your dog, protect it from thieves.

It could end up with a fate you don't want to imagine...

I'm off to Chapel Hill, which hosts the N.C. Editorial Writers Conference today.

Yes, the state's journalistic ivory towers are thinly manned this Friday. Our insulated overlooks provide the perch from which we editorial writers watch the battles of public discourse until it's safe to descend and shoot the wounded.

Today, we are scaling the ivory towers of academia where we will absorb wisdom that, in very small, barely perceptible portions, we will parcel out through our editorials over the next 365 days. Yes, a little goes a long way in our trade. Why, some of us really learned enough in college the first time to last our entire career.

But enough sillness. The program for the 2005 edition of this annual conference looks promising. Bloggers might be especially interested in a presentation by Phil Meyer, "Newspaper Opinion in the Internet Age." He holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication and is the author of "The Vanishing Newspaper."

Um, I hope he's wrong about that.

I'll report next week - or over the weekend if I can drive the demons out of my home computer.

It was a classy move for High Point's top two police officers to attend a fund-raiser for John and Martha Millard Sunday.

Martha Millard was severely injured last September when her car was struck by a vehicle that was being chased by police.

At the time, Chief Jim Fealy defended the chase - even though it led up Main Street, High Point, in the middle of a weekday afternoon at speeds up to 75 mph and resulted in injuries to three innocent bystanders (two not seriously).

I think that's a terrible misjudgment on Fealy's part, but I give him and Assistant Chief Blair Rankin credit for attending a fund-raising luncheon Sunday at the Millards' church, First Presbyterian ...

The way Phil Meyer reads the numbers, newspapers will lose their last reader in April 2043.

Or is that when Social Security goes belly up?

Either way, it's change or die. ...

A brief conversation with my wife about the Terri Schiavo case:

"I wouldn't want to be kept alive like that."

"What if it was one of our sons? ..."

It seems to me there are two fundamental questions:

At what point is it decided that a person's life should be ended?

Who makes that decision when the person can't speak for himself?

The best basketball conference in the country ...

... doesn't actually exist. But I wish it did.

It's the Tobacco Road Athletic Conference, which I proposed in a widely ignored blog entry last month.

But now that my TRAC teams - Duke, State, Carolina, Wake, Kentucky and Louisville - are 11-1 in the NCAA tourney (with Wake accounting for the only loss, a double-overtime disappointment against West Virginia), the idea should be revisited.

Come on, Big Four hoops fans. Let's rally for our teams to ditch the overgrown, football-oriented ACC, collect a pair of race horses from the Bluegrass State and form a pure basketball league. Let the NCAA domination begin.

My column today:

On the subject of public libraries, High Point is not on the same page as Greensboro.
That suits most people in Guilford County's second city just fine....

The first person Jeff Weise encountered at Red Lake High School in Minnesota Monday was security guard Derrick Brun.

Unfortunately, Brun was unarmed. Weise shot him dead.

I'm no proponent of an armed society. Suggestions after the Columbine tragedy that teachers should be allowed to keep guns in their classrooms were ludicrous.

But our SROs here in Guilford County are armed, and should be in order to prevent exactly what happened in Red Lake.

Brun was manning a metal detector, the purpose of which was to keep weapons out of the school. If an intruder is carrying a weapon with intent to use it, how is an unarmed security guard supposed to stop him?

Does it occur to anyone else that Mayor Keith Holliday and like-minded members of City Council are being pushed into a corner?

Either they confess that Greensboro remains deeply divided over the events of Nov. 3, 1979, and is in need of truth and reconciliation (as might be delivered by the commission of that name) or, by their denial, they prove that Greensboro remains deeply divided and is in need of truth and reconciliation.

Now that some sort of lottery bill seems to be heading toward action in the General Assembly, pressure is building on legislators to vote yes because "most people want it."

And, in a democracy, elected representatives have a responsibility to carry out the wishes of the majority.

Not so fast ...

Reducing poverty should be more about creating wealth than redistributing it.

Obviously, the poor need a hand in building the assets that can lift them - and their posterity - permanently out of poverty. The usual means are through education and homeownership.

What about retirement accounts?

This story from Pennsylvania is a week old but still worth considering.

Were first cousins Eleanor Amrhein and Donald W. Andrews Sr. discriminated against when a judge refused to give them a marriage license?

Should Pennsylvania's law be overturned as unconstitutional?

Should any two consenting adults be allowed to wed, regardless of gender or family relationship?

Three years ago, N.C. House Speaker Jim Black of Mecklenburg County sent his written promise to Jack Yena, president of Johnson & Wales University, which was considering a move to Charlotte:

"You have my personal commitment of support for a $10 million investment over the next five years by the State of North Carolina for this project."

There's a good article about this by Paul Chesser in Carolina Journal Online.

Black had absolutely no legal authority to commit $10 million of taxpayers' money to the culinary arts college. Neither the governor nor the N.C. Department of Commerce was a party to an economic incentives deal. No legislation had been passed backing up Black's word. He couldn't even be assured that he'd remain in the Legislature, let alone in the office of speaker, for the next five years.

It was strictly the arrogance of power speaking. And it seems to be all too typical of Jim Black. ...

A woman calling in bomb threats all over Greensboro? I always thought that kind of stupid prank was strictly the work of warped male minds.

Maybe the culprit is a man with a feminine-sounding voice.

I appreciate Jesse Jackson's statements today about the Terri Schiavo case.

This isn't political grandstanding - unless Jackson is pandering to the right wing. Not likely.

Let's remember, he's a minister. He's taking a stand for what he believes is right. Agree or not, his position deserves respect.

I'm not often in Jackson's corner, but I give him credit this time. It would have been a lot easier for him to stay out of this issue. It seems that he was moved, as I was, by the lament from Schiavo's parents that they're not even allowed to hold an ice cube to her lips while she dies of dehydration.

"This is a moral issue and it transcends politics and family disputes," he said.

Amen, Rev. Jackson.

My column today:

Greensboro needs the truth about Nov. 3, 1979.

But reconciliation? Maybe that's where so many people have a problem....

Tuesday's editorial, "The art of influence," borrowed stylistically from "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis. I hope it made its point, but it did go a bit light on the facts.

For more information about lobby reform efforts in Raleigh, please see the Web site for the North Carolina Coalition for Lobbying Reform. The coalition represents a broad array of organizations concerned about good government in North Carolina.

You can also read House Bill 6, the lobby reform mechanism introduced by Rep. Joe Hackney, D-Orange.

This effort deserves public support. Let's limit how much influence Wormwood can exert over our elected representatives.

Editorial writers at the Charlotte Observer are stretching their credibility on the issue of state funding for Johnson & Wales University.

They were all for the deal, brokered by House Speaker Jim Black, D-Mecklenburg, to "sell" a $5 million state office building in center-city Charlotte to the culinary arts school for a buck. Gov. Easley stopped that giveaway, finding a private buyer for the property instead.

Now the Observer says the state has to find another way to honor its promise to give Johnson & Wales $10 million for locating its campus in the Queen City.

But what promise was that? Why, it was given by Black and his Senate counterpart, Marc Basnight.

"The process of making the commitment was flawed," the newspaper conceded in an editorial published today (registration required), "but the House speaker and Senate president pro tem aren't two goofball political ne'er-do-wells making pledges no reasonable person would expect the state to honor."

A "flawed" process? That's putting in mildly. Black and Basnight might be powerful political leaders, but they don't have any legal authority to make personal promises for spending the state's money. That $10 million wasn't coming out of their pockets, and they were obligated to have it approved through the prescribed appropriations process. Any "reasonable person" should expect legislative leaders to follow the rules.

Even then, it's not the Legislature's job to make economic incentives deals on behalf of the state. We have a Commerce Department to do that.

No, Black and Basnight aren't "goofball political ne'er-do-wells." Rather, they're high-handed autocrats - or acted as such in this case. Fortunately, the governor put them in their place this time. The Observer shouldn't puff them up.

I attended an enjoyable program at A&T Wednesday evening titled, "The American South Meets South Africa 2004: A Cultural and Educational Exchange Program in Dance and Drama."

The exchanges involved A&T's departments of Visual and Performing Arts and Journalism and Mass Communication with cultural arts teachers in Cape Town, S.A.

Wednesday's event featured a video documentary by Michael Moore (no, not that Michael Moore) chronicling last year's exchanges in South Africa and Greensboro, a performance of traditional African dance by A&T's E. Gwynn Dancers, and the opening of a gallery of photographs by Dr. Sheila Whitley.

The photo exhibit remains on display in University Galleries on the second floor of the Dudley building through May 14. The images depict the landscape and people of South Africa and record the cultural sharing that took place through dance and drama. It's well worth a visit.