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By now you probably know City Councilman Tom Phillips has announced a sabbatical from blogging, noting a lack of time.

Too bad. Tom is a natural wit who is more brutally honest and direct than almost all elected officials I know.

Not that he won't still being shooting straight in other venues, sometimes at yours truly.

Come back soon, Tom. You've enriched the conversation round here.

Strange but true.

I nearly stood and cheered when Bill O'Reilly of Fox buttonholed a Cato Institute wag on the oil companies' exploitation of a natural disaster to jack up profits.

Global warming, my eye. Hell just froze over.

City Council member Don Vaughan said in a candidate interview this week that he has reconsidered retail incentives.

In fact, Vaughan said he would make a motion to remove retail incentives (such as the type that would have gone to a new Wal-Mart at Carolina Circle Mall) altogether from the city incentives policy.

He did not say when, but we look forward to it.

Retail incentives are even worse public policy than other types of corporate incentives because they tend to have a negligible economic impact -- if not a negative one.

The following "letter" was submitted Thursday to the News & Record from authors in Summerfield.

It says in part:

In anticipation of a big vote in early September on estate tax repeal, our U.S. Senators should take heed of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's view that Congress offset estate tax repeal or costly reform proposals. We need some fiscal sanity in Washington.

Since 2001, there has been a $7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to record deficits, not counting trillions proposed for broader-based tax relief, shoring up Social Security, homeland security and the war in Iraq.

Then came the following letter from Greensboro:

In a big vote in early September on estate tax repeal, our U.S. Senators should take heed of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's view that Congress offset estate tax repeal or costly reform proposals. We need some fiscal sanity in Washington.

Since 2001, there has been a $7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to record deficits, not counting trillions proposed for broader-based tax relief, shoring up Social Security, homeland security and the war in Iraq.

And so on.

Such "coincidences" are called astroturf because they are misrepresented as the original thoughts of the individual letter writer. They are usually part of an orchestrated campaign in which the same letter (or slight variations thereof) is sent under different names to newspapers all over the country.

If we're able to catch them, we don't publish them.

We caught this one.

I don't have much sympathy for the guy who pulled his big, black Hummer H2 into the gas line the other day.

There's no greater a sign of conspicuous consumption than the fat, 8,600-pound, pseudo-military SUV that escapes federal fuel-efficiency guidelines because it is, in a perverse twist of logic, too big.

Yes, it is this man's free choice as an American to drive what he darned well pleases. Now he can live with that choice.
As the Hurricane Katrina tragedy spikes gas prices beyond 3 dollars a gallon and sparks fears that there won't be enough fuel to go around, we are all living with choices.

We have chosen as a society to drive bigger and bigger vehicles with little regard for their practicality or environmental impact.

Yes, the burden of higher gas prices pales compared to the burdens of those still trapped in the deadly grip of Katrina. With its despair, pain and lawlessness, New Orleans less resembles a major American city than it does Darfur or Fallujah.

It also lays bare the deepening chasm between this wealthy nation's haves and have-nots and saps some of our swagger on the international stage.

Now the world is coming to our aid, even the Germans and the French.
But maybe it has shaken us out of our complacency that we will consume, consume, consume, the consequences be damned.

And maybe it will restore some sense of individual responsibility and sacrifice, which we seem to have forgotten, even in a time of war.
But back to those SUVs.

Some psychologists say our vehicles have grown so huge and ostentatious because they make us feel safer and stronger. If not smarter. They are imposing, muscular, macho vehicles that look cool even at the day care or the Seven-Eleven. (Only 5 percent of us ever actually take them off-road.)

Making matters worse are wacky federal standards in fuel efficiency that reward gluttony and fly in the face of all the heady rhetoric from Washington about less dependency on foreign oil.

Our interview with County Commissioner Bruce Davis, who chairs that board, appears in today's newspaper. The full audio of the session, held last week, also is available online.

I certainly give Davis points for directness. He does not hem and haw.

As for what he said in those straight-ahead answers ... well, that's another matter entirely.

Davis appears tragically naive about the untamed beast that is the commissioners. But he also is a victim of a system that too often places partisan politics over the good of the county.

When he served as chairman, Mike Barber, tried a different approach by making overtures to the Republicans in ways symbolic and substantive.

The commissioners rewarded him by dumping him as chairman
And we rewarded him by voting him out of office.

The lack of a quicker response to the devastation on the Gulf Coast is shameful, tragic and embarrassing.

That's hard for even the president's staunchest proponents to ignore.
This was not an unexpected even, not even the failure of the levees in New Orleans, which computers models predicted could happen in the wake of a hurricane more than a year ago.

Days after Katrina, some people's lives were threatened, not only by looters and the ravages of the storm but from lack of food, water and medication.

This was not some distant, overseas land leveled by a tsunami. This was the continental United States.

Even if you allow for a delay until the storm could run its course, how do you excuse the lack of instant mobilization once it had?

Somebody needs to be held accountable. Somebody needs to be fired.

Said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: "I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?"

There was also was this lastweek from an editorial in the Times:

"Troops are finally moving into New Orleans in realistic numbers, and it's past time. What took the government so long? The thin veneer separating civilization and chaos, which we earlier worried might collapse in the absence of swift action, has collapsed.

"He returns to the scene of the horror today, and that's all to the good. His presence will rally broken spirits. But he must crack heads, if bureaucratic heads need cracking, to get the food, water and medicine to the people crying for help in New Orleans and on the Mississippi coast. The list of things he has promised is a good list, but there is no time to dally, whether by land, sea or air. We should have delivered them yesterday. Americans are dying."

The Washington Times.

City Transportation Director Jin Westmoreland says that Amtrak passenger service definitely will return to the downtown Depot on Oct. 1.

The schedules have been locked in, he says. That means a grand tradition will return to the grand old station.

If you haven't seen the restored passenger station, it's magnificent -- the most impressive in the state.

Based on the John Le Carre novel, the new thriller, "The Constant Gardener," is one of the best films I've seen in recent memory.

The movie stars the superb Ralph Fiennes as a British diplomat drawn by his wife's death into a drug company's plot to test a new drug with dangerous side effects on poor Africans. It not only weaves a compelling, at times surprising, narrative, but gamely avoids Hollywood cliches.

Maybe I wasn't the only one starved for something more than superheroes and aliens.

The crowd at The Carousel was encouragingly large Monday. And the movie seemed especially topical in light of ongoing human tragedies in Africa, Iraq ... and closer to home.

We held a roundtable discussion today with five local folks: downtown residents Sue Young, 28 (a relative newcomer from Milwaukee) and Jerry Leimenstol (68, a local architect who has lived on South Elm Street since 1987); developer Milton Kern (who owns 22 properties downtown); former Mayor Jim Melvin (the driving force behind the new ballpark); and Downtown Greensboro Inc. President Ray Gibbs.

It was a lively, entertaining and informative conversation.

And although not everyone agreed on the everything, they all agreed that downtown Greensboro is coming back strong.

They also had some pointed comments for local government leaders.
You'll get to read about it a soon-to-come Sunday Ideas section.

The center city has come a long, long way since the windswept ghost town of the late 1980s.

Letters extolling the virtues of local candidates will begin to appear soon.

Amid complaints from some of you that they tend to be repetitious and not the most riveting reading,we'd considered not running them anymore.

But after surveying what other newspapers do (all of the ones we asked still run election letters) we decided to keep them as a reader service. Further, we thought it would be hypocritical, and unfair, for us to endorse candidates while denying our readers that same opportunity.

For this election, we've gotten rid of the 150-word rule. Now all letters are subject to a maximum length of 200 words.

Here are the complete rules:

Election-related letters should be no more than 200 words and should be as specific as possible. As is the general rule, all letters are subject to editing.

Include your name, home street address and a daytime telephone number. We will not print letters that are unsigned or have been submitted to other publications.

Though we are unable to guarantee that all letters will be published, we will make every effort to see that the full range of competing views is represented. Here are the criteria:

Substance: Letters that merely endorse or recite the obvious about a candidate are less interesting to our readers than letters that contain useful information or compelling arguments.

Criticism: Opinions about a candidate’s fitness or unfitness are welcome; allegations of misconduct are not. To raise that kind of issue, call the news department at 373-7001.

Deadline: Noon, Sept. 28.

Finally, letter-writing campaigns are unacceptable. A letter should reflect the writer’s own initiative and effort.

Please let me know if you have questions.

During the 2004 presidential election, we tried a new length requirement of 150 words for election letters. We thought would help ease the space problem created by the sheer volumne of campaigh letters, but it caused more problems than it solved. For one thing, it was hard in some instances to determine whether a letter was an election letter or a "regular" letter.

They're still quibbling in Chapel Hill over a policy that requires a minimum number of volunteer hours before a high school student can graduate.

Some students and their parents became discombobulated after recently learning that activities they assumed would fulfill the 50-hour requirement may not count after all.

You see, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools rightly distinguish between volunteerism that primarily benefits an exclusive few and volunteerism that benefits the broader community.

For instance, teaching a Sunday school class does not pass muster because it benefits only a handful of people in one church.
The policy has existed for 10 years now, but it has always had more than its fair share of detractors.

"It's hard for me to say, 'I'm sorry, but your service is ineligible,' " an East Chapel Hill High official told the News & Observer of Raleigh.

"I encourage them to get outside their comfort zone. They usually find out something they didn't know about themselves."

Yes, mandatory volunteerism in the public schools is an inherently contradictory concept, but whatever they choose to call it — community service, community involvement, mandatory selflessness — more power to them. Somebody's got to teach it.

The numbers are stark and unsettling, if not surprising.

Black people overwhelmingly suspect that relief for Hurricane Katrina would have happened sooner if more of those whose lives were threatened had been white.

According to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll, 60 percent of African Americans say that that their blackness and poverty were one reason the govenment responded so slowly.

Nine in 10 whites polled disagreed with that notion.

A similar poll commissioned by Time magazine asked, "Do you think race or the income level of many of the victims slowed government relief efforts?"

Seventy-three percent of black respondents said yes. Sixty percent of whites said no.

Thos perceptions, in and of themselves, are a problem.

Whites point to the likes of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and note, "Aha! See. They're black and they made it just fine. Racism was a factor years ago but it's gone now."

The blacks fire back: "How would you know?"

These perceptions ought to be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.

I'm looking for bicyclists who regularly commute to work for a future column. Please let me know if any of you out there can help. You can call me at 373-7010 if you'd like. Or you can email me at ajohnson@news-record.com

David Wharton notes that Wal-Mart finally concedes its stores don't have to be big and ugly. Communities are demanding better design standards. But not Greensboro. Why not, Wharton asks?

President Bush has assumed accountability for the Katrina debacle twice in one week.

Perhaps sobered by this plummeting poll numbers -- or a realization, finally, that true leaders don't look for others to blame when bad things happen on their watch -- the president again assumed ultimate responsiblity for the sluggish federal reaction to this fierce, deadly hurricane.

This is very un-Bushlike. Until now the buck has tended to stop ... somewhere else in this administration.

The president also acknowledged the glaring specter of poverty that took centerstage during the storm's aftermath.

"That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America," Bush said. "We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

We have been struggling to have a constructive dialogue about this in a thread on my previous post. I'll keep wotrking at it if you do.

Effective on Monday, Sept. 26, the News & Record letters blog will require registration from readers who wish to post comments.

The process will be quick and simple. Using a tool called Typekey, It will require commenters to sign in once with an ID name. Once you've registered that name, no one else can use it.

This process should add greater accountability to the letters blog by 1)preventing one commenter from impersonating another (yes, some grown-ups actually go to the trouble to do this) and 2) allowing us to track delinquent commenters more quickly and effectively.

This is an interim step. A more sophisticated registration process in the works for later in the fall.

Some bloggers believe we should let peer pressure deal with the miscreants, who are commonly called "trolls" in the wild west of the blogosphere.

But we see the letters as a village green, a place for spirited but civil discussion. Come on in. Let us know what's on your mind. But please don't forget to respect one another. Or we'll politely ask you to leave.

The time of reckoning is coming soon for Roy Carroll II, who wants to turn on the lights in the city skyline's infamous Dark Tower, aka the old Wachovia Building.

Carroll will need city help to make this work. Does the City Council have the gumption, especially during an election year, and as it narrows the search for a new city manager to replace the hard-to-replace Ed Kitchen?

Carroll wants to put shops, offices and residences in the 16-story tower. The city could help with parking. So could Jefferson-Pilot, which owns the building.

If Kitchen only could have hung around a little longer, I believe he could have cajoled the council to step up. Now I'm not so sure. Sigh.

The young girls and their mother gabbed loudly and endlessly as the trailers rolled at the Carousel Theatres.

No problem. As long as they cooled it when the main feature began.
No such luck.

The credits appeared. They talked on. The opening scene flickered across the screen. Big deal. They kept chattering, as if no one else was there.

Finally, I asked, politely (I have witnesses), if they wouldn't mind being a little quieter; we couldn't hear the dialogue. They minded.
No, they wouldn't be quieter, one of the girls said. The mother did nothing.

While shopping the Internet for model train supplies (cheap) I came across photos from Lt. Patrick Anderson and other U.S. soldiers building a model railroad in Baghdad.

The Baghdad Hobby Club seems to have made more progress on its layout than I have on my own in a lot less time. (On the lefthand menu of the Web site of the Japanese model railroad manufacturer Kato USA, click on the Customer Photo Gallery and go to the Baghdad Hobby Club at the bottom of Page 2.)

There's gotta be a way for my local model railroaders' club to help them with supplies.

I'll keep you posted.

I'm watching actor George Clooney on Letterman right now.
He's discussing his latest movie, "Good Night and Good Luck."

For those of you who missed my earlier post, the film chronicles legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow, a Guilford County native, during his Red Scare struggles against Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Clooney plays a supporting role as CBS News executive Fred Friendly.
The film opens Oct. 7.

The title, by the way, recalls the words Murrow used to close each newscast. (Now you know where Ted Baxter got the inspiration for "Good night and good news.")

Greensboro Coliseum Director Matt Brown and nearly a dozen civic and business leaders will visit us Monday for an hour-long meeting about the planned ACC Hall of Champions near the coliseum.

We are all for the concept, which we believe will add to Greensboro's appeal as a place to live or visit.

Still, we have raised several questions editorially about the project, including:

1. Should taxpayer money be used to help finance the project? We think not.
2. Should alternate locations at least be considered, including downtown Greensboro? We think so.

3. Why won't the ACC itself won't contribute to the cause? We believe it should.

If you've got questions of your own, please let me know, and we'll try to work some of them in.

For the second consecutive season my alma mater and N.C. State played a riveting, up-and-down football game.

And for the second straight year an underdog Carolina team came away with an improbable win.

Maybe I've written off ACC football (at least for the Big Four)as a dead zone prematurely.

One thing's for sure: One of my Carolina, do-or-die, co-workers (he's even a Serge Zwikker fan) will be in my face Monday morning.

Some kids in Raleigh probably are wondering where they went wrong.

They've done their best. They've tried to raise their parents right.

Then, first chance the grown folk get to prove they can control themselves in a public setting and they behave like this:

• Heckling opposing players at a youth football game, telling them they may as well not even try tackling their kids. You stink, they say. You're gonna lose. "And these kids are 8 and 9 years old," Robert L. Gordon, a coach for a Raleigh Little League football team, tells his hometown newspaper, the News & Observer.

• Spiraling so out of control so often that plainclothes police officers have been deployed at games over the past three years to protect officials and, if necessary, escort them to safety following youth football games and soccer matches.

• Forcing one youth football game to be called because parents and other fans spilled onto the field after the last of several players was ejected for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Obnoxious adults have become such a pain in the aspirations of Raleigh youth football players that the city this year has erected 6-foot-tall chain-link fences to keep foul mouths and foul deeds at a safe distance.

"Sometimes people have their own agendas," Shadu Jackson, supervisor of Raleigh's Walnut Creek Softball Complex, said Friday. "Sometimes they're not into the games."

And sometimes they're too into the games.

Lest we get too smug down the road here in Greensboro, we've had our own forgettable moments of Adults Behaving Badly.

Remember the soccer mom who was arrested for assault after she slugged a teenaged official in 1999?

A gentle reminder, dear readers: Today begins a new policy at the News & Record letters blog.

You must register via TypeKey (the instructions are on the blog) to be able to comment.

Also, effective today: We will selectively close comments on threads that we believe either have gotten out of hand or have run their course.

And comments on all letters will be closed after they have been posted one week.

These policies won't surrender your privacy. They will ensure that you post comments under only one registered name and will allow us to track down and/or ban commenters who violate our house rules (spelled out at the top of the blog). You also won't be able to impersonate another commenter.

By the way, this is only a temporary measure. A longer-term registration policy is due later this fall.

We encourage spirited debate on the blogs. We also want you to keep it clean and civil.

Good day, and good luck.

Even to the most rabid political junkie, campaign forums rarely are entertaining.

But Tuesday night's at-large forum at UNCG's Weatherspoon Art Gallery was about as engaging and informative as they come.

In fact, in this humble journalist's opinion, Temple Emanuel has been unseated as the champ of local election forums. At least for now.

Tuesday night's forum, planned and staged by local bloggers and moderated by one of their own, Michael Christopher, was clever and creative.

It also was wide-ranging and unpredictable, covering racial inequities, the Greensboro Coliseum, a proposed living-wage ordinance, Truth and Reconciliation, PAC contributions, domestic partner benefits and police morale, among other issues. Its format included a "lightning round" of fast-paced questions that quizzed Greensboro City Council candidates on topics such as the population of Greensboro and the city the tax rate -- and whether any of them aspire to run for mayor one day.

For the record, Florence Gatten and Yvonne Johnson do. As for Don Vaughan: "Hell no!"

One thing is certain: The candidates got a workout. More than once during the 16-question "Jump-in Round" (one of a total of four rounds)the candidates asked, "How many more questons are left?"

When asked at one point if they needed a break, challenger Diane Davis replied, no. "Let's get this over with."

Intriguing story in today's News & Observer (registration required)on the battle for the state NAACP presidency. Greensboro's Skip Alston, the incumbent, apparently faces a very serious challenge.

I'd heard rumblings in Greensboro that Alston could be in for a fight. Even some locals say they wouldn't mind him losing.

Stiff-legged and bleary-eyed, just returned from a day trip to Greenville, S.C., sponsored by Action Greensboro.

The headlines:
That city's downtown lives up to its billing.
1. Commitment matters more than size. Greenville has less than a third the population e of Greensboro.
2. Greensboro is eight to 10 years behind Greenville in downtown revitalization.
3. Seven words: Trees, wide sidewalks and public-private partnerships.
Greensboro can accomplish as much, if not even more, with the right vision, focus and leadership.

Much more later. Going (big yawn) to bed now. Bye.

Bill Bennett, author of "The Book of Virtues," is sounding less and less virtuous by the minute.

When disputing a caller on his radio talk show, who contended that abortions have reduced the crime rate, the former education secretary added:

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

The White House, in the meantime, responded with a limp statement that the president finds the remarks "inappropriate."

No kiddin'?