EdCone.com

RIP Harry Helms, who posted as LasVegasHeel on the IC board.

He wrote this fan's note at his blog earlier this year:

Last night was the last time I will ever get to see Carolina play. I watched it quietly while lying in bed, my calm the result of a painkiller I had to take earlier in the evening. There was none of the celebration that accompanied the 2005 title, but in the last few minutes of the game I was both giggling and crying tears of joy. . . . . . . the last time I will ever see Carolina play, and they win the national championship. That, my friends, is what you call a "perfect ending."

Yes, to some it was a silly ballgame. For me, last night was an escape from my decline and pain, and some welcome joy and happiness. I felt good and happy, and for that I am grateful.

"Mr. Matsdorf said Ms. Hanes was recommended for the United States attorney position solely on the basis of her credentials, which included being the girlfriend of the guy who nominated her." 

The original statement left off the part after the comma. Fixed!

Give the people what they want:

During Ramadan, Burger King offered a special sultan menu featuring dishes popular in the Ottoman years. In the television commercial promoting the meal, a turbaned Janissary — a member of an elite group of Ottoman soldiers — exhorts viewers not to "leave any burgers standing."

Correction of the week: "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number."

I guess the new De Niro flick is not quite Goodfellas: "The queasiness produced by this sentimental weepie builds into a wave of nausea during its interminable finale."

Bonus: Best bad films of the decade.

Profile of a late-term aboritionist.

Dr. Carhart has also begun performing some abortions "past 24 weeks," he said in an interview, and is prepared to perform them still later if they meet legal requirements and if he considers them medically necessary.

I'm so old I remember when 10% unemployment was high and 10K for the Dow was low.

The proximate cause of the online war and legal proceedings between bloggers Jeff Martin and Mary Johnson was a comment left by Martin at a site maintained by Mike Baron.

Baron is Greensboro's former water conservation manager. He maintains that the construction of the Randleman Dam was unnecessary, and that the campaign to get it built was a huge fraud.

Baron frequently calls out the media and bloggers for ignoring him. Martin, writing as "Fec" (short for his nom de blog, Fecund Stench) replied beneath one of Baron's posts: "You're criminally insane." Dr. Johnson objected to the harsh comment, and it was on.

Baron is wrong about the dam. Yes, GSO's water usage has declined with the demise of manufacturing industry and changes in pricing, but the ten-year usage projections brandished by Baron as evidence of a scam were not the impetus for the new reservoir, nor is there evidence that the projections were made in bad faith.

The Randleman project has been in the works for decades; a dam on the Deep River was approved by Congress in 1968. Randleman Lake is Greensboro's first new water supply since Lake Townsend opened in 1969; the city's population has increased by about 75% since that time, and times of drought routinely bring low reservoirs and water purchases from our neighbors.

The job of planning, permitting, and building a new reservoir is measured in generations. You have to plan ahead -- way ahead -- with this kind of project, and you don't stop work based on short-term trends. Randleman has long been discussed in terms of a useful life of at least 50 years. Even modest growth over the decades ahead will greatly overburden today's water supply. That's why the long effort to build the Randleman dam was necessary.

Mike Baron, who maintains good humor in the face of terminal cancer, is correct that Greensboro should have a meaningful, ongoing water conservation program. He deserves credit for helping to build one in the first place, and gratitude for keeping the idea alive.

But that doesn't mean the dam is a scam.

"The boom was fueled by easy credit, a poorly regulated market overrun by speculators, and cheerleading from Dubai officials." Typical left-wing hackery by the Wall Street Journal, not even mentioning the Community Reinvestment Act.

"This business/news integration is a progressive step and is strongly supported by the news leaders of both the Sports and Entertainment segments." Oy.

"Much of Mackintosh on the Lake, the massive upscale community that straddles the Alamance-Guilford line, is in foreclosure and will go on the auction block in about five weeks after its developer defaulted on loan payments."

More here. "Mackintosh developer Wakefield Development of Raleigh, defaulted on payments to PNC Bank."

Wakefield site. The parent company, L.M. Sandler and Sons of Virginia Beach, has problems of its own.

From the Mackintosh website:

Wakefield Development Company (WDC), the 2007 Raleigh-Wake County Home Builders Association Developer of the Year, is North Carolina’s largest developer of residential communities, with a portfolio including almost 18,000 homesites across the central and coastal regions of the state. WDC communities cater to six ideal lifestyle options...

Just curious, what are the monthly costs for a $1 million house?

Redbird Round, featuring Alice Gerrard, Laurelyn Dossett and Diana Jones, will play Triad Stage on Weds 12/9 at 7:30 PM.

Get your tix here, then listen to them a couple of days later on TSOT, then follow them around while the minitour lasts.

My upcoming newspaper column ends with the prediction that the banksters will eventually blow things up again. Damn early deadlines, otherwise I'd think about taking out the "eventually" and putting in "soon."

So the plutocrats, it seems are going to win. They had a nasty couple of years, by plutocrat standards, and in a handful of companies operating under de facto state control they don’t quite have the free rein they would ideally like. But the system as a whole hasn’t changed, and those who thought that it might can’t quite believe how naive they were.

Clemson is still Clemson, and the Big 11 finally wins a series against the unformidable ACC.

Watching Dook-Wisconsin was a win-win: you were going to get an ACC victory or a Dook defeat, and go to bed happy either way.

Prior to the season, I heard nothing but love for Dino Gaudio from Wake fans. Yes, he lost control of last year's team and they flamed out early, but what a great start and when you consider how he got the job, etc., etc. I believe that honeymoon is over.

A good thread about Izzo's decision-making on Tuesday night, in a game that pretty well settled this question.

Fec reads Taibbi: "Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads."

"Am I the only idiot around who still doesn’t quite get [Botticelli's] popularity?," asks Kimmelman, before explaining that popularity pretty well:

Yes, he’s a beautiful painter...And his appeal to traditional connoisseurs is obvious. It grows out of his lyrical humanism and taste for the classics...Botticelli represents a bygone ideal of high art, with its literary roots in rhetoric and poetry...decorative panache and those pretty, melancholy young women....he devised a signature style that acts like an advertisement for himself. The style was supple, elastic, linear, refined...He’s an abstract artist at heart.

All this, Kimmelman says, "endeared him to aesthetes." Fine by me. Above, a fresco of the Graces from the Louvre; click image to enlarge.

More on the media-golf complex:

The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers...

...Anything dissonant was dealt with quickly and mercilessly. Tiger's caddy, an otherwise unemployable thug named Steve Williams, regularly harassed any spectator whom Williams thought might eventually harsh his man's mellow. The IMG handlers differed from Williams only in that they were slightly more polite. The golfing press became aware that stories about Tiger's temper, say, or about his ties to unsavory corporate grifters, would mean the end of access to the only golfer in the world who matters. There is a quick way to tell now which journalists have made this devil's bargain and which ones haven't — the ones insisting that this "accident" is somehow "not a story" are the sopranos in the chorus.

Worst press release of the day (so far):

As the CEO behind largest paid mobile community (sic) [name of company and CEO redacted] would like to offer your readers tips on what to look for if suspicious that your partner, child or even friend is "sexting."

The mortgage industry in 32 words:

When Wall Street stopped eating Big Shitpile, all the action just went to the FHA.

Too much policy has been about propping up home prices, instead of letting people keep their homes.

California property tax rates will reset downward due to falling home prices. "Although that may bring a small smile to the faces of home-owners, it's downright bad news for the local governments that rely on property taxes to fund everything from police services to holiday parades."

I've wondered about the same thing happening in North Carolina, and the impact on local government budgets. How well are home prices holding up compared to the most recent tax assessments?

In need of a soporific after an exciting night at the Dean Dome, I
watched a repeat of the outgoing City Council's swan song, and I found Mike Barber's arguments for the swim center compelling.

It seems entirely fitting that the new Council reconsider the matter, but I hope they take the arguments made by their predecessors into consideration.

In my youth, North Carolina had some of the nation's worst liquor laws. Somewhere there exists a photograph of my father attending a costume party as a bottle in a brown paper bag, which was how people used to get their booze to restaurants. Then the voters spoke, and for many years we've been able to order cocktails at the fine restaurants that sprang up in the new regime.

But different states still do things...differently. Liquor licenses are hard to come by in New Jersey, which can make it very difficult to get a new restaurant off the ground. Now, after years of sky-high licensing prices caused by this enforced scarcity, the recession is hitting the market -- and hurting the townships that get the dough.

Via Atrios, who lives in Pennsylvania, where I discovered to my dismay as a college freshman that one had to be 21 to drink even beer and wine, which were available to 18-year-olds in NC -- all this before big-government Republicans nanny-stated us into binge-drinking neo-Prohibitionism.

A good discussion in the comments here about the proposed hotel for South Elm and Lee.

Stormy asks the question on my mind: "Where is the independent study to support the need?"

If there's a business case for the hotel, and a competent management team to run it, then using stimulus funds to jumpstart the project is a great idea.

For one thing, it would pump money into a county that needs jobs, just as the stimulus was intended to do. Not quite the Blue Ridge Parkway, but good enough.

For another, it would promote redevelopment of a brownfield site that has blighted the south end of downtown for years, providing an anchor for Elm Street south of the tracks.

If there's a business case for the hotel, and a competent management team to run it.

Worst press release of the day (so far):

How to Make Your Holiday Party Pay

Networking Guru [name redacted to avoid giving him publicity] offers 5 Key Tips to network at any event successfully.

CNN picks up the Mark Horvath story (link via the indispensable CMF):

Horvath videotaped more than 100 homeless people along his journey, which took him to more than 20 cities. He encountered several disabled people, including a woman named Cotton who has lived in a tent in Greensboro, North Carolina, for 16 years.

She told Horvath on camera what it was like for her to be homeless. "For lack of a better word, it's brutal," she said. "It's cruel; it's senseless. It's so unnecessary."

Iranian Revolutionary Guards, not quite getting the joke; somehow Maziar Bahari retained his sense of humor.

"Are phony academic conferences the new Nigerian princes of the internet?" Having Ted Kennedy on the agenda was a dead giveaway.

Counterinsurgency Lite: can a comprehensive strategy work if it's not implemented comprehensively?

A lukewarm response.

Just three years ago, COIN was itself an insurgent philosophy.

UPDATE: The old mindset at work: "Bin Laden expected to die...But [the] vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines...Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency."

Irony unintended: "The Nakheel 3.17 percent bonds, known as sukuk, [are] governed by Shariah laws barring investors from profiting from the exchange of money."

How a country where lending at interest is verboten managed to run up enough debt to shake the world financial system:

One discussion was led by a British banker from Barclays who had moved to the region to create an entire Shariah-compliance team. He shared tips about various ways to create "structured products" that would pass muster with Muslim investors. (To me, the investments looked like bonds, walked like bonds and talked like bonds — but he never called them that.)

Previously: Sovereign wealth 101.

If you're keeping score at home, these are the same folks to whom we didn't sell our ports a few years ago.

Artifacts from a sophisticated European culture older than the pyramids. More here.

Golf, a big business that takes itself too seriously and the press not seriously enough, has a problem: "The traditionally conservative golf media and Tour are, not surprisingly, skittish about reporting this story...Golf Digest, one of the largest golf publications in the world, has only posted AP articles and no personal opinions from their columnists on their website — for good reason, considering they are one of Tiger's sponsors."

The legitimate question of the day is, "Is a 0% funds rate creating the next financial bubble, and if so, will the Fed and other central banks raise rates proactively – even in the face of double-digit unemployment?"

No, replies Bill Gross to his own question.

"We will need another 12 months of 4-5% nominal GDP growth before Bernanke and company dare lift their heads out of the 0% foxhole – mini-bubbles or not."

Why?

The Fed is trying to reflate the U.S. economy. The process of reflation involves lowering short-term rates to such a painful level that investors are forced or enticed to term out their short-term cash into higher-risk bonds or stocks. Once your cash has recapitalized and revitalized corporate America and homeowners, well, then the Fed will start to be concerned about inflation – not until.

If you apply the famous Kübler-Ross model (aka the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) to public perceptions of the economy, where are we now? 

I still see a fair amount of denial, at least about the magnitude of the problem. People want to pretend that this was just another recession.

Anger is very much alive, although often misdirected.

There's plenty of bargaining under way, too. If only we buy enough stuff on a magical Friday, then the gods will be appeased...

I'm hoping Depression is a metaphorical term in this case.

Accepting the reality that market worship is a failed religion, and moving past the fantasy of a post-regulatory culture, can't happen soon enough.

"The cracks in Dubai’s property sector were showing long before last week...The most conservative estimates put the supply of new houses coming onto the market over the next two years at 40,000. According to other estimates, up to 25 per cent of residential units are already empty." At least they've still got the indoor ski mountain.

Nicholson Baker reviewing a Ken Auletta book about Google?

That's like chocolate sauce on ice cream on top of a brownie, but not fattening.

OB. Bad lie. Scratch golfer.

The puns, they write themselves.

Something I learned while reading the chart in the preceding post: there is a Wade Hampton County in Alaska.

Growing up in North Carolina, I've known people and places named for the Confederate general, but Alaska?

I know you're all like, duh, it was named by his son-in-law, the Woodrow Wilson appointee John Randolph Tucker, and includes Alakanuk and Nunam Iqua (formerly Sheldon Point), but it was news to me.

I'm sure the deep thinkers at the Cato Locke Heartland Enterprise Institute are picking apart these numbers even as you read this post, and writing policy papers pointing out that many of those implicated deserve to be poor anyhow, but still, damn, we are one broke-ass country.

How long until we start hearing that the Dubai meltdown was caused by the Community Reinvestment Act?

NYT follows yesterday's article on the ethanol glut with an op-ed against raising ethanol mandates:

Allowing a higher percentage of ethanol in gasoline will not make us less dependent on such foreign energy sources. It will not help the environment. It will not lower consumer prices. And it will result in the poor of the world having less to eat. Instead of raising federal mandates on ethanol, Congress and the Obama administration should end them entirely.

Somebody remind me...which state kicks off the presidential primary season, and which state is Obama from?