EdCone.com

Listen carefully, PhillyBurbs: people from Albemarle, North Carolina are NOT hillbillies.

Come correct with your condescending nomenclature, or don't come at all.

This American Idol Pickler chick may, as you say, have worn "nothing more than a skimpy halter top with a low-rise, barely-there bottom to her prom."

She may be, as one haterific site says, playing "an ignorant country girl."

I do not watch the show, I only know what I know from Lenslinger.

But look at the map. She's not a hillbilly.

Damn arrogant New Englanders.

Scoble on public speaking: "Now that I've given a bunch of speeches...I'm learning that the real skill a speaker needs is listening. Can you take a question during a talk and turn that into something useful?"

I think he's onto something. I try to make my talks as interactive as possible, to react to the audience's interests and knowledge and gaps in knowledge. So I have moved away from the format of talking for most of my time and then taking a question or two, and try set up my subject matter and then take questions, to which I give detailed answers. I still give a talk, but it's more like 15 minutes and then 15 minutes of questions, rather than a 25 minute lecture and a couple of hands in the air.

It probably doesn't work for every subject, and it requires the speaker to be flexible, knowledgeable on the topic, and willing to say "I don't know," but it's a lot more fun for me, and the people to whom I speak seem to like it.

My advice to speakers who are nervous -- apparently, a lot of people -- is this: remember that the audience wants you to succeed. They would rather that you be good than boring. When you pause, or get stuck on a thought, it seems at the podium to last an eternity, but it's quick for people in the crowd. Relax. Think. Personalize. Have fun.

People who believe that prayer will help with heart surgery are going to keep on praying.

So, probably, will a lot of people who don't believe it will help, but guess that it can't hurt.

If all one had to do is ask, then nobody would suffer complications from heart surgery, or anything else.

God does not influence football games either, nor does She particularly care for the point-to-the-sky gesture made by athletes.

I don't have a fancy study to back me up on the sports stuff, and I didn't hear it from a burning bush. It is just my personal belief.

And I'm not sure it applies to George Mason.

Friedman: "Iraq at the 11th Hour."

The fate of the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq now hangs in the balance, as the war has entered a dangerous new phase. It is the phase of barbaric identity-card violence between Sunnis and Shiites. In the late 1970's, I covered a similar moment in Lebanon, and the one thing I learned was this: Once this kind of venom gets unleashed — with members of each community literally beheading each other on the basis of their religious identities — it poisons everything. You enter a realm that is beyond politics, a realm where fear and revenge dominate everyone's thinking — and that is where Iraq is heading.

More from the erstwhile war-drummer:

Donald Rumsfeld's criminally negligent decision not to deploy enough troops in Iraq to begin with created this security vacuum. But the insecurity was compounded by the unique enemy that emerged to take advantage of that vacuum — Sunni Islamo-nihilists...When you are up against an enemy whose only goal is that you must fail...it is extremely difficult to establish order...It's now clear that some Shiite militias are ready to match the Sunni nihilists, killing for killing. So the slide into a medieval barbarism has begun.

Do not believe any of the Bush team's happy talk. It doesn't matter if Iraq is quiet in the south and quiet in the north. If Baghdad, the heart of the country, is being ripped apart, then there is no Iraq — because there is no center.

From today's Wall Street Journal, how a broken engagement helped bring down Jack Abramoff...and maybe Tom DeLay.

From Rolling Stone, a profile of Abramoff himself (via Fecund Stench), "The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington."

And in National Journal, a look at pre-war intelligence and its uses.

I spoke yesterday to the staff, boardmembers, and community supporters of the Greensboro Public Library about the use of technology in the library system, with a focus on the stuff we talk about here -- blogs and other user-generated content, RSS, mobile and wireless, etc. Lots of good conversation about needs, priorities, responsibilities, and mission...a tech guy from the City was there, the group was very positive and up-to-speed, and I left feeling good about where our library system is headed under its award-winning director.

I do not know the merits of Jerry Conner's case, but this blog says he should at least be subject to DNA testing before the State of North Carolina puts him to death.

Chevy is running a contest to create a new ad for its Tahoe SUV.

Roch Smith Jr. has a compelling entry (click to watch).

Probably not coming soon to a TV near you.

I hope somebody can make a copy of Roch's ad before Chevy kills it.

Diary of a Soldier: "My experiences in Iraq, with the soldiers I served with, the places I traveled, the situations I encountered and the fact that we accomplished our part of the mission and brought home everyone we took with us leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction that is euphoric." (via Patrick Eakes)

A moon landing?

A terrorist attack?

The end of a war?

No, it's just the freaking lottery, to which the N&R has devoted more front-page inches than I can understand (part of a pattern of disproportionate hype), and which today dominates A-1 -- I'm talking most of the page, from top to bottom, pictures and articles, with just a narrow band of other news in the left hand column.

There's a breathless headline in big-ass type: "LET THE GAMES BEGIN," with a superscript announcing, in red letters, "Opening day of the North Carolina Education (sic) Lottery." Photos of smiling people scratching tickets and selling them.

I know it's news. But seriously, why is the paper hyping this thing so much?

              (click image to enlarge)

Lex Alexander: "Anyone who actually thinks there's anything approaching a war on Christians in the U.S. needs to spend a little time in Afghanistan."

In the 2004 election, as went Ohio so went the campaign. Now John Kasich, the former GOP congressman from the Buckeye state, writes in the Wall Street Journal that things are very bad for his old home team.

The headline, bannered across the right hand page of the WSJ opinion section, gets right to the point: "Buckeye GOP Circles the Drain."

He starts with an abject (and court-ordered apology) by governor Bob Taft, and continues, "Were that the only instance of poor judgment by an Ohio Republican in recent memory, the state GOP would probably remain in relatively good shape leading up to the elections this November, despite growing indicators against the party nationally. Unfortunately, the governor's ethical lapses -- he pled guilty last August to four misdemeanors related to undisclosed gifts from lobbyists -- represent only a small fraction of an ever widening scandal that is drowning the Ohio Republican Party."

The litany includes an "endemic culture of money-for-influence" GOP-controlled state politics, including the "coingate" hijinks of Tom Noe, and this: "According to reports in Ohio newspapers, former Speaker of the House Larry Householder and his political fundraisers and consultants are currently under criminal investigation for various charges involving possible campaign and fundraising irregularities...[including] bribery, kickbacks and tax and mail fraud."

Kasich also details "political infighting and widespread distrust between the different ideological wings of the GOP," including "social conservatives and their allies within the fundamentalist Christian movement" vs "more moderate elements," which has led to accusations of pastors "using their churches and other nonprofit ministries to advance partisan causes." Senator Mike DeWine is also in trouble with conservatives for his stance on judicial nominations, and Governor Taft is dealing with microscopic approval ratings.

Kasich: "Ohio Republicans face some pretty tough obstacles in this year's elections...you have the makings of a Democrat sweep this November."

Of course, he adds that the Dems remain inept, but that doesn't seem to fill him with much hope.

Dave Winer said last May that Google could be vulnerable to a competitor in its core search business. Now the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg says that Ask.com, the successor the Ask Jeeves service, is making inroads against the search giant.

Mossberg: "Every so often, an underestimated contender rises up to compete with a champion play for play, or even to beat the champ. Something like that is happening in the search business...

"...Ask holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches. It has some very nice features Google lacks...

"...Google is still great, and I'm not suggesting everyone abandon it. But Ask.com is well worth a try if you want to benefit from some features that go beyond Google."

We finally saw Brother Wolf at Triad Stage last night.

It's very good. Not just the music by Laurelyn Dossett and Riley Baugus, which was as expected quite fine and an emotional driver for the show. The sets and staging were, as is usually the case at the downtown theater, good as well. But Preston Lane's play itself is smart and ambitious, a retelling of Beowulf set in the religion-drenched culture of the North Carolina and Tennessee mountains. It's not perfect, and I could quibble with stuff like the occasional overdone "southern" accent, but it's a thought-provoking and entertaining and musical evening, and Michael Abbott, Jr. is pretty amazing in the title role.

There was a full house on a Wednesday night, which was good to see.

That all of this was created in Greensboro is a fulfillment of Triad Stage's mission in a way that all the restagings of classic plays, good as they might be, cannot approach.

If he's interested in maintaining an orderly comment thread, that's probably the last time Doug Clark tries to say anything nice about me...

By the way, I had the same thought he did about the amount of free coverage the lottery launch is getting. I know it's news, but the barrage of front-page stories in the N&R has been a bit much, no?

Hugh Hewitt is getting shellacked for comparing his situation as a broadcaster in New York to the front-line position of Time correspondent Michael Ware in Baghdad.

The comparison is obviously flawed, but Hugh is right that New Yorkers have been very much on the front lines of terrorism, and that the threat of further attacks hangs heavy on the city.

Which makes it especially important to remember that New York was not attacked by Saddam Hussein, and that New Yorkers voted against the guy who went to war with the country that had not attacked them.

Web 2.0 makes the cover of Newsweek.

Paul Boutin tilts at the definitional windmill, asking "What the hell is it?."

I couldn't have put it better myself.

I did not see that coming: a negative review for Larry the Cable Guy's movie, which The Onion AV Club calls a "cynical hicksploitation romp...It'd be tempting to call Larry the Ernest of his generation, but that'd be a grave insult to Jim Varney's enduring legacy...Laughing at this turkey might not necessarily make you a redneck, but it sure does make you easily amused."

I disagree with the opening characterization of Mr. Guy,  which says that audiences see him as a "noble, down-to-earth, working-class hero, or the personification of loathsome white trash."

"Noble" is just not part of his schtick, and loathsomeness is part of his appeal.

That said, I have no doubt that the movie review is otherwise on target.

The Internets fact-check a would-be successor to convicted Congressman Duke Cunningham.

Doug Clark on Jim Black's last stand.

WaPo on Iranian blogs (via Sue): "Although exact figures are not known, experts estimate there are between 70,000 and 100,000 active weblogs in Iran...the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter Internet content of any country in the world...It also is one of a growing number of Mideast countries that rely on U.S. commercial software to do the filtering."

Hoder is of course part of the story. Seems like he's a guy we'd welcome in the land of the free and the home of the brave, huh?

WSJ: "Time Inc. is in the midst of another major effort to turn itself into a leading Web player. And this time, there is evidence that the publisher's management is willing to fundamentally alter the way the magazines are run to make the Web push work..."

"...Over the past decade, Time Inc. has tried and abandoned several Web strategies...Each venture ended in disappointment, hampered by an editorial culture that viewed Internet operations as a backwater."

Cobb has put his blog on hiatus...but I'm guessing we haven't seen the last of Mr. Bowen. Meanwhile the honorary Greensborian has organized his homepage into an archive map, and there's plenty of interest there.

Duke president Richard Brodhead: "This afternoon the captains of the Duke lacrosse team notified Mr. Alleva and me that the team wished to suspend competitive play until the DNA results come back...I have decided that future games should be suspended until there is a clearer resolution of the legal situation."

A couple of days ago Rusty Sheridan delivered "mad props to George Mason's basketball team and their free-market, liberty-loving economics department"...here's a Slate article by Peter Boettke and Alexander Tabarrok, elaborating on that theme.

Jeff Jarvis is mad as heck, and he is not going to take it anymore.

Bob Kober, publisher of BizLife, self-described "conservative right wing Bible thumping Wacko," and one of the nicer guys out there, has started a blog.

NC Conservative Leadership Conference, featuring George Allen, Sue Myrick, and more, Durham, April 7-8.

I went to a John Birch Society lunch today to hear a talk by Gary Benoit, editor of the organization's New American magazine.

Jim Capo graciously invited me. The lunch was at George K's, and the food was good. There were about 20 people there, including Capo and Benoit.

Benoit spoke about decoding the media. He had a robotic delivery and read the speech, which he must have given a thousand times, but somehow that just added to the charm.

He made some good points about considering the source and the spin of media stories, and pondering the alternatives to the dominant narrative, and spoke some truths also about the Establishment of business and government leaders who are loyal less to party than to power.

It helped to apply all the message-decoding tips to the message as delivered. We heard about the one-world-government plans of the Council on Foreign Relations (a "liberal" establishment group, as shown by the membership of Dick Cheney), a "debunking" of global warming based entirely on contempt for "experts" and the fact that National Geographic published an article on possible global cooling about thirty years ago, and so on.

The crowd seemed interested and informed and not necessarily ready to buy everything the JBS was selling. There was a thoughtful comment about immigration, and a reasonable mini-debate about trade agreements.

Unfortunately, Benoit was unable to answer some questions effectively because he was stuck in JBS-land, looking for ChiComs.

One guy asked why the media keeps showing us Natalee Hollowell stories instead of real news, and Benoit said he didn't know, although the obvious Iraq-avoidance-with-racial-overtones response would have fit his agenda fairly well.

Ditto a question from Roch Smith Jr., who asked why the "liberal" NYT had been such a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq. Here was a chance for Benoit to actually support his own thesis, by saying that the Times is much less a "liberal" paper than the voice of the internationalist establishment...but he came up with some lame stuff about it being a liberal plan to either make the conservatives look bad, or empower the UN.

Disclaimer: As noted in a book Capo gave me, The Insiders: Architects of the New World Order (I got the update version with W on the cover), my dear uncle is a member of the CFR, so bear that in mind as I try to jerk the veil back over the truth.

The NYT sets out to answer the question of how worried you should be about avian flu, and comes back with two answers: not very, and quite.

Front-pager in the N&R about Sandy Carmany's blogged allegation that the Wray report was probably leaked by a fellow Council-member...but no address for the blog is given in the print or online editions.

There is some progress in the reporting-on-the-web front: the article refers to Carmany's "blog," eschewing the fussy "Web log" the paper has inserted into my column for years...

Terry Heaton quotes Gordon Borrell: "Will the online advertising pie ever reach the local/national parity that's found with advertising overall?"

They both think the answer can be "yes."

AP: "We do not credit blogs."

We just rip them off.

John Hammer continues his bizarre defense of Michael King and Project Homestead: "I don’t think anyone who knew King would expect him to be a good record keeper. His forte was putting deals together, not keeping track of where every dime was spent."

Well, there you go.

Think John will try one that with the IRS on April 15? "You don't expect me to be a good record keeper, do you? My forte is journalism, not keeping track of every dime."

Deadspin: "Has this NCAA Tournament given us great basketball, or just close basketball?"

I vote for the latter.

The FEC will not regulate free speech on the internets. Congrats, and thanks, to Mike Krempasky and Markos Moulitsas and everyone who fought to win this important victory.

An article in yesterday's NYT about John Edwards.

[W]hen he spoke on the campaign trail about what he referred to as the "two Americas," he told a conference on poverty here this week, "people called it a downer."

Now Mr. Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina and a presumed contender for his party's 2008 presidential nomination, has made curbing poverty the centerpiece of his work and his political approach.

According to JimBlackMustGo.com, every major newspaper in North Carolina has now called for the Speaker to step down. The N&R was first in line.

Via Doug Clark, who says, "It's too bad Black didn't resign when we suggested he should.

"By hanging on this long, he's likely to drag other members of his party down with him, at least in a political sense. He would have done fellow Democrats a favor by stepping out of the way and letting them choose a new speaker heading into this election year."

Given the level of hype and expectation around the Big East this year -- 8 teams made the tournament, two as #1 seeds, after a season of high rankings and big talk -- is the nobody-to-the-Final-Four-flameout the biggest conference letdown in NCAA history?

Some of us are old enough to remember the ACC's Black Sunday. I guess yesterday earned that name in the Big Least.

A distinguished senior editor at Forbes magazine just emailed to ask how my tourney picks were looking about now, to which I replied:

Awesome.

I had a gut feeling that all four #1 seeds would flame out for the first time since 1980, and I've followed George Mason closely all season and had them in the Final Four.

Also, I knew the Big East would have no teams playing after this weekend, and the SEC would have two.

Plus, UCLA was a mortal lock.

So I'm sitting pretty, beyotch.

Seriously, when LSU won yesterday I was in the driver's seat in both my pools.

Then Memphis played one of the worst games I've even seen played this late in the season -- hey, they did break the 40-point barrier -- and I was still in the running.

Then came today's Big East debacle...

It was hard, I was rooting for GM as a basketball fan but UConn as a bracketeer...so at least I had some satisfaction.

I liked Ed Hardin's column today...maybe he and I can go bass-fishing together. If we do, I'll remind him that at least I knew the ACC wasn't very good this year.

Joy Jones in the Washington Post: "I was stunned to learn that a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents during slavery days than he or she is today."

The Independent's Fiona Morgan on allegations of serious wrongdoing by members of the Duke lacrosse team: "Rape and racism, the young women say, happen everywhere, and they know Duke is no exception."

Let me be clear that for all my woofing about Duke's basketball team, I have no ax to grind with the university, and do not wish its athletes ill. This is a terrible story in which nobody can take pleasure.

Carmany on the public's right to know, and the right way to know it: "My puzzled question, both to "the leaker" and the News & Record is, "WHY?" Why did you find it necessary to jeopardize our ability to uncover the truth and mete out justice in this case?"

UPDATE: John Robinson responds. "A newspaper's responsibility is to its readers and the citizens in its readership area. We think those folks deserve information in a timely way about one of the core city agencies."

This is enormously important stuff, this public conversation between an elected official and a newspaper editor.

Who supports illegal immigration? It's often portrayed as a bleeding-heart liberal issue, but there are other forces involved.

Big business, for one.

From this morning's NYT front-pager on the political pressure facing conservative Texas Senator John Cornyn over his nuanced view of immigration: "Bush first urged Congress to create a program that would legalize illegal workers and allow for foreign workers to come here in the future. Both groups would be required to return home after a period of time.

"The proposal was hailed by the United States Chamber of Commerce, typically a staunch Republican ally and a formidable political force."

Illegal immigrants come here in far greater number than the legal system allows. And they may work cheaper, and with fewer pesky demands for benefits and safe conditions.

It's not just about values, it's about money.

Michael Pollan goes hunting. "I find myself slipping into the hunter's ecstatic purple, channeling Ortega y Gasset. It may be that we have no better language in which to describe the experience of hunting, so that all of us who would try sooner or later slide into this overheated prose ignorant of irony. Or it could be that hunting is one of those experiences that appear utterly different from the inside than the outside."

Expect lots of letters to the editor from readers who don't want to acknowledge that the food chain extends past Zabar's.

My dad liked Hee Haw, drug free, but for the occasional beer or glass of George Dickel. Buck Owens was a lot cooler than I understood him to be when I was a kid, as Dwight Yoakam later explained to me.

I'm not in Iraq. You probably aren't there, either. We know what we're told.

Jeffrey Gettleman is there, and what he's saying is not hopeful. In Baghdad, "Gone were the American tanks that used to guard the intersections. Instead, aggressive teenagers with machine guns and shiny soccer jerseys ruled the streets. They poked their heads into cars and detained whomever they wanted. There were even 8-year-olds running checkpoints, some toting toy pistols, others toting real ones. Whatever they carried, 4-foot-tall militias made me nervous. The streets now had a truly Liberian feel."

More on the NORGs unconference...

...and an update from JR on the NORGinization of of the N&R: "The newspaper. The Internet. Audio. Video. Multi-media. Interactivity. They are all different ways to deliver you news and information that we hope makes a difference in your lives. Join us. Participate. Check back often. We add new content and tools every day."

Donald Patterson in the N&R reports on the scarcity of space in downtown Greensboro. "As it stands now, developers say, cheap space downtown is gone. What remains is overpriced, not for sale or lease, or too far away from downtown's most-sought address, South Elm Street."

That's the problem: people think of downtown and they think of one street. There's a map in the print version of Patterson's article that shows downtown development projects clustered along Elm like Pharaonic ruins along the Nile.

But there's another dimension to downtown, and it lies along and parallel to Market Street. In 2004, I got Cartesian in describing the downtown map: "Now look along downtown's often-ignored Y-axis, which is blessed with a campus of the state university system at either terminus."

The key to downtown's future growth is articulated in the article by one of the real heroes of the area's comeback: "'Downtown will expand its footprint,' said Milton Kern, one of downtown's major developers. 'It's not just going to be South Elm and Greene and Davie. It's going to be all over.'"

My newspaper column is about Project Homestead and the public's right to know.