EdCone.com

Tomorrow morning just past 8 AM on the Brad and Britt show: NC Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Meek and NC GOP Communications Director Brent Woodcox, discussing the Ad From Hell.

101.1 on your FM dial, # 1 in your heart.

Move along, nothing to see here: "Many Americans confronted with stories of media manipulation by government officials aren't, at this point, shocked and awed. Instead they've come to expect it. Increasingly, they consider the media simply a mouthpiece for whoever has the most power. You don't have to tell John Q. Public that the fix is in; he takes it for granted."

Because I am an idiot I failed to notice that tix for the Arcade Fire/Superchunk show aren't available until tomorrow, so I walked over to the old courthouse and then to the Obama office on Friendly where they clued me in.

While I was at the office a woman from Reidsville came in and voiced frustration that the office keeps running out of yard signs and other supplies, which is probably good in terms of demand but annoying if you are trying to get some supplies to Reidsville.

The concert tix will be available at a table outside the old courthouse so I realized I should just vote early tomorrow as I will be traveling on primary day, duh.

I noticed that my children had left $3 in my wallet which bought me a hotdog and a drink by the Gallucci gate. I thought as I ate that it would be great if GSO native and semi-official EdCone.com portrait artist Jack McCook would rejoin Superchunk for a few songs next Thursday, and even better if Obama showed up to do a Tracy Partridge thing with the tambourine.

NCGOP ad attempting to link Democratic gubernatorial contenders to Jeremiah Wright via Obama will run despite objections from McCain and the RNC.

It's not enough to scare away Sheriff Andy Taylor.

The NCGOP remains one of the NCDP's greatest assets.

UPDATE: "Not so long ago almost nothing was too extreme for North Carolina politics, including the Helms' campaign portraying Democrat Jim Hunt as someone backed by gays and lesbians, not to mention Teddy Kennedy and Jesse Jackson."

UPDATE: "The Next Six Months: Some Republican or conservative group runs a dumb ad. John McCain nobly distances himself from it. Cable news spends all day talking about it and showing it for free. Rinse.  Repeat."

UPDATE: "Some McCain supporters are spinning the disavowal of the ad as a masterful strategy to stay above the fray. Nonsense. It’s an idiotic strategy to convince more rank-and-file Republicans to stop giving money to the Beltway GOP elite."

This meaningful-primary stuff is entertaining in all kinds of ways.

Lisa Scheer took this pic quite recently in GSO.

The GSO blogger meetup is back -- tonight, 7:00, central library downtown.

Newbies welcome.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Changing drug laws would help. "In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000."

We should take a look at the incarceration industry, too.

Reducing crime is a good thing. Defining crime too broadly and profiteering on it are bad things.

We need to focus on the important stuff and think a little bit more about being the land of the free.

How do you pick a candidate for judge? The N&R asks, but the answer is frustrating: vote for the person who seems...judicious. Fair, honest, knowledgeable.

OK, but how do we know who qualifies?

I know Robby Hassell belongs on the bench, because I know him and I can say without reservation that he has a fine mind and an impeccable character, but I'm clueless on a lot of other races.

The N&R doesn't endorse district court candidates in the primaries -- a shame, because that's where the biggest info-gap lies. I don't really need the paper to tell me its institutional preference in any number of high-profile contests, but I could use some help with judicial races where information is scarce.

Doug Clark fills in some of the gaps in an appeals court race.

We don't know much even about supreme court candidates, which was why it's important for bloggers to step into the breach.

Candidate websites would be helpful, but they are thin on the ground.

CourtWatch is an independent group that does what the name suggests, but its online presence is skeletal.

Maybe we shouldn't elect our judges?

Arcade Fire and Superchunk will play concerts for Obama in GSO on May 1 and Carrboro on May 2.

Nancy McLaughlin points to an article about the shock of modest clothing.

The polygamist sect seems to have been playing by some rules of its own, but it followed a general pattern of communities (e.g., Amish, Hasids) that turn back the clock on fashion to make a religious statement.

They always seem to choose gear from the era their sect was founded. I guess the LDS offshoots look at pioneer days as the time their religion was born, but I always wonder why the look for these groups isn't more in the line of sandals and robes or whatever people wore in Biblical times.

UPDATE: Anna sends a link to Quaker Jane's page on Plain Dress. That practice was long gone by the time I got to Haverford, interesting to see it survives. Old-style Quaker speech is spoofed gently in a scene from The Philadelphia Story (about a minute into the clip):

Funny, in a sick kind of way: al Qaeda criticizes Iran for spreading the Jews-did-9/11 myth, not because al Qaeda likes the Jews but because al Qaeda wants credit for its work.

What next for Murdoch's Journal?

A general-interest newspaper dilutes the core brand, and also swims against the net-era tide of unbundled content.

Maybe it looks different if you consider the Journal as one piece in a global information empire.

ArtBeat Greensboro starts on Sunday.

Here's the sked. From Picasso to Polecat Creek, a pretty decent slate of events.

Protest petitions for Greensboro discussed in Greensboro.

The banks, they need more money.

This time its not opaque acronymic instruments causing the pain, it's good old fashioned loan-loss provisions. "Banks establish bad-loan reserves as a cushion against expected losses on defaulted loans. Additions to these reserves, called 'provisions,' get booked as an expense in a bank's income statement and reduce earnings...as the economic downturn starts to bite, rising defaults are prompting banks to add larger sums to the reserves."

Thank goddess somebody is telling the truth about the hidden agenda behind Earth Day. More here: "a watermelon holiday green on the outside but red inside."

Think I'll dump the oil from my chainsaw in a creek after I take down a few trees.

That was then, this is now.

Patrick McHenry threatens to sue over an ad by his primary opponent, Lance Sigmon, which seems like an excellent strategy to draw attention to the ad. Worked on me!

Keith Brown says, "Tonight in Greensboro at the City Council Chambers from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm is a great time to Lobby your State Legislators on any issue you think needs to be addressed. Like Protest Petitions in Greensboro."

Nancy Franklin on the Philly debate: "Charles Gibson, ABC’s nightly-news anchor, moderated, and was greasily avuncular and patronizing; if ever Gibson was in danger of raising the questioning to a level that might actually yield something useful for viewers, George Stephanopoulos, ABC’s Sunday-morning political quarterback, was by his side to make sure that didn’t happen. Clinton and Obama were trapped by questions that were unworthy of them, and trapped by not getting a chance to answer good questions that never came. ABC, Gibson, and Stephanopoulos actively trashed an important opportunity."

NCDP says there will be no Clinton-Obama debate on 4/27.

Both candidates are expected at the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Raleigh on May 2.

Keeping your cool during an errant spacecraft landing: "I looked at the others and I pretended to be OK."

That's what I'd do, too, although the sobbing and the fetal position might give me away.

Paying someone a salary without being able to direct their work is probably the biggest challenge to managerial culture within a business that one can imagine.

I spoke with Clay Shirky this morning about some of the ideas in his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The timing was good, because I had just read this post by Nick Carr, and it all led to a post at the DJB, Decoding the Professionalization of Linux. 

Sing along, you know the words: Bank of America has crummy quarter, consumer lending business is wobbly, housing woes are at the root of problem and nobody can say when that pain stops.

Crandall: "Market-based approaches alone have not and will not produce the aviation system our country needs."

He says prices need to rise if service is going to improve.

"The Afghan Army and police forces should be able to secure most of Afghanistan by 2011, allowing international forces to start withdrawing, the American commander of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, said Sunday."

I wonder what we might have accomplished there, in military and political terms, if we'd made the central front in the war on terror the central front in the war on terror.

One of the more useful blogs out there: Home Ec 101.

Myrtle Beach, yesterday morning.

Ludicrous as the whole spectacle was, ABC would not have been so widely pilloried had it not tapped into a larger national discontent with news media fatuousness.

Still, Stephanopoulos and Charlie "$200K is middle class" Gibson earn special discredit for their "failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan...Such defacing of American values is to be expected, I guess, from a network whose debate moderators refuse to wear flag pins."

The Beats and Beyond: Counterculture Poetry, 1950-75, tomorrow thru July 3 UNC's Wilson Library.

N&O: "Black Mountain College was a small yet dynamic ripple in the cultural tsunami that swept across America after World War II. It is this larger story -- of a time when the arts were not at the margin but at the center of American culture -- that the Wilson Library tells."

BMC site.

Some pics from CreateSouth.

I met these sick stooges there.

I started my session on communities with obvious examples of groups bound by geography and political interest. When I wanted to broaden the discussion to communities of interest that transcend geography, I called on Vera, who talked about the craft-blogging community (apparently the flame wars between knitters and crocheters can be intense) and also the iguana-blogging world in which her husband participated. (At dinner the night before she told me about another community of interest: the foot-fetishists who show up at knitting blogs to check out the sock models. Who knew?)

N&R weighs in on bond and tax issues: jail, school, EGHS, parks & rec, GTCC, and sales tax.

(I liked the side-by-side format in the print edition -- anyway to reproduce the front of today's opinion section as a PDF?)

I'm against the sales-tax increase -- the N&R is right that we need to quit raising property taxes, but I'd like to see some cuts to offset the bond-driven increases. The sales tax bump would increase revenue by $16 million -- surely we can find something to trim in a nearly $600 million county budget instead.

It's hard to argue against the bonds (the N&R says a reluctant no to the parks, but they're a rounding era on this big package). We need to have the best schools around, we need a new jail -- those things are investments, not frills. But I'd love to see a few bucks come off my property tax bill as we add these things to it.

That's not the way government usually works. Wouldn't it be nice if ours worked better than usual?

Troublemaker reports that the man killed yesterday by a GPD officer was the son of a man killed by a GPD officer.

So the EG put me up at Camelot by the Sea, which bills itself as "Myrtle Beach's only theme resort." I asked Slusher if he chose it for the kitsch value, but he said it was because they didn't require a two-night stay.

Anyway, the only thematic elements visible were a suit of armor stuck behind some plants, along with a tapestry and a mural in the small lobby, some Ren Faire shirts on the check-in crew, and a sign in the garage saying that parking rules were "by order of the King." I felt a little short-changed, or short-cheesed.

But I was given a 17th-floor room, from which I enjoyed a moonlit view last night and shot this today before taking an extremely nice walk on the beach. There were kids in the cold water at 8 AM and a few more people around than I expected, but the whole town had that sleepy off-season vibe, which I liked very much.

We talked at the conference about creating communities and discovering new ones and I confessed that I was a member of the community of middle-aged people who bore others with reminiscences of boyhood trips to Myrtle Beach when the Patricia was a weatherbeaten old building instead of a highrise and the town was not yet Branson-by-the-Sea (a previous flare-up of the syndrome here).

One of the folks behind CreateSouth was Andre Pope.

Much to our benefit, his creativity extends beyond digital work -- he and his wife, Heidi, made lunch for everyone in attendance.

The chicken bog was excellent. And while North Carolinians don't like to say anything too nice about barbecue from other states, I have to admit that the 'cue was damn good, too.

The Evil Genius, who says ConvergeSouth was an inspiration for the Myrtle Beach conference, described the Greensboro event to the crowd as an evening of barbecue surrounded by two days of talking.

Andre and Heidi responded in style.

Hoggard, the competition is on.

A very interesting presentation at CreateSouth: Building an ad hoc breaking news network out of free tools, by Dan Conover and Janet Edens.

A free press for a free people, or a military-industrial-media complex?:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance...The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves...

...[M]embers of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

CreateSouth has a good feel to it. Reminds me a lot of our original Piedmont blogger con -- I hope it has a similar impact for this part of South Carolina in terms of advancing a self-aware online community.

Nice venue, too -- the restored Myrtle Beach train depot.

Myrtle Beach, 5 minutes ago.

Lisa Scheer took this pic quite recently in Greensboro.

Josh Marshall:

Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing, if not something that's ever been too far removed from American politics. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans.

Jim Buie has a roundup from Obama's visit to Raleigh.

It seems to me that's the fundamental difference between Obama and Hillary Clinton. She speaks of "I," he speaks of "we." She's from the television era of voters as passive observers of politics. Obama is from the new Internet era of voters as active participants in politics.

I'm hearing that five more people were laid off from the N&R yesterday, although none on the reporting and editing side. My source says the Randolph County office, which included a customer service representative and maybe an ad person, is now closed. Any confirmation or clarification from East Market St?

Also, ME Ann Morris is leaving the paper. I don't know Ann well, but my sense is that she was well-respected. Managing editor is a critical position, it will be interesting to see how the N&R fills the job.

Is class the real third rail of American politics?

Certainly the economic elites of this country have done a bang-up job of turning "elite" into a dirty word that somehow doesn't apply to them.

Obama had a point about working people getting hosed but not having a platform to talk about it. Cultural issues are not always defined by economic status -- that was part of Obama's mistake. But it should be possible to discuss economic issues without being drowned out by shouts of "class warfare."

As Warren Buffett said, "If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning."

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle."

That's the opening line of a new report from the National Defense University.

The authors don't expect the surge to turn things around, either.

Nothing shocking in the document -- its criticisms of policy and strategy and people are all stuff you've read in horrible Bush-bashing blogs for years -- but considering the source and the convenient packaging, a useful addition to the literature.

"Sadly, much of the postinvasion state of affairs had been predicted. Many government and civilian experts had spoken well and loudly about the dangers of postwar Iraq, but their warnings were not heeded."

A knock on my office door, it's a guy I've known for years, we're friendly acquaintances, never talked too much beyond basketball and the weather. He asked if I had a moment, sure, he says it's kind of personal, so I close the door. He pauses, then starts: I read your column...

Recently diagnosed. Feels confident about treatment and recovery, just wanted to talk. Hasn't told many people, not because he's ashamed but because he's a private guy. I put him in touch with Ralph, and they talked, too.

This is turning into one of the more rewarding experiences of my career.

Joel Gillespie takes issue with Richard Cizik's statement on global warming, but he closes with a message that should reach across a lot of religious and political lines:

We cannot preach the gospel with integrity to our neighbor if we are killing him with our waste products. And pray tell, how many people do you know, when they need retreat, when they need to get away and pray and be with their God, prefer parking lots and freeways and such? We need special places, not only for the sake of God's glory (as their beauty reflect back to him) and for the sake of the creatures (which God declared to be "good" and which he blessed), but also for the sake of our own spirits as we seek to hear God amidst the din of this noisy and dirty world.

Gretchen Reynolds ledes an NYT article: "Sara Hall experienced an instructive epiphany in 2006."

William Safire's language column in the Times Sunday mag deploys its Squad Squad to chase down redundancies -- seems like they've got one close to home.

I flipped through the Clinton-Obama debate last night, but I've heard the candidates already and I found ABC's Charles Gibson unbearable.

At some points he seemed to think he was one of the debaters, and at others he just whiffed, as when he noted the anniversary of the murders at VA Tech and said "probably every American during this day, at one point or another, said a small prayer for the great people at that university and for those who died." I said out loud to the teevee that journalists are supposed to avoid generalizations like "every American," as it seems obvious that many Americans were oblivious of the anniversary, and that many others -- even some deeply touched by the event -- would not have marked the occasion with prayer. What a tool.

And I tuned in late, when they were actually talking policy. Apparently the earlier segments were worse in their own way: "Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances...dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with...the most fascinating aspect was waiting to see how low [Gibson] and Stephanopoulos would go, and then being appalled at the answer." MORE: "[T]he most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years."

UPDATE: Bunch says, "you disgraced my profession of journalism."

More on air travel: the industry before and after deregulation.

The ebb and flow of service at PTI has been maddening. There was a time in the '80s when Piedmont offered high-quality service, and -- pressed by People Express -- low prices. Overall service was very good. Then US Despair bought Piedmont, and things began to go south. There was our brief and wonderful run as a Continental mini-hub. And there have been long fallow periods, caused not just by airline industry woes but the decline of local business travel as well.

UPDATE: Just found out while planning some business travel that there are no more non-stop flights between PTI and Boston. That's one of the issues that really matters here -- not my trip in particular, but accessibility by air as an economic development question. If your business wants to put a facility or even a remote worker in this region, the ability to get in and out counts.

Arthur Sleeper writes in the N&R that fares are too low. He may have a point, although I don't think discount airlines themselves are a bad idea.

One possible payoff from GSO's Skybus adventure: it showed that this area will support a discounter, so maybe we can attract another one.