EdCone.com

Luna and I walked to Tate Street for lunch today.

Does anyone care that McCain doesn't do the net?

I do, but I'm a geek.

"It's like you're hearing about two different men with nothing in common," Peterman said. "It makes it impossible to figure out what's true, or what you can believe."

Yeah, that whole gay secret-Muslim who hates America thing you heard from your neighbor does confuse the issue.

People believe what they want to believe, and what their prejudices tell them is true.

I talk sometimes to a guy who tells me that he opposes the estate tax because he wants to leave his modest holdings to his kids. No matter how many times we go over the fact that no plan under consideration would tax his estate or even estates many times larger than his, the conversation begins the same way the next time.

One thing we discussed on the local politics panel at PDF is the importance of having national organizations pay attention to what's happening on the ground, so they can have dynamic battle plans instead of static ones.

Of course I used the DCCC's whiff on Larry Kissell '06 as my example, but others were raised as well.

It's not a new problem, but in the age of the web it's really inexcusable.

The Army says our occupation plan in Iraq was flawed from the start.

No, really?

I was told things were going well and it was just the liberal media that refused to focus on all the schools we were building.

Redrawing the red/blue map.

The Triangle is cited as part of the shift toward the Democrats.

If less-well-educated people in economically-distressed places are trending Republican, what does that mean for traditionally-Democratic (and less-well-educated, economically-distressed) Greensboro?

Nelson Johnson emails: "The Almighty Latino Kings and Queens Nation (also known as the Latin Kings Gang), the Beloved Community Center of Greensboro, area pastors and several African American and Latino community leaders are holding a media briefing on Monday, June 30, 2008, at 10:30 AM, at Faith Community Church, 417 Arlington Street, Greensboro, NC."

If obscenity is measured against community standards, then it helps to know what those standards actually are.

Hint to pornographers: get thee to Louisville.

Greensboro registers as pretty tame, but High Point seems to have a dirty mind.

NYT says Barr could be a spoiler, but doesn't mention NC.

Related: Plouffe says Obama is serious about North Carolina. Certainly a lot planned for this part of the state today.

The pottery war: "The Museum of North Carolina Traditional Pottery in Seagrove recently has been the center of disrespectful, negative, inflammatory rhetoric aimed at dividing our community of peaceful potters," writes Michael Mahan in a letter to the N&R signed by 46 other area artisans.

From an N&O article: "In a community known worldwide for throwing clay, there's a lot of mud-slinging going on." More from the Asheboro paper.

The rival organizations are the North Carolina Pottery Center and the Museum of NC Traditional Pottery.

A remembrance of potter Archie Teague.

The bear arrives: "The Dow is down 20.2% from its intraday high set in October. A decline of 20% from a high is traditionally considered the threshold for a bear market."

Like the official definition of a recession, the terminology doesn't really make much difference to most people. Things are not good, and at least some of the fundamentals behind the not-goodness won't get better for a while. 

Holland Cotter says the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Guggenheim has "surprises, beginning with what the exhibition reveals about the shape of her long career, and specifically, its departure from the linear shape that 'career' implies." At left (click to largify), a Bourgeois drawing from 1953 that you can see right here in Greensboro at the Weatherspoon Museum.

Kirk Ross writes in the Carrboro Citizen: "While to the vehemently anti-immigrant crowd that may sound wonderfully efficient, it is pure and simple racial profiling, and on the taxpayers' dime at that."

The Lowder post in question. And another.

Remember reading about auction-rate securities, which were supposed to be highly liquid but ended up trapping a lot of people when the credit markets froze?

I'm hearing that some GSO non-profits are stuck with sizable positions in these things, and have been forced to borrow to pay the bills...

444 houses/townhouses/condos over $500K on the market now in Guilford County.

A local realtor tells the story on this one: "This house is a relocation property, meaning that the owners were transferred last year and they took the buyout that was offered by the relocation company.  The price of the buyout was $830,000.  The relo company now owns the house and it is, as you can see, priced at $685,000,  and has been on the market for 342 days."

"An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad."

The landing page for the series includes a link to supporting documents.

Lawrence Kudlow, one year ago today: "[T]here are always worries. Now it's subprime coming back. Is there going to be a contagion meltdown? I don't believe that for a minute."

Three weeks later, he wrote: "Simply put, this is the greatest global stock market boom in history...Despite the persistent doom and gloom refrain from various sourpuss prognosticators, it remains the greatest story never told. And it's not over yet."

And a month after that he was begging the Fed to intervene.

Being wrong on Iraq was a good career move for a lot of people.

Being wrong on the economy doesn't seem to hurt, either.

New wiretapping law "a lot worse than you think."

When EPA officials persisted, Cheney stuck his fingers in his ears and shouted "I can't hear you" over and over again until they went away: "The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened."

Mayhill Fowler, Jay Rosen, and Amy Holmes at PDF (click image to enlarge).

Jay: "Do people have the right to report their own experiences? I think they do."

"I'm blogging this" was a cute t-shirt slogan four years ago. Now it's just a fact of life.

Jerry Bledsoe notes the speed at which neologisms enter the mainstream.

But words also hang around after the technologies that spawned them are obsolete. Some of us still talk about "dialing" a phone number and nag like "broken records."

For that matter, most Americans are at least a couple of generations off the farm but we still say "bullshit" a lot.

Vint Cerf talks about universal broadband and ways the net can survive the exabyte flood.

Home. Dog glad to see me.

Enjoyed my time at PDF. I'll be processing it for a while, online and off.

"Home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas fell in April by the most on record, signaling the housing recession is far from over."

More: "There's such an excess of inventories that we certainly expect to see more price declines,'' said James O'Sullivan, a senior economist at UBS Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. "The economy is still weakening and housing still looks pretty weak."

Press conference underway at PDF to announce Internet for Everyone. Non-partisan organization hopes to make broadband access available to all Americans. Too important to leave to Congress and carriers. Necessary to remain competitive. Digital divide not shrinking, not just economic -- includes 10 million rural residents without broadband access.

Robin Chase says broadband maybe not as essential as water, but as essential as hot water.

Presscon panel includes Larry Lessig, FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Vint Cerf, Jonathan Zittrain.

Lisa Scheer took this pic in GSO.

Ted Vaden tells his readers the truth:

There's no getting around it: The job cuts and other changes announced by The News & Observer last week mean that readers will be getting less. Specifically:

* Less local news

* Fewer late sports scores and less late-breaking news

* One less page of op-ed opinion each week.

* Less business news.

* All told, 14 fewer pages per week.

Those and some other less noticeable effects are the consequence of the ongoing financial meltdown in the newspaper business that finally caused McClatchy Newspapers.

Some quick notes from the morning sessions of PDF.

I think you can say a couple of the seven words on teevee now.

George Carlin, RIP.

Three to five inches of rain? When does that ever happen in GSO?

I hope some of it fell on the reservoirs.

My flight was the only NY-bound plane from Greensboro not to be canceled yesterday afternoon. (Safety note: It was good to see that almost seven years after 9/11, the TSA is still pulling grandmas out of line and wanding them; my inclination in fighting the scourge of grandma terrorism would be to test cookies for arsenic, but these are trained security professionals and their methods should not be questioned.)

We were late but I still got to the PDF opening party in time for a couple of gin and tonics on the terrace at the Bowery Hotel. Elizabeth Edwards couldn't get out of NC at all and her session this AM had to be rescheduled.

Robbie Perkins says the mayor needs a raise.

He doesn't go as far as John Hammer and I did, but it's a start.

Allen Johnson has an interesting column about Billy Yow's sales-tax crusade.

Yow has a point, but he fell behind early in the battle over framing the issue.

The trick was to make this about how we pay for things the people of Guilford County keep voting for.

Instead, it was framed as an up-or-down decision on raising our own taxes.

Framing matters. A million years ago I wrote that the key to the major league baseball question was how it was pitched: if it was framed as a vote on baseball, it had a chance; as a vote on taxes, no chance. We know how that went.

At first glance it may seem ironic to have Yow pressing for a tax increase, but it's really a practical response to the fact that the people of Guilford County keep voting to spend money. Property taxes can't go up forever, and the cost of bond referendums seems to be somewhat disconnected from votes to support them. A targeted, broad-based tax to raise some portion of that money is worth considering.

Related.

I'd be happy to have Duke Energy install and maintain solar panels on my roof, thanks.

Pat McCrory should use the Rogers profile in his campaign literature (and use Rogers as a model for his own outreach to environmentalists).

I watch television with my laptop open, check e-mail and surf the Web during phone calls. I like to think of this behavior as "multitasking" or Continuous Partial Attention, because that makes it sound like I'm doing it on purpose, but I know that's not really the case.

My newspaper column starts with Nick Carr's essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," and kind of meanders from there.

You can read the whole thing after the jump.

The ownership society goes back to renting.

“We’re not going to see homeownership rates like that for a generation,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

Rail growth faces capacity constraints.

Even with improvements to our regional service, NC has a long way to go.

Dook football's most successful day in years comes in court.

Louisville sued Dook for dropping out of some scheduled games. "Duke's lawyers argued that the Blue Devils football team, 13-90 since 1999, was so bad any Division I team could have replaced them on the Cardinals' schedule."

Happy birthday to my best friend.

Previously.

Related.

Waiting for the latest Ford F-150 pickup?

You'll have to wait a while longer.

"Ford is adjusting the public introduction timing of the new 2009 Ford F-150 by approximately two months due to the industry-wide slowdown in the U.S. truck market and the need to sell down dealer inventory of the current model. The new F-150 now will go on sale in late fall."

America's best-selling vehicle since 1991 recently lost that distinction, falling all the way to number five in the latest report.

Lunchtime conversation: Wachovia's negative amortization problem continues to grow.

Cheerful stuff.

Anyone want to buy a used bank?

The format is debatable but the topic is interesting: McCain and Obama camps square off over technology via Twitter.

Drupal-based N&R beta site.

Details here.

The AP vs blogger fight ends but is not over.

Bad review of the day, by A.O. Scott on Mike Myers' The Love Guru:

...[the joke is] somehow less amusing than it should be.

Which might sum up "The Love Guru" in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie's awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word 'unfunny' surely applies [...] but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, 'The Love Guru' is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

More from Slate's Dana Stevens: "[Myers' character] swings between vainglory and ravenous insecurity in a way that seems uncomfortably autobiographical...the movie audience sat in painful silence. It's difficult to get across just how unfunny the jokes in The Love Guru are."

"HuffPo wants to take on local newspapers."

Interesting. I think some version of the idea could work on the local level, although it needn't be a part of the HuffPo stable.

Apple fans: rabid but not necessarily wrong.

I never fill out the "What are you doing right now?" thing on Facebook, if only because I can never decide between "Ed is bitter" and "Ed is regretting something he said in 1983."

Anyway, here' s one from a friend's page today (a real friend, not just a FB friend): "Melanie is having surgery Friday am and will be awaiting for the pathology results."

A lot of people will be waiting with her, in person and on line.

There may be many reasons for Circuit City's problems, but the path from reducing service quality to losing customers to reporting bad numbers seems pretty linear.

"[T]he rate at which seas warmed and rose between 1961 and 2003 was about 50 percent greater than previous estimates."

More: "Those rejecting the enormous body of evidence pointing to a growing human influence on climate had embraced some transitory findings implying that the oceans were cooling. This new work may help resolve that particular line of debate. The formula holds: more CO2 = warming world = less ice + higher seas + lots of changing climate patterns."

"The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing 'war crimes' and called for those responsible to be held to account."

More from Taguba: "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."