EdCone.com

What a strange column on teacher pay by Charles Davenport Jr. It starts out alright, noting that NC teachers have done well in recent years, so maybe this is not the moment to complain about the pain caused by budget cuts. But then it meanders into union-bashing, thinktank-quoting, and flat-out trashing of teachers. Feels to me like he's trolling for angry letters more than offering insight on public education.

UPDATE: Terry Stoops from the John Locke Foundation discusses his teacher-pay research in the comments below. Some good feedback from a real live teacher, too.

"George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services." Not quite the common ground I was seeking in last week's column.

Facebook status for a local legislator: "Pricey Harrison wonders what the point is in being the majority party if we are not going to do the right thing- whether it is a budget that is not balanced on the backs of teachers/state employees/ the most vulnerable at the state level or solid energy and health care policies at the federal level."

Caveat Emptor is the title on this post about development and hosed homeowners along the planned route of GSO's urban loop. It's a phrase that applies not just to home-buyers but to voters. We live in a city and a county where politics are dominated by the real estate industry. We allow that to happen. And this is what we get.

"An elder among the nation's preserved sanctuaries, Great Smoky Mountains' half-million acres are still as wild as 9 million tourists a year will allow." The most-visited national park at 75.

Obama disappoints on mountaintop removal: "It makes us wonder what standards -- if any -- the administration is using."

Most Americans would be delighted to have the quality of care found in places like Rochester, Minnesota, or Seattle, Washington, or Durham, North Carolina—all of which have world-class hospitals and costs that fall below the national average. If we brought the cost curve in the expensive places down to their level, Medicare’s problems (indeed, almost all the federal government’s budget problems for the next fifty years) would be solved. The difficulty is how to go about it. Physicians in places like McAllen behave differently from others. The $2.4-trillion question is why. Unless we figure it out, health reform will fail.

I'm sure his answer will be popular with the docs in Texas:

About fifteen years ago, it seems, something began to change in McAllen. A few leaders of local institutions took profit growth to be a legitimate ethic in the practice of medicine. Not all the doctors accepted this. But they failed to discourage those who did. So here, along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Square Dance Capital of the World, a medical community came to treat patients the way subprime-mortgage lenders treated home buyers: as profit centers.

John Hart's The Last Child debuts at #17 on the NYT best-seller list.

UPDATE: Now #10.

Last night I became the next-to-last person in the world to watch Slumdog Millionaire. I enjoyed it, and then I enjoyed this scathing review.

Why Your Stadium Sucks.

I think Winston-Salem fans should make a case for their unfinished ballpark.

Greensboro has issues of its own: our stadium is great, and somebody else paid for it. That drives some people crazy.

"People are going to look back on this as the golden age of investment fraud."

The Charlotte area had its share. Thank goodness staid old Greensboro kept its money in respectable firms like AIG, Wachovia, and Lincoln Financial.

Our new strategy for North Korea: erase all of Kim Jong Il's Facebook friends. "The federal government will talk about defensive capabilities, but hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of people will be thinking about how to use cyberspace against U.S. enemies."

Another day, another challenger to Google. Meet Bing, a "decision engine" coming soon from Microsoft.

WolframAlpha doesn't know about it yet.

Blodget: "Every dollar of revenue and profit Oracle, IBM, SAP, Salesforce, et al, generate is a dollar that Microsoft is leaving on the table in a misguided attempt to make headway in a business it has no core competency in."

More local stories today on TSOT, including the good folks from Elsewhere and Monkeywhale, and live music from Amelia's Mechanics.

Yesterday's news panelists (l-r, Schlosser, Catanoso, Johnson, Kilimanjaro, Hammer; click image to enlarge) made a strong case for Greensboro's new FedEx hub. Given the constraints of time, they can be forgiven for glossing over the costs associated with it. But Allen Johnson's glib dismissal of people who questioned the hub struck me as off-key. Some of us were asking questions that remain unanswered. The cost/benefit analysis may well tilt toward benefit, but we still have not assessed the costs; that will have to be done in real time.

Tim Connor writes about my favorite photog: "Her technique is formidable, but the intensity of her vision can't be broken down into technique."

Long ago my friend Dana and I visited the Bronx Zoo. This was shortly after two polar bears had killed a kid at a Brooklyn zoo, and the crowd was buzzing with pungently-phrased boasts and dares about sneaking in to challenge the bears of the Bronx. That buzz was about the only entertaining part of the day. The polar bears themselves were slothful. A giraffe licked the painted wall of its tiny pen. That's when I realized I kind of hated zoos.

In 2002 Lisa and I took the kids to DC. At the National Zoo our then-eight-year-old daughter saw a bald eagle sitting in a cage the size of a large television set. That's when she realized that zoos are kind of depressing.

Our zoo avoids many of the issues that make old-school zoos so unpleasant. Elsewhere, people are wondering about the whole concept.

Loud noises in a small place: "If your only source of news was cable television, you might think that the Senate was gearing up for an historic fight over a Supreme Court hopeful so out of the mainstream that it might be worth questioning the sanity of the President who nominated her."

We watched Religulous. It was mildly amusing, but watching Bill Maher snicker at literalists and break the news that people sometimes kill in the name of religion got old pretty fast.

I spoke with a Madoff investor (not the famous one in Greensboro). She says she was late enough to the party that she's likely to get 100% of her money back, making her stake in the Ponzi scheme one of the safest bets she could have made last year.

So over at CIOI we published an interview with the CIO of a bankrupt consulting firm, BearingPoint. That drew some hostile, anonymous comments from people claiming to have worked at the company; we removed those comments, saying that personal attacks on the exec were not welcome, and allegations about the conduct of the business needed to have real names attached.

Then something interesting happened: real people came forward to sign comments about the company.

Suddenly we're practicing a new kind of journalism, done iteratively and in public.

There's got to be a fascinating story to tell about a multi-billion-dollar company -- heir to some of the most famous names in the business -- that overleveraged itself and ran aground in the recession. Finding the resources to report it the old-fashioned way is tough these days, but it looks like we may have found another way to skin the cat.

WUNC's State of Things broadcasts from Greensboro today and tomorrow. Jim Schlosser and I go first. Our job is to provide some context and color about our hometown and its history for an audience that may know very little about it. We have ten minutes.

Jeri Rowe writes about my favorite photog and her show on mill village life, which runs at the GSO Historical Museum through this weekend. You can hear Lisa talk about the show and see several images here.

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

Do we really need someone who thinks this way on the Supreme Court?

I might have watched a Kobe-LeBron showdown in the NBA finals, but now I'm kind of rooting for a Magic-Nuggets matchup, which would be surprising and fresh and I could ignore as thoroughly as I have the other post-Michael Jordan series.

"Americans may have to get used to unemployment greater than 8 percent for the first time since 1983 and an economy that won’t grow much beyond 2 percent as a consequence of the lost confidence in consumer credit that shattered financial markets." Not all the consequences of a more-frugal society are negative; Americans can thrive in a world of $300 Coach handbags. Similar point made here in typically apocalyptic fashion.

Guilford GOP chair Bill Wright endorses Chad Adams for NCGOP chair, rather than his predecessor in the county job, Marcus Kindley.

Removing comments at the day job.

"Denying judicial nominees of both parties, who seek to servie their country, an up or down vote simply is not fair. It's certainly not the intention of our Founding Fathers." Richard Burr, 2005. He was not alone.

Some people skip the blog comments and call me directly to tell me how crappy my columns are.

Got one such call today, which somehow turned into a rant about the awfulness of Europe, an awfulness exemplified by the alleged lack of innovation coming from that socialist hellhole.

As the designated spokesman for global liberalism, I was challenged to name a single important invention of the contemporary era that originated in Europe.

I thought for approximately 1.5 seconds and came up with the World Wide Web, which gets bonus points from coming out of a massive multi-government project.

Response? "Name another one!"

The last time a Sotomayor nomination came before the Senate, she did pretty well.

"...The Complete Idiot's Guide to 2012 (a bit redundant)." Boy, is he going to feel stupid if the world ends. Him, too.

I don't know how carefully Americans follow real news, but judging by conversations from South Elm Street to Pilot Mountain (left, today), approximately everyone knows that the Obamas got a Portuguese Water Dog.

"This is the true ground of opposition to war, namely, that a Christian is to live a life that does away with the occasion for war." George Fox: An Autobiography, edited by Rufus Jones.

My father used the expression "2 cents plain" in honor of Harry Golden.

"Politics should be a means to an end, not a sporting event in which you root for one team and against the other." I am confident that my newspaper column will completely change the dynamics of American political discourse.

Tom Fetzer: "The fact that I am heterosexual is a matter of public record."

Same goes for Cary Allred!

And, for that matter, Lady Easley.

Marketing call from Time Warner Cable, wanting me to upgrade services and switch my internet from Earthlink. I said that until they resolved the tiered pricing plan, I was looking for ways to give TWC less money, not more.

She said, can you educate me on that issue a bit, I'm not really familiar with it. That sounded like a scripted answer, and, after I gave her a thumbnail version of my concerns, she said, well, that's down the road a ways...I politely asked her to put in her notes that I don't trust the company and hope to find an alternative. She politely tried to sell me one more thing, then politely accepted and returned my wishes for a nice weekend.

Our friends at Conservative NC get a little link love from the Dome.

$5 gets you a lot of food at Carniceria El Mercadito on Spring Garden Street. Take-out only, but Lindley Park is just down the road. Don't be confused when you walk into a convenience store -- the restaurant window is in the back, across from the butcher shop.

"Essentially, four conditions would have to be met before a Skynet-like entity could take over the world."

We -- they -- aren't there. Yet.

America sucks at socialism: "The point of the warrants is that taxpayers participate in the upside," Johnson said in an interview. "It defeats the whole purpose if you’re going to sell them way below market price." Not if the purpose is to socialize risk and privatize profits.

"Blue Double Cross" is the headline on Krugman's column about an ad campaign by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, which undercuts industry promises of support for Obama's healthcare reform plans.

More here on BCBSNC (a great acronym, when you think about it) and the market for health insurance in this state.

TypePad says it's fixed the software and you can once again embed links in comments. So, have at it, and we'll see how it works.

WUNC's The State of Things, a Chapel Hill-based radio program that broadcasts from Durham, will come to you live from Greensboro next Thursday and Friday.

UPDATE: Tix available for Friday's show, which features live music by local talent.

Americans for Prosperity is promoting free bus rides from points across the state to a tea party tax protest in Raleigh on June 3.  Featured guests include homegirl Mary Katharine Ham and Joe the Plumber.

Of course, in life there are no free bus rides. This post has links to funding info on AFP, and there's a list of "coalition members" at the registration page above.

This event is not feeling very grass-rootsy to me.

A brief interview with my favorite photographer.

Maybe I missed it, but I couldn't find anything at the Carrboro Citizen website about the loan by Carrboro to the newspaper.

Insult to injury: Judge Wallace Dixon peppers opinion trashing Andrew Giuliani's suit against Dook with bad golf puns, citation of Caddyshack.

Policework once again proves effective against terrorism: "They stated that they wanted to commit jihad."

"If he had been a teacher or lawyer, there'd be no way he could return to his old job." Right, but he was a football player. Let Michael Vick play.