EdCone.com

A Greensboro boy in Queens:

Perhaps the most entertaining match of the day came in Louis Armstrong Stadium when John Isner outlasted Victor Hanescu of Romania, the No. 28 seed, 6-1, 7-6 (14), 7-6 (5). Isner, a big-serving American, made a splash here two years ago when he was just out of college, advancing to the third round and taking a set from Federer with the Ashe Stadium crowd cheering wildly for him.

Former GSO police chief David Wray gets a nice new job as federal security director for the Charlotte and Asheville airports.

Left-wing kook Bob Dole: "I would suggest that the day Congress reconvenes, President Obama's version of reform should be introduced by Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. Health-care reform is the vital issue of our time, and Obama should be out front with his specific plan on this make-or-break issue."

One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy "legacy" is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and "torch passing" rhetoric in general. The legacy is not as uniformly evil as he pretends, or as benevolent as the cultists would have it, but Hitchens is on the money about the celebrity dynasty stuff.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?

CHENEY: I am.

Transcript. I thought this was kind of odd, too.

"[T]he mere hint of bailout profits for the nearly year-old Troubled Asset Relief Program has been received as a welcome surprise. It has also spurred hopes that the government could soon get out of the banking business."

That sounds good..but wait!

To encourage banks to pick through the wreckage of their collapsed competitors, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has agreed to assume most of the risk on $80 billion in loans and other assets...The agency's total exposure is about six times the amount remaining in its fund that guarantees consumers' deposits, exposing taxpayers to a big, new risk.

I respect the N&R's decision not to publish the location of neo-Nazi meeting in Greensboro, and I think the critics have a good point, too. I understand the need to protest the meeting, and the impulse to ignore it.

Our friend Silas Newcomb makes the paper for his pogo prowess. More on the event here.

"They put that taser to your ass!" City Council candidate Ryan Shell scores an interview with a potential voter.

If Mike Easley, the jet-setting former governor, was dropped into a Borges story where he met an earlier iteration of himself — Mike Easley, the tough prosecutor — well, that would sure be an interesting story to read. One of the random thoughts collected in today's newspaper column.

[Y]ou really have two corporate parties who in their own way and their own time are serving the interests of basically a narrow set of economic interests in the country...these narrow interests seem to win, determine the outcomes, no matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter who has their hands on the levers of powers, these narrow interests determine the outcomes in Washington, even when they have to run roughshod over the interests of ordinary Americans.

More from Moyers: "100,000 Americans can’t protect the villages of Afghanistan – and now they say we’re going to be there to build a nation – we’re not good at building other nations."

A retired CEO, one of the wise men of North Carolina business, asked me today what I thought could power economic growth and a vigorous recovery in the absence of consumer spending.

It was a trick question, because he didn't know the answer, either.

"We have been surprised by this response," Cerberus chief Stephen Feinberg and co-founder William Richter wrote in a letter delivered to clients late Thursday.

Really? Makes sense to me. "Clients are withdrawing more than $5.5 billion, or nearly 71% of the hedge fund assets, in response to big investment losses and their own need for cash."

Previously linked: nice doggie.

Roch's got a point -- the City could make its communications much more efficient by having its email subject lines say something useful, and by pasting info into the email body. I don't want to open attachments unless I need to, and DocX is a tool of Satan.

I've never understood the antipathy Jim Melvin arouses in some people, but I do like the spending proposals mentioned here.

Not even trying to deny it: "In their book The Way to Win, two influential Washington journalists, John Harris (editor of the Politico) and Mark Halperin of Time had a chapter 'How Matt Drudge Rules our World.'"

Obviously Breitbart can say what he wants about Ted Kennedy or anything else -- but the corporate media is not obligated to dance to his tune.

Honestly, though, it's hard to see a lot of Breitbartism in the corporate media's coverage of Kennedy's death. Dead celebrities are big business, and that trumps pretty much everything else.

Krugman says we need to keep spending, and that we can afford the added debt: "According to the White House projections, by 2019, net federal debt will be around 70 percent of G.D.P. That’s not good, but it’s within a range that has historically proved manageable for advanced countries, even those with relatively weak governments." Healthcare reform, he says, is a key element of fiscal sustainability.

A story I missed in my summer haze: no more non-stop service from GSO to LGA. That sucks a lot.

A not-so-great exegesis of True Blood. If you're going to run a picture of Godric with your Cliffs Notes, at least mention that he's the vampire Jesus. The Dionysian sub-plot deserved more love, too, but points are awarded for calling the show "luridly voluptuous."

Lisa Scheer took this pic earlier in August at the Jersey Shore.

Six months ago Roubini was saying that we were six months away from some serious chicken-roosting in the bank biz. We may not see big nationalizations, assuming the Tinkerbell strategy works, but his timetable was not far off the mark: "The U.S. added 111 lenders to its list of 'problem banks,' a jump that suggests rising bank failures may force the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to deplete a reserve fund that shrank 40 percent this year."

"What makes Forest Hills different from—and much better than—most modern suburbs is not just the density,walkability, and architectural variety. It is also the attention to detail, whether in Olmsted's planting strips or Atterbury's distinctive street lamps. The designers understood that one of the great challenges of building a planned community from scratch is creating an instant sense of belonging." From a slideshow tour of a nice neighborhood in Queens.

Rhino reports that GSO will name Rashad Young, the city manager of Dayton, Ohio, as our new city manager next week. Nice scoop for the weekly.

Looks like Young is familiar with some of the issues he'll face in GSO: "The city of Dayton and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have agreed to settle a race discrimination suit over the city’s hiring practices at its police and fire departments."

Forgetting New Orleans: "Gulf Coast leaders give the Obama administration's recovery efforts a grade of 'D+.'"

Whatever else Lisa and I do wrong or right as parents, we've been pretty serious about making family dinners an integral part of our lives. I'm working on a newspaper column about food and family values, so I was interested to see this post (scroll past the intro paragraph). Not unrelated.

Thomas Paine vs enhanced interrogation. I'm sure this will settle the issue once and for all.

Dan Gillmor on anonymity: necessary but problematic.

Least shocking statement: "Dowd [...] seem[s] to be missing some key points and drawing the wrong lessons."

Health insurance reform made simple.

UPDATE: Furriners and their strange ways.

"Some area residents are raising questions about why meetings of the recently formed Aerotropolis Leadership Board aren't open to the public when the group is developing plans for the region and is affiliated with an economic development partnership that receives government funding." Link via PP, who ties in news from the west.

I'm sensing a pattern: Whether you feel FedEx will be for better or worse, it is something that is being done ''for'' or ''to'' the local citizenry, not by them.

My first reaction when I hear about public art projects is dread -- a fear of chosen-by-committee artwork that tries to please everyone and does not please anyone.

Greensboro's Public Art Endowment, though, seems different, more ambitious. I could be very happy with the kind of stuff seen in this video.

The group, which hopes to raise $2 million toward the funding of public art, will soon announce its first project, a Billy Lee sculpture for the Bicentennial Park at Market and Eugene Streets (scroll left on this image to see the location outside the Guilford County Courthouse).

If you are not spending some time rolling around on the floor with your dog each day then you may not be getting full value out of your canine investment, and your dog is getting short-changed, too. (Click image to enlarge)

N&R covers Mark Horvath's Invisible People tour as it hits Greensboro. Front page of the print edition, complete with a much-deserved shout out to Michele.

You don't have to be a Doomer to question the long-term sustainability of the petroleum economy; as a non-Doomer myself, I did not find the arguments in this column to be very convincing. I don't doubt his facts, just the weight of those facts in the larger scheme of things.

The new normal meets the old normal:

CBO now expects the unemployment rate to be near 10 percent through most of 2010. Its new projections will show that the unemployment rate will only return to more normal levels in 2013 or even 2014, more than six years after the collapse of the housing bubble threw the economy into recession...

...The rational response to the news that the economy will be far worse than had previously been projected should be a demand for more stimulus. After all, why should millions of people lose their jobs, their homes, and their health just because the people who managed the country's economic policy over the last decade were incompetent?

Unfortunately, the same people who wrecked the economy are largely still running it and they still have the same set of economic priorities.

Lending prowess beyond the mortgage market: "Bank of America, the only major card-issuer that didn’t sell any [asset-backed securities], lacks enough quality loans in its credit-card trust to sell TALF bonds without being labeled a subprime issuer."

New, improved Rendition^TM, with slightly less evil!

I wish the lapdog media would grow a freaking backbone.

Roubini says recovery will be "U-shaped, anaemic and below trend for at least a couple of years, after a couple of quarters of rapid growth driven by the restocking of inventories and a recovery of production from near Depression levels."

Also, "true deleveraging has not begun yet because the losses of financial institutions have been socialised and put on government balance sheets." [Brit spelling courtesy of FT]

And a double dip is looking more likely:

[P]olicymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they take large fiscal deficits seriously and raise taxes, cut spending and mop up excess liquidity soon, they would undermine recovery and tip the economy back into stag-deflation (recession and deflation).

But if they maintain large budget deficits, bond market vigilantes will punish policymakers. Then, inflationary expectations will increase, long-term government bond yields would rise and borrowing rates will go up sharply, leading to stagflation.

The season's surprise best-seller: Ms. Child’s recipes feature instructions like “thin out with more spoonfuls of cream” (Veau Prince Orloff, or veal with onions and mushrooms, pages 355-7) or “sauté the bacon in the butter for several minutes” (Navets à la Champenoise, or turnip casserole, pages 488-9). And for a generation raised to believe that Jell-O should have marshmallows in it, there is plenty of aspic — the kind made with meat.

Related: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I watched the end of the Wyndham on teevee. Greensboro won. The ending was dramatic*, the blimp views were pretty, and there has to be some branding value to all those mentions of the fantabulous locale.

*For golf. Well, for non-Major golf. Not True Blood dramatic -- not Tiny Bill the Sensitive Vampire snarling, "Take your hands off Sookeh" at the Horned God's avatar dramatic -- but still kind of exciting.

"What you learned from that episode in 1937 is that it's not enough to be recovering," says Christina Romer, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers and an expert on the Great Depression. "You don't want to do anything when you start recovering that nips it off too soon." The good news is that it's not 1932 anymore.

What part of "you lost because, among other things, people rejected your views on healthcare" does John McCain not understand?

Unfortunately, the Democrats have similar powers of comprehension.

Lisa Scheer took this pic earlier this month at the Jersey Shore.

Phony balance is not objectivity: "Armey's points about Medicare and Social Security benefits were left hanging out there, viewers wrote to challenge them and The NewsHour wasn't going to clear the air. Armey made much the same charge on NBC's Meet the Press program last Sunday and it also went largely unchallenged." Say anything, it's just teevee.

Hating a legend: "Fenway isn't different. Fenway is merely old and has long enjoyed the happy luck of being located among the most literary-minded regional chauvinists in the Union."

Roch wants the same insurance granny gets. Why?

During the past ten years, my insurance premiums have totaled just over $20,000. My monthly premiums have risen every year...My "non-profit" insurer pays its CEO $4M a year, spends 18% of its premiums on administrative costs, rewards its top couple hundred sales people with Caribbean vacations and is currently spending my premiums on advertising trying to block health care reform. It also employs a cadre of nurses not as care providers, but as gatekeeping bureaucrats whose jobs are to ration care by approving or denying payment.

And of course as a National Socialist, he'd use the savings to annex the Sudetenland.

Privatizing warfare is a bad idea for so many reasons, we really should stop doing it.

"For those of you still waiting for a surge of foreclosure sales, the truth is you'll likely be waiting a long time."

Why? "[D]efying logic to do what is politically expedient while simultaneously inflating bank earnings and bonuses and without regard to future consequences IS the new normal. We are yet again trading tomorrow for today."

Via WSJ, which adds a bit to the story.

"It would be really wrong if that was in any way what this said." That's from part two of the interview that begins below.

"[T]here's a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line."

The whole OMG REV WRIGHT MUSLIM BLACK BLACK BLACK thing may have obscured even for some fans the fact that Obama ain't much of a liberal, but he could at least act like a moderate, couldn't he?