EdCone.com

Awesomest genre plays New Year's (thnx to alert reader PLN for the pointer). Previously.

Billy Yow is on a tear. First he forgets that Greensboro residents pay county taxes, then he tries to take Steve Arnold's legal and ethical woes off the table as a political issue: "'I don’t think his personal business has anything to do with his business as commissioner,' Yow said."

The county needs to pay its share for the library system. Charging non-GSO residents for use would cost the library system $300k in direct state funding, plus other forms of state support, and more importantly it would undermine the whole idea of public libraries and hurt county residents who need libraries the most.

John Hammer does a good job of explaining the controversy around texting by City Council members, and the real estate dispute behind the story.

The texts in question are not scandalous (sorry, Joe). Still, the Council should weigh appearances of special access, and Mayor Knight's calls for courtesy to those in attendance, when considering the use of electronic communications during meetings.

Worst footnotes of the year from financial filings.

Six years ago today: "Spare me the zeal of converts."

Bruce Schneier on progress in airline security: "I've said there are two things - reinforcing the cockpit doors, and convincing passengers they have to fight back. Everything else has been a red herring."

Frisking granny doesn't make much sense, but I guess we'll be doing more of it now.

America offline: "As a stranger to the Web, my brother belongs to one of the nation's fastest-shrinking minorities."

I read online that it's possible to use the web and also to turn it off from time to time.

Estate tax reset even worse than it appears: "[T]here will be many more losers than winners under estate-tax repeal, and the losers will be among Americans who are farther down the wealth ladder."

Seven years ago today: "Why is the movie Elrond such a jerk? We know from the books that he is half-human himself, but in the films he's like a WASP who compensates for a Jewish ancestor by being an anti-Semite."

Not unrelated: Tolkien's Jews.

Also: Crusaders vs Muslims in Middle Earth.

A friend told me recently that he's never read any Graham Greene. I was envious, because he has before him the pleasure of discovering a particularly lucid and interesting writer.

I came fairly late to Greene, and have savored his work slowly instead of rushing through the canon, so that I still have a few books left to read.

I employ the same economy with Gore Vidal's historical novels. I'm allowing myself Julian over this holiday season, which led me via the magic of associative thinking and hyperlinks to the map at left, which I'm posting here so I'll remember to go back and follow a few more links.

In Raleigh as it is in Greensboro: "Creation of the express-review process provides the clearest glimpse yet of how Easley used his authority to help developers who needed permits, including those at the center of questions about him."

Senate, heal thyself: "[A]bout 8 percent of major bills faced a filibuster in the 1960s. This decade, that jumped to 70 percent. The problem with the minority party continually making the majority party fail, of course, is that it means neither party can ever successfully govern the country." 

Three years ago today: "It was a veritbable Benetton ad of present-exchangers and gift-card wielders, and nobody shot each other, even in the hectic parking lot."

Armed robbery reported in NIP -- couple held up at gun-point on their doorstep as they came home on Christmas Eve. Suspects are two black males.

Happy Holidays!

"Mr. Obama's approach to this battle should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his career or his campaign for the White House."

Still seems to be surprising to some folks, though.

Switches, ashes, and several nice lumps of coal.

My cup runneth over.

Merry Christmas.

We're down to a skeleton crew here at EC.c -- the reporters have been calling in sick all week, it's a union holiday for the typesetters and press crew, and the sales team has long since decamped for St. Maarten. Of the dozen or so souls still in the office, not one of us has even begun our Christmas shopping....

Have a lovely Christmas Eve.

A new reader asks about Percy Walker.

His blog is gone (MySpace still active) but memories of the Greensboro billionaire will never die.

Guilford County says I can pay my property tax via officialpayments.com.

Advantages: I get interest on the balance until my credit card bill is due in late January; save on stamp and envelope.

Disadvantages: "convenience fee" charged by payment service is about 8.5x the amount I'd earn in interest if I use the highest money market rates I can find online, probably more like 20x for many accounts, and is far more in absolute terms than I'd even consider paying.

Anyone got a stamp?

Three years ago today: "[W]e preservationists are the real dumbasses...That has to change or we need to shut the hell up."

"The policy has been to prop up prices, not people."

A reaction to an article bearing the headline, "Full Housing Crisis Effect Yet To Be Felt."

"At 7 a.m. the next day, the researchers roused the subjects from bed (a wake-up that did not include coffee or aspirin) and asked them to rate the severity of their hangovers."

The experiment was flawed from the start by excluding coffee and aspirin, which, along with water the night before and a large greasy lunch the next day, are key variables in any meaningful research into this subject.

Flaws aside, I thought of the study last night while ordering a vodka at the 28th annual iteration of a Christmas party given by old friends, as I knew today was going to be a busy one.

I was reminded in due course that vodka works quicker than brown liquor. Or maybe I just drink it faster? A discussion was held on the exceptional qualities of gin and tequila, which seem to operate according to different rules from other spirits.

I felt fine this morning, fwiw, although the usual ration of coffee was involved.

"I'd love to see more of the folks who turn out for the Blandwood Ball come out for this event," I wrote in 2008 after attending the annual gala for the Greensboro Civil Rights museum.

So much for that idea.

The 2010 Blandwood Ball is scheduled for January 30, the same night as the museum gala.

Bonus points for the Blandwood Ball being a fundraiser for Preservation Greensboro, and the International Civil Rights Center & Museum being one of the most meaningful preservation projects imaginable.

Double bonus for this being the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins, and the eve of the long-awaited opening of the museum.

Three years ago today: "We disagree on some political issues, we trade hard shots online -- but it's important to remember that blogs and comments and media and politics are not the whole world."

I ran into Marcus at the same fine affair on Friday night. It was even more fun with the snow falling, and I think he knew I was sincere when I said he could stay at our house if his ride home looked treacherous.

It's the most redunderful time of the year for local teevee news.

Maybe calling it a "War on Drugs" is a self-fulfilling prophecy:

For two years, the center of Mexico's bloody drug war has been this gritty city of 1.5 million people across the river from El Paso, Texas...In 2008, 1,600 people were killed in drug-related hits. This year, more than 2,500 have died. By some estimates, Juárez's approximately 165 deaths per 100,000 residents make it the murder capital of the world. That compares with 48 violent deaths per 100,000 residents of Baghdad.

Apparently there is a golf course near Pinehurst that is booking tee-times for today.

But your new bus might smell a little funny: "[T]he three firms hired by the FDIC to sell furnishings from shuttered branches and warehouses stuffed with repossessed collateral [...] are having a banner year."

Six years ago today:

"How's your brain?," I asked him.

"Great," he said.

Obama, the wild-eyed socialist pragmatic Senate veteran, may get something like the best bill possible a good-enough bill under a broken system. 

Advice for disheartened progressives:

Start organizing for the next health-care fight. Enactment of a single bill will not mark the end of the struggle. It will open a series of new opportunities. It's a lot easier to improve a system premised on the idea that everyone should have health coverage than to create such a system in the first place.

Nate Silver is tired of arguing with would-be bill-killers.

Brits rebel against Simon Cowell: "A grassroots Facebook campaign, launched by Jon and Tracy Morter, sought to game the system by encouraging music fans to support Rage Against The Machine's profane, anti-authoritarian anthem 'Killing In The Name' as the Christmas single."

I've been critical of Golf Digest for being in the tank for Tiger, but I have to admire their willingness to address some of the issues at hand, and to update a new cover that could otherwise have become a punchline (click image to enlarge).

It was supposed to be different this time:

The Fed's failure to foresee the crisis or to require adequate safeguards happened in part because it did not understand the risks that banks were taking...

Regulatory agencies exist to lean against the wind. But rather than looking for warning signs, the Fed had joined -- and at times defined -- the mainstream consensus among policymakers that financial innovations had made banking safer. Bernanke said the economy had entered an era of smaller and less frequent downturns, which he and others called "the great moderation."

"In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s."

You can carve worse 10-year periods out of the Crash/Depression years, if that's any comfort.

From 2000 through November 2009, investors would have been far better off owning bonds, which posted gains ranging from 5.6% to more than 8% depending on the sector, according to Ibbotson. Gold was the best-performing asset, up 15% a year this decade after losing 3% each year during the 1990s.

This past decade looks even worse when the impact of inflation is considered.

Asheville councilman Cecil Bothwell (and North Carolina's unconstitutional constitution) make the national news. Well, MSNBC. (Thnx to GM for the pointer.)

A profile of Robert P. George, "this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker."

George's admirers say he is revitalizing a strain of Catholic natural-law thinking that goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas...His critics, including many of his fellow Catholic scholars, argue that he is turning the church into a tool of Republican Party. They say he is too focused on the mechanics of sex and morality, neglecting the other sides of the Christian message: the corruption of human reason through original sin, the need for forgiveness and charity and the chance for redemption...

"George argues that reason alone shows that heterosexual sodomy and homosexual sex are morally wrong." Calling things natural and reasonable does not make them so, even if you count all the angels on the head of the pin, as George all but acknowledges: "He admits the argument for marriage between a man and a woman can require 'somewhat technical philosophical analysis.'"

Joe's been posting excerpts from the Manhattan Declaration; his conclusion is here, his intro here, several more in between.

Five years ago today: "People who write for free are worried about losing money they don't make to a company that doesn't have a clear plan for capitalizing on their work...My advice: write for the same reasons today that you did yesterday."

Soon-to-disappear Radio comments on that post after the jump.

As I wrote more recently, "There was a moment of idealism and harmony, which lasted about 18 hours after the first local blog conference. The first cause of discord was not politics, but money."

You'll want this one full screen, high def:

Biden on Senate health bill: "culmination of a struggle begun by Theodore Roosevelt nearly a century ago;" the perfect is enemy of the good; great progress on insurance coverage and access; "this country’s single largest deficit-reduction measure in a dozen years."

Unhappiness on the left. 

The case for mandates without a public option not sucking, which is met with skepticism.

Krugman, who pre-Bidened the "good enough" argument earlier this week, says it's not over even when it's over: "social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by." A possible example?

Worst ideas of the decade.

I'd add: Invading Iraq without a Plan, Market Worship, and Vampire Saturation.

Five years ago today: "Merry Christmas. There, I said it, and I meant it, too."

Ian McDowell lists creepy Christmas traditions, including a favorite of this blog, Krampus.

Some he left out: Christmas sweaters, fruitcake, Bill O'Reilly, the year-end letter...

Not long ago, not far away. Dog frolicsome. Fire lit. Etc.

Because 11% unemployment is not high enough?

"I would have loved it if just one council member spoke up and said hell no, we don’t want stimulus money, period."

Fortunately, nine out of nine council-members figured out that voting against a non-binding application for federal funds would be a terrible idea.

I wish they could find a way to get stimulus money for the aquatic center.

Jerk blasts cheater: "We've gotten into this situation where integrity is really lacking and that's why I'm glad I'm not coaching," [Knight] said. "You see we've got a coach at Kentucky who put two schools on probation and he's still coaching. I really don't understand that."

The National Enquirer angle is pretty much as expected, but the Golf Digest deal tells you all you need to know about golf "journalism."

Under Golf Digest's contract with Mr. Woods, the monthly, which is owned by Condé Nast Publications Inc., spent as much as $1 million annually on donations to the Tiger Woods Foundation, printing the charity's annual report and sponsoring many of Mr. Woods's preferred tournaments, according to a person familiar with the terms. In return, Mr. Woods agreed to contribute monthly articles on golf techniques and limit his appearances in competing publications.

WaPo picks up on a hot NC story:

"It's sort of like which devil do you fear the most?" asked Gary Pearce, a longtime North Carolina Democratic operative. "Are you more afraid of the party base or are you more afraid of the health-care reform opponents?"

Kissell picked the latter, and it may have been the wrong bet. Conservative opponents to health-care reform are unlikely to vote for a Democrat regardless of how he votes, Pearce said, yet Kissell cannot win reelection without the support of his base.

"That's why they call them freshmen -- because they make freshmen mistakes," Pearce said. "That's why a lot of them don't become sophomores."

At least Summers is now in a job where he can't cause any further harm:

The swaps, which assumed that interest rates would rise, proved so toxic that [Harvard] agreed to pay banks a total of almost $1 billion to terminate them. Most of the wrong-way bets were made in 2004, when Lawrence Summers, now President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, led the university. Cranes were recently removed from the construction site of a $1 billion science center that was to be the expansion’s centerpiece, a reminder of Summers’s ambition. The school suspended work on the building last week.

Previously.

Krugman: "[P]ass the health care bill."

Why?

First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

All of this would be paid for in large part with the first serious effort ever to rein in rising health care costs.

I'm sure this can be traced to the Community Reinvestment Act: "Homeowners with mortgages of more than $1 million are defaulting at almost twice the U.S. rate."

"You are just starting to see the tip of the iceberg with luxury short sales," said Adrian Heyman, owner of Property Advisors, a real estate broker in Scottsdale, Arizona. "A lot of wealthy people are upside down in their mortgages and they just can’t afford the second or third vacation home anymore."