EdCone.com

UPDATE: Thnx to Andy Brod in the comments for pointing to a clarification indicating that only the verbiage has changed, not the policy, a strategy that carries with it the familiar aroma of bullshit.

"I think the term 'cap and trade' is not in the lexicon anymore," Salazar said, adding that supporters -- including senators working on legislation -- will focus more on ideas such as slowing pollution, creating jobs and becoming energy independent. "It's in that context" the Senate will move forward, he said.

Slowing pollution, creating jobs, and becoming energy independent make sense no matter what you think about anthropogenic contributions to climate change, so I'm sure this will be completely uncontroversial.

If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it?

You may not be as safe as you think.

Interesting to see who loved this idea in 2008 but hates it now, and vice versa:

The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time.

What do we tell the children?

"Now we have stable colliding beams-first time ever at this energy!"

Excited physicists tweeting about their new toy, which finally works.

Big tech companies don't just love us for ourselves:

Greenpeace also links Apple's decision to locate a huge cloud data center in North Carolina to that state's cheap electricity supplies, which come mainly from coal-fired plants. Other companies, including Google, also run big data center operations in the Carolinas. Noting that the IT industry "holds many of the keys to reaching our climate goals," Greenpeace says that it is pursuing a "Cool IT Campaign" that is intended to pressure the industry to "put forward solutions to achieve economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions reductions and to be strong advocates for policies that combat climate change and increase the use of renewable energy."

How to cover a tea party: "They're neither freaks nor Norman Rockwell representations of every American."

Previously.

Deja vu:

After four years of Civil War, in a "new birth of freedom" that resurrected the Union, Calhoun's states' rights doctrines were utterly disgraced—but they did not disappear forever. Nearly a century later they were exhumed to justify the so-called "massive resistance" of the segregationist South against civil rights and, in particular, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The current rage for nullification is nothing less than another restatement, in a different context, of musty neo-Confederate dogma.

American Lion is useful reading if you want know more about Jackson, Calhoun, and the nullification crisis.

Fighting the New World Order seems so '90s, but I guess some things never go out of style.

Beyond birds, bees, and educated fleas: "It turns out the truffles, too, have sex lives."

Local TV affiliate WFMY 2 should lose its broadcasting license for preempting entire second half of Duke-Baylor NCAA Southeast Regional Basketball Championship Game to run painstakingly repetitive thunderstorm updates.

AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The founder of this Facebook page was so upset that he misspelled "dook."

Google says its fiber contest received "more than 1,100 community responses and more than 194,000 responses from individuals."

Over the coming months, we'll be reviewing the responses to determine where to build. As we narrow down our choices, we'll be conducting site visits, meeting with local officials and consulting with third-party organizations. Based on a rigorous review of the data, we will announce our target community or communities by the end of the year.

(click map to enlarg) "Each small dot represents a government response, and each large dot represents locations where more than 1,000 residents submitted a nomination. We plan to share a complete list of government responses and an updated map soon."

Even necessary tax increases are unpopular, but breaking down our Cold War military-industrial complex seems like a reasonable enough goal -- especially given the alternative.

George Packer visits Martinsville.

The full article, Obama's Lost Year,  is worth reading if you can find a print copy of the 3/15/10 New Yorker.

After the passage of the North American Free Traded Agreement, Martinsville's textile mills began shutting down. Over the past decade, its furniture factories buckled under the foreign competition and the housing collapse. At the same time, farms that had grown tobacco for centuries went fallow, as farmers took federal buyouts, and local tobacco-processing plants closed.

Throw in a sellout of a major financial-services company by pocket-lining hired guns, and you could be talking about Greensboro, although our economy is more diverse and thus less bombed-out.

A central figure in the article is Congressman Tom Perriello, who hoped for a more transformative approach to economic recovery approach from the Obama administration; the status quo has been bad for years in Southside VA, so just restoring it doesn't seem like much of a plan.  Perriello seems to have been targeted by extremists after his vote on healthcare reform.

Where do ideas come from, mommy?

The 13-state lawsuit against the new health-care law is focused on a provision long advocated by conservatives, big business and the insurance industry.

It's not the bill I wanted, either, but let's stop pretending that the Waterloo strategy was based on substance or principle.

Al Qaeda struggles with new media:

Despite the alluring prospects of greater connectivity, new media have generally offered more pitfalls than benefits for jihadists. User-generated content imperils message control. Social networking renders jihadists vulnerable to detection, surveillance, and arrest. Mobile phone applications that connect like-minded users in real time and space might sound attractive to jihadists in theory, but in practice could open the door to disastrous security risks. For now, jihadists appear set on maintaining the distinction between external and internal communications that new media are so adept at breaking down.

Lisa Scheer took this pic recently off Summit Avenue.

John Blust:

Since 2003, I have offered a bill to adopt this type software every session and/or offered an amendment to the budget to require the use of this software. At last, the legislature and the governor saw the light and consented to its use. Now they are grabbing the credit and getting the good press over this proposal.

Greensboro's final GoogleFi application is posted here.

This part made me feel good:

The community strongly supported and helped shape the City’s efforts.

Volunteers organized meetings, started Facebook pages, blogged, wrote op-eds, created a toolbar to track online activity, and built a webpage to aggregate blog posts and news.

Volunteers posted to YouTube...

I did not attend the hush-hush well-publicized, open meeting Joe describes here, but I'm told by Nancy Vaughan that the document he mentions here has two additional pages beyond the one he displays, and that those pages explain that the potential property appreciation along the Greenway would come only if certain projects are completed -- not, as he reports, that anyone claimed "the Greenway would cause valuations of adjacent properties to multiply."

Raleigh councilman offers to name twins for Google founders (thnx to alert reader MLI for the link).

I think a sold application and good test site will probably matter more than that kind of foolishness.

I just proof-read GSO's application, and it looks good.

"How much does the public care about the operation of its government?"

Skip Alston is betting the answer is "not much."

Oh, yeah, that whole housing bubble thing:

Banks participating in the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, now will be required to consider writing down the principal for borrowers who are eligible for that program and whose mortgage debt is more than 115% of the current value of their homes. The principal would be reduced in stages over three years if the borrowers kept up on their payments.

Lenders are to receive 10 to 21 cents of federal subsidies per dollar of loan principal reduced, depending on the degree to which the borrower is underwater.

"Required to consider?" That doesn't sound very strong.

I'm told that this house, near Freeman Mill Road on the south side of town, was open for more than a year until the City, notified by a neighbor, prevailed upon the owner to address the nuisance.

Somewhat scary stuff:

They know that serious violence is very likely. They are simply inoculating themselves against the charge that it was their inflammatory rhetoric that caused it. It will be the Democrats complaining about their inflammatory rhetoric that made the teabaggers snap. If they'd just stayed quiet and not made daddy mad, he wouldn't have had to hit them.

Since the bank-based loan program began in 1965, commercial banks like Sallie Mae and Nelnet have received guaranteed federal subsidies to lend money to students, with the government assuming nearly all the risk. Democrats have long denounced the program, saying it fattened the bottom line for banks at the expense of students and taxpayers.

Fixed. 

Defenders of the old regime insult conservatism by pretending it's the same thing as corporate welfare.

I would disagree with them if they argued that the government should not be in the student loan game at all, but at least they'd be making a coherent point.

From the upcoming Times mag article on financial regulation:

[T]he Obama plan has a lot to recommend it...Whatever the regulatory apparatus, it will still be operated by regulators...In a way, this issue is more about human nature than about politics.

(Related: How not to run an SEC investigation.)

Back to the article, in which history those who do not learn from history etc etc:

Eventually, so-called shadow banking made up roughly half of the American financial system. It also helped recreate the same preconditions for a panic that existed before the 1930s.

Dergeg was part of the problem, but:

Finance evolved, and Washington did not keep up. So the creation of another quiet period probably cannot revolve around restoring old rules. It almost certainly depends on new rules, whether they are of the sweeping variety or the more nuanced.

Lots more at the first link.

Greensboro's Google fiber application is due tomorrow.

You have to think that answers on stuff like "Negotiation of a master pole attachment agreement" will carry a lot of weight, but I think GSO did a pretty good job of making its case in less technical ways, too.

Getting reform wrong?

When a major bank fails, in the years after the Dodd bill passes, we will face the exact same potential chaos as after the collapse of Lehman.  And we know what our policy elite will do in such a situation – because Messrs. Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and Summers swear up and down there was no alternative, and people like them will always be in power.

Lisa Scheer took this pic recently in a barbecue joint off Summit Avenue.

 

I disconnected my office line after almost 19 years with Bell South/AT&T.

The pleasant woman who assisted me never  asked why I was dropping the service.

Which says something about why I was dropping the service.

Watching 30 Rock and seeing:

[P]rivileged semi-feminism...I associate this brand of feminism with a certain variety of white, coastal-city dwelling, fairly well-to-do heterosexual cisgendered woman, a woman with a comfortable white-collar job that is so very comfortable and so very white-collar that she is free to spend her spare time yearning for, and semi-believing that she could attain, something with more "meaning."

I don't think Liz is supposed to be ugly as much as dorky and clueless, and I'm sure a lot of people think "it's a comedy, and the men are jerks, too," but it's an interesting post for all kinds of reasons.

When I criticize the use of think-tank articles in the N&R opinion pages -- a trend likely to continue as their budget shrinks -- people sometimes ask how those columns are different from other columns.

Simple: columnists get paid to have an opinion, think-tank columnists get paid to have a particular opinion.

They probably share the general views of the organizations that cut their checks (and the Kochs and the Popes and the Soroses who fund the organizations), but they can't be expected to show a whole lot of independence when filing on the company dime.

That may be why the truth-telling David Frum is no longer with AEI.

As first reported here yesterday, recovery zone bond financing for the Deep Roots Market relocation is looking like a no-go.

The developers had hoped that underwriting fees would be spread across all bond projects, but instead each project appears to be responsible for its own fees. Even with low-cost bonds, these fees make the effective rates too high for a smaller project.

Not sure where this leaves the other small downtown deal, the Miller Loft project on South Elm.

Deep Roots has not formally pulled the plug on bond financing, but it has stopped pursuing it actively, says developer Bob Isner. He hopes another option, new market tax credits, can still make a downtown Deep Roots a reality.

How did we get here? DRM manager Joel Landau says the bond program "is new, and it's complicated, and it's hard to get information about it."

The Obama administration’s chances of achieving a bipartisan victory on financial reform increased dramatically Wednesday as two top Republicans acknowledged the legislation would pass the Senate and Democrats sought to harness the momentum of their health care win.

One of those Republicans, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, conceded that his party had made a "major strategic error" by refusing to back bipartisan negotiations before the bill passed out of committee. He suggested that Democrats are right to think they have the political advantage on the issue.

I guess sitting on their hands during the SOTU speech wasn't such a great idea after all.

"Many financial experts who aren't aligned with either party now believe that Geithner was right."

A sympathetic take on the policies of a man liberals love to hate.

"My basic view is that we did a pretty successful job of putting out a severe financial crisis and avoiding a Great Depression or Great Deflation type of thing," [Geithner] said. "We saved the economy, but we kind of lost the public doing it."

Triad Watch gets a little love from the Sunlight Foundation for this post about Greensboro's new policy about email to and from City Council members.

Bank of America acknowledges the facts of bubble math: people paid more for houses than those houses are going to be worth anytime soon.

"The time has come to test this sort of program," Jack W. Schakett, who heads credit loss mitigation strategies at Bank of America, said in a briefing. "Modifications are better than foreclosure."

Looks like passing HCR may allow the Failed Obama Presidency^TM to get a few more things done (subs req):

The White House and congressional Democrats are plotting the end game of their financial-regulatory overhaul, with one Republican saying his party has lost leverage in negotiations and another predicting a "100% chance" the legislation will pass.

Lisa Scheer took this pic recently at a beauty parlor off Summit Avenue.

 

Robbie Perkins and I were lunchtime panelists for Youth Leadership Greensboro's session on politics and the media.

He kept saying stuff -- about a sewer-system revamp, the economics of the White Street landfill, a report on the efficiency of City government, and more -- that made me ask him, Why don't I know this?

I kept telling him that the City needs to get the facts out there in ways beyond long videos and transcripts of meetings.

A daily news blast online and via email would be helpful in all kinds of ways. The City can't just sit around hoping that newspaper and teevee coverage is going to improve.

In the meantime, I asked him to email me some material, and I hope he does.

Ribbon-cutting for the first segment of the Downtown Greenway,  4:00pm today.

The release I got doesn't say where this is happening, but it does say, "At 5:00pm the group moves across Eugene Street to South Elm for a reception (great food, no charge) at the mill at 816 South Elm Street, formerly known as the North State Milling Company and recently refurbished by Eric Robert for office and residential spaces," so I guess the event is on the west side of Eugene, near the back side of the Urban Ministry.

Alert reader R:

Did any of the papers or the Journal report that the Deep Roots project won’t/can’t seek the bond funding?

Not that I've seen.

R says he hears from sources close to the project that Deep Roots does not qualify for the bonds, and wonders what's up with the Miller Furniture and downtown hotel projects.

Randall Kaplan told me on Valentine's Day that the new new hotel plan was forthcoming in two-three weeks. We're now past the vernal equinox, and nobody seems to have heard anything.

I'm not clear on how the editing process is managed at the GSO Google wiki. Who decides on the content of final document, and when will that be done?

I do know that the final version should not lede with bloggers instead of universities, as the current front page seems to do.

In general, the verbiage needs to be smoothed out and de-hyped into simple declarative sentences that don't pretend we're Paris on Mars, but represent our many strengths with clarity and conviction.

On March 17, 2010, Vornado received a letter from the special servicer on the debt securing its High Point, North Carolina commercial properties that the loan on that asset is in default.

Tucked into an article about a DC-area mall deal gone bad, news about what may be the biggest commercial real estate story in the Triad, which for some strange reason continues to be advanced more on this blog than in the local press.

From JH:

The third Triad Flight of Honor takes place on Saturday April 17, leaving PTI at 8:30 AM and returning at 8:30 PM. The public is invited to come greet and pay tribute to the 100 World War II veterans, age 83 to 100, as they return Saturday evening from the World War II Memorial in Washington. If you or anyone you know would like to personally express your gratitude to those who defined "The Greatest Generation", this a wonderful and increasingly rare opportunity to do so.

Also, if you have any interest in being a guardian, sponsor or otherwise becoming involved with future flights, more detailed information and contacts can be obtained here.

if you know of any WW II veteran who might want to make a future trip, let me know and I'll pass the word along.

UPDATE: I posted some suggestions at the Google app wiki, and I'll be back again later. Nothing dramatic, just trying to improve flow and clarity. And I'm pretty modifier-phobic.

As promised, the City of Greensboro is requesting input from citizens on its response to Google's RFI.

Perhaps less valuable to Google than a test market with a mayor willing to do silly stunts, but pretty good nonetheless:

He's only advocating vandalism, and only against property used by Democrats, so what's everyone so upset about?

OK, the part about threats to family members is a bit much, but that's not what he suggested.

Way cooler than a mayoral stunt: Greensboro is putting parts of its Google fiber RFI response on a wiki to get public input.