EdCone.com

Translated from the Elvish: "I spend every waking hour fighting orcs while Elrond and Galadriel eat lembas bread all day. I am the 99%."

Thnx to PLN for the link; I sent him this, which now has been posted here at least three times.

A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing...

Yet another reason to fast-track fracking in NC, right?

Just in case the single short paragraph buried in the N&R sports section this morning left you wanting more about the NBA suicide pact, here's your more.

A 50-game regular season would be fine by me every year, but even that may be out of reach.

The News & Observer is seeking a public apology from the Town of Chapel Hill after one of its reporters was detained with protesters Sunday afternoon.

Link. Previously.

If that blights Joe Paterno's declining years, that's too bad. If that takes a chunk out of the endowment, hold a damn bake sale. If that means that Penn State spends some time being known as the university where a child got raped, that's what happens when you're a university where a child got raped. Any sympathy for this institution went down the drain in the shower room in the Lasch Building. There's nothing that can happen to the university, or to the people sunk up to their eyeballs in this incredible moral quagmire, that's worse than what happened to the children who got raped at Penn State. Good Lord, people, get up off your knees and get over yourselves.

A view of Penn State and big-time college sports so harsh that it makes me feel dirty for following basketball.

UPDATED in real time til about 3:15 PM Mon 11/14

Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt says in ongoing now-concluded press conference [will add when archive posts] that police response was appropriate to unlawful breaking and entering and continued trespass on Franklin Street.

K. takes pains to distinguish between Occupy Chapel Hill group and the group involved in the incident.

Lots of questions about the urgency of response, the militarized police presence, and lack of attempts to speak with the group. Police chief Chris Blue says there had been threats to police.

Question, what kind of weapons did cops have, why willing to inflict bodily harm or fatal injury? Chief: Our intent was not to inflict injury, but to secure the building quickly.

Kleinschmidt's FB page, from which the image above was boosted.

I found Jimmy Fallon unfunny and annoying on SNL and his talk show is on past my bedtime but some of his clips are teh lulz.

I think this article misses something about the resentment over austerity -- after WWII, austerity was the legacy of shared sacrifice and the price of a new beginning.

Now it's the legacy of a casino implosion and the price of rebooting the casino.

I saw a pretty little chart at a recent financial presentation that showed the low exposure of US banks to Eurozone problems.

It seemed too good to be true, and it was; throw in all the hidden and indirect stuff and "the potential sum could exceed $4 trillion."

WSJ says (paywall) "raw land destined for residential development has fallen so far in value that thousands of acres across the country are being used again for agriculture."

It made me think of this photo, taken almost three years ago at "the last edge of the bubble."

And back again to Walker Percy.

A new round of internecine ugliness is simmering in Guilford County Republican circles, visible, briefly, in quckly-deleted online comments and anonymous emails.

Let it go, people, before you derail your party for another election cycle, or more.

Democrats romped in Charlotte on Election Day to roughly the same extent as they did in GSO. What didn't cause the rout.

On a similar note, JR addresses the myth that media bias swung the vote in Greensboro. Given that most of the races were not  even close, and that there's a substantial conservative newspaper in town, that meme won't hunt.

Spain and Italy in effect reduced themselves to the status of third-world countries that have to borrow in someone else’s currency, with all the loss of flexibility that implies.

Two cheers for Krugman for getting to the heart of eurouination, says PragCap, but MMT has been predicting this for a long time.

Erika Fry's CJR post makes reasonable points about over-aggregation and attribution, and also makes Moos and Poynter look worse than ever.

I try to avoid over-long snippets here, and I try be consistent in my use itals, block quotes, and quotation marks to indicate authorship.

NC wind-power project at risk of missing subsidy deadline.

Lots of subsidies out there, not all of them going to the right places.

It's easy and appropriate to criticize poorly-run government programs, but we should be aware also of the externalized costs of other energy businesses (e.g., military support for the oil industry, pollution from coal plants, etc.) and the success of public investment in developing key technologies that became integral to the private sector (e.g. internet, atomic power).

Not a lot in this week's note from the manager, although it does say the lame-duck Council will be asked for one more garbage-related vote on Tuesday night.

New restaurant featuring African and Caribbean food set to open at the former site of Riva's Trattoria on Greene St. downtown.

I've seen this movie before.

Sometimes it ends well.

Things are a little different these days*, and Ol' Roy has tuned his system to the times by trading sustained excellence for a monster team every few years.

This is supposed to be one of those years. We'll see.

I have high hopes for John Henson and am lighting candles for Butter's back.

*Assuming that these days include the eventual return of the NBA.

I will not be taking Ashton Kutcher any less seriously now.

Nor Rick Perry, for that matter.

My comment yesterday at the blog formerly known as Romenesko:

Poynter's loss.

I read Romenesko for many years, appreciated his links to my work, and never had any trouble doping out who wrote what.

Moos writes that "many readers and sources understood Jim’s intent to credit properly and felt fairly treated by him." A gift for understatement, she has.

A post recommended by Romenesko himself, and a longer take on ethics and standards.

If Moos had a problem with Romenesko's style of attribution, fair enough -- but how is it that she only now noticed it? And why go nuclear instead of just saying she'd asked him to change his style for the sake of clarity?

I'll be keeping the link in my righthand column to Romenesko, but not to the media blog at Poynter.

It was a gathering of professionals to discuss “media and stakeholder relations” in the hydraulic fracturing industry — companies using the often-controversial oil and gas extraction technique known as “fracking.”

But things took an unexpected twist.

On the one hand, blustery self-styled bad-asses are not uncommon in the business world.

On the other hand, kind of creepy.

Dave quits Facebook.

I don't think I'll delete my account any time soon, because it helps me keep up with birthday greetings and addresses, but it's just not very interesting to me as a reader or a publisher.

"I think the question is, where do we go from here?"

Well, you're the Mayor-elect now, Robbie. We await your plan.

Zack Matheny, quoted in the Brown Town newsletter:

Golden Gate Center has numerous vacancies and little chance any will lease in the foreseeable future.  There had been talk that Food Lion might move into the HT space, but that has not moved forward… This center is obviously in trouble and if something dramatic does not happen, it could be turned back to the lender. Retail leasing prospects are slim right now.

The email also says that Trader Joe's seems to have eliminated Golden Gate as a prospective location.

UPDATE: GCGOP chair Al Bouldin says at the C4GC FB page that the article is "absolutely inaccurate."

Where does that leave his executive director? Twisting in the wind, obviously, but I mean jobwise.

Bouldin also says, "The election in the City of Greensboro turned into a referendum on the landfill issue. It had NOTHING to do with C4GC or the local party."

This logic escapes me. If a party or a group champions an issue that voters hate, then the party or group would seem to have SOMETHING to do with the subsequent disaster at the polls, no?

End UPDATE

[Guilford GOP execuitve director Michael] Picarelli said his party was also challenged by infighting. Conservatives for Guilford County, a tea party-affiliated political action committee, ran their own get-out-the-vote effort.   

Picarelli said the group — also called C4GC — concentrated on right-wing talking points and encouraged candidates like Thompson and Rakestraw to adopt hardline conservative stances...

...Going hard right may have alienated the moderate Republicans, independents and conservative Democrats that might otherwise have voted for them, Picarelli said.

Front page of this morning's N&R; link to the GPV.

C4GC didn't lose this election. I don't think the hardline rhetoric helped, but most of these races were not decided at the margins. Bill Knight got landslided. Danny Thompson finished fifth out of three. Discontent ran deep in GSO.

Knight set his course on the landfill long ago, and cast himself as the Mayor of People Who Agreed With Bill Knight, not the Mayor of Greensboro, which is why he no longer has the latter job. Beyond dump politics, which were central and also symbolic, Thompson lost support with his hinky fundraising, tragicomic ads, and finger to the windism, and Rakestraw hurt herself on the curb market and with Marymandering.

And both the GOP proper and C4GC set themselves on a suicide mission by making party politics a major talking point in a town where voter registration skews Democratic.

C4GC has an uncertain future. It can settle down and promote financial conservatism, or it can go down the path of bigotry and scorched-earth politics promoted at Joe Guarino's blog. It didn't do much good this time around, but blaming it for Tuesday's wipeout is a reach.

[A]t least the mob that tore Kadhaffi apart had decades of murderous subjugation to blame for their bloodlust. What do Penn State students have - less of a reason to tailgate this Saturday?

Nice post by Lenslinger about the riot in State College.

People do love Paterno -- think Dean Smith if basketball fans were football fans -- but also crowds can turn into  mobs quickly and the vibe can shift fast from We are Unhappy About Whatever to Let's Break Some Shit.

I'm not sure how last night's GSO election results fit into the pattern across the country, or how accurate the emerging narrative about the results from places like Maine, Ohio, and Mississippi really is.

That narrative has it that voters were unhappy with GOP agenda items that didn't directly address the lingering suckiness of the economy, and so they sent a message via the issues presented them.

Maybe, or maybe each high-profile issue has its own story. The Mississippi personhood amendment seems to have failed not because Mississippi is suddenly getting squishy on conservatism, but because people figured out it threatened a lot more than abortion rights. The Maine voter registration law may have just seemed like the right small-d-democratic thing to do.

In Ohio, the crushing defeat of an anti-union bill lines up more closely with the GOP Fail meme, and, closer to home, the stridency of Wake County school board members probably contributed to their fall.

Here in Greensboro, voters clearly didn't buy the savings-at-any-cost justification for the White Street plan, but then again that argument was never thoroughly vetted, and there was a significant backlash against the political style of the mini-majority as well.

So it was a bad night for Republicans in a lot of places, but not necessarily a good night for Democrats in all of those places, and even some clear Dem victories don't guarantee success in 2012.

People are pissed off at both parties, and rightly so.

Gingrich says repealing Glass-Steagall was "probably a mistake."

Maybe he can convince the Democrats.

Mary Rakestraw, who lost a close race last night, served in city and county government for a lot of years. She took positions I disagreed with and positions I liked, and she was always gracious and friendly in person.

And a couple of years ago she really impressed me.

During the hot debate over filtering library computers, it would have been easiest for Rakestraw to join her usual allies on the Council as they pushed for more filtering, taking potshots at library management along the way.

But Rakestraw, who had worked closely with library leadership, stood up for the talented and experienced staff and spoke out in defense of their professionalism and integrity.

That took integrity on her part, along with a healthy dose of political courage.

It's a standard for the incoming Council to remember.

Austerity as a response to the recent rise in Italy’s borrowing costs is therefore exactly the wrong policy prescription...the only way to break out of the remorseless spiral of contagion is to take radical steps to fundamentally change market expectations about Italy’s debt market.

The European Central Bank is the only institution that has such power right now...

And given the ECB's crackerjack job to date...excuse me while I curl up under my desk for a while.

Reader DW recommends that members of the new City Council read Rick Baker's book,The Seamless City: A Conservative Mayor's Approach to Urban Revitalization that Can Work Anywhere.

Here's a review.

How liberal is the new Council? More liberal than the last one, to be sure, especially on social issues, but we're still not the People's Republic of Greensboro.

Our new mayor is a registered Republican and a real estate developer. Matheny and Vaughan are moderates who were pushed into opposition by the outgoing mini-majority, but they may tack rightward now. All three are anathema to C4GC, but letting the extremes define the center hasn't been working out very well for this country, so let's move on.

Wade is conservative even by conservative standards. Kee seems business-friendly, and Abuzuaiter's hippie tendencies are balanced by her ownership of a small business. Johnson can count, Hoffmann I don't know enough about to guess, and TDBS does her own thing.

So I'm hopeful that we can have some respectful and open-minded governance that maintains discipline on taxing and spending.

I've never understood the GOP strategy of increasing the level of party identification in GSO elections. I guess there was a short-term payoff, but the numbers just don't add up for the Republicans, and I think that math figured in last night's results.

Mississippi voters reject "personhood" amendment, which lost a lot of support as the election neared.

UPDATE: It seems reasonable to assume that Abraham siphoned votes from the at-large winners, and that if he'd dropped out after the primary their margins of victory would have been much larger.

Also, Perkins' margin of victory was pretty extraordinary, as was the weak showing by the incumbent Thompson.

This was a rout.

UPDATE: Perkins beats Knight by a wide margin; Hoffman ousts Rakestraw; Johnson, Vaughan, Abuzuaiter win at large, with Thompson finishing fifth, behind Lawyer, and Abraham capturing a significant number of votes; Wade, TDBS, Kee, and Matheny cruise.

GSO now has a very different City Council. Let's hope they approach the job with some humility and vision, and that they don't confuse the emphatic ouster of their predecessors as a rejection of fiscal responsibility.

Yeah, I got your election results right here.

Taking a strong moral stand on dessert:

Penn State students, including Brittany Manski (sophomore-finance) and Paul McAndrew, expressed approval for the Creamery’s decision to discontinue sales of the flavor [named for Sandusky] and many said that they would not purchase the flavor if it were still available.

You can still get Peachy Paterno, but you might want to hurry.

Alert reader BV writes:

Last night I got a robocall from a woman complaining that "both Greensboro Mayoral candidates are registered Republicans" and urging "black voters to exercise their choice by writing in a candidate of their choice." It said it was paid for by a group I'd never heard of before and couldn't understand from the voicemail.

Of course, the caller ID was the same 919 number from Bill Knight's earlier robocall. Pretty good coincidence, eh?

For reasons I have forgotten and may not have been able to articulate as an eight year old, I was rooting for Joe Frazier in that first fight with Ali.

UPDATE: That first fight. I can't tell you where I left my car keys last night, but I do remember that I watched this at Pete Tannenbaum's house in 1971.

Mean things the Euros say to and about each other.

I was surprised upon moving to France to learn of the existence of Belgian jokes, but, then again, Belgians, right?

More information about the games you watch would just confuse you and then you might say mean things:

Charley Casserly, a former general manager who was a member of the NFL's competition committee, says he voted against releasing All-22 footage because he worried that if fans had access, it would open players and teams up to a level of criticism far beyond the current hum of talk radio. Casserly believed fans would jump to conclusions after watching one or two games in the All 22, without knowing the full story.

"I was concerned about misinformation being spread about players and coaches and their ability to do their job," he said. "It becomes a distraction that you have to deal with."

Huh, and I chose that English major expecting to get rich.

I'm almost done with Holy War, which I've enjoyed, although some of the history is pretty horrific.

Nigel Cliff makes his case that the age of exploration can be seen as an extension of the Crusades and the Reconquista, but he underargues the centrality of commercial and political concerns as major drivers of the action (although his narrative makes those interests clear).

I can't say how much I'll retain -- I once listened with great interest to a 48-lecture series on ancient Egypt, about which I now can tell you only that the Nile is kind of a big deal and also how they got the brains out during the mummification process -- but for the moment I have a new appreciation for the extent of Islamic influence down the east African coast in the 15th Century and the accomplishments of Vasco da Gama relative to those of that piker Cristóbal Colón.

Also, the etymology of the word "factory" dawned on me after several references to Portuguese factors operating along the Malabar Coast, and now I feel like an idiot for not having doped it out long ago.

Berlusconi is awful quite apart from his stewardship of Italy's finances, so if the eurouination ends his political career, well, that's something good to come out of it.

[P]rincipal reductions are not only helpful but necessary if the housing mess is going to clear. The question isn’t whether they’re going to happen, it’s how they’re going to happen.

The moral hazard seems less hazardous than not addressing the problem.

Shrinking the crypto-Keynesian war machine will be painful.

Right.

Now, get on with it.

They We should also change the name back to the War Department.

Loaf Bakery set to open in the alley.

And Stephanie Teague's new clothing store is just up the block from me.

Elsewhere is closing for the season, which will make our block duller, but there will be some activity there over the winter. The final dinner was an elaborate project, including an unusually intense discussion of whiskey sours, and a Rube Goldberg meets Willy Wonka chocolate-pouring-contraption at dessert.

These arrangements at MF Global underscore two big problems in the credit derivatives market: risks that can be hidden from view, and risks that are not backed by adequate postings of collateral.

These are the same market flaws that helped hide the problems at the American International Group — problems that arose from insurance that A.I.G. had foolishly written on crummy mortgage securities.

Occupying various properties across the country may not address this kind of thing directly,  but if it helps focus attention on an underregulated and predatory financial industry than it's doing something worthwhile.

Weird times in Happy Valley.

Makes John Blake and our own flagship university look a little better by comparison.

My spam filter has been doing a poor job of filtering spam, but it is catching some actual comments.

So if your comment ain't showing up, let me know.

Hansbrough as the Prebow, and 49 other great college players.

Bobby Hurley should have made this list, but I guess Ferry and Laettner bumped him.

Also, I would have included Walter Davis.

Rakestraw also took campaign cash from the Griffin family.

I'm with Roch on this one -- I like Mary, and appreciate her good work on the library, but as I said about Danny Thompson's much larger money-grab, it looks awful to get funding from a vendor in the heat of the landfill debate.

Roch's on fire as the election approaches, with a devastating post about Thompson (and a funny one, too), plus more on campaign finances.