EdCone.com

Saving the Cascade Saloon is a fine idea in theory. The building has a colorful past and a unique location.

But what's the end game? Is there any demand for a major fixer-upper in that location? Not saying there isn't, and the Momentum projects on Barnhardt St. suggest that there might be, just wondering about the viability of that particular intra-track geography.

And is it true that people would be less likely to walk past green space than a scary boarded-up building?

For that matter, why is downtown GSO's main street still bisected by train tracks in 2013, with traffic (those vehicles operated by people who don't know the oddly unmarked alt route that cuts under McGee) backing up on both sides when a freight train comes through? 

A government of laws, not men: "[W]e should never allow a power to the presidency that we wouldn't feel comfortable giving to George W. Bush."

So I guess calling them the Carolina Panthers was more than a branding exercise: "The deal hinges on [...] the state chipping in $62.5 million in aid toward the stadium upgrades."

Nothing from the Palmetto State? Maybe they should be the NC Panthers. 

Although if I paid taxes in Charlotte, I'd probably opt for the QC Panthers, or maybe the Queen City Corporate Welfare Queens.

"Berger’s intention for the petition remains unclear. But often online petitions serve a distinct political purpose."

A likely purpose of the bogus excuse to hoover up contact information? 

"Sen. Berger is running for first shot at the primary against Kay Hagan."

"I think we are somewhere between Panic and Capitulation in Hyperlocal."

As he says, this is the opportunity Buffett sees in papers like the N&R.

Somewhat incredibly, our battered local brand still has a chance to become the dominant media hub for this region.

Your weekly report from the City Manager seems a little bland after such a busy week of GSO politics.

In which cable companies are on the right side of an access issue:

Freeing up more unlicensed spectrum holds out the promise of solving the so-called “spectrum crisis” created by exploding consumer demand for video and other high-bandwidth apps on mobile devices, while simultaneously bringing competition and innovation to a cellular market that has been rapidly trending toward a two-carrier duopoly dominated by AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Following on a point made in a thread here the other day, the mobile explosion does not make a robust wired network less relevant, and GSO should be working hard to make sure we have the bandwidth we need.

Hartzman makes his case:

My employment at Wells Fargo Advisors was terminated on Monday, October 8, 2012 in direct retaliation for disseminating whistleblower information that our regulatory infrastructure seems unwilling to act upon.

I believe Wachovia and Wells Fargo’s executive management misled taxpayers, shareholders and Congress concerning material information.  In doing so, executives violated fiduciary duties to the firms financial advisors and their clients while gaming executive compensation at the expense of Wachovia shareholders, whose stock probably wouldn’t have dropped as much if the loans had been disclosed under law.

Despite a welcome eschewal of his usual gnomic writing style, it takes some work to get through. Take your time.

News reports about Duke Energy's rate-hike request tend to focus on the nearly 10% average bump, but this company document says residential customers would see their bills go up by nearly 12%, and this analysis says the real number would be closer to 14%.

A public hearing on the proposed increase will be held 7 PM Monday 2/11 at the NC Utilities Commission on N. Salisbury Street in Raleigh. You are invited.

Not unrelated: Pat McCrory, Duke's man in the mansion.

"It's a great-looking place, but they need to raise their game on the whole restaurant part of the deal," I wrote about Bin 33 a while back. Food was meh and service was worse, and after a while we didn't go back. Apparently we were not alone.

Ham's was a staple of my youth and my father's under the original ownership; is it a good fit for downtown?

Lightfoot hotfoots out of pre-K job. Good to know you can still be too far out there to keep a position in the new regime. May be an early volley in the intraparty combat I mentioned earlier today.

Not surprising to see a newspaperman come out swinging against prior restraint, but a morsel at the end of John Hammer's column on the GPD surveillance story caught my eye:

Police keep an eye on groups that they think might cause problems all over the country, but in Greensboro they are probably a little more vigilant than in other places because Greensboro had a famous shootout in 1979 between two such groups – the communists and a Klan-Nazi group.

...if the police had been there on site, instead of several blocks away where the march was supposed to take place, the bloodshed would likely have been prevented.

The Klan/shootout was a lot of things, and one of those was a major failure of the Police Department. 

I made a similar point here last week about local history and police culture, but more important is the sentence I highlighted, the one where John addresses the  events of November 3, 1979 in a way that goes well beyond the tired old two-extremist-groups-from-somewhere-else story that satisfied too many people here for too long. Seeing that hard reality stated matter-of-factly in the pages Greensboro's conservative weekly seems meaningful to me. 

Some progress: "The decision to release the legal memo to the Intelligence Committees came under pressure, two days after a bipartisan group of 11 senators joined a growing chorus asking for more information about the legal justification for targeted killings, especially of Americans."

Entertaining as the Rove vs Tea Party show may be -- and if you like watching old white dudes break shit, it's a better bet than the new flops by Ahnuld and Sly -- I wonder about the consequences for Kay Hagan, who is gearing up for reelection in a purplish state that is fickle about its Senate seats. A juicy GOP primary fight would be helpful to her, and entertaining for the rest of us. 

Ben Holder points out that a recording of that closed-door meeting between Wray and Johnson was released in 2007.

BJ Barnes isn't gonig to waste his time chasing shadows, and he isn't going to be bullied into joining the crowd:

I was not going to posture against something that at this point has not happened...Unlike the former Sheriff from Arizona, I don't have a book to sale or nonprofit to fund or speaking engagements I'm trying to book. I have a county of approx: 485,000 people who look to me and the men and women who work with me to protect their homes and families and you can be assured we will contine to do that.

I haven't had the chance to even begin unpacking last night's marathon City Council meeting, but I gather some progress was made on the downtown performing arts center. Not that you would know it from the booster side, where (I guess) a lack of ongoing funding has kept any updates from appearing on the website or social media. Seems like a mistake to me. 

I do know that Roch Smith Jr spoke about the City's adventures in prior restraint, because he was kind enough to post his remarks.

The 401(k) experiment has been a disaster, a disaster which threatens to doom millions to economic misery during the later years of their lives.

His proposed solution of sharp increases in Social Security benefits seems unlikely, to say the least.

That said, I thought at the time and think today that Bush's effort to privatize SS is underrated as a driver of the Democratic resurgence in national politics.

In my limited experience, retirement plans are not very well managed. Other people seem to have noticed.

Which means we have a big problem without likely solutions.

Oops.

The killing of Mr. Jaber, just the kind of leader most crucial to American efforts to eradicate Al Qaeda, was a reminder of the inherent hazards of the quasi-secret campaign of targeted killings that the United States is waging against suspected militants not just in Yemen but also in Pakistan and Somalia.

Your liberal media, actually sounding kind of liberal for once, complete with shout-out to the ACLU: "This dispute goes to the fundamental nature of our democracy, to the relationship among the branches of government and to their responsibility to the public."

Drone FAQ. Previously.

Transcript of the lock-out meeting between David Wray and Mitch Johnson.

N&R headline refers to firing, article to resignation. Same diff! Zero comments on this one tells you all you need to know about the Buffett team's challenge with their new website.

Is it accurate to characterize Wray's complaint as "because he is white, the city discriminated against him?"

Even with racial politics as a context, "because he is white" seems like a really tough sell.

"The Republican governor is working with a Republican-led General Assembly but is finding out that a shared party doesn't always mean a shared viewpoint." 

I hope he can do something on this Medicaid bill, because the GA version will do all kinds of harm to this state. 

An unfortunate point of agreement.

Both critics and proponents of the creative economy approach to GSO's future focus too much on the arts, as if the blown engines of textile manufacturing, insurance, tobacco, and furniture would be replaced by a tribe of beatniks planning interpretive dance programs over fair-trade coffee in a charming fauxhemian downtown.

The arts are good business and contribute to a livable city, and we should be building on our long history as one of North Carolina's funkier places, but there is much more to the idea of creative culture, and I'm not sure we're thinking about the other stuff as publicly and coherently as we should be.

Creative culture includes STEM workers, designers, media, education, healthcare, and more. We have real assets in these areas -- new ones, like the nanotech program, and existing ones like our universities and a big, strong health system, myriad small businesses that grew up servicing the old giants -- but we don't seem to have a cohesive brand or plan. The lack of a serious broadband strategy is one indication of this problem.

Two articles on the future of manufacturing speak to our opportunity. One is a bullish piece about reshoring jobs as cheap energy here and rising costs in Asia change the math of globalization. The other describes real value drivers in this new manufacturing economy, which go well beyond the relatively limited number of reshorable jobs that involve actually making things to the design, service, and management jobs that power modern manufacturing.

Mouhoud suggests reinstating a philosophy of services in the debate on industrial policy. The outlines of the industry must be redrawn keeping in mind that many of the relocated services belong basically to the industrial world: “Many medium-sized cities would see their economic importance increase if these services were better implemented. Moreover, the presence of these services is likely to attract industries and their subcontractors.” In short: a reversion of causality whereby the industry would cease to be considered as the sacred engine of economy. Industry could become a manufacturing version of a strategy that is primarily focused on services and design.

This is the real creative economy, and it should be a sweet spot for Greensboro and Guilford County. 

If Pat McCrory is concerned about bullshit academics in the UNC system (that is, if he's not just building talk radio cred by LOLing about the pointyheads) he could address an actual problem:  

When stories like McAdoo’s burst into public view, the athlete is almost always cast as the villain, a cheater gaming the academy. But, in this case, McAdoo was the true victim...

...Once he got on campus, however, he was quickly informed by his academic counselors that North Carolina didn’t have a criminal justice major. According to McAdoo, his counselor picked his major, African-American studies, because it wouldn’t interfere with football practice.

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone cable company.

GSO's best blogger dusts off his keyboard and finds a moment of connectivity to drop a line to Time-Warner Cable boss Robert Marcus:

From our end, your customer service protocols look like they are designed to impede access to that service and to wear down customers who have only minor problems until they give up...

...All of this would be a lot less galling if I could simply cancel my service and sign on with a competitor. But the lobbying arm of Time Warner has been so effective in North Carolina that you have no competitors, and your industry even managed to persuade my state legislature to make it illegal for cities like mine to provide their own broadband service.

I guess the going rate for a legislature is less than the cost of building out a decent service network.

GSO's proposed post-RUCO plan (can someone tell me how it stacks up with this one, please?) and more in this week's report from the Manager.

The Greensboro Four chose a strategy of nonviolence, which made it easy for others to rally to their cause. They showed great physical courage and perseverance, which allowed the spark they had struck to catch and spread. And they sought inclusion in an America that had made them second-class citizens, which helped America become what it had pretended to be.

I knew the story of the Sit-ins. I knew the pride this city takes in this piece of local history. But I did not know how the philosophy of passive resistance had come to the store at the corner of South Elm and Sycamore. I looked at myself, and at my own 17-year-old son, and I wondered, where does a college kid find the strength to risk his life for justice? I was curious about how the men themselves see their roles, and the role of Greensboro itself.

So I asked them.

Happy anniversary, and thank you.

Well, I guess you can't accuse them of sucking up to the new boss.

N&R front-pages acquisition news, misspelling Buffett's name.

Some sound advice from JR.

There are things GSO and W-S papers could collaborate on, and things that demand more local coverage. I hope the far-away owners pay attention to the locals when making those distinctions.

QC hub at risk in USAirways/American deal.

Trends like globalization and technology shifts earn the attention they get for their impact on local economies, but mergers, roll-ups, and asset-shuffling decisions made elsewhere also help determine the fate of cities. Certainly true for GSO, up to and including the feckless absentee ownership of the N&R.

What I'm hearing about the N&R deal:

• Robin Saul out, sooner rather than later.
• Terrible CMS will be replaced. New computers, soon, replacing museum pieces now in use. This may sound like inside baseball, but it matters in terms of productivity, quality, and morale.
• Terrible website will be upgraded.
• Gauger confident for the first time since his discovery of grits that he'll get the support and resources he needs to do the job.
• An insider: "There are definitely going to be some shakeups, but I'm optimistic.

Ben Holder: "It's one thing to have cops watching your blog or social media.  It's another thing when they get off their computers and come watch you in real life."

Shah-Khan said the city sought the restraining order to prevent the dissemination of information that was not public record but was criminal intelligence, even though it was released through public records requests filed with the city's public information office.

Oversharing. It's not just for Facebook.

Back to Ginsburg's YES Weekly article...

Marikay Abuzuaiter may not see herself as an informant, but the cops call her one ("'She was a frequent CI [confidential informant] during the Palestinian Protests,' [Sgt. Mike] Richey wrote.. keep her involvement among us'"] and she seems to have done more than just alert the police to bad things happening at events she attended. I'd guess a lot of people are unhappy with her now, and will view her attendance at meetings differently in the future.

Also, GPD has been watching local and area groups forever. That's one of the reasons people are still talking about the 1979 Klan-Nazi-CWP killings -- law enforcement was deeply wired yet did not stop the massacre from going down.

UPDATE: Thoughts (mostly positive) from JR. 

The website disaster bespeaks a culture of decline that goes beyond the newsroom cuts, and will take a real effort to reverse. I hope the cavalry is coming. /update

Buffett buying N&R.

A change in ownership is long overdue. 

Roch follows up the Ginsburg expose with a reminder of issues he's raised before:

There is another question, however, that remains unanswered: To what extent are rest of us—the public at large—being monitored while we go about our business under the impression that we are doing so in obscurity.

"The unarmed fear the armed, but the armed are disposed to fear the better armed."

Walter Kirn on guns and gun owners.

As [gun advocates] have repeatedly pointed out themselves, and as even Wayne LaPierre might agree, assault rifles are functionally similar to ordinary semi-automatic rifles, differing chiefly in their sinister cosmetics, not in their underlying ballistics. This being the case, what will be lost by giving them up? Nothing but their destabilizing allure for the grandiose, image-obsessed mass killers who favor them—and whose crimes represent a far greater risk to gun rights than does the perceived hostility of certain politicians.

So that's who reads this blog:

Liz Seymour, the director of the Interactive Resource Center, made [GPD criminal intelligence officer] Finch’s list but was mentioned in one other intelligence e-mail in September 2007 when Richey found a post on Ed Cone’s blog with a link to her website and said, “We should probably keep an eye on it.”

Here's the post that piqued the GPD's interest. Really?

Lots of interesting stuff about local law enforcement, its targets, and its informants in Eric Ginsburg's YES Weekly article.

Just pulled a tick off Luna.

I'm like, what, ticks in January?

Luna's like, hey, give me back my tick.

Beas sold parts for 12 .50-caliber weapons, the most powerful available for public sale, in a hotel parking lot off Interstate 85 in Charlotte.

Thus fulfilling the Founding Fathers' dream of liberty.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/01/30/3821005/accused-gun-trafficker-to-plead.html#storylink=cpy

Oh noz, An educational elite has taken over North Carolina's universities.

Ah, for the good old days when just anyone could teach a college course or plan a curriculum. Why should lack of knowledge and training keep me from my dream of a tenure-track position? And I look so good in tweed.  

For serious, there's plenty of room for discussion of what kidz r learning, and I encourage my own liberal-arts-oriented offspring to think in practical terms along the way, but surely McCrory can do better on this subject than chortling out buzzwords on talk radio.

After state legislators collected more than $1 million in campaign donations from Time Warner Cable and AT&T, the General Assembly passed a law in 2011 that effectively barred communities from building their own networks...

If the goal were to increase investment in the state, it failed. In fact, it accomplished the opposite effect: The big companies are investing less in North Carolina because they face less competition.

I really don't mind saying I told you so, except for the part where it really hurts this state.

Things you find on the way to finding something you need: I had forgotten about most of these interviews, but the one about the challenge to economists of measuring the changing value of like products (e.g., a modern new car that is longer-lasting and safer than a 1970 new car) has stayed with me. 

"I'll be frank with you. I've never seen such a broken information systems operation until I came here," the governor said. He added: "That's not a reflection on the people in this (agency), but you have a broken system right now."

On whom is it reflection, then?

And how did a huge agency -- "vast computer networks and systems" and a major new IT project just months from delivery -- make it to this late date without a CIO?

UPDATE II: Tony notes in the comments below and at FB that the correct stat is GSO having higher property tax rates than NC's other largest cities. Good on him for having the conversation, including corrections, in public.

So, back to Clarey's point: What do we get for that money, and is it worth the cost?/update

UPDATE: This information from the NCDOR (courtesy of alert reader Stephen) indicates that GSO does not have the highest property tax rate in NC. It is among the highest, and higher than other larger cities, and we also pay Guilford County's relatively high rates, but based on this document the statement that GSO has the highest property tax rate in NC seems to be incorrect. We also pay lower sales tax than CLT or Durham. /update

Tony Wilkins, via FB: "Today at the City Council Budget Retreat: I asked that we set a goal to reduce the .6325 property tax rate low enough to take us off the list as THE highest property tax rate in NC. Help me get 5 votes to do that."

Comment from Brian Clary: "I don't doubt we have the highest rate, though I'd like to see those numbers. And a lower tax rate sounds great, but before I sign off on it I want to know what you plan to cut to make up for the lost revenue."

More good discussion within the walled garden. 

When we lived in Paris we had a little B&W TV that spoke only French, and the interwebs were just a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye, so we would take the metro to the American Library and load up on books and, y'know, read them. One thing I did was try to fill in some canonical gaps by catching up on authors I'd never quite gotten around to reading. Graham Greene and Mario Vargas Llosa were two of those I enjoyed. Another was Jane Austen, who really could tell a story. The social attitudes seem outdated, except when they don't, but a lot of the tales feel surprisingly modern (I thought the same thing when rereading the first chapter of Anna Karenina at lunch last week). Also, the way her heroines measure the economic value of prospective mates by annual income instead of net worth is pretty astute.

A well-argued version of a common refrain: More P.J. Hairston, please.

In other players-from-GSO news, I clicked through from this Deadspin post because GDS alum Jalen Ross plays for the winning team and I wanted to see how he has been doing (pretty well) and that allowed me to discover the existence of a player named Daveon Balls, which is pretty much the best name ever.

Plate 333 from Eadweard Muybridge's series "Animal Locomotion" is one of four works by the groundbreaking photographer in the collection of the Weatherspoon Museum (the others include a couple of his famous horse frames and a landscape of Yosemite). I often stop to look at his stuff when browsing the Spoon's photography online, but today's post was prompted by this review of a new biography of his freaky old self.

Letters from Duke Energy to the City, a lobbyist report card, and more in this week's report from the City Manager.

Protecting GSO's trees from overzealous Duke Energy crews may be harder than it looks.

I was so excited to read about GSO's economic recovery in 2011 that I set the DeLorean for early 2012 and bought some investment properties, and am writing this from the private island I purchased with my gains.

Previously in slow economics.

Wolf howls, funny voices, Huh! Best sing-along-in-the-car-song ever?