Close only counts in horseshoes...

I saw this shiny new newspaper rack today. Notice anything? (Hint)

www.triadpolitics.info

Yes! Weekly's guide to area elections and candidates: www.triadpolitics.info

Judging judicial candidates

How do you decide which candidate to vote for for North Carolina Court of Appeals? There is the non-partisan Board of Elections voters guide and there is Doug Clark's digest, a worthwhile three minute read.

Shaw vs. Spagnola: Shaw misrepresents herself, Spag is right

I do not have a dog in the district 3 county commissioners race. I don't live in the district and there are things I like and dislike about both Republican candidates Linda Shaw (incumbent, no website) and Sam Spagnola (website, blog). My interest, as it often is, is in ferretting out the facts from contradictory assertions.

Spagnola recently wrote on his campaign website that Linda Shaw said at a candidates forum "we are going to have to raise taxes" to pay for recently passed bonds. Shaw denied having said that.

Most recently, The News & Record reported:

“It wasn’t that I supported the bonds,” Shaw said. “I supported the right of the people to vote on them. And I have never said I wanted to raise taxes or I thought we were going to raise taxes. That’s just not true.”

But it is true and Shaw is wrong in her recollection of both her support for the bonds and her anticipation of higher taxes, as her own words demonstrate. In the video below, Shaw says she hopes the education bond will pass and she says:

"I know it is going to be a tax increase, hopefully that sales tax we would like to get." (00:42)

Thinking of using listguy.com for email lists? Think again

I do not know what representations Listguy.com makes to potential buyers of its email lists. If they represent their lists as people who have asked to receive unsolicited email, they are lying. I have been getting some new email spam lately addressed to "Business leader." I finally got one of the senders to cough up the source of their list. They said it was Listguy.com. When you send unsolicited email to people who don't want to receive it, whether you get their email address from a Listguy.com list or from another source, be ready to have the reputation of your product, company or institution suffer in the eyes of the people you annoy.

Not the city of the lie again... please

Please, let us not reinforce our reputation as the City of the Lie, yet again.

When the possibility of building a new minor league baseball stadium was being discussed, there was legitimate concern about the fate of the then-minor league venue, War Memorial Stadium. At the time, certain city council members and then-mayor Keith Holliday defended hiding information assessing the structural condition of War Memorial Stadium and that stalwart of honest public policy, Action Greensboro, brushed aside concerns that WMS would not be repaired were a new stadium built. In official literature, Action Greensboro promised, they did, that WMS would become the "the premier venue for amateur baseball in North Carolina." 

In another example of Greensboro's institutionalized mendacity, Action Greensboro never followed through to help make WMS a premier venue for anything.

There is still a chance, however. Still a chance to make War Memorial Stadium, a tribute to World War One veterans, something more than a footnote in Greensboro's history; still a chance to keep it something relevant to the lives of Greensboro's citizens; still a chance to avoid threading another lie into the fabric of Greensboro's progress.

David Hoggard tells us how.

Surveillance Greensboro

 "After six months, we’ll review how the [downtown surveillance cameras] worked and, assuming we have found that it is effective, we will come in with six more locations." -- Ed Wolverton, president and CEO of Downtown Greensboro Incorporated

By what authority does Downtown Greensboro Incorporated decide to surveil public spaces? Who authorized the city's cooperation with this surveillance?

The News & Record reports the cameras "will operate around the clock and be monitored through a single console during certain hours of the day and night." Where is this "single console" located and who will have access to it?

Then again...

While I admired people for exercising the Constitutional rights of free speech and assembly at the Greensboro Tea Party demonstration, the crowd itself was less accommodating, cheering the arrest of a protester carrying a sign with a message they did not like:

"A protestor (sic) dressed in black with a hood or mask appeared at one end of the stage and held up an illegal sized sign that read, Prosperity = White Supremacy. The man was arrested."

Greensboro, NC Tea Party

I attended this afternoon's Tea Party demonstration in Greensboro, NC. It always makes me proud of America when I see people exercise their Constitutional rights like this. The enthusiastic crowd was about 2,000 strong, give or take a couple hundred.

Here is video of the opening prayer (sorry for the jump cut).



Here are some of my favorite photos:

The Crowd

These guys will be voters in 2012.

Probably not Obama voters.

Now that's the ticket!

Greensboro's gentleman conservative, Fred Gregory.

City of Greensboro press releases are lame

Can the City of Greensboro not think for two seconds about the user experience of receiving their press releases?

I just got one from someone whose name I do not recognize. I would not have known it was from the City but for the domain name of the email address:

Subject Line: FW: new_press_release_format[1]

Body:
From: Grosvenor, Henry
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 1:40 PM
To: Police WOC
Subject: new_press_release_format[1]

Attachment: new_press_release_format[1].doc

The City sends out several press releases a day, most of them are this cryptic. I will repeat, can it be arranged for David Theall from the Library to give a primer to city press release senders on how to do it? His press releases have a meaningful subject line and the email body contains the press release so that recipients are not required to open a word processing program to read an attachment just to see if the damn thing is of any interest. I mean, really--this is contemptuous of the people the City supposedly has an interest in communicating with.

The modern editor

I use technology to design web sites that bring together content from a single place. My intention is to give all people with a thought to express equal footing without the influence of a gatekeeper. It is good--needed.

While I work against the idea of humans as gatekeepers, as shepherds--guiding readers to the relevant, insightful and interesting--humans are superior. Such is Lex Alexander when he publishes his occasional roundups. Yes, he has a point of view, but it is transparent and, agree or disagree, thoughtfully substantiated. He defines the modern editor.

Here is my test for the value of an editor: Does he or she help you understand the world better than you would without him or her or, at least, expedite your education? He does it in a thoroughly modern way but, for Lex, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Childish

"Earlier this week, Commissioners Chairman Melvin “Skip” Alston reiterated a promise there would be no tax increase, saying in other published reports that he was “100 percent” confident."

--(Greensboro, NC) News & Record, April 10, 2010

It was not "reports." It was a single report -- in the Rhinoceros Times. I understand that local media often disrespect each other by stealing borrowing from each other without credit. (WGHP MyFox8 is a frequent exception.). But it is contemptuous of news consumers when an editor removes the name of a publication from a story and replaces it with the obfuscating and inaccurate "other published reports." As a bonus, it also diminishes the value of the N&R's online product. Rather than being a resource for complete information through hyperlinks, it is as much a dead end as the print version.

Other than some petty self-satisfaction with poking Rhino Times editor John Hammer, there is no reason for the intentional diminution of the news value of this article.
 

Pro tip: Don't write your punctuation

-- Frank Mickens, WFMY

No, exclamation point!

Commissioner Alston on wrong side of the law

A county commissioner wanted budget information. County staff said no. Commission Chairman Skip Alston sided with staff saying releasing the information would be "irresponsible." No. Not releasing the information would be irresponsible -- and illegal. You'd hope the Chairman would have a clue. Public information may not legally be withheld because some do not consider it to be "ready." Alston should know better.

Fortunately, the (Greensboro, NC) News & Record (update: Joe Killian, specifically) pushed back with a formal public records request and the County Attorney responded appropriately, breaking the logjam and making the budget information public.

[Related: Doug Clark notes the contrast with Greensboro City Manager Rashad Young, who put the City's budget information out by his own volition, for public inspection and comment -- hardly irresponsible. As Clark says, "[T]hat's how public officials are supposed to conduct public business."]

Confused

News & Record editor John Robinson can't get his stories straight.

Continuing his previous self-contradictions, Robinson keeps saying that a story was not online because not all of the newspaper is online, this eight days after announcing that all of the newspaper is online.:

Robinson yesterday:

"There are people like you who don't subscribe to the paper and chose to read the Web site instead. That's cool. That's what it's here for. But we've never put everything online and feel no obligation to." [Emphasis added]

Robinson eight days ago:

"Everything we publish in the newspaper doesn’t appear on our Web site. Never has.

"Does now, though." [Emphasis in original]