newsobserver.com projects - e-mail - Comments

Re: Quick Hits

alltheway — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:46:49 -0400

Mr Johnson is dealing with Karma!! I know his family!!! From what I can tell, it seems that everything is coming around in a full circle and biting him in the ass!! He has stated, ooohh sooo many lies! If you all only knew!!! I tell you, it's Karma! He uses a lot of bibical scriptures but does not practice what he writes or what comes out of his mouth. He is not able to hide behind the bible anymore. Keeping a close eye on the "saga".

Re: Dome Memo: Promises and counting

bnartist — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:34:57 -0400

It doesn't help when you claim the state wasted $635 million and the link substantiating the claim puts that number between $177 and $226 million. The fact that it's spread over three years is lost in the confusion. The Beaufort Observer explains it thus:

First, they looked at how much money could have been saved had the cost controls that should have been put in place which were ultimately installed had actually been in place from the beginning. That number came to $635 million, of which North Carolina's share was $226 million.

Then they looked at what would have happened had there been earlier detection and reaction once the soaring expenditures began. That number was $498 million, of which $177 million was state money.

The annualized "waste" is thus $59-$75 million at best. Also lost in the confusion is the fact that many Republicans voted for the Mental Health Reform bill that pushed these services in the direction of private providers. These Republicans included free market champion James Arthur Pope. Now Tom Fetzer & his Republicans want to claim there wasn't enough of the government red tape they constantly decry. Also forgotten is the fact that Fetzer was part of the Martin administration that "raised" taxes including the Highway Use Tax, another much abused political football. Fetzer is a professional spin doctor and McClatchy has been spun.

Re: Dome Memo: Promises and counting

TheNextCalifornia — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:11:44 -0400

Hhhhm, so bniolet, do you suggest that because the constituents are making less money and spending less money that the answer is for the government to take more money from them through taxation?

That doesn't sound like a formula for success in my book. We cut our household budgets and our personal spending, the government should do the same.

Re: Dome Memo: Promises and counting

bniolet — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:39:32 -0400

dahedgehog,

If you follow the link provided in the Dome Memo, you will see the following paragraph:

Revenue next year is expected to be more than $4 billion behind what it would have taken to keep funding programs and services at recent levels. Even measuring against this year's spending, which has been cut from what was approved in this year's budget, revenues are nearly $3 billion behind. Those figures do not account for approximately $1.3 billion in federal stimulus money, as the state historically has not calculated federal money in totaling up the general fund budget.

We wish there was a simple answer. But the fact is the size of the deficit depends on how you calculate it. Each side of this argument has their own way of crunching the numbers.

Re: Dome Memo: Promises and counting

dahedgehog — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:34:00 -0400

Meanwhile, Rep. David Lewis, a Dunn Republican, launched a campaign to show that the Democrats are using faulty math in describing a budget deficit.

This seems like a great opportunity for a reporter to step up and inform his or her readers! Are Democrats using faulty math? Is Rep. Lewis wrong? As a reader, I'm unable to make any sort of informed opinion from the reporting offered via this blog.

Given that this is an argument over math, there is presumably an objective answer. As a reporter, you should work to provide your readers that answer, and serve your primary function of informing your readers.

By presenting this issue in terms of he said/she said, you do nothing to better inform your readers. Instead, partisans leave here assuming that their opponents on the other side are lying. Nonpartisans just throw their hands up in the air in frustration. It's a lose-lose situation. But it's a lose-lose situation that could be rectified....with actual reporting!

Step up and be a reporter, bniolet! Your readers need you!

Re: Perdue toughens e-mail policy

Chicago_Guy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:03:42 -0400

Users must keep all messages for 24 hours, but do not need to keep "spam" messages for 24 hours. Hopefully, the messages that state employees don't need to keep for 24 hours will be better defined than "spam".

Perdue not really letting light in

PoliticalJunkie — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:39:10 -0400

Why has she refused to have an outside investigation into how the Highway Patrol managed to "lose" a year's worth of Easley travel records?

Re: Perdue toughens e-mail policy

landshark — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:46:41 -0400

What took so long? She had to examine all her pass e-mails to make sure there wasn't any evidence of wrong doing on her part in the NCSU mess?

Re: Quick Hits

jjsmith2 — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:00:08 -0400

I know they endorsed a Republican for Water and Soil Conservation District Supervisor last election, but I don't remember who their other endorsements were.

Also, why the hatred at the Independent. You would figure the Republicans would want to know where this man got his PhD. and if it is a legitimate PhD.

Then again, I thought they would care about him being a wife-beater. Turns out they didn't.

Re: Quick Hits

PaulTerrell — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:18:34 -0400

I question the fairness of the Independent. After all how many Republicans did they endorse last year and why aren't their stories ever going after Democrats?

Putting the Independent in a story here raises their credibility and lowers that of the News and Observer.

Re: Drescher disagrees with Easley's comments

domewatcher — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:39:10 -0500

I applaud the N & O and their efforts to report the news rather than just pass along the "approved" press releases.

I live in one of the smaller towns and our newspaper is one of the "Freedom ENC" chain. Their motto is that "everything is all good!" They toe-the-line and rarely ask any questions of government or the "city fathers." Read our newspaper and you would think that these were "the best of times." The editorial board is comprised of the paper's largest advertisers, the mayor's dog and some surfer in California.

So the efforts of the N & O seem mighty spectacular.

Re: McCrory's plan for government reform

lefaim — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:21:16 -0400

Some of those are horrible ideas. People have to write checks to give a 5 dollar contribution? Thats a little absurd.

Do these regulations mean that Patty would give a speech everytime anything about duke power or charlotte came to his desk?

Re: Crane now working at Nature Conservancy

j1c2kp — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:22:01 -0400

Congratulations Debbie!

Mikey and others should still be ashamed of themselves.

Re: Missouri, N.C. e-mail parallels continue

Proctor — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:52:28 -0400

Again, we have the fundamental question: when is it supposed that emails constitute a public document? How many public appointments or public addresses does the governor of Missouri make through the communications tecehnology of personal email? Jeffersonian and Madisonian prerogatives of confidentiality of inter-departmental communications are once agian being nullified or infringed upon through efforts by the press, the legislative branch or other offices of the executive branch to substitute their own opinions for those of the governor as the constitutional head of the executive branch of state government.

It would be interesting to determine to what extent these suits against the right of the governor as head of the executive branch to be the arbiter or editor, in effect, of public disclosure of internal executive branch communications are "journalism-driven." Both states, North Carolina and Missouri, are homes to highly respected schools of journalism and moreover, schools of law, on the flagship campuses of their respective state university systems. Therefore, one hopes that there will be some clarification of the question of whether the University of Missouri and University of North Carolina journalism schools are academically or philosphically neutral as to the merits of these lawasuits or whether they are actively or coincidentally supportive of them.

But since Watergate, we have seen at the federal and state level the activity of offices of attorneys general, press institutions and other governmental and non-governmental entities in seeking to contest or intervene in the administrative decisions of elected heads of executive branches of government. Yet constitutionally, the ultimate remedy for disallowing the actions of a head of an executive branch department is often by the process of impeachment unless individual disagreements can be resolved through judicial rulings in those specific cases.

Nearly every few months or so, we witness the continued and measured release of previous executive branch communications of the presidential administration of Lyndon Johnson by those properly entrusted with the maintenance and oversight of these records in behalf of the former Johnson presidency under the auspices of the LBJ Library at the University of Texas in Austin. It would be interesting to hear the views of such an erudite and articulate former assistant in the Johnson administration as Bill Moyers on the procedures by which judgments over public disclosure of LBJ White House communications have been rendered in the particular case of the Johnson presidential archives as compared with what has happened elsewhere at the federal and state levels in executive branch administrations whose active terms of office have not even been completed.

The open opportunity made available to members of the Nixon administration in the 1970s by Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr. as chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee to bring forward certain pertinent information relative to the committee's investigation of the Watergate break-in was not fully and frankly accepted and acted upon by some officials from both the Nixon administration itself and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (in the 1972 election), and therefore this missed opportunity by some officials of the Nixon administration to take the lead in providing information to the Ervin committee on just how it had been seeking to determine the facts of the matter and establish the true responsibility for the actual Watergate break-in may eventually have complicated the efforts of subsequent presidential and gubernatorial administrations at the federal and state levels to resolve records-disclosure problems not necessarily related to criminal wrong-doing.

But should the press or should offices of attorneys general have the right to supervise or regulate internal communications among officers of executive branch offices and departments before such times as those officers are lawfully or constitutionally required or obliged to report certain information or disclose certain records to their legislative branch counterparts or to the public?

One possible response to perceived infringements upon their constitutional prerogatives in such cases would be for elected heads of executive branch departments at the federal or state level, whether a President or a governor, to proceed to make their own direct cases and, if necessary, appeals to the judicial branch and argue in the courts in favor of their presumed rights to release various records and make public such informative in a manner and in a time frame consistent with their judgments as to how to carry out the responsibilities of their offices properly and "see to it that the laws are faithfully executed."

Rather than wait for protracted legal actions to be waged against them in such disputes, elected heads of executive branch departmentments, whether in Washington or in the state capitals, should "take the bull by the horns" and actively seek a satisfactorily resolution to questions in these areas of contention before efforts by others to intervene in executive judgments and evaluations take on such momentum and velocity that they become a sort of political driving force in executive branch determinations, stampeding the more deliberate progression of steady reliance upon the constitutionally instructed guidance of these decisions by the executive branch heads themselves.

Of course, in some circumstances executive decisions have to be made promptly or almost immediately to respond to some developing crisis, so there is no substitute for a timely disposition of matters requiring urgent attention. But these disputes over what constitutes an actual and specific "public record" of some sort which therefore ought to be protected or even dislosed to the legislative branch at the appropriate time are generally in a different category.

Meanwhile, press organizations should reflect on whether they cherish their traditional role as "the Fourth Estate" in American republican democracy or whether they aspire instead to a new political status as a veritable fourth branch of government.

David McKnight

Re: State GOP blasts e-mail panel

Wildgoose — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:12:07 -0400

TNT, C-4, nothing will crack the Raleigh hard-heads in Easly's Administration. How inept can you be? These folks can screw up a two car funeral. A panel, maybe they thought they were just recommend how to redecorate the Governors Office for Perdue?