While the move today to bar illegal immigrants from North Carolina community colleges won praise from groups like Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, it drew a rebuke from the left for Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue.

Perdue, the Democratic nominee for governor, made the motion to ban illegal immigrants from community colleges while a study is being done on the issue.

The motion, approved by the State Board of Community Colleges, was a reversal from Thursday, when officials indicated they were inclined to admit illegal immigrants pending the outcome of the study.

That drew the following response to Perdue from James Protzman at BlueNC:

I'm sure you and your staff agonized about whether to sell out poor brown people for political advantage, but agony or not, you came down on the wrong side of an important moral issue. Which makes your campaign irrelevant to me. Don't bother calling. Don't bother writing. Don't bother me at all. You don't need progressives, and progressives don't need you. I'm heading for Mike Munger.

John Livingston stopped blogging when he began studying for the bar.

As a third-year law student, Livingston and classmate Lance McCord started BlueNC with James Protzman. His inspiration was George W. Bush's win in 2004.

A native of Florida, Livingston, 27, said he spent the first few months getting up to speed on North Caorlina politics. One of his major issues was the creation of large landfills in the southern part of the state, where he has a few relatives and friends.

He posted under the screen name TarGator, a reference to his time in Florida and at UNC-Chapel Hill.

By the summer of 2006, Livingston said he didn't have time to blog between studying for the bar and starting a new job as a real estate attorney for Kilpatrick Stockton in Raleigh — coincidentally, the same firm where McCord now works.

"I wasn't able to be involved in it day to day, and there were other people who were more knowledgeable," he said.

He still has front-page privileges, but he rarely uses them and he hasn't written in months. Still, Livingston said he reads the site every day and occasionally adds his two cents in the comments thread.

Robert Peterson considers himself an old-fashioned blogger.

A life sciences researcher in Chapel Hill, Peterson started out blogging for The Daily Kos, where he first learned about BlueNC in 2005 when he saw a piece crossposted by James Protzman. 

"At the time, I thought it was this well-established Web site," he said. "It wasn't until some time later that I found out that I was user No. 14."

Peterson, 37, started out writing about health care, something he knew about from a stint as vice president of Health Care for All's North Carolina chapter. As a volunteer for John Edwards, he also wrote a lot about that campaign.

When that ended, Peterson became interested in the race for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor.

He says that the main contributors to BlueNC agree on a few basic principles: They support increasing health care coverage for the uninsured; they think No Child Left Behind should be changed or scrapped; and they opposed the proposed landing field in Eastern North Carolina.

The one area where they disagree: Which candidates to support.

Lance McCord helped start BlueNC, but he's no longer active.

As a second-year law student at UNC-Chapel Hill, McCord was inspired to start a political blog by reading Crooked Timber, a blog run by a group of academics.

He asked his friends who might be a good partner, and James Protzman's name came up. Along with fellow law student John Livingston, the three started BlueNC in March of 2006 after a single face-to-face meeting at a coffee shop in Research Triangle Park.

McCord, who blogged as Lance, was originally interested in national politics, but he said his interest shifted because of BlueNC's relentless focus on state politics.

"I had a realization that the politics that mattered in most peoples lives were local," he said.

After graduating in 2007, McCord took a job as a corporate attorney with Kilpatrick Stockton in Atlanta. After the birth of his daughter last year, he stopped blogging entirely.

"New job, new town, new baby," he said. "Something had to go, and BlueNC was it."

James Protzman says he has toned down the rhetoric of BlueNC.

The former marketing consultant told Dome that the site intentionally adopted a harsh tone in its early days — alternating criticism with praise — as a way to gain attention in a crowded media market.

"Our early strategy was attack, attack, pat on the back," he said.

A few of Protzman's targets: George W. Bush, Blackwater, Art Pope, N&O columnist Rick Martinez, U.S. Rep. Walter Jones and Robin Hayes, right-wing commenters on Dome, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole and the UNC-Chapel Hill school of journalism.

Aside from markeitng, Protzman said he also blogs on issues that made him angry, spurring him to use strong language. He said that he is now trying to "dial back" on the curse words and offer more measured criticism of reporters and politicians.

"I regret every rant, "he said.  "It's easy to be angry about a lot of things. Sometimes out here in the blogosphere, blowing off steam is the only way to stay sane, but it often creates problems and I'm aware of that."

BlueNC has come of age.

Started in 2006, the liberal group blog has had its moments in the political spotlight: Helping Larry Kissell's unsuccessful Congressional campaign in 2006, targeting a proposed Navy landing field on the coast, breaking the news of Senate candidate's Jim Neal's sexual orientation in a live blog.

But none will be as big as next week's live online debate between Democratic gubernatorial candidates Richard Moore and Beverly Perdue.

The debate will be notable in a few ways. Moore and Perdue have only squared off a handful of times in this campaign. It is also certainly a historic first for two gubernatorial candidates to debate online. And it marks a milestone in the growing power of the netroots in North Carolina.

Dome is working on a dead-tree story about BlueNC's role in the Democratic primary. We're interviewing readers and contributors of the site in an open thread here and have started a profile of co-founder James Protzman here and an FAQ on the site here.

If you have thoughts on the site, please share them in the comments below.

Why is it so hard to find bills online?

One of the major "online sunshine" headaches for Dome — as well as state political bloggers — is the difficult of finding legislation on the state Web site.

For example, this morning we linked to a story about how water bills became private in 2001. We wanted to add a link to the bill that made them private.

The N.C. Legislature Web site allows you to search for old legislation by year and keyword, but that can be a frustrating and time-consuming process.

Type in "utilities" for the 2001 session and you get 135 bills, arranged in no apparent order. Narrow it down to ratified bills and you still have 59. The bill appears to be this one, but it would have been a lot easier to find by searching for the sponsor — an option that is not available for older bills.

But don't just take our word for it. Progressive blogger James Protzman says he has the same problem.

"It's important to draw a distinction between simply having information available and having information that's understandable and easy to use," he writes. 

* High school students stump John Edwards on conflict diamonds, recycling nuclear waste and North American currency consolidation at N.H. event. (NYT)

* BlueNC founder James Protzman, a.k.a. Anglico, announces he's leaving the Democratic Party to become unaffiliated over state Sen. Kay Hagan's U.S. Senate run. (BlueNC)

* Hagan replacements mentioned: Reps. Maggie Jeffus and Pricey Harrison, education activist Margaret Arbuckle; Republicans Mark McDaniel and Rep. John Blust. (Capital Beat)

* U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx holds "virtual town hall," fielding mostly positive calls and questions about illegal immigration. Democratic opponent Roy Carter cries foul. (W-SJ)

A noted Democratic blogger apologized for creating an intra-party feud.

In an open letter to state Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Meek on group blog BlueNC, James Protzman, a.k.a. Anglico, said he was sorry for writing an inflammatory post about the potential for state Rep. Rick Glazier to challenge Congressman Robin Hayes in 2008.

Glazier, a Fayetteville Democrat, was mentioned as a possible candidate in an article last week in The Hill, a Washington, D.C., newspaper. That upset Protzman and other netroots types who favor 2006 candidate Larry Kissell, who fell just 329 votes short of beating the Concord Republican in a surprise upset.

"This pretty much annoys the hell out of me," Protzman wrote in a post on BlueNC. That sparked a flame war between supporters of Glazier and Kissell, Meek weighed in, and the chair of the state Republican Party gleefully issued a press release saying she'd "heard more rational discussions in a first grade sandbox."

And today, Protzman apologized.

"I'm sorry it happened and I hope you will forgive me for my role in starting the frenzy," he wrote.