Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges is leaving shortly for Iraq where he will both teach a business seminar and write a daily blog on his experiences.

Hodges will be a visiting professor at American University at Sulaimani for 10 days, lecturing an advanced course on business and ethics and law. He will also visit Dubai, Rob Christensen reports.

While he is in Iraq, Hodges will be writing a daily blog about what he learns in the town located in the Kurdish dominated north of Iraq. The blog, which will begin Feb. 4th, is called the Tarheel Democracy Dispatch. You can read it here.

"I'm teaching over there for the adventure," said Hodges, who is 72.

The program is being run by the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill, where Hodges is an adjunct professor.

The blog was the idea of Joyce Kohn, a Raleigh public relations executive.

Hodges hopes to show the "new Iraq."

"If we can see a different Iraq that people are used to seeing," Hodges said, "it might improve all our perspectives."

Hodges is a retired banker and former deputy and acting commerce secretary under President Jimmy Carter. He was a U.S. Senate candidate in 1978. His father was governor of North Carolina and commerce secretary under President John F. Kennedy.

Hodges will arrive in Iraq on Saturday, Feb. 7.

Harold H. Webb, chairman of the Wake County Board of Commissioners and a former Tuskegee Airman, will have prime seats at the presidential inauguration next week.

The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies invited those still living among the flyers who trained as part of the famed segregated unit in World War II, Michael Biesecker reports.

After being drafted out of N.C. A&T State University as a freshman, Webb served two years as a mechanic and gunner in the U.S. Army Air Corps before gaining acceptance at Tuskegee. He was training to be a bomber pilot when the Japanese surrendered and the war ended.

The distinguished record of the all-black Tuskegee airmen during the war helped persuade President Harry Truman to desegregate the U.S. military in 1948.

Webb, 83, had planned to go to the Obama inauguration anyway. He has previously attended the inagurations of presidents Kennedy, Carter and Clinton.

But as a former Tuskegee Airman, he will be a honored guest sitting with former members of Congress in the terrace below the podium where Obama will be sworn in.

"It is an honor to literally have a front row seat to history being made," Webb said in a county media release. "I view the location of our seats as symbolic, because Obama stands on the shoulders of my fellow airmen and other trail blazers that helped pave the way for desegregation and ultimately, his place as the first African-American president."

Over the past century, North Carolina has rarely been a battleground.

Since 1908, the average margin of victory in the presidential race here has been 18 percentage points, and the median has been 12.4 points.

The closest race out of those 25 elections was Bill Clinton's challenge to incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992. As a Southern governor running on the economy, Clinton campaigned heavily in the state, but he was helped by a strong third-party showing by Ross Perot.

Bush only won by 0.79 percentage points, beating Clinton 43.4 to 42.7 percent. (Perot got 13.9 percent of the vote, the third-best showing for a third-party candidate in North Carolina after George Wallace in 1968 and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.)

The next closest race was 1956, when Democrat Adlai Stevenson edged Dwight Eisenhower by 1.32 percentage points despite losing the national election.

In third place was Ronald Reagan's 2.12 point win over Jimmy Carter in 1980. In fourth place, John Kennedy's 4.22 point win over Richard Nixon in 1960. And in fifth place, Bob Dole's 4.69 point win over Clinton in 1996 despite losing the national election.

Otherwise, North Carolina was reliably Democratic from 1908 to 1964, and reliably Republican from 1968 to 2004 (with the exception of Carter's post-Watergate win in 1976.)

Former Sen. John Edwards has gone so anti-establishment that he's planning to skip the annual New Hampshire Democrats’ pre-primary dinner in Milford, N.H., on Friday night.

Ray Buckley, head of the state Democratic party, said he heard this week that Edwards had given his regrets on the invitation. Instead, Edwards plans to be at an event in Portsmouth, Barb Barrett reports.

Buckley's still holding out hope. "Candidates have said that before, and they've come," Buckley said today. "They said they couldn't make it. I said we'd still certainly welcome him and hope he comes by."

If Edwards does skip the event, he'll pass up the chance to give a 10-minute speech to 3,000 Democrats paying $100 to $1,000 a plate for the dinner. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama plan to be there, Buckley said.

The dinner, begun in 1959 with a speech from John F. Kennedy, is the state party's biggest annual fund raiser.

"Since 1959, we've hosted every candidate in the pre-primary dinner,” Buckley said, "and I have faith we will this time as well."