Linda Carlisle says diversity will strengthen the new administration.

The retired Greensboro businesswoman, who was added Monday to Gov.-elect  Beverly Perdue's transition team, said that having male and female staffers with diverse ethnic backgrounds will improve decision-making.

"We reach better decisions and get better results when we have all levels of diversity," she told Dome. "It will make whatever is done better, stronger and more effective."

As a vice president at a major North Carolina bank in the 1970s, Carlisle remembers when few women or minorities held positions of power. More recently, she was the only woman on the original board of the state lottery.

A longtime resident of the Triad, she said geographic diversity is also important for the newly elected governor.

"It's always difficult to ensure that those outside of (Raleigh) have a sense that they're being heard," she said. 

Carlisle first met Perdue when she was lieutenant governor and worked as a fundraiser and volunteer for her gubernatorial campaign. She was appointed to the lottery commission and the UNC-Greensboro board of trustees by Gov. Mike Easley.

Communication professors from around the country have signed a statement calling on the campaign of Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin to stop "incendiary mendacity" and "false and inflammatory" statements about Democrat Barack Obama.

The statement, found here, urges both presidential campaigns to halt "blatant misrepresentations of their opponent's positions." But the professors say the McCain/Palin campaign's discourse — on the stump and in robocalls — "is unethical and stokes the fires of racism."

"We see an effort to color code the election as between an urban, African-American Obama falsely linked to terms like 'terrorist,' 'unpatriotic,' and 'welfare,' versus small town, white 'patriotic' Americans like the mythical Joe the Plumber," the statement said in part.

The Web site also singles out U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes of North Carolina for his recent comment that "liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve and believe in God."

The statement was signed by 140 professors, including 14 from North Carolina. The N.C. signers are: Carole Blair, Renee Alexander Craft, Lawrence Grossberg, Dennis Mumby, Della Pollock, Michael S. Waltman and Eric King Watts, all from UNC-Chapel Hill; Jessica Katz Jameson, William J. Kinsella, Craig Allen Smith and Sarah Stein, all from N.C. State University; Spoma Jovanovic and Chris Poulos from UNC-Greensboro; and Kathleen J. Turner from Davidson College.

Kay Hagan got a few pet projects in the 2004 budget.

As a Senate Appropriations co-chair for the second year in 2004, the Greensboro Democrat got a few more provisions than in her first go-round to help our her home district.

Here's a quick look:

Millennium Campus: Hagan secured $4 million to convert buildings at a former school for deaf children for a research campus run by N.C. A&T and UNC-Greensboro. (Section 32.1)

Design Center: The N.C. School of the Arts got $2 million to start the Center for Design Innovation in a Greensboro research park. (Section 32.1)

Tuition Promise: Hagan's provision to give free tuition at state universities to graduates of the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics added $780,000 to the budget.

Rape Kits: After getting the reduction of a backlog of untested rape kits labeled a "priority" in 2003, Hagan got $250,000 set aside to test them. (Section 15.2)

Previously: Hagan's pet projects from 2003. 

State Sen. Kay Hagan was not very bipartisan in her second term.

With the Democratic Senate nominee touting her bipartisanship in the legislature, Dome has been taking a closer look at the number of Republicans who signed on to her bills.

In the 2001-02 session, the Greensboro Democrat was the primary sponsor of 29 bills. Of them, 14 had no cosponsors, five had only Democratic cosponsors and 10 had Republican cosponsors.

Again, a few of the bills had more than one Republican cosponsor. Overall, her 74 cosponsors included 61 Democrats and 13 Republicans, or about a four-to-one ratio.

The most frequent Republican cosponsor was Sen. Robert G. Shaw, also of Greensboro. He signed on to four Hagan bills on local issues: UNC-Greensboro's parking authority, helping the High Point furniture market, giving the city of Greensboro more roads jurisdiction, and funds for a business court.

Other bills that attracted GOP support: suspending driver's licenses for stealing gas, teaching financial literacy in school, making changes to financial oversight of local housing authorities, limiting secrecy orders in civil cases, amending domestic violence laws, and revising laws on electronic transactions.

Previously: Cosponsors in 2003-04, 2005-06 and 2007-08.

A UNC-Greensboro vice chancellor inappropriately hired a technology contractor who was paid $431,925 in state money over two years, including $65,000 in expenses for commuting to Greensboro from Los Angeles and Las Vegas, according to a state audit released today.

The payments included $212,000 in student fee revenue to the contractor, whose billing rate was raised from $150 to $200 an hour during the period, Jane Stancill reports. The contract was executed by the vice chancellor for information technology services without following university procedures, the audit said.

The job, which was to ensure that a new administrative computing system was implemented on time, was not posted nor competitively bid. The university's top legal and business officials did not review the contract in violation of university procedure.

The vice chancellor who approved the contract was not named in the audit, nor was the independent contractor.

More after the jump.

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Sen. Kay Hagan is seeking more than $48 million in state spending.

The Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate has sponsored one bill and co-sponsored 16 bills seeking appropriations in the upcoming state budget. As a longtime state senator, she is serving an advisory role on the budget in the short session.

Hagan is the primary sponsor of a bill that would give the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering run by UNC-Greensboro and N.C. A&T University $2.9 million in the budget.

Among the larger appropriations bills she is cosponsoring: $12 million for the N.C. Housing Trust Fund, $9.5 million to the UNC system for 4-H camps, and $8.1 million to buy a building for a student services center at N.C. A&T.

She is also asking for $3 million for Boys & Girls Club programs targeting dropouts and teen pregnancy, $3 million for an International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, $2.6 million for promoting the semiannual furniture market in High Point, $2.5 million for minority financial literacy programs, $2 million for arts programs and $1 million for a parental school involvement pilot program.

Among the appropriations under $1 million: Money for a literacy program in Wake County public schools, an electronic health information study commission, Kids Voting programs, a John Coltrane Music Hall in Greensboro, job training for the homeless and former inmates, a male-oriented teen pregnancy prevention program, and housing for recovering substance abusers in Greensboro.

Actors Shawn and Marlon Wayans will be visiting North Carolina colleges this weekend on behalf of Barack Obama.

Their mission - to get students registered to vote.

Obama's campaign announced today that the Wayans brothers will be part of a larger effort to get people registered by North Carolina's April 11 deadline.

The actors are scheduled to visit N.C. State, N.C. Central, UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, N.C. A&T, UNC-Greensboro, Winston-Salem State and Wake Forest.

Greensboro Mayor Yvonne Johnson officially endorsed Barack Obama.

At a press conference this morning, Johnson announced her backing along with details of a town hall meeting on Wednesday.

"Senator Obama has outlined a broad agenda for change and shown his unique ability to bring people of all backgrounds, beliefs and party affiliations together to make change happen," she said.

The campaign also announced that Obama would appear at 1 p.m. at the War Memorial Auditorium at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex. The auditorium seats 2,400.

Doors will open at 11 a.m.

Tickets are available in the Atrium at UNC-Greensboro from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., or at the Guilford County Democratic Party headquarters from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. 

Rep. Paul Luebke says he would have voted to expel Thomas Wright.

The Durham Democrat was one of five state representatives who had an excused absence from today's special session on Wright.

A professor at UNC-Greensboro, Luebke had an Introduction to Sociology course today. Under a signed agreement with the UNC Board of Governors, he cannot miss class to attend a special session or study commission meeting.

(During the regular session, Luebke takes an unpaid leave of absence.)

He said he would have voted to expel Wright based on what he's read in the Select Committee etc. etc. report on Wright. He would not have voted for censure.

"Of course, I don't know how the debate went, but I have the book," he told Dome. "The report makes a compelling case of flagrant violations of campaign finance law."

Andrew Brod argues building roads would help counter the recession.

In a column in the Greensboro News & Record, the director of UNC-Greensboro's Center for Business and Economic Research writes that a "comprehensive public works program" could help the state counter the recession.

He says issuing bonds to repair roads and bridges would "put people to work," while extending Internet service would help "the movement of ideas."

Rural Internet access in North Carolina is higher than in rural areas nationwide, and yet even here we lag behind the many industrialized countries whose broadband networks are superior to those in the United States, in terms of both access and speed. Redoubling the efforts and funding of e-NC would pay dividends well into the future.

The projects, Brod writes, would make North Carolina even more competitive and better able to withstand future economic downturns.

Hat Tip: Ed Cone