She's Got Balls

Apparently not satisfied with the heavy aroma already enwreathing her and her husband's exercise of power at N.C. State University, Mary Easley says she intends to cause a further stink by appealing her firing from that institution.

Thus keeping the whole sorry mess o' pottage bubbling on the stove.

She says she's aggrieved.

And she's got the attorney to prove it.

The Downside of Good Intentions

Todd, N.C., residents near the South Fork of the New River are suspicious of Boone and intend to defend their waters from any poachers. That's understandable. But blind opposition to Boone's permit request to draw a maximum of 4 million gallons a day from a river that's flowing at a rate of 50 or 60 million gallons a day may cause them to shoot wildly into their own foot.

The progressive mayor and Town Council of Boone wants to do more than the law requires. That is, they want permission from the state to put the water intake completely out of sight in the riverbed, and out of the way of recreational users of the river.

For no particular nor logical reason that we can discern, the Todd area citizens united to fight this project want that special permission defeated, so that Boone would have to follow the minimum standards of water intake and put the piping structure in full view on the banks of the river.

In other words, if the opposition wins, they lose, and they'll get an uglier facility.

Not that the facility itself is the issue for them. It's the very idea of any town government anywhere in the known universe taking their water. Which, again, is humanly understandable, given the acquisitive assumptions of the species, but ultimately rather silly and ... self-defeating.

Benefits of the Gospel

When hearing this tale, one just naturally meditates on the words of Jesus: "Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 19:23, KJV).

Here's the outline:

Major evangelism industry big-wig builds $100 million per annum broadcasting empire in Charlotte, is subsequently lured to the South Carolina suburbs of Charlotte by $26 million in tax incentives, pays himself over $1.5 million per annum, and is building himself a $4 million playhouse in a gated community on the shores of Lake Keowee -- 9,000 square feet with a 2,000 square-foot screened porch. That's some mortification of the flesh! While this extravagance is still under construction, the big-wig begins trimming his pay-roll, laying people off, cutting salaries ... the mortification of other people's flesh!

Said media evangelism big-wig, when asked: appeals to donors are "based on the Bible" (which we think probably means that appeals to donors quote the Bible without necessarily following it).

The Chosen People

Here's an example of using your Christian status among The Saved as a trump card to save you from punishment, i.e. in this case, loss of job:

Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), on Friday:

I have been doing a lot of soul-searching on that front. What I find interesting is the story of David, and the way in which he fell mightily, he fell in very very significant ways. But then picked up the pieces and built from there.

Zachery Roth helpfully reminds us of the plot of David&Bathsheba:

As King of Israel and Judea, David saw Bathsheba in the bath (he was walking on the roof at the time, goes the story) and immediately had to have her. After getting her pregnant, he tried to conceal it by ordering her husband Uriah to return from war and sleep with Bathsheba, so that the baby would be thought of as Uriah's.

But Uriah preferred to remain at war. So David gave an order that Uriah should be abandoned in battle, ensuring his death. Then he married Bathsheba.

And he didn't even have to give up his kingship.


According to reporters who were present when Sanford compared himself to King David, the governor's cabinet exhibited "looks of nervousness and incredulity," so that immediately afterward, the Guv's office issued a written statement:

I remain committed to rebuilding the trust that has been committed to me over the next 18 months, and it is my hope that I am able to follow the example set by David in the Bible -- who after his fall from grace humbly refocused on the work at hand. By doing so, I will ultimately better serve in every area of my life, and I am committed to doing so.

Will someone please send this child to camp?

Dear Senator Hagan: Please don't mistake our lack of respect for a lack of interest.

You've emerged full-blown as THE major roadblock to a public option reform of national healthcare.

And your cryptic utterances are beginning to take on an Esperanto-esque "what did she mean by that?" It looks as though you're determined to defend for-profit insurance providers and other special interests while trying to sound sympathetic to the uninsured and to the bankrupted-by-medicine.

That act ain't gonna fly around here. Not with the people, though the big-business lobbies will probably be happy to bundle those checks together for you.

Blessed Are the Gun-Toters, For Theirs is the Paranoid Fantasy

A Kentucky Assembly of God Church is hosting a "bring-your-gun-to-Church" Sunday.

We are not making this up.

Free Advertising for Foxx?

Visiting the homepage for The Appalachian Visitor Center, an advertisement-driven for-profit website, we were startled to be confronted by that all-too-familiar visage, giving her blessing to $$ tourism.

How many furriners, given The Madam's recent notoriety, might turn around their plans to come here, seeing who represents (?) us in Congress?

Lights! Camera! Action!

We're generally not agreeable about government-funded corporate welfare. As a rule, it makes us dyspeptic. But this idea currently up in the N.C. General Assembly, has our full support.

According to the N.C. Film Office, in the past 27 years some 800 movies and 15 TV series have been filmed in our state, vastly enriching the local areas where they set up with jobs (temporary, but still), props, services, even the occasional trained dog. Having supplied props and furniture to both "The Winter People" (1989) and "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992), we loved to see "the movie people" coming. Generally, they paid cash.

Don't know what the current statistics are, but back in the mid-1990s North Carolina had risen to third among all the states for on-location movie production, behind California (duh) and New York. Third. There for a while we were experiencing a building boom of studio facilities. The best known and largest is in Wilmington, but they're scattered through the middle of the state too. That's infrastructure ... and jobs, lots of jobs. How many extras, weapons experts, horse wranglers were hired for just "The Last of the Mohicans"? Thousands. The ripple effects are pronounced. Our western mountains are still visited by people who were first stunned to see them represented in that Michael Mann movie.

In fact, it was the movies that put Hendersonville, Hickory Nut Gap, Bat Cave, and Chimney Rock on the map back before World War I. When I was actively researching Hollywood history, I was astounded to discover that film crews were flocking to Asheville and Hendersonville every summer beginning in 1910 to make dozens of "two-reelers" that were shown in the nickleodeons of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Hickory Nut Gap and Chimney Rock got utilized repeatedly as background for moonshiner and feud shoot-'em-ups as well as a series of movies about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Those silent films didn't create Asheville as a destination, but they certainly didn't hurt. Movie crews and troops of actors regularly monopolized the rooms at the Esmeralda Inn, that historic stopping-off place near Bat Cave that (alas) burned down (again!) a few years ago.

What's being proposed in the General Assembly is a very modest tax rebate, a far more productive investment, IMHO, that the millions offered Dell, Google, and various other corporate flim-flammers.

Odd Man, Out

So South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's staff was just plain lying for him when they announced yesterday that he was on a hike.

Instead, he was in Buenos Aires without telling his wife and four kids.

"I wanted to do something exotic," Sanford told The State newspaper.

ADDENDUM
The "something exotic" that Sanford was doing turns out to be an Argentinian woman.