Thursday, June 12, 2003

The WUNC-TV segment taped last week on the Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation project is supposed to run tonight. I hear CNN is planning a story, too, perhaps tipped by the Newsweek article. 3:09:46 PM    comment []

Monkeytime: “It's obvious that a lot of people in Raleigh are ready for something interesting to happen downtown.”   Here, too. Luna and I were eating outside at Undercurrent today and wondering about the junkshop cattycorner to us and the malt-liquor emporium adjacent to the junkshop and the empty storefront next to it. You could put a nice little restaurant on the corner, with a few tables outside and some parking places, too. I hear the City of Greensboro is going to offer sub-prime loans for that kind of stuff. And it would go nicely with our ACC Hall of Fame.  3:07:54 PM    comment []

One of the BeggingtoDiffer guys on Animatrix: “After watching the segments depicting the rise of the machines on Earth, I found myself rooting for the bad guys.”     I bet this lady's site has been getting a lot of traffic, huh?   Meanwhile frograbbitmonkey hasn’t finished unloading on Reloaded. “I'm so over the vinyl clothing. And if people get to look however they want in the Matrix, why do they all wear such fugly sunglasses?”   I’ve said it all along: a key to enjoying the movie is to see it with an eleven-year-old. 12:43:34 PM    comment []

Another reason to be mad at Hillary: she once kept Bill from punching Dick Morris. 12:36:15 PM    comment []

Could an ACC sports hall of fame really go up at the corner of South Elm and Lee in downtown Greensboro? Maybe, but there’s a lot of work to be done before it can happen.   The City Council on Tuesday authorized staff to solicit public input and come up with a redevelopment plan for the site. The ACC hall of fame is one possibility under consideration.   When I floated the idea in a column early this year, I didn’t know that a group led by former UNC star and ex-City Council member Dick Grubar was already at work on a plan. That plan, which does not specify the South Elm site, is still in the works, although the current turmoil over league expansion is soaking up a lot of attention these days at the ACC offices in Greensboro.   Grubar’s group, which includes the Greensboro Sports Council, Merchants Association, and a development organization, hopes to have a detailed feasibility study completed by a Washington, DC-based company within the next thirty days. The group has had general discussions with the ACC, and the league has given them a green light to proceed to a certain point.   Grubar is adamant that any ACC sports hall of fame not be limited to dusty displays of old trophies and jerseys that would attract visitors for a couple of years and then peter out. He wants interactivity and other high-tech goodies. That dovetails with the league’s desire for an educational component to the exhibitions, but it will also raise the price.    If the planners see the project as doable, the critical issue will be money. Financial support from the ACC won’t be forthcoming, and the member schools may be reluctant to let the Hall approach their big donors. But if this idea catches fire, then I think the money can be found from all kinds of sources, including foundations, ACC alumni, corporate sponsors with ties to the ACC (JP, Nike, Chik-fil-A…), federal redevelopment grants, and more.   South Elm and Lee would be a good site – close to the highways, the Coliseum, and the downtown Civil Rights Museum.   Greensboro is lucky to have Grubar leading this effort. But our elected officials and business leaders can’t wait for him to do it all – we need to be actively looking for ways to make this dream a reality. 9:09:29 AM    comment []

There’s a clever switch of subjects being attempted in the post-war debate over Iraq’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs.   The real question isn’t about the legitimacy of concerns over those programs – as the blogospheric ass-coverers have documented, those fears were serious and widespread.   The Administration’s apparent misstatement of fact, intentional or not, was in saying that the threat of these weapons was so immediate that we had to invade Iraq right away to deal with them.   Whatever the reasons for this seeming failure of US intelligence, most of the world’s other countries didn’t buy it. The spinners – aw hell, let’s just call them liars – make it sound like it was only France, with maybe a little help from fellow Old Europeans in Germany, but reliable pals like Canada, Mexico, Turkey, et al didn’t rise to the bait, either.   Condi Rice’s vision of a mushroom cloud over an American city sounds today like bellicose propaganda. And whatever we may eventually find in terms of other “weapons of mass destruction,” that may not be the same thing as proving the imminence of the threat to the United States.   But that’s what they told us, and unless you’ve sold your soul to spin it’s worth asking why they did it.   Update: Josh Marshall weighs in on the same topic: “This is just a head-fake with an advanced degree and it's deeply dishonest.” Read the whole thing.   BTW, I’m trading email with Marshall on the same subject as yesterday's phone call with InstaPundit...watch this space for the exciting details. 7:44:56 AM    comment []