Thursday, September 02, 2004

Another N&R blog launches: The Inside Scoop on local politics. I'm going to like this one. Look for lots of depth and detail and documents. Geek out: Click here to download a more detailed .pdf file, says one of the first posts. Writing in 3-D, I called it in my first N&r column on blogging in May 2002. 8:06:17 PM    comment []

"Our tribe will attack their tribe. And then we will kill their men, make their livestock our own and take their women to mate." This, I'm told, is from the draft version of Zell Miller's speech, before word came down that Zell really shouldn't hold back. -- Josh Marshall 4:07:47 PM    comment []

Eric Muller: "This isn't about selling books, and it isn't about getting my handsome mug on TV or my mellifluous voice on the radio. It's about countering, in the only way I know how, the stunningly successful spread of false insinuations about the loyalty and conduct of a group of Americans I've come to know and care deeply about." 3:52:56 PM    comment []

Jeff Thigpen: "(T)he Mayor's comments and John Robinson's reflections represent a natural tension between public officials and the news media." Yes. For the record, I coined the phrase Greensboro Disease, and I did so in a News & Record column. So here you have the supposed engine of negativity defining the negativity. It's complicated. As a reader, a journalist (but not an N&R employee) and a pro-GSO guy, I don't find the N&R to be overly negative. It does some serious investigative work, which sometimes must be uncomfortable for public officials (Project Homestead, the hockey ownership fiasco...). Sometimes it's a matter of perspective: I would have liked more hard-hitting articles on the environmental impact of FedEx; my friend Stanley Frank, for one, found the FedEx coverage to be far too negative. Ditto the new baseball stadium, on which I would guess that Jim Melvin and David Hoggard saw the coverage in quite different ways. Thigpen: "I hope the Holliday/Robinson dialogue moves us toward recovery, not relapse." Wouldn't it be great if the mayor had a blog? UPDATE: John Hammer, a regular Typhoid Mary of negativity, says in an as-yet-unposted article in the Rhino that Greensboro's problem isn't being pessimistic, but "pretending things are going well when they aren't. Or in some cases, contending that there is only one answer to a question...Perhaps the us-versus-them mentality fostered the chamber and Action Greensboro is the real Greensboro Disease." That comes after a long, sneering article in which he went out of his way to make the speakers at the state-of-the-City confab sound simplistic or absurd. As someone who doesn't really have a dog in the fight -- I'm neither a part of the Action Greensboro nexus, nor a knee-jerk Melvin basher -- I don't think John is adding much to the debate. I want Greensboro to prosper. Sometimes I think the powers that be are wrong (eg on the best location for a new stadium) but I can still see that the long messy process, which didn't put the stadium on South Elm where I wanted it, will indirectly lead to something going on the South Elm site. And it seems obvious that the stadium project is part of a downtown renaissance that Hammer seems incapable of addressing, because that might lead to saying something, y'know, positive. 9:02:41 AM    comment []

I'll be on WUNC's The State of Things (91.5 FM, archived here) at noon today to talk about NC issues...it's another roundtable conversation with smart people who know more about the topics than I do. 8:23:38 AM    comment []