Only in North Carolina?

I'll try not to say too much about yesterday's presidential primaries (a promise I intend to break promptly in my next post), but I'll shine some light on other items of interest.

North Carolina had a full slate electoral contests this year - the presidential nomination, of course, but also contests for the two parties' nods for Senator, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and a whole slew of down-ticket offices (around here, even officials such as the Commissioners of Insurance, Labor, and Agriculture are elected, which presumably asks a lot of voters).

None of that has anything to do with this however: a candidate for the State House, Stan Morse, arguing that his challenger was more electable (to say nothing of "better looking and smarter"), endorses his opponent and goes so far as to make a preemptive concession speech and campaign on his supposed opponent's behalf. The voters, however, were not having any of it and simply renominated Morse with nearly 55% of the vote.

Only in North Carolina? Perhaps not, but it's certainly amusing.

Two additional, tangential notes: first off, for all things political in the state, there's no better source than the Raleigh News & Observer's blog Under the Dome. Second, the N&O should be congratulated - their reporting on state and local elections provides an incredibly detailed accounting of voting, including maps of geographic distribution and turnout data. I wish every publication was this committed covering elections.

Heh

I awoke to the usual slew of emails today. One of them announced that an ACLU speaker was coming to speak here - but not just any ACLU speaker, a fellow named King Downing, head of the group's national Campaign Against Racial Profiling. CARP. Obviously I was amused, given that Merriam-Webster defines carp, when used as a verb, as "to find fault or complain querulously." How apropos.

Econ Blogs

Given the tumult of the market, and a general interest in economics without any real training, I'm drawn to economically-oriented blogs. A few of the good ones I've dug up in recent days:

• Kudlow's Money Politics on National Review: National Review's economic editor, and CNBC host blogs on economically-related issues...
• Kudlow's Money Politics: Same guy, different blog; this one is a bit more related to his show.
• Greg Mankiw's Blog: Random Observations for Students of Economics: Mankiw's a Harvard professor as well as the former chair of President's Council of Economic Advisers. His focus is a bit more on economics students, particularly those at the graduate level, but that doesn't diminish the value of his insights.
  

Cool

Perhaps it's been around for a while and I've just missed it, but meet ScotusWiki. Yes, it's a Supreme Court wiki...and it's pretty cool.

Maybe this just says something about me.

New Favorite Blog?

Hyperbole, I promise, but The Pour - the blog of Times wine critic Eric Asimov - is certainly amusing and interesting.

Speaking of Social Networking

Two things I touched on in my last post were the increasing prevalence of Internet-ready phones and the power of social networking sites such as Facebook.

I'm not the only one talking about that - Apple's got a new iPhone ad that only talks about Facebook on your iPhone.

Besides being the typical brilliant, effective, stylish Apple ad (I swear they have the best ads in the world right now), it's a pitch to a younger crowd than may already be toting the thing (which I'm in love with). But it's also targeted at a certain demographic of this younger crowd - as I'd noted last year, Facebook is used largely by a younger, preppier, more affluent crowd than MySpace. Which is to say I don't expect to see an iPhone MySpace ad anytime in thenear future.

Opening the Ballot in North Carolina

I could hardly believe my eyes this morning as I perused The Chronicle, Duke's daily which bills itself as "The Tower of Campus Thought and Action" or some such drivel. Buried inside was some real reporting, regarding efforts by North Carolina's Libertarian and Green Parties to liberalize state ballot laws, currently among the nation's strictest. The present requirement to collect 70,000 votes in order to qualify obviously discriminates against such small parties, which usually spend the majority of their respective budgets in the process. Now, however, the Greens and Libertarians have laid their ideological differences aside in an attempt to overturn the law.

First, I was flabbergasted by such reporting in the Chronicle; more often than not, I feel that the thing should come in two ply on a roll because that's about the limit of its value. Second, and this isn't always the case, I like the idea. It's not out of any ideological willingness to see third (and fourth) parties compete in the general - it's bad enough having Ron Paul in the debates without having Cynthia McKinney in there. Rather, it's because of the Libertarian Party's gubernatorial candidate Mike Munger.

Munger, the Political Science Department Chair here at Duke, has a well-deserved and legendary reputation. He's also inarguably brilliant. He almost certainly wouldn't win election - he's too smart for that (a sad testament to our political system) - but I'd love nothing than to see him get into the gubernatorial debates. This isn't to say the others are dunces, indeed by Tarheel State standards, they're not a bad lot (Wake Forest grads, one graduate degree from LSE). But Mungowitz is a) brilliant and b) absolutely without regard for political convention. Thus the debates would quickly become must-see TV (and I might not be joking had the writers strike recently ended). Oh and Munger's an enormously amusing blogger. Check him out.

I won't cry if he and his greenie counterpart don't make the ballot - but I do think North Carolina politics will be the worse for it.

Quick Question

So, Comrade Castro finally "announced" that he won't seek "reelection" tomorrow. Does anyone honestly believe that he's even had a pulse the last 18 or so months? Comrade Castro had a cold...embalming cured it nicely.

Finally!

It's been a headache multiple times in the past for reasons that are entirely inexplicable to me, but if you look down the page on the right side, you can finally see a Technorati-driven "tag cloud" - a quick way to see what I've been blogging about.

The Next Big Thin

This is just cool: Sony's set to roll out its new line of TVs in December. The kicker? The screen will be .12 inches thick (3mm) thanks to Sony's revolutionary use of organic light-emiting diodes. Of course they'll be released first in Japan, so American techies will have to salivate from afar for a while.

Sorry for using both the typo-as-pun and pun in four words. It's early, I'm tired.