Legislative panel subpoenas unaired WUNC TV documentary

5 p.m. UPDATE:  UNC TV spokesman Steve Volstad says  there's not a documentary, but three reports in the works that UNC TV plans to air. They're unfinished at the moment, he says.

Here's something new: the Senate Judiciary II Committee, chaired by Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, R-Cabarrus, has subpoenaed UNC-TV for a copy of a documentary the television agency has prepared but has not broadcast. Hartsell said Wednesday night the committee met after the legislative session Wednesday and agreed to request the documentary and, just to make sure, to formally subpoena it as well.

The subject of the documentary is Alcoa, which is seeking renewal of its federal license to operate hydroelectric generating stations on the Yadkin River. The Perdue administration has opposed the license renewal before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and wants the legislature to pass a bill that would create a way for the state to purchase the hydro plants.

What's especially interesting is that this represents a fairly rare issuance of a subpoena for materials by a legislative committee -- but it's extremely rare, sources say, for a committee to subpoena a documentary or a news story that has not run. I don't know if this has happened before. This raises all kinds of questions about the relationship between branches of the government -- in this case, legislative versus executive, in that UNC-TV is an agency overseen by the UNC Board of Governors. And it also involves the power of the state versus the academy. Yikes! Controversy? Complications? Clashes of conscience? Oh, you bet.

I have no clue what the documentary would say or why UNC-TV has not broadcast the documentary. I can tell you that if the agency complies and hands over the documentary, Hartsell's plan is to show it in a committee session on Tuesday, July 6 at 9 a.m in Room 643 of the Legislative Office Building in Raleigh.

I don't have any information about compliance, but if I were running UNC-TV, I wouldn't wait. I'd run the documentary over the weekend and then give the committee all the copies of  the thing it wants. When you've got people demanding to see something you're put together, it seems a fair bet that the ratings would be high.

UNC historian finds himself in Obama speech

H.G. Jones, curator emeritus of the North Carolina Collection at Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill and a former N.C. cabinet secretary, passed along a note the other day about a recent discovery: President Obama had quoted him as a "Navy man" in a speech last year commemorating the extension of the G.I. Bill.On Aug. 3, 2009, the president spoke about the adoption of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. In that speech, he took note of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's thinking on post-war education for veterans that made college possible for millions of returning veterans, and mentioned something Jones had written about it.

Obama said:

"The GI Bill was approved just weeks after D-Day, and carried with it a simple promise to all who had served: You pick the school, we'll help pick up the bill. And what followed was not simply an opportunity for our veterans -- it was a transformation for our country. By 1947, half of all Americans enrolled in college were veterans. Ultimately, this would lead to three Presidents, three Supreme Court justices, 14 Nobel Prize winners, and two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners. But more importantly, it produced hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers, doctors and nurses -- the backbone of the largest middle class in history. All told, nearly 8 million Americans were educated under the original GI Bill, including my grandfather.


"No number can sum up this sea change in our society. Reginald Wilson, a fighter pilot from Detroit, said, "I didn't know anyone who went to college. I never would have gone to college had it not been for the GI Bill." H.G. Jones, a Navy man from North Carolina, said, "What happened in my rural Caswell County community happened all over the country -- going to college was no longer a novelty." Indeed, one of the men who went to college on the GI Bill, as I mentioned, was my grandfather, and I would not be standing here today if that opportunity had not led him West in search of opportunity."

Jones sent me a note about that speech after an exchange he and I had had about the use of the word "sendup" -- defined as a funny imitation or parody of something. Here's what Jones wrote back:

"You've just taught me a new term. Back in Caswell County, 'send up' would mean to send something up to Rockingham County.

"I don't feel too bad, however, for I have recently learned that President Obama quoted me in a speech on the passage of the new GI Bill last year. Have no idea how his speech-writer got ahold of my Kemp Plummer Battle Lecture to Di/Phi Societies in 1990. Anyway, I was honored to be compared to his grandfather. If interested, click on this link, then click on video, and go to the 7 minute 22 minute mark. HGJ"

http://www.whitehouse.gov/video/President-Obama-Launches-Post-9/11-GI-Bill

Jones is a bit more than a "Navy man'" though he did serve in the Navy in World War II. Here's a brief bio from the UNC website: Dr. H. G. Jones is Curator Emeritus of the North Carolina Collection and Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is currently the Thomas Whitmell Davis Research Historian. Prior to coming to UNC-Chapel Hill, Dr. Jones served as State Archivist of North Carolina and Director of the North Carolina State Department of Archives and History. He is the founder and secretary of the North Caroliniana Society. He has written widely on North Carolina history, including the state historical column "In Light of History," which was distributed by the Associated Press for seventeen years, and the books North Carolina Illustrated and North Carolina History: An Annotated Bibliography.

'Third' senator from North Carolina has died

A political footnote: Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.VA., has died after more than half a century in the U.S. Senate. He was the third U.S.. Senator from North Carolina serving in the Senate. Byrd was born as Cornelius Calvin Sale JR. in Wilkes County, N.C. in North Wilkesboro, but after his mother died in a devastating flu epidemic, he went to live with relatives in West Virginia and took their family name.

Here's part of Wikipedia's entry:

"Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr., in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, in 1917. When he was one year old, his mother, Ada Mae Kirby, died in the 1918 Flu Pandemic. In accordance with his mother's wishes, his father, Cornelius Calvin Sale, dispersed the family children among relatives. Sale Jr. was given to the custody of Titus and Vlurma Byrd, his uncle and aunt, who renamed him Robert Carlyle Byrd and raised him in the coal-mining region of southern West Virginia.

Byrd had a fascinating career, at one point joining the Ku Klux Klan and later repudiating that organization.
Here's the Washington Post story on Byrd and his place in Congressional history.

Latest battle in 'war' over diversity

The latest fireworks at the Wake County Board of Education came yesterday with the arrest of four people after a sit-in disrupted the board's Tuesday meeting. The Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, Nancy Petty, senior minister at Raleigh's Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, author and Prof. Tim Tyson, who teaches at Duke University and parent Nancy Williams were arrested on charges of second-degree trespass. They were later released. See the News & Observer's story on it here.

The arrests came after the four said they would continue to occupy school board members' seats and speak about the board's decision to end its diversity-based school assignment policies until they were arrested. The arrests came about an hour after the meeting was to begin.

What's really interesting is that Gov. Bev Perdue recently weighed in on the board's move to assign students to neighborhood schools and said the state was in a war. The Wilmington Journal covered last week's meeting of the N.C. Legislative Black Caucus and had this report, which blogger Gary Pearce of www.talkingaboutpolitics.com quoted the other day in these paragraphs:

Declaring that the state was ''in a war,'' Governor Beverly Perdue told members of the NC Legislative Black Caucus last weekend that she, as a citizen, fully supported the efforts of NC NAACP President Rev. William Barber in challenging the resegregation of public schools across the state. Even if that ''war'' ultimately ends up in the US Supreme Court.


''North Carolina is in a war,'' the governor declared last Friday during the opening night banquet of the 24th Annual NC Legislative Black Caucus Foundation's Education Scholarship Weekend at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel and Convention Center in the ResearchTrianglePark….


''If it takes going to the Supreme Court of this great country from WayneCounty and for Wake County, and for other counties in North Carolina, so be it,'' the governor continued. ''We will stand together, to make sure that all of the children of this state have a chance.''

It’s not clear whether Gov. Perdue will make this war a part of her administration or whether she will intervene in any court action, including any Supreme Court litigation, or whether this was just political talk. She’s already got quite a lot on her plate, but she does sound mighty fired-up about the Wake board.

Second debate more civil, and maybe more help for Cal

Tuesday night's debate between the Democratic candidates for their party's U.S. Senate nomination was a more civil affair than last week's debate, which was marked by sniping from the candidates and a short, messy format. And just guessing here, but it seemed to me Cal Cunningham helped himself a little more than Elaine Marshall as they head into the June 22 runoff.

Early voting has already begun, of course, but expectations are that turnout will be, in technical terms, lame bordering on dismal. Those who've watched the debates -- sponsored last week by WRAL-TV and Tuesday by NBC 17 and the N.C. League of Women Voters -- were likely looking for distinctions between the two candidates that would help make up their minds on whom to support or even whether to go to the polls.

I liked Tuesday's debate better. For one thing, NBC 17 used just one moderator, Kim Gernardo, in an hour-long format rather than the two moderators in a half-hour format that WRAL-TV had. If I were WRAL, I'd scrap the two-moderator arrangement and rethink the lightning-round, yes-or-no answers it wanted from candidates last week.  Asking candidates if they'd vote for a tax increase, yes or no, seems to me to emphasize the worst about politics by failing to provide context of what might be in such a proposed tax increase. Raise taxes on retired school teachers? Nobody would want to do that. Raise taxes to, say, keep Ft. Bragg open another 10 years? Maybe so. Or keep the nation's school teachers in the classroom? That's also might bring a different result.

It seemed to me that NBC 17's and the League's format worked smoother and gave the candidates a bit more time to answer the questions, which generally focused on the same topics as last week: The oil spill, immigration, Social Security, don't ask, don't tell and the record of incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Burr.

One place where Cunningham scored points, I thought, was his emphasis on his service in Iraq and his support of the surge in Afghanistan. Cunningham pointed out that if elected, he would be the first Iraq veteran in the Senate. Cunningham is a military lawyer. He would also be the first U.S. senator from North Carolina with military experience since Sen. Jesse Helms, who served in the Senate from 1972-2002, and who was in the Navy during World War II, though he stayed stateside. Former U.S. Sen. Terry Sanford, who served from 1986-1992, was, I think, the last U.S. senator from North Carolina who served in combat. He was an Army paratrooper in World War II. Lauch Faircloth, the Republican who beat Sanford in the 1992 Senate race and served one term, also served in the Army in the mid-1950s.

Kissell better off facing D'Annunzio?

U.S. Rep. Larry Kissell would be a lot better off if he faces Republican Tim D'Annunzio in the general election Nov. 2 than if he faces Harold Johnson, the former broadcaster who's in next week's runoff with D'Annunzio.

So says PPP's Tom Jensen, who has the numbers showing Kissell leads Johnson only 41-35 in a hypothetical race but whips D'Annunzio 48-26. The reason? The negative controversies over D'Annunzio's checkered record have damaged his standing with voters. No wonder D'Annunzio was mad enough to sue.

Here's what Jensen had to say in a news release:

The various controversies that have cropped up around D'Annunzio over the last six weeks have been devastating for his poll numbers. 39% of voters say their opinion of him has become more negative over the last month while just 10% say they now hold more positive feelings about him. Overall 38% have an unfavorable opinion of him now compared to just 19% with a favorable one. And only 25% think he's fit to hold public office while 41% think he is not.


Kissell's seen a steep decline in his approval numbers since PPP last polled the district in January. Then he was at a positive 45/30 spread, now he's at a negative 30/39 spread. The decline has come across partisan lines but has been most dramatic with Democrats. What was a +37 approval at 58/21 is now just +7 at 40/33, a drop of 30 points. With Republicans he's gone from -14 at 28/42 to -33 at 15/48 for a drop of 19 points. And with independents he's gone from +3 at 40/37 to -9 at 31/40 for a 12 point drop.


At this point a third party bid from Wendell Fant actually works to Kissell's benefit, likely because voters haven't heard anything from Fant yet and don't know what his angle is. When he's included in a three way match Kissell gets 40% to 30% for Johnson and 14% for Fant. Fant actually gets slightly more Republican support at 12% than he does Democratic support at 11%.


Although there's no doubt Kissell's health care vote has eroded enthusiasm for him with the Democratic base it appears to largely be a wash politically. With voters who can correctly identify that he opposed the bill he leads Johnson 42-35. Among those who erroneously think he supported it he's up 45-42. As much attention as Kissell's vote has received, still only 46% of voters know that he voted against it with 31% thinking he was in favor and 22% not making a guess.


No matter what happens next Tuesday Kissell is favored for a second term but the outcome of the GOP runoff will determine how hard he needs to work for it.

'Oil spill residuals' on Outer Banks in September-April time frame?

Michael Voiland, head of the N.C. Sea Grant program at N.C. State University, met with his counterparts in other Southern states last week to discuss the oil spill in the Gulf and what might happen if things go wrong and the oil comes up the East Coast. Oil residuals in some form might show up at Cape Hatteras and other Outer Banks beaches in the September-April time frame, the group things.  Here are a few of the group's conclusions:

* Despite estimates by BP and federal agencies, the amount of oil that has spilled into the Gulf is essentially unknown. The actual volume of oil spilled there will affect the chances of it reaching South Atlantic waters.

* It is still highly speculative to pinpoint the location, depth, and amounts of GoM oil that might eventually be captured and transported by the Loop Current over specific periods of time.

* The first major step in any movement of Gulf oil to the South Atlantic would be its entrainment in the GoM's Loop Current. In recent weeks and at present (June 11, 2010), the Loop Current has been “pinched” at its ox-bowed (loop) narrowing, creating an eddy or gyre separated from the Loop Current itself. This fluctuation, manifested as a separated eddy, has acted as a barrier to major movement of oil into the Loop Current.

* Once oil borne by the Loop Current reaches the southeast end of the Florida peninsula, it then could become captured by the Gulf Steam and move to the north, offshore of the east coasts of FL, GA, SC and NC.

(See: http://www.skio.usg.edu/?p=news/showarticle&n=128 )

* The risk of having oil spill residuals come ashore would be greatest along the southern portion of Florida’s east coast, due to closer proximity of the Gulf Stream to that shore. Factors affecting the prospects and amounts of oil reaching the shoreline include shearing and eddy effects along the Gulf Stream’s west (inshore) edge, prevailing winds and their speeds, and acute weather events.

* A second area in the South Atlantic that would be at higher risk for oil spill residuals coming ashore is at North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras and neighboring Outer Banks beaches, and especially in the September to April time frame. Again, this would be mainly driven by proximity of the Gulf Stream to the shore and weather events, but also by onshore eddies and jetting actions caused by interactions of the Gulf Stream near Hatteras with southerly flowing currents of cooler water from the north.

* Shorelines and waters between south Florida and Cape Hatteras also could experience visible oil deposits, diluted concentrations of oil, and other effects. Manifestations of oil will likely be more highly dependent on acute weather events (significant coastal storms), prevailing wind direction and speeds over set periods of time, and seasonally-related perturbations (e.g., eddies, meanders, “spin-offs”) along the inshore (western) edge of the Gulf Stream.

* The expert panel noted that the longer Gulf oil remains at sea, the more likely natural degradation of the oil could take place. As such, it is possible that oil reaching south Florida waters may be in more visible forms such as sheens, slugs, and tarballs; while oil that makes it to Hatteras waters may be more diluted and dissolved — and, if conspicuous at all, perhaps only seen in forms such as water color/turbidity differences, thin oily residues on contact objects, and smaller tarballs.

Katie Mosher, spokesperson for the program, cautions that Voiland's comments about residual oil coming ashore at Hatteras were not meant to be ominous or dire

"The reference to oil spill residuals is vague because we do not know what exact form degraded oil from the Deepwater Horizon would have after weeks of weathering as it may move. The experts do not want to speculate so far out. But the panel did want to note that Cape Hatteras is closer to the Gulf Stream than other parts of the NC coast, or the coastlines for SC, GA and northern FL. Of course, the southern FL area is closest to the Gulf Stream."

Coincidentally, Gov. Bev Perdue is briefing legislators and local government officials this morning on the state's Emergency Preparedness office's plans for dealing with the oil spill should the need arise.