Sen. Albertson: Leave ol' Willie alone

Serious fans of country and gospel music have long known about Sen. Charlie Albertson, D-Duplin, a state legislator with a nice touch with people, a mane of snow white hair and a flair for writing songs and recording them with his band.

Albertson, who represents Duplin County as well as Lenoir and Sampson counties, was appalled when local law enforcement officials busted Willie Nelson and his band last month before a concert down in Kenansville. Albertson, who has announced he won't run for re-election this year, has written and recorded a song "Leave the man alone" about that incident. It's worth a listen. Here's a link to a Wilmington StarNewsOnline site where you can read more and listen to the music.

Who knows? Maybe Ol' Willie will ask the singing senator to join him in a few gigs after the legislative one winds up.

Justice Center's 'favorite' health insurance innovations

Adam Linker, a policy analyst who often writes about health care issues on the North Carolina PolicyWatch blog for the N.C. Justice Center, has a piece about the "Top 10 Favorite Health Insurance Company Innovations." It's a timely send-up because of President Obama's health reform summit today.

Here's a link: The list is funny, but it would be a lot funnier if it were not right on target in so many cases.

Take Number 7 on the list, for example:
Charging women more than men for the same coverage. Let’s face it, women keep having children. When women have children they demand a room and a bed and all kinds of services that men of the same age rarely use. Luckily, insurance companies have figured out how to saddle women with the expenses of childbirth instead of making men, and society at large, share the costs. After all, men didn’t have anything to do with the pregnancy.

Or Number 4:
Lifetime caps. If you break an arm or scrape a knee you should know that your insurance company is there to help you pay the bill. But if you are going to get hit by a car or take a trip to intensive care, well, the insurance company isn’t going to sit around paying bills forever. After a certain amount you reach your lifetime insurance limit. That will teach you not to get cancer.

Linker notes: "I don’t understand why President Obama would want to thwart any of these great American inventions."

Tom Ross: UNC or MLB?

Old friend D.G. Martin mentions Davidson College President Tom Ross in this morning's Observer as one potential successor to Erskine Bowles as president of the University of North Carolina system. Martin should be a good judge of academic administrators -- his father was once president of Davidson, where Martin took his undergraduate degree, and Martin himself was a vice president of the UNC system as well as a ranking official at what is now UNC Pembroke.

But would Ross leave his beloved Davidson, even for Chapel Hill where he has pulled for the Tar Heels as long as they weren't playing the Wildcats? I don't know. That job would have a mighty strong pull. But I remember Ross once saying, a good many years ago, that the only two jobs he wanted in life were either president of Davidson College, or Commissioner of Major League Baseball. As a lawyer, former judge, former foundation head and college administrator, he'd be good at the helm of baseball, and gosh knows the sport needs someone good at the job for a change.

Me? I'm still angling for Commissioner of Barbecue, but I think Jerry Bledsoe has first dibs if the job is ever created.

Winter in the hills

One of my best years as a boy came 50 years ago, when it snowed three or four Wednesdays in a row and school was canceled for the rest of the week. It was a wonderful time for an eighth-grader struggling with basic algebra concepts, not to mention the complexities of a biology course I had no business taking. The weather bailed me out each week and I've ever been grateful to the cold hand of nature for saving me from some of those dreary days. Never have gotten enough snow.

But this year I'm getting close. Up in the Blue Ridge in Patrick County, Va., it has snowed more this winter than anytime since at least the 1980s, according to faithful bloggers on one of my favorite Web sites, Kevin Myatt's The Weather Journal. Myatt is a copy editor and "principal weather geek" on The Roanoke Times, a newspaper I once served as a Washington correspondent, and it's clearly a site for snow lovers looking for the next big storm. I've read more comprehensive information about coming storms in southwest Virginia -- and along the N.C. state line -- than anywhere else I can recall, and it has been helpful to understand each time we were about to get another 12-16 inches of snow.

Around our place just a few hundred yards from the highest point in Patrick County (barely visible at top right of the picture), we've gotten at least three major snows, two or perhaps all three of them followed by freezing rain and ice storms, and at least two smaller snows that have brought the white level back up to 10 each week. We've had our driveway plowed twice by Garrett Goad, the indefatigable plow king of Vesta, Va. Garrett gave me good advice: When it snows, you've got to plow it soon before it sets up. Amen, Brother.

We shoveled our way to our front steps through waist-deep snow twice. There's three feet of snow on our deck in two places where it has slid off the steel roof, and walking to the barn is an exercise in, well, exercise.

With a couple of frozen levels in the snow and a slick crust on top, I had to dig out my old baseball spikes to get around before discovering some semi-crampons called Yaktrax. They were a big help in getting to the barn so I could dig out the snowplow for the ATV, whereupon we made it all of about 10 feet before miring up in a hard icy slush the consistency and weight of concrete that was poured maybe an hour earlier.

I was going to try to find a used scrape blade this week for the tractor until the truck radiator blew out, so now I'm trying to figure out how to adapt a loader bucket for a plow. My engineering's coming along about as well as that eighth-grade algebra-and-biology business.

An ice storm around Christmas day left us with several hundred trees badly damaged -- most of them along the tree line around our fields. Some were large limbs broken off but still hung up; our favorite deckside maple snapped in half; and a lot of elderly locusts simply gave up and lay down under the cold blanket of ice. I've been replacing the blades on the old chipper-shredder to help reduce the stuff, assuming the snow and ice ever melt. If that day ever comes, it's going to take a long time to clean it all up.

The sun was out over the weekend and the temperature soared to 51.2 degrees, and a lot of stuff melted from the roof. A few bare patches appeared in the driveway and a six-foot icicle on the shady side of the house disappeared under a brief but noisy avalanche of ice, snow and melt water.

Wakely Phillips, who helps his son Jimmy keep our old tractor running, told me a while back we wouldn't see bare fields again until April. I thought he was joking, but that was 27 inches of snow ago, and now Kevin Myatt says watch out. Temperatures will plunge again, and while there's not much chance of a big snow this week, he cautions: "Long term, there appear to be a couple of train cars on the tracks (moist systems from the Pacific) rolling into the first week of March as cold air dominates. We'll just have to watch them one by one."

We will indeed. I'll have to say I've thoroughly enjoyed the snows we've had this winter, but after trying to clear a path across the deck and down a few steps Sunday morning, I've realized that I'm mighty doggone close to having my fill of this stuff, thank you very much.

Lake: Innocence process "most important thing I've done'

A regular attendee of the special session of Wake Superior Court over the past two weeks has been former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Bev Lake, whose 2002 decision to set up a study commission on how to handle claims of innocence by convicted inmates led to the General Assembly's creation of the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission. It also led to the adversarial process by which convicted murderer Greg Taylor proved to three Superior Court judges that he was innocent of the crime -- not just not guilty, but innocent.

Moments after Judge Howdy Manning read the decision of the unanimous panel, I asked Lake what the decision said about N.C. justice. "I've always said that we have the best system in the world," Lake said, "but it's not perfect."

Lake, now retired, has had an interesting career -- serving as a deputy attorney general in the state Department of Justice, as a Wake County state senator (update: A Democrat, Perry Woods reminds me, not a Republican back in those days), as a Republican candidate for governor in 1980 (unsuccessful, against Gov. Jim Hunt), as a Superior Court judge, as an associate justice of the Supreme Court and then as chief justice. Among other things, he wrote an important decision requiring the state to refund $1.2 billion in intangible taxes the court ruled the state unconstitutionally collected.

Where, I asked, did he rank creation of the innocence process in his long career? Lake thought for a moment and said, "All said and done, this is probably the most important thing I've done."

Lake, of course, did not create the process adopted by the legislature. That took a lot of work from Democrats as well as Republicans in the General Assembly who hashed out how it would work. Credit is also due to such folks as Chris Mumma, who has directed the nonprofit N.C. Center on Actual Innocence for years, as well as members of the study commission that examined the issue. But without the credibility that Lake gave the movement back in 2002 when he asked for a study, the process might never have become law -- and Greg Taylor would still be behind bars.

Geithner: Growth stronger, but jobless rate will take time to drop

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner dropped by the N&O building this afternoon to talk with reporters and editors about the economy. Geithner was hampered by the loss of much of his voice, but he had some things to say:

-- The economy is in "dramatically stronger shape than it was a year or 18 months ago" but added, "It'll take us a long time to heal" the problems in the economy.

-- The price of credit has come dramatically down, he noted, and consumers are being more careful. "Consumers are borrowing much less and that's healthy" for individuals, he said.

-- A case can be made for "a series of targeted incentives" including tax credits to boost the economy. While people generally have their doubts about last year's stimulus, it helped stave off panic. And individual parts of the stimulus -- such as helping retain teachers and improving infrastructure -- actually were very popular with people, he said.

-- We can't go on forever without bringing down the deficit, he said, but we can't do it right now.

-- Asked if he was surprised that the unemployment rate remains high, he said, "I think the growth is stronger, sooner, than almost anyone predicted," but it going to take a long time for unemployment to come down.

-- Two things are notable about the economy now, he said. Productivity is very strong, and we're seeing "a huge amount of innovation" in companies. Companies are also expanding the work week and rehiring, but we have a long way to go because the economic crisis has caused a "huge amount of damage to people's confidence."

Judges proclaim Taylor innocent after 17 years in prison

Three judges of the N.C. Superior Courts unanimously found Greg Taylor innocent of murder charges Wednesday afternoon after Taylor spent 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Wake Superior Court Judge Howard Manning, Mecklenburg Superior Court Judge Calvin Murphy and Superior Court Judge Tanya Wallace of Rockingham found that Taylor's lawyers had proved "by clear and convincing evidence" that Taylor was innocent in the murder of Jacquetta Thomas.

Immediately after the decision was announced, Wake District Attorney Colon Willoughby walked over to Taylor, extended his hand and told him he was sorry that Taylor had been convicted in the case in 1993.

Minutes later, Taylor was taken into a side room of the new state business courtroom in Campbell University's Wiggins School of Law in downtown Raleigh. His shackles were removed and he was freed.

Taylor was the first inmate to be freed after a three-judge panel hearing under the state's new Innocence Inquiry Commission law. In Taylor's case, the Innocence Commission ruled 8-0 last fall there was a high probability Taylor was innocent. With the conclusion by three judges that he is indeed innocent, the state officials charged with the duty of deciding his case have now voted 11-0 in Taylor's favor -- a convincing ruling.