Do a Google News search for Heath Shuler and what do you think you will find? Stories about fundraisers? Nope. Stories about the former local football star made good? Nope. Stories about the successful businessman who is a moderate Democrat facing one of the most corrupt Republicans in Congress, yeeeeeeeeeah, that'll be the day.

No, this is what you get....after the break.

The N&O does a good job today reporting on The War on Education currently being fought between UNC campuses and We the People.

Seven tuition increases in eight years, including a 71 percent increase for North Carolinians from 1999 to 2004, raise serious questions about whether the UNC system has run afoul of the state's constitutional mandate for free tuition "as far as practicable," says a report by the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research.

I haven't seen the final report, and I don't know much about the NC Center for Public Policy Research, (except for the fact that they need a new website), but the N&O's preview suggests this work is pretty solid. And it certainly doesn't tapdance around the elephants in the room. According to the article, the Center's report:

concludes that the basic structure of public higher education is sound but in need of a tuneup. The study calls on UNC leaders to get better control of big-time college sports and rid the UNC system of rampant political influence.

Given the ethics moratorium passed in Raleigh last month, I don't hold out much hope for either, but I appreciate the Center's calls for sanity.

Synergy: The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

Since his loss in the Presidential Primaries, John Edwards seems to have been making all the right steps towards 2008. Surely, a win in 2004 would have been great for his chances, in 2012, but the loss that many saw as a death knell appears instead to be just one of the acting agents in his 2008 synergy.

I hate to stir this bees nest, but something that MKleinschmidt said earlier has been on my mind. He said:

The biggest insult to liberty and the constitution apparent in Flippen's case (at least to me) is how the NC Supreme Court punted when they did their proportionality review. The Court is supposed to do an independent analysis of every death case that comes before them and determine whether the facts of the present case are so far afield from the rest of the death cases that the present case must be deemed to be disporportionate. In those cases, the Court imposes life. The problem with this analysis is they don't compare the present case with the literally 1000s of cases in NC of child murders that are not prosecuted capitally. They ignore the 99% of cases that are most similar to the present case and only look at the 1% of aberrant cases to determine proportionality. This is a legal CROCK! Every citizen should be embarrassed by this Court proportionality review.

This got me thinking.