We all know the good on the top: Obama, Hagan, Perdue, and Kissell. Some more good downballot but some losses.

A couple of posts have made the national blogs today about this. On the North Carolina ballot, voters have the option of voting a "straight party ticket." Note that if you choose to vote a straight party ticket, that does NOT count as a vote for President, which is above the straight party vote, or for judges, who are on the back of the ballot.
---edited to add the Obama Straight Flip video, RP----

The North Carolina Democratic Party has this post calling out John McCain for his trip to Charlotte to raise the money that he claims to be against:

As the Washington Post recently reported, McCain, the presidential candidate is hypocritically employing the very same fundraising tactics he spent years criticizing and trying to change.

While I do think that John McCain is a power-hungry gumby-like politician who twists his views depending on whatever suits him, I do not think that this is a fair criticism and also have doubts about whether the state party should be getting into this.

First, the criticism is unfair because John McCain should not have to run for president with a hand tied behind his back just because he is closer to the sane, rational position of limitting campaign contributions than other Republicans.

I was at a meeting of the Triangle Chapter NAIOP, a group of local developers and others involved in the commercial real estate industry, on Thursday and witnessed an event that should gives any of us that talk in public pause to ensure that we know who we are talking to.

Former Justice Bob Orr was scheduled to speak at the event. The speach showed great courage on the part of Orr who was speaking on the evils of economic incentives to a very business friendly group. Orr ignored the death stares to give numerous coherent arguments against the use of incentives or "subsidies" as he called them to businesses to relocate to North Carolina or expand here; the main focus of his speach were the famous incentives given to large corporations like Dell, Lenovo, and Google recently which were tied to the creation of jobs in the area. There are in fact some arguments against the use of incentives, but the one thing Justice Orr came back to, as might be expected from a Republican speaking to crowd of business Republicans, was that "no one in this crowd receives incentives" (essentially the if it does not directly benefit you, why bother argument). The problem with this argument became apparent when at the close of the meeting the president of the chapter asked who in the crowd had received subsidies as part of a deal; over half of the crowd raised their hands. Then the president asked how many received incentives more than once, and about a quarter of the group had. Then the president turned to the representatives of Progress Energy and stated that "I could ask this all day and Progress would keep their hands up."