Adam Searing is the Director of the North Carolina Health Access Coalition. My one experience with Adam was watching his downtrodden and negative take on healthcare at a Chapel Hill forum. That and he doesn't support the push for UHC at this time, which I disagree with. He's been fighting for healthcare reform longer than any of us, but I think maybe he needs a change of scenery.

That aside, he has put together a good postmortem on why the high risk pool died a lonely death (PDF). It is easy to see why Mr. Searing (his resume says graduate degrees in law and public health, but I don't think they are Ph.D.s, if so, I apologize) is downtrodden on healthcare reform in North Carolina. The high risk pool would have covered somewhere between 9,000 - 20,000 North Carolinians. There are 1.5 million uninsured. This bill would have covered 0.1% of them, and it didn't pass. I'll cut and paste a few things after the break, but the PDF is a good read.

i work in hendersonville, so this is totally doable!

via the asheville citizen-times:

Edwards to campaign with Shuler
by Staff reports
published August 15, 2006 12:01 pm

ASHEVILLE – Former vice presidential candidate John Edwards will visit Hendersonville at 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 22 to campaign with Heath Shuler, the Democratic challenger to U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor of Brevard.

Edwards, a former U.S. senator representing North Carolina, and Shuler plan to talk about affordable housing. The local Democratic Party will be sponsoring a hot dog lunch benefit with all proceeds going to Habitat for Humanity, Housing Assistance Corporation and Mainstay.

The New York Times has a piece out today saying there are large increases in immigration and that it has spread to more diverse areas, which might be why it is becoming an election year issue. My Dad tells me that in the trucking business, the garbage haulers from PA-NY now travel with one English speaker and the rest are undocumented workers that might not be able to speak the language. It is these stories, true or not, that are driving the debate.

But, I wanted to clear up a point about undocumented workers. Some of the NYT story below the break, then the clarification.

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.

In a recent story, Rob Christensen profiles Roy Cooper, why he declined to run for Governor in 08, and what the future might hold. The surpise? Not one mention of Burr '10.

The whole story is here (it is short). Clips 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.

Since we're on national politics today, what would you think if you were the prime minister of Israel and AWOL George was declaring "mission accomplished" in Lebanon? (I'm not commenting on the insanity of this particular war, just on the insanity of this particular President.)

President Bush today said Hezbollah had been defeated by Israel despite the group's claims of victory and blamed Hezbollah, emboldened by its "state sponsors" Iran and Syria, for the current conflict in Lebanon.

"It was Hezbollah that caused the destruction," Bush said in a speech at the State Department. "They're claiming victory. How can you claim victory when you were once a state within a state and now you're going to be replaced by the Lebanese Army and an international force?" he asked.

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.

You will forgive me if someone else has already done this. I got the 100actions link from the Stanly county website (great idea). So, this is my running tally from 100actions.com

86 - Recruit Your Friends to Volunteer
Okay. They gave us a couple softballs, but now comes the hard push. It's time to go out and convince someone to volunteer. I've got just the guy in mind.

87 - Talk Politics
Had a long talk with my mom and another with my brother-in-law. Opened his eyes to blogs.

88 - Get a Yard Sign
Hmmmm....I spoke to someone at Rep. Price's office about this but still no word on the yard signs. I would love a Kissell sign, but I think those should stay over in his district. So, I wonder if the NCDP has any generic yard signs?

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.