Locker Room

As soon as I heard about the Bill Clinton-brokered agreement to keep sugar soft drinks out of schools, I knew we'd be hearing complaints from the free market crowd—even though the deal was worked out in the marketplace by market actors. Well, we didn't have to wait long. Witness this tantrum in response to a professor who thinks that the industry might have gone farther:

dent isn't sure, but does dent smell something burning? dent also offers a quick Orange County rundown. Needless to say, OrangePolitics.org does too. You can read WataugaWatch on the elections starting here, and Matt Hill has gay and Greensboro covered. Finally, the good folks at the Locker Room offer an outcome summary.

Sorry for the title, but this is just about the dumbest argument against a minimum wage increase that I've ever heard:

He says the higher the wage, the more likely minimum-wage jobs will attract people into the work force who haven't been seeking jobs in the past. Who are those people? Teenagers from wealthy families. Those teens begin to crowd out other teens and adults for minimum-wage jobs, so the higher minimum wage actually makes it harder for a low-income adult to find a job to support his family.

Right. Chase and Brittany, who would rather hang out at the club than flip burgers at $5.15 an hour are going to be beating down the doors to do that same job at $6.00 an hour.

Over at the Locker Room, in a post about (you guessed it) how the libruhls hate the constitution, Jon Ham describes the Klan as "wackos on the right."

Now, being a lefty myself, I wouldn't have called the Klan a right wing group. I might have thought it, but I wouldn't consider it fair to describe racism and xenophobia as conservative values. Just because it has been the left in this country who has been responsible for fracturing and marginalizing this particular hate group doesn't make the group itself part of the "right" (any more than a plumber who happens to be a Democrat converts a grease clog in to a Republican).

Anyway, thanks Jon for clearing that up for me. And as to the constitutional question, the First Amendment doesn't preclude a community from considering potential legal means for enforcing community standards; it just provides a stopping point when it comes to speech. It seems that in this case, the stopping point once reached was respected. So Jon, you can probably lay off the hand-wringing.

There's a a primary a'brewing in NC House district 98 (Mecklenburg County). It has been a hot topic of discussion here at BlueNC, and has been profiled as a showdown between the new guard and old guard Republicans in the South. Sounds spicy, right? But according to Joseph Coletti over at the Locker Room, the race isn't about much more than cafeteria food. Are these guys paying attention?