Dan Besse

In order to thwart the Winston Salem Occupy Wallstreet group.

Winston-Salem City Council considers changing free-speech ordinance
By: LAURA GRAFF | Winston-Salem Journal
Published: December 20, 2011

With no public notice and no public input, the Winston-Salem City Council on Monday night considered temporarily changing the city ordinance governing free speech and public assembly to prohibit such activities on City Hall grounds

This was proposed by Dan Besse, city council member, who some may remember for his campaigns for Lt Gov.

I usually steer clear of reposting stuff from Facebook, especially from people who have accounts at BlueNC. I figure they know how to copy and paste, and if they wanted people here to get their news, they'd post it here. That said, Besse sums up this situation nicely today.

Bad news: NC's jobless rate is still near 10% and we're short on dollars to modernize our transportation system. Good news: We've won a federal grant of over $500 million to modernize rail tracks and crossings on our most heavily used state rail lines--creating 5,000 construction jobs. Crazy news: A dozen NC House Republicans have a bill being heard today which would force the state to turn down the grant.

All Republican challengers to council lost, including a stealth write-in campaign against Molly Leight in the South ward. Blue NC member Dan Besse (SW), successful Democratic primary challengers Derwin Montgomery (E) and James Taylor (SE), unopposed Democratic Mayor Allen Joines, and the other Democratic nominees for council in NE, N, NW, and S wards won. West ward is still held by a Republican who ran unopposed.

The incumbents were weighed down by screwups in the financing of the baseball stadium, the incentive package to recently departed Dell, and a bunch of pissed-off new residents in annexed areas. Despite this perfect storm of local reactionary fervor combined with the national teabagger craze, conservatives made exactly zero gains in W-S.

To make it worse for them, all those teabaggers' heads are currently exploding over NY-23. Though I'd trade that for Maine Q1 anyday.

Filing has closed for those wishing to run for local office and three of our own will be on the ballots in different cities in North Carolina.

Gordon Smith, a long-time friend and front pager at BlueNC is running for city council in Asheville. Gordon has been blogging for years in Asheville and used to make very frequent appearances at BlueNC. After working to unseat Charles Taylor, Gordon's attentions were turned to helping other local candidates in Asheville and now to becoming a candidate himself. I know Gordon well enough to say Asheville will be lucky to have him serving on the city council.

Our friends at NC Policy Watch have the good fortune of featuring this excellent post by Dan Besse.

The economic stimulus package approved last month contains nearly $30 billion for surface transportation projects. That will help kick-start spending for a short-term economic stimulus, as intended, but it will put hardly a measurable dent in the backlog of project demands.

In the Piedmont Triad region, for example, one of the largest uses of the transportation stimulus funds will be a multi-million dollar pavement rehabilitation project on a potholed stretch of I-40. That will smooth millions of rides for the next few years, but it won't touch the issue of how to deal with rising travel needs in the long-term.

I've just said this in an email, and I want to say it directly to all my BlueNC friends:

THANK YOU to everyone who supported my run for the office of North Carolina's Lieutenant Governor!

23, 17, 9, 5

Those are the numbers in the newest (only) public poll released on the Lt. Governor's race. The big number, though is 46 - that's the number of undecided voters in that race. The MoE is 5.

Walter Dalton has the backing of the entire Democratic State Senate, 53 Sheriffs, and all the money industry can throw at him. He's been on the air for months with the same ad repeating his name over and over and claiming to have saved the world from destruction and done everything but deliver babies, and he can't get over 23.

A progressive is going to win this election, and it's going to be Hampton Dellinger.

I had the honor of representing Jim Neal at the Alamance County Democratic Convention today, and luckily, he showed up just in the nick of time so I could avoid the public speaking aspect of my surrogate duties (whew).

I'm sure I would have done just fine, but since I actually live in Alamance County, it's not like I could just fade away and never come back if I tumbled over a chair ala "America's Funniest Home Videos" or accidentally dropped an F-bomb while speaking. While they may not be as horrific as the nightmare where you show up at school naked, these things were playing in the back of my mind, nevertheless.

Here's our glorious and recently face-lifted courthouse where the Convention took place: