UNC championship is a victory for many

If you're not a college basketball fan, you can skip this post, but I'm elated about UNC's NCAA championship last night. I've been cheering the Tar Heels for about 50 years, in good times and bad. I was overjoyed in 1982 when Dean Smith finally got the "can't win the big one" monkey off his back. I felt the same way in 2005 when Roy Williams got that same monkey off his back after turning a group of disgruntled, self-centered boys into a team.

This year's championship was special, too, not for the coach, who had the team extremely well-prepared for the final game, but for the players who dedicated themselves to winning the national championship that embarrassingly eluded them last year. Monday night vindicated Tyler Hansbrough's decision to return for his senior year, even though he could have been an instant millionaire as a first-round draft pick last year. Danny Green also decided to come back after flirting with the NBA, as did juniors Ty Lawson and Wayne Ellington. I've rarely seen a happier young man than Hansbrough was as the seconds ticked down last night. Lawson's and Ellington's tournament performances certainly boosted their draft standing.

I hope Hansbrough, last year's Player of the Year, will be like Peyton Manning, who chose to put off a pro career to return for his senior year of college. After becoming an All-Pro NFL quarterback, Manning made a commercial for the NCAA explaining how much that final year of college meant to him and encouraging students to remain in school. Hansbrough might not become the professional star that Manning has been, but I think he'll be a reliable, journeyman player in the NBA. His determination alone will take him that far.

One more thing about last night's championship: It proved to me the value of print. Although I watched every minute of the game last night, I couldn't wait to sit down with this morning's paper (thank you, News & Observer, for moving back your deadline to get the complete game package into the edition sent to Wilson) to read every detail. That is where print newspapers excel. They provide information, detail and insight that you don't catch as you watch the game on TV or listen to play-by-play on the radio. And they do it without interrupting to promote tomorrow night's TV show, which the TV announcers do continually and maddeningly.

Computer glitch brings household to a halt

A simple glitch late Saturday afternoon almost brought our household to a grinding halt. My wife noticed that our Internet connection was down. No e-mail. No Web surfing. No connection to the "outside world" — unless you count the telephone and cable television, which we weren't. She walked her way through the diagnostics to check the computer's Internet connection to no avail. I also checked the connection without finding the problem, and I went upstairs to check the other computer to see if it might still be connected. It wasn't, so the problem was not just in our "main" computer but had to be in the cable modem or the wireless router that kept our two household computers, plus my wife's work laptop that she uses more and more often at night to complete job-related tasks, connected to the world.

With a nice dinner with our son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and a national basketball semi-final game awaiting us, we decided to wait until morning to try to fix our computer problem. But it nagged at me through the night and was among my first thoughts on Sunday morning. We keep our downstairs computer going 24/7. No one walks past the computer (in a high-traffic corner) without checking to see if any e-mail has arrived. We habitually check the weather (our browser's home page), and my wife will check for any activity on her social networking site. I check for any comments posted to this blog several times a day. And I do nearly daily searches of job listing in my search for a new career.

We're hooked on high-speed Internet. We might be able to give up cable TV (now that college basketball season is nearly over and college football hasn't begun). We might even get by without a land-line telephone. I might even give up my cell phone. But not high-speed Internet. We use it to send and receive photos, to communicate with children and other relatives in distant locales. When we can't remember something or don't know the answer or want to know more about anything, we "google it." And there are a gazillion YouTube videos I haven't seen yet (I was just watching the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing "Take Five," "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and "Unsquare Dance").

Our computers have been reliable. We bought a cast-off Macintosh from my newspaper employer 10 or 12 years ago and have been Mac people since then (though my wife works in Windows at her job). The computer on which this is being written is 7 or 8 years old and has never given us any trouble. We bought our "new" computer about five years ago to get the new features (a DVD burner and faster processor) that we wanted. I added a wireless card to this computer and bought a wireless router so that we could have Internet access on both computers. It's not unusual to find both of us on the Internet at the same time. 

Sunday morning I sat down at the computer and called our Internet provider. Because it was before 7 a.m., I was quickly connected to a tech person, who began walking me through the diagnostics. As I was about to follow her directive to restart the wireless router, I found the trouble: The ethernet cable from the modem to the router had come loose. Although I had checked the connection before, the looseness had gone unnoticed. I reseated the cable. Problem solved.

We are connected again. Hallelujah!

Electric cities seek federal relief

Eastern North Carolina's vexing burden of high utility rates is finally getting some federal attention. U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield of Wilson has vowed to try to give some relief to customers of North Carolina Eastern Municipal Power Agency cities, who are paying several cents per kilowatt more than customers of Progress Energy or Duke Energy. It won't be an easy fix.

The problem goes back about 30 years, to the late 1970s, when both Duke Power and Carolina Power and Light sought financing to build new power plants to meet soaring demand for electricity. At the same time, municipalities selling electricity were looking for a reliable, economical source of electric power to resell to their customers. The result was two power agencies, NCEMPA and Power Agency 1. The two agencies pooled the electrical demand and financial resources of about 60 cities (32 in eastern North Carolina) to invest in new power plants being built by Duke and CP&L (now Progress Energy). The power agencies would receive the portion of power generated from the new plants equal to their share of ownership. Additional power would be sold at wholesale rates. Municipal officials expected to be able to sell electricity at a rate lower than CP&L. Wilson actually set its retail rate slightly lower than CP&L's for a brief time.

Two things went wrong: Interest rates hit a century high with the prime rate topping 20 percent at one point, and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident soured the public and the government on nuclear power. The high interest rates increased the financing costs for the municipalities, and the Three Mile Island incident brought new regulations for nuclear power plants, which sharply increased the costs of building the new plants CP&L and Duke were constructing.

The bottom line is a continuing NCEMPA debt of $2.5 billion some 30 years after the bonds were originally sold and retail electric rates that are significantly higher than those charged by the investor-owned companies. Compounded by some bad decisions and questionable spending by power agency officials and inattention by city officials, the high electric rates have sparked a rebellion by captive  customers.

The state considered a radical type of relief in the form of electricity deregulation in the late 1990s, but the failure of deregulation in California, where rates soared and shortages caused blackouts, put a stop to the deregulation fervor. The deregulation plan would have forced municipalities to sell their electric systems, but the cities strongly objected. A forced sale would have minimized the value of their assets (power lines, substations, poles, trucks, etc.) and would not have generated enough money to pay off the municipalities' debt. Cities who had pioneered municipal electric systems would have been left with a crushing debt and no means of paying it off, except for property taxes and water/sewer rates.

Cities who went into this venture 30 years ago in good faith have found themselves in a terrible dilemma. Paying off their debt forces them to maintain high electric rates, but the high rates cause residents to rebel and also hurts economic development.

The only short-term hope might be some form of federal relief. If that relief involves the sale of cities' electric assets, however, the cities will object. They want to keep their valuable electric systems. The only way to give both cities and customers the relief they want would be some form of federal program to reduce or eliminate the debt. If Congress can salvage banks and automakers, it's not too far-fetched to hope for relief for cities who made a bad bet 30 years ago.

That won't be easy to do, but at least NCEMPA cities and customers have the attention of Congress. That's a start.

Acquittals don't restore a reputation

Attorney General Eric Holder's decision this week to drop all charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, who had been convicted by a jury and subsequently lost his 2008 re-election bid, reminded me of the comment made in 1987 by former Labor Secretary Ray Donovan: "Which office do I go to (to) get my reputation back?" Donovan, Ronald Reagan's Labor secretary, was indicted on charges that he defrauded New York City while he was part-owner of a construction company before taking a public office. A Democratic prosecutor in New York brought charges against Donovan and others just before the 1984 election. When the case went to trial in 1987, the defense presented no witnesses, confident that the prosecution's weak case needed little rebuttal. The jury returned all not-guilty verdicts in short order. That's when Donovan made his iconic remark.

Holder's review of the conviction, which Steven's attorneys had appealed, discovered numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct, including failure to inform defense attorneys of an exculpatory interview with Stevens' primary accuser. The trial judge had admonished the prosecutors and threatened to declare a mistrial because prosecutors had withheld evidence. Stevens only narrowly lost his re-election bid and almost assuredly would have won had it not been for the highly publicized conviction.

Lest anyone think the prosecution was politically motivated, Republican Stevens was charged by a Republican U.S. attorney.

A Republican Party official has called on Stevens' successor to resign from the seat he won dishonorably (though not dishonestly) because of the misconduct  of Republican prosecutors. That's not going to happen, but one could hardly blame Stevens for quoting Ray Donovan's remarks from 22 years before.

District of Columbia grabs for political power

The new Democratic Congress seems hell-bent on granting a congressional seat to the District of Columbia, no matter what the Constitution says. A bill before Congress would add a 436th seat to the U.S. House, the first time since 1911 that the number of House seats has been altered (the original House had 65 representatives). Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered a reconsideration of an original Justice Department analysis that found the bill unconstitutional.

The problem with this legislation, and of other, similar legislation over the years, is that the Constitution limits representation in Congress to the states. The District of Columbia is not a state; therefore, it cannot have a voting representative in the House, nor can it have two senators, as all states are allowed. And don't doubt that, if this bill passes, Senate representation will not be far behind. Previously, advocates have proposed statehood for the District of Columbia, but it is obvious that statehood for a city of a few square miles was never envisioned by the Constitution.

The Constitution, in Article I, clearly states that "the House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen ... by the people of the several states" and members shall be "an inhabitant of the state in which he shall be chosen." The Constitution also refers to vacancies "in the representation from any state." "State ... state ... state" — it's abundantly clear that the Founding Fathers were establishing a legislature composed of representatives from the states.

In Section 8 of Article I, the Constitution gives Congress "exclusive" authority over a "district" that might be ceded by the states for a seat of government. This is an area ceded by the states but is not, by definition, a state. It's a district.

But what of the civil rights of residents of D.C.? Some proclaim that they are suffering "taxation without representation." That is only partially true. Since 1960, D.C. residents have counted in presidential elections, and they have had a non-voting representative in the U.S. House for decades. But their voting power is less than that of citizens of the states.

There's a simple solution for this slight, however. Congress can exercise its exclusive authority to shrink the size of the District of Columbia, to limit this seat of government to no more than the Capitol and its accessory structures, the Supreme Court building, the White House and executive offices, the National Mall and the national museums and monuments nearby, and the Executive Branch buildings and offices. The remainder of the district could be returned to Maryland, which ceded it to the federal government 200 years ago. Virginia had given a similar size parcel to the feds at the same time but took it (present-day Arlington) back when the government built the Capitol, White House and other structures on the Maryland side of the Potomac. As residents of Maryland, the former D.C. residents would have full voting rights, a voting representative in the House and two U.S. senators. Problem solved.

But this controversy is not really about civil rights, it's about political power. Adding a new reliably Democratic representative to the House (and eventually two new Democrats to the U.S. Senate) would give Democrats greater power on Capitol Hill. And let's not let the Constitution get in the way of a grab for political power.

Job search might clash with involvement

This morning, I'm headed out for a meeting of a local charitable organization. Next week, I'll have a lunch meeting with another charity and an evening meeting of a church committee. In between, I'll be job hunting and filling out applications for any openings I might find. Although I am submitting applications for jobs within a 50-mile radius of Wilson, I am concerned about what a job in another city and a long commute would mean to my civic involvement.

Soon after I was laid off last fall, my wife and I concluded that we would stay in Wilson, meaning I would search for jobs only within Wilson or within a reasonable commuting distance. But commuting to another city or taking a job that allowed no flexibility would mean that I could no longer be involved in the charitable organizations to which I've given my time over the past several years.

When I first entered journalism, ethics and behavior codes were as prevalent in discussions as layoffs are now. At the time, conduct codes prevented a reporter from accepting a rose from the garden of a man she was interviewing. Newspaper editors were urged to seal themselves off from civic involvement so as to prevent any bias, actual or perceived, in news coverage. So I refrained from joining charitable organizations' boards or even civic clubs. Over the years, I and some of the navel-gazing philosophers of the business concluded that sealing oneself off from the community made it made it difficult to cover the news of that community. I eased into involvement in a few charities, such as Red Cross and United Way. More recently, I have been involved in other charities.

When I left the newspaper business, thinking I'd never return, I realized that I might have no more restrictions on being involved in the charities and nonprofits I  believed in. But as my job search has faltered, I now realize that a new job might mean the end of my involvement in all those organizations that meet at lunch or anytime during the normal work day.

Although I'll regret giving up that involvement, that contribution to the community to which I've hitched my future, a job is a job, and a job is increasingly hard to find.

Blossoms herald arrival of spring

It's official. Spring has arrived in eastern North Carolina. Forget the calendar. I'm not referring to the Spring Equinox, which came almost two weeks ago, or to Good Friday, a traditional green light for planting flowers and vegetables, which is more than a week away. Around here, the heralds of spring are the azaleas and the dogwoods. I'm happy to report that both are proclaiming the arrival of spring.

The dogwood, North Carolina's state flower, is a beloved enhancement to any lawn or forest. The dainty tree with its colorful flowers and deep red fall colors stands out in the spring and in the autumn. What's not to love?

Azaleas, properly cared for, can produce banks of color in an extraordinary spectrum of hues from white to dark red. In every home my wife and I have ever owned (not counting that second-floor condo we lived in for a couple of years), we've had azaleas. Some were legacies from other owners, big, rounded, fully mature bushes that demanded little care. Others were scrawny new plantings we brought home and planted, never sure whether they would produce hundreds of delicate, small flowers or scores of the much bigger, older variety. In the South, a house just isn't a home without a few azaleas.

Dozens of cities across the South have azalea festivals and dogwood festivals, linking festivities to the uncertain blooming of these flowers. Golf's Masters tournament may be the tour's most popular event because of the beautiful azaleas that line the fairways in Augusta and brighten every fan's television screen.

Like other things that can never last, dogwood blooms and azalea blossoms are treasured because they are so ephemeral, producing flowers that last only a week or two (I haven't yet invested in Encore azaleas, which bloom twice a year). So this week, and maybe the next, take a stroll around the neighborhood and soak up the colors of springtime.

Poet T.S. Eliot proclaimed April "the cruelest month." He must not have had enough azaleas and dogwoods around to cheer him up.