The Rhino Times will hold its April Showers Schmoozefest on Thursday, April 27 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Blue Agave Mexican Bar & Grill at 3900 Battleground Ave. Those who sign in and wear a name tag are welcome to enjoy free hors d’oeuvres and beer and wine (while supplies last).
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Many of us are wondering how long it will be until Greensboro no longer has a daily newspaper but a daily edition of some kind of regional newspaper based in Winston-Salem. That day, in all but the name of the paper, may already be here.
Monday’s News & Record had three articles on the front page. One was about Rockingham County written by a N&R reporter. The paper’s fascination with every little thing happening in Rockingham County is bizarre.
The N&R couldn’t spare a reporter to attend the meetings last week of the Greensboro City Council or the Guilford County Board of Commissioners but could assign a reporter to cover Rockingham County. Maybe the regional newspaper won’t be based in Winston-Salem but in Reidsville.
The other two stories were from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, another newspaper owned by Warren Buffett. Those stories were about the 10th anniversary of the shooting at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and one was written by a reporter who was fired a week ago, so it was written some time before that – hardly what you would call breaking news, and not local news either.
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Good news for North Carolina: Civitas is reporting that the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) lost 3,450 members and had an operating deficit of nearly $700,000.
I’ve attended countless meetings where representatives of the NCAE spoke and what they invariably end up talking about are teachers’ salaries and benefits. It seems like if the organization were more concerned with education, it might fare better.
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I was looking out my window this week and saw yet another car going the wrong way on Friendly Avenue. I’ve been seeing more cars doing that recently, but fortunately I haven’t seen an accident.
However, I did notice that there are no “one way” signs across from the three parking lots I can see from my window. So if you were visiting downtown Greensboro and pulled out into Friendly from one of these parking lots and turned right, there is nothing to tell you that you have done a bad thing.
The City of Greensboro hates privately owned signs and loves government owned signs. It is amazing that there are no one-way signs across the street.
Of course, a much better but far less likely solution would be to eliminate the one-way streets in downtown Greensboro. It would make getting around the downtown so much easier for visitors as well as people who come downtown every day.
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The mainstream media in Greensboro give big play to bills introduced in the legislature by the Democratic representatives from Guilford County.
This is sweet, and it’s understandable that the mainstream media want to help out their buddies in the legislature with free publicity. But it hurts the credibility of the mainstream media, which already has huge credibility issues, made worse by the last election. Except in rare cases, bills filed by Democrats aren’t going anywhere, just as for over 100 years bills filed by Republicans were rarely passed.
Both the state House and the Senate have huge Republican majorities. If a Democrat files a bill that the Republicans like, some Republican is going to file a similar bill and – while the Democratic bill goes off to the Rules Committee where it dies a quiet death – the Republican bill will then make its way through the legislature. If the Republicans don’t like that bill then it will be sent to the Rules Committee to die a quiet death as well.
If the mainstream media want to improve their standing for reporting news and not promoting propaganda, they should be reporting on the bills that Republicans like state Sen. Trudy Wade and Reps. John Blust, Jon Hardister and John Faircloth are introducing. Both Wade in the Senate and Hardister in the House have moved up to significant leadership positions. That should be good news for Greensboro except that the City of Greensboro has taken an adversarial position as far as the state legislature goes.
The Greensboro City Council spent over $250,000 of city tax dollars to win the battle over city redistricting. It’s worth noting that the state legislature didn’t spend a dime in defending the law. But in the long run the City of Greensboro is not going to win the war against state government and the losers are going to be the taxpayers of Greensboro.
North Carolina is more rural than urban. As cities like Charlotte and Greensboro try to fight the state, you can expect more funding to be going to rural initiatives and less to the cities.
I heard a report on the radio about some bill the reporter clearly was excited about supporting. I have to admit I wasn’t paying close attention but I did catch the enthusiasm in her voice about this great bill introduced by a Democrat, and at the end of the segment the reporter said cheerily that it had been referred to the Rules Committee. If you are in favor of the bill and it was referred to rules, you should be sad, because it is extremely unlikely that bill will ever see the light of day again.
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It’s hard to believe the World Cup – which for all of you football and basketball fans out there is a huge soccer tournament, except only in the US is it called soccer; in most of the world it’s called some variation of football – is even considering coming to the US.
It can go anywhere else on Earth and be huge. In the US most people will not know who are in the finals, much less care about who wins.
Perhaps the US is being considered because it is like playing on a neutral court. And most people in the US won’t be attending, which gives people from all over the world a shot at tickets.
Of course, it would be a boost for tourism here, since most of the fans would be coming from other countries.
