Even with that in mind, we don’t need a law to tell us not to text or check e-mail while driving, or to tell us it’s crazy to attempt a Linda-Blair-like head spin to keep kids in line while in the car. Yet, now comes another effort — this time from the well intentioned but misguided nanny-staters in Chapel Hill – to do just that. Pay special note to the last several paragraphs of the WRAL story. It refutes the argument that bans lead to fewer insurance claims.

Even as the state grappled with a budget crisis last year, bureaucrats spent nearly $45 million on new vehicles, almost $30 million on new furniture and more than $2 million on off-site meetings and conferences, a legislative panel has found.

The expenditures were outlined in a report released Monday by the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review, which plans to call on state agency managers to explain their spending at a hearing Wednesday.

“These expenses came despite an executive order from the governor last year for each state agency to cut costs and eliminate vehicle purchases unless they were for emergency purposes,” said Mark Martin, a consultant for the committee.

When will heads roll?

Brewer said the process didn’t involve consultation with history professors or teachers and that, if anything, there should be more time devoted to history in high school.

“We need to move away from one semester of U.S. history to two semesters and we need to keep world history,” Brewer said.

She said the poor attendance at the protest was due to it being planned the night before and the fact that those who feel most passionate about the issue were teaching Monday afternoon. She said a Saturday protest may be in the works sometime in the next two weeks, since the deadline for feedbacks on drafts was extended until March 2.

Read more on this issue from JLF’s education analyst Terry Stoops here.

In a Kafkaesque series of letters and telephone conversations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection explained that it would not release the names of people flying on government aircraft until Roll Call got those people to sign a waiver allowing customs to release their names.

Say what?

That’s right. Roll Call requested passenger manifests for flights on government airplanes. Customs replied that “DHS regulations require, in the case of third party information requests, a statement from the individual verifying his or her identity and certifying that individual’s agreement that records concerning him or her may be accessed, analyzed and released to a third party. Because you have not provided this documentation with your request, we are unable to initiate a search for responsive records.”

In other words, we are prohibited from telling you who those people are until you contact them and get them to authorize us to tell you who they are.

The federal civil service is rapidly expanding as Obama increases the size of government, with 33,000 new positions being added in January alone. Only 9,000 of those new slots were for temporary census jobs.

Obama and his party are acting in collusion with unions that contributed something like $400,000,000 to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic party.

Say it isn’t so.

The city couldn’t unload the 2006 Chevy trucks on other nearby municipalities or through an online auction. So instead of scooping up bulky items and downed tree limbs over the past four years, the trucks sat parked, depreciating rapidly, until they were recently auctioned for $29,000 apiece—32 percent of the original price. Each truck had fewer than 1,000 miles on it.

A 68 percent-off sale! A great deal for the buyer, Chapman’s Automotive in Hillsborough, which snapped up the trucks at the auction. A bad deal for Durham’s taxpayers, who don’t like to see government officials make mistakes with their money, a scarce commodity these days.

At the least the city has put in place a process to catch this kind of thing before it happens again.

The year after Davis bought the trucks, the City Council enacted a Fleet Replacement Program to manage and monitor the proper maintenance and replacement of the 2,100-plus vehicles the city uses. Any purchases now have to go through a lot of checkpoints, requiring input from the city’s fleet and financial managers.

It’s a strange sensation. Clicking through the photos makes it look as if the Obama photos are the kind of subliminal messages that drive-in theaters used to use to get people to go spend money at the snack bar. Only this time, instead of “Buy more popcorn,” the message seems to be “It really is all about ME!”

Here are a couple of lame excuses:

Speculation about political ideology aside, the tea party story does present some unique challenges for political reporters. It is a diffuse national movement composed of activists with a variety of philosophical motivations that lacks clear leadership to turn to for analysis or leaks and that has little presence in Washington, where most national political reporters and their sources are based.

But wait. While they may have ignored the movement at its beginnings, and the massive Sept. 12, 2009, rally in Washington, as well, they’re on the case now:

Still, in recent weeks, The New York Times, the paper conservatives love to hate, has assigned a reporter, Kate Zernike, to covering the movement, and she has produced a couple in-depth pieces analyzing countervailing efforts by tea party activists to take over Republican parties from the ground up and Republican Party efforts to harness the energy of the movement.

Meanwhile, The New Yorker magazine, the bible of liberal intellectuals, ran a nuanced 7,500-word analysis of the movement called “The Rise of Tea Party Activism,” which the thoughtful conservative blogger Dan Riehl assessed as fair, even as he noted it highlighted “fringe elements” that some tea partiers see as embarrassing anomalies held up by critics to marginalize the movement.

The article linked above begins thusly:

Distrust of the mainstream media has been among the strongest sentiments uniting philosophically diverse tea party activists, who almost universally believe the national media have purposefully underestimated their ranks, highlighted their extremes or portrayed them as racists, rednecks or worse — that is, when it wasn’t ignoring them completely.

Dan Reihl notwithstanding, there’s only one reason every national editor in the country has pointed their reporters to Nashville, and it’s not to cover this very interesting grassroots movement.

It’s to try to find any extremist convention goer with an Obama-is-Hitler sign to use in news reports to represent the entire movement. Tea Party activists in Nashville this weekend would be wise to assume the media has not changed its view of them.