The Southern Highland Reader

REGIONAL–The Hendersonville Times News, along with the Knoxville News Sentinel, have followed closely 11th District Congressman Heath Shuler’s real estate misadventure involving the TVA in east Tennessee.

The Times News warned early on that even the appearance of influence-peddling in real estate matters would recall memories of Shuler’s predecessor, Republican Charles Taylor.

In a Friday editorial, the Times News “wraps the thing up neatly, and says Shuler’s damage in this case is self-inflicted.

Here’s the lead:

ASHEVILLE–11th District Rep. Heath Shuler said mildly nice things about Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a speech yesterday in Asheville, and the result was a comical fit of pique by a Republican National Committee spokesman.

In general, Shuler suggested that the criticism of Pelosi might be, oh, shall we say, exaggerated.

In response, RNC spokesman Andy Seré said:

“Heath Shuler is the one who’s ‘misunderstood’. He may call himself a Blue Dog, but Shuler’s lavish Pelosi-praise has revealed him to be little more than a lap dog for the most liberal speaker in U.S. history. She may have let him off the leash this weekend in a vain attempt to salvage his re-election bid, but his political affair with Nancy Pelosi is destined to land him in the doghouse with Western North Carolinians.”

Story from the Asheville Citizen-Times
Story from the Raleigh News and Observer

REGIONAL–Hendersonville, NC, mayor Greg Newman will challenge incumbent Democrat Heath Shuler for the 11th District’s seat in congress.

Shuler, who unseated long-time Republican incumbent Charles Taylor in 2006 and won handily in 2008, is a relatively conservative “Blue Dog” Democrat in a conservative district.

An excerpt of a story in the Hendersonville Times News:

If elected, Newman said he would not hesitate to hold town hall meetings to hear what the people want. One of the biggest reasons he has decided to run is what he has been hearing from residents.

“We have young people who want to know if they will have a good job when they get out of school,” he said. “There are elderly residents who are hearing about possible cuts in Medicare. National security is a major issue that needs to be addressed. Are we meeting the needs of avoiding a terrorist threat?”

He said his major focus would be to bring industry to Western North Carolina.

Read the whole piece here.

STATEWIDE–Jack Betts at the Charlotte Observer writes that Governor Bev Perdue and Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton endanger their legacies as leaders in education by wavering on the matter of undocumented immigrants in North Carolina colleges.

Writes Betts:

Democrats such as Perdue and Dalton generally hold in high regard the views of a former education governor such as Jim Hunt or a lion of American higher education such as Bill Friday. But on the issue of illegal immigrants in public colleges, their view is more in line with Republicans in the legislature who hope to push legislation next year to prohibit the admission of undocumented students.

Read his entire blog post here.

STATEWIDE–There’s right much being made of this passage from Congressional Quarterly:

NORTH CAROLINA: Democrats stand a chance of picking up the state’s other Senate seat if they can find a solid challenger to Richard M. Burr , who in 2004 succeeded Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards. Obama narrowly won the state last year, and Democrat Kay Hagan unseated Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole. Burr might have gained running room when popular state Attorney General Roy Cooper announced in May that he would not run for the seat; Democratic recruiters are still looking for a top-tier candidate.

And while it stands to reason in the current NC climate that Burr could be challenged, the suggestion — as one publication made — that he “faces a tough test” might be a little premature. After all, the same paragraph above notes that he has no actual competition.

STATEWIDE–Where do North Carolina’s senators stand on confirmation of the president’s supreme court nominee?

Predictably, Sen. Burr, a Republican, is dragging his feet.

From the Raleigh News and Observer:

Burr spokesman David Ward said Monday that the Republican senator wants to ask Sotomayor a few more questions about her record. Burr is scheduled to meet with the Supreme Court nominee next week.

“Senator Burr is continuing to review Judge Sotomayor’s judicial record as well as her remarks at last week’s Judiciary Committee hearing,” Ward said in a prepared statement.  “He will be able to make a more thorough assessment of her qualifications after meeting with her next week and asking specific, substantive questions to ensure that she is committed to upholding the Constitution and the rights and freedoms it protects.”

Sen. Hagan, a Democrat, is supporting confirmation, and reached back to 1998 for the vote count in which the iconic Jesse Helms supported Sotomayor’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which is based in New York.

NATIONAL/STATEWIDE–In a shocking announcement, Bristol Palin, daughter of last year’s Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, has announced that she and the father of her newborn baby have split up.

Palin, 18, discovered that she was expecting after her mother had accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination. At that time, she and her baby’s father, Levi Johnston, announced their engagement. Critics wondered aloud whether the engagement was a measure of political expedience rather than undying devotion.

Palin, who’s in a clear position to know, declared recently on Fox News that teaching “abstinence-only” to teenagers was “unrealistic.”

You think?

Fortunately, a full continent away, the North Carolina legislature has hit on the same idea. After falling under the sway of various levels of the abstinence-only argument in past years, the legislature is considering making the The Healthy Youth Act (HB 88) law.

This law would provide parallel curriculums between which parents could choose for their North Carolina children. One curriculum would be abstinence-based, the other based on detailed sex education.

The legislation just passed the NC House Education Committee, but is facing strong opposition.

Here’s a story from Mark Binker at the Greensboro News and Record that details the legislation.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece in the Raleigh News and Observer:

The bill has a long way to go in the legislature. Another House committee will consider it before it goes to a vote of the full House. If the House passes it, the bill would then go to the Senate for consideration. So far, Republicans have shown little interest in changing a law that was passed in the mid-1990s, when they controlled the House.

In 1995, the legislature passed a law requiring schools to focus sex education classes on abstinence until marriage. The courses in seventh and eighth grades include information on the effectiveness and failure rates of birth-control methods.

RALEIGH–Governor-elect Beverly Perdue on Tuesday named Asheville Republican Lanier Cansler to head up the state Department of Health and Human Services — widely perceived as one of the most challenging jobs in her administration. The choice of the former four-term state house representative and former deputy secretary of the state health department is being widely hailed “across party lines.”

Lift quote from the N&O:

Cansler was deputy during the early years of mental health reform, when the state began discouraging public mental health services in favor of having private providers do the work. The result was more short-term stays in state mental hospitals, patients who could not find care, and a proliferation of low-end mental health services that wasted millions.

“I believe the concept of community capacity was good,” Cansler said Tuesday. “Implementation was a real problem, and we want to focus on addressing that.”

Cansler has wide support among advocates who say he is not responsible for the system’s failings.
“He’s been in the legislature, he has a financial background, he understands the system pretty well,” said Frank Edwards, a co-president of the Wake County chapter of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

A new management team would be “very, very, very positive,” Edwards said.

Story from the Raleigh News and Observer.