Where to find me
From now on, the best place to find me is on Facebook. Or as a regular contributor to the JLF blog The Locker Room.
See ya on the Interwebs ...
By Rick Henderson, ink-stained wretch; alum, UNC-Chapel Hill (A.B. 1979); aficionado, American roots music and eclectic pop culture; cheap wine snob. In my mind, I'm going to Carolina.
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"John Edwards admits federal investigators are asking him questions. Federal subpoenas were issued Friday related to Mike Easley.
"As the separate federal probes into a former senator and the former governor are emerging, Democrats are taking steps to replace the Republican prosecutor who is spearheading the inquiries about the highest-profile North Carolina Democrats of the past decade."
That's the lede of today's story by N&O reporter Andy Curliss on the deepening federal investigations of the two top Dems. (Curliss has been absolutely on fire lately.)
Curliss goes on to report that freshman Sen. Kay Hagan has chosen a panel to come up with successors to U.S. Attorney George Holding, a Bush appointee, who's led the probes. And Hagan said she might have a nominee in mind within a few weeks.
When a new president takes office (especially when that transition involves a change of parties), it's not at all unusual for the new administration to replace most if not all U.S. attorneys, not to mention other office-holders who serve at the pleasure of the president. Obama could have fired any or all of the nearly 100 federal prosecutors who worked for George W. Bush. But he didn't, and as Curliss reports,
So far, Obama has been slower to make changes than some of his predecessors. Bill Clinton asked all U.S. attorneys to resign when he took office, for example. Democrats this year also have signaled they want to keep some holdovers, including political independent Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, who is overseeing the case against former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat.
So with Holding knee-deep in the Edwards and Easley probes, any move to replace him now sure would look like a calculated move to help Democrats escape scrutiny now, wouldn't it?
While he was governor, Mike Easley turned a small group of influential North Carolina businessmen into his own private air service, an arrangement Easley kept secret.
Starting in 2003, Easley took at least 25 flights on private jets, some in apparent violation of campaign laws and ethics rules, documents and interviews show. Some flights were free. The value of others exceeded campaign contribution limits.
The first danger for the Obama administration, of course, is that his teams of experts may not be as farsighted as they believe. It may not be so easy to out-think the market.

Could I have made a mistake? Sure. The (rules) manual is 508 pages. Someone could’ve made a mistake.