Deregulator: Alive since '85!

STEP AWAY FROM THE INJURY REPORT: If you're a fan of college sports and wonder why it's more difficult than it used to be to find out the nature of a player's injury, this posting from TarHeelBlue.com , the official UNC sports Web site, offers the answer: It's against the law. Here's writer Lee Pace, answering a query about the medical status of two current hoopsters: "This seems like an easy question to those of us used to simply asking the trainer about medical ailments of college athletes. However, it's no longer quite that easy. The NCAA recently adopted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The legislation is complicated but essentially boils down to the fact that a college trainer (in this case, head hoops trainer Marc Davis) can no longer discuss the nature of an athlete's injuries with anyone. Our understanding is that Davis would be breaking the law if he even uttered which body part might be holding back Grant or McCants, a...

PEP TALK: Julius Peppers, fellow Tar Heel and a graduate of Southern Nash Senior High School near Rocky Mount, the same institution from which my lovely wife matriculated, is the NFL's defensive rookie of the year. The naysayers who argued that the Carolina Panthers should have selected Joey Harrington or Quentin Jammer with the No. 2 pick in last year's draft -- rather than the awesome Mr. Peppers -- should be properly admonished. The Panthers improved from 1-15 last season to 7-9 this year on the strength of the defense, which went from a sieve to the league's second-best, thanks in large part to Peppers' 12 sacks (in 12 games), his ability to stop the run and his overall intimidation of opponents. Think Lawrence Taylor (another Heel) only larger (6'6", 290#), stronger and quicker. My only regret is that Pep's football career has kept him off the hardwood, where he would have prevented the Heel hoopsters from losing 20 games last season and would be be a...

MORE ON JOHNNY: Geitner Simmons, who was an editorial writer in North Carolina during John Edwards' Senate campaign and conducted an extensive interview with the candidate, has some interesting observations about the presidential hopeful. An excerpt: "I'd say the key to Edwards' political fortunes is his public persona. It's what I call the Boy Scout persona: dear, sweet John -- of course we can trust him! "In that sense, Edwards reminds me of Oliver North. In the summer of '87, the national press and a lot of Washington politicians piled on North (rightly, in my view) for helping run a covert foreign policy operation without the slightest public accountability -- but it was all for naught. At the much-awaited investigative committee hearings, North used his God-and-country-good-soldier persona as an impenetrable shield against the nitpicking by Inouye and all the others. Same thing with Edwards. His persona is his shield: Dear, sweet John as an opportu...

EDWARDS IS IN: My longtime friend John Hood -- who got me into this biz by 1) offering me a gig at the Carolina Critic, a classical-liberal zine he founded at UNC in the '80s, which allowed me to 2) get an internship in Washington, where John was working at the time and where he 3) introduced me to Virginia Postrel , who gave me an entry-level reporter's job at Reason -- has a fascinating, contrarian take on John Edwards' probable run for the presidency. The thrust of John's argument -- Edwards' opponents underestimate him at their own peril -- may indeed make him a formidable contender for the Democratic nomination. Still, as much as I hate second-guessing my friend, who understands N.C. politics better than anyone I've run across, it's my guess that, whether he'll admit it or not (even to himself), Edwards' best hope is to land the No. 2 spot on the ticket. John's piece notes that it's folly to merely write off Edwards as a trial lawyer,...

A SOMEWHAT LENGTHY CIVICS LESSON, NEVADA-STYLE: One myth about my adopted hometown that's difficult to dispel is that Las Vegas -- let alone Nevada -- is some sort of freewheeling, libertarian paradise. Please. For one thing, more than 80 percent of the state's land mass is controlled by the federal government, and nearly 10 percent more is either state or county property. Even 90 percent of Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, is public land. That's one reason desolate, sparsely populated Nevada is one of the most urbanized states in America : What little land is in private hands is crammed with tract houses. Gambling-inspired tourism may be the prime engine of economic activity. And prostitution is legal in 15 of the state's 17 counties ... though, notably, not in Clark (Las Vegas) or Washoe (Reno) counties. Gambling-related taxes provide roughly 40 percent of state revenues. But Nevada's sin industries aren't exactly entrepreneurial enterprises. They...

A TASK FOR AN ENTERPRISING BUSINESS REPORTER: Debunk the now-accepted-as-Gospel myth that states "lost" $13.3 billion in revenues from "untaxed" e-commerce last year. An AP story, published in USA Today , my paper and countless others across the country, repeated this bogus factoid. The $13.3 billion figure was derived by University of Tennessee researchers based on e-commerce projections by Forester Research that were, to be charitable, way off. Forester estimated that retail e-commerce transactions would amount to $58.5 billion last year; instead, the total was roughly $30 billion, or half that. I have no clue how accurate the projections were on b-to-b transactions, but I'd be willing to wager they weren't close, either. I'm also not confident in UT's methodology. They estimated that about 28% of e-commerce transactions were "escaping" taxation, but a 1999 study by Ernst & Young concluded that only about 13% of e-commerce is going...

RACIAL GERRYMANDERING, R.I.P.: Here's an unexpected surprise: While relatively few African-Americans call Nevada home (roughly 7 percent of the population is black), it turns out that the Silver State has elected the nation's highest proportion of black legislators . About 11 percent of the Legislature is comprised of black lawmakers, and as this editorial I wrote point out, that's not bad for a state once known as the "Mississippi of the West" for the blatant segregation practiced at public and private facilities. Think about it. Such politically correct havens as California has a mere six African-Americans in its 120-member Legislature, and Massachusetts has elected only seven blacks to its 200 member legislative body. It's also worth noting that none of Nevada's black lawmakers hail from majority African-American districts, and three of the seven reside in districts in which less than 5 percent of their constituents are black.