Friday fracking video

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NC State basketball newsin': Cane Broome out, Anthony Livingston in; Butch Pierre deal reportedly 'done'

A few items have hit this afternoon relating both to NC State's search for transfer players and Mark Gottfried's search for a new assistant coach. First, Sacred Heart transfer guard Cane Broome has trimmed his list to Seton Hall and Cincinnati, per Adam Zagoria. On Wednesday, Broome had four finalists, including the Pack, so uh, I guess he works quickly?

On to the next guy, then!

Arkansas State transfer Anthony Livingston has received interest from BC, NC State, St. John's, Memphis, & Iowa St, source told @CBSSports.

— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) March 31, 2016

Livingston is a 6'8, 230-pound forward who averaged 15.5 points and 9.4 rebounds per game for Arkansas State last season. He is a graduate transfer, and thus is immediately eligible to play. Dude is an excellent defensive rebounder, decent paint scorer, and he made more than 85% of his free throws in 2016! /faints

Though there is some baggage.

On the coaching front, it appears NC State and former Oklahoma State assistant Butch Pierre are in the dottin' I's and crossin' T's phase.

Told Butch Pierre to NC State is done. Pierre top 5 most feared assistant by other guys in business.

— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanESPN) March 31, 2016

As I outlined yesterday, Pierre has an excellent reputation as a recruiter.

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Renee Ellmers vs. #NeverTrump

Yesterday, I spoke with a former constituent of Renee Ellmers who had supported her in the past. Now she’s seriously peeved with the congresswoman, so much that she even called her office to complain. Naturally, I was curious about what had aroused her wrath. Could it be Ellmers’ weakness on the illegal immigration issue? Being […]
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Republican state legislatures: Guns, gays, and forced child-bearing

Forget DC, we need to clean these houses:

Ms. Baker said that a new frontier in gun rights involves laws that let people over 21 carry concealed weapons without permits. In West Virginia, Republican lawmakers passed such a law this month after overriding a veto from the Democratic governor, Earl Ray Tomblin. In Georgia, Republican legislators passed a bill allowing people over 21 to carry concealed weapons onto public college and university campuses. Mr. Deal has indicated that he has concerns about the bill but has not said definitively if he will veto it.

That's a new "frontier" all right, one where walking out your front door exposes you to dangers not evident in most civilized societies. I wonder what twisted logic NC's concealed-carry advocates will cook up to explain this away? You know, the ones who are always harping about how "well-trained" these people must be to obtain said permit. Put your gun away for the moment, so we can see how these intrepid Republican legislators are protecting you from Teh Gays:

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Charter takeover of public schools moving forward in NC

Under the seemingly harmless name Achievement School Districts:

Glazer stressed that one of the biggest challenges for ASDs in Tennessee was the fact that they are neighborhood schools. Whatever population the school served before joining the ASD was the same population it served after. Largely, parents didn’t choose the school.

“These are charters that take over neighborhood schools,” he said. “That is not the way that charter schools are meant to operate.”

Despite the rosy presentation by Malika Anderson, there appears to be some serious issues involved with the funding of these takeover projects. She claims the handful of Memphis ASDs secured $100 million in donations from the private sector, but she also says the major capital improvements to the schools will come from the same place they always do, from local school district funding. And I'm assuming the state per-pupil funding will also continue. So where does the $100 million go? These issues come up starting at about the 15:00 mark of this video:

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His vanishing world

Pat McCrory’s response to the backlash to HB2, the sweeping law that strips away protections for LGBT citizens and overrides local government control, is that everybody’s been duped by a biased media and liberal spin machine. The world is out to get the him and the Republicans. It couldn’t possibly be that people read the […]
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The 1974 NC State team is one of the five worst title teams in the NCAA era?

I'm a big fan of analytics, and you don't have to be on this website more than 25 seconds to get that. When given the choice, I'm always going to err on the side of an objectivist approach. I think that's really important. But output is only as good as input, and when it comes to this, I just don't know, man...

PredictionMachine.com jumped head-first into controversy by attempting to rank every national championship team, using a pretty standard method:

To build our National Championship Power Rankings, we "played" every team against every other team, using strength of schedule adjusted statistics, 50,000 times each and ranked them by overall winning percentage of those games.

The thing is, this becomes really problematic once you dive back beyond 1995 or so. There are so many obvious problems with this, that actually there's probably no point in bothering with any teams outside the last quarter century. The statistics get fuzzier and fuzzier.

The results of this analysis place NC State's 1974 team among the worst to ever win a title. That's right, the team led by David Thompson and Tommy Burleson, which lost exactly one game in two years, and which beat a top-five Maryland team to get into the NCAAs, AND which happened to end the UCLA dynasty, is somehow a statistical footnote.

This is like denying David Thompson a legal dunk. Your rules are stupid, the route to them equally so, and how do we rectify this situation?

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