NC State holding open football practice for students on Friday

The Frontrunner

Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican Party nomination. For the first time, insiders not only think he can win the nomination, but the White House as well. The idea is not so far-fetched. Already, he has proven to be a resilient candidate, seemingly impervious to the laws of political gravity that should apply […]
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After failure to disenfranchise voters, Trudy Wade goes after environment

Defending the indefensible:

That measure, included in the Senate’s version of the Regulatory Reform Act of 2015, would eliminate all air-quality monitoring not required by federal law. A chart released recently by the state Division of Air Quality suggests that could knock out 58 of the 115 testing devices that environmental regulators currently check at a total of 50 test stations across the state, screening for such pollutants as ozone, air toxics, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, nitrate and various types of particulate matter.

“It would strengthen it, I would think,” she said of the bill’s impact on air-quality, “because it would put it at the local level where you could identify where a problem is coming from.”

She's said a lot of stupid things recently, but this one might take the anti-science cake. It's like saying you should get rid of the carbon monoxide detectors in your home, because they don't tell you which specific appliance or air circulation problem is trying to kill you. The Senate's rewrite of these bills are so bad not a single House vote was cast in their favor:

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Monday News: The witch and the lion-killer version

LaRoque: My prosecution was 'a witch hunt' (WRAL-TV) -- Days before he begins serving a two-year prison sentence for misdirecting federal funds, former state Rep. Stephen LaRoque said Sunday that he was the target of a "witch hunt" by adversaries who sought to criminalize him.
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Celia Rivenbark: The odd couple of doctor hunters (Wilmington Star-News column) -- I imagine there is nowhere safe for Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer to hide now that everyone knows he essentially killed the Lion King.
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NC State football notes: Wolfpack hoping for another big year on the ground

NC State is coming off its most successful season rushing the football in more than two decades, which is a little astounding given how impotent the Pack was just a couple of years ago. NC State finished the year strong, and that's led to optimism, but it's not just blind hopin'.

As ESPN's David Hale noted the other day, NC State was really good in several different respects:

Last year, NC State's ground game ranked 13th nationally in yards-per-rush (5.98), first nationally in third-down conversions (66.1 percent), ninth in fewest runs stopped at or behind the line of scrimmage (14.2 percent) and sixth in percentage of runs going for at least 5 yards (46.8 percent).

It's fair to wonder how much State's soft non-conference schedule contributed to the overall numbers, but the advanced opponent-adjusted statistics agree that the Wolfpack had an excellent ground game. State ranked 9th in rushing S&P+, and ninth in Adjusted Line Yards (which is a measurement of the quality of a team's offensive line). The Pack finished higher than Wisconsin in both categories, and higher than Auburn in rushing S&P+, to give you an idea of what kind of territory we're talkin' about here.

Now they want more -- Shadrach Thornton's goal is to finally hit 1,000 rushing yards in a single season, while Matt Dayes wants 1,000 rushing and receiving yards. Those goals are admittedly a wee bit on the optimistic side, what with the number of RBs the Pack has to feed, but they also don't seem totally nuts, either. These are strange new times.

The question that will linger for a while, of course, is how effectively the team replaces its offensive tackles. Perhaps we're worrying about that more than we should, but in the meantime we can rest easy knowing last year was no mirage. The Pack will be productive running the ball in 2015, it's just a matter of how far--and in which direction--the ceiling's moved.

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Coastal residents up in arms about offshore drilling

And the un-democratic approach of local lawmakers:

Some 300 people showed up at the town hall that Monday evening, filling the meeting room and spilling into the parking lot. Angry locals waited as long as two hours to confront Mayor Dean Lambeth, who recently had signed a letter to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, endorsing a move to begin seismic testing for oil and gas deposits off the North Carolina coast. The letter had been written by America's Energy Forum, an arm of the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry lobby group. Lambeth had signed it, lending his endorsement as the mayor of Kure Beach, without any public debate.

It's a good bet a lot of those angry locals rely on tourism for their livelihoods, even if they're not environmentalists in the classic sense. And the last thing you want to do as a small-town Mayor is piss off small business owners. They can flip a local election in the amount of time it takes to say, "Start packing your stuff, we may have to leave town." And it doesn't take much to spread that outrage statewide:

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Silly Senators and Ruch the Great: A weekend post

At what point does the Senate finally get sick of itself? After four years of putting up with them, even their erstwhile allies in the House have tired of the Upper Chamber’s pointless, chest-thumping gestures. It must be exhausting to blast another doomed bill through the chamber every week or so. I really don’t know […]
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