Government

Future Vision for Chapel Hill

 First to be clear I am supporting Mark Kleinschmidt for mayor.  Below is a link to a letter I wrote to the Chapel Hill News supporting Mark is you wish to read it.

http://www.chapelhillnews.com/opinion/story/52564.html

 In my last blog I challenged the assertion made by councilman Czajowski that rising taxes were impacting the demographics of Chapel Hill in a manner which was reducing diversity in town.  I also thought, given that property taxes are being raised by several candidates in the race, that it would be good to review them.  Please check me if I am in error, but I believe the current tax rate for someone living in Chapel Hill (as I do) is:

What Would You Be Willing To Do Without?

One of the recent threads raised the issue of the unsustainable increases in taxes that Chapel Hill citizens are faced with.  I'd be interested in knowing what services/benefits citizens (this includes Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Orange County) would be willing do do without in order to minimize tax increases or to even decrease taxes.  Would you be willing to have trash picked up every two weeks instead of weekly?  Would you be willing to have recycling every other week as well?  What about schools?  Would you be willing to have larger class sizes and/or fewer teachers?  How about fire/police protection?  Would you be willing to have fewer police and fire persons or to have fewer stations and longer response times?

Anyone who watched the Chapel Hill budget process last year knows that the Town Manager and his staff worked hard to cut the budget to the bone, in many cases leaving staff positions unfilled to make the Council-requested percentage cuts.  Although I don't believe public safety was jepoardized by these cuts it is hard (for me, at least) to see where any future cuts might come from.

What do you want on a voting guide?

The Daily Tar Heel is planning on making a voter guide to be published on early voting day -- a page that Orange County voters can take with them to the polls from Oct. 15 until Election Day. We're envisioning a chart that you can use to match Chapel Hill and Carrboro candidates with their plans for addressing issues that are important to you, so you can compare them.

We've made a list of issues that we think concern those candidates. Some are more for Carrboro, some are more for Chapel Hill:

- economy
- development
- town-gown relations
- safety
- panhandling
- immigration
- environment

I want this guide to be as useful for voters as possible. What would your list look like? What are we misisng?

Book Discussion: The Forever War

Join us for a discussion of The Forever War by Pulitzer Prize winning author Dexter Filkins. This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Time magazine. Copies of the book are available at the Cybrary for borrowing.

Book Description:
From the front lines of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, a searing, unforgettable book that captures the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time. Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, the prizewinning New York Times correspondent whose work was hailed by David Halberstam as “reporting of the highest quality imaginable,” we witness the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Filkins’s narrative moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage; a public amputation performed by Taliban; children frolicking in minefields; skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52s; a night’s sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero. We embark on a foot patrol through the shadowy streets of Ramadi, venture into a torture chamber run by Saddam Hussein. We go into the homes of suicide bombers and into street-to-street fighting with a battalion of marines. We meet Iraqi insurgents, an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days, and a young soldier from Georgia on a rooftop at midnight reminiscing about his girlfriend back home. A car bomb explodes, bullets fly, and a mother cradles her blinded son.

Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.

Starred Review from Publisher's Weekly:
Filkins, a New York Times prize–winning reporter, is widely regarded as among the finest war correspondents of this generation. His richly textured book is based on his work in Afghanistan and Iraq since 1998. It begins with a Taliban-staged execution in Kabul. It ends with Filkins musing on the names in a WWI British cemetery in Baghdad. In between, the work is a vivid kaleidoscope of vignettes. Individually, the strength of each story is its immediacy; together they portray a theater of the absurd, in which Filkins, an extraordinarily brave man, moves as both participant and observer. Filkins does not editorialize—a welcome change from the punditry that shapes most writing from these war zones. This book also differs essentially from traditional war correspondence because of its universal empathy, feelings enhanced by Filkins's spare prose. Saudi women in Kabul airport, clad in burqas and stylish shoes, bemoan their husbands' devotion to jihad. An Iraqi casually says to his friend, Let's go kill some Americans. A marine is shot dead escorting Filkins on a photo opportunity. Iraqi soldiers are disconcerted when he appears in running shorts (They looked at [my legs] in horror, as if I were naked). Carl von Clausewitz said war is a chameleon. In vividly illustrating the varied ways people in Afghanistan and Iraq have been affected by ongoing war, Filkins demonstrates that truth in prose.

"Already a classic–it has the timeless feel of all great war literature. Dexter Filkins’s combination of courage and sensitivity is so rare that books like his come along only once every major war. This one is ours." ~ George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq

“Filkins confronts the absurdity of war head-on. . . . This is a page-turner, and one of the most astounding books yet written about the war in Iraq.” ~ Time

“The best war reportage you are apt to read in a lifetime.”
~ The Washington Times

Date: 

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - 2:00pm

Location: 

Carrboro Cybrary, 100 N. Greensboro St.

Undocumented Immigrants in America: Access to Higher Education

Taken directly from the Parr Center for Ethics website:

Undocumented Immigrants in America:
Access to Higher Education

Public Discussion

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Thursday, September 10th, 2009


In light of the legal battles over immigration policy reform, a panel of experts explores the ethical dimensions of the debate and aim to reframe the discussion by highlighting the range of viewpoints on immigration reform, specifically targeting state policy on access to higher education and the DREAM Act, as a springboard into a discussion that identifies the range of factors that must be considered when formulating a position on this issue.

The resulting dialogue will promote a deeper understanding of the ethical issues surrounding immigration and the question of human rights, and encourage rigorous discussion for future personal and public policy decisions.

This event is coordinated in conjunction with UNC’s first year student summer reading book selection,"A Home on the Field," by Paul Cuadros, Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. For a  further listing of related events  across campus this year, please visit:
http://www.unc.edu/srp.

Sponsored by the Parr Center for Ethics and the Center for Global Initiatives.

Location: FedEx Global Education Center, Nelson Mandela Auditorium
(Room 1015), 6:30pm
. This event is free and open to the public.

Parking: Free parking is available in the deck underneath the FedEx Global Education Center building. Access to the deck is off of McCauley St.


Opening Presentation:

A summary on current and past immigration legislation, by Irene Godinez, Advocacy Director of El Pueblo Inc.

Panelists:

Ron Bilbao, undergraduate student, founder of the Coalition for College Access

Paul Cuadros, Assistant Professor, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication; author of A Home on the Field, the 2009 UNC Summer Reading Selection

Hannah Gill, Assistant Director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at UNC-Chapel Hill

Robert Luebke, Senior Policy Analyst, John W. Pope Civitas Institute

Noah Pickus, Director, Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

Niklaus Steiner, Director of the Center for Global Initiatives at UNC-Chapel Hill

Ron Woodard, Director of NC Listen

Moderator:

Deborah Weissman, Professor and Director of Clinical Programs, UNC School of Law

Date: 

Thursday, September 10, 2009 - 2:30pm to 4:30pm

Location: 

FedEx Global Education Center, Nelson Mandela Auditorium (Room 1015)

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