This just in. The King County Housing Authority in Seattle has announced that it will stop issuing housing vouchers under a federal program that benefits "elderly or disabled households, veterans, and families with children."

You didn't know there was a King County Housing Authority? Get ready - maybe - to learn about a lot of obscure government agencies in various and sundry locales as the sequester shoes start to drop ..... if they drop.

The big question that everyone has as the clock strikes midnight and the sequester begins is: So what? The sequester is supposed to cut $85 billion off federal spending of around $3.5 trillion a year. If we were talking about a household, we'd be talking what you pay Time Warner for your cable TV, internet and phone bundle. Maybe with HBO thrown in.

Except that instead of being able to disconnect Time Warner, and just use your cell phone, poach your neighbor's wi-fi, and get Hulu, the sequester makes it an across the board cut, with several exceptions. You'd have to cut some on clothing, some on the light bill, some on the Slim Jims that you like to buy on the way home from work, etc. Even some of the money you drop into the box Sunday. Across-the-board is not a particularly sophisticated way to cut, but there it is.

So the federal government is putting the word out to all its agencies to cut, and some of those cuts will be in Washington, but some of the cuts will be in the field operations of the federal government, and some of them will be in grants that the feds make to state and local governments and universities and payments to federal contractors.

One of the big questions, for example, is how soon civilian employees who work at bases like Ft. Bragg will have to take a furlough day off without pay each week. We keep hearing it will happen, but how soon is hard to say. It may be that President Obama and Congress will reach some kind of deal in the next few weeks before the furloughs go into effect.

But there will probably be a lot of agencies at all levels of government, non-profits and contractors who will start making cuts right away.

I was curious about the King County Housing Authority, so I went to the Seattle Times web site, where I found a story about this decision, news of which moved across the country courtesy of the Associated Press. Here is an excerpt:

"The King County Housing Authority announced Thursday that it will stop re-issuing rental assistance vouchers that are turned in by people who no longer need them. Normally, those vouchers would then go to people on a waiting list.
Authority spokeswoman Rhonda Rosenberg says that about 45-50 vouchers are re-issued to new people in their Section 8 House Choice program every month.
Rosenberg says that if the so-called budget sequestration lasts a year, it will cost King County about $6.3 million in housing assistant money."

Ah.

Normally, the decision of a housing authority in the Pacific Northwest would not be national news. Then again, we normally don't care about what's going on in Dixville Notch, N.H., except every four years on election day when they vote at midnight, all 10 of them, and the tally rockets through the global media. So fame comes to them what seize their opportunities. King County Housing Authority, enjoy your moment in the glum.

Here is one prediction. On Monday morning, editors like me will come to the office and all pose the same question: Can we find any King County Housing Authorities? Any federal employees getting furlough notices, any programs being cancelled, any parks being closed, any delays at the airport?

We've been getting some different messages on this. One is that the sequester's coming and things are going to be bad. The other is that the sequester's coming but the impact may not be really felt until April.

At any rate, I'm weary of Washington, the place where absolutely nothing of substance gets done, and tired of the sequester and it doesn't even officially start until later on tonight, when the president throws out the first memo. And then we start the long march through a long March.

And, by the way, you could also try Netflix.

It is not easy to convince your kid sometimes not to engage in underage drinking or smoking things that are deemed illegal under North Carolina general statutes. So share this developing story out of Johnston County.

The police went back and tried to find out everyone at this party who might have been engaged in illegal activity, and they have cited a number of them. Which is interesting.

So what I would tell my son or daughter is that if you are at a party where there is under-age drinking, it is possible that someone is going to leave the party and get into an accident.

And so there is a possibility that in an effort to stamp out underage drinking, the authorities will quickly backtrack and try to find out everyone who was at that party and who was drinking and doing other things they shouldn't have, and start showing up at their front doors, asking questions and issuing citations.

What this means, for a 17-year-old kid, is that even if you were briefly at a party, had a quick beer, and left, but someone saw you drinking, the next day, a police officer may be at your door.

Now your kid may be able to beat that rap, but only after spending a few hundred or even thousand dollars on legal fees. Not to mention the enormous hassle and the questions from colleges that have policies unfavorable to high school seniors who get arrested.

Since you never know, if you are a 17-year-old kid, what party is going to be tied to a highly publicized motor vehicle accident involving alcohol or other drugs, it's a good idea to not be seen with a beer or joint at a party, and it's a better idea not to go to parties where you think there will be underage drinking and such.

Now 17-year-olds are still developing, judgment-wise, and sometimes even the most logical arguments don't register. I have expertise here, both as a former 17-year-old and as a parent who shared responsibility for raising two children into and out of their teens.

But most kids will understand that there are other kids out there who will, if squeezed hard enough by the police, give up their names.

So the conversation might go like this: These kids were at a party, and there was drinking and smoking, and then a bad accident happened, and the next thing you know, a bunch of kids who might have only thought they were doing some harmless recreational stuff were in big, expensive trouble that will fill their lives with major hassles for months or more. As Ferris Bueller said to Cameron after the unfortunate Ferrari incident, you don't want this much heat.

We got this video of Marines with the Combat Logistics Battalion 2 returning to Camp Lejeune last night.
The Marines were deployed for six months at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Leatherneck is the largest Marine base in Afghanistan.

Courtesy of Encompass Digital Media, Inc., on behalf of the military's Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System.

The governor has been getting some heat because of remarks he made on the radio about how he'd like to change higher education in North Carolina.

I consider myself something of an expert in North Carolina's higher education system. My wife and I have have funded two undergraduate degrees for our children over the past eight or so years.

Actually, I'm not an expert at all, just someone whose tuition checks cleared the bank. But I think we should all keep our eyes on the ball, and not get tangled up in the merits of women's studies vs. computer engineering.

The more interesting challenge, as I have said before, is in the high schools. Too many children are dropping out of high school. So they don't get to join in the debate over whether they should take philosophy classes in college, as opposed to learning how to program javascript.

Because they drop out of high school, they can't take advantage of the really good public university system that their parents and grandparents helped fund.
The second problem is that too many of the kids who do graduate high school have to take remedial math and English classes at the community colleges, because they test so low. This is the secret shame of our K-12 system, kids walking across the stage at graduation who are going to have to repeat high school-level courses at the communities.

The companies that we want to recruit to North Carolina need employees who can do math and who are able to read and write well. Particularly in the rural counties where unemployment is running in double digits. No use trying to woo a company to build a factory in a corn field if it can't find enough trainable workers in the county. Trainable meaning they can pass basic reading and math skills tests.

If the dropout problem isn't solved, and if the kids who do graduate high school are shaky at math and don't have much comprehension when it comes to reading, then our biggest educational challenge isn't in Chapel Hill.

So here we go. Today, the state jobless rate for December came out. It went up to 9.2 percent, up one-tenth of a percentage point from November. Around 3 and a half years from now, McCrory will start campaigning for re-election, and one of the things he will be evaluated on by voters will be the jobless rate in the summer and fall of 2016. And whether it is a little less than 9.2 percent, a lot less than 9.2 percent or, God forbid, higher than 9.2 percent.

So you don't get to be a general in the United States Army by being incompetent. The Army is an extremely meritocratic organization. So maybe people should give Tony Tata the benefit of the doubt as he prepares to take over the reins at the state Department of Transportation.
When Tata was announced as the new DOT boss, the first reaction in some quarters was surprise, given that he lost his job as Wake schools superintendent in part because of the bus debacle.
I have always wondered how this happened. You would have thought that you could pick some bus routes at random and drive them with a stop watch to see if the new route system would work, or would leave youngsters stranded.
Maybe his military background led him to depend on the chain of command under him too much. Maybe it was his relative lack of experience in the logistics of running a school district.
Your typical school superintendent has had years of experience as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, etc. Your typical school superintendent is pretty familiar with what can go wrong when you operate too close to the edge with too few buses.
What I hope Tata took away from his Wake County experience was to recognize that while he had vast experience in the military running big budgets and organizations, he didn't know all he should have known to run a school district, and now he doesn't know much about running a massive transportation department.
So there are two ways he can go.
He can fall back on his chain of command instincts, rely on what people tell him and operate at 30,000 feet. Or he can get out on the ground, probe, ask good questions in the field and find out what's going on. Develop his own sources of reliable information, the chain of command be damned.
Tata, according to his critics, had an autocratic management style as superintendent. Imagine that. An autocratic ex-general. If that's the case, then maybe he needs to dial it back.
The most effective managers I have known were not tough guys. They inspired loyalty because they didn't have to be the smartest people in the room, were considerate, and people followed them because they wanted to, not because they had to.
I do believe that the best lessons are found in failure, not in success. Anyone who doubts that should review the arc of Steve Jobs' history at Apple, the first act consisting of running a successful business into the ground, and Act Two consisting of building the most successful consumer electronics business in the history of mankind.
It is not unreasonable to believe that Tata learned a good deal from his tenure in Wake County, the good, the bad and the ugly. He may do well in his new job precisely because of his experience as superintendent. I hope so.

It is always a shock to some people when Republicans who run as conservatives actually look like they are going to govern that way. This may be particularly true in North Carolina, which had a Democratic-dominated legislature for a gazillion years and a Democrat in the governor's mansion - with interruptions for a couple of moderate Republicans - for a similar gazillion.
So I expect to hear some progressive exclamations and attacks of the vapors from Pat McCrory's latest appointments, Art Pope and Kieran Shanahan. Both gentlemen are real, bona fide, conservative Republicans. Pope will be deputy budget director. I expect his influence will be somewhat larger than traditional for that position. And Shanahan will be secretary of public safety. He promises to have a slightly higher profile than your typical public safety secretary, because Shanahan is no shrinking violet.

When I was a kid reporter in Virginia many years ago, the Democrats had the huge misfortune to lose the state attorney general's office to a Republican. I don't know whether there had ever been a Republican AG in the history of the commonwealth. Maybe in the years after the Late Unpleasantness, but I couldn't swear to that. One of the first things that the new attorney general did was switch all the highway department's right-of-way work from Democratic law firms to Republican law firms. The Democrats howled. Why, these fine (Democratic) law firms had done a phenomenal, efficient service to the Commonwealth for generations, and this ..... this Republican (spoken as an epithet) was putting the state's magnificent land-acquisition process at risk in the cause of rank patronage.
Now, the eons of Democratic attorneys general shoveling that lucrative work to reliable Democratic law firms was not considered rank patronage ever before, but never mind.

As the Democrats have lost the legislature and are now in the process of exiting the governor's mansion, there has been a lot of gnashing of teeth among progressives about the way the Republicans have been running things, and this gnashing will continue after McCrory is sworn in.

But this is why elections have consequences. For many years, the Democrats viewed elections in this state as a mild inconvenience that required that they expend a little energy. They viewed their locks on the branches of government as the normal state of nature. And they allowed a culture of corruption to flourish in some quarters. Their decline is not the result of some meteor hitting Jones Street. The Democrats had a big part in creating their current situation. What they should not do now is sit around and mope.

It is important for many reasons to have competition in politics. We need two strong parties in this state. Actually, the Republicans have a strong vested interest in a viable Democratic opposition. They actually have a lot to lose if, believing themselves invincible, they go off the deep end.
It is hard to keep yourself honest when the opposition is weak. It is hard to know if some of your ideas are short-sighted if there is no opposition prepared to point out their weaknesses. One-party control is great while it lasts for the party that enjoys it, but eventually it collapses after a run of bad decisions and abuses of power.

It is an interesting juxtaposition of two economic theories that business reporter David Ranii captured well in his Page 1 story Tuesday about the prospect of 100,000 North Carolinians losing unemployment benefits.

Sports Illustrated senior writer S.L. Price, a 1983 UNC graduate and a Daily Tar Heel alum, wrote in a recent issue of the magazine that his views about college sports' "white hats" have changed. 

In the Nov.  5 issue, Price contributed a five-page piece about Penn State a year after the revelations about former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky rocked that university. Price interviewed Russ Rose, the highly successful Penn State volleyball coach. Rose pointedly asked Price: "Did you take those classes when you were there (at UNC)? The ones that didn't exist?"

"It's a nasty swipe, and more than apt," Price wrote. "After all,  North Carolina was, like Penn State, a school with overweening pride in its own rectitude." Price graduated nearly 30 years ago but Rose's point was that individuals, not a community, should be held to account.

Yet Price wrote that "attending a school that 'did it the right way' marked me more than I knew. The UNC ethos embodied by basketball coach Dean Smith had burrowed deep. I spent the last 30 years actually believing that big-time sports can be folded into an academic environment without warping it...Yes, college sports can be dirty, but places like Notre Dame, Duke and Stanford prove that white hats can thrive too." Price wrote that he no longer believes that. Even schools with the best intentions, he wrote, are unduly influenced by the money from big-time football and basketball.

--John Drescher

The Employment Security Commission released October numbers for NC counties. Read David Ranii's story to get the big picture, that the Triangle's unemployment rate has dropped to 7.5 from 8.7 percent a year ago.

In the Raleigh-Cary MSA, there are 8,000 more people working than October 2011. The biggest gain came in the category "Professional & Business Services," with 3,300 more workers. Next was "Education & Health Services," with 2,800 more employed.  The biggest drag on employment came in "Government," with a drop of 2,100 employees, and "Mining, Logging & Construction," with a drop of 1,900.

In the Durham-Chapel Hill MSA, there are 4,200 more people working.  The biggest jump, again, year over year, was in Professional & Business Services, with a gain of 1,800.

The ESC said that, compared to October 2011, 98 of North Carolina's counties have seen a drop in unemployment.

Five years ago, the Triangle's unemployment rate was below 4 percent. At the rate we are going, we may not see that level until 2015.  In large measure, that depends on housing and government.  Both sectors are still shedding jobs. If we go over the fiscal cliff,  not only will the federal government cut positions, but federal aid to states and localities will get hammered. For a state government town, that has important consequences. Regardless of whether you are a liberal or conservative, government workers are indistinguishable from private sector workers in the way they spend on cars, housing and frappucino, and when they are laid off, there is less consumption in the local economy.