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.

Who can criticize the group co-founded by Erskine Bowles aimed at rally support for deficit reduction.  A group that will put on a press conference Tuesday featuring the bipartisan presence of former Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt and former Republican Gov. Jim Holshouser. And distinguished business leaders.

Well, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, whose day job as a New York Times columnist consists mainly of calling people he disagrees with idiots.

As a Maryland alum, I was somewhat distressed to see that the university is leaving the ACC for the Big Ten. As a fan of openness in government, I was also not thrilled to see how the university's leadership did it.  Here's a story from the Washington Post raising questions about whether the decision-making process complied with Maryland's open meetings law.

Now, I understand that some public officials subscribe to the theory that when making an omelet, sometimes you have to break some eggs, and sometimes those eggs involve compliance with laws they regard as a nuisance.  Usually, this happens when those public officials are trying to get something done quick that they know many people will be unhappy about.

I have long felt that student reassignment in Wake County was mostly about real estate. Today's story by Tommy Goldsmith and Keung Hui reinforces that belief. This was a very analytical story that gets down to the nitty gritty, which is the linkage between real estate and schools.

I always look to the market for solutions. WWMFD? (What would Milton Friedman do?)

My solution is to set up an exchange wherein people whose kids are in capped schools can sell the seat to newcomers who want to send their kid to one of the schools. It would be called "Cap and Trade". How much would a family from New Jersey buying an ITB home pay for a seat at Lacy Elementary? They would bid on PSLs, Pupil Seat Licenses, and the cash would go to a family willing to ship their kid to a less desirable school, or maybe a private school. This could all be handled at closing, like paying for the termite bond.

You're welcome, Wake County school board.

--Dan Barkin

A portion of Boston College juts into the part of Chestnut Hill that sits in my home town of Newton, Mass. Growing up as a boy in Newton, I did not realize that the precincts where I spent my youth were really in ACC country. 

I did not discover the ACC until I migrated to Virginia for college in the early 1970s, believing that I had left BC behind in the faraway northeast, where it played Holy Cross. Little did I know of the vagaries of athletic conferences.

Now I come to find that College Park, Maryland, where I studied in the middle '90s, is really located in the eastern reaches of Big Ten country, and not the northern end of Tobacco Road as I had understood sports geography. As a Maryland alum, I must now consider how we match up against Nebraska. I must also find out where Nebraska is.

I am all mixed up.

In his farewell column in Thursday’s News & Observer, longtime outdoors correspondent Bob Simpson apologized for recently using material from another writer without giving credit.

Simpson’s Nov. 1 column was similar in many ways to an essay published by humorist Patrick F. McManus. The essay was part of a collection of McManus’ work published in several books. Simpson and McManus know each other and over the years have written for some of the same outdoors publications.

The structure of the essays was similar, as was the wording in several places. For example, McManus wrote: “My research paper, ‘Levitation: A Roommate’s Response to a Garter Snake in His Bed,’ caught the fancy of a psychology professor who invited me to join him in research on abnormal behavior in lesser primates.”

In his Nov. 1 column, Simpson described research from his college years. He wrote: “One excellent example was in submitting a research paper titled, ‘Levitation: a Roommate’s response to Black Snake in his Bed. This caught the attention of the psychology department, which invited a couple of the more notable students to participate in ‘abnormal behavior in lesser primates....’”

When a reader noticed the similarities in the two pieces of writing, we asked Simpson about them. He acknowledged borrowing heavily from the McManus piece without giving credit and apologized.

We agreed mutually that Simpson should stop writing the column. Simpson, 87, is not a member of the staff but has been an outdoors correspondent for The N&O since the 1950s. Recent health problems have made it difficult for him to get outdoors. That has limited his ability to write his column.

Simpson was admitted to the hospital recently with pneumonia. He was released and is at his home at the coast.

“While it’s been more fun for me than I can describe, it’s time to hang it up,” Simpson wrote in his farewell column.

Simpson said the Nov. 1 column was the only column in which he borrowed material from another writer and did not give credit. We randomly selected four recent columns and ran them through two computer programs that detect plagiarism. The programs can detect word-for-word copying but are less successful when sentences have been rewritten.

There was no indication that any of the other Simpson columns were copied from another writer.

This explanation of Simpson’s departure will be published in Saturday’s print editions of The N&O. 

Simpson has been a spirited observer and graceful writer for The N&O for more than five decades. We wish him well.

--John Drescher

Top story on the front of the Wall Street Journal has the headline: "U.S. Redraws World Oil Map."  Subhead reads:  "Shale Boom Puts America on Track to Surpass Saudi Arabia in Production by 2020."

This, of course, is terrible news to those who despise fossil fuels, but good news for many other Americans. Particularly those of us who have lived as hostages to OPEC since the early 1970s.

We just elected a new governor who unabashedly campaigned on a platform of exploiting North Carolina's potential natural gas resources. This is somewhat controversial and politically incorrect because 1) everyone knows you can't frack without messing up the groundwater 2) There's not that much natural gas to be had in North Carolina and 3) It'll take a long time before we get any out, and especially if the price of gas stays low. 

Those, anyway, are the main arguments the anti-fracking crowd has put forward against exploiting North Carolina's natural gas resources.  Pat McCrory doesn't buy those arguments and thinks a nicely developed energy sector in North Carolina might help knock down the state's ghastly unemployment rate.

And now that there's the possibility of Republican rule over the executive and legislative branches for the next eight years, it's likely that we will put fracking to the test in this decade. And for all I know, there may be oil rigs off the NC coast by 2030.

Anyone who says it doesn't matter who is in charge on Jones Street is nuts.

When the Republicans seized control of the legislature two years ago just in time to redistrict, and when Gov. Perdue's very late decision not to seek re-election effectively sealed McCrory's victory this fall,  North Carolina's government went from ambivalent to very enthusiastic on the matter of energy exploration. This may wind up being one of the major policy shifts from Democratic to Republican rule.

We will see, eventually, how much natural gas there is to be extracted through fracking. Right now, the anti-fracking crowd points to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate that there is "only" 1.7 trillion cubic feet in the Deep River basin that runs from Durham to South Carolina. Republican legislators weren't put off by that; they said let's start punching holes in the ol' Triassic rock and see how much there really is. Maybe it will turn out that there is twice as much natural gas under the Piedmont. Me, I'm interested in the Cumberland-Marlboro basin to the southeast of the Deep River basin, which hasn't been assessed yet.

There is an interesting kicker to the whole energy independence narrative.  China gets around half its oil from the Persian Gulf. As the Journal article points out, the country that has been in charge of protecting the sea lanes to and from the Middle East has been the United States. So the question is whether we are going to continue to pay for the Navy's Fifth Fleet - a cost the Journal pegs at $60 billion to $80 billion a year - to make sure that China's growing oil deliveries arrive safe from the Middle East, even as our exports from that volatile region decline. After all, the Chinese need that oil to make our iPads. Or will China build an expansive and expensive blue-water Navy to protect its own tankers, and are we OK with that?

John Kerry might have won Ohio eight years ago if he had gotten a handful more votes per precinct. That would have made him president, and North Carolina's John Edwards vice president. If Kerry won re-election in 2008, which is entirely plausible, Edwards would have probably been the front-runner for this year's Democratic presidential nomination. as a two-term vice president.. (Assuming, as vice president, that he would have had capable enough subordinates to keep him on the straight and narrow, which is moderately plausible, and we would not have heard of a woman named Rielle.)

So tonight, John Edwards could be sitting in a fancy hotel suite somewhere, waiting for the returns to come in. He could be preparing to deliver his first speech as the president-elect, completing an amazing rise from a relatively obscure but successful Raleigh lawyer to the Oval Office.

That's what a few votes per precinct in Ohio would have done. Maybe Hillary Clinton would be Edwards' vice president-elect, or that charismatic Illinois senator, Barack Obama.

I was talking about this with a fellow editor, and we came up with this question for you, faithful reader:  Which would you have preferred, George W. Bush re-elected in 2004 for a second term, or President-elect John Edwards tonight?

Such are the thoughts you have as you wait for the polls to close.

--Dan Barkin, senior editor

Maybe Duke Energy thought that Bill Johnson would be accommodating enough to disappear from public view after they voluntarily resigned him. After all, they gave him a package worth up to $44.7 million to go away and work on his short game.

But then an unpleasant thing happened to the guys in Charlotte this weekend, which is that the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge utility, picked Johnson to be the new  CEO. Which may be puzzling to Duke shareholders.

After all, Johnson was said by the old Duke members of the new Duke board to be such an overbearing sort that they felt they had to eject him from the C-suite toot suite once the merger with Progress Energy closed and give him a huge pile of cash to get his badge. In a matter of four months, however, Johnson is back in a big job with a big salary.

Presumably, given his nano-tenure atop Duke (congratulations on your appointment, handshakes all around, and, then, "It's been literally minutes, and it's just not working out, Bill"), Johnson probably said to the TVA board something like: "You guys really mean this. I mean, you don't have crossies on, or nothing?" And the TVA board replied: "No crossies." And they all probably had to pinky swear in the execution of  the employment contract.

Well, it's been several hours, and nothing from Knoxville suggests that Johnson has been frog-marched out the front door yet, and it is early afternoon, so his new job is probably secure.

---Dan Barkin, senior editor

I was mocked today because I had not voted yet. Evidently, early voting is now seen as a badge of informed, motivated citizenship, and us late, or as I liked to call us, "classic" voters, are now being cast as ..... what? Set in our ways, such that we prefer to exercise our franchise on Capital-E Election Day?  Or maybe a little fuzzy in our thinking, because we can't make up our minds?