Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a columnist with the Wall Street Journal whom I admire. Yesterday he weighed in on the controversy surrounding Bill Johnson's quick ouster after a tenure of literally tens of minutes as CEO of the merged Duke Energy-Progress Energy. Jenkins' take on it was that it was Duke Energy's decision on who should run the company, and the N.C. Utilities Commission should butt out.

He said at the end of his column, about the Utilities Commission's investigation into the ouster: "They just want to soak themselves in some headlines for a while at Duke's expense."

That may seem perfectly reasonable from the chi chi salons of Manhattan. But it overlooks the fact that the commission was told by Duke that Johnson was going to be the CEO of the combined company. Whether that is relevant or not to the commission's oversight is a good question, because the commission is normally concerned with how a power monopoly serves the public,  not who is in the corner office.

Undoubtedly, if Duke had said from the beginning that Jim Rogers was going to stay in the CEO job after the merger, this wouldn't have been an issue at all.

But Duke didn't say that. It said Johnson, the CEO of Progress Energy,  was going to be CEO of the meged companies, and that made the deal go down better with Progress employees and shareholders. And Raleigh in general. When he was bounced by the Duke board after the deal became official, it is reasonable to believe that the Utilities Commission felt that a fast one had been pulled. I think Jenkins miminizes this. As does Hugh McColl, the former Bank of America chairman and Charlotte pezzonovante, as does the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.  McColl and the FERC chairmen have basically said to the Utilities Commission, get over it.

Well, if you have ever felt like someone had pulled one over on you in a very public way, and might be snickering about it with their buddies, you can get a sense of what the Utilities Commission feels like. It takes a bunch of time to, as they say, move on.  Maybe you want to do some driveby regulating just to drive the point home that you don't like getting jerked around. And I don't think that being told to man up by out-of-town big shots and the Wall Street Journal is going to calm things down.

In the wake of our reporting on the academic fraud scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill, reporter Dan Kane has attracted a bit of attention of his own.

More folks have noticed a web site, dirtydankane.com, that went up earlier this year after some of Dan's reporting about the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. The web site bigleadsports Tuesday morning raised the question of whether Julius Peppers' agent had set up a web site to vent his anger about Dan.

In a word, yes. But the site set up by Carl Carey Jr. goes back a few months, and it isn't related to Dan's work Monday and Tuesday about the UNC transcript bearing Peppers' name. His professional relationship with Peppers, which goes back to when he was Peppers' academic adviser at UNC, is coincidental to this story.

Look, I don't know if it makes any difference sending boys to all-boy academies and girls to all-girl academies.

The latest word from the USDA on corn production is not good. This is what the AP reported today:

"The government slashed its expectations for U.S. corn and soybean production for the second consecutive month Friday, predicting what could be the lowest average corn yield in more than 15 years as the worst drought in decades continued punishing key farm states."

Here's the NYT version.

Martha Quillin explained the implications for North Carolina livestock growers  of high feed prices due to the Midwest drought in last Sunday's paper.

One possible beneficiary of this might be the North Carolina ports, I guessed, because if you can't get grain in the right amount and at the right price from the Midwest, then maybe you can ship it in through Wilmington.  So I searched the Wilmington Star News  web site, and lo and behold, I found this story from July, written by reporter Patrick Gannon. It said, in part:

"The N.C. State Ports Authority ended the fiscal year on June 30 with a net profit for the first time since 2008, an accomplishment that officials said stemmed mainly from substantial increases in wood chip exports and grain imports."

"....The Port of Wilmington, meanwhile, saw large increases in grain imports, primarily wheat, which is used in the hog and poultry industries as a replacement for high-priced corn. The facility handled 474,764 tons of grain in the 2012 fiscal year, nine times more than the 55,000 tons from the year before."

That's globalization for you. If you can get it cheaper off a ship floating into Wilmington from South America than you can get it by rail from the Midwest, you will.  Grain comes in through the ports, pork goes out.

Presidential campaigns are long, grueling affairs, particularly when they transition from the primaries to the general election campaign.  At least in the primaries, you know you're in New Hampshire. In the general, it's a 50-state election, so you are crisscrossing the country every day. You might only know where you are because someone staffer whispers into your ear.

So here's the challenge for Mitt Romney's staff.  On Sunday, Romney will be on a bus tour that will stop in Morrisville and in Mooresville. Morrisville, obviously, is in Wake County, and Mooresville is north of Charlotte.  It will be important for Romney to say, "Hello, Morrisville" when he is in Morrisville, and "Hello, Mooresville," when he is there.  Tip:  The people in Mooresville will be wearing lots of Nascar-looking clothing.

In Mooresville, he will likely have some Nascar-related remarks, but he should stay away from mentioning his close friends who are Nascar team owners, as this didn't go over so well in February.

I had to do some quick research, which consisted of looking in our archives, to find out about Smokey's Shack, where Mitt Romney is supposed to be going for a rally in Morrisville Sunday.

Here is what I found, from a Greg Cox column in 2007:

"Meanwhile in Morrisville, Rub's Smokehouse has been reincarnated as Smokey's Shack (10800 Chapel Hill Road; 469-1724; www.smokeysshack.com). The name is about the only thing that has changed, according to Kim Lee, who reopened the barbecue joint with new partner Kevin Mote on Dec. 5. The menu, whose Memphis style spareribs, beef brisket and pulled pork earned a cultlike following among barbecue aficionados, is substantially unchanged. Even the wait staff have returned to work. Or, as the jocular Lee puts it on the restaurant's answering machine, returning Rub's fans can expect "the same great food and the same questionable service." Also like Rub's, Smokey's is open Monday-Friday, for lunch only (11 a.m. to 2 p.m.)."

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Now you know what I know. I like the questionable service line. If you have anything to add about Smokey's, comment below.

Long lines were popping up everywhere around the Triangle at Chick-fil-A drive-thrus.  If you just wanted to pull in quick for some Chick, yesterday wasn't the day. Yesterday was the backlash against the backlash.

So India was wracked by widespread failures of its power grid today, again, but I learned something.  The power system in India is evidently so flaky that what the New York Times called the "unofficial power grid" exists.  ".....(T)ens of thousands of diesel generators and inverters, most privately owned, that serve as backup power sources during the frequent localized failures."

Sometimes it just takes a while.

Citrix announced today that it will move into an old Dillon Supply building in Raleigh's warehouse district on the west side of downtown.

The redevelopment of the warehouse district has been the Next Big Thing for a long time. Here's an excerpt from a 1994 story  in the N&O.

One of the most interesting lines in the report of the special UNC faculty panel that looked into academic fraud was in the section entitled: A Campus with Two Cultures.

"....some faculty are reportedly openly disapproving of having any student-athletes enroll in their courses."

The report doesn't elaborate on that sentence. But you can speculate where those "openly disapproving" faculty members are coming from, given what we have learned about cases of academic fraud involving, primarily, football players at UNC-CH.  If, on the first day of class, a faculty members looks out at the students sitting in the room and sees a bunch of extremely large men squeezing into the seats, what is the professor to think?

a. Great. Somehow my class has gotten on the unofficial list of gut courses circulating in athletic circles. So much for my reputation.

b. Great.  I give lots of homework and quizzes, and take off points for missing classes and late assigments. I don't know who put these guys in my class, but  I'm going to be the guy who, halfway through the semester, will be in the dean's office explaining to some offensive line coach why his starters are failing.

I taught at Maryland in the journalism school, in the mid-'90s. My course was an introduction to news writing, and there were - as you might imagine - non-stop writing assignments. If you couldn't write clearly and quickly, or if you had spelling or grammar issues, you were toast in this class. Attendance was mandatory and there were constant quizzes. In four semesters of teaching nearly 150 students, I had exactly one athlete take the course - a member of the woman's lacrosse team. I knew this because instructors had to fill out progress reports for any athlete in a class and send the form to the athletic department.