March 17, 2016 by Rhino Times

Vol. IV No. 11

Greensboro, North Carolina

www.rhinotimes.com

COUNCILMEMBER NOT NAMING NAMES Scott D. Yost

County Foreclosure Website

Thursday, March 17, 2016

plus Under The Hammer, Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

AND MORE

RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

HINOSHORTS

by John Hammer Editor

If you haven’t made plans for lunch for Wednesday, March 30 – consider Jersey Mike’s. Jersey Mike’s will give 100 percent of its sales that day – every single dollar – to JDRF toward a cure for type 1 diabetes. There are three locations in Greensboro: 2939-B Battleground Ave., 2014 Georgia St. and 425 Pisgah Church Road; two in High Point, 2200 N. Main and 2620 S. Main streets; and one in Jamestown at 4835 W. Wendover Ave. The post primary election Rhino Times Schmoozefest is Thursday, March 24 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Bravo! Cucina Italiana at 3324 W. Friendly Ave., in the Shops at Friendly Center. Free hors d’oeuvres, beer and wine will be provided to those who sign in and wear a name tag. Along with the election returns came the sad news that District 58 state Rep. Ralph Johnson had died on Tuesday night from complications associated with a stroke he suffered last month. Johnson was in the midst of his first full term in the state House. Before winning election to the House in 2014, Johnson was an active proponent for his community and was co-chairman of the Concerned Citizens of Northeast Greensboro. Johnson had fought long and hard for a grocery store in northeast Greensboro, and yesterday the Renaissance Community Coop signed a lease for the grocery store in the Renaissance Shopping Center.

If the goal of the federal judges was to cause as much confusion in the primary election as possible, they couldn’t be doing a much better job.

It took me longer to vote than it should have, and it had nothing to do with the voter ID law. I found my driver’s license without having to search my house and office. But after I got through voting and had a chance to review my ballot, I remembered that I hadn’t voted for the District 58 House race. I went back through the ballot and couldn’t find the House District 58 race, so I went through it again. It was only when I was on my third trip through the ballot that I realized the District 58 House race was a Democratic primary and I am not a Democrat. I did cast what may be my final vote for Congressman Mark Walker, even though it won’t count. My precinct is now in the 13th Congressional District and Walker will be running for reelection in the 6th District. Or he will be unless the federal judges decide that a Republican North Carolina legislature has no right to draw congressional districts and only a Democratic legislature or federal judges appointed by Democrats should be allowed to draw districts. It’s a strange interpretation of the Constitution, but nothing compared to what is going to come down the pike if Hillary Clinton is our next president. The International Civil Rights Center & Museum has lost another key employee. Bay Love resigned and, according to his statement, it was not to take

advantage of another job opportunity, but rather after a year he was leaving because he was leaving. The problem with the museum today is the same problem it has had from the beginning: The two men who run the museum, Skip Alston and Earl Jones, can’t run a museum. When Greensboro loaned the sit-in museum money on this last round, part of the deal was that Alston and Jones would step aside from leadership roles. Alston and Jones got highly respected High Point businessman George Clopton to step in as chairman and the loan from the city was finalized. Then Clopton stepped down and revealed that Deena Hayes, an Alston protégée, had been the actual chairman all along. Now the museum, which can only survive by raising funds, is once again without a fundraiser. If they can’t raise money from private sources, that leaves only the government. The museum isn’t going to get money from Guilford County or the state. You can expect a request for more money to be coming to the city soon, and considering the makeup of the current City Council, the museum will probably get it. March is the anniversary of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Last weekend the reenactment of the battle was held at Greensboro Country Park. In this month’s O. Henry magazine is an article about Martinville, the town that grew up around the Guilford County Courthouse before the courthouse was moved to the center of the county and the new town that grew up around it was named Greensboro.

(continued on page 4)

Not many folks were in the county commissioners meeting room of the Old Guilford County Court House to watch the elections returns come in Tuesday night, which was fortunate because once again the State Board of Elections kept messing things up. The way the process works now is that the counties send the results to the state and the state posts them to the web, except it seems that year after year something goes wrong with the state system on election night. You would think that elected officials would be interested in providing the Board of Elections with whatever it needs in terms of personnel and equipment to get the returns up in a timely manner, but evidently not. The primary voting ended Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning filing opened for the newly drawn congressional districts across the state. The problem with these districts, which were drawn without taking race into consideration, is that they haven’t been approved by the federal court. The three-judge panel that ruled the previous districts unconstitutional could rule today, tomorrow, next week or next month.

Wil and Hilda Courter caught up on some reading of the Rhino Times while spending a week on the American Empress paddlewheel steamboat as it cruised along the Columbia and Snake Rivers through Washington and Oregon. Send your Rhinos Around the World photos to letters@rhinotimes.com or to PO Box 9023, Greensboro 27429.

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

RHINOSHORTS

table of

(continued from page 2)

This gives Greensboro the chance to correct a historical inaccuracy that drives some people who know history bonkers. The road that used to lead to Martinville, because of a misspelling years ago, is named Martinsville Road. It should not be Martinsville Road because the closest Martinsville is in Virginia, and this road doesn’t go anywhere near it. It is actually the old Martinville Road. The city didn’t have any problem renaming High Point Road and Lee Street to Gate City Boulevard. The same City Council could easily drop the S from the road name and correct a misspelling that has been perpetuated for decades. The businesses on Martinsville Road wouldn’t even have to change their signs and such, but could simply drop the S when it came time to replace them. The Guilford County Economic Development Alliance (GCEDA), pronounced “ga-see-da,” announced it is hiring consultants to tell them how to promote Guilford County. So the people hired to promote Guilford County are hiring people to tell them

how to promote Guilford County. No doubt the consultants they hire will outsource the work to other consultants and on down the line. But a real issue here is that both Greensboro and High Point have pretty good name recognition. Greensboro in part because of ACC basketball and the Wyndham Championship PGA golf tournament, which for decades was the Greater Greensboro Open, and High Point because of the twice-yearly furniture market. Guilford County by contrast has almost no name recognition except to Revolutionary War buffs. A lot of wasted time, money and effort was spent on promoting the triad, a mythical area that nobody could really define and that according to a somewhat reliable source means nothing to 94.5 percent of Americans. I hope that now Greensboro is not going to spend money trying to promote Guilford County. Any sizable industry that comes here is going to need water and sewer from either Greensboro or High Point. Greensboro and High Point have a leg up in the marketing department. Let’s hope that in the spirit of regional cooperation they don’t ignore it.

CONTENTS

GREENSBORO’S MOST EXPENSIVE HOMES ISSUE Thursday, March 24 To advertise in this issue

call: 336-763-4170

15 UNCLE ORSON

BY ORSON SCOTT CARD

BY JOHN HAMMER

25 YOST COLUMN

PRIMARY DONE, ON TO NOVEMBER

27 ASK CAROLYN ...

FORECLOSURE WEBSITE LIGHTS FIRE UNDER LATE PAYERS

BY JOHN HAMMER

BY SCOTT D. YOST

BY CAROLYN WOODRUFF

39 UNDER THE HAMMER

BY JOHN HAMMER

RHINO SHORTS

10 OLD MCDONALD HAD A BONA FIDE FARM, OR DID HE? BY SCOTT D. YOST

RHINOS AROUND WORLD

11 DISPARITY, YES. RACIAL BIAS, NO BY JOHN HAMMER

16 SUDOKU 19

REAL ESTATE

CHILDREN’S SCHEDULE

THE SOUND OF THE BEEP

NEWS OF THE WEIRD

NYT CROSSWORD

30 12 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GROUP 32 CONSULTANTS SEEK 33 CONSULTANTS

PUZZLE ANSWERS

Wouldn’t you like to know who lives in Greensboro’s most expensive homes? Where they are and what they look like? And, of course, how much the houses are worth? It will be in

NOT NAMING NAMES BUT DEFINITELY KICKING

BY SCOTT D. YOST

GET FUZZY LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

EDITORIAL CARTOON

Cover: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse reenactment on Saturday at Greensboro Country Park. Photo by Sandy Groover

PUBLISHER Roy Carroll EDITOR-IN-CHIEF John Hammer

GENERAL MANAGER Joann Zollo

managing editor ELAINE HAMMER

creative director ANTHONY COUNCIL

county editor SCOTT D. YOST contributing editor ORSON SCOTT CARD

advertising consultants CHRISTINE CHAPMAN DARDEN KELLY TYE SINGLETON

cartoonist GEOF BROOKS

216 West Market Street, Greensboro NC 27401 P.O. Box 9023, Greensboro NC 27429 | (336) 763-4170 (continued on page 11) (336) 763-2585 fax | sales@rhinotimes.com | www.rhinotimes.com

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

Councilmember Not Naming Names But Definitely Kicking

by John Hammer The current City Council constantly touts the need for economic development and to be business friendly. Mayor Nancy Vaughan says the city needs to have a “say yes” attitude. While the city staff at times appears to be doing everything in its power to thwart economic development and make opening and operating a business in Greensboro as difficult as possible. City Councilmember Mike Barber has finally had enough and, on Tuesday, March 15, he sent a strongly worded email to Vaughan, his fellow councilmembers and senior city staff. Barber doesn’t name any names in his letter, but he is clear that he wants immediate action concerning at least one member of the city staff. Barber refused to identify the employee he wrote about. Barber’s email states, “We have an individual working for our city that is consistently identified as someone who is inflexible, provides poor customer service, and does not collaborate with colleagues on customer service matters, among other issues. I have brought incidents and issues to the City Mgr and his staff on numerous occasions for months. The latest incident was a meeting where multimillion dollar investors in our city were present, and this team member’s name came up as a BARRIER to further investment in our city. I believe the Mayor was in attendance.” Vaughan said she was in

attendance and the incident happened when she was at a retail trade show in Charlotte with developer Marty Kotis talking to people about the advantages of coming to Greensboro. Vaughan said they were discussing a project underway in Greensboro with an out-of-town developer already involved in the project. Vaughan said that Barber’s statement was a bit of an exaggeration and what she remembered being said was, “So and so was just being his typical self.” Vaughan added, “I thought it was very enlightening that it happened.” She said she was surprised that this out-of-town developer knew the name of this particular city employee. Vaughan would not reveal the name. Vaughan said it was a personnel issue so she took it up with City Manager Jim Westmoreland. She said, “I don’t believe in putting something like that in an email and putting it out there to score points.” However, Vaughan said, “I do think something should happen.” Vaughan said, “We need to have a culture of yes that needs to permeate throughout the organization. People need to understand that we have an obligation to find a solution if possible.” Vaughan added, “By and large I think we have great city employees, but we have one or two in key positions who are problematic.” Vaughan said about her conversation with Westmoreland, “What I would hope is that Jim takes this very seriously. Jim has to be

accountable for the decisions he makes or doesn’t make.” It sounds like Barber and Vaughan are on pretty much the same page, with the notable exception that Vaughan isn’t too fond of Barber’s methods. Barber’s email continues, “Let me be plain, if this employment issue is not addressed immediately, I will ask my colleagues to consider changes at the department head level or higher, until someone acts. This has already been discussed over the past months. Please feel the gravity of this action item.” The frustration expressed by Barber is evident, and other councilmembers have expressed a similar frustration about the way the city staff handles problems, in particular problem

employees. The staff’s response in the past has been to smooth over whatever the issue of the moment was and evidently hope that something will distract the councilmembers before they get back to it. It’s a strategy that has worked pretty well up until now. Lately, Barber has been the go-toguy for development issues. He has had onsite meetings with Assistant City Manager David Parrish to handle delays that should have never been a issue and that never should have reached the level of having an assistant city manager and a councilmember out walking a construction site trying to solve problems that the city staff created. (continued on page 16)

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RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

Primary Done, On To November by John Hammer Tuesday, March 15 was primary day in North Carolina, and while most successful candidates simply won the right to run in November, a few were all but elected because they have no opponent in the fall. In the District 58 state House race, Guilford County Board of Education member Amos Quick defeated state House Rep. Ralph Johnson in the Democratic primary by a vote of 9,559 for Quick to 3,805 for Johnson. (I am sad to report this because Ralph Johnson, who was a fine man and a good representative, died on Tuesday, March 15. He had a stroke several weeks ago and had returned to the hospital. Our condolences go out to all of his family and friends.) Johnson was originally elected in 2013 to finish the term of 12th District Congresswoman Alma Adams, who resigned from the state House when she was elected to Congress. Former Greensboro City Councilmember Dianne Bellamy-Small with 3,667 votes for 57 percent won the District 1 school board Democratic primary over school board member Keith McCullough with 2,817 votes for 43 percent. And with no Republican candidate in the race, Bellamy-Small should win in November. Last fall Bellamy-Small lost her bid to get reelected to the Greensboro City Council. After serving on the City Council for 10 years, she was defeated in 2013 by City Councilmember Sharon Hightower. In the 2015 City Council race, Hightower beat BellamySmall again. But now the Guilford County Board of Education will get the opportunity to try and deal with Bellamy-Small, who takes being hard to get along with to whole new levels. In the District 4 school board Republican primary, incumbent Linda Welborn with 4,273 votes for 56 percent defeated former school board member Paul Daniels who had 3,317 votes for 44 percent. There is no Democratic opponent in the race, so Welborn was effectively reelected on Tuesday night.

Photo by John Hammer Not many folks were at the Old Guilford County Court House on Tuesday night to watch the primary election returns come in.

In the District 2 school board primary races, former school board member Anita Sharpe with 3,417 votes for 56 percent defeated first time candidate John Nosek who had 2,648 votes for 44 percent. Sharpe was on the school board for 18 years, but stepped down in 2008 and, after taking eight years off, decided to get back into the fray. Sharpe will face Democratic school board member Jeff Belton in the November general election. In the District 3 school board Republican primary, Pat Tillman, making his second run for the school board, with 5,035 votes for 63 percent defeated first time candidate Brian Pearce who had 2,979 votes for 37 percent. Tillman will face Democrat Angelo Kidd in November. Kidd is a retired Guilford County Schools regional superintendent. School board member Deena Hayes was on the ballot facing Matthew Stafford in the Democratic primary. However, Stafford was only on the ballot because he had dropped out of the race too late to have his name removed. Hayes had already won before any of the votes were counted, and although the vote count didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Photo by John Hammer matter, she got 81 percent of the vote and Stafford received 19 District 2 Guilford County Board of Education Republican percent. candidates Anita Sharpe and John Nosek at the Old Court The only other local races on House on Tuesday night the ballot were two primaries for

District Court judge, which are nonpartisan. In one race Bill Davis with 39,659 votes and 42 percent finished first and Miranda Reynolds Reavis, who had 31,752 votes for 34 percent, finished second. The two will face each other on the November ballot. District Court Judge Jon Kreider, who had 23,125 votes for 24 percent, was eliminated from the race. In the other District Court race, Lora Cubbage finished first with 37,834 votes for 40 percent, and District Court Judge David Sherrill finished second with 35,007 votes for 37 percent. Cubbage and Sherrill will run against each other in November. Ron Butler, who had 22,008 votes for 23 percent, was eliminated from the race. On the national scene, Donald Trump won North Carolina with 40 percent of the vote to 37 percent for Sen. Ted Cruz, 13 percent for Gov. John Kasich and 8 percent for Sen. Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the race after losing his home state of Florida to Trump. But Cruz won Guilford County with 38 percent over Trump with 35 percent. In the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton won the state with 55 percent and did slightly better winning Guilford County with 56 percent. Sen. Bernie Sanders finished statewide with 41 percent and in Guilford County with 42 percent. You might think that with the large number of college students in Guilford County Sanders would have done a little better. Sen. Richard Burr had no trouble winning the Republican primary with 61 percent while Dr. Greg Brannon in his second run for the Senate was once again defeated in the Republican primary finishing with 25 percent. (continued on page 29)

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

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County Foreclosure Website Lights Fire Under Late Payers For Sale

by Scott D. Yost If you ever wanted to know which of your friends or neighbors were in financial straits, well, Guilford County government just made that easier. Guilford County has created – and now gone live with – a new online service that lists every home and business that the Guilford County Tax Department has put in foreclosure proceedings. The site, which offers searchable mapping functions and much more information about the homes or businesses, states precisely where the property is in the foreclosure process and which properties can be bid on. Guilford County Tax Director Ben Chavis said it’s a novel idea, but one he believes will help with the county’s foreclosure efforts. He added that it will let potential buyers know which properties are on the auction block. “I haven’t seen anything like this across the state,” he said of the new site. “I think it will help more people become part of the [bidding] process. Also, it’s a chance for the property owner to recapture that property before it goes on sale.” In other words, one of the advantages is that it lets the property owner know that Guilford County means business. An “active” listing on the site is a very concrete and undeniable indication that one’s property is about to go up for public sale. “We put it on the front burner for them,” Chavis said of their foreclosure proceedings. “We want to make it a priority for them. Those people who are going to pay will understand that we mean business.” Chavis also said that, in the majority of cases where foreclosure proceedings have begun, the owner will find the money some way to pay the back taxes – for instance, by selling other assets or borrowing it from relatives. The new web-based foreclosure information service is the latest in Guilford County’s effort to deal with what has been a growing problem for years – an overwhelming number of foreclosures. The Tax Department doesn’t want to be in the real estate business; however, these days it’s

Call

Ben Chavis GUILFORD COUNTY

REALTY

000-0000

coming to terms with the fact that, like it or not, it is in that business. One purpose of the new web service is to make that process more transparent for those who want to purchase houses. County officials didn’t say it, but there’s also likely a hope that the public shaming involved with letting the whole community know whose house is in foreclosure due to a failure to pay property taxes will help encourage them to pay. Chavis said that the site (foreclosures.myguilford.com) will, among other things, make it easier for those interested in purchasing the foreclosed property to bid on it at auction. After many other efforts to collect taxes on the houses or businesses or parcels of land, Guilford County takes the property, sells it to the highest bidder to pay the taxes and, if there are any proceeds left after attorneys’ fees and other transaction costs, the remainder is given to the former owner. Chavis said that, before the launch of the new web service, it was difficult to find out which properties were in foreclosure or know where they were in the process. He said a short list of buyers who specialized in trading in foreclosed homes had the tools and information to stay on top of the process and they would bid on desirable properties, but he added that now everyone has access to the information from their tablet, phone or computer. “We want the public to be aware of what’s out there rather than just select people,” Chavis said. “Any citizen can bid on a property and this just makes it more transparent than it was.” More citizens bidding on the

property should mean higher sale prices. In the past there might only be a listing of a foreclosure in small print in the back of a newspaper, the tax director said, adding this will be a much more open system. “It actually shows where they are in the process and people can arrange the information in a different order, or, say, print the entire list of what the county has,” Chavis said. “It also shows the status – which ones are pending, which ones have sold. ‘Active’ means we are working it.” Guilford County has been trying to deal with its large number of foreclosures for years. Handling those foreclosures has been an increasing problem for the county since the financial crisis eight years ago. As of Friday, March 11, the Tax Department had 965 foreclosures in either active or pending status. That number topped out at about 1,040 parcels in the fall of 2015. Two years ago the number was around 800 and a year before that it was about 500. Guilford County now owns 30 properties as a result of tax lien foreclosures. Small changes in the tax collection rates can mean millions more for the county budget and the Board of Commissioners is just in the process of putting that budget together for 20162017. The Tax Department has one of the highest collection rates in the state – it’s now at just over 97 percent and the foreclosures are part of an effort to get that even higher. Chavis has been using technology to bump up tax revenues. Two years ago, the department began using advanced aerial photography known as pictometry to catch citizens who

add on to their homes and businesses without informing the county. Software compares the new photos with pictures taken years ago to locate unregistered additions to homes and businesses, and those are then put on the tax roles. That program is bringing in more than it cost. “I sold pictometry as an investment,” Chavis said. Chavis said he was pleased with the way the foreclosure website came out and that he appreciated the work of Guilford County Information Services Director Hemant Desai and his team. “Hemant and his staff did a tremendous job. It’s pretty slick,” Chavis said. Desai said that it did not cost the county anything other than staff time since Information Services didn’t outsource it. “It was all internally done,” Desai said. Chavis said that further enhancements were coming in the future such as hyperlinks on property listings that take viewers to other information the county has on hand. The Guilford County Tax Department only resorts to foreclosure proceedings as a last resort to collect taxes – and that usually happens after taxes on property have been delinquent for two years or longer. For years and years, the Tax Department almost never foreclosed on property to collect taxes. However, that all changed after Chavis took the Guilford County tax director job in 2009. In the past, the county has used a private attorney – Jerry Weston, with Gabriel Berry Weston & Wells – to help oversee foreclosures. Weston still handles many of the foreclosures for the county, but last year the Board of Commissioners created a new position in county government devoted to foreclosures. The commissioners approved the new position, which falls under the Guilford County attorney’s office, with the belief that it will pay for itself by increasing the speed at which foreclosures are moved along. Matt Mason, who was an attorney for the Guilford County Sheriff’s Department, took the Tax Department

(continued on page 14)

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

RHINO

Restaurant Guide Chris and Denise Maness, the owners of Jams Deli, love the restaurant business. And it shows – in their highquality sandwiches at competitive prices and their contented repeat customers who have supported Jams for 30 years. Chris opened the ﬁrst Jams Deli in 1988 in the Quaker Village building that currently houses Boston Market. After only ﬁve years, he outgrew that 33-seat restaurant and moved to a larger location just up the road at 5707 West Friendly Ave. In 2013, the business expanded to include a Jams Deli – complete with an outdoor patio – at 2920-F Martinsville Road near the intersection of Pisgah Church Road and Lawndale Drive. Jams Deli promises quick service, but not fast food. Chris and Denise maintain that promise by being hands-on at both locations. In fact, Denise left her 16-year dental hygiene career to help run the Martinsville Road location. The pair thrives on the rush from busy lunch and dinner services and making their customers happy. Jams is known for its delicious menu items including savory burgers, sandwiches, soups and salads, and just this month, Spoon University ranked Jams Deli among the top 15 places to eat in Greensboro. Both locations are open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. To learn more and for a complete menu – including daily soups and specials – visit www.jams-deli.com.

10 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

Old McDonald Had a Bona Fide Farm Exemption, or Did He? by Scott D. Yost

A “bona fide farm exemption” sounds like something that’s fairly innocuous and uncontroversial. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t – it depends on who you ask. One brewing Guilford County land use dispute is an example of similar battles that are cropping up across North Carolina, where the bona fide farm exemption is allowing farming operations – as well as activities related to farming – regardless of a county’s zoning regulations. In the Guilford County case, it is Landon Farm, a 4.8-acre lot at 6103 N. Church St. in the Mears Fork Estates neighborhood. Landon Farm has a Greensboro address but is not in Greensboro. It is in unincorporated Guilford County. Though the land is zoned Residential Single Family RS-40, the owners opened a horse riding school on their property, and when they were told by county zoning officials that they could not have a business there, they got their property reclassified as a farm, making it exempt from zoning laws. Kathryn Rodosky Taylor, who owns the property along with her husband, said they merely used a perfectly legal option that was available to them. “What we did was 1,000 percent legal,” she said. The bona fide farm exemption came into law in 1959 and was meant to help protect farmers from obtrusive zoning regulations that might impair their ability to farm or conduct business related to farming. It applies in unincorporated

areas of the state where land use rules have traditionally been much more lax than in municipalities. The exemption is not available inside city limits unless a special exception for a town or city is made by law. While Taylor said the exemption was a solution to her zoning issue, not everyone is pleased. Jacquie McClain said she and her husband, Keith, a pharmacist, as the owners of three acres at 6097 N. Church St., were disturbed to return to their property last fall and find a riding school right next door. She and her husband lived on their property until about 10 years ago when a fire burned down their house. When they decided to begin using the property again last year and got some renters there in a mobile home, they discovered the riding school. “It is terrible public policy,” she said of the bona fide farm exemption that makes zoning laws irrelevant for any tract that gets a farm ID number – something many argue is too easy to do. “We bought residential rights in a residential neighborhood and now we have a lighted arena, traffic, horse shows and the smell of manure,” McClain said. She said she’s spoken with various government agencies and elected officials and said everyone has been sympathetic but that the way the law reads now, the business is protected. She contacted the Guilford County commissioners, but several told her they have no control over the state law

that permits this type of situation. The two properties fall in the county commissioners’ District 4, represented by Commissioner Alan Branson. Branson said that there is little to nothing the county can do since this issue pertains to state law, but he added that, even though the land is zoned residential, the lots in the area have more of a rural flavor to it. Branson said this case was exacerbated by the fact that the two neighbors clearly do not get along. Not all of the neighbors dislike living next to the horse riding school. When McClain voiced her complaints to the county commissioners at a meeting earlier this year, another Landon Farm neighbor spoke and said she liked being next to the riding school because it was enjoyable to watch the horses. She said she had moved to the countryside for exactly that type of scenery. In one complaint to the county, McClain wrote, “One neighbor should not be allowed to manipulate the system and impact the quality of life and property values of so many others. Promoting agriculture is a good thing, but it should not be at the expense of neighborhood communities and our country.” This week McClain said that, once a property is designated as a farm, the owners can use it to put on weddings, sell tomatoes, open a “pick your own strawberries” business – and the list goes on and on, she said. “If you have a half-acre lot, you can build a 75-foot chicken coop and get

200 chickens and start selling eggs out of your front yard, and they can’t do anything about it,” McClain said. She said the increased traffic is a problem, sludge routinely runs off onto her driveway and large vehicles have at times been blocking her access. McClain said at first she was pleased when a Guilford County planner told Landon Farm’s owners, “Look, you can’t have a business here,” and then told the McClains that the horse business “was going to be shut down within 30 days.” But after the farm owners hired an attorney and acquired a farm ID number for their property, a county planning official told her, “Surprise, surprise – they can become a bona fide farm.” In recent months, there have been disputes about the use of their driveway, and the Guilford County Sheriff’s Department has been called out. McClain said there had been several “Jerry Springer moments” between the feuding neighbors, including one conflict that ended up in court briefly. Guilford County Planning Director Leslie Bell said he has seen interesting cases popping up in other areas of the state related to this exemption. He said that sometimes there are benefits to being classified as a farm, for instance, that classification might put some landowners toward the front of the line when it came to certain types of federal assistance. The enabling legislation for farm (continued on page 14)

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

Disparity, Yes. Racial Bias, No by John Hammer Back in October, Greensboro Police Chief Wayne Scott was dealt a difficult hand. The New York Times on Oct. 25, 2015, published a front-page story on the racial disparity of traffic stops by the Greensboro Police Department. Scott had a lot of options on how to deal with the situation, but he faced it head on and said his department would study the data, find out what the problem was and then figure out what to do about it. At the City Council meeting Monday, March 14, Scott gave a report to the City Council on where the Police Department is in dealing with the issue. The Police Department contracted with professors at NC A&T State University and University of North Carolina-Greensboro to delve into the data that showed that 55 percent of traffic stops involved black drivers and 45 percent involved white drivers. And also that black drivers were 102 percent more likely to be searched

than white drivers. One controversial action Scott took immediately was to order the police not to stop cars for minor vehicle equipment violations that were not a safety hazard. This dramatically reduced the number of traffic stops citywide. Scott said that this also worked well with the emphasis on Neighborhood Oriented Policing. According to the report based on research by the two universities, “Research consistently determines that racial disparity in traffic stops and searches is not definitive evidence of institutional or individual bias.” One of the points made by Lee Hunt, manager of the Information Services Division for the Police Department, was that the data from the state wasn’t as good as it needed to be and that the state system introduced errors into the data provided by the Greensboro Police Department. Scott elaborated on this saying that the information came from the statewide system of crime reporting

and the state provided the software for the reports but offered no training on how the reports should be filed. He said the state software transposed some of the information and that it had inherent problems. Scott said that each officer has a self-assigned five-digit number and that some other officer in the state could have the same number as a Greensboro police officer, which meant the city would have to sort through the reports and separate out the ones from Greensboro. Scott also said that all traffic stops are not equal. He gave a number of examples of different reasons for a traffic stop, such as a tip from Crime Stoppers, a 911 call, the description of a vehicle used in the commission of a crime or the observations of the officer. Councilmember Tony Wilkins asked if they had records that showed how often a police officer knew the race of the driver before a car was stopped. Hunt said one of the studies was designed to try and determine if

there was a disparity when police officers were more likely to be able to determine the race of the driver before the stop. It is called a “veil of darkness” study and is based on the week before and after daylight savings time, since an officer is more likely to be able to determine the driver’s race in daylight than at night. That study showed no disparity. Several points that Scott repeated were that there was a racial disparity in traffic stops, that it is a very complex issue and that the disparity doesn’t mean that the officers are operating in a racially biased manner. Scott said some of the actions they had taken involved additional training for all officers, requiring that all consent searches either be documented with a signed form or by a police body cam, and requiring a case report on all consent searches that would be reviewed by a supervisor. As far as inadequate data, Scott said he asked 12 supervisors how (continued on page 14)

12 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

Economic Development Group Consultants Seek Consultants by Scott D. Yost There’s been a lot of talk and many meetings over the past year and a half in the effort to create a coordinated countywide economic development group to recruit new business to the area. And now that the Guilford County Economic Development Alliance (GCEDA) is established, it’s putting together its first “action plan” and branding initiative. That plan, which will be formed with the help of a soon to be selected economic development consulting firm, will also “include recommendations for branding the community for economic development purposes.” The GCEDA sees a need for something new and catchy – no doubt with a spiffy new logo as well.

Greensboro Partnership President and CEO Brent Christensen and High Point Economic Development Corp. President Loren Hill are the two staffers for the GCEDA Leadership Group, which has now sent out a request for qualifications (RFQ) to find the best firm to help put Guilford County back on the path of success in business recruitment and expansion. Christensen said the GCEDA needed to use outside help for this project. He said the Leadership Group could get the ball moving faster if it brought in an industry expert rather than attempted to form the plan in house. The RFQ sent out by the Leadership Group seeks marketing and consulting expertise centered on seven industries or market sectors that have been identified in previous studies as key areas for Guilford County’s future

economic growth. Those seven areas that consultants will focus on as part of the action plan are listed in the RFQ as, “Aviation and Aerospace, Supply Chain and Logistics, Life Sciences, Innovative Manufacturing, Specialized Business Services, Furniture Design and Marketing [and] Commercial Photography.” The consultant hired to create the action plan will review past marketing efforts in these target industries, as well as the previous attempts to brand and promote the community, and then provide guidance on the best course of action. For instance, the consultants will suggest which conferences county representatives should attend and which site selection professions the GCEDA should focus its efforts on. It will also establish a calendar of events related to those targeted industries

and determine a budget for carrying out the plans. The Greensboro Partnership – or one of many former incarnations of that group under a different name – and the High Point Economic Development Corp. have conducted most of the studies and analyses that will form the foundation for the new plan. In the past, those two organizations based in the county’s two largest cities have worked separately to promote their cities – often seeking to recruit firms in these seven targeted industries. But ever since a historic meeting on Friday, Nov. 20 of last year between the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, the Greensboro City Council and the High Point City Council, those three groups have been working in unison to bring more (continued on next page)

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

consultants

WHAT HAVEN’T WHAT HAVEN’T YOU HEARD? YOU HEARD?

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business to the county. Once the responses from consulting firm suitors have been received, Christensen, Hill and the three managers in the alliance – Guilford County Manager Marty Lawing, Greensboro City Manager Jim Westmoreland and High Point City Manager Greg Demko will review the applications. After the list of applicants is narrowed to three to five finalists, those candidates will be interviewed via Skype and a final selection will be made, perhaps as soon as the end of March. That consulting or marketing firm will then make “recommendations on best marketing practices to engage site selection consultants and businesses in the target industries.” Christensen, Hill and other members of the GCEDA are trying not to make the process too complicated. “We want this to be short and sweet in terms of asking for these qualifications,” Christensen said. “There’s a finite number of firms that can do this economic development work.” He added that since this will build on studies and plans that have gone before, the county and the consultant won’t be starting from scratch. “This is not a new targeted industry plan study,” he said. “That will run you in six figures if you want to do something like that. This is one that says, here are our targeted industries.” The cost of hiring the chosen consultant hasn’t been determined and will be negotiated once the parameters of the work are better defined. The RFQ was the topic of discussion at the first two meetings of the GCEDA Leadership Group that were held on the Cameron Campus of Guilford Technical Community College in Colfax earlier this year. In January, at the first meeting of the Leadership Group, Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan expressed concerns that there didn’t seem to be any up-to-date list of sites available for development in the county. That issue has come up several times before, and Vaughan wants this to be addressed as the action plan is created. At the Monday, Feb 29 meeting of the Leadership Group, Christensen told other members that the effort isn’t starting from scratch. “I can tell you that aerospace and aviation we’re probably already good on,” he said. “We’ve been working with the airport on that over the past 60 days. But some of these other ones we would want them to come look at.”

Christensen also said the new branding and marketing effort for Guilford County would be a key part of this process. He added that, at this point, a little vagueness in the RFQ was a good thing. “We don’t want to go into too much detail here because we want them to come back [with ideas],” Christensen said. “We don’t want this to be too prescriptive. And this is not an RFP [request for proposals] – this is an RFQ. So we want them to come back and say, ‘Based on your needs on the questions you’re asking, here’s the way we would propose to do this’; and we would also ask them their qualifications and some of the past work that they’ve done that’s very similar – rather than just coming back with a dollar amount. Let us get comfortable with who we think can do this and then start negotiating the amount from there.” The RFQ is being disseminated through groups such as the NC Economic Developers Association, the International Economic Development Council and the Site Selectors Guild. At the Leadership Group’s last meeting on Feb. 29, Lawing asked why “commercial photography” was one of the target areas. “Is that a large industry?” Guilford County’s manager asked. Hill jumped in quickly and said, “In the City of High Point it is,” and he added that there were about 10 studios in that city. Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Jeff Phillips and others in the room pointed out that there was a lot of business focused on photographing furniture and shows related to the furniture market, the event High Point is best known for nationally and internationally. There were also questions about the RFQ’s use of the language, “Innovative Manufacturing,” rather than “Advanced Manufacturing” – the terminology Guilford County has used in the past when speaking of these things. Hill said the term “advanced manufacturing” was no longer in vogue. “Everyone laughs at that term,” Hill said. “What is advanced manufacturing? It’s almost meaningless – at least a lot of folks are saying that these days. So folks have been looking for a better word – a more interesting word. I like it better myself.” That’s just one type of industry the group hopes to see a lot more of in the county in the coming years.

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14 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

farm

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exemptions dates back 47 years and has been frequently updated, but disputes such as the one on North Church Street began in recent years after the codification into law of some court interpretations of the exemption significantly broadened the scope of the bona fide farm rule. On the one hand people move to unincorporated parts of the county so they can have more freedom, and zoning laws have become overly restrictive in recent decades. On the other, those who move into land zoned RS-40 are unlikely to be aware the bona fide farm exemption exists and may be surprised at its availability to their neighbors and the myriad of uses it may allow. In 2011, Richard Ducker, a land use expert who was at that time with the School of Government in Chapel Hill, wrote about the lack of any strict

safeguards around the exemption and predicted this type of problem would arise due to the recent court interpretations of the rule. Ducker wrote that some of the “proof” now required to become a farm was hardly adequate. He stated: “The items of proof include (a) a farm sales tax exemption certificate; (b) a copy of the property tax listing showing that the farm qualifies for the present-use-value property taxation that applies to agricultural, horticultural, and forestry uses; (c) a copy of the farm operator’s federal income tax form that demonstrates farm activity; (d) a forestry management plan; or (e) a farm identification number issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.” He added that, for some of those criteria, there was no vetting, and no regulatory agency set up to see that

disparity (continued from page 11)

they trained officers to fill out reports and received 12 different answers. Since no training was provided by the state on how the data should be supplied, this kind of disparity could be expected. Scott said that everyone would be trained to fill out the reports in the same way, but that it all takes time. Councilmember Mike Barber said that he had talked to a minority councilmember from a different city who, when faced with similar data, went back to her community and asked if they wanted less frequent police patrols in their neighborhood, which would result in fewer traffic stops. She said the response was a resounding no. Scott said he wanted Greensboro to be a leader in the state in solving the problem of disparity. He said that

other police departments were already contacting him and asking for help training their officers. Scott said that the resist, delay and obstruct charge was a problem because he thought it was too vague and too all encompassing. He said it was the same charge for giving false information to a police officer or running, and he saw those very as different crimes. Scott said that they would need help from the state legislature if the law were going to be changed. Scott said, “I can’t say that if we pull these numbers a month from now there will not be disparity. I call tell you that the disparity is not based on the bias of police officers.” Councilmember Yvonne Johnson said, “Thank you for your honesty. This is a very complex issue.”

the system isn’t abused. Just as Ducker predicted the issue is now showing up all over the state. Some Guilford County commissioners have spoken with NC Republican state Rep. Jon Hardister of the Guilford delegation, who said the Landon Farm situation and the farm exemption issue are now on his radar. “This is a large issue and something that we will have to look at – with the House and Senate committees on agriculture as a committee, and with the commissioner of agriculture,” Hardister said. He added that, “More than likely we’ll get the county commissioners’ association involved.” Hardister said that agriculture is a very important industry with a great deal of political clout behind it, which is one reason it has these protections. “Agriculture is the number one industry in the state,” he said. “You don’t want to do anything that will harm agriculture, and a farm is a business that employs people. On the other side, you have property rights and people who bought their land expecting not to be next to a farm.” He said that, ideally, state legislators will be able to “strike a balance” between the two competing interests. Hardister said anything that hinders agriculture will be a tough sell for state

legislators. Special legislation in 1999 also means that within Summerfield, Oak Ridge, Pleasant Garden and Stokesdale, the bona fide farm exemption is in effect just as it is in unincorporated Guilford County. Guilford County Attorney Mark Payne said that, as it is now, the county’s hands are tied. “The statute is fairly black and white,” he said. He said the applicant fills out a form and sends it in to get a farm ID number. “The bar is not particularly high,” Payne said of becoming a bona fide farm. Adam Lovelady, a zoning and land use scholar with the School of Government, said that, once someone gets that farm ID number, it allows for all sorts of uses – not just farming, but also anything related. He said one case in Orange County involves a barn-like structure that the owners rent out for wedding receptions. “Is that agricultural related or incidental to it?” he asked. As for Guilford County’s horse business, Lovelady said that “dairying and raising” animals is a protected use when land is classified as a farm, and he said that an occasional horse show might be deemed allowable as well.

foreclosure (continued from page 8)

job last year. Mason said he’s pleased with the new web-based foreclosure offering. He said that, even after his office gets the case, there is a timeframe in which the owner can pay because the first letter the county sends out is “informal and not dictated by statute.” However, a failure to pay at that point means another letter laying down the law and, after that, the owner has

30 days to pay the bill. If that bill still isn’t paid, Mason said, it is scheduled for a court date, which can be several months out. He said that, given all those steps, seven months is a good rule of thumb as to how long the process takes from the time his office sets the wheels in motion to the time the property is sold. There is $10.8 million in delinquent property taxes outstanding on 24,624 properties in Guilford County for 2005 to the present. Guilford County can collect back taxes for 10 years. However, after that time, it can’t use the enforcement remedies – garnishment of wages, attaching bank accounts, using foreclosure – that are all part of the Tax Department’s arsenal of collection powers in cases where the statute of limitations hasn’t expired. So, after a decade, the county can continue asking for the money but it has no way to force payment.

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

UNCLE ORSON Reviews

Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

The Funeral I Could Not Miss by Orson Scott Card When famous musicians die, we get all kinds of testimonials about how they were so transformative or innovative, or how much their music “shaped our lives.” In most cases, they did nothing of the kind. They were simply famous, and often achieved this by being odd and/or offensive in some way.

But last Saturday, my wife and I learned of the death of a musician who really had shaped our lives. We knew her as Margaret Brown, and I’m pretty sure that not a soul in Guilford County knows anything about her except what my wife and I have told them. But when my wife told me that Margaret Brown was dead, I asked,

“When is the funeral?” and she said, “Tuesday” and I said, “I want to go.” I wanted to go because her music changed my life. Don’t bother looking her up on iTunes. She isn’t there. When I was 16, my family moved from Arizona to Utah. I had been in the marching band at Mesa High School, but at my new school, they already had too many of the instruments I played. I had been a very good boy soprano, but when my voice changed I lost my vibrato and I replaced it with a feeble tremolo so that it wasn’t even a pleasure for me to hear me sing. But I still had perfect relative pitch (something that I lost with my stroke a few years ago) and so I could sing. A family moved into our ward (parish) in 1967. The Browns were a lanky blond country-boy father, an energetic, outspoken mother and three young daughters. In the Mormon Church, there are no paid positions. Members with musical

talent are invited – and expected – to provide or lead or accompany church music for free. Before Margaret Brown joined the Mormon Church in Winnipeg, she had been a paid soloist in the largest church in the city. That position ended when she became a Mormon, and began to attend meetings in a rented room above a warehouse, with a congregation of 60 people. They called her to be choir director. By the time she was done, the choir consisted of the whole congregation – which, you must admit, has a kind of efficiency to it. Anyway, when the Browns moved to Orem, I had no idea how they were going to change my life. Elbert Brown, the dad, hired me for one of my first jobs. He ran a hardware store in downtown Provo – and I was confident of my ability to sell hardware, because my dad was a tool guy and I had paid attention. But I instantly discovered, as Elbert

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trained me, that in the autumn, all of the hardware store’s profits came from selling skis. This was Utah, and skiing was the main thing that brought tourists to our state in the winter. How could Elbert possibly guess, before he hired me, that I was an acrophobe who had never been close enough to a ski to see how they attached to people’s feet. Within two days, Elbert realized that his assumption that I had a basic understanding of skis was utterly false, and I realized that “selling hardware” was not at all the job that my boss needed me to do. Do you count it as “firing” if you agree with your boss that you’re completely incompetent to do the job and you are as eager to leave as he is to get you out of the place? That was a great lesson for me to learn, and I liked Elbert Brown even more afterward than I had before. But it was Margaret Brown who affected my life most powerfully. Now, in most Mormon wards, singing in the choir is a self-appointed position. You want to sing in the choir, you show up for the practices, and ... voila. You are a choir-singer. My wife, who lived in the ward longer than me, had wanted to join the choir as an 11-year-old. Now, most

people don’t realize that girls’ voices “change” with puberty just as much as boys’ voices do. A child’s voice is not likely to blend with the rest of the choir. So she was told, you can’t join till you’re 12. She didn’t forget – as soon as she was 12, there she was at choir practice. But she quickly learned that some of the adult sopranos did not want to have her there. The message was made clear when they refused to answer her questions, and would not share music with her when there were limited copies. Seeing what was going on, some kind altos took this eager 12-yearold into their section and made her welcome. That’s why my wife learned to sing harmonies instead of singing melody all the time, as sopranos usually do. But she loved that first choir director of her life, who let her join the choir – and those altos, who made her feel like part of the group. Later, when the bishop of the ward learned of Margaret Brown’s musical credentials, they asked her to become the new choir director. Did I mention that Margaret was strong-willed and outspoken? The story is that she said, “I’ll only direct the choir on two

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incapable of learning a harmony part and singing it correctly. Margaret intended to create an excellent choir. She had to have the power to weed out the people who could not contribute. If you think that was going to hurt some feelings, you are exactly right. She was expecting to run her choir the way a college coach runs a basketball team: Not everybody gets to play varsity, especially if they can’t shoot, pass, run or rebound. (You know, like me.) The second condition was: “All three members of the bishopric [the bishop and his two counselors] must sing in the choir and attend every choir practice.” Now, in a Mormon ward, the bishop and his counselors are some of the busiest people – and they are also not called to their position because of their musical talent. However, Margaret understood that for the choir to work, the choir members had to take it seriously and attend the practices. If they saw three of the busiest men with the most prestigious offices coming every week, they’d begin to think of it as an Important calling. In Margaret Brown’s funeral this past Tuesday, her eldest daughter spoke, and instead of talking about her (continued on next page)

kicking

Hyper-Sudoku 4

conditions.” Let me point out that nobody gives bishops “conditions” for accepting a calling. You say yes, or you don’t. No, I take that back. When one bishop called me to be the Young Men’s president, meaning that I would be responsible for providing both gospel lessons and useful-and-fun activities for boys from 12 through 17, I told him, “Yes, on one condition.” But he already knew me well enough to know what the condition was. He said, “I will take the boys on campouts and hikes. You don’t even have to come.” That’s why all the boys I led during my two years in that position lived through their campouts and came home from their hikes with all their limbs intact. But it’s rare to accept a calling “with conditions,” but here was what Margaret Brown insisted on – or so I was told at the time by those in a position to know. “First,” she said, “you have to release from the choir anyone that I ask you to.” Now, choir members are all volunteers. Nobody “called” them to the choir, so it’s deeply weird to “release” them from that calling. But one of the things that makes it hard to achieve excellence in a ward choir is having singers who are, for instance, a quarter-step flat on every note, or

Barber would not comment on the email other than to say, “People get so caught up in the repercussions of good management that they become bad managers. They won’t address problems because they know it will be painful. What they forget is it is a lot more painful to keep someone on the team who doesn’t want to be on the team.” The city staff has said one problem is that they need more people. Some of those who have to work with the city see things differently and think that the problem is too many employees with too little to do. In 2008, when development ground to a halt, the city didn’t reduce staff in the effected departments to the level justified by the workload. One of the justifications for this action was that the city didn’t want to be caught shorthanded when development started up again. But one result of having too many people and too little work is that employees stretch out a job to take longer. What could be

done in a day takes three days, a week or more. Other cities faced with similar issues have reduced staff and found that with employees busy, instead of looking for work to do, everything ran smoother. It sounds absurd, but one of the city staff’s solutions to the growing complaints from contractors and developers is to redecorate the area where people go to get permits and plans approved. Evidently the city staff is under the impression that a smiley face on the wall and a cheerful paint color is going to make getting plans sent back for the third time unapproved easier to swallow. The problem the City Council has with the whole issue is that the City Council only has two employees – City Attorney Tom Carruthers and the city manager, Westmoreland. Since this is not a legal issue, it only involves Westmoreland. The City Council can order Westmoreland to take action, but the City Council can’t order any other employee in the city do anything.

uncle orson (continued from previous page)

mother, she spoke to her mother. And here is how she began: “Mom, you were a difficult person.” The gathered congregation smiled or chuckled because we knew it was true – and we loved Margaret Brown anyway. But the daughter wasn’t done. “Anybody who knew you for very long, you probably offended some time or another.” And there was an even bigger chuckle. Because it was true – and we all loved her anyway. Margaret Brown had several crusades as a choir leader. The western accent, and particularly the Utah accent, has very hard retroflex R sounds – perhaps even stronger than the hard R of the Appalachian accent. In Margaret Brown’s choir, however, all those hard Rs at the ends of words were verboten. The word was not heart, it was hawt. There was no water, only wateh. And the vowels. The Utah accent knows no distinction between the pronunciations of the names “Laura” and “Lara.” That open O that Southerners pronounce as AW, as in

dawg, and New Yorkers pronounce as OAH, as in doahg, is pronounced in Utah with the flattest possible short O sound – so flat the instead of dog, it sounds to non-Utahns almost as if the word were dag. Well, folks, that’s the same vowel that occurs in the word God, and that’s a word that gets said in a lot of church choir music. So Margaret would stand before her choir of Utahns and say, “It’s not gad, it’s Gawd we’re singing about.” She made the Utah accent sound so obnoxious that we gradually began to transition toward the openthroated – and more standard – pronunciation. We also learned to control our breathing, so that we pronounced our final consonants in perfect unison. And there I was, as a 16-year-old “tenor” with a weird and irritating tremolo (think of Glenn Yarbrough’s voice, if you ever heard a recording of his), but I took her lessons to heart. I was also a college student taking voice, diction and interpretation, so I took her admonition to pronounce our words clearly to heart. I pronounced

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES them so clearly that she began to hold me up as a model of correct pronunciation to the rest of the choir. Of course I was flattered! But other things were happening, too. I began to think of singing as an art and a craft that had to be learned. My mother was a trained singer with a magnificent voice, and I knew she had had voice teachers, but I had been such a nice little boy tenor with my perfect pitch (you should have heard me, as a 5-year-old, sing “Ol’ Man River” – YouTube-level cuteness, even without a puppy) that I thought singing was effortless. I began to put forth effort. And with Margaret Brown as my only voice teacher, I learned to relax my throat, kill that false diaphragmatic tremolo, and replace it with a real vibrato in a well-supported voice. By the time I was in my late 20s, I had a singing voice that could fill a hall without a microphone. My tenor high notes at the end of Battle Hymn of the Republic could rattle windows. But Margaret’s real gift to me wasn’t just helping me acquire my singing voice. It was the same gift she gave my wife: Both of us came away from her choir knowing how to lead a group of singers to excellence. She was teaching us not only how to sing, but

also how to conduct. Both my wife and I have conducted many church choirs since then -- in fact, my wife is conducting a choir that will perform a program of Easter music “He Is Risen” this coming Saturday and Sunday evening, March 19 and 20, at 7:00 p.m. at the LDS Church, 3719 Pinetop Road. The community is invited to attend. (I’m also singing a solo of Malotte’s The Lord’s Prayer, but remember: I’ll be using the voice I have now, post-stroke, not the one I developed as the young star tenor of Margaret Brown’s choir.) Thousands of hours of our lives have been spent performing and leading music in church, and most of our training for it came from being singers under Margaret Brown’s demanding tutelage. Now, when I say “demanding,” that doesn’t mean she wasn’t ever fun. In fact, she made fun of herself even as she made her strange (but effective) demands on us. Singing under her direction was fun because she was such a loving and funny person, and welcomed humor from others. Singing under her was fulfilling because if we did what she said, we became very, very good. There were choir pieces from (continued on page 18)

18 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

uncle orson (continued from page 17)

Handel’s Messiah that we performed better than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir – at a better tempo, with clearer pronunciation. You’ll never hear our version, so ... take my word for it. It’s simply true. That’s why, when I learned that Margaret Brown had died, and that she herself had asked for a funeral consisting of a choir singing her beloved music, I knew I had to be there. I don’t have the voice I used to have. I knew there would be notes out of my reach. I wasn’t going to show off how well I sang, because my voice has become a rather plain church baritone in the past few years. I was going to go there because people had to see, by my making that trip, just how important Margaret Brown had been in my life, and how much I loved her. My wife felt exactly the same way, but she couldn’t go – for the reason Margaret herself would understand best. There was no way my wife could attend and get back in time to conduct the vital choir practice that is the last one before we perform.

Missing the funeral of a great conductor because you have to conduct a choir yourself is the most valid of all possible excuses. We met at 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning to practice Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, Crimond (with words paraphrasing Psalm 23), and Peter Wilhousky’s arrangement of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Her granddaughters also sang How Can I Keep from Singing, and her grandsons sang Ye Elders of Israel. And her youngest daughter sang a solo: O Divine Redeemer. The whole funeral made it clear that no matter how important music was to Margaret Brown, no matter how rigorous and demanding she was, what mattered most in her life was the gospel of Jesus Christ, and her beloved family. It was a privilege to take part in that funeral service – by singing, with what’s left of my voice, songs that I first learned under Margaret Brown’s baton. You’ve never heard of Margaret Grace Softley Brown before, and you’ll never hear a choir that she conducted. But the influence of her life is still

moving outward in waves. Dozens of conductors got their entire training from her, and now many of the people we’ve conducted are carrying on by conducting choirs and congregations in churches around the world. You don’t have to be in People magazine to change the world for the better. You just have to do the best you can with the talents and opportunities you’ve been given, and spend your life trying to help other people also do their best and be joyful in their service. She had such a tribe of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren there at the funeral. That is the legacy she was proudest of and loved the most. But there were also many of her musical children there, voices she had nurtured and trained. When David Bowie died, I thought, “I really liked the song Changes.” When Margaret Brown died, I thought, “Who would I be if she had not touched my life?” That’s influence. That’s transformation.

.... Because I was in Utah at a funeral, I did not get to vote in the primary election on Tuesday past. The old saying used to be, “God

protects fools, drunks and the United States.” Drunks don’t get the same protection they used to – if they ever did – but when the voters choose the fools to govern them, it’s hard to know why the Almighty would bother to try to sort out which to protect. Let’s just remember, as we witness the self-destruction of the Republican Party, that any fool can see that while the rules award Trump a disproportionate number of delegates (as they also do for Hillary), in fact there are few places where Trump has received a clear majority of Republican votes. Instead, time after time, a majority of Republicans reject Trump in favor of – considering that Cruz is so far in second place – just about anybody. Meanwhile, contemplating the general election, it is hard to imagine what independent or Democrat voters are supposed to cross over and give Trump a victory over any breathing Democrat. We have long known that if Hillary, the politician with more negatives than anybody else, were the Democratic nominee, the Republicans could nominate any plausible candidate and beat her. So the Republican Party has found (continued on page 24)

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Just Look Up BY SANDY GROOVER

UNCG THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE 406 Tate Street • Taylor Theatre

James and the Giant Peach

James lives with the most revolting aunts in England. They make him work and slave and never let him play. Then one day he meets a mystical old man who gives him a bag with the strongest magic the world has ever known. When he accidentally spills it near an old peach tree, the most incredible things start to happen. Shows are Friday, March 18 at 9:30 a.m. and noon. Saturday, March 19 at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 20 at 2 p.m. and Tuesday, March 22 through Thursday, March 24 at 9:30 a.m. and noon. Tickets are $8 to $18. For information, call (336) 272-0160 or visit performingarts.uncg.edu.

ARTQUEST AT GREENHILL 200 North Davie St.

Free Family Night

Every Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m., ArtQuest at Greenhill hosts a free Family Night. Stop in to play and explore ArtQuest’s studios, where families can create art and share ideas, create one-of-a-kind paintings and work with clay or new and unexpected materials at the hands-on exploration table. For more information, call (336) 333-7460 or visit GreenhillNC.org.

GREENSBORO SCIENCE CENTER 4301 Lawndale Dr.

Pajama Jam

On Thursday, March 24 from 6 to 9 p.m., enjoy an after-hours party especially for families with children ages 12 and younger. Put on your favorite jammies and dance to the rockin’ tunes of Big Bang Boom while enjoying plenty of farmyard fun. Explore the museum and aquarium and watch a show in the OmniSphere Theater. Play games and participate in activities including crafts, animal encounters, face painting and balloon animals. Tickets are $10 for members and $12 for non-members at (336) 288-3769 or at www.greensboroscience.org.

HIGH POINT MUSEUM

1859 East Lexington Ave., High Point

Natural Egg Dyeing

Saturday, March 19 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., get ready for the Easter bunny. The museum will provide eggs to dip in dyes made from plant material, like onionskins and blueberries. All ages welcome. $1 per egg. Free for members. Limit two per person. For more information, call (336) 885-1859 or visit highpointmuseum.org.

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If your roof isn’t leaking, you probably don’t think much about the ceilings in your house. Yet they can set the tone for a room and have evolved over time. Originally installed to simply hide the underside of a roof or an upper floor, ceilings hide unsightly trusses or piping and wiring, as well as provide a room with a feel of completion. Ceilings can be as simple as plain white plasterboard or as elaborate as the Sistine Chapel’s frescos. One of the most popular types in America during the Victorian era was the tin ceiling. Introduced to North America in the 1800s as an affordable alternative to the elaborate plasterwork used in European homes, tin ceilings gained popularity for their sophisticated designs and fireproofing capabilities. A stamped tin ceiling was traditionally painted white to give it the look of hand-carved or molded plaster. These ceilings could be found in both residential living rooms and commercial businesses. Their popularity began to wane during the 1930s, but now the look is beginning to make a comeback, and tin ceilings are either being restored in older homes or installed in new construction. Imitation tin panels of plastic or aluminum are now available, and when painted can be difficult to distinguish from actual tin. From the 1950s through the 1980s, a common ceiling finish was the “popcorn” ceiling. It was widely used in homes and residential buildings throughout the country. The finish could either be sprayed or painted on. Some of these paints were created with paper or Styrofoam bases that added texture. Before its use was banned in 1980, many contained asbestos. In part because of the ban, popcorn ceilings lost their popularity, although asbestos-free formulas are still in use today. You may not find many popcorn ceilings in new homes today, but the choices of ceiling styles being incorporated into new construction are quite amazing, such as cathedral, coffered, barrel vault, trey and beamed ceilings, along with traditional smoothfinishes. Raised ceilings are often called cathedral due to their resemblance to a church’s interior space. They consist of symmetrical sloping planes that meet in the center of the space and are often the same pitch as the roof. Vaulted ceilings are also elevated and can give even a small room a

feeling of spaciousness. In contrast to cathedral ceilings, they are generally asymmetrical or can be smooth or curved. Beams can be added to a cathedral or vaulted ceiling to accentuate their design. The use of beamed ceilings has never ceased to be popular and are often incorporated into great rooms. While cathedral and vaulted ceilings make rooms feel larger, dropped ceilings are often used to make a space cozier, by lowering an unusually high ceiling. They are also used to hide problems areas, for sound dampening and to provide space for electrical work, plumbing or ductwork. The space between the upper structure and the dropped ceiling can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet. In the past dropped or suspended ceilings were normally made of white tiles, but modern dropped ceilings come in a wide array of sizes, colors, patterns and materials. Another popular ceiling type is the coffered ceiling, made up of recessed panels in the shape of squares, rectangles, octagons and triangles. Each of the sections is finished with various types of trims and moldings. The interior of the panel can be painted, tiled, mirrored or wood. Coffered ceilings are often found in formal dining rooms where they add an elegant touch. Trey ceilings are another popular style for dining rooms as well as master bedrooms. They give the appearance of a cutout that resembles a serving tray. The cuts can be vertical or angled, even circular, and can include a series of steps until they reach the “trey.” The depth of the trey can be anywhere from six inches to a foot or more. When each of the steps is accented by recessed lights or painted a different color, the effect can be quite dramatic. Concave or barrel shaped vaulted ceilings, also known as tunnel vault or wagon vault, are also gaining in popularity. These ceilings are rounded upward, making them a striking architectural feature. They can be constructed of wooden slats, wood inlays or smooth plaster. An excellent example of this type of ceiling is R&K Custom Homes’ barrel vaulted ceiling in their fall 2015 Parade of Homes entry in Birkhaven. Not only is the ceiling vaulted, it is also coffered, (continued on next page)

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www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

(continued from previous page) making the house’s two-story family room quite unique. R&K has always been known for their unusual ceilings, but all of the builder members of the Greensboro Builders Association (GBA) utilize the very latest in ceiling designs in the homes they build. Trey ceilings in bedrooms, soaring cathedral and vaulted ceilings in great rooms, coffered ceilings in dining rooms and beamed ceilings in keeping and great rooms are among the most requested ceiling styles. With the GBA’s spring 2016 Parade of Homes Saturday, April 23 and Sunday, April 24 as well as Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1, you will be able to view many of these ceiling styles. Of course, ceilings aren’t just used

for interior spaces. Porches too, have ceilings, and no matter what material, one tradition calls for it to be painted blue. Why blue? There are a number of theories. Some say it’s a natural insect repellent stemming

from the original milk paint mixes that often incorporated lye. Lye is a known insect repellent, thus insects would avoid nesting on a blue painted porch ceiling or ledge. Others say sky blue was popular

with Victorians who liked the colors of nature in their homes. The blue porch ceiling would remind them of sunny days when it was overcast or raining. One of the more interesting blue paint theories comes from Southern folklore and a fear of “haints” – the restless spirits of the dead who still wander this world. The blue color was said to protect the inhabitants, as haints are not able to cross bodies of water and will be tricked into not crossing into the house. Especially in South Carolina, you’ll find the soft blue-green “Haint Blue” on door and window frames as well as porch ceilings. However, many people just like the color blue, and enjoy the way it brightens their porches. So the next time you’re touring a house, don’t forget to look up.

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www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

The Sound of the

beep

What follows has been transcribed from the answering machine on our comment line. We edit out what is required by the laws of the state, of good taste and of good sense. The limit on phone calls is one minute and each caller may make up to two calls per week. If you have something to say, call our comment line at 763-0479 and start talking at The Sound of the Beep. A big thank you to the RNC, Republican National Committee, for handing the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. You can’t or will not control your candidates and elected-for-life members of Congress from the 2012 redistricting. The new Tea Party members are obstructionists and the new best friends of the Democratic Party. The entrenched Republican establishment is unwilling to stymie the renegade Tea Party members who needlessly hold up vital legislation just because they can. Go on and deal with President Obama appointing a Supreme Court judge. If you don’t, Hillary sure will. And probably many more to come in her upcoming eight years in office.

%%% I was a paperboy riding a bicycle in 1948 making about $10 a week. I’ve been in some kind of business about all my life, and this business is 38 years, paying my debts, buying my products, selling it, collecting for it. And I see in the news where Greensboro’s civil rights museum needs to raise $550,000 a year just to pay expenses. That absolutely does not make any sense whatsoever to me. I’d like to know how many downtown businesses make $550,000 a year.

%%% Yes, I’m calling in regard to Sunday’s News & Record, Susan Ladd’s column. I find it interesting that she is discussing how the state has gone wrong in so many ways based on some polls, some out of High Point. I wonder who she thinks did elect the people in our state who are making some of the decisions that she disagrees with. We, the people of North Carolina, elected the officials. And they are doing our bidding.

%%% Yes, I really wish that aging feminist white women and these young girls who have no clue as to world affairs, and probably many of them are low-information voters, would consider seriously that we’re dealing with a terrible situation in the Middle East, and they’re not going to deal well with a woman as president. I have no problems with a woman being president, but at this particular time, it’s not the right move for the United States, especially considering what’s happening in the Middle East now. I hope that some of these people realize that. Thank you. Jim, Greensboro. %%% This is in regards to the finances of the civil rights museum. Since 1994, $4.8 million taxpayer dollars has been raised for this museum to stay afloat. It needs to raise $550,000 a year to operate. It has received $150,000 grant from the Reynold’s Foundation and will get another $50,000 if the museum raises $50,000. Property tax owed is $57,000. Maybe Earl Jones, Nancy Vaughan and Skip Alston will donate this amount so something owed will be more up-to-date and current. What a wonderful white elephant. %%% I saw that Leonard Pitts Jr., the columnist for The Miami Herald, would make a great president. The way that he has spoken, or what he has written on the Republican Party, is true, that they are so much trying to get it together that they can’t get it together. They’re so against one another. I wouldn’t vote for a Republican. Republicans always seem to want to take all and leave nothing. The wealth usually runs with Republicans. (continued on page 24)

24 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

uncle orson (continued from page 18)

a shockingly implausible candidate. Thus, this coming November we are likely to find ourselves choosing between the two most despicable human beings ever to be in contention for the presidency. After comments I’ve seen from Trumpites, they seem to believe that all politicians are liars. They never deliver on their promises, therefore they’re not honest and must be thrown out. Let’s remember, though, that we live in a constitutional republic in which

beep (continued from page 23) %%% I turn on the TV today, and what do I see? Peyton Manning whining and babbling like a little baby that he is. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t feel sorry for anybody who retires as a multimillionaire at 39 years old. And on top of that, for playing a kids’ game. I really don’t feel sorry for him. And not to mention, if his dad wasn’t Archie Manning, you’d never heard of him. He never would have gotten a starting quarterback position in pee wee, elementary, middle or high school or college. His dad paved the way for him and his brother without a doubt. So, let’s continue to star these little millionaire crybabies who have to retire at 39 years old. I’m sorry. I can’t join that crowd. %%% Yes, I see where Hillary Clinton, and now Bernie Sanders, are offering a free college education. Is that going to apply to seniors as well? Equal protection under the law. I know a lot of seniors that would like to get a college education that didn’t have the opportunity when they were working and raising families. And I would love to know, is there going to be some kind of a sign-up petition that we can get our name on so we can take advantage of this? Ooh, I forgot. I also need to remind all those kids chomping at the bit to get a college education. The Republicans currently hold the House and the Senate. There will be no money. %%% Bill Clinton was in Greensboro campaigning for his wife, Hillary. (continued on page 26)

there are checks and balances. There is no such thing as an office in which one can keep whatever promise one might have made to the voters, without first persuading others to go along with you. Admittedly, Obama’s dictatorship by executive order, which both Hillary and Bernie are disposed to continue, does make it more likely that, by defying the Constitution, they might be able to keep a promise or two. But in the world of ordinary American politics, a politician’s promises are a statement of intention – yes, even George Bush Sr.’s “Read my lips. No new taxes.” But with Democrats in control of Congress at the time, Bush found that they would not approve any rational budget unless Bush humiliated himself by breaking that pledge. Did that make Bush a liar? No. It did not even make him a promise breaker. It made him an American politician with a determined opposition. We bandy about the term “lie” and “liar” far too freely in American politics. The rebellious folks who make deeply stupid statements like, “There’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans once they’re in office,” are the same folks who call “all politicians” liars. The truth is that sometimes politicians are powerless to bring about the whole package they promised. So grownup voters should realize that political promises are statements of intent, of philosophy: This is what I would like to do, and will try to do if elected. Then it’s the job of the voters not only to elect this politicians, but also to elect enough other like-minded politicians to get their changes enacted. Democrats kept their promise to get health care reform (as they envisioned it) made into law. Incredibly bad law, but it’s a threshold from which everyone knows there is no turning back. And Republicans kept their promise to do everything in their power to block socialized medicine under the guise of Obamacare. Both parties were honest in their promises to voters. So when I hear honorable men and women being tarred with the “liar” brush, it makes me angry, because that term should be reserved for the real liars. Like Trump, who calls himself a winner because he simply lies about all his defeats and failures by

denying they happened, and who tries to escape the consequences of his stupid, ignorant, mean-spirited statements by saying he “never meant” things he freely and openly said. Like Hillary, who is surrounded by so many lies throughout her career – right down to her refusal to disclose papers she wrote in college or how she managed to perform perfectly in the difficult cattle futures market. Like her husband, she always has a new lie to explain why her previous lie wasn’t really a lie. A Trump-Hillary contest in November will be a race between the two most obvious liars in American politics today. And Hillary will probably win, because the Leftist media never, never, never hold her feet to the fire, and when Fox News or congressional Republicans do, the Leftist media mocks them for it. But they will hold Trump to every lie and keep riding them till Election Day. The only reason they haven’t done it already is that they love the idea of a Trump nomination, since that’s the only way Hillary can be elected. So once Trump has a lock on the nomination, you can look forward to the Palinization of Trump. And when you consider that Sarah Palin was a true grass-roots citizen politician, a genuine outsider who rode a few issues to become governor of Alaska, and yet they could savage her the way they did (while ignoring Obama’s many secrets and stupidities completely), just think what they’ll do to Trump. Will it matter? Not really. Because Trump has already moved most Americans into the “will never vote for Trump ever for anything” category by the things he’s said and done himself. Palinizing him will really serve no purpose but to destroy Republicans running for other offices, so that Hillary can come into the White House as Obama did, with control of both houses of Congress. That’s what the media and academic elites are hungry for, even though they know Hillary is a lying monster of ambition. In our era of identity politics, all that matters is that she’s a woman of the Left and therefore sacred. (Women of the Right are traitors, and therefore it’s OK to destroy them using all the sexist attacks that are always trotted out against women.) Trump is no conservative. Trump doesn’t understand history, foreign relations or honor – does anybody seriously think he will keep any promise he’s made? I pray not, since his promises are all amazingly stupid and anti-American. Hillary, like Obama, also doesn’t

understand history, foreign relations, or honor – which is why American foreign relations are in a shambles. Leftists, like the perfect mindless conformists that they are, will reply, “Look at the condition Bush left us in, with quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan!” They can say this because they believe their own propaganda – they called Iraq and Afghanistan “quagmires” before we even invaded them. But the fact is that by the time he left the White House, President George W. Bush had followed the counsel of the wisest military leaders and we were well on the road to long-term victory, including nation-building, in Iraq and Afghanistan. No, the mess came about because Obama announced a deadline for withdrawal from both countries, which instantly made America irrelevant in both countries, no matter how many troops remained. Obama created ISIS by the premature withdrawal of a very effective occupation force long before the faction-riven Iraqi military could create itself as an effective, unified army. Ignorant, self-willed presidents who think they’re emperors create messes like the one Obama is leaving us in, and both Hillary and Trump are even less competent than Obama. Hillary will no doubt continue Obama’s “America is always wrong” philosophy, while Trump will be a bully who has nothing to back up his bluster. Even if God wanted to continue to protect fools, drunks and the United States, is he really likely to override the votes of the American people? “Oh, you don’t want any of the decent people who were running for office, because they’re ‘all liars,’ so you’re now going to elect the worst liars in the race? Apparently, you don’t want to be protected, so ... have at it, children.” America is going to have exactly the government that we deserve. But that really annoys me, because I don’t deserve that government. But I’m stuck with whatever the rest of you vote for. We will all pay the price for this election, in which we are throwing out anyone with honor and understanding, in favor of the poster children for Naked Ambition, Lazy Ignorance, Shameless Brag and Deep-Rooted Contempt for Truth. It wasn’t true when George Wallace used it as a campaign laugh line, but it’s true now: We’re about to have an election choice between Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dumber. The very thing that Trumpites accuse “establishment” politicians of, they are going to bring about in truth: They’re going to give us an election in which the only difference between the candidates is their hairdo.

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

YOST Column

Yost Column

Yost Offers Hillary Fashion Advice by Scott D. Yost A man walks into a pet store looking to buy a monkey. The proprietor takes him to the back of the store and shows him three identical looking, well cared for and content monkeys each housed in spacious, animal friendly environments. “This one costs $600,” says the owner. “Why so much?” asks the customer. “Because it can sing and play the banjo,” answers the owner. The customer inquires about the next monkey and is told, “That one costs $1,200, because it can

talk, translate 20 languages and mix cocktails.” The man is astonished and asks about the third monkey. “That one costs $4,000,” answers the proprietor. “4,000 dollars!” exclaims the man. “What can that one do?” To which the owner replies, “To be frank, I’ve never seen it do anything, but it calls itself a consultant.” – www.independent-consultingbootcamp.com

A lot of people have bad things to say about consultants, but I believe that they’re a very valuable resource and I’ll tell you why. My thesis this week is that not only are consultants in every industry sometimes wrong – it’s that they are always wrong. But, still, I’m not trying to put the experts out of work, because, like I said, I think they can be very helpful if used properly. What I’m saying is that you should hire expert consultants and listen to them carefully so you’ll know exactly what not to do. Also, listen closely to their predictions of what the future holds, so that you can know absolutely positively what will never happen. At the Rhino Times, about ten years ago, we went through a phase where we had a series of consultants. I called them “the Bobs,” after the two management consultants in Office Space, because that was who they all reminded me of. The only thing I remember about those interactions is

that I had to constantly stop working in order to meet with one of the Bobs and make “flow charts” – which were like our TPS reports. Then one of the Bobs would come around and ask me things like, ”What would you say are the major impediments to doing your work effectively?” and I would think to myself, “Well, the top two things are clearly you and your flowcharts.” Only, of course, you couldn’t say that even though you thought that because you were under orders to be respectful to the Bobs, because they were consultants – i.e., the Holy Holders of All Knowledge. I remember one time we had a mandatory all-day off-site meeting where we filled out index cards with like the best names for unicorns or something, and then we had to arrange the index cards in different piles based on which of the unicorns we thought were likely to win in a fight and which ones were likely to be the most peaceful unicorns. I may not (continued on page 26)

26 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

yost

(continued from page 25) be remembering that exercise exactly right, but I do know it was something with roughly that same degree of relevance to my work. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a story about the fact that Guilford County’s jail population had fallen from where it was a decade ago – even though in 2005 the expert jail consultants confidently predicted skyrocketing jail populations from 2005 to 2015. Right after that report came out 10 years ago, I was down in the Virgin Islands with my family, but I couldn’t relax because the jail report and its predictions didn’t make any sense to me based on what I knew and it was bothering me greatly. I was just obsessed with trying to figure out what I was missing and I had this long discussion about it with my stepbrother who said, “Well, who’s saying this?” “The consultants,” I answered. “The jail experts.” And, when I said that, he suddenly got this look of total understanding and said, “Oh, consultants,” and he just waived is hand as to dismiss the idea that they had anything at all to offer. “Oh, they’re worthless.”

beep (continued from page 24) And he said if you are Democrat or a progressive, which we all know that progressive is another word for being a socialist or communist. Any true American would not vote for this. Americans, we need to wake up. %%% People wonder why they can’t find jobs. The situation with jobs and battle for jobs with illegal immigration, all that has an effect. There’s 11 states in this country that have more people on welfare than working. They are California, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, New York, Maine, South Carolina. Senate budget commission ordered this in 2012. And that’s three – four years ago. Between food stamps, housing support, child care, Medicaid and other benefits, the average US household below poverty line receives $168 a day in benefits in government support. (continued on page 31)

He said it in a way that implied, why didn’t you just say they were consultants in the first place? That was when a light bulb kind of went off in my head and I realized that consultants, like the emperor, had zero clothing. I used to write for the Murphy in the Morning radio show and, when I first got the job in the late ’90s, the biggest advantage I had was that I knew absolutely nothing about radio – so I’d write bits that I thought were funny without knowing all the rules about why they would not work. Now, radio stations spend a fortune on consultants and those consultants have all these hard and fast rules as to what does and doesn’t work. One of the things they learn in radio school is that you can’t have recorded bits over a minute and a half. Audiences can never pay attention that long, supposedly. Now, one running bit I wrote, “As Irving Park Turns,” was immensely popular. It was essentially a mini radio play and to do it right, the episodes had to be four or five minutes long. “Now, Scott,” the consultants would say, “you need to realize that in radio, 60 seconds is a long time for bit, and 90 seconds is a century – and four minutes, well, four minutes is an eternity. So in the future you need to cut those down to about a minute.” I pointed out that Irving Park was by far our most popular bit, we had the best ratings of anyone in town, and for the first time in the history of the station people were driving down to the station and demanding that we burn the bits on CD for them. We did 70 or so episodes, all of them four or five minutes long – some nearly six minutes – and we had similar wildly popular recorded bits that were the same length with the consultants telling us the whole time to shorten them by two-thirds. Listen, consulting is very much like voodoo minus the animal entrails and the occasional correct guess. I mean, consultants are always pulling things out of thin air. The best example I can think of was the consultants who tried to sell the county on something known as Project Haystack. That was this big idea about three years ago for Guilford County and other partners to build the infrastructure for a giant data-center park on the Prison Farm land and then hope that hightech data companies would come. The consultants who made the presentation to the commissioners and many others that day said that

the lone stumbling block was the $102 million it will cost. There were consultants everywhere you turned in the room with all these charts and PowerPoint presentations and they were saying things like, “We have already put together all the charts and graphs you will need – now all you have to do is find the $102 million to pay us and the firms we’re working with, and then wait for the $5 billion in new investment and the 5,000 new jobs that the project will create.” At that presentation, there was this highly detailed packet they had passed out. News & Record reporter Joe Killian and I only had one copy between us of this multi-billion dollar plan, and, when it was time to go, we looked at each other. I handed the packet to him. “You keep it,” I said. “It’s all bull--anyway.” Now, my argument applies to consultants in every industry, but, of all the consultants in the world, the absolute worst, by far, are the political consultants. In fact, in the past year, only one candidate has been going gangbusters. Donald Trump. Why is he doing so well? Well, it’s quite obvious, isn’t it? He’s doing so well because everything he does is the exact opposite of what a political consultant would advise. If he does have consultants, he never listens to them, and if he did have one at one time, he doesn’t anymore because in the first two days of his campaign any political consultant would have died of a heart attack. Whether Trump’s impending presidency leads to all out global nuclear war three days after his inauguration, or leads to making this country great again, the real lesson to be learned from all this has nothing to do with Trump or public policy or election strategy – instead, it has everything to do with consultants … Trump’s big advantage has been that everyone else has consultants and listens to them and he doesn’t. Consultants are the same people who told their candidate clients that Trump would never get in the race in the first place, and then said he would never gain any traction or real support, and then, after he did, the consultants said he would self-destruct like a poorly made nitroglycerine-based bomb being transported over old rocky roads in the Andes. So, basically, all the consultants providing information to the other candidates were amazingly wrong at every step of the way and, to this day, they continue to get everything wrong. And why is Mark Rubio’s campaign

floundering? He seems like a very nice guy and I’m sure he would make a fine president, but he is the absolute poster boy for people who listen way too much to their consultants, and I’m sure the consultants are the ones who keep telling him to say the same three things over and over again no matter what. And look at Hillary Clinton and her fashion choices as another example. She is paying some consultant good money to tell her what to wear. I mean, there’s someone somewhere getting paid to tell Hillary things like, “We’ve tested likely voters in your target demographics and we’ve determined that, for your clothing choices, you should go with the North Korean dictator look with a hint of 1950s Marxist Chinese field worker influence. If you’ll step in the dressing room, we’ve got some great outfits of some clothes from the Kim Jong-un clothing line for you to try on, as well as some official uniforms from the store of the People’s Republic of China Workers Party. After Bill Maher’s show goes off the air each Friday night, they continue on the internet and answer questions and one of the questions sent in this week was “Why are the polls always so wrong?” Now, the political consultants rely on polls for everything they do, but these day by the way polls are conducted, they filter out the entire breadth of humanity except the people who meet both of the following qualifications: (1) They have landlines. (2) They have time to talk to random pollsters on the phone. So it’s like cat ladies, department store Santas during the 11 months they are out of work, and 85-year-olds who’ve been denied visitation rights for their grandchildren and therefore have nothing but free time on their hands as long as you don’t call during a Matlock rerun. They give pollsters answers like, “I’m voting for Calvin Coolidge just like I did in the last 300 elections, Sonny Boy,” and the consultants are making notes such as, “Be more like Calvin Coolidge.” So ask the consultants if you want to to know what the cat ladies and department store Santas are thinking. Listen, save yourself the money and just use the follow advice from a refrigerator magnet I have that displays a Buddha quote: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” Note that the ancient wisdom of the East tells us that consultants need not apply.

ask

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

arolyn...

Straight Talk

from the Dancing Divorce Attorney

by Carolyn Woodruff

Ask Carolyn… Dear Carolyn, I have a 2-year-old son. I am not married to the father, who I just learned has terminal cancer. He has a house

and life insurance. How can I make sure my son inherits from him? He doesn’t pay child support and his parents are mean and have nothing to do with their grandson, which is unbelievable to me. I do not think he had a will when we were together.

Carolyn Answers ... You potentially face a very serious problem for your young son. An “illegitimate” child does not automatically inherit under our

intestate succession laws (the laws that apply when a person does not have a will). If the father of your son dies without a will, your son will not inherit unless certain formalities are adhered to under the law. Your child must be legitimated in order to inherit. There are several methods of legitimation, and the father being simply on the birth certificate is not enough unless the father and mother are married. First, we’ll discuss the methods of legitimation before the death of the father. One, the father

may file a petition for legitimation with the clerk of superior court if the father and mother are not married to each other at the time of the birth. The father must obtain an order of legitimation before his death under this method. Two, the father and mother can marry each other after the birth of the child. Three, the father can file an affidavit of parentage during the his lifetime and the child’s lifetime with the office of the clerk of court of the county where he or the child resides. (I”ll discuss

(continued on page 38)

28 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com NEWS OF THE WEIRD

Running With His Feet On Fire Nothing More to See Here? Additional Details Needed: (1) Andrew McNeil, 34, was arrested in Lincoln, Nebraska, in January and charged with disturbing the peace. According to the police report (and lacking follow-up reporting by local news outlets), McNeil was found around 11 p.m. naked and “covered in sawdust.” (2) Rob Moore, 32, was arrested for misdemeanor drug possession in Marathon, Florida, in February, but he had only come to police attention when an officer heard him banging on the trunk of his car from the inside. Without follow-up reporting, Moore’s story was that he was looking for something in the trunk, fell in and couldn’t get out.

surveillance video showed that, in dousing the outside of the building with fire accelerant, he had also doused his own shoes and was spotted running off with his feet on fire. (2) Simon Chaplin, 62, thought he had cleverly evaded police near Hebron, England, recently (thus avoiding a speeding ticket) by employing a do-it-yourself, James Bond-style smokescreen device on his Peugeot sedan, facilitating a smoggy getaway. Initially, baffled police officers were forced to hang back, but of course as the haze broke, they merely followed the smoke trail up ahead and caught Chaplin (who was convicted in Swansea Crown Court in February).

Least Competent Criminals Didn’t Think It Through: (1) The man who tried to vandalize a cafe in the Richmond suburb of Melbourne, Australia, in February, got away, but

Take That, Portland! Seattle’s ambitious Office of Arts & Culture has allocated $10,000 this year to pay a poet or writer to create a work while present on the city’s Fremont

Bridge drawbridge. The office’s deputy director told the Seattle PostIntelligencer in January that the city wants to encourage “public art” and that the grant will oblige the recipient to create a work of prose or poetry from the bridge’s northwest tower, to help the people of Seattle understand the function of art in the city. (The artist will not be “in residence,” for the tower has no running water.) New World Order Exasperated, Columbia County (Pennsylvania) District Judge Craig Long felt the need to post a sign outside his courtroom in January informing visitors that they should not wear pajamas to court. However, even Judge Long acknowledged that his admonition was not enforceable and that he was merely trying to encourage minimal standards. “Microaggression”: In its brand-new communications stylebook this year for city workers, San Diego officials noted that the city’s then-upcoming Presidents’ Day announcements should, to be bias-free and inoffensive, never refer to America’s “Founding Fathers” – even though they were all males – but only to “founders.” Bright Ideas According to a former spy for the Soviet Union, dictator Josef Stalin so distrusted his Communist China counterpart Mao Zedong during the 1940s that when Mao visited the USSR, Soviet engineers arranged to capture his bowel movements so that Stalin’s scientists could examine them chemically to form a psychological profile. Spy Igor Atamanenko found evidence that other world leaders received similar treatment. Among the indicators: High levels of the amino acid tryptophan signaled the person was calm and approachable, and lack of potassium portended nervousness and insomnia.) Just Too Creepy The roadside billboard giant Clear Channel Outdoor Americas announced in February that it would soon be recording the cellphone locations of drivers who pass the company’s signs in 11 cities in order to give advertisers more information

on how to pitch products to people with those particular travel patterns and behaviors. Clear Channel asserts that no individual identifications would be sought, but privacy advocates fret about potential abuses, and even a Clear Channel executive acknowledged that the program “does sound a bit creepy.” (On the other hand, as Clear Channel pointed out to The New York Times, cellphone users’ locations and characteristics are already being extensively monitored by advertisers.) Not the Usual Suspects A then-married couple, both graduates of elite California law schools, were convicted of felonies and went to jail briefly two years ago for a criminal scheme inexplicably tawdry – and in February 2016 lost a resultant civil lawsuit for $5.7 million to the scheme’s victim. A woman at their child’s school had referred to the lawyers’ son as “slow,” enraging Kent Easter (University of California at Berkeley) and then-wife, Jill (UCLA), who retaliated by planting drugs and paraphernalia in Kelli Peters’ car and then, a man identified via circumstantial evidence as Kent (with an accent as if from India), called in a DUI tip to police, resulting in Peters’ arrest. According to Peters, neither perpetrator has ever expressed remorse, and although Kent admitted to “stupidity,” he now complains that Peters does not deserve her windfall (like a “Powerball winner,” he said). Perps Who Needed to Hit the Gym (1) Anthony Nemeth, 26, seeking pain medication but lacking a prescription, leaped over the pharmacy counter of a Walgreens in Bradenton, Florida, in February and demanded a supply. Customer David West, 25, standing at the counter with his girlfriend, ended the “robbery” with four quick punches, sending Nemeth to the floor. (West is a competitive boxer and reportedly a former state champion.) (2) Wheelchair-user Betty Jeffery, 76, was briefly the victim of a pursesnatching in Pitsea, England, in February. She appeared vulnerable, but in fact is a former national armwrestling champion and slugged the young female thief in the face, slowing her down and leading her to drop the purse as she fled.

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

primary

(continued from page 6)

Burr – who is from Winston-Salem, making him almost a hometown boy – did better in Guilford County with 69 percent of the vote while in Guilford County Brannon only had 20 percent. Gov. Pat McCrory proved to be well liked by his own party, winning 82 percent of the vote in the Republican primary to 11 percent for second place finisher Robert Brawley. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who is running for governor, also proved to be popular in his party receiving 69 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary to 31 percent for Ken Spaulding. McCrory and Cooper have been running against each other by proxy for months, and now they are running against each other for real. In the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, Linda Coleman won with 51 percent of the vote over Holly Jones with 29 percent. This gives Coleman a rematch against Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, who narrowly defeated Coleman in 2012. This time around Forest has the

advantage of incumbency, but this is turning out to be such a strange election year, who knows if that will carry the weight it normally does. In the Republican primary for commissioner of agriculture, two candidates from Guilford County faced off, and Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler won pretty handily with 69 percent of the vote over Andy Stevens with 31 percent. Stevens said that considering the money he spent, getting 31 percent could be considered a success and that the campaign gave him a chance to bring his issues of gun rights and registering backyard chickens to voters statewide. In Guilford County, where both Troxler and Stevens are better known, Stevens didn’t fare as well. Troxler received 84 percent of the vote in Guilford County and Stevens 16 percent. In the Republican primary for commissioner of insurance, Mike Causey from Guilford County won the right to make his fifth bid for the seat in November. Causey finished

statewide with 41 percent beating Joe McLaughlin with 33 percent and Ron Pierce with 26 percent. Causey did better in his home county finishing with 53 percent of the vote. Causey will face Democratic Commissioner of Insurance Wayne Goodwin in November. In the Democratic primary for commissioner of labor, Charles Meeker with 57 percent of the vote defeated Mazie Ferguson from Greensboro with 43 percent. Ferguson won Guilford County with 61 percent to 39 percent for Meeker, but Guilford County wasn’t enough to win the state. Meeker will face long-time Republican Commissioner of Labor Cherie Berry in November. In the Republican primary for attorney general, Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill narrowly won Guilford County with just over 50 percent of the vote, but statewide was defeated by state Sen. Buck Newton with 55 percent to 45 percent for O’Neill. Newton will face state Sen. Josh Stein in November, who won the Democratic primary with 53 percent over Marcus Williams with 47 percent. Former 6th Congressional District

Republican Party Chair A.J. Daoud came up short in his second run for secretary of state. Michael LaPaglia had 62 percent of the vote over Daoud with 38 percent. LaPaglia will face Democratic Secretary of State Elaine Marshall in the fall. In the Republican primary for superintendent of public instruction, Forsyth County Board of Education member Mark Johnson, with 53 percent, defeated Dr. Rosemary Stein with 33 percent. Wesley Sills, a schoolteacher, finished third with 14 percent. Johnson will face Democratic Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson in November. Atkinson won the Democratic primary with 80 percent of the vote. Dan Blue III won the Democratic primary for state treasurer with 58 percent of the vote over Ron Elmer with 42 percent. Blue will face Republican Dale Folwell from Winston-Salem in November. The $2 billion Connect NC state bond referendum easily passed with 66 percent of the votes cast on Tuesday night in both the county and the state.

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30 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

The New York Times

crossword puzzle No. 0306 IN CHARACTER

107

108

BY DAVID J. KAHN / EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ

Note: The answers to 23-, 31-, 45-, 62-, 69-, 90-, 103- and 115-Across are themselves clues to the names spelled by their circled letters. ACROSS

1 Spokesperson in TV insurance ads 4 Candidate’s concern 9 Snap 13 “Not ____!” 18 Manhattan developer? 19 Big name in travel guides 20 Track runner 21 “Et tu” follower 22 Sharing word 23 See blurb 26 It may detect a break, for short 27 Hit 2011 animated film 28 Stay here 29 Source of iron 30 An eternity 31 See blurb 35 Crashes badly 37 Czech reformer Jan 38 Press (for) 39 Cut off 40 Request after a breakdown 43 Some cleaners 45 See blurb 50 Billionaire sorts 52 ____ Peninsula 53 Borah Peak locale 54 Part of a foot 55 Music appreciation Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 4,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year).

5 7 4

C U Z C O

S O N A R

P I A N O

A L L O C M A A T D E

F R E E T H R O W

A P A R T

M O A N

A G E S

P L A I D

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9 6 4

518B

Sudoku Solution

Distributed by The New York Times syndicate

Solution sudoku_518B I N A S L U M P

B E Y E N O S

M O U S E

P R E S S

Y O U I N

P L E D

9 6 7 5 4 1 2 3 8

From last week’s issue

1 5 4 2 8 3 6 9 7

24 27

38 44

39 45

51 55

52 56

53 57

68 72 80

86 91

83 88

94 98 103

111

104

95 99

105

100 106

112 117

113 118

114 119

120

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128

From last week’s issue

L A W I L A Z E R B B A WW O W H O W L E N O N T G U D I T S O M Y B A B L A D I E L D L O L H E C T O H I N G A D O S B A R M I Z E T O N

8 5

Crossword Solution E Q U I P

57 Lead-in to care 121 Part of a legend 17 Modernists, 26 informally or dare 122 Hunted for morays 31 32 33 20 Kind of column 58 Nike ____ Max 123 Sides of sectors 24 Giorgio’s god 61 Dedicated works 124 Atypical 37 25 Like comebacks? 62 See blurb 125 Lascivious sort 43 67 How to play solitaire 126 Some speedsters, for 32 Brunch pie 33 Food-safety org. 68 Some conversation short 50 interruptions 34 Commander’s place 127 Photographer 54 69 See blurb 36 Years at the Adams Colosseum 79 Italian fine? 128 Seedy type? 62 63 39 Christopher ____, 80 Big head tippler in “The 67 81 Figure in “The DOWN Taming of Garden of Earthly 1 Rude thing the Shrew” 69 70 71 Delights” to drop 41 Earthy color 82 Hal, to Henry IV 79 2 First lady before 42 “____ asking?” 83 Titania or Oberon, in Michelle 43 Singer Anthony 84 85 space 3 Senate’s president 44 Metal marble 84 Former NBC drama pro tempore after 90 46 Duchamp’s 86 National alternative Patrick Leahy movement 96 97 88 Getting ready, with 4 Movie co. behind 47 Sci-fi race “up” “Boyhood” and 101 102 48 It may come 90 See blurb “Transamerica” in sheets 95 Jazz (up) 5 He played Bond seven 49 Flaps 109 110 times sudoku_518B 96 Place for plaques 50 Fourth parts in series 115 116 6 Allows in 97 Dos of eightby Will Shortz Created by Peter Ritmeester/Presented 7 Not follow orders or 98 Bro or sis 121 51 It’s a wrap guidelines 100 Mound great 56 Reached, numerically 125 8 Time 101 Ham 58 Dumas swordsman remembered 103 See blurb 59 Arctic weather 9 Phony persona phenomenon 109 Squeakers 70 Real-time messaging 10 Stumblebum 60 “I Wanna Be 111 Best Foreign system Sedated” rockers 11 One of two New Language Film 71 ____ piccata Testament books of 2014 63 ____ Jemison, first 72 Move, informally African-American 12 Like some old 112 Fiver 73 Three-time woman in space schoolhouses 113 Always, to All-Star Longoria 64 Tag end? 13 “Scandal” airer Shakespeare for the Tampa 65 Didn’t move 14 Food for 114 One carrying Bay Rays 66 Some newcomers’ a toon? Oliver Twist 74 It’s good for the long study, in brief 115 See blurb haul 15 Major Italian 69 With 16-Down, what 75 Lottery winner’s cry highway 120 Har-____ (tennis “stet” means court surface) 16 See 69-Down 76 Mel Blanc, notably

8 D A B S

2 3 8 6 9 7 1 5 4

6 7 1 9 3 4 8 2 5

3 2 9 8 5 6 4 7 1

4 8 5 7 1 2 9 6 3

5 1 2 3 6 8 7 4 9

8 9 6 4 7 5 3 1 2

7 4 3 1 2 9 5 8 6

518B

77 Daughter of Nereus 78 Director Lee 79 Sucked dry 85 City on the Brazos River 86 Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder: Abbr. 87 Greek summit 89 Pit-____ 91 Penalty for poor service, maybe

92 Colors 1960s-style 93 Many ski lodges 94 Like Lhasa apsos 99 Lhasa apso and others 102 Like polenta 103 Some electrical plugs 104 First string? 105 Inc. cover subj.

106 “Journey to ____,” recurring segment on “Sesame Street” 107 Unhip 108 Lose, in a way 109 Tousle 110 ____ Empire 116 Pay-view connection 117 Keyboard abbr. 118 Packers’ org.? 119 Up to, briefly

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

beep (continued from page 26) %%% Continuation. We’re $19 trillion in debt. We borrow money from Japan and China to give to places overseas. We spent $100 million last year in rebuilding mosques in foreign countries. Nine hundred million went to the Palestinians. We continue to borrow money and give it to every other cause around the world. And Obama’s wanting more Muslims in this country. It’s a disgrace what’s happening to this wonderful country. %%% I watch the news every night, and I cannot believe the ignorant people that I see that are supporting Hillary Clinton. It is absolutely mindboggling that she can get somebody to support her and want her to run this country. All the way back to when her husband was president, the Whitewater scandal, where people mysteriously died in socalled suicides. Now the lying and untrustworthiness of the investigation of Benghazi, the emails, all this stuff.

Are you people kidding me? This is what you want to run our country? I would rather have Elmer Fudd run our country, or Spud the dog, the Bud Light dog, than this woman. %%% First-time caller. I was just wondering if somebody out there can tell me why Donald Trump is hated and badmouthed by the Democrats because they think he hates and talks about other people. %%% I never said Obama did everything good. What I said was if everyone is going to say that everything that bad happens is Obama’s fault, then I’m going to say everything good happens is Obama’s fault. I didn’t say that that would be the actual truth. Neither is everything bad happening Obama’s fault. That is not the truth. As far as OPEC, producing fuel at the highest rate they can to make the price of gas go down, that may very well be. But my understanding from the people who print this paper here is because of

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supply and demand, you can thank the people driving around by themselves in Hummers and Suburbans and things like that that are getting 12 to 14 miles per gallon, they’re the reason your gas prices go up. Whatever reason they go down, I don’t care. If your health insurance went up, it’s because of your health insurance company, not Obama. They decided they were going to make up money that they were losing by charging you more, not cutting into their profit. %%% I was just wondering, maybe if we make our veterans illegal immigrants, maybe we can get some help for them. %%% A large number of us want to make sure this gets in the Beep. We want to know what happened to the integrity of Alma Adams that we thought we was voting for, but we certainly would not ever consider voting for her again. And let us tell you why. Every one of us, and there’s a large number of us, called one of the offices that she opened on every corner at taxpayers’ expense asking if we could speak to her. And the first question that comes out of each one of the staff’s mouth is, are you in her district? Well, some

were and some were not. But they told the ones that were not in her district that she was not legally able to talk with them unless you were in her district that you could not speak to her at all. Now, we want to know, recently the district has changed. But she says that she still is going to represent her people … %%% Second call. And we just read in the Feb. 25 Rhino where the people that receive food stamps are going to be required to perform community service or some other type of activity to get their food stamps. Now, our question has been asked before in the Rhino, and we’re going to repeat the question. And we have – several of us have volunteered and worked with the homeless people. So, we know what we’re talking about. And some of these people that write in complaining that we are telling it like it is. They’ve not been there. They don’t know. But we can tell you this, that the majority of them are just as perfectly able to work as any of us are. But it’s foolish for them to work when they can get everything free, even somebody to cut their toenails.

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32 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

beep (continued from page 31) So why aren’t they required to do volunteer work? %%% I am a Republican, but the same voters that put Obama in are about to make a huge mistake with Trump. I do not understand. He has been bankrupt four times, and he lies about it. Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal has reported his four bankruptcies. He has doubled his net worth. Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal has shown this. He will not show his income tax reports. If he does, he’s going to be in big trouble. He has diarrhea of the mouth. He has been through three marriages. I guess he’s going to keep the one he has until he tries to get elected. These people need to be informed before they vote. Obama was a terrible mistake. Trump will be even worse. %%% Editor’s Note: Donald Trump has never declared bankruptcy. Some of the corporations he owns have. There is a huge difference between personal bankruptcy and one of the many corporations he owns declaring bankruptcy. %%% I’m just wondering, Sen. Rubio, why is it that you want to call out Trump on the KKK having a march. You don’t think it’s all right for them to march, but why is that I have not heard Rubio say one thing about the Black Lives Matter movement getting out here and marching, saying death to the policemen. Just tell me what’s the difference between the black lives movement and the KKK. In my opinion, they’re both hate groups. And it just makes me wonder why you don’t care about the white lives. %%% Have you noticed the New York media no longer mentions the top-secret emails Hillary Clinton lied about, or the Benghazi attack that murdered our ambassador who pleaded with Hillary Clinton more than four times for help before the attack? We will not get a balanced political report out of New York unless we stop spending more money in New York. Hey, let’s boycott New York, New York until they stop extreme liberal coverage of the presidential election. Hit New York, New York in the pocketbook. Let’s boycott New York, New York. Boycott New York, New York. Hey, this could work people. %%% I don’t understand why these people on Fox News has got Donald Trump already the president when we haven’t even voted yet. Like Eric Bolling and Sean Hannity have already got him in there. And anybody that goes on their shows that says anything bad about Donald Trump, they just blow them away. I don’t get that. This man needs to be vetted just like everybody else. I think that Donald Trump would be worse than what we already

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Get Fuzzy

by Darby Conley

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

Letters IRANS ACTIONS NOT PROHIBITED DEAR EDITOR,

John Hammer needs to check his facts. He states in his column of March 10, 2016, Under the Hammer, that “Iran has already violated the agreement [the Iran Nuclear Agreement] by testing missiles and buying a missile defense system from Russia.” The fact is missile tests are not prohibited by the nuclear agreement. Nor is the sale by Russia to Iran of a missile defense system barred by the agreement. The United Nations Security Council has passed Resolution 2231, which did call on Iran to refrain from ballistic missile activity “designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.” This is separate from the deal with the United States and the other signatories to the Iran Nuclear

LETTERS To The Editor

TO THE EDITOR Agreement. The UN Security Council may require adherence to Resolution 2231, but the United States does not have the power to act for the Security Council without UN authorization to do so. Iran, by the way, says it is not in violation of Resolution 2231 because it has no nuclear weapons.

Peter T. Hoffman

KNOCK-OUT LAW DEAR EDITOR,

A Texas couple is thinking about suing their child’s dentist. Four-yearold Nevaeh Hall was put in a restraint device called a papoose, which prevented her from moving her arms and legs. She was also sedated with five different drugs over a seven-hour period. She had several seizures during her ordeal and now has brain damage. Her parents were told to stay

in the waiting room. They weren’t allowed to see their daughter until the paramedics arrived. I think that we need a national law that would require all doctors, dentists, veterinarians, etc., to film all medical procedures when a patient is unconscious, anesthetized or “knocked out.” Otherwise they should allow a witness to watch the procedure. I don’t know how many times that a child has been abused when their parents were in the waiting room. A law would prevent this abuse.

Chuck Mann

PAY THEIR WORTH DEAR EDITOR,

I am no fan of Margaret Spellings, if only because she is an education bureaucrat who is paid a base salary

of $775,000 a year and is clearly obscenely overpaid. But this evening I watched protests against her, which were outlined by Bill O’Neil on WXII. One of the protesters was a middleaged lady professor whose name slipped by me – but the sentiments she expressed did not. Her grievance with Ms. Spellingas was that she intended to impose “performance based criteria.” My goodness, imagine that. Apparently the notion that people ought to be paid according to their performance is a heinous and despicable concept among our government educators. (They should try working in the private sector for a reality check.) Does that not explain why America has the worst education system in the advanced world? The outrageous remuneration, the

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34 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

beep

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(continued from page 32) got in there. I am not a Democrat nor am I a Republican. I am an Independent. %%% I don’t guess Romney understands that he’s status quo, and we’re voting against status quo. What a fool. %%% I had just called earlier about vetting our candidates. As you can tell, we didn’t vet Nancy Vaughan, and look what we got there as a mayor. I think everybody needs to be vetted regardless of who they are, because we need the best and the brightest that we can get now, because of the state of our country and the state of our economy, because of the job situation that we have no jobs. Everybody is working part-time jobs. We need full-time positions for people because people are living paycheck to paycheck. Factory jobs are going to other places. Look at Lorillard. They just got bought out by ITG, and those jobs are being lost. %%% I watched a Senate hearing where the head of border control down there told the senators that if the patrol officers are down there and didn’t like Obama’s border policy down there, they could find them another job. That’s the most outrageous statement I’ve ever heard. If I had the power, I would have fired him on the spot. It’s outrageous for anybody to make such a statement. We have absolutely no control of our borders thanks to Obama and his illegal immigration policies. And they wonder why people are running to Donald Trump. They have no control of anything going on in this country. We are spending billions upon billions to support and pay for every education, every entitlement that illegal aliens can steal from American taxpayer. %%% Continuing. The fact that they’re wanting to bring more Syrian refugees into this country, it’s outrageous. We don’t need any more. It’s outrageous – $64,307 per refugee for a five-year period of time is an estimated cost. That money could be well-spent on our own citizens, the ones that can’t buy their medicine or pay their light bills, or can’t even afford to live in their homes anymore because they’re not having decent wages paid, because they’re in competition with illegal

letters

aliens on job sites. %%% It’s time, as it has happened many times, that I have looked at the police blotter for Randolph County, the vast majority of the citizens arrested for the day are white males. That’s so that I checked back and checked back, and that is the case. Some females in there. Other than that, the majority are white females. I can guarantee you those arrests were, and are, deserved. But may I submit to you the truth of the matter is, it’s all about demographics. %%% Hi, this beep is directed toward the beep having to do with the gift of warmth, and winter heating assistance. Yes, one does go down to the Salvation Army to inquire and apply. Bring all your pertinent ID, like Social Security number, driver’s license, anything showing your money that you make and your address. Bring your lease agreement if you rent. And perhaps the mortgage papers, or the deed of trust, I guess. And they pay the billing party. They don’t give you the currency, as is stated here on the Beep. If you’re approved and everything is accepted, and they see everything is valid, they do pay either the utilities, not water. Not water. Excuse me. But they pay those for you. And it’s shows up on your bill. %%% I don’t understand the prestige or the stigma when it comes to northwest Greensboro. The people that live there, for some reason they just have to say that’s where they live. That is the only part of town that they want to trade with or be seen in, and I just don’t understand it. Because in northwest Greensboro you have privileged areas, and you also have underprivileged areas. I see a lot of airport noise. I see a lot of contaminated soil, and I see a foreclosure rate through the roof. %%% A partial-birth abortion is illegal in most states. In the states where it is legal, it is only done for the safety of the mother. With that being said, you find me one instance of Hillary Clinton saying she is for abortion, just one. If you look real hard what you find is she’ll say she is for a woman’s right to choose. And that’s what it’s all about. Don’t misrepresent things by putting your little spin on it. She is not for abortion. She’s for a woman’s right to choose, as should everyone be. It’s America. Why are men telling women (continued on next page)

secured “job for life” tenure, the smug self-satisfaction of the fat and happy “educators” symptomize everything that is wrong with our public sector education. Meanwhile, our children suffer as those of third world countries outperform our future citizens – by a country mile. It is time for a radical restructuring of our pitiful education system, for at present it clearly exists as a mechanism to fill the pockets of incompetent and arrogant bureaucrats who believe they are above answering to the people they profess to serve. And they are right, for now. Pay our educators what they are worth? Certainly. So let us pay them as the 27th best paid in the world, at least until they do a better job. Fair enough?

Austin Morris

DO YOUR HOMEWORK DEAR EDITOR,

Call this a homework assignment. If you truly care about what is happening you’ll complete it. Here are some articles to read regarding the state of our economy. (Does “circling the drain” mean anything to you?) “Federal deficit to soar in 2016 after Ryan-Obama tax deal” by Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times. “Exclusive: Secret Fed Docs Show Obama Misled Congress, Public During Debt Limit Crises” by Richard Pollock, The Daily Caller. “BLS says 665,000 job losses, unadjusted” by Paul Bedard, @ SecretsBedard) “Fed’s Kashkari Floats Breaking Up Big Banks to Avert Meltdown” by Christopher Condon, Bloomberg.com. Here is some reading regarding the state of our national security (and they want to limit Second Amendment rights). “As Feds Plan to Cut Border Monitoring, Texas Officials Ask Why” by Julián Aguilar, The Texas Tribune. “Report: MS-13 foot soldiers use ‘surge’ to cross border, ‘colonize new criminal territory’ by Paul Bedard, The Washington Examiner. “Border agent: ‘We might as well abolish our immigration laws altogether’” by Paul Bedard, The Washington Examiner. “Pentagon orders commanders to prioritize climate change in all military actions” by Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times. “Almost 90,000 dangerous illegal

immigrants go free” by Paul Bedard, The Washington Examiner. Add to this a treaty signed back in 2002 that would allow Russia to conduct unarmed surveillance flights over any part of the United States. And yes, Putin has issued a request to the Geneva-based organization to conduct such flights. I believe it’s called the Open Air Treaty. Google it. And finally, reading on the state of our constitutional rights “UK wants authority to serve warrants in US” by Kevin Johnson and Gregory Korte, USA Today. “FCC commissioner: U.S. tradition of free expression slipping away” by Rudy Takala, The Washington Examiner. If reading these articles doesn’t get you going then you obviously want Bernie Sanders as your next president. Just Google the headline. And speaking of voting, dear leader’s DOJ is very quietly backing several groups that are advocating for giving non-citizens the right to vote. If this happens would you care to guess who will win every election from national on down? Here’s a novel idea: Tune out TMZ and start checking various news sites. Not just one or two but several, then run comparisons to glean out the real facts. The results will scare you. Go Galt and go vote

Alan Marshall

HOUSE DIVIDED DEAR EDITOR,

The Republican Party is a mess and unless it unites then we will have Clinton in office and four more years of lies, corruption and pay-to-play politics. The mess of 2012 is happening again with Republicans attacking each other while Clinton is just enjoying the house divided of the GOP. The fact is Trump is the best choice. Ted Cruz is just too shady and he looks so shady that he would steal from himself. The way it looks right now is that Clinton will win because of the Republican failure to unite. The people who voted for Clinton are either, blind, deaf or just plain lost. Clinton is so anti-American – a proven liar. She was so shady she got tossed from the Nixon investigation by her own Democrats. Clinton gives new meaning to the term shifty and shady. She has more scandals then Al Capone did. She makes all the royal families of Europe look like welfare

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www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

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beep

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cases when it comes to scandals, but yet the people feel she is a leader and good for this nation. The Clinton campaign reminds me of my high school health teacher, Mr. Murphy. He always said, if you throw enough stuff up against the wall then some of it will stick. The funny part is which president was impeached – Clinton. You ever hear the term, you are known by the company you keep? She is married to the guy. The Democrats call Nixon a crook for a few minutes of tape deleted. Clinton lost thousands of emails. She is being elected. What double standards we have.

Sal Leone

BROKEN RECORDS DEAR EDITOR,

Listening to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton is like listening to a parrot repeat a losing theme. Sanders talks about expanding the middle class, but this class of people barely exists in most socialistic societies. And

as far as taxing Wall Street, it would not likely even exist for long. Clinton, like LBJ, seems to hold up a finger to get the direction of the wind and then say, “Look, I know where the wind is coming from.” It didn’t offer any pearls of wisdom in LBJ’s time and I’m not looking for any now. When Bill Clinton was president, our success came as our private sector sold high technology to the rest of the world. When governments bind our private sectors, they underperform. Also, the “liberal” way seems to see anyone disrupting a planned rally as a right for free speech. It is not. It is only an excuse to disrupt and take away another persons right to free speech. Maybe it is time for all of us to return to the native lands of our ancestors and give the Indians their land back. We took it away from them and, just maybe, we’ve lived too good on it for too long.

Ray Hylton

Send to letters@rhinotimes.com or P.O. Box 9023, Greensboro 27429

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what to do? %%% Just finished reading two good books by Ed Klein. One is about the exalted Hussein Obama called The Amateur, and the other is about our favorite lady, Hillary Clinton, called Unlikeable. They’re both outstanding books. If you get a chance, pick them up and read them. Thank you. %%% I don’t understand why everybody is getting excited because David Duke and the KKK are planning on voting for Trump. The Black Lives Matter and mostly black people, they’re going to vote for Hillary Clinton. So I just don’t see the difference. %%% Keep in mind, I have compassion, but if this gets printed, I expect to be bashed by some readers. AIDS, a sad situation and a deadly virus. Millions of dollars are spent trying to find a cure – understandably for those already infected. But instead of spending a fortune looking for

take care of yourself in all the ways that matter.

a cure, why not save a dime by avoiding and turning away from the lifestyle known to encourage and keep this sickness ongoing? I would much rather see money spent on cancer research – a killer we have much less control over. True, children born with AIDS or HIV have no choice in the matter, and the parents of such should be held responsible. That in itself should be considered child abuse. %%% That crazy Donald Trump has finally walked back some of the things about killing the family members of the ISIS and waterboarding, and just doing all kind of foolish things. That man, without a doubt, all he’s wanting to do is say I’m president of this United States. He wants – he’s got an ego. And Hillary Clinton is the same way. This country is doomed if either one of them get it. And I don’t know what we’re going to do about it. We’ve messed around here, and we’ve got two fools running for (continued on page 36)

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36 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com

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and Hillary Clinton is the nominee, they plan to vote for Donald Trump in November. It sounds incredible. Sanders is as far left as you can get and still be considered a national candidate. In fact, he is much farther left than any Democratic presidential candidate in decades. Trump is running as a conservative. He may not be as conservative as Sen. Ted Cruz, but he’s pretty far right. What that says to me is that a number of voters on the right and left don’t really care about the political positions of the candidates, what they don’t want is the same old stuff they’ve been fed for years by both parties. Every Republican that has taken on the mantel of the establishment has gone down in flames. First it was Jeb Bush, who the Republican establishment had anointed to be the next president. All the good little Republican voters were supposed to get in line and vote for Bush. But an unfortunate thing happened to Bush on the way to the polls – the good little Republicans said, “This is one of the guys responsible for getting the country in the mess it’s in. No way.” They voted for Trump. They voted for Dr. Ben Carson. They voted for Carly Fiorina and they voted

for Sen. Ted Cruz, who, although he has been a part of the establishment his entire adult life, is hated by the establishment. But they didn’t vote for Bush. Then the establishment picked Sen. Marco Rubio as its choice and his numbers started falling. People blame the demise on the fact that he went negative, but he went negative because his numbers were falling. In retrospect it appears that was the exact wrong thing to do, but he was doing it to try to gain back some of the ground he was losing. Rubio didn’t go negative because his message was working. A good portion of the Sanders vote has nothing to do with Sanders’ socialist policies. People are voting for Sanders because he wants to stick it to the man. In this case the man is represented on the Democratic ticket by a woman, Hillary Clinton. You can’t get any more establishment than Hillary Clinton. Everyone knows that she would say or do absolutely anything to get elected. That is one of the things that makes the email scandal so incredible. Hillary Clinton actually thought having her own private email server and doing the bidding of the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of

beep (continued from page 35) president. They’re trying to find out which one has got the more sense than the other, and that is really hard to do. Donald Trump has got something wrong with him mentally. Hillary Clinton is a liar, a proven liar that the whole country knows. And when they start voting in people just because, like they did Obama, they listened to him and voted him in. He didn’t know one thing about running the government, and he’s proved that. %%% You know what? My wife is a Democrat. I am a Republican. And my wife is African American, and she is getting very fed up with her party, because all these people are going to these Republican rallies of Trump’s and Cruz’s, and others are demonstrating and messing up things. I found out when they took them in custody they ask them their name, address, their driver’s license,

and what their voter registration is: Democrat or Republican. I hate to say it. Democrats are just there to stir stuff up. And certainly Hillary has got enough sense to deal with her own with emails and telling people about the videos, the Benghazi attack, and all the other stuff that’s going on. It looks like … %%% Hi, Rhino. Thanks for your time. Toll roads in North Caroline. North Carolina doesn’t need them. I remember driving to Massachusetts, stopping for 25 cents here, 50 cents there, 75 cents there. Everyone in the car wanted to find a way around this theft. North Carolina doesn’t need toll roads. Somehow they’re being snuck into the public without public debate. If the high gas tax isn’t enough, tough. Toll roads equal more taxes. Toll roads equal more taxes. Please, stop it. Thank you.

state would not be a problem. If she had had any idea that it was going to turn into a scandal she would have communicated with her staff by tape recordings like on Mission Impossible, that self-destruct after the message is played. There is no way that Hillary Clinton would have taken that risk if she saw it as a risk. She thinks she is above the law and can do whatever she wants because, after all, she is Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, and it has always worked for her before. How many other people in this country have gone to a broker, borrowed $1,000 to invest in a commodity they know nothing about and, a few months later, received a check from that broker for the $100,000 they made on the market. That was about as transparent a payoff as you can get, short of a brown paper bag full of cash left on the doorstep of the governor’s mansion. Hillary Clinton said she made the money legitimately and her trades were made based on her study of The Wall Street Journal, which is not even a believable lie. But it was all OK because she is Hillary Clinton. She and Bill Clinton thought they could steal furniture from the White House when they left, and they did. Can you imagine the audacity of stealing furniture from the White House? They later paid for some of it, proving that it was indeed stolen. President George W. Bush could have made a much bigger deal of the whole White House mess, but he is a really nice man and chose to handle it quietly. But when push comes to shove, many of those folks who “feel the Bern” are not going to go to the polls and vote for Hillary Clinton. They may decide to stay home or they may decide that as long as they can put someone in the White House that isn’t a member of the inside gang, they don’t care whether he is a socialist senator or a billionaire businessman. Trump is going to get a passel of those votes. I was reading what Hillary Clinton supporters were saying about her and it reminded me of something similar I’d heard, but I couldn’t place it at first. Then it came to me – it sounded like what Mitt Romney supporters said about him four years ago: “He’s not my favorite, but I guess I’ll vote for him (her).” “I wish someone I could really support was in the race, but since there’s not, I’ll vote for her (him).” I always think it’s interesting the way the mainstream media report on

events. They pick a couple of people to interview and then the readers are supposed to believe that this is what the other 10,000 people present thought. I’ve never understood that brand of journalism and I think it comes from newspapers trying to be like television, where they rope one person out of the crowd for a live interview and that person represents everybody who is there. But since I was reading several sources that interviewed different people at different rallies, I’m going out on a limb and assume that they were desperately trying to find someone who was head over heels in love with Hillary Clinton as a candidate and couldn’t. What killed Romney was that the Republicans didn’t turn out to vote for him. Way too many Republicans just stayed home on Election Day. The same thing could hurt Hillary Clinton. Why bother to go vote for a wornout old candidate who wants to be president because her husband was? The big difference in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party candidates this year are not their politics but the fact that Republicans sent their tired old it’smy-time-to-be-president candidate home early. The Republicans this time didn’t buy the “my turn” argument, just like the Democrats didn’t buy it in 2008. And that philosophy worked out pretty well for the Democrats in 2008. The Democrats love to talk about higher taxes for corporations. I’ve heard candidates say that we have the highest corporate tax rates in the world. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but what is true is that you can’t tax a corporation. You can’t tax a corporation because they just pass the tax along to their customers. To a corporation, a tax is no different than the electric bill, the cost of employees or any other business expense. A corporation is not going to eat the tax and make less profit. A corporation is going to pay the tax and, if possible, pass it along to its customers. If the corporation can’t afford to raise prices and be competitive, it will go out of business or move to a country where it can pay lower taxes, lower wages and maybe lower energy costs and make a profit. Corporations only exist if they can make a profit. If taxes are raised on them in the US to the point that they can’t make a profit, they leave. But you can’t tax a corporation anymore than you can get rich people to pay more taxes than they want. (continued on next page)

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If taxes on the rich are raised, they hire more people to find more ways around the high taxes, or they move somewhere with lower taxes. North Carolina is a great example. Last year we ran a story about the wealthiest people in Greensboro. For a couple of weeks people asked me why certain well-known wealthy people in Greensboro were not on the list. The answer in almost all the cases was that their official residence was Florida, which, in addition to being a great place to spend the winter, has no state income taxes. So a lot of people that most of us think of as residents of Greensboro are officially residents of Florida. The reason taxes keep getting raised on the middle class is because we are the ones who have to pay them. Most middle-class folks can’t afford a team of accountants and attorneys to figure out tax breaks. If we could we wouldn’t be middle class. And we can’t move some place with lower taxes because we can’t afford it, and we have to be at work everyday. Then, being the trusting souls that

we are, we send $50 or $100 to the candidate who says he’s not going to raise our taxes. But when one of the big boys writes him a check for $10 million – Republican or Democrat, it doesn’t matter – he changes his mind and decides that a little more can be squeezed out of the middle class. Wouldn’t you? Back when Rubio was still in the race, he attacked Trump for saying what he really thought. Incredibly, he said a candidate can’t go out and say whatever he thought. It was revealing that, at that point in the campaign, when Rubio was in single digits everywhere but his home state – where he was losing by double digits – he hadn’t figured out that one reason Trump was beating him in state after state was that Trump was saying what he thinks while Rubio was saying what his handlers told him to say. It does make you wonder: If Rubio had gone out and campaigned as Marco Rubio, instead of as the political consultants’ caricature of Marco Rubio, how well would he

have done? The consultants said go out and work into as many answers as you can that President Barack Obama is not incompetent but is doing exactly what he set out to do. And Rubio did exactly that which Gov. Chris Christie pointed out, much to the detriment of Rubio. Then the consultants said go out and attack Trump. He’s really sensitive about having small hands, talk about that. So Rubio went out and did that. It’s too late now, but if I had been one of his political consultants I would have advised him to fire his consultants who had taken him from a front-runner to an also-ran and go out there without a prepared or memorized speech and say what’s on your mind. It couldn’t have hurt. Rubio said repeatedly, as he was wont to do, “Leaders cannot say whatever they want because words have consequences.” Ignoring the problem with syntax, Rubio is out of step with the times. What the country is desperately calling for is a leader who will say what he thinks. Who will not speak in sound bites that have been tested before focus groups, but to say what they actually think. Trump does it, and at time gets carried away, but his supporters

forgive him because they aren’t getting prepackaged sound bites. Just mentioning this makes me a birther, but why is it that I know Rubio’s high school grade point average and I know virtually nothing about our current president’s academic career? Obama said he wasn’t much of a student when he was at Occidental College, but somehow a not very good college student got accepted to one of the most prestigious schools in the country. Ivy League schools don’t accept transfer requests from students at small colleges who aren’t doing very well. There must be some story there. I also know that Rubio played football in college, but nobody seems to know whether Obama played college basketball or not. Perhaps after Obama leaves office he will write another novel about himself and then at least we will have his side of the story. The point is that even after seven years in office, the mainstream media, which have the ability to get to the story on Obama’s background, have never done it.

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ask carolyn (continued from page 27) more about this method in the next paragraph.) Four is DNA testing if the father died prior to the birth of the child or within one year after the birth of the child. Lots of times at a happy birth of a child, the unmarried father will want to be on the birth certificate and the hospital will provide an affidavit of parentage for the father to sign before a notary. This is not enough to establish the right for the child to inherit from the father under North Carolina law. Recently, the North Carolina Court of Appeals decided a very harsh result in re Estate of Williams. The young child in Williams was not allowed to inherit even though his deceased father was on the child’s birth certificate and the father had signed and notarized an affidavit of parentage. The problem was that no one filed the affidavit of parentage with the clerk of court. Just out of luck, and oh so harsh. I wonder if we are denying illegitimate children equal protection of the law as compared to legitimate children

born of a marriage, who can inherit simply by the father being on the birth certificate. Of course, in your situation, the father has some time to plan and he may very well write a will. The methods I discussed above deal with persons who die without a will. I would suggest you make sure your child gets to know and love his father. Then I would mention to the father that you would like for your child with him to both be in the will and a beneficiary of the life insurance policy. Please note that the beneficiary designation on life insurance controls who receives life insurance, not the will. Seeking the advice of a family lawyer on these quite technical issues is warranted. Good luck.. Dear Carolyn, I am a new father, and I think the mother of our new baby is depressed. I am concerned. She seems exhausted and stressed. I am helping and her

mother is helping, but there seems to be a problem. What should I do? Carolyn Answers ... You need to get the mother of your child to her doctor for an assessment. Thirteen percent of new mothers suffer from postpartum depression. You are naming some of the most typical symptoms, which are sleep deprivation, stress and exhaustion. There are many celebrities who have spoken out about their personal experience with postpartum depression. One book I would suggest is Brooke Shield’s Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression. In this bestselling memoir, Brooke describes the joyous birth of her daughter followed by crippling depression. Brooke describes how she made her way back from the depression with talk therapy, medication and time. Shield’s real life postpartum depression was far different than the role she played in The Blue Lagoon. In

this famous movie, Shield’s character accidentally became pregnant. In real life, Shield’s had trouble getting pregnant and had numerous IVF cycles, as well as a miscarriage. After the birth of her daughter, she said, “I was in a bizarre state of mind.” I trust you can help the mother of your child go forward with medical help and recovery. This is a real problem, not a made up one. Do not be ashamed of this.

Send questions on family law and divorce to askcarolyn@rhinotimes.com, or P.O. Box 9023, Greensboro 27427. Please do not put identifying information in questions. Note that the answers in Ask Carolyn are intended to provide general legal information and the answers are not specific legal advice for your situation. The column also uses hypothetical questions. A subtle fact in your unique case may determine the legal advice you need. Also, please note that you are not creating an attorney-client relationship with Carolyn J. Woodruff by writing or having your question answered by Ask Carolyn.

www.rhinotimes.com | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | RHINO TIMES

under theHAMMER

by John Hammer

Tuesday night Hillary Clinton all but declared herself the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination. Sen. Bernie Sanders still has money, so he’ll stay in the race, but his chances of winning are minimal. He needed to win a couple of big states and he didn’t. His supporters are still wild about Sanders, but there just aren’t enough of them. After Tuesday night it looks like Trump will definitely go to the Republican convention with the most delegates, and the odds are he will cross that magic 1,237 threshold shortly before the convention. The states where Sen. Ted Cruz had the best chance of beating Trump were in the South because of the large percentage of evangelical Christians – the demographic where Cruz does the best. Those states are all now in the rearview mirror and Trump came out the winner. But whether Trump goes to the convention with 1,000 delegates or something over 1,237, the Republican Party will be giving the election to Hillary Clinton if Trump doesn’t get the nomination. A party can’t ignore its base and hope to win. The whole purpose of the lengthy and extremely costly primary election process if for the regular members of the party to get to decide who they want to represent the party in November. If that’s not how the Republican

Party wants to do it, they should just announce that a couple of the old guard will get together in a room and choose the nominee. But what you can’t do is hold elections and then ignore the votes of the people. So far this has been the most bizarre presidential primary in at least 50 years, so who knows what’s going to happen next. One of the most curious arguments against making Trump the nominee, regardless of how many votes he gets, is that he isn’t a conservative. The Republican Party is supposed to nominate the Republican nominee. Whether he is conservative or not shouldn’t make a difference. If the members of the party selected him, he must be conservative enough for them. Mitt Romney got the nomination and he isn’t a conservative. In 2008, Sen. John McCain got the nomination and he isn’t even close to being a conservative. And then there are the two Bushes; they certainly aren’t conservative. You have to go all the way back to Ronald Reagan to find a conservative who got the Republican nomination. So why all of a sudden is the Republican leadership saying that the nominee in 2016 has to fulfill their definition of a conservative? Trump may not be as conservative as some would like for him to be, but he is popular with the voters. It evidently goes against Republican Party principles to nominate a candidate popular with the people, and this might be a good time to change those principles.

I’ll have to say that the coverage of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump by the political pundits is getting more and more bizarre. The very people who said that he would not make it through July are now saying Republicans shouldn’t support him because he can’t beat Hillary Clinton. The same people who said that it would be all over for Trump after the first debate –, because he couldn’t hold his own against bone fide professional politicians who had been on the public dole all their lives – are saying that Trump can’t win the convention. For those who may have forgotten: Before the first debate, according to the political pundits, Trump was great in front of a big rally – very entertaining and all that – but when he had to stand on stage with the professional politicians he would immediately be revealed as the fraud that he is. It turned out that when you put a professional businessman up

against professional politicians, the businessman eats them alive. Since the other predictions about Trump by the pundit class have been wrong, why should anyone listen to them now? Trump is connecting with voters in a way pundits don’t understand because it is not the way they say politicians should connect with voters. The problem might be that Trump is not a politician. Whether Trump can beat Hillary Clinton or not is a good question. But if you want a good answer, you can’t turn to the people who have been dead wrong about Trump for almost a year. Several people who told me they voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary said that if Sanders doesn’t pull off some remarkable comeback (continued on page 36)

40 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, March 17, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com