During our tours and discussion of Ann Arbor, which were expertly organized by the staff of our Chamber of Commerce, I kept feeling like I wanted to get another two or three sides to the story.  We heard from some business, nonprofit, and government leaders - ones that were recommended to us by the Ann Arbor Chamber. All of the panelists were knowledgeable and informative.

But missing were voices of residents, students and faculty, community advocates, downtown boosters, bloggers and that much-vaunted "creative class."  Interestingly, I returned home to get several messages by e-mail and twitter from some of the very folks who felt left out of our visit! The Ann Arbor Chronicle, a new local news website not unlike the Carrboro Citizen, wrote about our visit. And Ann Arbor consultant Bill Tozier tweeted about it and shared some local frustrations on his blog:

Via the News of Orange:

Thursday, July 24. The Orange County Democratic Women will meet at 7:30 p.m. at the Chapel Hill Museum, 523 E. Franklin St. in Chapel Hill. The monthly meeting will focus on taxes and comparing the priorities of national political parties. The guest speaker will be Meg Gray Weihe, policy analyst with the N.C. Justice Center’s Budget & Tax Center, who will speak on “Why Tax Fairness Matters.” For more information, call Anne Thomas at 929-0547.

My GP doctor of 18 years and his practice, Chapel Hill Family Medicine, are converting to "concierge medicine", sometimes known as boutique medicine. What this means is that to stay with my doctor, whom I like, it will cost me $1500 per year, $1000 which goes to him and $500 which goes to MDVIP, the company which franchises this service. My doctor will reduce his patient load to a maximum of 600 patients. MDVIP limits its franchises to experienced established practices in high income areas.

What this buys is 24 hour access to your doctor, extended preventative medicine including expanded physical, all you records on a cd.. etc.. or to put it another way, high quality individual attention that should be available anyway.

(cross posted from Exile and BlueNC)
This week the Emerging Issues forum is taking a long, intense look at energy and the future of North Carolina with respect to climate change, greater energy efficiency and self-sufficiency and so on.
While there is a lot of emphasis on green and alternatives, there's also going to be a heavy focus on the corporate sector including a panel with both Bill Johnson of Progress Energy and Jim Rodgers of Duke Energy and another panel on "converting Green to Green" with Jeff Immelt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, General Electric Corporation.
The whole things starts off with Thomas Friedman who will dutifully remind policy makers that only the free market can save us.

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I don't think I ever met him but Daniel Okun's name often came up whenever you heard about activism around the environment, peace, or civil rights. Okun passed away on Monday. He was 90.