Blogs

You'd think that with all the issues at stake in federal, state, and local issues, there would be no problem coming up with headlines. But today, the Chapel Hill News leads with Town politicians not shy about party loyalty.

The idea is that, since municipal offices are non-partisan, those who hold them should not wear political buttons reflecting their allegiances. I find this notion to be fairly ridiculous. After all, the oath of office does not require Town Council-members to foreswear their political allegiances. Nor should it.

Elected officials are indisputably highly engaged political actors. To suggest that they should hide their allegiances during strongly contested campaigns is unreasonable. For them to do so would hardly be possible.

The Chapel Hill News is replacing long-time editor and publisher Ted Vaden with Brenda Larson ("business development analyst for The News & Observer's community newspapers") who will also act as the publisher of the Cary News. The loss of Vaden is bad in itself, but replacing him with someone who is not from Chapel Hill and won't be focused on Chapel Hill sounds like a disaster to me. I hope I'm wrong!

Before joining The N&O, Larson was director of new product development for York Region Newspaper Group, a group of Canadian community newspapers north of Toronto. In addition, she served as editor-in-chief for seven newspapers in that group, which is owned by Metroland.

Larson also will become publisher of The Cary News, another N&O community newspaper, and will split her time between Cary and Chapel Hill.

I am excited to release our first-ever Orange Politics Voter Guide! This is not intended to endorse any candidate or issue, although readers may feel free to post their own endorsements in the comments with the caveat that you may not refer to any other candidates that you are not endorsing (same rules as this primary thread).

A lot of this inforation is available from the Orange County Board of Elections or the N.C Board of Elections.

We tried to find candidate web sites when available, please contact us if you have more information. Also, we would like to add columns listing which endorsements each candidate has received, but we need volunteers to do the research... hint hint. Basically, this is a work in progress, so wait until closer to the election before you print it out for November 2.