Sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side:

The school has lost 53 of 77 faculty members recruited by universities during the last academic year, a retention rate of about 30 percent. Most years, it wins 55 percent to 60 percent of its recruiting battles by boosting pay or adding resources such as a coveted piece of lab equipment.

The losses are a gut shot for one of the nation's top public institutions, where leaders take pride in recruiting and retaining faculty members who might otherwise end up at elite private institutions. But this year, deep-pocketed elites such as Yale and Cornell are having their pick of Chapel Hill faculty.

As he tries to spray dispersants on the growing concerns over offshore drilling:

The pictures of oil from the BP gusher reaching the shores of Louisiana tear at my heart. But the images haven't changed my mind about offshore oil exploration. I'm still a "Drill, baby, drill" guy.

I've previously written about the need to do a full cost accounting of alternative energy such as solar, wind and biomass. Now it's time to apply the same standard to oil. As with every other source of energy, I want to know the true cost of oil exploration and extraction, and that includes the cost of safety measures to prevent catastrophic blowouts.

No, you don't, Ricky. You say you want to know, but that's only to make your other wants seem reasonable.

Just because you can do a thing, it doesn't necessarily follow that you should:

The commercial paper industry's plans to plant forests of genetically altered eucalyptus trees in seven Southern states have generated more cries from critics worried that such a large introduction of a bioengineered nonnative plant could throw natural ecosystems out of whack.

ArborGen, a biotechnology venture affiliated with three large paper companies, got U.S. Department of Agriculture approval last month for field trials involving as many as 250,000 trees planted at 29 sites during the next few years. Much smaller lots of the genetically altered trees have been growing in some of the states for years.

I think we should formally declare "Town Halled" as a verb, like keelhauling:

U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C.. encountered Chowan County’s version of a “tough crowd” during an often confrontational town hall discussion about health care reform in Edenton Thursday.

Butterfield, who voted for the landmark health care reform legislation in March, was peppered with mostly hostile questions and comments about the new federal law by an audience of about 60 at the Chowan County Senior Center.

Hopefully this signals the General Assembly is getting better at recognizing a really bad idea when it surfaces:

The state House of Representatives on Thursday cut funding for a study that's required if the port is to be built near Southport. Among the concerns is that the proposed port, which would be the state's biggest, would be built next to a twin-reactor nuclear plant and that it could pose environmental risks to protected habitats.

The House voted 104-11 in favor of Rep. Pricey Harrison's budget amendment that eliminated the study funding. Harrison, a Greensboro Democrat, said the proposed port was envisioned more than four years ago as a public-private partnership, but the N.C. State Ports Authority had not found a private investor.