Washington County

Anglico's nightmare is real.

Sometimes when I'm lying in bed almost asleep I have these panic attacks that they Navy is scheming some underhanded deal to screw over farmers in some other part of the state . . . and that our elected officials are quietly aiding their efforts. It scares the pee out of me . . . and I'm just enough of a conspiracy theorist to assume the worst.

It isn't the Navy's scheming that keeps the OLF hooked to life support, it's George Bush's refusal to pay our troops a decent wage.

Perfect to start our day! Go Grannies, indeed. Thank you, James.

Remember all the OLF protests to the Navy's misguided attempt to take over Washington County? Well, the Grannies in the northeast part of the state seem to have caught the bug! They're now acting up against George Bush's War in Iraq.

One woman at the center of the firestorm is named Pat Seibert. Pat was born in Pennsylvania, and moved to Kernersville in 1978 with her husband and four kids. She graduated Winston-Salem State 1988 - and earned an MPA from UNC 1990. When she retired in 1998, she moved to Beaufort County.

According to a mutual friend, Pat had this to say about the Gathering of Chickenhawks who harass the Grannies every weekend:

According to the Washington Daily News The NC Association of Realtors misled many county residents this week with letters and advertisements claiming that a public hearing was going to take place about the imposition of a transfer tax. No such hearing was scheduled and no such decision was on the table but many people showed up at a county commissioner's meeting Monday night for nothing.

There's a great column in the News and Observer today by Laura Marciniak about the Navy's insane plan to build an outlying landing field in Washington County.

All that nice open land probably looks good from 10,000 feet in the air. The northeastern section of North Carolina is some of the last undeveloped land on the Eastern seaboard. You can see it yourself from Google Earth. But what you can't see from a plane or a satellite is what's taking place on the ground.

The family farmers and the birds of the wildlife refuges have a symbiotic relationship. The birds do more than eat the farmers' leavings of grain and corn. They also leave nitrogen for the next crop and they dine on insects and weeds. Good land stewardship should be rewarded, not betrayed.