Durham City Hall construction

Durham's City Hall is not exactly putting its best foot forward. Amid renovation, its sign hidden by shrubs, the site strewn with dumpsters and construction debris, it is not much to look at right now.



Photo courtesy of BWPW.

Another Washington tragedy

A candid photo of Ashley Turton...

More tragedy. The inside the Beltway community suffered a third blow this morning when Ashley Turton, the wife of a key Obama staffer and a prominent lobbyist herself, was found dead today inside her burning BMW SUV at her Washington, D.C. home. A police investigation is still underway.

The story has immediately triggered speculation, Turton's SUV was found halfway in-and-out of her garage when fire officials responded to 911 calls from neighbors at 4:50am. Metropolitan Police Lt. Nicholas Breul said, "This could be just a tragic freak accident. And that is why we're crossing our t's and dotting our i's, because it is a little freaky."

She was the mother of three young children and a lobbyist for Progress Energy, which is in the middle of a $13 billion merger. From North Carolina, Ashley Turton graduated North Carolina State and first worked on Capitol Hill for Congressman Mike McIntyre from North Carolina's 7th congressional district. Her husband, Dan Turton, has worked as liaison between the Obama administration and the House of Representatives.

Our condolences and prayers to her family and friends.

Check out the photos of the very odd circumstances here.

Durham refinances

While cities and municipalities across the county are in heaps of financial trouble, things are not so bad here in Durham, North Carolina. Earlier this month the city received approval from Standard & Poor's, Fitch and Moody's, the three big credit ratings agencies, to refinance up to $60 million in bonds at an AA+ credit rating. This will save Durham approximately $2.1 million in interest charges on bonds and other loans original made to the city in 1998, 2001 and 2008.

Thanks to the Durham Herald Sun for this note.

A hearty F-U from the USPS

The United States Postal Service has taken to giving Durham the proverbial bird all summer long. Ostensibly a government service, the inefficient, inscrutable, opaque USPS has decided not to offer service in many of its Durham branches this summer. The bums are closing the main downtown post office at 2pm. The losers fail to offer an automatic teller machine that sells stamps or stickers packages in this, the main Durham branch. For fuck's sake, there are 217,000 people in this city, the Postal Service can't come up with one automated machine at the main downtown branch!!!

They need to fire a few of their lax, lazy-ass supervisors and they could afford quite a few more machines.

Maybe there are those of you who think, well, they are closing the main post office three hours early and not opening at all on Saturday, perhaps we could go to the 27705 branch off of La Salle Street. Ha! Nope! They are closed at 2pm also. However, at least La Salle Street does offer an automatic postal machine. Unfortunately, the USPS specializes in finding new ways to inconvenience their patrons; the machine does not accept cash!

Perhaps the 27704 post office is better. After all, the USPS just spent the money to relocate that branch across the street to a new location, from the horrible dump with atrocious nearly impassable parking lot, where they had it. Of course it is not better, it is perhaps even more infuriating than any of them. During peak hours (when most of the other post offices in town have knocked off early) this post office is manned by a mere one counter employee. There is no automatic postal machine.

These jerks found time and money to sponsor a bike team for eight years!?! If the Clarion Content had its way, the Post Office would be forbidden from advertising, and forced to redirect those expenditures into improving service and efficiency with a particular emphasis on automated service machines. (Including one's that accept cash, seriously, the grocery store has them.)