Every day, when we fork over a few bucks for lunch, swipe our debit cards for tanks of gas or load up a cart of groceries, we make decisions based on value, convenience, quality and availability.

Earlier  this month, the Republicans in the NC House took some time off from denying science, creating a shadow educational system, fetishizing firearms and making life better for dogs to introduce what they touted as a Taxpayer Bill of Rights to be added as an amendment to our state constitution.

Birmingham is a wonderful city with a retro-cool downtown, a full slate of festivals, a burgeoning urban condo market and a trolley that runs through it all.

Not because of voter fraud — the NC Board of Elections found just 310 cases of voter fraud in 2008, out of more than 4 million votes cast. Elections aren’t stolen by convincing miscreants to vote more than once — it barely moves the needle, though each instance is a felony.

One suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing is dead. The other, 19-year-old Dzokhar Tsarnaev, is in custody. Tuesday reports say that the surviving bomber, from his hospital bed, indicated they acted alone, without support from outside interests or terrorist groups.

Last week, members of Greensboro city staff and the city council invited members of the print media and area bloggers to a meeting down at Melvin Municipal Building to discuss public records — this was in the wake of the Marikay Abuzuaiter scandal resulting from documents released to YES! Weekly.

Despite the state’s plurality of registered Democrats among the electorate — in itself somewhat misleading, because NC has voted for Republican presidents since the Southern Strategy took hold in the 1960s, with the lone exception being Barack...

The stretch of High Point Road and Lee Street that traverses the southern edge of the city runs past fields and warehouses, the UNCG campus and the Greensboro Coliseum before dog-legging through Jamestown, where its known as Main Street, on the way to its namesake city — it becomes Greensboro Road just as it hits High Point.

McCrory took some flak back in February when he criticized the system for focusing on “elite” liberal arts programs instead of “what business and commerce needs to get our kids  jobs,” as if our state university system, the envy of the nation, was a vocational education program.

A seismic change is taking place on the eastern flank of downtown Winston-Salem, with the nascent Wake Forest Innovation Quarter (formerly Piedmont Triad Research Park) supplanting the historic campus of Reynolds Tobacco Co.

And that’s completely unacceptable. The reason public notices were put in newspapers in the first place is so that people can see them — all people, and not just a select group of government watchers. It’s why foreclosures get posted on a bulletin board at city hall, and also get put in the paper.

But Milton Rhodes is distinct not just for his efforts in the arts scene of a city that prides itself on it, but because — unlike Lawrence Joel or RJ Reynolds — he is very much alive. Not too many people get buildings named after them while they still draw breath.

The town had outsourced its legal department a few years earlier to a private firm of VanDeventer Black. And Semans discovered that Kitty Hawk had paid the firm about $1 million over three years. Kitty Hawk has about 3,000 full-time citizens and an annual budget of about $4.

That’s what’s happening with the proposed Florida Street extension, which would continue the road past East Lee Street and into the new Gateway Center, a nanotech facility near the NC A&T University Farm. To reach the center, the road would have to cut across a portion of the 492-acre farm.

We were floored. For years we’ve admired her stance on social justice, her advocacy for human rights, her outreach into communities that don’t always rate a seat at the political table. We’ve backed that up with endorsements for her city council campaigns going back to her first in 2007.

Here’s another piece of speculation: There will be layoffs, probably not massive, but certainly a few — bad news for our friends and colleagues at the Journal.

But the time is being spent regardless of Besse’s opposition, largely at the behest of his political allies and constituents. Besse has been a consistent progressive voice on council since he was elected in 2001. His cohort on the general government committee — Molly Leight and James Taylor— supports the resolution.

But because of our regulatory fervor in this city, the ordinance looks like something someone’s parents drew up, with exceptions, loopholes, licensing and out clauses which can be invoked to shut anyone down at any time.

Fortunately for its 1.8 million NC residential customers, Duke’s 17 percent bid was denied, and though a 7 percent rate increase was approved in January 2012, Attorney General Roy Cooper has been fighting it. The state Supreme Court heard arguments about the rate increase in November.

But here in Forsyth County, the Republican-controlled county commission seems to have no problem leveraging the state’s November Red Tide. As reported in this week’s Dirt section, the commission fasttracked school board candidate Irene May to finish Donny Lambeth’s term.