Hey, hate to say it but Hitler is 100% on point here. Johnny White goes for a buck-oh-five or the Heels get nuked Saturday night in Atlanta.

Go to hell State.

It is September. Back in January the working plan was to try Mark Carver and Neal Cassada for the May 5th, 2008 murder of UNCC student Ira Yarmolenko in July.

What is the deal?

Unemployment rate rises, in sign of weak growth — The Washington Post
August jobs report: Signs of life for employment — CNNMoney

You’ll never believe the city of Charlotte’s defense in the civil suit brought by two of Marcus Jackson’s alleged sexual assault victims.

“If Mr. Jackson had not been hired, he may very well have assaulted these individuals,” claimed senior assistant city attorney R. Harcourt Fulton in Mecklenburg County Superior Court, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, Planet Earth.

Superior Court Judge Lane Williamson — a former defense attorney and a Bev Perdue appointee — bought this line of reasoning and opted to send the matter of a possible civil rights violation by Jackson to a jury.

In other words, the city and Judge Williamson believe it is an open question whether handing Marcus Jackson a badge, a gun, a squad car, and full powers of arrest enabled him in any way to allegedly commit multiple acts of sexual assault while on duty and acting as a member of the city’s duly sworn police force.

That Marcus Jackson, private citizen, in a t-shirt, flip-flops, on a moped, armed only with evil intent could have compelled women to pull over to the side of the road, get out of their vehicles, and submit themselves — without resistance — to his gropings. That male companions of the female victims would have stood by as Marcus Jackson — private citizen, alone, unarmed, and without the power to call down the entire multi-billion dollar boot-heel of state and local law enforcement on their heads — assaulted their girlfriends.

That the city of Charlotte could not possibly be at fault because ipso facto the corporate entity that is the city is The City of Charlotte, and The City of Charlotte is never, ever wrong about anything. Ever.

Let’s put it this way, in a test of wits between state Sen. Dan Clodfelter and Afshin Ghazi, I know who my money is on.

At issue is the $550,000 the city of Charlotte advanced Ghazi for “infrastructure” around the EpiCenter. Ghazi is at a loss to explain why he transferred the money to another company he controlled, out of the reach of the lender he had stopped paying. But I’ve always been baffled by the city of Charlotte’s willingness to to stick to the original funding agreement for the EpiCenter, considering the project changed significantly, losing the condo component — a change that helped drive Mecklenburg County tax officials to save 26 percent off of the tax value of the building.

However, we digress. Regions Bank is clearly on the warpath — and unlike Wells and BAC — has not particularly interesting in subsidizing bad loans in Uptown Charlotte.

Pop some popcorn, this is only going to get better.

Yeah, the Labor Secretary is supposed is say crazy-happy stuff. But this is complete fantasyland. Let’s roll it for posterity, with fact checks:

Charlotte is a great example of the progress we as a country are making in turning around the economy. When President Obama took office 20 months ago, the country was losing an incomprehensible 800,000 jobs a month and the unemployment rate in the Charlotte area had nearly doubled in less than a year. Now the country is averaging almost 100,000 new jobs a month, and Charlotte is experiencing an employment rebound. When President Obama took office Mecklenburg County had 411,566 jobs. The latest state figures show the county has almost 800 fewer jobs — 410,789, or a decline of 33,000 from April 2008. There is no employment rebound. At all.

I believe Charlotte represents the future of the American economy. The city is focused on clean energy and green jobs, and it understands that investing in our workers makes good sense.

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The airport has an Airport Advisory Committee. It, like city council, essentially acts as a rubber stamp, approving all that is put before it by airport head Jerry Orr. That said, the minutes from the monthly AAC meetings do make for an interesting read, as they lay out exactly what the issues are that the airport is working on.

The airport has traditionally done a good job of posting the minutes of a meeting soon after they they have been approved at the next month’s meeting. Until recently that is. The AAC met this morning; the most recent minutes available online though are from the June meeting. Which is not so helpful.

Update (September 3): Minutes from July and August were posted today. An yes, the minutes do suggest an issue that you’ll be hearing more about shortly — and no, it’s not taxi cabs either.

On the occasion of an “investigation” into what federal banking regulators did to whom in the fall of 2008, let’s excise the notion that the meltdown was some sort of surprise. Here is some coffee-stained blogger from August 2007 warning that Bank of America and Wachovia faced some sort of downside due to their mortgage portfolios:

Merely as participants in the broader credit and lending sector there has to be some sort of impact on the two giants as a result of a general tightening of credit after years of easy money.

Having said that, Wachovia execs seem far too glib about the status of their Golden West Financial arm. You do not want to be holding a bunch of California no-money-down mortgages during the bust cycle of the state’s infamously fickle real estate market. Plus they do not seem to grasp that California’s high-tax, high-regulation model has been steadily chasing off jobs and economic activity for a solid decade now.

And again here in November 2007:

Ahem. Don’t look know but it looks like the subprime infection is a little deeper at Wachovia and Bank of America than previously known. Still too early to panic, but this is going to take most of 2008 to fix and the local economy may feel it. … Tremendously oversimplifed, the banks acted like they were merely making change — 4 quarters for $1 — in these transactions when in reality the value of their subprime holdings was tremendously sketchy and wound up falling through the floor.

Things get really interesting however, when you consider that had these transactions been considered outright loans federal capital requirements would have kicked in, mandating that the banks set aside higher levels of reserves in order to match the increased lending risk.

That did not happen. Hence there is no money. Well, that is not exactly correct.

There is some guy named John Q. Taxpayer that the bankers, the Fed, and politicians are trying to track down.

As analyst Chris Whalen explained there is no such thing as “off-balance sheet” transactions for banks — or anyone else. Someone always pays in the end.

Bend over, America.

Ow. That’s painful to read. More from April 2008 here and here in May 2008.

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Says here that Mayor Anthony Foxx will head up a “task force” on small business for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. More:

In his new role, Foxx will serve as a voice for small business on a national level. … “Our local and national recovery, particularly a jobs recovery, is dependent upon the ability of small businesses to grow jobs,” Foxx says. “We’re doing things in Charlotte that can be replicated elsewhere.”

Foxx says he will use his position to advocate for a small-business tax credit as an incentive to attract private capital.

Hmmm. Why not advocate for a cut in North Carolina’s sky-high top marginal income tax rate to allow small businessmen and women to keep more of their own private capital? Isn’t that more rational that taxing money away, creating a government capital micromanagement program, pick winners-and-losers, hand some of the money back to government-approved ventures, and call that private capital?

Oh, and any chance that the the mayor’s employers at DesignLine would be eligible to be on the winning end of a such a tax credit?

Ballantyne Scoop tries to answer the question, are foreclosures hurting home values in Ballantyne — or elsewhere for that matter? Partial credit for the answer:

These properties do present a future risk to Ballantyne home prices, as they might come on the market as short sales or bank-owned sales in the future. However, these homes are distributed throughout the various Ballantyne neighborhoods. Statistically, only a small percentage of homes in each neighborhood are in the foreclosure or preforeclosure stage. So, it’s not the foreclosure per se that is causing home prices to fall. It is the oversupply of homes that is causing the home prices to fall.

It goes a little deeper than that, to the fact that bank sales are almost always fire sales. And those fire sales — at a time of relatively few sales overall — do put downward pressure on comps in the neighborhood. Take the sale which took place in April 2009 a few blocks from me in Providence Plantation.

The home had a revised 2006 tax value of $455,400 and had sold for $518,000 in June 2005, very nearly the peak of local home values. By late 2008 it was in foreclosure and was sold for $374,000 in 2009. That’s a 28 percent drop in value in less than three years. Does that mean that all homes on the same street saw a similar drop? No, of course not.

But some downward pressure tends to be confirmed by the fact 1) Only one other home on the street has been sold in the last 15 months 2) That home sold for all of three (3) percent above 2006 tax value and all of 5.5 percent above its 2000 sales price. Plus we must consider the fact that many South Charlotte homeowners in otherwise OK shape are probably staring at and servicing HELOCs they took out in the 2005-2006 boom times, effectively adding a 20 or 25 percent “bonus” to the home value numbers they need to have to feel whole.

Now, toss in the likelihood that the ongoing property tax reval is probably going to add 10 to 20 percent to their annual property tax bill — and hence to their monthly mortgage payment — whoosh, you have the makings of a real brushfire on top of the fire sales.