I have been so incredibly upset since I heard about the Chapel Hill Town Council's swift decision to retire the Technology Advisory Board and the Horace Williams Citizens Committee last week, that I couldn't even write about it. I have been waiting to cool down, but the more I think and the more people I talk to about it, the madder I get.

So I will let Jason Baker do the talking for me (from his blog):

Last week, the Chapel Hill Town Council opted to end the service of both the Horace Williams citizens' committee and the technology committee.

Doing so was a mistake. With her sole dissenting vote, apparently only former citizens' committee member Laurin Easthom saw the value of the hard work and diversity of perspectives those folks would bring to the town in the years to come.

As a town, we're far behind where we ought to be in the technology realm, and disbanding our technology committee without a thoughtful replacement is only going to put us farther back.

According to the N&O Chatham regularly invokes Jesus prior to its Commissioner meetings. Bunky is saying Jesus taught him to pray, Outz says non-christians can leave the room, Emerson says his Jewish friends don't care...do you?

"I always thought if they didn't like [the prayer], they could step outside," Commissioner Carl Outz said.

"I talked to a Jewish person about it, and he had no problem with the Lord's Prayer," Emerson said. The Lord's Prayer begins, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."

Doesn't seem like a very friendly and welcoming place to me. So, who wants to go to the next commissioner's meeting?

WCHL (1360 AM) will holding its annual Forum on air today from 8 am to 6 pm. I can't find the schedule on their site, but they generally dedicate each hour to a different topic with 4-6 guests and a couple of journalists.

It probably won't be as exciting as in 2004, when the forum was kicked off by a tense 2-hour tete-a-tete over UNC development.

In 2005, I was a particpant in the "Civil Rights & Equality" topic. This year I'll be on during the 3 pm hour in which the topic is "Community Diversity," which appears to be a re-phrasing of the same issue(s). And I'm still frustrated at the hourly separation of topics because of course I have things to say about all of them! ;-)