Each day, tractor-trailers unload goods at warehouses or stores in and around Charlotte. For many, the stop marks a brief foray into North Carolina. They’ve come from Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga., or distributioncenters set up along interstate highways to serve those ports.

For as long as anyone has kept track, the most influential lobbyists in Raleigh have been colorful characters who rose to the top of their trade on their connections and ability to schmooze prickly legislators.

My daddy was a union man, but he didn’t cut a particularly proletarian figure in the custom-tailored suit and Sinatra-style, short-brim fedora he favored upon shedding his blue twill uniform for a night on the town. Then again, the Plumbers and Pipefitters union had been part of the American Federation of Labor — “skilled craftsmen, the aristocracy of labor,” he was quick to remind us - before its merger with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955.

Perhaps you look at the embarrassing debacle in Roanoke Rapids involving the publicly financed theater overseen by Randy Parton and think, “Well, when you lie down with third-tier country singers, you get up with a huge debt andpublic scorn.” I look at that same mess and think, “Did we learn nothing from Global TransPark and the North Carolina Information Highway?”

Landscapers and lawn-care companies feel picked on these days. They really shouldn’t. They may soon have plenty of company when it comes to how water, or the lack thereof, affects businesses in North Carolina.

Every four years, North Carolina Republicans talk about ending the Democrats’ stranglehold on political power in the state. And every four years, Democrats usually beat them back.

Despite some winter rain, North Carolina is still mighty dry. In mid-January, more than half the population was subject to mandatory water restrictions. An additional 25% was under voluntary restrictions. How has the drought affected the state economy?

In a piece he recently wrote for The Washington Post, David Simon — the former cops reporter who is the creative force behind what many consider the best-written show on television — recalls what it was like as one of the “starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches[.]”

Hey, Mecklenburg County: You snooze, you lose. Gaston County has taken center stage as the possible site of a detention center for illegal immigrants after the project’s main proponent, Rep. Sue Myrick, announced that “insurmountable obstacles” were dragging out the process in her home county.

The impact of blacks on the state economy should grow by more than a third between 2004 and 2009, according to a study done by the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC Chapel Hill and funded by the North Carolina Institute of Minority Economic Development. But if Tar Heel businesses don’t wise up, gains by blacks could end up in other states, says James H. Johnson Jr., a study co-author and professor of entrepreneurship at Carolina.