Our first murdered president, Abraham Lincoln, was for all practical purposes a casualty of the national crisis whose outcome he had done so much to determine. Lincoln's leadership had been indispensable to the North's victory in the Civil War and so to the end of American slavery and preservation of the Union. While he wasn't knowingly putting himself in mortal danger when he went to see a play on the evening of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, he became a martyr all the same.

John Edwards, campaigning of late in do-or-die South Carolina, has been laboring mightily to inject some noticeable giddy-up into his run for the White House. Oops, getting ahead of the game: With the Democratic presidential nomination still dramatically in play, Edwards is running for the White House only in a figurative sense. Winning that nomination is the big hurdle now, obviously enough. So the Tar Heel senator will have to perform respectably in the kickoff Democratic showcases of Iowa and New Hampshire, even if victories there are beyond reach considering the strength of rivals such as Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean.

Years down the road, when the nation's candidates for public office are conjuring with how far they legally can go in ripping their opponents, might they harken back to the famous North Carolina lawsuit pitting Dan Boyce against Roy Cooper? The Boyce vs. Cooper battle has been in the news lately because of questions raised about the impartiality of some election officials and judges. Campaign contributions -- is anybody shocked? -- were what incited the finger-pointers.

So are the folks at UNC-Chapel Hill -- or simply "Carolina" as they like to call the place, suggesting that their self-regard may in fact have cosmic dimensions -- so snooty as to prefer not to have to cast their pearls before the daughters and sons of mere North Carolinians? We're assured that the answer must be in the negative: Nope, nope, a thousand times nope.

During my two years, nine months in uniform, in which capacity I carried a camera for the Army, I took lots of pictures at various headquarters and had a reasonable amount of contact (nothing chatty, to be sure) with a couple of brigadier generals. One of them was promoted to major general (two stars), in charge of the 1st Signal Brigade in Vietnam, while I was his de facto staff photographer. Essentially this fellow -- Thomas Matthew Rienzi, if you're curious -- was in charge of a telephone company in the midst of a war zone. He struck me as a highly capable executive and leader. Still, as military brass go, he was relatively low on the totem pole.

For the developers, contractors, lawyers, bankers, real estate agents and everybody else who's been hoping to see Cary regain its title as the Numero Uno Tar Heel Boom Town, it matters little that last week's election failed to settle the issue of who will be mayor for the next four years. What matters to them is that -- whew! -- the mayor won't be Glen Lang. When Lang erupted onto the Cary political scene in 1997, he brought a whole new dimension to the word "brash."

You slaved away in North Carolina's emergency operations center during the gut-grinding run-up to Hurricane Isabel for heaven knows how many hours. Then the storm ripped into the Outer Banks and blasted a swath of havoc through the eastern counties. You helped gauge the damage, coordinate rescues, get relief supplies rolling. You're tired, stressed-out, hungry. What's this -- someone handing out doughnuts? Must be an angel of mercy!

Reading through John Edwards' speech declaring himself a candidate for the White House -- a speech that was, sadly for Edwards, trumped by an out-of-nowhere rival -- I was struck by just how difficult it must be to write such a speech. It's like the ultimate job application letter. How many people could stand there and say, "I'm running for president and here's why," and expect to be taken at all seriously? How many could make that announcement and not leave listeners laughing so hard the tears ran down their faces?

Whatever else can be said about the practice field the U.S. Navy intends to build near Plymouth -- and there's plenty of food for discussion -- this swatch of Washington County boondocks is likely to draw people who get a kick out of watching high-performance aircraft. No telling how close gawkers will be able to get to the strip where F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets will be put through their paces as pilots hone the skills they need for that most formidable of maneuvers: landing on a carrier. But even if we civilians have to stay outside the gates and well clear of the action, there figures to be enough of those hot planes around to give sightseers a thrill.

Some days it must be what Governor Easley wants more than anything else in the world: a request for clemency in a death penalty case that is so ridiculously unwarranted that he can give it the old heave-ho with nary a twinge of doubt. Sorry, guv. They just don't make 'em like that any more, or so it seems.

Scads of N.C. Central University students ousted from their dorms by infestations of toxic mold now are making do as guests of various Durham hostelries -- not a bad deal in creature-comfort terms, but still a losing proposition when it comes to campus access and ambience. For years, building maintenance and repair on the campus has been a study in neglect -- not because university officials haven't known it was needed, but because they couldn't afford it. Now students are paying the price. Along with the university, that is, which has to put the students up in rented quarters, while still having to go back and remove the mold and fix the problems that let the mold grab hold.

Listen carefully and you can hear them: Tar Heel mamas imploring their young'uns to please, please, pretty please not grow up with any idea of making a living in the textile industry. We're here to tell you -- having been enlightened by someone who should know -- that the outlook in textiles is nowhere near that bleak. In fact, unmistakable shadows notwithstanding, the industry in some ways can be said to shape up as a zone of bright promise.