The health-care analyst and wife of former U.S. Sen. John Edwards wrote Politico to quell speculation that her absence at a recent rally for Barack Obama and recent praise for Hillary Rodham Clinton's health-care plan meant she was backing Clinton.

"Hillary's health-care plan is closer to what I want to see than Barack's," she wrote. "As a spouse, it is not surprising that I have a very small change purse of political capital and I have repeatedly said that I was going to use my capital, such as it is, for the issues about which I care and not on an endorsement."

She also noted that she personally likes both Obama and Clinton and their respective spouses.

"Do we play Boggle together or go biking together? No, although it would be okay with me if we did," she wrote. "They are interesting, compelling people with many of the same thoughts as I have about the issues that confront us."

Ethics Act bill gets boost

A bill that would prohibit the state auditor from enforcing the state's Ethics Act will move forward.

The Legislative Ethics Committee voted Tuesday to have the bill filed with the understanding that it's still got some kinks to fix. The bill would designate the N.C. State Ethics Commission, created in 2007 in response to a series of scandals, as the sole entity charged with enforcing the act.

The bill has come up because State Auditor Les Merritt, a Republican, has investigated a legislator for potential ethics violations. He supports having the ability to investigate ethics violations. Ethics Commission members and staff say that the commission is best suited to the job.

Merritt's chief deputy, Kris Bailey, told the committee that the bill could interfere with the auditor's ability to do his job. At the minimum, audits would have to carry a sentence stating that the audit might be incomplete because of the limitations placed upon his office by state law.

Figuring out how to keep the auditor from the Ethics Act without interfering with his other duties will be the next task for the committee, members said.

Geddings will persist

Former N.C. lottery commissioner Kevin Geddings will appeal his case further, his attorney said Tuesday, a day after a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court upheld Geddings' public corruption conviction.

Geddings will appeal his case to the full nine judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., according to Jonathan Edelstein, his attorney.

"There are several issues of importance in this appeal that have been the subject of a judicial conversation all over the country in terms of limiting the scope of honest-services fraud," said Edelstein, of New York.

Geddings was convicted in 2006 of a federal charge of depriving the public of his honest services. He concealed that he had done thousands of dollars' worth of work for a lottery vendor when he accepted a seat on the state lottery commission in 2005. He did not disclose the work for Scientific Games on his state ethics form.

He is serving a four-year sentence at a federal prison camp in Jessup, Ga.

On Monday, a three-judge panel from the appeals court rejected arguments that Edelstein made before the panel in February that the honest-services law was being interpreted too broadly. He emphasized that Geddings did not try to profit from his lottery commission post and that he did no work for the company after joining the commission.

The next step for Geddings is to ask all nine of the 4th Circuit's judges to hear the case, which Edelstein said he would do. Another lawyer in the case, Gene Matthews of Columbia, S.C., spoke with Geddings, who asked for the further appeal, Edelstein said.

"If necessary," he said, "we may end up going [to the U.S. Supreme Court]."

(Mark Johnson of The Charlotte Observer contributed to this report.)