Phil Hardwick

The March 24th edition of QUORUM on MPB focused on the state's economic and employment prospects. The programs are now archived on YouTube . This one is well worth watching if you want to understand current economic conditions in Mississippi. Click here to view the program. The panel consisted of Gray Swoope, executive director of the Mississippi Development Authority ; Mississippi Economic Council president Blake Wilson; and Maury Granger, chairman of the Department of Economics at Jackson State University . To view archived editions of Quorum go to YouTube.com and search for quorum mpb.

The Southern Education Foundation just released a new brief, Miles to Go - Mississippi, Pre-Kindergarten: Time to Begin , which documents the impact of education on poverty and which makes the case for Mississippi to establish a Pre-K program. The brief gives the adult unemployment rates in Mississippi by educational level, as follows: high school dropout: 15.7% high school/GED graduate: 10.6% some college: 8.5% bachelor's degree and higher: 4.7% Those figures were as of December 2009. Education makes a huge difference even in distressed economic times.

A community is more than a place. It is a collection of people with a common interest. That interest might be anything from sports to religion to politics. It often amazes me how people who have the same interest have a way of finding each other in a crowd. But what about people who move to a new town and want to find others who share their same interests? It can be tome-consuming and difficult. Or what about people who want to start a community if people with a certain interest? Fortunately, there is an excellent online tool to assist in creating communities. It’s called Meetup , and it describes itself as follows: Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities. Meetup ’s mission is to revitalize lo

Are you conservative, moderate or liberal? Or are you traditional, neocon or libertarian? Republican, Democrat or Independent? Do you consider yourself a Progressive? Perhaps you are some of these some of the time, but not all of them all of the time. Whatever the case, political labels can be tricky. Certain labels mean one thing in one part of the country and another in another part of the country. Governor Bill Ritter presides over the "moderate" state of Colorado, but is having difficulty governing from the center . (Perhaps we should add "centrist" to the label list above.) Ritter ran as a pro-business Democrat. How many people do you know who would say that term is an oxymoron? City-Data.com is a Web site that gives people the opportunity to discuss just about everything related to places in the United State. Postings in the "Most conservative states, cities" section reveal how the label issue can be defined in many ways. The Gallup o

A just-released report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism has some good news for Howard, Maggie and their colleagues at WLBT-TV, a Jackson, Mississippi television station. The local television station is still the number one source for Americans. The rest of the story – actually the main story – is that we news consumers are utilizing multiple formats, and that the Internet has moved ahead of radio and newspapers as news sources. In this writer’s younger days it was network news and the local newspaper. These sources were supplemented by magazines. Today it’s the Internet, tv news, radio, newspapers, etc. Although the sources have changed, what is really new is the instant feedback from readers to news stories. Instead of waiting until tomorrow to discuss the news with a co-worker I can read multiple reader reactions posts on the news source’s Web site. Some other findings from the study: Portable : 33% of