Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, defying a directive sent to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.
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The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.

“Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week,” Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his “doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice” and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

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In a string of e-mail messages with his superiors, Eason was told he could either lower the flags or retire effective immediately.

Though he’s only 51, Eason chose to retire, although he pleaded several times to be allowed to stay at the lab. Eason, who had worked for the Agriculture Department since graduating from college, was paid $65,235 a year as the laboratory manager.

He clearly gave up the ghost before one of them colored fellers became Preznit.

Yes, I really do wish he’d hung on until Nov. 5.

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Ordering the deaths of innocent civilians is OK if one is “deeply religious”? I wonder if he ever ran that one by Jesus.

I love this TBogg, I laughed so hard my stomach ached.

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

Forget marriage — we can’t even work in the same factories.

As a lifelong North Carolinian and a childhood member of the church Jesse attended (once every six years, anyway), I am glad he is dead and gone; it should have happened forty years ago. Apparently he’d been near-catatonic from stroke-caused dementia in a local rest home for the last few years. Too bad; it would have been nice if he could have felt and remembered his pain.

“CANNIBALISM”? What grade school is teaching “CANNIBALISM”? Did anyone question Jesse on that? What the hell is going on in North Carolina? I want answers.