He then goes on to discuss some of the precedent from the Court of Appeals, as well as the conflicting opinions of the Appellate Division, First Department, which reviews his decisions on appeal. And there seems to be little doubt they will be seeing this one.

One reason the appellate court is likely to see this is that Justice Victor explicitly rejected one of its opinions calling it "questionable and out of step with the more liberal guidelines provided by the Court of Appeals" with respect to how the law is to be applied. He did this while acknowledging that it is "a precedent which ordinarily would be absolutely binding on this Court."

In his view, however, he had no choice in rejecting appellate case law. In a section of the opinion after the details of the case are explored -- a section entitled Competing Statutes and Rules of Construction -- "A Judicial Dilemna" -- he says that due to conflicts, he must choose one or the other of how to approach the "difficult and frustrating" task of a judge weeding out frivolous claims or small cases, based solely on paper submissions.

According to the judge, "This legislatively imposed task has caused more than a season of judicial discontent and frustration, it has resulted in an extremely difficult and flawed process which results too often in an inconsistent and unfair application of the law."

The decision is a must-read for any New York practitioner that deals with automobile cases and the "serious injury" threshold of our No-Fault insurance law. It is a terrific exposition on the confusing state of the law brought on by the legislature.

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asymmetry a fact of nature, or is it merely voluntary and the result of ignorance (spurred by an intensive globalist ideological propaganda program, to be sure)? Does India, for instance, need to privatize its state-owned banks as earlier was planned, or is it right to pull back? More to the point, have the neoliberal programs imposed on the former Soviet Union succeeded in their economies and raising production capacity and living standards as promised? Or, was it all a dream, indeed, a nightmare?
The three Baltic countries, for instance Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have long been praised in the Western press as great success stories. The World Bank classifies them among the most business friendly countries, and their real estate prices have soared, fueled by foreign-currency mortgages from neighboring Scandinavian banks. Their industry has been dismantled, their agriculture is in ruins, their male population below the age of 35 is emigrating. But real estate prices added to the net worth on their national balance sheets for nearly a decade. Has a new moment of truth arrived? Just because the Soviet economic system culminated in bureaucratic kleptocracy, has the neoliberal model really been so much better? Most important of all, was there a better alternative all along?
We expect the post-Soviet economies to go the way of Iceland, having taken on foreign debt with no visible means of paying it off via exports (the same situation in which the United States finds itself), or even further asset sales. Emigrants remittances are becoming a mainstay of their balance of payments, reflecting their economic shrinkage at the hands of neoliberal and the free-market international dependency that the Washington Consensus promotes. So, just as this crisis has led the U.S. government to shift gears, is it time for foreign countries to seek to become more in the character of mixed economies? This has been the route taken by every successful economy in history, after all. Total private-sector markets (in practice, markets run by the banks and money managers) have shown themselves to be just as destructive, wasteful and corrupt and, indeed, centrally planned as those of totally governments from Stalins Russia to Hitlers Germany. Is the political pendulum about to swing back more toward a better public-private balance?
Washingtons idealized picture of how free markets operate (as if such a thing ever existed) promised that countries outside the United States would get rich faster, approaching U.S.-style living standards if they let global investors buy their key industries and basic infrastructure. For half a century, this neoliberal model has been a hypocritical exercise in poor policy at best, and deception at worst, to convince other economies to impose self-destructive financial and tax policies, enabling U.S. investors to swoop in and buy their key assets at distress prices. (And for the U.S. economy to pay for these investment outflows in the form of more and more U.S. Treasury IOUs, yielding a low or even negative return when denominated in hard currencies.)
The neoliberal global system never was open in practice. America never imposed on itself the kind of shock therapy that President Clintons Treasury Secretary (and now Obamas advisor) Robert Rubin promoted in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet bloc, from the Baltic countries in the northwest to Central Asia in the southeast. Just the opposite! Despite the fact that Americas own balance of trade and payments is soaring, consumer prices are rising and financial and property markets are plunging, there are no calls among its power elite to let the system self-correct. The Treasury is subsidizing Americas financial markets so as to save its financial class (minus some sacrificial lambs) and support its asset prices. Interest rates are being lowered to re-inflate asset prices, not raised to stabilize the dollar or slow domestic price inflation.
The policy implications go far beyond the United States itself. If the United States can create so much credit so quickly and so freely and if Europe can follow suit, as it has done in recent days why cant all countries do this? Why cant they get rich by following that path that the United States actually has taken, rather than merely doing what its economic diplomats tell them to do with sweet self-serving rhetoric? U.S. experience itself provides the major reason why the free market, run by financial institutions allocating credit, is a myth, a false map of reality to substitute for actual gunboats in getting other countries to open their asset markets to U.S. investors and food markets to U.S. farmers.
By contrast, the financial and trade model that U.S. oligarchs and their allies are promoting is a double standard. Most notoriously, when the 1997 Asian financial crisis broke out, the IMF demanded that foreign governments sell out their banks and industry at fire-sale prices to foreigners. U.S. vulture capital firms were especially aggressive in grabbing Asian and other global assets. But the U.S. financial bailout stands in sharp contrast to what Washington Consensus institutions imposed on other countries. There is no intention of letting foreign investors buy into the commanding U.S. heights, except at exorbitant prices. And for industry, the United States has once more violated international trade rules by offering special bailout money and subsidies to its own Big Three U.S. automakers (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) but not to foreign-owned automakers in the United States. In thus favoring its own national industry and taking punitive measures to injure foreign-owned investments, the United States is once again providing an object lesson in nationalistic economic policy.
Most important, the U.S. bailout provides a model that is far preferable to the Washington Consensus-for-export. It shows that countries do not need to borrow credit from foreign banks at all. The government could have created its own money and credit system rather than leaving foreign creditors to accrue interest charges that now represent a permanent and seemingly irreversible balance-of-payments drain. The United States has shown that any country can monetize its own credit, at least domestic credit. A large part of the problem for Third World and post-Soviet economies is that they never experienced the successful model of managerial capitalism that predated the neoliberal model, advocated since the 1980s by Washington.
The managerial model of capitalism, predominating during the post-World War II period until the 1980s (with antecedents in 18th-century British mercantilism and 19th-century American protectionism), delivered high growth. Postwar planners, such as John Maynard Keynes in England and Harry Dexter White in the United States, favored production over finance. As Winston Churchill quipped, nations typically do the right thing [pause], after exhausting all other options. But it took two world wars, interspersed by an economic depression triggered by debts in excess of the ability to pay, to give the final nudge required to promote manufacturing over finance and finally do the right thing.
Finance was made subordinate to industrial development and full employment. When this economic philosophy reached its peak in the early 1960s, the financial sector accounted for only 2 per cent of U.S. corporate profits. Today, it is 40 per cent! Carrying charges on Americas exponentially growing debt are diverting income away from purchasing goods and services to pay creditors, who use the money mainly to lend out afresh to borrowers to bid up real estate prices and stock prices. Tangible capital investment is financed almost entirely out of retained corporate earnings and these too are being diverted to pay interest on soaring industrial debt. The result is debt deflation a shrinkage of spending power as the economic surplus is a new word, only recently added to the worlds economic vocabulary.
Since the 1980s, the U.S. tax system has promoted rent seeking and speculation on credit to ride the wave of asset-price inflation. This strategy increased balance sheets as long as asset prices rose faster than debts (that is, until last year). But it did not add to industrial capacity. And meanwhile, tax cuts caused the national debt to soar, prompting U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney to comment, Reagan proved deficits dont matter.
On the international front, the larger the U.S. trade and payments deficit, the more dollars were pumped into foreign hands. Their central banks recycled them back to the U.S. economy in the form of purchases of Treasury bonds and, when the interest rates fell almost to zero, securitized mortgage packages. Current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson assured Chinese and other foreign investors that the government would stand behind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as privatized mortgage-packaging agencies, guaranteeing a $5.2 trillion supply of mortgages. This matched in size the U.S. public debt in private hands.
Meanwhile, the Treasury cut special deals with the Saudis to recycle their oil revenues into investments in Citibank and other U.S. financial institutions investments, on which they have lost many tens of billions of dollars. To cap matters, pricing world oil in dollars kept the U.S. currency stronger than underlying economic fundamentals justified. The U.S. economy paid for its imports with government debt never intended to be repaid, even if it could be (which it cant at todays $4 trillion level, cited earlier). The American economy, thus, has seen its trade deficit and asset prices rise in accordance with economic laws that no other nation can emulate, topped by the ability to run freely into international debt without limit.
Managerial capitalism mobilized rising corporate net worth and equity value to build up in the real economy. But since the 1980s, a new breed of financial managers has pledged assets as collateral for new loans to buy back corporate stock and even to pay out as dividends. This has pushed up corporate stock prices and, with them, the value of stock options that corporate managers give themselves. But it has not spurred tangible capital formation.
A real estate bubble in all countries has been fueled by rising mortgage debt. To buy a new home, buyers must take on a lifetime of debt. This has made many employees afraid to go on strike or even to press for better working conditions, because they are one check away from homelessness, or mortgage foreclosure. Meanwhile, companies have been outsourcing and downsizing their labor force, eliminating benefits, imposing longer hours, and bringing more women and children into the workforce.
Todays new economy is based not on new technology and capital investment, as former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan trumpeted in the late 1990s, but on price inflation generating capital gains (mainly in land prices, as land is still the largest asset in the U.S. and other industrial economies). The economic surplus is absorbed by debt service payments (and higher priced health care), not investment in production or in sharing productivity gains with labor and professionals. Wages and living standards are stagnant for most people, as the economy tries to get rich by the miracle of compound interest, while capital gains emanating from the financial sector provide a foundation for new credit to bid up asset prices, all the more in a seemingly perpetual motion credit-and-debt machine. But the effect has been for the richest 1 per cent of the population to increase its share of interest extraction, dividends and capital gains from 37 per cent ten years ago to 57 per cent five years ago, and nearly 70 per cent today. Savings remain high, but only the wealthiest 10 per cent are saving and this money is being lent out to the bottom 90 per cent, so no net saving is occurring.
Internationally, too, the global economy has polarized rather than converged. Just as independence arrived for many Third World countries only after their former European colonial powers had put in place inequitable land tenure patterns (latifundia, owned by domestic oligarchies) and export-oriented production, so independence for the post-Soviet countries from Russia arrived after managerial capitalism had given way to a neoliberal model that viewed wealth creation simply as rising prices for real estate, stocks and bonds. Western advisors and former emigrants descended to convince these countries to play the same game that other countries were playing except that real estate debt for many of these countries was denominated in foreign currency, as no domestic banking tradition had been developed. This became increasingly dangerous for economies that did not put in place sufficient export capacity to cover the price of imports and the mounting volume of foreign-currency debt attached to their real estate. And nearly all the post-Soviet countries ran structural trade deficit, as production patterns were disrupted with the breakup of the U.S.S.R.
Real estate and capital gains from asset-price inflation (not industrial capital formation) were promoted as the way to future prosperity in countries whose profits from manufacturing were low and wages were stagnant. The problem is this alchemy is not sustainable. An illusion of success could be maintained as long as Washington was flooding the globe with cheap money. This led Swedes and other Europeans to find capital gains by extending loans to feed neighboring countries from Iceland to Latvia, above all via their real estate markets. For some exporters (especially Russia), rising oil and metal export prices became the basis for capital outflows into Third World and post-Soviet financial markets. Some of the backwash, for example, flowed into the worlds burgeoning offshore banking and real estate sectors only to stop abruptly when the real estate bubble burst.
In these circumstances, what is to be done? First, countries outside the United States need to recognize how dysfunctional the neoliberalized world economy has been made, and to decide which assumptions underlying the neoliberal model must be discarded. Its preferred tax and financial policies favor finance over industry and, hence, financial maneuvering and asset-price inflation over tangible capital formation. Its anti-labor austerity policies and un-taxing of real estate, stocks and bonds divert resources away from growth and rising living standards.
Likewise destructive are compound interest and capital gains over the long term. The real economy can grow only a few per cent a year at best. Therefore, it is mathematically impossible for compound interest to continue unabated and for capital gains to grow well in excess of the underlying rate of economic growth. Historically, economic crises wipe out these gains when they outpace real economic growth by too far a margin. The moral is that compound interest and hopes for capital gains cannot guarantee income for its retirees or continue attracting foreign capital. Over a period of a lifetime, financial investments may not deliver significant gains. For the United States, it took markets about twenty-five years, from 1929 to the mid-1950s, to recover their previous value.
Todays desperate U.S. attempt to re-inflate post-crash prices cannot cure the bad-debt problem. Foreign attempts to do this will merely aid foreign bankers and financial investors, not the domestic economy. Countries need to invest in their real economy, to raise productivity and wages. Governments must punish speculation and capital gains that merely reflect asset-price inflation, not real value. Otherwise, the real economys productive powers and living standards will be impaired and, in the neoliberal model, loaded down with debt. Policies should encourage enterprise, not speculation. Investment seeks growing markets, which tend to be thwarted by macroeconomic targets such as low inflation and balanced budgets. We are not arguing that inflation and deficits can be ignored, but rather that inflation and deficits are not all created equally. Some variants hurt the economy, while others reflect healthy investment in real production. Distinguishing between the two effects is vital, if economies are to move forward to achieve self-dependency.
In sum, a much better economy can be created by rejecting Washingtons financial model of austerity programs, privatization selloffs and trade dependency, financed by foreign-currency credit. Prosperity cannot be achieved by creating a favorable climate for extractive foreign capital, or by tightening credit and balancing budgets, decade after decade. The United States itself has always rejected these policies, and foreign countries also must do this if they wish to follow the policies, by which America actually grew rich, not by what U.S. neoliberal advisors tell other countries to do to please U.S. banks and foreign investors.
Also to be rejected is the anti-labor neoliberal tax policy (heavy taxes on employees and employers, low or zero taxes on real estate, finance and capital gains) and anti-labor workplace policies, ranging from safety protection and health care to working conditions. The U.S. economy rose to dominance as a result of Progressive Era regulatory reforms prior to World War I, reinforced by popular New Deal reforms put in place in the Great Depression. Neoliberal economics was promoted as a means of undoing these reforms. By undoing them, the Washington Consensus would deny to foreign countries the development strategy that has best succeeded in creating thriving domestic markets, rising productivity, capital formation and living standards. The effect has been to decouple saving from tangible capital formation. They need to be re-coupled, and this can be achieved only by restoring the kind of mixed economy by which North America and Europe achieved their economic growth.

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What is a debit card?
A debit card is one form of plastic money that is linked to your bank account and is as good as cash. You can use it in merchant establishments and pay up or use it in an ATM to withdraw cash.
What are the ten words on using debit cards and personal finance advice?
1. A debit card is an excellent means to replace your cash. It eases you off the burden of carrying cash and at the same time provides you with the convenience of cash.
2. Unlike cash you can keep track of the payments made through your debit card. This will help in keeping track of your personal finances as you may not remember where you spent that $18 last week if they go from cash but you will have an entry in the bank if you spend it through the debit card.
3. You must handle the PIN number and identification details carefully. Most people are in the habit of storing their pins in their mobiles. While it is good to store the pin in a place that you can later retrieve from easily it should not be too easily viewable to others. What you can do is instead of storing your PIN as just the four or five digit number you can make it look like a phone number with the last digits the same as your PIN.
4. Debit cards and personal finance advice are good instruments for people who are in the habit of overspending on their credit cards. You can have the convenience of plastic money and at the same time cut yourself off that unwanted credit limit by developing a habit of using your debit instead of your credit card at all places.
5. If your debit card however is stolen it is relatively easier to be used than a credit card. This is because you can block your credit and stop payment in the case of a credit card but as soon as the debit card is used the money in your account is gone and therefore the first thing that you should do if the debit card is stolen is to call up your bank and inform them and stop the card transactions immediately without doing anything else.
6. Here’s good debit cards and personal finance advice - Don’t give out your personal financial information about the debit or credit card over the phone or on the internet. In one incident an individual who was booking airline tickets was giving out his personal financial information over the phone and while the airline company did not cheat him he was overheard and since only numbers are required for online banking even without physically having the card the guy who overheard him still misused his card.
7. With phishing attacks and viruses and Trojans becoming more and more sophisticated one can never be too careful while giving out their personal finance information over the internet. The key is to make sure that there are a few websites only which you use to purchase online and you make yourself familiar with them so that if there is any attempt of creating a mirror website and tricking you off your details you can spot something fishy and report to the authorities immediately.
8. Debit cards act as a good mechanism for parents whose children are going out to college and are going to live separately. While on one hand it gives the parents the comfort to know that their children can get access to cash whenever needed at the other hand it also gives them a track of where the money is going and how frequently are the withdrawals being made.
9. Another key thing to note is that while there is no fee for using debit cards normally if you are using debit cards and personal finance advice of one bank in the ATM of another bank there may be some fee attached to it. This is generally high as banks figure you will only do so when faced with no other option. So you should indeed do it when having no other option and keep at the back of your mind that its always better to not spend another couple of dollars when there is an option of saving it.
10. And the last one which we all know but no one really does is its best to keep changing your identification number frequently as even if it leaks once the numbers can’t be used after a certain time period.

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a poem by Steven Cramer, stinks to the highest reaches of irony, and its a fine thing too.A monologue in essence, the essence of which is the voice of what we consume processed and reduced to its fouler essences in turn. This is the food we eat and the drinks we imbibe with all the cosmetics of preparation removed, after all the benefits (nutrition, energy) and debits ( obesity, high blood pressure) have been had. Insulted, railed against, invariably used as a pejorative, equated with the foulest intents and deeds a race is capable of, sewage finds its voice, it talks back to the world that is other wise obliged to consume and make crap and crud an unavoidable consequence; there is hypocrisy here, the fetid mess proclaims, everything winds up in this repulsive stew:
Give me roots prying into the joints
of your main waste line, Charmin
thickening her web first to a nest,
then to a dam, and Ill sluice in reverse,
top the basement tub and spill
into a poem! Damn! Ive sunken
to new heights! Will you take
a hint and stomach your disgust?
What does The Thinker look like
hes doing? How come Luther heard
Gods thunderclap of justice via faith
whilst sitting on the privy?
Steven Cramer has an especially acute wit to imagine a dark mass taking on a voice one could imagine being intoned by a hammy Shakespearean actor intent on over-emoting the lines, a misunderstood and maligned end product talking shop with a product, Charmin, thats ostensibly dedicated to wiping it out. But wipe as much you can, the stinking sludge maintains, you will become part of this flushed proletariat, these breakdowns of food stuffs, fecal encrusted tissues, diapers, sanitary napkins, condoms, illegal drugs and syringes.
At the heart of the matter is that is we really are what we eat, echoing an otherwise stale counter culture cliche, and regardless of how we gussy up the chambers with spray-can aroma, disinfectants, no matter how much art and artifice we set around our dinner table preparations, regardless to what extreme we pervert language to raise our collective self image and have our race be at the top of the food chain, we are in the food chain none the less, inseparable, consuming vast amounts of products to keep the mortal body a going concern, producing waste in all varieties, forms.
You knowwhere loves pitched his mansion, so
dont shower so much. Squeaky cleans
for mice. No soaps got enough tallow
to wash out the mouth mouthing off.
What made you so nice? Polites
kind of like death, isnt it? Okay, not
quite. But consider this, my sweet kin
in excretion: to flies we taste like candy.
Whether its The Thinker or Theologians considering the feasibility of a personal God, everything resembles the process of taking a dump, a long and ponderous crap, the moment when every idea one has absorbed in passing finally passes through us, if were lucky enough, leaving only that bit of nutritional purity that has helped us grow, come up with an idea, an invention, a poem that is truly our own. Steven Cramers personification of an unspeakable and limitless mass of stinking waste as having a voice to raise in its irony-citing defense is an excellent bit of wit.
The literary references are less self conscious than such citations usually are since his point is to reduce the space between humanitys greatest conceit as an elevated species and the inevitability of its least appealing biological requirements. Everything is shit, like it or not, all is waste, the finest poems become sludge. One needs to embrace the fact, if not the cistern that contains the messenger.

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Buying a laptop computer isnt something that you should go into lightly; its something that you should do an ample amount of research on before making your final decision. Laptop computers are often quite a bit more expensive than comparable desktop computers, so a high quality laptop can be a pretty big investment.
Do You Really Need a Laptop?
This is a very important question to ask yourself. If you wont be required to travel with your computer for business or school, a desktop computer may be a better option because it will most likely be faster, have more memory and be much easier to upgrade.
If you are really pressed for space or if you absolutely need all of your information to be portable then a laptop may very well be your only option, but there are even more laptops to choose from than desktops, so its important to choose wisely.
Which One Should I buy?
Once you decide that a laptop computer is the type of computer that youll need, youll have to narrow the wide field down to the option that best suits your situation.
A quick visit to the Dell Computers website will show you just how many different laptop and notebook computers there are to choose from. Models come in different weights (from under five pounds to well over seven pounds), different screen sizes (from under nine inches to over fifteen inches), different sized hard drives and a whole host of other options and accessories.
Dont Get Overwhelmed
Dont let the myriad of choices make you think that you need more than you actually do. Sit down and think about everything that you will be using the computer for and that should put direct focus on the options that will be best for you. Ask yourself questions like: How many USB ports will I need? Will I need a high speed CD/DVD drive? Will I need to be accessing the internet while Im on the road?
The Dell computer website has a helpful selector that will aide you in the process of narrowing down which model of laptop and which accessories will best be suited for your particular situation.
Where should I get it?
When considering purchasing a laptop, your best bet is to do your research and shopping online. You wont be able to have immediate access to your laptop computer this way, but laptop and notebook computers are lightweight and easily shipped. The sheer multitude of options that youll be able to choose from online is much greater than you would have been able to see in any store, so it will be much easier and more likely that youll find a laptop computer that is a perfect match for your needs.
Online shopping is convenient, not to mention faster than in store shopping, and you can often find better deals online than you can in stores, so youll very likely be able to save a good bit of money. If youre buying a high quality, state of the art laptop computer, the price tag could potentially be very hefty, so every bit of money that you can save will be helpful.
Do I need an Extended Warranty?
Many people think that buying an extended warranty is a waste of money and those people may very well be correct in most cases, but one purchase that youll want to shell out the extra cash for the longer warranty is on your laptop.
Laptop computers are fragile pieces of equipment that youll be lugging around with you everywhere you go. Theyll likely get banged and bumped around, something inside may become jarred loose, the monitor or case may crack - you really never know what could happen. If you lay down the extra loot for a three year warranty, your investment will be safer for those two extra years over the manufacturers standard one year warranty - with a piece of equipment like a laptop computer an extended warranty is a very worthwhile investment.

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Got this information from http://www.obcgs.com/. Have it as some of my permanent "Great Asheville Info" and wanted to share it.
Asheville is located at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers. Buncombe County rests in a central area of a high plateau bordered by the Blue Ridge, Great Craggies and Black Mountains on the east and the Great Smokies chain of the Appalachians on the west. Recorded history began with the visit of Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto to Western North Carolina In 1540. Trade was first established with the Cherokee Indians In 1643. Early trading paths followed established Indian routes which crossed at Asheville's present location. At the time of the revolution, the English had established the limits of colonial expansion westward to the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This assurance of territorial Integrity aligned the Cherokee with the British. Cherokee raids on colonial settlements brought a force of colonists headed by General Griffith Rutherford Into Western North
Carolina In 1776, He destroyed Cherokee villages and broke the power of the nation.
Early settlers were largely Scotch-Irish Immigrants from Ulster in Northern Ireland, where restrictive British tariffs had ruined the wool and weaving industries. Samuel W. Davidson and his family were the first to settle in Buncombe County on Christian Creek In the Swannanoa Valley in 1784. He was later killed by Indians. He is buried on Jones Mountain. A permanent settlement was established there in 1785 in what was then known as 'Eden Land.' In later years Davy Crockett courted and wed Elizabeth Patton, a member of a leading Swannanoa family.
The County of Buncombe was established on December 5. 1791 by an act of the legislature, initiated by William Davidson and Colonel David Vance. A log courthouse was constructed in 1793 at a point which is now Pack Square. A year later John Burton obtained state grants of land for the establishment of a settlement he called Morristown. He laid out 42 half-acre lots which sold for roughly $2.50. Three years later, In 1797, it was incorporated and renamed Asheville In honor of Governor Samuel Ashe.
Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian circuit riders brought religion to the settlers of the Southern Appalachians In the early 1800s. Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury was the most noted of these. In 1840 Asheville's population was 500; to 1860 - 1,100; 1880 - 2,610; 1890 - 10,237; 1900 - 14,694; 1930 - 50,193; 1970 - 57,681. The 1980 U.S. Census showed Asheville's population to be 60,500. and the population of Buncombe County to be 162,000. In 1828 a road following the French Broad River was completed to East Tennessee. With It wagons of settlers moving west began coming through Asheville, while droves from Tennessee and Kentucky moved herds of cattle, sheep, hogs and turkeys through to the population centers of South Carolina.
The town's growth was further stimulated by the completion of the "Asheville and Greenville Plank Road' in 1851. The wealthy and favored began to come ~o Asheville aboard four and six horse stages. The city's reputation as a health resort began to grow. When the War Between the States broke out. Asheville became a major Confederate military center. The Buncombe Rifles, first company organized west of the Blue Ridge, marched forth on April 18, 1861, with a flag made of silk dresses of the belles of the town. Captain Zebulon Vance organized shortly thereafter the Rough and Ready Guards. Of the ten companies of the 6Oth North Carolina Regiment, seven of them were Buncombe County men. An early and flourishing industry was the making of Enfield Rifles, prized by Confederate soldiers for their accuracy.
In 1878, Asheville and Western North Carolina acquired the descriptive phrase "The Land Of The Sky" which derived from a well known book by Mrs. Frances Tiernan of Salisbury, writing under the name of Christian Reid. The nickname quickly caught the attention of thousands and spread Buncombe's fame more widely than ever. When the railroad broke through the Eastern continental divide in 1880, a new era was launched for Asheville and Western North Carolina. Elaborate hotels were built, including the Battery Park In 1889. From its vantage point on "Stoney Hill," George W. Vanderbilt discovered what he described as the most beautiful spot in the world. He purchased 145,000 acres and began building one of the great country houses of the world, Biltmore House. Great religious assemblies were established In the area. A grand opera house was built, and a convention auditorium followed.
In 1900, a newly organized chamber of commerce, the "Asheville Board of Trade," launched national advertising, and proclaimed the city to be one of the "leading convention cities In the country." A new wave of luxury hotel construction began: the Langren in 1912, the unbelievable Grove Park Inn In 1913, the new Kenilworth Inn in 1918 ... and with Battery Park. The break of the land boom, followed by the great depression of the early 1930s brought financial ruin to Asheville, from which It was slow to recover. However, during this period two great natural attractions were in the making: the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway, which were to make the Asheville area the most visited recreational area in the country.
At the present time Asheville enjoys a broadly based economy supported by a thriving travel industry, conventions, widely diversified Industry, forestry and agriculture. In 1980, Buncombe County's industries Include BASF, Square D., Gerber, Ball Corporation, Beacon end Sybron/Taylor. Asheville is the junction point of two Interstate highways, 26 and 40. It is the hub of five federal highways, two Appalachian development highways, five state highways and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Southern Railway serves Asheville. The modern Asheville Airport is served by Piedmont Airlines, plus commuter airlines. The Asheville-Buncombe Consolidated Water District reservoir holds 6 billion gallons, and is centered In a remote timbered watershed covering 24 square miles. Buncombe County was served by a new $10,400.00 sewage disposal system. In 1970, Asheville earned the designation "All American City." A
new Civic Center was completed In early 1974. Asheville's most famous native son is author Thomas Wolfe, whose boyhood home is open to the public as a memorial. Evangelist Billy Graham is Asheville's most world renown citizen. - The Historic News, Feb. 1999
LOL... I have talked to people that really got upset when I told them that "Southern" is not a nationality, but some locals knew their history and family tree for a hundreds of years. Nice! I think... Maybe the older I get, the more interested in history I become? The photo above is by Ben Pierce on Flickr.com.

*To see the future of Asheville, please see http://www.askasheville.

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Collisions with Deer and Moose Spike This Holiday Season Fatal Crashes Up 50% Since 2000 November is the peak month for vehicle-deer collisions, and a new analysis of insurance claims and federal crash data indicate the problem is growing. The Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), an affiliate of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), recently examined insurance claims for animal strikes under comprehensive coverage month by month from January 2005 through April 2008. The main finding is that insurance claims for animal collisions are nearly 3 times higher during November than the typical month earlier in the year. For example, for every 1,000 insured vehicles 14 claims were filed in November 2007, compared with an average of 5 claims per 1,000 during January-September. Insurance claims usually dont specify the animal involved, but other data show that deer are the main ones.
Most vehicle-animal collisions arent severe enough to injure people, but data from the federal government show that crash deaths are increasing. In 1993, 101 people died in crashes involving animals. By 2000, the number was 150, and in 2007 it was 223. The states with the largest number of total deaths are Texas with 227 deaths during 1993-2007, Wisconsin with 123, and Pennsylvania with 112.
Analyzing monthly data on fatal crashes of passenger vehicles and animals during the past 3 years, IIHS researchers found patterns similar to those reported by HLDI. Depending on the year, the crash deaths occurred most frequently in October or November.

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