On a recent Tuesday earlier this month, the North Carolina legislature – which had gathered in Raleigh for a special session solely for this purpose – voted to give two huge corporations $60 million in incentives to ensure that their industrial facilities wouldn’t be relocated to another state. It was the legislative equivalent to a homely girl paying the handsome jock to occasionally take her out on a date: pitiful, needy and utterly lacking in self-esteem.

A couple of days after that vote, I came across a news article about how the founders of Google had worked out a deal to park their personal private jet at a federally operated airstrip just minutes from their headquarters in Mountain View, California. The airstrip is normally closed to private use, and other Silicon Valley tycoons have to fight traffic to get to their jets at faraway airports. But the Google boys threw a little money at the feds to clinch the deal. God knows they’ve got it to toss around. The two founders of Google are tied for No. 5 on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. The Wall Street Journal estimated the pair spent in the neighborhood of $15 million for the used Boeing 767, and then invested at least $10 million more for upgrades like private staterooms with king-size beds.

What’s the connection between those two events? Well, you may recall that Google was yet another handsome jock that the NC legislature paid for its affection. It got tax breaks totaling $260 million from the state and local governments to locate a plant in Lenoir – or to put it more vividly, it got ten more upgraded jumbo jets from us, the taxpayers.

What did my pal David, who built a one-man marketing business operated out of his spare bedroom into a thriving firm employing a half-dozen people, get in the way of tax breaks and incentives from the legislature? A steaming pile of squat.

Forget about asking how this is fair. Clearly, it’s not. In fact, the state’s one effort at fairness ended up costing taxpayers even more. The aforementioned $60 million incentive deal started out as a $40 million package of goodies to Goodyear Tire & Rubber, which has a plant in Fayetteville. But after Gov. Mike Easley vetoed that giveaway, the legislature tweaked it – in the name of fairness – to give $20 million to Bridgestone Firestone, too, which operates a competing tire plant in Wilson. Oh, yeah. That’s better.

So instead of asking about fairness, ask how it can be legal. That’s what the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law has done with its court challenges to the legislative giveaways. So far, the institute’s efforts have seemed like a Quixote-like crusade to have such giveaways declared unconstitutional. But all it needs is one favorable decision from one judge to get the issue rolling.

It seems like a straightforward matter to me. Our tax laws may be a patchwork quilt of deductions and benefits, but they’re still equally available (at least loosely) to all. Not everybody gets a tax break for dependent children, for instance, but if you’re not getting that break it’s because you’ve chosen to not have or adopt a child. But passing laws that give tax breaks only to specifically named companies is blatantly unjust. It’s as if the legislature had decided that your neighbor should get a bigger dependent-child tax break because it thinks his kids are better-looking than yours.

I’m sure your children are cuter than kittens. But the North Carolina legislature gets homelier by the day.

Ever since the Weekly World News published its last issue a couple of months ago, consumers of a certain genre of journalism — a group in which I proudly claim membership — have had to scavenge their pickings wherever they could find them. My local newspaper made it easy for me yesterday with this item, which I reproduce here in its totality for you, the loyal reader. I give give give and never take. That’s just how I am.

MAIDEN, N.C. (AP) - A man who bought a smoker Tuesday at an auction of abandoned items might have thought twice had he looked inside first.

Maiden police said the man opened up the smoker and saw what he thought was a piece of driftwood wrapped in paper. When he unwrapped it, he found a human leg, cut off 2 to 3 inches above the knee.

The smoker had been sold at an auction of items left behind at a storage facility, so investigators contacted the mother and son who had rented the space where the smoker was found.

The mother explained her son had his leg amputated after a plane crash and kept the leg following the surgery. The mother said her son plans to drive to Maiden, about 35 miles northwest of Charlotte, to reclaim his amputated leg, police said

I did a quick Google search and learned, just as I suspected, that this little news nugget has likely circled the globe. I found it on the web sites of newspapers from coast to coast, and as far away as Ireland. All around the world, people are surely asking themselves a multitude of questions about North Carolina. I can imagine what they are because, frankly, I’d like to know these things myself:

Is the saving of severed limbs a tradition in certain parts of North Carolina? Had the leg actually been smoked, or is it just common for amputees to store their limbs in unused cooking devices? Has anyone checked that guy’s stove for other amputated limbs? Do Tar Heel hospitals typically wrap and bag amputated limbs for you, or do you have to request that as a special service? Would insurance cover it? Was the leg covered in a newspaper or something like Christmas wrapping? If it was a newspaper, which section? (In a perfect world, Health and Science.) If it was Christmas wrapping, did it have fun, happy Santas printed upon it, or somber wise men? Doesn’t the leg legally now belong to the man who bought the smoker? Has he agreed to give it back? What would an abandoned leg fetch on eBay?

It’s a moment like this when I most wish I was still in the newspaper business. I’d find the answers to those questions for you because I would consider it my selfless duty to do so. That’s just how I am.

I don’t wish to be impertinent here, especially since we Americans have just completed a hearty round of self-congratulation for being so committed to free speech that we can even make room for the reprehensible Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the bully pulpit. Still, I have to ask:

Isn’t it just a tad impolite to invite somebody to your home — or in Ahmadinejad’s case, to Columbia University — and then insult him at length as you introduce him to the other guests?

If he’s that awful a fellow, why invite him at all? A commitment to free expression doesn’t require you to turn over the auditorium of a major Ivy League institution to anyone who wanders through town and wants to speechify on this or that. You support free speech simply by agreeing that you won’t get in the way when somebody decides to have their say on a topic. You don’t have to provide him or her with a microphone and a warm place out of the rain and cold. If you think Ahmadinejad is so vile that you have to essentially apologize to the audience for even having him in the house, then perhaps you should have simply suggested that he avail himself of the same free-speech forum shared by countless other New York City nutjobs: a milk crate on the street corner of his choice.

That was just one of the things that puzzled me about Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia two days ago. Another was the hollow sound of the university’s justification for inviting the Iranian president (who solicited the chance to appear, by the way). One university dean explained it this way: “Opportunities to hear, challenge, and learn from controversial speakers of different views are central to the education and training of students for citizenship in a shrinking and dangerous world.” That’s all well and good, but I’d place a little more stock in such soaring declarations of principle if Columbia had ended his 60s-era ban on campus ROTC programs by now — which it hasn’t, despite formal requests. A university that decides that Ahmadinejad can be tolerated on campus but that the U.S. military cannot is an institution with seriously skewed values.

But Columbia’s worst transgression in this matter, transcending even bad manners and false piety, was that it muffed the opportunity to create a true marketplace of ideas. Why turn over the stage to Ahmadinejad alone? Columbia could have told him that the invitation came with a condition: That Ahmadinejad agree to appear onstage with a panel of smart, informed, skilled debaters, whose job it would be to pose tough questions and press for specific answers. Just the thought of Christopher Hitchens having a shot at the guy made me quiver with anticipation. (A writer for Slate was equally enchanted with that prospect.)

The simply beauty of that idea is that free expression genuinely flowers in that kind of situation. Better yet, you can skip the insulting warm-up and let your guest’s reputation be stained by his own hand.