RALEIGH – I began my professional career as a newspaper and magazine reporter. One of the habits I picked up from my newsroom colleagues who had regular columns was the trusty “cleaning out my notebook” device.

The notion was that not every story idea or stray notion a reporter jotted down in his notebook merited a full-blown story. If blogs had existed back then, they’d have been a perfect place to plant these little nuggets, snippets, or rhetorical questions. Instead, such items became the substance of an occasional notebook-clearing column.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I had a few stray thoughts last week that didn’t quite reach column-length. So I’m going to toss them at you one at a time:

• When Greensboro voters pulled the surprise of Election Night by replacing incumbent mayor Yvonne Johnston with challenger Bill Knight, most of the attention gravitated to the partisan angle (the upset win of the Republican Knight made a natural complement to the news that Anthony Foxx has won the Charlotte mayoral race for Democrats for the first time since the 1980s). To a lesser degree, Knight’s positions on city spending and crime got mentions as a conservative contrast to recent Greensboro governance.

But what got attention only belatedly was the role that forced annexation likely played in the Greensboro race. Knight campaigned hard in neighborhoods that had resisted the city’s annexation in 2007, and won large majorities of the new Greensboro voters there. Something similar happened to the incumbent mayor in Fayetteville a couple of cycles ago. Be careful, all you mayors and city councilors. You may think you want to annex thousands of new taxpayers needing few services, but remember that you’re also annexing thousands of potentially angry voters.

• In Chapel Hill, advocates of taxpayer-funded elections praised the narrow victory of Mark Kleinschmidt in the mayor race, oddly citing it as “proof” that the city’s public-financing scheme was a success. First of all, that makes no sense. If Kleinschmidt had lost, they wouldn’t have announced it as a failure of the financing system – unless, of course, they consider taxpayer-funded elections as a device for electing left-wing candidates.

Surely they don’t think that.

But there’s something even stranger about the claim. Given the slim margin of victory, it is quite possible that a last-minute mass mailing by a political foe of mayoral candidate Matt Czajkowski helped tip the balance in favor of Kleinschmidt. That’s exactly what campaign-finance reformers fail to admit – that their taxpayer-funding schemes will never eliminate the ability of private individuals of means to influence elections. All such schemes do is push political activity further outside the relatively transparent political parties and campaigns into independent political committees and factions that operate in the shadows. A success for open and honest politics? Hardly.

• Tony Rand’s surprise announcement that he was retiring from the NC Senate to take over the state parole commission led to a bewildering array of speculations and scenarios among the political class. I admit to have participated in some of the hallway conversations about it. I still don’t think anyone really knows the full story except Tony.

Here’s the only point I want to make today: are there really that many people around Raleigh who get to call the second-most powerful senator in the state “Tony”? I must have heard dozens of people, often in public settings, do this on Thursday and Friday. The only time I did it was in the previous paragraph.

I take that back, senator, and apologize for the excessive familiarity. Please don’t use the awesome power everyone says you have to shoot thunderbolts at my house or fill my backyard with locusts.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation