Monthly Archives: May 2005

Oh, yeah? Well, calm THIS!

This first got under my skin almost two weeks ago, but I set it aside, having other things to write about. But now that I’m really ticked off, it’s time to say something.

I have a bone to pick with Mr. Andres Duany, famous architect and urban philosopher extraordinaire.

I get allergy shots — one in each arm — every two weeks. It’s a hassle, as between driving there from my office, waiting for the shots, waiting to make sure there’s no reaction afterward (there never is, but it’s a rule) and driving back to the office, it takes at least an hour out of my work day (like most service providers, the doctor’s office isn’t open for shots either before or after my work day).

On Wednesday, May 18, I was running really late for my shots. It was hot. There were two things wrong with my truck — the air conditioning wasn’t working, and the fuel pressure was seriously fouled up, causing it to give off clouds of noxious exhaust generated by inefficiently-burned gasoline. So I had to have the windows open, and every time I stopped at a traffic light I would gag and choke on the fumes that filled the cab until I started moving again.

And the traffic on Bull Street was standing still from about Taylor Street to the start of 277. Move a few feet, then stand still for half a minute and cough and gag and wheeze, move a few feet, cough and gag and wheeze, for a period of time that seemed like it would never end. But I eventually made it to the doctor’s office, and then put the incident out of my mind — except for resolving to take the truck in to let my mechanic take yet another crack at it (this time successfully).

Then, the very next morning, I read in my newspaper that Mr. Duany, the fancy-schmancy thinker of deep thoughts working on a plan for the State Hospital property, wants to expand his brief to alter the surrounding area — as if the Mental Health Department site were not enough to work with. He wants to “calm” the traffic on Elmwood Avenue, Harden Street, Colonial Drive and Bull Street with, the story said, “on-street parking, plantings, narrower lanes and lower speed limits.”

Quoth the urban planning guru (in a statement with cadences that, not having met Mr. Duany, I hear in my head as spoken with the voice of Marvin the Martian):

You have very wide streets here and, for some weird reason, you are proud of them…. They are very speedy and unpleasant streets.

He should try driving on them from 5 to 5:30 p.m. on a stifling Wednesday in a rolling gas chamber. Unpleasant, yes, but speedy? It was a parking lot!

How, pray tell, does Mr. Duany recommend that we get from, say, the USC campus and points south to Palmetto Richland hospital? Basically, there are two paths to choose from — Bull and Harden. If you make those any “calmer” you will lock up the city, trapping thousands who commute from downtown to their homes in the exploding Northeast via 277. (At least, I assume that’s where they’re going. They could be going to Charlotte for all I know.)

What does he propose to do with all that traffic, if he basically eliminates those routes as arteries (just barely) capable of handling that volume? (When I raised this question at the time, some of my colleagues facetiously suggested going all the way around town on 77 — which is about the only alternative that would handle the volume of traffic we’re talking about).

Now, I’m all for Town and Country and yuppies getting to walk from their condos to work and to the corner store. “Livability” is a great thing for those who can afford it. But that doesn’t help the rest of us get from point A to point B in X amount of time — which modern life insists that we do, whether we want to or not. (And I, for one, don’t want to — at least not this way. But until someone waves a wand and creates a true mass transit system for our area, I’m stuck with this way.)

So what set me off on this subject at last? Why go all Denis Leary now, rather than two weeks ago? Because I went to get my shots again today, and the traffic on Bull was so “calm” that I for the first time ever, I got there too late. Or at least the nurse said it was too late. My cell phone, which runs (like most cell phones, I suspect) to the second in synchronization with the U.S. Naval Observatory, told me I was just barely on time. (On another day I’ll address the issue of why there’s no reason in the world we can’t all be on the same time standard, instead of people in offices and stores closing early because their clock says it’s time.) But I didn’t argue, at least not much. I didn’t trust myself to say what I was thinking, because I was far too “calm” after fighting the traffic on Bull Street. The nurse was doing her job, and she didn’t deserve to receive the brunt of that. It wasn’t her I was mad at, anyway.

But where’s his buddy?

(OK, this item is now outdated — if you click on the Washington Post link below, you get a much more complete story that actually tells you something. I just thought it was interesting late this morning, as a snapshot of a moment in news limbo. The AP story quoted in full at the bottom is a rough approximation of what the Post was saying at the time I first put this post up.)

The Washington Post is reporting that Vanity Fair is reporting the identity of "Deep Throat." Which is weird, when you think about it.
What’s weirder is that the brief item the Post has posted doesn’t say what Bob Woodward has to say about it (at least when I looked; maybe they’ll have updated the story by the time you read this. Couldn’t they find him? The magazine’s site isn’t helpful, either.
In case you have trouble with that link — registration hassles, etc. — here’s what the AP is saying about it (which is as much as the Post is):
{BC-Deep Throat, 3rd Ld,0168}
{URGENT}
{Former FBI official says he was `Deep Throat,’ his family says in} statement
{Eds: UPDATES with family statement. Changes dateline from NEW YORK}
   SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) — A former FBI official claims he was "Deep Throat," the long-anonymous source who leaked secrets about President Nixon’s Watergate coverup to The Washington Post, his family said Tuesday.
   W. Mark Felt, 91, was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s. His identity was revealed Tuesday by Vanity Fair magazine, and family members said they believe his account is true.
   "The family believes that my grandfather, Mark Felt Sr., is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from a horrible injustice," a family statement read by grandson Nick Jones said. "We all sincerely hope the country will see him this way as well."

How about here, Bob?

Bob Gahagan tells me via e-mail that he has a book he’d like to recommend on this blog, but he couldn’t figure out where to place his comment.

Seeing as how the book in question is Tom Friedman‘s latest, and seeing also as how I was recently presented with a copy of it and have not had a chance to open it yet, and considering that I am one of Mr. Friedman’s biggest fans, I’m particularly interested to see what Bob and others who’ve read it have to say about it.

So how about here? The discussion thread begins now…

Your comments

I’m still trying to figure out how to maximize interactivity in this medium. I started out e-mailing responses to comments, then remembered that the reason I started a blog was so I could share dialogues with readers at large. The next most obvious thing to do was to offer my own comments in response to others — but then people would have to revisit an item and scroll to the bottom to discover that I had responded to them.

So I’m going to try this: I’ll single out some points made in comments, linking to the full comments as I do so, and respond in a separate posting. I would appreciate feedback as to whether you think this works.

Anyway, right now, I’d like to respond to a couple of points made by Jim Cothran and Jake, regarding my last posting:

Jim Cothran writes:

For instance, I would assume you would have had to trust John Graham Altman’s actions a few weeks ago, since he was in meetings that you were not in. Or does your line of reasoning only apply to decisions with which you agree?

Jim, I don’t think you followed my line of reasoning, if you think it would be logically consistent to follow it in the case of someone I did not vote for, and would not have voted for even if I’d had the chance. (Remember that my comments were in the context of the attitude of one who not only voted for Lindsey Graham, but worked hard to get others to vote for him.) To elaborate on what I was trying to say in response to Shell Suber’s excellent letter to the editor, when you support someone for election, you do so because you trust that person, and you are delegating him to do what you don’t have time to do — go to Washington for extended periods, study issues in detail, listen to different and opposing arguments in debate (and that’s the part that seems hardest for those angry at Sen. Graham to accept — the notion of a deliberative process) and then vote and act as his reason and conscience dictate.

I would not trust John Graham Altman to do those things, which is why I would never vote for him.

Now, to respond to Jake, who wrote in part that:

I think Shell’s letter is brave, yet misguided. There should never have been a compromise on judges, every one of them deserves and up-or-down vote…period.

I agree that that is what should happen, all the time. The Democrats’ argument that they have a right under the rules of our republic to block nominees permanently when the majority wishes to confirm them — to exercise what amounts to a minority veto — is utter nonsense. Every nominee should get an up-or-down vote. The purpose of the filibuster is merely to ensure that the minority gets a chance to be heard (and, if the world is working the way it should instead of the way it works in these hyperpartisan days, a chance to win over some who disagree).

So why support the compromise? Because under the rules of the game, the stubborn minority was in a sufficiently strong position to prevent an up-or-down vote on any of the nominees. Under the compromise, most of them will get confirmed. Yes, the Republican leadership was in a position to change the rules in the middle of the game. But that’s hardly cricket, is it? It’s something that is offensive to the sense of fairness of anyone who is not blinded by his own political position (a position that, in this case, I agree with — but I try not to let that overwhelm my sense of fairness).

The "nuclear option" was well named, because if Republicans had employed it, it would have been enormously destructive on a couple of levels. First, it would have destroyed whatever vestiges remain of the ability of senators to get along, across party lines — in a collegial and mutual respectful manner. The importance of collegiality in a deliberative body such as the U.S. Senate is something that partisans tend to sneer at — particularly partisans who happen to be in the majority at the moment.

Secondly, it could have been destructive to Republicans’ ability to lead the nation. Changing rules in the middle of the game, just because you can, tends to be offensive to objective observers. Since the beginning of this recent debate over the filibuster, I had a sense that the GOP was overreaching this time. They were going to lose the broad middle of political America. Partisans — once again, particularly when they have the upper hand — tend to forget that there is no such thing as a majority for either party without the votes of us in the middle. Polls consistently show that both parties represent minorities. If a party gets so wrapped up in its power that it forgets the need to keep the good opinion of independents, it will lose its grip on that power, because it will lose the support of the nonaligned. Think it can’t happen? Remember how Republicans came to power more than a decade ago. There were a number of factors involved, but one of them was that it was offensive to people in the middle that Democratic committee chairmen would not allow numerous bills with broad support to be debated or voted upon. Their arrogance, based in their confidence in their majority, helped lead to their downfall. To change rules in the middle of a process — rather than at some later, more neutral, time when everyone could deliberate more coolly — would have seemed to most people in this country like arrogance of power, and it would have cost the GOP.

Nice letter, Shell

That was an excellent letter to the editor we ran from Shell Suber on today’s editorial page. Am I saying that because I agree with his point? Well, yeah. But there’s another reason — the way that he expressed the point.

After pointing out that he was not in the room when the filibuster compromise was reached, he said he just has to trust Sen. Lindsey Graham‘s judgment as to whether it was the right deal. He then added,

Leaders lead. Politicians who only take us where we wanted to go in the first place are bus drivers. I did not volunteer my nights and weekends to help elect a bus driver.

This demonstrates that Mr. Suber (pictured on the last night of last year’s Republican National Convention), the chairman of the Richland County Republican Party, is a true republican in the "small R" sense. That is to say, he believes in representative democracy. Too few people do today, including — judging by some other letters we received and ran on this subject in the past week — a lot 6a_2 of people who misleadingly call themselves "republicans."

Here’s the way republican government is supposed to work: You vote for (and in the case of a dedicated supporter such as Mr. Suber, campaign for) a candidate whom you trust. You trust his values, you trust his judgment, so you do your best to elect him.

If he is elected, you then trust him to act as your delegate in the representative governing body. That doesn’t mean he checks with your every five minutes to see how you would vote on a given issue, or act in a given situation. If you had the time to study the issues and engage in debate and do all the things an honest representative should do as part of the discernment process, you wouldn’t need him. You’re sending him because he’s volunteered his services to do all that for you, and you trust him to do that.

This enables him to be, as Mr. Suber says, a leader: He acts in accordance with his judgment and conscience, applied to a body of information to which he has access by virtue of being there and doing the job while you’re back home doing your thing. Sometimes, his actions will be just what you would do (based on your own relatively limited knowledge of the situation), and of course you will be find that gratifying.

But sometimes he’ll do something you wouldn’t have done — or at least you think you wouldn’t, based on the limited information at your disposal. When that happens, a mature voter has a couple of options. He can just take it on faith that since this is a representative he trusts, the representative knows what he’s doing, and move on. Or he can demand, or await, an explanation of his representative’s behavior, giving him the benefit of the doubt until said explanation is presented (and a good representative will give such explanations). And he should truly listen to that explanation before making up his mind whether his representative is still trustworthy, or has gone off his trolley.

What a mature voter does not do is immediately holler, "That’s not what I would do!" or "I’ll never vote for him again!" or "He’s betrayed me and all the right-thinking people like me!"

In other words, he doesn’t berate the representative as though he were a bus driver who had made a wrong turn on his route. Not if he understands what our republic is about, he doesn’t.

All the little piggies…

This is supposed to be an immediate medium, but this is a delayed posting. I’ve had all the pieces for over a week, but just not had them together in one place. In fact, I waited so long that some of what I’m about to tell you has been reported elsewhere. (And congrats to Tim Kelly for doing as a blogger should and jumping on it immediately, even if he did jump to a hasty conclusion or two.)

It’s been a while now, but do you remember the full-page ad with all the little piggies on it that ran on May 18? The text went like this:

Did your family budget grow by 13% this year?
State revenues did and some politicians in Columbia want to use it all to grow government.
Governor Sanford said “Enough is enough.”
Thank You Governor Sanford for standing up for the Taxpayers.
Check out our website to see whether your legislator votes with Governor Sanford to keep pork out of the budget.
www.scclubforgrowth.org
Paid for by the South Carolina Club for Growth

The ad kicked off a storm of speculation among South Carolina’s chattering classes. I wondered about it myself. I had never heard of the "South Carolina Club for Growth." I knew that the national Club for Growth was a huge fan of Gov. Sanford. But a Palmetto State connection was a new one on me. And knowing Piggies_7 that a number of national groups have in recent years created South Carolina fronts to hide the fact that outsiders were trying to manipulate our politics, I was a little suspicious.

Others did more than wonder. E-mails were passed around and blot items were posted saying the ad was really a front for by this group or that individual, but while some of it was on the money, much was speculation.

Well, here’s the real story. The phone number on the web site on the ad (which for some reason I can’t access today; let me know if you have the same trouble), was the same number as for The Bastiat Society, an organization "formed to promote the virtue of commerce, and its role in making the world a better place." It was named for Frederic Bastiat, a 19th century French economist and writer.

The same phone number also belong to that organization’s president, who is none other than my good friend Ben Rast, the zen Catholic libertarian so well known locally for the financial advice he has long distributed on radio and television. I made a note to call Ben, but before I could, he had e-mailed me a press release telling me all about it. The release explained that "the South Carolina Chapter of the Club for Growth is dedicated to expanding the prosperity of working families through the Reagan Doctrine of lower taxes, smaller government and strong free enterprise."

But it didn’t explain where in the world the group suddenly came from, or what it had to do with other groups, individuals and entities within and without our state. So I e-mailed Ben to find out. He responded that

The Club is a registered political non-profit (a 501c4 and a PAC), and a state affiliate of the national Club for Growth. I filed all the paperwork over a year ago, and continue to file the public disclosures with the Ethics Commission. I’ve learned the governing class has made it very difficult for an interested citizen to get involved in politics outside of the major political parties.

I recruited a board, raised some money, and got involved in the general elections. I believe I sent you a press release announcing the Club’s formation.

I don’t recall that release, but if Ben says he sent it, I know he did. I doubt I would have taken much note of it at the time. Another libertarian group is born, ho-hum, I would have thought.

Anyway, I asked him who else was involved in this with him, and he said the group’s board was

currently composed of Thomas Ravenel (Charleston), Don McLaurin (Columbia and Georgetown), Griffin Cupstid (Spartanburg), and me. Dusty Rhodes, the publisher of The National Review and a resident of Hilton Head was on the board for most of last year, but he resigned because he didn’t have time.

The most active board members have been me, Ravenel, and McLaurin. Although we’ve been around for some time and we sent out press releases to let people know what we were doing, we clearly didn’t catch anyone’s attention…until now.

Anyway, on one of the several things Ben sent me (maybe it was the web site I can’t get to now) was a link for providing feedback. The link, it turns out, was labeled South Carolinians for Responsible Government — you know, the group that puts out all that misleading, and often insulting, propaganda about the "Put Parents in Charge" bill. Ben, if you’ll recall, wrote an op-ed piece for us a while back also supporting PPIC. I discovered this on the Saturday after the ad ran. OK, I’ve got to call Ben again. I did, and he called me back while I was shopping out on Harbison late that evening. (He had just gotten out of the new Star Wars movie, which he said was somewhat disappointing.)

It turns out that the connection is that Ben, or rather the S.C. Club for Growth, had hired Randy Page to help negotiate the regulations of political participation. (By way of explanation, he repeated his complaint about how politicos made it hard for ordinary people to get involved with politics outside of the major parties — something with which I empathize to some extent, despising parties as I do.) This was apparently some time before Mr. Page became affiliated with SCRG — something that happened after his predecessor was caught sending fake letters to The State.

The two groups, he assured me, had no connection beyond that one personnel overlap. "I wrote the check" for the ad, he said, acting for the S.C. Club for Growth. Cynics will sneer and say "yeah, right," but I know Ben, and I believe him. You’d have to talk to him for a while to understand why; he’s a clever guy, but there is no guile in him, as far as I can tell. He has that purity of belief that characterizes the true economic libertarian. Of course, there is no major philosophy in our politics today with which I disagree more, so Ben and I engaged in polite debate for the next half hour while I went here and there in the commercial maze of Harbison. Mostly, we talked about things that I cover in a previous posting, so I won’t bore you any more.

Suburban panhandling

It had been a long day, because it was Friday, and as I’ve said before, Fridays are always long days. I was driving with the windows of my ’89 Ford Ranger down, because the air conditioning hasn’t worked for awhile.

Stopping at the Li’l Cricket convenience store near my home, I just didn’t feel like rolling the windows up and locking up — even though my briefcase and, worse, my laptop were on the floor of the truck. I looked around and saw no suspicious characters. I knew I was going straight in and out — there was no queue — and that I could keep an eye on the vehicle pretty much every second I was in there. And who would be looking for anything of value in my battered, grimy pickup?

Well, I was in and out quickly, but when I got out regretted immediately having left things unlocked, because there was a rootless-looking little guy sitting on the curb just a few feet away. He hadn’t been there before. As I opened the door awkwardly holding my purchases, he spoke up, "Sir…"

OK, here we go.

He started into the familiar story of how he had his momma in the car — waving vaguely over toward a van a short distance away, and if I could just help them out, they could get home. He had been from store to store, and …

"Here, I can give you a couple of bucks." I struggled to get the two ones out of my wallet while the gallon of milk dangled from one hand. I had the two ones, and two twenties.

He was quiet for a moment as I rummaged for the money, and I had a second to take him in. He was about five-three or -four, and couldn’t have weighed more than 125. Grubby jeans, grubby T-shirt, grubby ball cap. Sparse stubble on chin and upper lip. Hard living had made his age hard to guess, but it was between 18 and 30.

Once he saw the bills, the silence ended: "Oh, sir. Can’t you help us get home?" He was taking on a whining tone. "I’m a Christian. I’ll mail it back to you, I swear."

"That’s all I can do for you. You’ll have to get the rest from someone else." There was no way I was giving this guy the rest of my cash for the week, when I was 95 percent sure he was scamming me. Only the 5 percent uncertainty had induced me to come up with the ones. Besides, I’ve always had this attitude — it’s not entirely logical, but it’s mine — that if someone is so down-and-out, or so degraded in personal pride, as to beg, I’ll hand over something, even if I don’t believe the story at all.

But that was it. This was the first time a beggar had turned his nose up at what I had offered him since a guy in New York had all but chewed me out for giving him a dollar. But that was New York, and with this guy, what sympathy I had was floating out to sea pretty fast.

"But sir. My babies… I’m a Christian. I swear…" His chin was trembling. Nobody wants to see a man cry, even a sad little man.

My voice got colder. "That’s all I’m prepared to do for you tonight." I got in, closed the door, and told him through the open window, "Good luck." I was doing the right thing, I was sure, though of course it didn’t feel like it. As Huck Finn said,

But that’s always the way; it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does I would pison him.

But my pangs didn’t last long. I hadn’t started the engine when the shifty little guy scooted by in front of my truck in a double-time march. I thought he had spotted another likely mark. But he kept going until he got to the passenger side of a red subcompact, and jumped in. The driver was a burly young man with a crew cut. They were backing out before I had completed the same maneuver. You’d have thought they were on their way to a fire.

It crossed my mind that he had seen the two twenties and they planned to follow me. It was becoming clear that these were guys who would do something desperate for 40 bucks. The little feathermerchant I could handle, but the big guy was something else. I was rolling slowly out of the parking lot and considering my options when I saw them tear out in the opposite direction.

Yeah, he’s a real Christian, I thought. And what did that have to do with anything? Was his religious affiliation relevant to the situation? Seems like he was counting on me to be a Christian (or a Jew, or anybody who believes we should act justly and love mercy), and a gullible one at that. On reflection, it seemed his plea was both a compliment and an insult to Christianity. He was perhaps assuming that no Christian would fail to be charitable. At the same time, there had been an ugly tinge of "Look at me; I’m one of the good and decent people, like you. I’m not one of them; you can trust me." Unfortunately, he was right to assume there are those who think that way and see themselves as Christians.

As I drove off it struck me to take a look around the cab of the truck. All right, the laptop and briefcase were still there. And as I looked, my eyes fell on the cross dangling from my rear-view mirror. My daughter had woven it out of a palm frond on Palm Sunday a couple of years back, I had tied it up there with thread, and it was there yet. "But I’m a Christian, sir…" So that was it; that’s why I was chosen as a mark, and why he took that approach.

I decided that next time, I’d take the time to lock up, however tired I was. I might not be lucky again. As for the little con artist, I felt pretty sure I’d never see him again. By now, he was up at the Circle K, pulling the routine on somebody else. Maybe somebody with a fish symbol on his bumper.

The REAL Sanford-Legislature Divide

My apologies to Joe Erwin. Oh, I still think the S.C. Democratic Party chairman was wrong to say the governor’s vetoes threatened to turn us into a third-world country, a separate proposal of the governor’s almost, but not quite, fits that description.

In my reaction to Mr. Erwin’s Thursday press release, I said it’s more accurate to say that in some ways South Carolina is a third-world country, and that the governor doesn’t understand the need to do something about it.

Well, it’s worse than that. The governor is fixated on the idea of not letting the state budget grow any more than the rate of inflation, or some such arbitrary formula. He explains this with Ross Perot-style charts, and clothes it all in populist rhetoric (which is odd, because the wonkish Budget_vetoes_2 Mr. Sanford is a most unlikely populist) about not letting government grow faster than family incomes.

He completely disregards a couple of important points. First, we’re just coming off several years in which a number of agencies took drastic, double-digit cuts in money needed for essential services. (And while the governor is obsessed — and I think rightly so — with restoring the trust funds raided during hard times, he has only passing interest in restoring operating funds for critical agencies.)

Secondly, if we’re going to increase the rate of growth in family incomes — which the governor constantly touts as a top goal — we’re going to have to invest in some basic wealth-producing infrastructure, such as, say, our shamefully neglected rural schools. The governor still thinks the solution to educating the rural poor is to offer tax credits that they’re not eligible for (because their income’s too low) for attending private schools that they either can’t get to for lack of transportation, or which won’t accept them, or both.

In short, the governor proposes not merely to be passive on the subject of our third-world status. His arbitrary spending cap would be an active measure to prevent our ever getting out of that situation. Put another way, he proposes that government never do any more than it does right now — not only to educate the state’s children, but to keep our roads and prisons safe, and our critically mentally ill off the streets of our cities (and out of jails and emergency rooms).

That is a formula for perpetual mediocrity, or worse.

The governor would call this "big government" talk. No, I just want our state leaders to do what they should have done a long, long time ago: Start out by pretending we don’t have a government. Then look at the state’s needs, and figure out which ones government needs to address. Then figure out the best way to get the job done, in terms of organizational structure and resources. Then blow up the current structure and replace it with the logical one. And, now that you have a price tag, design a fair, consistent and economically sound tax system (something we definitely don’t have today) to pay for it.

That’s what we call "comprehensive tax reform." And it should be the Legislature’s top priority when it comes back in January (just as it should have been this year, and  last year, etc.).

Using uncharacteristically demagogic language, the governor says he and the Legislature stand on opposite sides of a "legitimate, real divide on taxpayer issues versus spending." The true divide is between a Legislature that despite its many flaws — and they are legion, and often appalling — is actually trying to deal with the real world (however ineffectively) and a governor who sits around and spins libertarian theories and never looks up to see the reality around him.

Frood, where’s my towel?

I’m totally befuddled — like some hapless twit who doesn’t know where his towel is.

I’ve been hesitating to go see "Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" because I’ve waited so long for it, and I don’t want to be bitterly disappointed. I’ve read such contradictory reviews. The one we ran in The State made it sound awful, and it seemed to be written by someone who knew his way around Douglas Adams’ universe. Then The New York Times made it sound delightful. This made me hopeful. That’s a pretty good paper, right? And has Martin Freeman ever been in anything bad? (Then again, the Times had kind things to say about the awful American ripoff of "The Office." And the original version of that is the only thing I’ve ever seen Martin Freeman in.)

There are reports that true believers are split on the matter.

Help me out, froods. If you’re a true fan of Arthur, Ford, Zaphod and the rest — and you have to have read all five volumes in the Hitchhiker Trilogy, and read the first two repeatedly, to qualify — and you’ve seen the film, let me know.

Which is it? Should I avoid it like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal? Would it cause me to walk out in the middle, gratuitousy muttering "Belgium" under my breath? It so, tell me now. But if it’s really hoopy, just say, "Don’t Panic!"

Advance America, payday lender

The editorial board met for two hours Thursday morning with Billy Webster, CEO of Advance America, the big dog of payday lenders. He was accompanied by his board member and former Democratic state attorney general nominee Steve Benjamin, and Patsy Allston. (I’m not sure of the spelling of her name, as I didn’t get a business card.)

The purpose of the meeting was to address criticism we have aimed at his industry, particularly recent columns by Associate Editor Warren Bolton.

The essence of the presentation was this: That while there are some in his industry — and particularly among check-cashing businesses, which are often confused with payday lenders — who engage in unscrupulous practices that take advantage of the powerless and unwary, his company is on the contrary trying to elevate the industry by not only being ethical itself, but pushing for legislation that would cause all in the industry to be equally free of taint. (Mr. Benjamin elaborated on that to explain why the company is at odds with some groups pushing for more regulation: "We support regulation. A lot of people, when they say regulation, they mean prohibition.")

A second part of the argument was that there is a natural demand and market need for the services he provides ("I can’t change the demand for the product," said Mr. Webster. "I can’t solve the problem that they need the $300."), caused by a number of factors. Conventional lenders such as banks no longer do the small "signature loans" (such as for $500 or less) that they once did, because the cost of processing it is greater than the return. He compared what his business does to the practice by banks of offering ODP (overdraft protection) service — something that has become an increasingly lucrative part of the bank business. He said banks used to drop customers who repeatedly bounced checks, until they realized how foolish they were — they were missing out on the fees they could be charging each time they save a check-writer from embarrassment (and higher fees) at the local merchant’s.

There was some talk about "credit migration" and "FICO scores" and such that made me feel a little like Yossarian listening to Milo Minderbinder, but I think I understood most of it.

We had some questions, which they answered readily, such as:
— While they say they don’t target minorities and the poor, might their support for the NAACP and the Urban League not be seen as a tacit acknowledgement of the importance of those communities to their business? Mr. Webster, who has long been active in Democratic Party politics, cited his involvement with the NAACP and Urban League going back many years "before Advance America was even considered." Besides, he also supports the League of Women Voters, the Palmetto Institute, and other organizations.
— Did the company pay to fly Sen. Joe Biden in from Washington to speak to an NAACP function? At first, Mr. Webster said he had offered to, but couldn’t remember whether that had happened. When Mr. Benjamin jumped in with "We did," Mr. Webster joined him for two simultaneous repetitions: "We did; we did."
— Did the company fly S.C. House Speaker David Wilkins to Salt Lake City for a meeting of the national association of state legislators? Mr. Webster was unsure, but said he would check. He called me later in the day to say that was correct, and to add that a reporter from The State was on board the plane as well. (The newspaper paid for the reporter’s passage.)
— What about that $20 million he made last year, putting him out far ahead of any other CEO in South Carolina? Mr. Webster said he receives no salary, no options, no bonus, or any other compensation from the company. However, "I am a major shareholder. I sold 15 percent of my original holdings."

I’m working on developing a similar portfolio position with Knight Ridder via my 401k, but I’m not quite there yet.

Manhattan, the Midlands — what’s the difference?

I was holding up the wall at the back of the S.C. House chamber, trying to follow what was going on with that body’s Shermanesque march through Gov. Mark Sanford’s vetoes, when Rep. Walton McLeod spotted me. After his usual genial, "Hello, Mister Editor," he started telling me what the MIdlands ought to do with the State Hospital property.

He said we’d be passing up a huge, never-to-be-seen-again  opportunity if we don’t make the whole thing into a park, and he has a model in mind — New York’s Central Park.

Well, I tried to imagine that, thinking back to last summer, when I stayed in a hotel on the park during the Republican National Convention. (Pictured is the gorgeous view from the S.C. delegation’s hospitality suite — my own room had a less breathtaking vista).Negative00421a1

And it didn’t quite work, because while the park might be nice, it would be far less spectacular for lacking the contrast of being framed by Gotham and its eight million people.

I think Rep. McLeod saw that in my eyes, because he immediately asserted that Lexington and Richland counties combined are about the same size NYC was when Central Park was founded in 1870. Well, he got the date wrong, and the population figures aren’t exactly the same, but I take his point.

Interesting. I don’t know what I think about it. If we’re not going to use the site to build something cool like a minor-league ballpark (see, I never give up), I don’t have a preference. But I had heard others say something similar to what Walt was saying, so I thought I’d throw this out there.

A SECOND-world country, maybe

S.C. Democratic Party Chairman Joe Erwin is a very reasonable person under normal circumstances, but obliged by virtue of his office to say absurd things. He said one such thing in a press release Thursday. In the release, he celebrated the fact that the House was overriding most of Gov. Mark Sanford‘s vetoes. Which is fine. Reasonable people can disagree. Our editorial position was that most of the vetoes should have been sustained, even though Mr. Sanford’s reasoning for the cuts was unsound.

Here’s the overboard bit: "Sanford’s bizarre vetoes threatened to turn South Carolina into a third-world country. Thankfully, Democrats and Republicans in the legislature worked together to avoid the Sanford catastrophe.”

OK, Mr. Erwin, I don’t like Mr. Sanford’s philosophy about taxing and spending and the proper proportions of government any more than you do. But come on: None of the cuts the governor proposed in order to restore trust funds (something that needed doing), were going to lay waste to the land.

Now if you wanted to argue that South Carolina by some objective measurements already is a third-world country, and has been so under both Democratic and Republican regimes, I’d be with you. I’ve sort of made the same argument myself in the past. And if you’d then said that Mr. Sanford seems clueless about the need to pull us out of that condition, you’d have something of a point on your side.

But these budget cuts would not have laid waste to the land.

Of course, we can be proud that the absurdities of factional thinking in South Carolina seldom reach the outer limits that are routine on the national level. How far out there do you have to be to actually imply that it is a deliberate policy of the Bush White House, rather than a bureaucratic oversight that would have happened under any administration (like in 1998, for instance), for sex offenders to get Viagra through Medicaid? I mean, Republicans don’t even like Medicaid. And here I was thinking a South Carolina Republican was going out of his way to find something to worry about (or something to discredit Medicaid with) earlier this week when he brought up the subject. He must have been reading The Nation, and it boggled his mind. But no more than it has addled the folks at Democrats for America’s Future.

There’s reform, and then there’s…

Sounding a theme he mentioned during our lunch Wednesday, Gov. Mark Sanford put out a press release today praising a handful of House members who pretty consistently voted to uphold his budget vetoes — and running decidedly against prevailing sentiment in the body in doing so.

On Wednesday, the governor’s legislative liaison Carl Blackstone told me folks in the chief executive’s office had been talking for some time about the emergence of a "reform caucus" — or as the release called them, a "Growing Nucleus," in the House. He ascribed this in part to the fact that 50 percent of the GOP caucus had been elected in the last six years. He stressed that they weren’t just Sanford clones, though: "They’re not carrying our water; they’re independents."

Of course, the governor has an erratic sense of the meaning of "reform." Carl cited the examples of these same folks supporting Sanford initiatives on government restructuring (which I would call real reform) and linking growth in the state budget to inflation (which I would call wacky). In his release today, the governor said, "There’s a growing core of House members who – like most working South Carolinians – realize that the good ole’ boy system of growing government at nearly three times the rate peoples’ incomes are growing simply doesn’t make sense." (There’s that arbitrary standard of his again. As I said to him Wednesday, and as we’ve said editorially, if the program’s not worth the money, say so and kill it. But don’t say it’s worthwhile, but that you need to cut it to match some arbitrary formula.)

Well, I think some of the lawmakers in question are genuine reformers myself. But that’s partly because of something something  that both the governor and Mr. Blackstone choose to shrug off about them: They don’t support the signature Sanford tuition tax credit proposal, the "Put Parents in Charge" bill. I’m thinking in particular of Ted Pitts, Nathan Ballentine, Kenny Bingham and Joan Brady. (While she wasn’t quite the Sanford stalwart some of the others were, Mrs. Brady supported enough of the governor’s vetoes to draw the ire of colleagues.)

The vagaries of competition

Our lunch with the governor did not produce much that was new. I suppose if we issued a joint communique, it would say we had "a frank and open exchange of views." He said a lot of stuff he’s said before, and we — mostly I — said a lot of things we’d said before.

One thing came back to mind, however, when reading this morning’s op-ed page — specifically, the piece by Charles Bierbauer that serves as a sort of apologetic for Newsweek. Personally, I’ve not felt compelled to comment on that. Newsweek screwed up, pure and simple, and people died as a resultIndia of what a bunch of fanatics did with the dubious report.

But when we were talking to the governor about — what else — school choice, he asked something to the effect of whether I could think of a case in which competition did not have a salutary effect. I said yes, health care. And then, prompted by something colleague Cindi Scoppe said, I repeated a point I made in a column long ago — that competition can sometimes be very destructive of good practice in the news business.

And presto, Mr. Bierbauer today provides a perfect illustration of that.  He mentions how Newsweek‘s Michael Isikoff got burned when he waited to get confirmation on the Monica Lewinsky story, and Matt Drudge scooped him by breaking it on his blog. Well, Mr. Isikoff wasn’t about to let that happen again — he went with the Quran-flushing item without waiting to go through the extra confirmation to make sure had it nailed. And people died. While some have halfheartedly stuck up for Newsweek by saying the story could be true — a pretty pathetic defense — it hasn’t checked out yet. (By the way, late Thursday, the Pentagon released this transcript of its briefing on the issue.)

Which leaves me with two points: Bloggers can be an extremely destructive force, not only on their own, but in terms of what they can egg the mainstream press into doing — if the mainstream press is not sufficiently grounded in its own values not to be sucked into a competition with people who don’t employ high professional standards.

What was my second point? Oh, yes — I am now a blogger. And I already see, as I acknowledge in the disclaimer at the top of my main page, that I can’t guarantee the same level of accuracy as I do my best to maintain in the newspaper. In fact, a reader pointed out a mistake just in the last 24 hours — I set out to list the 14 female members of the U.S. Senate, and only listed 13, which turned out to be an unlucky number in terms of my credibility. (I left out Barbara Mikulski, and I’ve gone back and fixed it now.)

These are humbling thoughts. I’m not even sure, from what I’ve seen, that bloggers are supposed to have humble thoughts, but I’m having them. This is going to be a tricky enterprise, with one foot in print and the other in the blogosphere. I’ll endeavor to do my best at both, but only time will tell how well I actually do.

Most grownups are women

Robert Ariail’s cartoon today depicts the moderates who forged the compromise that averted the "nuclear option" as a mom — or maybe as an elementary school teacher. In any case, and this is my point, the grownup in the cartoon is a woman.Ari0525_1

This reminded me of something I noticed, but failed to mention, when I was compiling a list of those who participated in the negotiations. Out of the total of 15 I was able to identify from various published sources over the weekend, four were women. That struck me as disproportionate, but not surprising: In my experience of life, Robert’s cartoon is very accurate. Men tend to revert constantly to immaturity when faced with conflict; their reaction when challenged is to duke it out the way they did back on the schoolyard. Women, unencumbered by machismo and overendowed (by male standards) with common sense, tend to look for a way to settle things like, well, grownups.

Not all women, of course. My reaction was somewhat tempered when I went and counted, and discovered that the U.S. Senate has more women than I would have thought. I guess my expectations are tainted by living in South Carolina, where women in office is still a relative rarity. (Linda Short is the only woman among our 46 state senators.)

In Washington, there are 14 female senators. And it will hardly surprise many to learn that Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton were not among the moderates who joined in the negotiations (even though Mrs. Clinton has been courting that sort of image lately). Nor were Maria Cantwell, Elizabeth Dole, Kay Hutchison, Blanche Lincoln, Barbara Mikulski, Patty Murray or Debbie Stabenow.

The four women who did participate in the negotiations were Susan Collins of Maine; Mary Landrieu of Lousiana, the Senate’s cutest member (give me a break — I had to say that so nobody would think I was going soft on feminism… besides, it’s true); Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Olympia Snowe, also of Maine. Sen. Murkowski was not mentioned in initial stories about the final deal, but I give her credit for being involved in the talks.

Even though that’s a minority of the women in the Senate, it’s a larger proportion of them (28.57 percent) than the male negotiators constitute compared to the whole set of male senators (12.79 percent). Trust me on those — I’m a guy, so I’m good with numbers and stuff (we have to be good at something).

So my basic thesis still stands: Grownups tend to be women.

Of course, I guess you could also say people from Maine are more likely to be grownups, but I don’t think we can say that conclusively, based on such a small sample…

Lunch with the governor

As I mentioned previously, it is a goal of this blog to inform readers of meetings we have with sources,at least with a brief summary here, even when we don’t write about them in the paper.

Well, I’m telling you about this one ahead of time. At Gov. Mark Sanford‘s request, Publisher Ann Caulkins, Associate Editor Cindi Scoppe and I are having lunch with him tomorrow (Wednesday). I don’t know what the governor has on his mind, but I’m sure we’ll find plenty to talk about, what with vetoes pending and the legislative session about to end. And while we know it’s that time of the year, we’re hoping that this isn’t his day to take the livestock to the State House, or there might not be enough for all at the buffet.Pigs_1

I’m writing this to ask you — yes, you, out there in the Blogosphere: What would you like us to ask the governor about? Time permitting, I’ll bring up to him the top suggestion or two.

Give Lindsey a hand

At my speech this morning to the state retirees, I took a question from the audience asking the ubiquitous question, Why is there always so much "bad" news in the paper instead of "good" news?

Well, that reader apparently missed the truly excellent news on this morning’s front page. ThatGrownups_2 wasn’t the first place I heard about it, though. It was the very first thing I heard at 6 a.m. on my clock radio, which stays tuned to NPR. The only thing that caused me concern in that report was the brief sound clip from our own Lindsey Graham (whom you can see, second from right, if you click on the picture to blow it up), who said he expected to take a political hit back home for having been part of the small band of true leaders who pulled the Senate back from the "nuclear" brink on judicial nominations. Specifically, he said, "People at home are gonna be very upset at me for a while."

I have no doubt that he will hear from the narrow interests whose great goal in life is to infest our representative bodies with ideological and partisan hatreds, to whom this development is a serious body blow. More than that, these well-funded groups will use phone campaigns, automated and otherwise, to stir up easily excitable constituents back home to howl partisan imprecations at these senators for daring to be statesmen.

So you know what? Everybody — and I do mean everybody — who appreciates what Sen. Graham and his handful of sensible colleagues have done to restore sanity should take the time to let him know about it. You can reach Mr. Graham at this address or (202) 224-5972. And you can find addresses (including snail mail addresses) and phone numbers for all senators at http://www.senate.gov/.

It’s a fact of political life that angry extremists are far more likely to contact their lawmakers that reasonable, mature people. So grownups, please take a few moments out of your busy schedules filled with responsible tasks, and give the senator an attaboy. He’s gonna need to hear it.

State retirees speech

I’m going to be speaking to state retirees at their annual meeting Tuesday morning. Amazingly, they have asked me to do that even after I spoke to them last year.

I’ve roughed out a speech, and I’m not really crazy about it. Maybe I can improve it some tonight. But in the meantime, I’ve looked back over the speech I delivered last year, and in retrospect, I sort of like it. So if I can figure out how to attach a Word document to this posting, I’ll share it with you.

Maybe I’ll post the new one, too. But it’s going to have to get a lot better first. Or I’ll have to let some time pass. These things tend to look better after the fact.

Enjoy the old one, if you’ve got nothing better to do. It’s about leadership in South Carolina, or the lack thereof.
Download state_retirees_speech.doc

All together now

All day long, I’ve had the headline from one of my previous postings running through my head: "A new U.S. Senate."

Except that it’s always to the tune of "A New Argentina" from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, "Evita." Even though I haven’t heard that music in years. You can hear a snippet of it if you go here, and scroll to the bottom where it says, "Listen to Samples."

This could become a hit with the new words. After all, starting tomorrow, we could have a new U.S. Senate, even though it might not be the one I had hoped for. Of course, the Perons didn’t turn out all that great for Argentina, either.

The robot begs to differ

Associate Editor Mike Fitts and I had a long day Friday, as usual. One of many things we had to do that day was put out Sunday’s editorial page, which included my column praising Lindsey Graham (see previous postings).

When he finally dragged himself home, he found a phone message. It was a recorded voice (or as Mike put it, a "robot caller")  from a group called "The Judicial Confirmation Network." The message implored him to call Sen. Graham and tell him not to make a "secret backroom deal" with those "liberals" over the filibuster issue.

Remember how I mentioned in my column how the narrow interest groups on both sides have all but a handful of the Senate afraid to act reasonably? Well, this is one of them. The Democrats have the likes of NARAL, and the GOP has groups like this one. And that automated phone call Mike received is what they do to you if you dare to stand up them and act like a grownup.

Those robots — first they go around stealing old people’s medicine, and now they’re making crank phone calls.