This morning, before arriving at the office, I got an e-mail from Cindi to the following effect:
A comment on a Shot blog post about the Sanford grant story, for your amusement:
It is interesting to see who the Sanford boys are …the blogs that won’t touch this story.
Palmetto Scoop…not a peep.
SCPols.com…not a peep.
Brad Warthen…not a peep…Certainly instructive, though not surprising…
That is funny, and I want to make sure the governor and his actual boys see that, and stop whining about what I write about the gov. I was wondering, though, why the boys over at The Shot — Tim Cameron or that other one — would be so confused. After all, Tim wants to be treated as a journalist, so you’d think he’d read the paper once in a while.
But it turns out this was not a post but a comment, written by some brave soul hiding behind the handle "Dingle," so Tim is off the hook. (Oh, and Dingle — SCpols.com is produced by Campaigns & Elections magazine, and I’m not entirely sure those out-of-staters know who Mark Sanford is. Not that I feel any need to defend them, even though they’ve been kind to me.)
Next, I had to wonder what "Dingle" was talking about, and I finally realized it was this thing Jake Knotts and Rod Shealy had been pushing about some grant that somebody Sanford knows got, and which, by the time I’d heard about it, Sanford had gotten his pals to pay back — or some of it, anyway. I read the story a couple of days ago and promptly forgot about it. (I didn’t even bring it up at our morning editorial meeting, which I seem to recall having a vague notion to do when I was reading it.) Seemed like a footnote on a larger issue I’d written about in the past, although there was a certain irony to Sanford being at the trough, too.
But let’s treat this as seriously as we possibly can, and beat up on ol’ Brad a bit: Brad has a sort of dull spot in his brain where stories about "ethics" — by which I mean the appearance of ethical impropriety, as opposed to its substance, which is usually what we’re talking about in these sorts of stories — about about money go to die. This, by most folks’ reckoning, is a weakness.
Here I am kicking myself because, other than passing on this tip after the fact, I haven’t had anything to say about this story, which (unlike the Jake thing) lots of other folks actually seem excited about, and I had not even thought about kicking myself over this one.
There’s no question that people who are into self-flagellation really ought to go into journalism. There’s just buckets of fun in it, for masochists.
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Brad,
Below is a comment representative of those posted around the net today. There have been many stories about this Sanford “Dirty Money”. That u missed it shows how wrapped up you are in the “biz” of politics…and like much of the media, forget what is important to average South Carolinians.
SC has lost its government to out of state business interest, rich guys and lobbyist. The average person can’t get the facts on their own. It is your honor and obligation to help keep our government honest…and yet the Governor has brought in, according to a reliable insider I know, 4 million dollars of money to these charities that he can then use to further his agenda, and affluent lifestyle.. Shame on us, and shame on our media. There can be no excuse for us selling our government like some third world country.
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At the heart of Mark Sanford’s administration is the claim of accountability and transparency. Now, he is caught secretly sending $100,000 of taxpayer money to his wealthy friends so that they can support his agenda.
If Mark Sanford wants to be anything other than a hypocrite he will:
1. Call for the immediate disclosure of all donations and expenses for ReformSC, and South Carolinians for Change, Inc. and Carolinians for Reform.
2. Call for the immediate disclosure of all donations and expenses for the private host committee of the Republican Governors association meeting in Charleston.
It is time for Mark Sanford to come out of the darkness and disclose the MILLIONS in out of state and lobbyist contributions that have been made to Sanford and his friends. Honesty will sweep away this murky business…and restore honor back to the Mark Sanford.
In case u missed it, here is a great story…read it and let us know what u think.
Sanford out of step with states on spending extra NGA money
By JIM DAVENPORT – Associated Press Writer
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Gov. Mark Sanford’s Web site
COLUMBIA, S.C. —
When the nation’s governors gathered in Iowa two years ago, the state committee that hosted that event turned a surplus. The Iowa State Fair got the nearly $180,000 in extra cash.
And when the same National Governors Association met in Seattle the year before that, the Washington state group that ran the show had $7,000 left over. The money went to a library and to pay for a conference of national lawmakers.
When South Carolina took its turn last year, hosting visiting governors for a conference in Charleston, the committee sponsoring the event also made more than it spent. Gov. Mark Sanford ordered the money sent to a charity formed by his friends that aims to push his political agenda.
It’s just the latest example of the moves the two-term Republican governor has made that irk his critics, a group that includes many who run the GOP majority in the state Legislature.
The revelation of the money transfer has earned Sanford a new round of attacks, including calls for an attorney general investigation. Sanford’s defense, as stated by spokesman Joel Sawyer, was that the bulk of the $1.2 million raised to host the governors came from private donors – with only an initial $150,000 from a taxpayer-funded grant.
Sawyer maintains the grant money was long spent by the time the 2006 conference was held and its bills were paid.
“The state money was received and spent in June,” Sawyer said. The remaining “money was in a nonprofit and they deferred to us about what should be done,” Sawyer said. Carolinians for Reform Inc., a charity run by Sanford donors and friends to help move along his political vision, was deemed by the governor to be “a worthy nonprofit.”
Still, by Tuesday, the governor had ordered the extra $101,524 left over from the event back into the state’s budget. Sawyer said giving back the money was a good example of how grant money should be handled. The head of the watchdog group Common Cause called the move political spin, and criticism continued to mount throughout the week.
Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell said mingling the state money with the private money makes it all public money. “If the state puts money into something like that and there’s a surplus of money, that money shouldn’t go to political purposes,” said McConnell, a Charleston Republican.
And that’s the course other states have followed or plan to follow with their surpluses from National Governors Association meetings.
– Michigan was the NGA’s 2007 host and the program used no state funds, said Liz Boyd, spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm. All the bills haven’t yet been paid, she said, but if there is a surplus, that money “would be directed to an apolitical nonprofit.”
– In 2005, Iowa hosted the event and had a $178,000 surplus, said Matt Paul, who was former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack’s spokesman. “It made sense to us then to direct those funds to the state fair, an event that draws millions and served as a backdrop for the national meeting,” Paul said.
– The 2004 NGA conference in Seattle had a $7,000 surplus, according to DeLee Shoemaker, who directed the conference committee for then-Gov. Gary Locke. She said the money was split between an upcoming meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Gov.’s Library at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle.
– Idaho hosted the program in 2002 and ended up with a surplus, said Mark Snider, who at the time was spokesman for then-Gov. Dirk Kempthorne. “My recollection is that those dollars were directed toward educational grants or donations,” he said.
– For its part, the governors association in a statement told The Associated Press that while it offers general guidelines to host states about how money is raised and spent for annual meetings, surplus money is left to the discretion of the state.
Sanford has been known to spar with members of his own party. He’s formed a group to help fund candidates to take on Republicans in the Legislature. In his first term, he brought piglets to the state Capitol to protest overrides of his budget vetoes, and his Web site sports a ticking “spending clock” aimed at proving lawmakers spent too much taxpayer money.
This latest brouhaha was prompted by the release of documents detailing the money transfer by state Sen. Jake Knotts, R-Lexington, who believes Sanford is behind political attacks against him. Knotts demanded this week that Sanford account for the money and motives involved in its use or face the prospect of special legislative hearings.
Sawyer called Knott’s questions the “paranoid delusions of a nominal Republican.”
Attorney General Henry McMaster’s office did not reply to messages Friday about a call for an attorney general investigation made earlier in the week by John Crangle, state director of the watchdog group Common Cause.
Meanwhile, the head of the state Democratic Party has more questions about the money transfer and the private donors whose cash went to the Sanford-picked charity.
“Do they know the money they gave actually went to promote the Gov.’s agenda and to his buddies who work to defeat both Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature? Why should the people of South Carolina trust a governor who misleads his own donors?” Carol Fowler said in a statement.
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Associated Press Writer Dave Ammons in Olympia, Wash., contributed to this report.
Mike, buddy — we did all that; that’s what made the comment funny. You should follow the links…
Oh, there’s one thing you mention I didn’t link to above — our editorial about ReformSC and disclosure. (It’s not on thestate.com any more; here’s a copy from our archives.) But my post in which I hyperventilated about the whole aim of the group IS linked.
And you must have missed the entire 2006 election, in which one of our most consistent themes was the influence these out-of-state ideologues are having, or at least trying to have.
In fact, there’s the distinct possibility that if you know about this stuff, it’s because we’ve gone on about it so.
I keep learning the lesson that I have to be careful with the self-deprecatory irony, and I keep forgetting it…
Brad,
I sincerely appreciate your writings about the School Voucher folks, ALG, etc. This Sanford “Dirty Money” is actually a bigger story…in fact I think the biggest story of the year…as it will track a more aggressive and onerous quest for money by a sitting governor and his “aristocratic” friends.
I can tell you, without any doubt, that our largest problem in SC is that our government has been stolen by BIG MONEY, and much of it from out of state. Sure, these types of things have always gone on…but never to the degree that Sanford and friends have managed.
I hope your paper will aggressively chase this story. I hope your paper will FOI the groups involve and expose the secret underworld of big money. You AlG stories have scratched the surface…dig deeper, and free SC from the grips of people that believe the ultimate arbiter of our society is the “markets”.
This is a national story. I hope you break it, and not some outside of SC outlet. We need this…it is our problem and we should be the ones to fix it.