Monthly Archives: August 2008

Name that test (nice words only, now…)

Ohboyohboyohboy, but that Jim Rex is a glutton for punishment. The day after he and Jim Foster came to see us, I got this release from Jim (Foster, that is):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

South Carolinians to select name of state’s new  testing system; deadline to vote is Labor Day

EDITOR’S NOTE – The direct link to the online ballot is
http://ed.sc.gov/tools/NameThatTest/

COLUMBIA – State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex announced today that South Carolinians will name the state’s new standardized testing system, which will replace PACT  tests that have been administered statewide since 1999.

Voters can visit the South Carolina Department of Education’s web site and cast their ballots on line.  The deadline to vote is Labor Day, Sept. 1, at 5 p.m., and Rex will announce the winning name on Wednesday, Sept. 3.

I replied to Jim (Foster, that is) with three words: Don’t tempt me!

Given the wild unpopularity of this test, offering the public the chance to name it seemed to me like what Huck Finn said about telling the truth:

… it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to.

But then I followed the link, and saw that Jim (Rex) wasn’t taking near the chance that I thought. It’s multiple choice, not essay. The public won’t get to express itself fully with this "choice," to say the least.

Y’all better stop it, or I’ll get Ah-nold to beat you up

Finally, somebody’s out there to stick up for ME, and who better than the Governator?

Hello,

Families and the private sector are the main actors in online safety.  But government has an important role to play as well.  Government can make it easier for families and others to purchase the right technological tools, as well as help educate people of all ages about how to protect themselves online.  Government is also the only entity that can hold people accountable when they cross certain lines.

Cyberbullying is one of those lines.

State governments are beginning to address this threatening behavior.  The California legislature recently passed Assembly Bill 86.  The legislation authorizes school officials to suspend or recommend for expulsion students who engage in harassment using electronic devices.  Most important, it includes electronic messages that originate off school grounds.  It is perhaps the strongest legislation of its kind in the country.

The cyberbullying bill now awaits signature by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Schwarzenegger has refused to sign any bill until the California state government passes a budget….

Wait! You say Ah-nold won’t stick up for me? Oh, whatever shall I do with all these Cyberbullies who come to my blog just to be mean to me?!?!?

Yes, I know that many kids today confuse their online lives with real life, sometimes with horrible consequences. And hanging is too good for any adult who uses any opportunity to be cruel to a child (just as slapping is too good for kids who do the same). But sometimes I look at stuff like this — virtual bullying? — and I think maybe David Brooks was right the other day when, after seeing the stoic way that the Chinese move on in the face of devastating personal disasters, "you do wonder if we Americans are a nation of whiners."

We wuz robbed! Pass me the potato chips…

Can’t South Carolina be first at anything? Now I see that we’re only fifth in the country when it comes to obesity,something I could have sworn we could do better than anybody:

Washington, D.C. August 19, 2008 – South Carolina was named the 5th most obese state in America according to the fifth annual F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America, 2008 report from the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).  The state’s adult obesity rate is 29.2 percent, an increase for the third year in a row.
     Nationally, adult obesity rates rose in 37 states in the past year. Rates rose for a second consecutive year in 24 states and for a third consecutive year in 19 states. No state saw a decrease.  Though many promising policies have emerged to promote physical activity and good nutrition in communities, the report concludes that they are not being adopted or implemented at levels needed to turn around this health crisis….

Now I suppose we could get all petulant about this and demand a recount, but that would show a poor attitude. There’s nothing to do but to pass the potato chips and try harder…

OK, yes, I know — this is a deadly serious manner. It’s just that we hear so much bad news, and we seem to do so little to make things better, even when we know better, that one lapses into irony out of sheer frustration, to keep from going mad. Or from going madder, anyway.

If there’s no ‘or else,’ Putin will never change course

Had to shake my head again this morning at the fecklessness of the West:

North Atlantic Treaty Organization ministers struggled against the
limits of their powers Tuesday at a meeting in Brussels. They called on
Russia to withdraw its troops from Georgia immediately, but stopped
short of saying what they would do to punish noncompliance.

If we don’t say what we’ll do "or else," Putin does what he pleases. He might anyway, but this way it’s cost-free for him.

A civilization that behaves this way, that can’t stand up to naked aggression against an underdog ally, deserves to decline. The tyrants running China, looking forward to their century, have to be loving this — first the Olympics, now this. Can life get any better?

American Sardaukar? Best combat picture from Iraq, anyway

Sardaukar
Although Susanna seemed to like it, my analogy back on this post — comparing American troops to the Atreides in Dune — wasn’t quite perfect.

Truth be told, the overwhelmingly superior efficiency, dedication and effectiveness of U.S. troops today is more closely comparable to the Sardaukar. That’s not an analogy I like to make, because the Sardaukar were the bad guys — or at least, allied with the bad guys. They were arrogant, and received their comeuppance from the little-regarded, fanatical desert people they thought they could easily crush. So you can see how I wouldn’t like that analogy at this particular point in history. It doesn’t fit with my worldview at all.

Probably the best way to put it in Dune terms (if one is to be so frivolous as to draw such analogies) is that the U.S. military has the virtue of the Atreides combined with the competence of the Sardaukar. (And now that I think about it, I seem to recall that the reason the emperor sent the Sardaukar after the Atreides was that the Atreides troops under Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck had been trained to the point that they were almost as tough as the Sardaukar, and the emperor saw that as a threat. So maybe our guys are the Atreides after all — or what the Atreides might have been. That makes the sci-fi nerd in me feel so much better.)

This brings me, through a leap that probably makes sense only to me, to a photo I grabbed from AP back during the fighting in Fallujah in 2004, and never used. If I had been blogging then, I would have posted it, but I wasn’t.

It’s the best photo I can remember seeing from the fighting in Iraq. Actually, when you think about it, it was one of the LAST photos of actual fighting I’ve seen. You don’t see pictures of action any more on the wires. You see portraits of soldiers and marines who have died, and pictures of caskets and funerals. You see pictures taken AFTER something happened — say, the aftermath of an IED. Or you see pictures of soldiers on routine patrol, or aiming their weapons from a fixed defensive position, but not firing them.

What you don’t see is American troops inexorably, irresistibly advancing the way they are in this photo. This photo is classic, and illustrates a standard offensive infantry tactic in the act. Maybe some of you with infantry experience will correct me on this, but what I see is one soldier laying down covering fire down a street with his M-240 Bravo (which, as James reminded us Monday, is likely manufactured right here in Columbia SC, at FN) while the other men in the squad cross the street. Another soldier (actually, I’m guessing these are Marines; someone with sharper eyes than mine can probably tell for sure) backs up the machine-gunner, prepared to shoot with aimed fire at any enemy who stick their heads out, using his standard rifle.

The second man to cross the street is another machine-gunner, who will no doubt establish a base of fire from the opposite side of the street in order to allow the first MG operator and the last of the squad to cross.

The squad seems to be operating with a relentless, almost mechanical efficiency that is terrible to behold — if you are the enemy. In fact, it’s probably the unusual perspective of this photo that created the literary (if you can call sci-fi "literary") allusion in my mind: This is probably what it looks like when you are the enemy, and the U.S. Marines are coming to get you — like the Sardaukar with their "hard faces set in battle frenzy."

As I said, you don’t see many pictures like this one. It’s impressive. It certainly made an impression on me.

Did Obama get Bush cooties from hugging McCain?

Cooties

We’ve all seen the pictures that the Bush haters love to circulate of McCain hugging W. To these people, the picture is worth a million words. It’s worth a book, in fact — I saw an anti-McCain book in Barnes & Noble not long ago that had that photo on the cover. It made me wonder whether the publishers had lost their minds, because the target audience doesn’t need to see anything else! The picture tells it all! Anyone who would hug Bush, under any circumstances, HAS to be bad, because no one who deserves to draw breath would ever, EVER do that.

Etc.

It’s important to these folks to circulate the picture, and the video, in order to keep hate alive. Otherwise, what would they have to live for after January 2009? The only way to go on is to equate McCain with Bush, despite all the logical barriers. They touched! So that makes him radioactive. No more needs to be said.

Given all that, imagine my shock to learn that, at the Saddleback Church debate, Obama hugged McCain! This raises the burning question: Did McCain give him Bush cooties?

Think of the implications! The Democratic National Convention will be next week, and what would Obama be expected to do — hug fellow Democrats, of course! OMG! The whole party could become infected by this detestable contagion! And what are the alternatives? Well, to put Obama into quarantine, of course. But if you do that the week of the convention, Bill and Hillary will REALLY take over!

So it turns out that there are WMD after all, and McCain’s got ’em: Bush cooties.
Cooties1

Hit Russia with consequences NOW

The first couple of days after Russia went into Georgia, everybody in the West said, How awful! And there’s nothing we can do!

Well, it’s awful, all right, but there’s plenty we can do, as writers across the political spectrum (from Charles Krauthammer to Trudy Rubin) started saying by the end of last week. These bullets come from Krauthammer:

1. Suspend the NATO-Russia Council established in 2002 to help bring Russia closer to the West. Make clear that dissolution will follow suspension…
2. Bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization.
3. Dissolve the G-8….
4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene…

Ms. Rubin used softer language, such as "Under present conditions, it’s hard to imagine holding the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, not far from the Georgian war zone…" But made similar points. She added:

    Europe and America must support, and provide substantial aid to,
Saakashvili, and insist on the need for independent peacekeepers in
Georgia. European countries must finally fashion a joint energy policy
and lessen dependence on Moscow, rather than cutting separate deals
with Russia.

So we had, and have, options. But it hit me this morning that we need to go ahead and act on them, NOW, and not let up until Russian behavior changes dramatically — for the better, that is.

Why? Because the pattern has been clear in recent days: Russians invade. West gets upset. Russia says we’ll be done in a minute. West fumes. Russia says it’s done now. West starts talking (sort of) tough. Russia agrees to cease-fire. West says that’s better. Russia says it’s withdrawing. West says, you’re not withdrawing, either. Russia says we’re ABOUT to withdraw and moves closer to Tbilisi. West says why aren’t you withdrawing? Russia says NOW we’re withdrawing, and blows up a Georgian airfield….

The consequences, to the extent that the West can get them together, need to start NOW. Then Russia is in the position of waiting for US to do something that is completely up to us — lift the consequences — instead of the other way around. Because folks, this current arrangement is not good.

Did anybody besides Republicans watch that ‘debate’ Saturday night?

Saddleback

You may have noticed that I write more lately about what various pundits are saying, comparing and contrasting and noting trends. That’s because I inherited one of the main tasks that Mike Fitts used to take care of — choosing syndicated columnists for our op-ed page. Therefore every day, I’m more conscious than usual of what all the major writers are saying, as opposed to just the ones that happened to grab my attention that day.

And I notice things. For instance, last week I was noticing that the columnists most eager to write about what the Soviets — dang, Russians (there I go again) — are doing in Georgia were the "conservatives." (Since then, Paul Krugman and Trudy Rubin have weighed in.)

I should pause at this point to explain the unfortunate fact that pretty much all major columnists are labeled — either by their syndicates, by the papers that run them or by themselves — as "liberal" or "conservative." Many are marketed this way (which is one reason you’ll never see me syndicated — I have no niche). There are some who resist this nobly. David Broder, for instance, has so much of the reporter in him still that his writing is remarkably even-handed. He is "moderate" in pretty much every sense. But hold a gun to an editor’s head and force him to choose, and he will describe him as "center-left" Similarly, Robert Samuelson approaches his subjects with such an academic detachment (I say "academic," although it is my rough impression that these days such detachment as Samuelson’s is rare in academia), particularly with regard to economics, that he does not fit comfortably in one camp or the other. But force it, and I suppose he is "center-right." Maureen Dowd is an equal-opportunity insulter, but would you ever call her "conservative?" No.

Anyway, this week I’m noticing that those who either lean right or are unabashedly "conservative" and/or Republican keep bringing up this forum that John McCain and Barack Obama participated in at Saddleback Church Saturday night. I gotta tell you I missed it. My wife and I did a rare thing that night — we got dressed up and went out. Specifically, we went to the Cap City Club’s 20th Anniversary Gala, but for us it was an excuse to celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary, which was on Sunday. When we got home, I watched a little bit of the Olympics, and saw Michael Phelps make sports history (although not in high definition).

Apparently, most of America was doing the same, including all left-leaning pundits. I say that because I’ve seen the following three descriptions of the event, all of them saying both that the event was well-run, and that McCain came off looking better than Obama did:

  1. William Kristol’s column in the NYT Monday:

        While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn’t enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching — and for me yielded three conclusions.
        First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates….
        Second, it was McCain’s night….

  2. This typical piece in the WSJ today, which essentially trashed what was revealed about Obama during the event:

    On Saturday night at the Saddleback Church in Southern California, Rick
    Warren showed Jim, Gwen, Tom, Bob and Co. what a presidential moderator
    can accomplish when he makes the debate about the candidates and not
    himself….

  3. A column by Cal Thomas, meant for Tuesday publication:

       The "civil forum” featuring presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain may not have been as exciting as Michael Phelps winning his eighth Olympic gold medal, but it was civil and it was a forum from which emerged useful information.
       McCain had the most to gain. Judging by the applause, he won the night among evangelical voters….

So my question now is this: Did any Democrats or liberals watch this event? Did they, too, think Rick Warren did a great job? Did they think their guy did better than McCain, or do they think the less said, the better? So far, I have no indication.

Any of y’all who saw it, help us out here.

We will kill Harkonnens together

James Smith is a very nice guy, and he’s also a Democrat in the post-Vietnam era. These undeniable facts lead to a sense of dissonance sometimes when he talks like a soldier. I’ve noticed this several times in the couple of years since he joined the infantry.

I noticed it again yesterday during his address to Rotary. Now that I’m writing about it, I forget exactly who said the words that kicked off this train of thought, although I remember the context. Maybe James said it, or maybe it was said by one of his comrades during a video clip he showed us. No matter. It was part of his presentation, and I know I have heard James say the same thing at other times.

Anyway, the context had to do with fighting alongside Afghan allies. These are a people bred to unbelievably (by Western standards) harsh deprivation ever since Alexander the Great was there. The dry, stark landscape is practically lunar, and the person you speak with today could get his head cut off and his body left in the dust of the road (there is only one paved road running through the entire province, and you stay off of it because a beaten path invites IEDs) as a warning, just because he spoke to you.

James speaks warmly of the bonds between his men and the Afghan police they work with. He repeatedly says any one of them would have taken a bullet for him. At one point in the presentation, either James or the guy on video, speaking of those allies, mentioned this thing that binds them: They "kill Taliban" together.

Normally, James speaks of the bond in terms that wouldn’t make delicate civilians — especially peace-minded fellow Democrats — wince, such as mutual self-sacrifice (that willingness to take a bullet) or the way the children of the country inspire him to believe in its future. But one gets the impression that among soldiers (and national police), the "kill Taliban together" thing is either said often, or is so understood that it doesn’t have to be said.

When it came up Monday, I immediately thought of Dune. Similar landscape, and the bond that the Atreides sought with the Fremen (too late to save the Atreides, unfortunately) was so very much like this one. There is the passage in which a small band of surviving Atreides form an ad hoc alliance with some Fremen, and the key affirmation that they are now allies goes like this:

    "We will kill Harkonnens," the Fremen said. He grinned.

A Rotary meeting is about as far as you can get from the surface of Arrakis. But I get the impression that Afghanistan is not.

Jim Rex on public school choice

   

Obviously, this was not a good day to leave my camera at home. First the interesting James Smith speech, then Jim Rex visited us to report on his first year in office.

He talked for some length about his initiatives pushing public school choice. He had a lot to say about it, some of which I captured on my phone above (sorry again about the quality).

I haven’t really had time to go through all my notes yet from this meeting. When I do, maybe I’ll find the beginnings of a column; I don’t know. But in the meantime, I’ll share his response to my expressing one of my big reservations about school "choice," whether it’s public or private.

Specifically, I worry that there’s no way to administer choice so that everybody has access to it (which is why I’m always preaching that we need to improve ALL the schools). In a state where the Legislature won’t even come up with enough money to pay for the gasoline for buses to go where they go NOW, how are kids who don’t have middle-class Moms with a minivan to run them to a program 20 miles away supposed to avail themselves of these opportunities.

Rex had a fairly decent reply to that. He said that if you start a good program — say, single-gender programs — in a few schools, parents across the state will demand the same opportunities, and soon you’ll see it in every corner of the state. In the case of single-gender, the program started in a handful of schools, and this year is in 250. Of course, single-gender is a low-cost kind of "choice" to offer. It’s a little harder to ramp up such programs as Montessori.

But he’s committed to this course.

Again, sorry about the video quality. You know where my usual camera (which by the way is my own personal camera, not the newspaper’s) was? I’d left it at home where I’d taken some pictures of my twin grandbabies, who are — no offense intended here — WAY more photogenic than Jim Rex and James Smith. For proof, see below. (And that’s just ONE of them. I could have shown both, but I didn’t think y’all could stand that much cute.)

Tiptoes

Capt. Smith speaks to Rotary

Capt. (Rep.) James Smith spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club about his experiences in Afghanistan. Some highlights:

  • Before the speech, the club recognized my colleague Chuck Crumbo for the job he did reporting, in country, on the exploits of the 218th Brigade. Chuck accepted the well-deserved honor with typical modesty.
  • Capt. Smith told the story again of how he, at age 37, bucked the system by insisting that he be allowed to quit the JAG Corps and join the infantry — after being inspired by a visit to Ground Zero in NYC. The system bucked back, and in fact finally told him that he would have to resign his commission and start over as an enlisted man in basic training, keeping up with the 18-year-olds. Obviously, they expected him to say, "Never Mind." But he accepted the challenge, went through basic, worked his way back up to captain, and ended up leading a team that fought the Taliban alongside Afghan national police forces. (The poor-quality video below, from my phone, is the part when he was telling the story of going to Basic again.)
  • Yes, he did say the phrase, "If I run for governor." Interestingly, the subject was brought up by arch-Republican Rusty DePass. Rusty’s son served with Capt. Smith in Afghanistan, and he has warned his Dad that if the captain runs, he’s going to support him.
  • Also in the audience was Joe Wilson, and this provided another example of how military service bridges partisan gaps. (It’s a pet theory of mine that the partisan bitterness of this generation results from politics now being dominated by the post-draft — and especially post WWII — generation, and they lack that shared experience to teach them that we’re all Americans first, not Democrats or Republicans.) Anyway, Rep. Smith made a point of mentioning that Joe was his C.O. back in his JAG days.
  • As in his e-mailed reports you read on this blog, James exhibited his characteristic optimism about the future of Afghanistan, based on his experience with the children of the country. Whenever they’d roll into a village, he’d send his second-in-command to talk to the village elder, then go question a 10- or 11-year-old himself. The elder, trying to walk a tightrope between the Coalition and the Taliban, would blow smoke, such as "We last saw about a dozen Taliban a couple of weeks ago." The kid would give the straight intel, along the lines of "There were two dozen, and they rolled out of here the moment they saw you coming, just minutes ago."

It was a compelling presentation (particularly the part about how his team tracked down a Taliban leader who had been terrorizing the region), and I wish I’d had the resources at hand to have gotten the whole thing on video — good-quality video. Sorry about the lousy quality of this below…

   

How much 55 mph could save us

Ran into Samuel this morning and he gave me a break — he didn’t ask me if I had read the book yet. But he did, of course, get onto 55 mph, and he started throwing a bunch of numbers at me, and I meant to ask him to e-mail his numbers to me, but forgot, but that’s OK because when I got to the office I found that he had already sent me the numbers, over the weekend. To wit:

If we had a 55mph which Chevron says we save 22 Billion Gallons of Gas which is 524 million barrels of oil on an annual basis, here is what you get  a drop in the price of oil of at least $ 15 to $20 dollars a barrel, the dollar’s value improves and the price fall further and then the speculators see that this is not there ballgame anymore  and it falls further and so the thugocracies start seeing their boondoggles shrink and Putin , Ahmadinajad and others find out they are no longer awash in petrodollars and remember Europe is facing a slow down now and even in China  it is slowing down so now we need to go for efficiency and energy security so we can make the jump to other fuels for transportation. Now the other big factor here is inflation and if we did this we would hit it with a big bat  and slow it down significantly which then brings all  things down. Now we  cannot let out domestic retail price slip below $ 2.50 a gallon so we  need to set a floor that if the prices dips , it is taxed to fund alternative fuels , low-carbon , non-carbon, wind , solar. There are answers , but not from Washington. Are you the one ? Will you lead ? Are you related to Thomas Paine ,Thomas Jefferson, & Abigal Adams It is time for the ONES to emerge. We need new Founding Leadership.This country needs action ! Are you the ONE ?????????

As Samuel said to me this morning, "That’s the word, ‘Thugocracy.’" And he’s right. Why does Putin think he can get away with this stuff in Georgia? Because he can. And why can he? Because of the oil and gas.

Anyway, before he got away, I got Samuel to agree with me that we should do 55 AND drill, thereby reasserting the essential Energy Party organizing principle: Do Everything. Only then can we make the thugs feel it.

Note that at the end of his missive Samuel was expressing his frustration at the lack of leadership. Amen to that. He says he’s about had it with all of ’em — Democrats as well as Republicans. Of course, I’ve been there for some time.

Fabulously Hot

Being shorthanded and having much to do, we don’t have as much fun as we used to in our morning meetings — gotta get out, get to it. But silliness can insinuate itself no matter how brisk and businesslike we are, especially if we try to go a little too fast.

This morning, as he was quickly moving through a list of things he might write about, assuming we achieved consensus on them, Warren mentioned the new "Fabulously Hot" slogan for the Columbia metro area.

Wait, I said — I think you’re confusing this promotional campaign with another one.

Of course, the real challenged faced by the Midlands isn’t communicating a clear, unified sense of place to the rest of the world. For folks who are not here, we are Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. Whether we are in Cayce (slogan: "Lebensraum"), Irmo ("Where Referenda Go to Die") or Richland Northeast ("Halfway to Florence"), folks elsewhere see us as being in Columbia.

The problem is that we can’t get our act together to capitalize upon that, or accomplish much anything else, because of our balkanized system of many tiny, competing governments. As Warren said later in the meeting: Sure, it’s hot — thanks to all the friction between the many little governments.

Tom Davis on the Jasper Port deal

Tom Davis dropped by to see Cindi and me Tuesday morning — his first visit since the one I wrote about back here and here — and we talked about a number of things.

Tom, you will recall, is the governor’s former chief of staff who is now the GOP nominee for what is for the moment Catherine Ceips’ Senate seat.

Anyway, one thing Tom talked about was progress that’s been made on the Jasper Port deal. Tom continues to believe that his ex-boss, Mark Sanford, doesn’t get enough credit for bringing the deal with Georgia along to this point (even though my former colleague Mike Fitts did a column awhile back pretty much covering Tom’s talking points on the subject).

But Tom expects that years from now, when some of the more southern Corridor of Shame counties have benefited greatly from the economic development the projected port will bring, Mr. Sanford will get the credit, and deservedly so. This, he says, will be Mark Sanford’s legacy.

It will also be, if it turns out as hoped, Tom Davis’ legacy. He was, near as I could tell, the most ardent advocate for the Jasper Port in the Sanford administration, and the one who worked hardest to make it happen. I think you can probably see some of Tom’s passion about the subject in the above video.

What? Only $25 more per month for smokers?

Yes, of course smokers covered by the state health plan should pay more, because they cost more.

But $25 a month? What is that, a joke? That’s not enough either to cover the added cost of their filthy habit, or to encourage them to quit. It’s desultory. As the story said:

State health insurance system officials said an extra $25 a month would
not cover the full cost of smoking-related expenses. It is more
effective, they said, to encourage smokers to quit.

And $25 a month won’t do that.

Who even notices a $25-a-month increase in insurance premiums, the way they go up these days? That’s less than the increase most of us deal with in most years, without engaging in stupid and harmful behavior.

Two cheers to the governor for supporting the increase, pathetic though it is.


footnote: I have a shorter answer to the question posed in the sidebar with this morning’s story, QUESTION: I’m a state employee. How will the state know I’m a smoker? Answer: By the smell.

Good call by DHEC on Lexington Medical’s revote request

The DHEC board was right to grant Lexington Medical’s request for a revote on a previous action by an advisory committee before proceeding with the much, much larger issue of whether LexMed’s umpty-umpth request for reconsideration of its quest for an open-heart center:

    Do it over.

    Those are the marching orders passed down
Thursday by the DHEC board on a committee vote cast six weeks ago that
seemed to end Lexington Medical Center’s four-year pursuit of a new
open-heart surgery unit.

    The decision, reached after complaints
lodged by Lexington Medical over how the State Health Planning
Committee conducted its June vote, breathes temporary new life into the
issue.

Of course, in the end, DHEC must stick to its guns and say no yet again on the open-heart center, as we said again editorially on Thursday. DHEC shouldn’t have approved the Palmetto Richland expansion request several years ago; it must not compound the problem by approving a third program. That would quite likely take us in short order from the enviable position of having had one truly exceptional, excellent open-heart center (Providence) to having three mediocre ones. As we’ve explained time and again, you’ve got to do a lot of these to be good at it, and there won’t be enough bypasses done in the Midlands to keep three separate operations at the top level of excellence and competence (and remember, it’s less about the surgeons that it’s about the impossibility of keeping that many full surgical teams at razor sharpness).

But that final decision must be made against a backdrop in which nobody has an excuse to say that it was dealt with unfairly at any step of the way.

So by all means, have the advisory committee redo its vote. And then, deny the CON request, again.

What the Capital City Club did for Columbia (column version)

Yep, once again, my column today was something you’ve read before here. In fact, the earlier blog version was more complete — I couldn’t fit all that into the paper today.

But there is something new to mention on the subject, which is to urge you to watch for Clif LeBlanc’s follow-up story to the one he wrote that appeared on our front page Wednesday. The folo will be in the paper Sunday (or so I’m told), and it will address the question that  has occurred to me a number of times in the years since the Capital City Club opened Columbia’s private club world to minorities and women:

Just how open ARE the rest of the Midlands’ clubs today?

I look forward to reading it.

Today’s editorial about Georgia

With Mike gone, I’ve taken up the task of occasionally writing editorials on national and international issues (I say "occasionally" because our editorial emphasis remains as always on South Carolina). So it is that I offer for your discussion the one I wrote for today about Russian aggression in Georgia. Here’s the link, and here’s an excerpt…

… Aw, it was all so good that I couldn’t pick an excerpt. Here’s the whole thing:

Russian aggression
turns U.S. focus
to true global stakes

THERE IS A STRAIN of naive isolationism that has been woven tightly into the American character since the birth of the nation. Insulated by oceans from Europe and Asia, occupied with our own pursuits of happiness, we have through most of our history wished the rest of the world would just take care of itself.

This has been true on the political right as well as on the left. George W. Bush promised as a candidate not to engage in “nation-building” (and his frequent bungling of that task post-9/11 might be seen as a backhanded way of keeping that promise), while Democrats still repeat the post-Cold War mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid!” We prefer to view the rest of the world in simple terms, from the rare need to respond to naked aggression (think the 1991 Gulf War, World War II) to the occasional opportunity to show charity (think the Somalia relief effort, before that day in Mogadishu), or as spectacle (the Olympics).

But the world is more complicated than that, and demands our full attention, and our complete engagement on all fronts — economic, military, humanitarian, cultural and diplomatic. The world was more interconnected than George Washington wanted to face even in his day (as we quickly learned from the Quasi-War with France, and the War of 1812). And since 1945, the United States has been not only the world’s mightiest power, but its most interconnected — whether we want it to be or not.

Last week, a Russia still dominated by an ex-KGB man yanked us back to that mode. Russia’s swift and remorseless move to crush a U.S. ally that had tried to assert control over two disaffected provinces was a direct challenge to U.S. complacency, and a stark warning to other former Soviet republics and satellite states that they had better reconsider their steady drift toward the West, or else.

A resurgent, oil-rich Russia has for some time moved resentfully from emulation of the democratic West toward pursuit of its lost superpower status. Add to that China’s determination to go far beyond dominance in Olympic gold medals, toward an economic and military hegemony that is within the reach of its phenomenally dynamic economy and vast supply of human capital. Both countries have the potential, and apparently the will, to pose challenges to the United States and other liberal democracies that will make Iraq and Afghanistan seem like minor irritations.

America’s first response to the Georgia incursion was to realize just how little it was prepared to do about it. The second response was to send in U.S. troops to provide humanitarian aid, an assertion of soft power that nevertheless drew a line in the sand, evoking the Berlin Airlift.

But this is not the Cold War. This is not Czechoslovakia in 1968, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asserted. Nor was it either of the other U.S. presidential election years in which Russia used force against its neighbors, in Hungary in 1956 or Afghanistan in 1980. (Today, for instance, oil wealth and control of natural gas supplies are the new “nuclear deterrent.”)

But in this election year, what is at stake goes so far beyond our internal obsessions about celebrity or even such serious domestic concerns as health care. And yes, it goes far beyond Iraq. And it will go beyond Georgia. The selection of the next president of the United States should be about who will lead us more wisely through the global challenges we have not even yet foreseen.

Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama — we’re listening.

Thumbs up for curfew

Any thoughts on the curfew being announced today for Sandhills, to wit:

    Teens 16 and younger soon will not be allowed at Village at Sandhill after 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights unless they have parents or guardians with them.
    The new policy, drafted by shopping center management with help from Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, is being announced today and is scheduled to take effect Sept. 5, Richland County Councilwoman Val Hutchinson said Thursday…

My thoughts? Well, they’re pretty straightforward. Unless I hear something I haven’t heard yet that makes this case a special exception, I’m for it. I’ve got this thing, you know, about grownups being in charge.

Provocative thoughts about Iraq

Fallujah

Now that the Surge has been indisputably successful, and the debate is mostly about what one does with that success going forward, it’s possible to have more intelligent and dispassionate discussions of what has happened, is happening and should happen in Iraq.

Here are two examples that were side-by-side on the WSJ‘s opinion pages this morning:

  • Francis Fukuyama’s "Iraq May Be Stable, But the War Was a Mistake," in which he tells of a $100 bet he lost. He had predicted in 2003 that at the end of five years, Iraq would be a mess of the sort that "you’ll know it when you see it." Of course he lost, and paid up. But he is not giving ground on whether we should have gone into Iraq to start with. He still says that much-larger-than-$100 gamble wasn’t worth it.
  • Jonathan Kay, in a book review of The Strongest Tribe by Bing West, describes how local U.S. commanders in Iraq understood from the start what it would take to succeed as we now have. But they were hampered by a SecDef who ironically had a little too much in common with the antiwar folks:

    Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary until November 2006, was focused from the get-go on bringing the troops home and insisted that "the U.S. military doesn’t do nation- building."

    It was only after Bush got rid of Rumsfeld and then decided to do what the likes of Petraeus and McCain advised did our success begin.

    Probably the most compelling part of the review is at the beginning, where a passage describing what it was like to be a gyrene in Fallujah in 2004 was quoted at length:

    "Imagine the scene. You are tired, sweaty, filthy. You’ve been at it day after day, with four hours’ sleep, running down hallways, kicking in doors, rushing in, sweeping the beam of the flashlight on your rifle into the far corners. . . . there’s a flash and the firing hammers your ears. You can’t hear a thing and it’s way too late to think. The jihadist rounds go high — the death blossom — and your M4 is suddenly steady. It has been bucking slightly as you jerked and squeezed through your 30 rounds, not even knowing you were shooting. Trained instinct. . . . ‘Out! Out!’ Your fire team leader is screaming in your face. . . . [He] already has a grenade in his hand, shaking it violently to get your attention. . . . He pulls the pin, plucks off the safety cap, and chucks it underhand into the smoky room."