As I said earlier today, the only way Glenn McConnell would give up power to be lieutenant governor would be if he felt that his personal honor as a gentleman was at stake. And it appears that that is just what has happened:
Stepping into the role is McConnell, who is giving up one of the most powerful positions in all of state government for a mostly ceremonial role whose only duties are to preside over the Senate and run the state Office on Aging.
Speaking with reporters after a closed-door meeting in his State House office, McConnell said becoming lieutenant governor is “a personal sacrifice” but his reading of the state constitution makes it clear that the Senate President Pro Tem has a duty to become lieutanant governor when the post is permanently vacated.
“After much thought, prayer and discussion, I have decided that I have a moral obligation to my oath of office and to the constitution of this state,” McConnell said in a prepared statement. “It is an obligation that compels me to do the right thing no matter how difficult it may be to me personally.”
McConnell said he expects be sworn in on Tuesday. McConnell would not say who his preference was to replace him as the leader of the Senate, and he did not rule out the possibility of running for his state Senate seat again in four years.
Wow. What a weird, back-handed way for the mighty to fall.
This is the one really significant thing to have happened in all of this. Whether Ken Ard had continued to be lieutenant governor or not was of no consequence (which is why you never caught me paying much attention to the matter one way or the other). It doesn’t matter who the Gov Lite is, unless the governor dies or leaves office suddenly. But the most powerful man in the Senate, who has done more than anyone else to set the course for the General Assembly for the last couple of decades, has just walked away from power (for now).
That’s really something.
Whatever happens next, I must say — my hat’s off to you, senator.
The State tried this morning to foreshadow the Ard resignation with two stories. One speculated on how Glenn McConnell will dodge the unthinkable fate of being demoted to the useless, meaningless job of lieutenant governor. The other dealt with the phenomenon we’ve seen plenty of over the last couple of years — the state Democratic Party’s Sisyphean efforts to somehow turn recent scandals to its advantage. An excerpt from the second one:
An agriculture commissioner indicted for cockfighting. A state treasurer indicted for cocaine use. A married governor caught lying about an international affair. A lieutenant governor spending campaign contributions on iPads. A state House member indicted on tax-evasion charges. Another state House member arrested on harassment charges.
What do all of those politicians have in common? They are all SC Republicans…
A brief comment on that (which I had on my mind before the Ard development): I’ve heard that litany over and over from SC Dems over the last couple of years, and it hasn’t gotten traction yet. Perhaps this latest development will give it a boost, but probably not. Nor should it.
There’s a simple reason why so many scandals affect Republicans: Most state officeholders are Republicans. If the Democrats dominated the way the Repubs do, most scandals would involved Democrats. There is nothing inherent in being a Republican that makes a person more likely to be a crook (or whatever), and it’s disingenuous of Democrats to pretend that there is.
Of course, they’re counting on the way voters have been fooled into thinking about politics to help them. Far too many people today believe what the parties, interest groups and tell them — that something that happens involving one member of a party somehow reflects on all member of that party. This is an absurd proposition, but like sleep-teaching in Brave New World, it has been repeated so often — with no competing views being heard — that most people accept it implicitly.
There is only one sense in which there might be an actual cause-and-effect relationship between being Republican in SC and being a the sort who would do something unsavory: People who are attracted to politics for the wrong reasons are more likely to pick the dominant party, to ease their path into office. People who choose the hapless, minority party are generally True Believers and less likely to be hustlers. Right now the Republicans are the dominant party. To suggest that Democrats would be more virtuous if they had all the power strains belief.
But my ultimate point is this: Each person who behaves badly in office does so in his own way, and for his own reasons — not as a logical, direct result of his party affiliation. And its silly to pretend otherwise.
“I want to thank the great people of South Carolina for the incredible opportunity to serve as their Lieutenant Governor. It truly has been an honor and an experience I will never forget. The love and support you have shown my entire family has been humbling and something I will always remember.
“I also want to thank my family, especially my wife, Tammy, and my three children, Jesse, Mason, and Libby. You have lived this experience with me. There were challenges and setbacks, but you were steadfast in your support and were there for me at every turn.
“To those who volunteered and worked on our campaign, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You were always there and never expected anything in return.
“To my staff, I have nothing but praise. Your professionalism and work ethic have been exemplary from day one. You have remained focused on carrying out the duties of our office in spite of other distractions.
“To all of the above and more, I owe a great apology. During my campaign, it was my responsibility to make sure things were done correctly. I did not do that. There are no excuses nor is there need to share blame. It is my fault that the events of the past year have taken place.
“I regret the distraction this has caused for the people of this state, my family, my staff, and other elected officials in South Carolina. It is because of these mistakes that I must take full ownership and resign from the Office of Lieutenant Governor. Once again, I am deeply sorry and take full responsibility for the entire situation.”
State Attorney General Alan Wilson will hold a 1 p.m. news conference today at the State House along with State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel.
The media event follows the announcement this morning from embattled Lt. Gov. Ken Ard’s office that he will step down from his second-in-command post in the Senate.
Ard, a Florence Republican, is the focus of a state Grand Jury investigation related to his spending of campaign cash.
The assumption is being made (and perhaps confirmed off the record; I don’t know) that the AG’s presser deals with Ard. Maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t. Could be something else. We’ll see.
It’s a sign of progress. Friday, the Tower at 1301 Gervais — a landmark in the Columbia skyline — becomes IT-oLogy @ Innovista.
The installation of the IT-oLogy @ Innovista signage exemplifies the already successful partnership between IT-oLogy and Innovista to foster the development, growth and relocation of information technology (IT) companies, small and large.
“This marks the fruition of one of our original visions: a district with the strategic clustering of IT companies in one locality,” said Don Herriott, Director of Innovista Partnerships. “More companies are seeing the advantages of co-location, and IT-oLogy @ Innovista now houses 9 IT companies, and counting.”
IT-oLogy’s mission is to promote, teach and grow the IT talent pipeline and profession. With Innovista’s mission of creating, attracting and growing knowledge-based companies in the Midlands of South Carolina, the two constitute a perfect partnership for recruiting to the new IT-oLogy @ Innovista building. Clustering IT companies in a single location, such as the Tower at 1301 Gervais St., can open the door for new opportunities for partnership and business development, stimulate new ideas and industry innovation and help in the recruitment of new companies to the region.
“Our goal is to bring the IT community together in a collaborative environment to develop the IT pipeline through programs at all levels,” said Lonnie Emard, executive director of IT-oLogy. “The partnership with Innovista is a perfect example of this collaborative effort because we are bringing together people and companies that are dedicated to both of our missions.”
The establishment of an IT district is not about a sign at the top of the Tower at 1301 Gervais St. While that is a visible representation of the partnership, the real story is what happens both inside and outside of the building. The uniqueness of IT-oLogy is that it is not a single company or entity; instead, it is a non-profit collaboration of companies, academic institutions and organizations uniting to address the nationwide shortage of skilled IT professionals. To address this challenge, IT-oLogy offers K-12 programs where students explore numerous IT career options, internships for undergraduate students and continuing education opportunities that keep professionals constantly learning and up-to-date. When all this happens, the result is a vibrant economic picture, which is the goal of Innovista.
The confluence of opportunities in IT-oLogy @ Innovista will provide a home in the community for local talent as well. “At the University of South Carolina, our responsibility to students and alumni extends beyond education. It includes a commitment to helping them find jobs, good jobs, when they graduate,” said Dr. Harris Pastides, president of the University of South Carolina. “The pairing of IT-oLogy and Innovista is perfect because of their complementary missions, each focused on growing our innovation economy in this region and across South Carolina.”
“From the outset, the vision of IT-oLogy has been to have business and academic partners collaborate to advance IT talent,” Emard said. “The lack of IT talent is a national epidemic that is solved in a local manner. The establishment of IT-oLogy @ Innovista is a visible representation of bringing companies together to collaborate and partner, fostering new ideas and technologies.”
Recently, IT-oLogy announced the establishment of the branch IT-oLogy @ University Center of Greenville, located in Greenville, S.C. This is yet another way IT-oLogy is working locally to address a national issue. In the future, IT-oLogy will continue to open branches across the nation as a way to advance IT talent in a grassroots manner.
Innovista is a strategic economic development effort that is connecting USC and university-spawned innovations with entrepreneurs, businesses and stakeholders. Its purpose is to help attract and create technology-intensive, knowledge-based companies, which result in higher-paying jobs and raise the standard of living in South Carolina.
Several months ago, I heard a rumor that Innovista’s headquarters were going to move from the USC campus to this building, in part to emphasize the point (emphasized by Don Herriott) that Innovista is about the whole community, not just those blocks in the area described by Assembly and the river, Gervais and the baseball stadium (and certainly far, far more than those couple of buildings people keep going on about).
Then I heard that wasn’t right. Maybe this idea is what started the rumor I’d heard.
Anyway, this is interesting, and I’m not sure what all the ramifications are yet…
The thing that grabbed me was that this campaign video is narrated by Tom Hanks. Hence the headline.
Beyond that, this video is interesting on two levels:
It gives us a taste of how the president is going to sell his record for re-election purposes.
It’s a new wrinkle to me — a trailer for a campaign ad. Sort of like the trailer for the Ferris Bueller ad ahead of the Super Bowl. It goes (I think) where no candidate marketing has gone before…
The Obama campaign has released the trailer to director Davis Guggenheim’s 17 minute film about President Obama’s first term in office.
The film is narrated by Tom Hanks and the trailer includes interview clips of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Austan Goolsbee, and Elizabeth Warren among others.
According to the campaign, the film will be released next week at support events around the country.
Just a couple of days after I posted a video of the director of the Ayn Rand Institute, that organization sends out this release:
Apple Should Be Free to Charge $15 for eBooks
WASHINGTON–Apple and five top book publishers have been threatened by federal antitrust authorities. According to the Wall Street Journal, they are to be sued for allegedly colluding to fix ebook prices.
According to Ayn Rand Center fellow Don Watkins, “Traditional books may come from trees but they don’t grow on trees–and ebooks and ebook readers such as the iPad definitely don’t grow on trees. These are amazing values created by publishers and by companies such as Apple. They have a right to offer their products for sale at whatever prices they choose. They cannot force us to buy them. If they could, why would they charge only $15? Why not $50? Why not $1,000?
“There is no mystically ordained ‘right’ price for ebooks–the right price is the one voluntarily agreed to between sellers and buyers. Sure, some buyers may complain about ebook prices–but they are also buying an incredible number of ebooks.
“What in the world justifies a bunch of bureaucrats who have created nothing interfering in these voluntary arrangements and declaring that they get to decide what considerations should go into pricing ebooks?”
I didn’t know what the Institute was on about until I saw this Wall Street Journal piece:
U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers
The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.
Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions.
The five publishers facing a potential suit areCBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster Inc.;Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group;Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group (USA); Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp. , which also owns The Wall Street Journal….
This is truly a fight in which I do not have a dog. I think. And it should please the Randians that my own attitude has to do with market forces. I can’t conceive of paying $15 for a book when, after the transaction, I don’t actually have a book.
So I can approach this dispassionately, and ask, to what extent is this a monopoly situation? After all, Apple has competitors — such as Amazon, which actually pioneered this business of selling “books” to people electronically. The WSJ story addresses that:
To build its early lead in e-books, Amazon Inc. sold many new best sellers at $9.99 to encourage consumers to buy its Kindle electronic readers. But publishers deeply disliked the strategy, fearing consumers would grow accustomed to inexpensive e-books and limit publishers’ ability to sell pricier titles.
Publishers also worried that retailers such as Barnes & Noble Inc. would be unable to compete with Amazon’s steep discounting, leaving just one big buyer able to dictate prices in the industry. In essence, they feared suffering the same fate as record companies at Apple’s hands, when the computer maker’s iTunes service became the dominant player by selling songs for 99 cents.
Now that sounds more like what I would think the market would bear, if the market were like me. $9.99 sounds closer to what I might conceivably be willing to pay in order to have access to the contents of a book without actually getting a book. But it still seems high.
Yes, I can see advantages to a e-book. You can store more of them in a smaller space. They don’t get musty, which for an allergic guy like me is nothing to sneeze at. And you can search them, to look up stuff you read, and want to quote or otherwise share. That last consideration isn’t that great for me because I have an almost eerie facility for quickly finding something I read in a book, remembering by context. But… once I’ve found it, there’s the problem that if I want to quote it, I have to type it — which is not only time-consuming, but creates the potential for introducing transcription errors. Far better to copy and paste. (At least, I think you can copy and paste from ebooks. Google Books doesn’t allow it. See how I got around that back here, by using screenshots of Google Books.)
But I still want to possess the book. Maybe it’s just pure acquisitiveness, or maybe it’s a survivalist thing — I want something I can read even if someone explodes a thermonuclear device over my community, knocking out all electronics.
In any case, all of us are still sorting out what an ebook is worth to us. Let Apple set the price where it may, and try to compete with Amazon. Then we’ll see what shakes out.
Well, I’m back. I had some sort of crud yesterday that made me leave the office about this time yesterday– upset stomach, weakness, achiness. It lasted until late last night. When I got up this morning, I was better, but puny. So I went back to bed, and made it to the office just after noon. Much better now.
Anyway, instead of reading newspapers over breakfast at the Capital City Club the way I usually do, I read a few more pages in my current book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann. Remember how I was all in a sweat to read it several months ago after reading an excerpt in The Wall Street Journal? Well, having read the prequel, 1491, I’m finally well into this one.
And I’m reading about how settlement by Europeans in many parts of the New World established “extraction societies.” At least, I think that was the term. (It’s one I’ve seen elsewhere, related to “extraction economy” and, less closely, to “plunder economy.” The book is at home, and Google Books won’t let me see the parts of the book where the term was used. But the point was this: Settlements were established that existed only to extract some commodity from a country — say, sugar in French Guiana. Only a few Europeans dwelt there, driving African slaves in appalling conditions. Profits went to France, and the institutions and infrastructure were never developed, or given a chance to develop.
Neither a strong, growing economy with opportunities for all individuals, nor its attendant phenomenon democracy, can thrive in such a place. (Which is related to something Tom Friedman often writes about, having to do with why the Israelis were lucky that their piece of the Mideast is the only one without oil.)
Here are some excerpts I was able to find on Google Books, to give the general thrust of what I’m talking about:
There are degrees of extraction societies, it would seem. South Carolina developed as such a society, but in modified form. There were more slaves than free whites, and only a small number even of the whites could prosper in the economy. But those few established institutions and infrastructure that allowed something better than the Guianas to develop. Still, while we started ahead of the worst extraction societies, and have made great strides since, our state continues to lag by having started so far back in comparison to other states.
It is also inhibited by a lingering attitude among whites of all economic classes, who do not want any of what wealth exists to be used on the kind of infrastructure that would enable people on the bottom rungs to better themselves. This comes up in the debate over properly funding public transit in the economic community of Columbia.
Because public transit doesn’t pay for itself directly, any more than roads do, there is a political reluctance to invest in it, which holds back people on the lower rungs who would like to better themselves — by getting to work as an orderly at a hospital, or to classes at Midlands Tech.
It’s a difficult thing to overcome. Other parts of the country, well out of the malarial zones (you have to read Mann to understand my reference here), have no trouble ponying up for such things. But here, there’s an insistent weight constantly pulling us down into the muck of our past…
State Senator Chip Campsen will host a two day Town Hall Cruise aboard his 100′ charter vessel, Spirit of the Lowcountry. The Cruise is scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, March 13 – 14. Senator Campsen will be joined by Congressman Tim Scott as they conduct floating town hall meetings at various marinas in Beaufort, Colleton and Charleston Counties. Citizens are welcome aboard for a town hall meeting at each marina.
The Town Hall Cruise is an opportunity for Campsen and Scott to cruise their new coastal legislative districts while greeting and listening to citizens along the way. They will also embark on land-based excursions to significant sites in their districts.
Senator Campsen and Congressman Scott’s new districts encompass vast portions of South Carolina’s coast as a result of the redistricting plan passed by the General Assembly last year. Campsen’s district spans 80 miles of coastline from Bulls Bay in Charleston County to Port Royal Sound in Beaufort. Scott’s district extends 115 miles from the Santee River in Charleston County to Beaufort’s Calibogue Sound. They will run for re-election in the new districts this year.
Senator Campsen said, “As a mariner and avid outdoorsman, I have spent a lifetime in the woods and coastal waters of Charleston, Colleton and Beaufort Counties. From the pristine Cape Romain Wildlife Refuge in the north, to the heart of the ACE Basin in the south, my district encompasses the most spectacular coastal resources in the nation. A cruise is the perfect way to see it. I am excited about representing it’s people and places.”
Congressman Scott said, “I look forward to representing the beautiful South Carolina coast running south from Charleston through Colleton and Beaufort Counties. When Chip suggested the Town Hall Cruise, I thought it was a great way to tour the district and hear from directly from its constituents.”…
This was from a release apparently sent by the cruise line that owns the boat. I tried to link to “Campsen for State Senate,” which the release said was paying for the release, but found nothing. The senator needs to work on his SEO. Maybe ADCO could help him with that…
That format, with seven candidates not all running for the same job, was a bit unwieldy. And the staging — with the candidates sitting in shadow with bright pools of superfluous light to either side of them — was ideal for making photographers want to pull their hair out. But dim as it was, it was the first look I’d had at both of these lineups, and I found it useful, as I expect the audience did.
You can read an account of the forum — “debate” would be misleading — at thestate.com.
Here are a few additional comments of my own:
As Carolyn indicated in her story, the sharpest disagreement — really, the only disagreement — was over Richland County sales tax increase that is the only plan this community has come up with for paying for bus service for the Midlands. Which tells you where I stand, as if you didn’t know already. Since a city without public transit might as well go out of business.
The candidates with the best answers on that were Cameron Runyan (running for the at-large seat) and Daniel Coble (running in District 3). Both offered passionate, even vehement, support for the sales tax increase as essential to the community going forward. Beyond those two there was a second group (Jenny Isgett, Mike Miller — both District 3 candidates) who were sorta kinda for it, but with caveats. Then there were Joe Azar and Robert Bolchoz (both running at-large), who expressed the strongest skepticism for the plan. (For some reason, I don’t have what Moe Baddourah — the other District 3 candidate — said on the issue in my notes. Blame me for that, not him.)
Beyond that, I have scattered impressions. There was general agreement, and not only from small businessmen Baddourah and Azar, that the city makes it too hard to do business. When the candidates were asked about Famously Hot (yay, ADCO!), Mike Miller said his favorite part of the campaign was the “surprisingly cool” — which he said was accurate (as former music writer at The State, Mike was the only one on the panel who has actually been a professional arbiter of what is cool). Jenny Isgett diagnosed the city as suffering from ADD, with the symptoms being the inability to pick priorities and see them through.
I look forward to learning more about what differences exist between these candidates and sharing what I find with y’all. I also need to see what’s happening, if anything, in the 2nd District, where Nammu Muhammad is challenging Brian DeQuincey Newman.
But this was a start — actually, a belated one. The election is just under a month away — April 3.
The thing that got me about the Laurens County GOP “Purity” pledge wasn’t the general idea about having politicians behave themselves on the sexual front. I’m for that. Mainly because I get sick of hearing about their failures in that department, when there are a lot of other things we should be talking about.
If you can find a candidate who never did anything wrong on that front and never will, I’m all for it. And I’m particularly sympathetic to the Laurens County folks, because they’ve endured such aggravation on that front:
The 28-point pledge passed last week appeared to be at least in part a response to an extramarital affair had by the county sheriff, who was also accused in a lawsuit of driving his mistress to get an abortion in a county-owned vehicle, leading to an inter-party squabble when the local group’s leader called for the sheriff to resign.
So I’ve got no beef with that. Nor am I bothered by the impracticality of, for instance, living in the United States in 2012 and not being exposed to pornography. You couldn’t, for instance, be on Twitter. The Twitter folks do an awesome job, I think, of keeping it clean. I’m surprised by how quickly new followers who are really just come-ons for porn sites disappear.
But still, there are those brief moments, before they get booted off as spam, when you innocently go, “Let’s see who’s following me now,” as I did this morning, and you make the mistake of clicking on the avatar, as I did this morning, and bang, you’re looking at a wet, naked girl in a bathtub. And I mean “girl,” as in so young you feel like the dirtiest man in the world for having glimpsed her even for a second. You see something like that, and the first thought in your head, if you’re a normal, red-blooded American male, is, “Now I can never run for office in Laurens County!” (By the way, lest any of you perves go to my Twitter feed and click on my followers trying to find the picture — I’ve already reported that account for spam, and it’s gone.)
But that’s not my biggest problem with the pledge, either. My biggest problem is that the “purity pledge” is… adulterated… with unrelated material:
The pledge is full of traditional Republican talking points in a conservative state – balancing budgets, opposing gun control laws and abortion, supporting school choice and a statement that marriage is “fundamental to the stability, betterment and perpetuation of our society.”
Nothing against balanced budgets, but what does that have to do with porn? And opposing gun control? Really? So you’re saying, you can’t touch a woman until you’re married to her, and you’re not to touch, um, porn ever, but you’re encouraged to sit there caressing and oiling up your Smith and Wesson?
Nothing against guns, either, but really — what does that have to do with purity?
John Locke at his most obsessed. Trust him, or not?
If you’ve never watched “Lost,” and intend to someday, don’t read this, because I’m going to give some stuff away.
I didn’t watch it when it was on, maybe because I had seen bits of it, and it made no sense, or so I inferred.
Now, I have almost finished watching all six seasons on Netflix, and I know for sure — without having to infer — that it makes no sense. I would have finished watching all of it by now, except that I turn it off and look for something else when my wife enters the room. Not because I’m sensitive to what she wants to see, but because I don’t want to be scoffed at. Because I know it’s silly, but I’m determined to see it to the end. NOT because I have any expectation of the ending being satisfying, but because I can’t help myself.
I thought it was a flawed show before I watched it, and now I know just how flawed it is, in great detail. And the greatest flaw, the greatest sin against storytelling, is its inconsistency.
But we have lots of brain circuits that are making predictions about all kinds of things, every second of every day. And the brain pays special attention to other people, Linden says.
“We’re extremely attuned to the veracity, and the predictability, and the group spirit and the motivations of those around us,” he says
That’s probably from thousands of years living in groups. To stay alive, we had to know if the person who helped us yesterday might hurt us tomorrow.
Prediction is so important that our brains actually give us a chemical reward when we do it well, Linden says.
“We are intrinsically wired to take pleasure from our predictions that come true,” he says.
Get it right and you get a burst of pleasure-inducing dopamine or a related brain chemical. Get it wrong and dopamine levels dip, Linden says.
All that training makes us extremely sensitive to the consistency and predictability of people we depend on, Linden says.
“If we have a sense that there is a mismatch between our prediction and their actions, that is something that sets off neural alarm bells,” he says. And if we think they have been inconsistent about something fundamental, he says, we will feel betrayed.
“When we feel deeply betrayed, either by a leader, or by someone in our social circle, or by our beloved, that pain really is similar to physical pain,” Linden says.
In other words, we’re hard-wired to suffer from the inconsistency of flip-floppers. No wonder we don’t like them.
Well, maybe. And that would help to explain why I don’t like the central flaw in “Lost:” You can’t rely on the characters to be consistent.
Take John Locke, for instance:
First, you like him. You’re cheering for him because you’re glad he can walk again. And you like that his knowledge of outdoor lore (which I guess he got from books or something) — tracking, knife-throwing, boar-killing, etc. — can be useful to the castaways. He’s a reassuring presence, an avuncular figure who befriends the boy with the dog and makes a cradle for Clair’s baby.
Then, you start to wonder about him, as he starts talking about what “the island” wants and demands, and obsessing about “the Hatch.”
Then, you’re SURE he’s nuts, as he makes a religion out of pushing the button.
Then, you find out he was RIGHT, because not pushing the button was what crashed their plane to begin with. And leads to a catastrophic mess when it happens again.
Then, you find out about his miserable life before the island, and you really sympathize with him.
Then, he dies.
Then, he turns up alive after his body is brought back to the island.
Then, it turns out he’s dead after all, and the “Locke” we see is really the Smoke Monster.
Then, character A trusts him anyway, and tries to do his bidding, while Character B fights him as hard as possible.
Then, Character B trusts him completely, and Character A strives to frustrate him.
And… well that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
There are a couple of character arcs that are a little more consistent, but still jarring. Such as the steady degradation of Jack from Boy Scout Everyone Can Rely On to nervous, neurotic wreck who might do anything. Meanwhile, Sawyer goes from the guy you can’t trust to a fairly heroic figure, more or less.
Other characters will switch back and forth, sometimes more than once in an episode, from bad to good, trustworthy to untrustworthy. Note how many times we are led to believe that it’s a good idea to trust Ben Linus, only to find out, yet again, that it is not?
Beyond the characters, there’s the fact that the Explanation of What is Going On keeps changing. Something is revealed, then we learn that that is an illusion, and it’s deeper than that, on and on down the rabbit hole. (Speaking of rabbits, the occasional allusion is fun. Such as when a lab rabbit is referred to by name as “Angstrom.” Or the characters named for philosophers.)
“Lost” isn’t the worst in this regard. The worst case of this I’ve ever seen in a TV series was another cultish series, “24.” Within the bounds of a single episode, a character who we are led to believe we can all trust our lives to turns out to be the incarnation of evil, and then switches back. Which is made even more outrageous when we consider that this is all supposedly happening within one hour’s time.
I felt so manipulated and abused by that series that I gave up after two seasons.
So why am I still watching “Lost”? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the scenery. In any case, I don’t have far to go now…
This video, brought to my attention by Nancy Mace Jackson on Twitter, is interesting on a couple of levels. First, it’s apparently a course on conservative theory taught by Mallory Factor, who’s been in the news again recently.
Second, the guest speaker appearing before the class is Yaron Brook, director of the Ayn Rand Institute. Interesting guy. He’s introduced as having served in Israeli Intelligence. He has an accent I can’t quite place — he sounds vaguely like former USC President John Palms.
The ideas he’s talking about could hardly be more timely than now, when various strains of libertarianism, from Ron Paul to the Tea Party, are striving to seize control of the Republican Party.
The famed co-author of the “broken windows theory” which inspired a generation of community-policing advocates, passed away on Friday. The Wall Street Journal ran a collection of short snippets from articles he had written over the years. I thought this one was interesting, because I had not seen it put quite this way:
The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many of the writers [for The Public Interest], myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter’s presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy.
That hardly seems consistent with neocons’ Wilsonian faith in our power to affect the world in Iraq and other places, but perhaps it works in the domestic sphere. It just goes to show how slippery any political designations can be, which is why I avoid them. The main narrative I had seen in the past was that neocons were liberals who became disenchanted. I suppose Wilson’s explanation for why that disaffection occurred is as good as any.
Wilson was a very smart man, but of course he could also spout nonsense, such as here:
Men like to complain about what bad drivers women are, but the evidence about highway fatalities suggests that testosterone causes twice as many deaths (per 100 million miles driven) as female driving does. And women can help men drive better…
Kirkman Finlay, the only one of this bunch likely to run as a Republican.
Anne Sinclair (not the one who is inexplicably married to DSK, but the one who long served on Columbia City Council) — whom I can also ask today, if I see her at Rotary…
To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up…
— Rick Santorum
But since Bud mentioned it today on a previous post, and I read it again in The New Yorker while eating my lunch today, I thought I’d go ahead and say something that’s occurred to me several times in the last few days.
This sort of thing keeps happening. Someone running for president says something that I wouldn’t say, but I understand what he means, and what he means isn’t that awful — and the Chattersphere goes nuts over it, day after day, as though it were the most outrageous thing said in the history of the world.
It happened with Mitt Romney saying he wasn’t concerned about the poor. Obviously, he meant that there were mechanisms in place to help the poor, and that people like him didn’t need any help, but he was worried about the middle class. Not the best way to say it — and if he thinks the safety net makes it OK to be poor, he’s as wrong as he can be. But he was right to express worry about the state of the middle class, whatever he may imagine the remedies to be.
As for Santorum and the “throw-up” line. Well, to start with, I would recommend that no one running for president ever say that something someone else says or believes makes him want “to throw up.” It makes him seem… overwrought. Not at all cool. How can we trust him with that 3 a.m. phone call, with having his finger on the button, when he keeps running to the john to, in a memorable phrase I heard several years ago, “call Roark on the Big White Phone?”
That said, I get what he’s trying to say about the JFK speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. I used to have a similar response to it, although I was never in danger of losing my lunch. Matter of degree, I suppose. In any case, it put me off. Because, far from being an assertion of the legitimate difference between church and state, I had taken it as an assertion that JFK would not bring his deepest values into the public sphere. I further saw it as a sop to bigotry. If offended me to think of a Catholic giving the time of day to anyone so small-minded as to suppose that a mackerel-snapper couldn’t be a good president, much less trying to tell them what they wanted to hear. Altogether a shameful instance of a candidate putting winning ahead of everything. Or so I thought.
My reaction was somewhat like that of Santorum when he addressed the subject a couple of years ago:
Let me quote from the beginning of Kennedy’s speech: ‘I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.’
The idea of strict or absolute separation of church and state is not and never was the American model. …
That’s correct. There is no such “absolute” separation, and none was intended, except perhaps by Thomas Jefferson (who was not one of the Framers of our Constitution, FYI). Kennedy’s choice of the word “absolute” was unfortunate. Santorum went on:
Kennedy continued: ‘I believe in an America … where no Catholic prelate would tell the president — should he be Catholic — how to act … where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.’
Of course no religious body should ‘impose its will’ on the public or public officials, but that was not the issue then or now. The issue is one that every diverse civilization like America has to deal with — how do we best live with our differences.
There, I can really identify with what he’s saying. The paranoia toward the Church that Kennedy was addressing is so idiotic, so offensive, that one hates even to see it dignified with an answer.
As for the overall point — was JFK’s performance offensive or not? I once thought it was, although as I say, it didn’t make me physically ill. But that’s because I had never read the speech in its entirety, or heard it. I had simply relied on characterizations of it by others, and the way they presented it made it sound as though Kennedy were kowtowing to anti-Catholic prejudice in a way that bothered me. Worse, there was this suggestion that he was pushing his faith away from him, suggesting that he would conduct himself in office as though he had no beliefs.
Implicit in all of it was the suggestion that faith had no place in the public sphere, which, like Santorum, I reject.
The speech itself is so well-rounded, so erudite, so articulate, so thoughtful about the relationship between faith and political power in this country, that I find myself won over to a candidate who could give such a speech…
I then quoted an excerpt:
Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end, where all men and all churches are treated as equals, where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice, where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind, and where Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral levels, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe, a great office that must be neither humbled by making it the instrument of any religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding it — its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him¹ as a condition to holding that office.
I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty; nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so. And neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test, even by indirection. For if they disagree with that safeguard, they should be openly working to repeal it.
I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all and obligated to none, who can attend any ceremony, service, or dinner his office may appropriately require of him to fulfill; and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation.
I went on to wax nostalgic for a time when political candidates had the respect for the American people to speak to them that way. This was far, far from the simple “separation of church and state” speech that I had heard about.
Even before I read the speech, there was never a time that mention of it made me want to throw up. The worst thing I said about it was that “I don’t much like the way Kennedy did it.” But I did, like Santorum, have a negative conception of it.
The thing was, I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I slipped and did something the other day that I didn’t mean to do.
Normally, I keep two browsers running (with multiple tabs going on each) at the same time, and it helps me keep track of what I’m juggling. There are certain things I only do on Google Chrome, and certain other things I only do on Mozilla Firefox. An example of how that helps: On Chrome, I have myself permanently logged in to my Twitter feed, so that when I click on my Twitter bookmark, it’s up and ready to go (although actually I use Tweetdeck mostly for composition of Tweets, I find the regular browser version easier to use for looking up followers and such). On Firefox, Twitter thinks of me as the author of ADCO’s feed, so I’m automatically logged into that one.
Earlier this week, I broke protocol. For some reason, an invitation to do something on LinkedIn came in on my ADCO email (Firefox). That was weird, because normally I deal with LinkedIn only on Chrome. And I thought LinkedIn only had my blog email address, which I only look at via Chrome. Some prospective connection must have manually entered the ADCO address on an invitation; I don’t know.
In any case, since it had never come up on that browser before, LinkedIn treated me like someone who had never been to the site before, and among other things invited me to send invitations to all my contacts. I’m quite sure that, faced with the prospect of invitations going out to a couple of thousand people, I clicked on the option that said not to do that. I did it quite deliberately.
But I must have clicked on something wrong at some point along the way, because all week, ever since that day, I’ve been getting responses to LinkedIn invitations from people I never (with intent, anyway) sent such invitations to.
Which is fine, on some level. Some of these were people I probably should be connected to in that way, as part of a balanced social media strategy. But others were nice people, friends of mine, who are just not into that kind of stuff at all. People I would never dream of bothering with such a request.
Some of them took the time to write me thoughtful emails (and in one case, a voicemail) thanking me for having thought of them (which, I hereby confess, I had not done, at least in this context), but explaining as nicely as they could — letting me down easy — that they just didn’t do stuff like that.
My first instinct, in each case, was to write back and apologize for having bothered them. But then they would know that I hadn’t been thinking of them, and that might make the situation even more awkward than it was.
So I did nothing, except to write, “That’s all right” to one or two of them.
This happened on Monday. So far, I’ve heard from about 40 people, either accepting the connection or politely refusing. I don’t know how many are still hovering out there.
I don’t know about you, but so far, LinkedIn hasn’t done much for me. Twitter and Facebook have helped me build my blog readership, and I just really enjoy Twitter as a medium of expression. But LinkedIn… smart people tell me that it’s an important part of a professional personal brand strategy, so I have dutifully recruited 863 connections so far. But I have yet to get anything out of it that I haven’t gotten from other social media tenfold.
Anyway, if you are one of the unfortunate who received an invitation this week, I didn’t mean to send it. Not that I don’t think of you all the time. I just wasn’t thinking of you that way…
If you’re like me, you’ve run across this gag a number of times before, but it still brings a smile. This was sent to me today by a longtime colleague, who like me is probably nostalgic for the days when newspapers mattered in the ways implied by the joke.
This particular iteration no doubt comes out of Memphis judging by No. 12. The final line tends to vary. For instance, here’s one in which No. 12 reads, “None of these is read by the guy who is running the country into the ground.” I think I saw a version once in which the punchline was about The State, but I forget how it goes. Anyway, here’s this version:
1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
2. The Washington Post is read by the people who think they run the country.
3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country, and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country, but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time — and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.
7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.
10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped, minority, feminist, atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.
11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
12. The Memphis Commercial Appeal is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.
Not a particularly imaginative version, since it was always taken as a truism, even a point of pride, by newspapermen and -women that yesterday’s news is used to wrap fish. Perhaps the author of this one didn’t know that.
Speak out, you got to speak out
against the madness,
you got to speak your mind,
if you dare.
But don’t no don’t try to
get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair.
— Crosby, Stills and Nash
Pursuant to our previous discussion of ponytails and their relationship to credibility (in a specific context, not in general), Kathryn Fenner shares this article:
Hair style and dress sense are the only issues where politicians present a narrower range of options for voters than policies. Their political conservatism is reflected, and possibly shaped by, their follicular safeness. If you like, you can research this yourself. But you will find, after inspecting candidates’ heads at the local, state and federal level, there are very few afros, perms, ducktails, beehives, streaks, mop-tops, hi-top fades, curtains, asymmetrical fringes, Mohicans, pony-tails, dreadlocks, cornrows, Jheri curls, devilocks, liberty spikes, rat tails, bowl-cuts, under-cuts or mullets.
Tony Blair BEFORE thinking up New Labour.
If you are one of the thousands or millions of men with one of these things on your head, voting can be a lonely and frustrating process.
Today’s politicians don’t actually have a thing against long hair per se, since a lot of them are deserters from the long-haired community. Look at old pictures of Barack Obama with an afro, Bill Clinton’s shaggy mop and Tony Blair in his Mick Jagger phase. But they visited the barber before they ran for office because politics is an annex of the banking, legal, military and other notoriously short-haired professions.
The political establishment and its associated industries simply use a candidate’s appearance as a means of weeding out people who don’t act in their interests. So we end up with phrases like “presidential hair,” which means, on a more subtextual level, that the man underneath it won’t be out of place pressing flesh at a Wall Street dinner or engaging in bonhomie with military personnel. In short, these industries want to make sure the candidate is one of their guys, and in their antiquated world of alpha masculinity, something approaching a buzz cut is essential. Considering their election campaigns — especially the fundraising part — are essentially a series of job interviews with a panel of generals, bankers and super-rich lawyers, it’s not surprising that candidates scissor themselves as soon as their name gets near a ballot paper.
Gas prices are too high, and we need President Obama to listen.
With an 8% gas price spike last month and prices expected to rise further this summer, it’s time to solve our energy problems, provide real energy solutions for the American people, and get our economy focused on creating jobs. The president’s energy policy isn’t helping and begs the question: is the president even listening? We need the entire Keystone XL pipeline built, we need to drill domestically, and we need to stop depending on foreign oil. If we can lower gas prices, we also can grow our economy and create jobs for the American people.
Welcome to my new Rally page – where you can rally behind my pro-jobs, pro-growth campaign. Leave comments, donate, and support the campaign.
Let’s get this economy back on track.
What precisely does that mean — “President Obama: Will you listen?” What are we to suppose the president hasn’t heard? That there’s an uptick in gas prices? Hasn’t the predicted advent of $4-a-gallon gas been done to death over the last couple of weeks — even before it arrives?
And what, pray tell, is it that we’re to assume the president should do about the global market forces and geopolitics that are causing this momentary uptick?
And do you really believe that lower gas prices are in the long-term interests of the United States?
I was momentarily encouraged two weeks ago when I saw this headline on a release from Joe Wilson: “Wilson Supports All-Of-The-Above Energy Bill.” I thought maybe Joe was moving toward an Energy Party stance. But then I saw it was just more pandering about the gasoline prices that he and others are always so eager to exploit.
Yep, people don’t like paying more for gas; it’s true. I don’t. Present gas prices are hard for me to pay already. But I also know that Joe’s right when he says we need to “stop depending on foreign oil,” and that keeping prices low is the OPPOSITE of a policy that would encourage that.
Further development of domestic sources of fossil fuels.
A crash research and development program to get us OFF fossil fuels as soon as possible.
A gasoline tax increase that not only pays for research, but discourages overuse of the resource.
Conservation.
Public transit.
Expedited construction of nuclear power plants.
There was a bill, awhile back, that moved in the right direction. Unfortunately, Lindsey Graham withdrew his support for it when Republicans of Joe Wilson’s ilk persecuted him for the “sin” of working with a Democrat.
A rational policy aimed at energy independence would include elements that Republicans hate, and others that Democrats hate — and would require some general sacrifice. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Joe Wilson to push for anything like that. He’d rather pander to us.
Speaking with reporters after a closed-door meeting in his State House office, McConnell said becoming lieutenant governor is “a personal sacrifice” but his reading of the state constitution makes it clear that the Senate President Pro Tem has a duty to become lieutanant governor when the post is permanently vacated.
