Darla Moore announcing another multi-million-dollar gift to USC, shortly after Nikki Haley dumped her from the trustee board.
To us South Carolinians, Darla Moore was a logical choice to break the gender barrier at Augusta National. And then Condoleezza Rice was sort of a case of, well yeah, that makes sense, too.
The item was long on “mini” and short on explaining:
We’re guessing you’ve got a rather good handle on exactly who Rice is. (Hint: She’s the former secretary of state.) However, you’re probably not as familiar with Moore, a South Carolina financier who is the vice president of Rainwater, Inc., a private investment firm founded by her husband, Richard Rainwater, an American investor worth about $2.3 billion byForbesmagazine’s latest count.
According to the University of South Carolina, where Moore graduated from and where the business school bears her name, she is also the founder and chair of the Palmetto Institute, which describes itself as a nonprofit think tank aimed at boosting the per capita income of South Carolina residents. She’s also served on the boards of USC and the New York University Medical School and Hospital and was named to Fortune‘s list of the top 50 “most powerful” American businesswomen.
Her husband is now mentally incapacitated, struggling with progressive supranuclear palsy, a disease that Forbes explains is often mistaken for Parkinson’s disease, and strikes just six in every 100,000 people. His family is now funding research into a cure for the disease. CNN Money has that story here.
It would have been a great opportunity to give the world just a little perspective on our “first woman” governor, on the eve of her big moment speaking at the GOP convention. And it would have presented such a relevant contrast between the sort of woman of achievement who gets invited to join a club like this, and the sort who doesn’t.
“I haven’t done anything morally or ethically wrong,” Akin told Huckabee, saying the backlash against him “does seem like a little bit of an overreaction.”
“We are going to continue this race for the U.S. Senate,” Akin continued. “We believe taking this stand is going to strengthen our country, going to strengthen, ultimately, the Republican Party.”
So… who is this “we,” Kemo Sabe?
I’ve often wondered at politician’s odd penchant for saying “we” when they mean, “I.” So many times over the years I’ve asked an elected official, “What do you think about X?” and heard in reply, “We’re taking the position that…” No. There is no “we” here, white man. It’s you. You are the elected official (or the candidate), the only person responsible to the voters for the position you are taking, so don’t be trying to dilute accountability. You might have a team behind you, but you’re the only player who counts.
Sometimes I think pols believe it sounds less self-centered to say it that way. Other times, I believe they are presuming a certain grandiosity, as in the royal “we.”
Of course, a casual observer might note that I have often written “we” during my career as an editorialist. But that was different. If I were speaking of a personal column, I said, “I think.” If I were speaking for the editorial board — expressing the opinion of an institution, not an individual — I said “we.” The word added to clarity (assuming the listener was paying attention to the distinction), rather than detracting from it.
In any case, I would imagine there are plenty of Republicans right now who wish Akin would ixnay the eeway.
A columnist in The Wall Street Journal (“Social Justice and Ryan the Heretic“) this morning took on liberal Catholics’ criticisms of Paul Ryan. For a moment, my heart leapt at the prospect of a discussion of the meaning of “subsidiarity” (hey, some people get excited that football season is coming; go figure) but it was not to be. This piece existed on a more modest intellectual plane. It was more in the line of, “Oh, yeah! Well, so’s yer mother!”
That is to say, the writer was accusing the left of adopting such a position.
Here’s how the piece concluded:
Unfortunately, suggesting that Mr. Ryan is a bad Catholic is the entire case. Stuck with the fact of Mr. Biden, who has long since made his peace with the party’s absolutism on abortion, progressive Catholics know that it would be laughable to try to present Mr. Biden as faithful to church teaching. They know too that clarity about church teaching does not work to their advantage. The only way to take on Mr. Ryan is to tear him down.
In the past, the liberal Catholic vision sought to inspire. Today, in the pages of the venerable lay Catholic magazine Commonweal, a blogger tries to diminish Paul Ryan by saying, “like the rest of us, he is a Cafeteria Catholic.” Surely it says something about a movement when its most powerful argument against an opponent is this: You are just as lousy as we are.
Think about that. In another age, Catholic progressives would have laughed at the suggestion that people were corrupted by reading certain works; now they believe Paul Ryan’s soul is in peril for his having read Ayn Rand. Before, they would not have feared science; now they insist that a program such as food stamps ought to continue ad infinitum without consideration of its effects. And while they believe that the pope and bishops have nothing of value to offer about the sanctity of marriage or the duty of protecting unborn life, when it comes to federal spending, suddenly a miter means infallibility.
But while columnist McGurn accurately pegs the liberals, he comes up with little substantive defense of Mr. Ryan’s rather odd interpretation of Catholic social teaching, beyond quoting a column by Ryan’s own bishop saying that unlike on abortion, Catholics might legitimately disagree “on issues such as how best to create jobs or help the poor.” I think the bishop has a point. But I’d still like to see a serious discussion of how well Mr. Ryan applies Catholic principles.
Lacking such a ringing endorsement, we are left to conclude, if this is all the evidence we go by, that there is no “good Catholic” to be found on either ticket.
But let’s be optimistic. Let’s say that Mr. Ryan and Mr. Biden reflect different sides of the faith. Put them together, and pare away their objectionable positions, and you have one pretty good Catholic.
Just a quick post to give y’all a chance to comment on today’s two main trending stories. First this:
Rep. Todd Akin said Monday that he will not give in to calls for him to end his Missouri Senate campaign after his controversial comments about “legitimate rape.”
“I’m not a quitter. My belief is we’re going to move this thing forward,” he said during an appearance Monday afternoon on Mike Huckabee’s radio show. “To quote my friend John Paul Jones, I’ve not yet begun to fight.”
Akin also said he still sees himself as the right candidate to take on Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), even as many Republicans have begun to doubt it. He apologized for his remarks but said it doesn’t mean he should end his campaign.
“I feel just as strongly as ever that my background and ability will be an asset in replacing Claire McCaskill and restoring some sanity in government,” Akin said. “Just because someone makes a mistake doesn’t make them useless.”
Akin has found himself in hot water after saying in an interview airing Sunday that “legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy. Akin was explaining his no-exceptions policy on abortion…
The Augusta National Golf Club, home of The Masters tournament, said Monday it had admitted female members for the first time, following years of criticism both public and private over its stubbornly-held policy of admitting only men as members.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina investment banker Darla Moore were both invited and accepted membership, golf’s most prominent club said in a statement. The club’s next season opens in October.
The step breaks with the 79-year-old private club’s practice of admitting only men, who make up a veritable who’s who of corporate America. The club has been under pressure from corporations, some members, a prominent women’s organization, and most recently President Barack Obama, who said through a spokesman before this year’s Masters tournament in April that he thought women should be invited to join….
I congratulate Darla and Ms. Rice, assuming of course that they wanted to join. If they invited me, of course, I’d have to refuse in light of the Marx rule (that would sound so much better than admitting I couldn’t afford the dues). I’m not sure whether this changes anything in the larger picture, unless they didn’t have ladies’ tees before. But as I said, I’m happy for the new members, especially since I know one of them.
I am not capable of thinking like a feminist or anyone else who is into Identity Politics, but I’m imagining that if I were a feminist, I’d be looking at today as sort of a mixed bag. You win some ground, you lose some ground.
No, scratch that. Given the general reaction to Akin, it looks more like a win-win.
This just in from Billy Keyserling, mayor of Beaufort (and one of my favorite ex-legislators, since he served in Columbia as an independent):
August 17, 2012
Dear Friends:
At 12:30 on Wednesday afternoon, I learned — as the deadline for filing for Mayor passed — that no one will be on the ballot running against me. Gearing up and ready to run, I had a funny feeling.
How am I going to run for re-election if there is no opponent?
You see being mayor is not about Billy Keyserling. Rather, it is about making our “best hometown in the world” even better. It’s about communicating more clearly, as well as listening and learning to work well together toward shared goals. It’s about having the confidence to consider new ideas and opportunities even though we may not fully understand the consequences. It’s about achieving success, admitting when something does not go the way we thought it would, acknowledging so and making it right.
Being mayor is about being accessible to Beaufort residents — those who encounter problems with government plus those who need help how we can build on our history and natural beauty without destroying all we have inherited. In all cases we must continuously be aware that we are merely custodians of the city we love for just a relatively short span within the 300-year timeline of our community.
I had looked forward to campaigning because I learned long ago that elections are the people’s best opportunity to hold you accountable for what you promised, and measure how they think you have done. People generally think more about public life when a local campaign is underway and are more engaged in civic matters.
So even though I have no “official” opponent, between now and election day I am going to campaign anyway in order to be a part of the process of listening, learning and gauging how am I am representing you as Mayor of Beaufort.
In this case I am going to take a page from a successful big city mayor who told the city’s voters when he had no election opponent, “I’ve never been one to sit out an election and, while I am grateful for what some of my friends have said is voter confidence in my public service, I will be engaged and available as if I had a serious opponent.”
I thank the people of Beaufort for the chance to serve another term. You’ll be seeing a lot me at campaign events this fall- whether they be Republican, Democrat or non-partisan.
As Michelangelo said at age 91, “I am still learning.”
Sincerely,
Billy Keyserling
Just to be on the safe side, he should get his opponent to sign a pledge to keep the campaign clean and positive. You just never know, these days…
Some of you cynics out there may doubt that this is a real campaign. Oh, yes it is. I refer you to the postscript:
PS: Unfortunately, every campaign needs funding, so I hope you will consider a small donation to help support my initiatives to better communicate with you and the many others in Beaufort about issues facing our community. Last year I invested nearly three times my $6,000 annual salary on newsletters, website, my weekly television show and the many other expenses associated with being Mayor.
I would appreciate what you can to do help defray some of these expenses… You can respond on line by going to
www.mayorbilly.com and clicking “Support” and using PayPal or by sending a modest check to Billy Keyserling for Mayor, Post Office Box 2145, Beaufort, S.C. 29901-2145.
If you have already responded to my initial solicitationand contributed, please disregard this email as I do not want to be redundant or bothersome or seem like a greedy nag. Sorry if that is the case
Never fear, Billy. Not even your opponent would call you a greedy nag…
Here’s one of those videos that proves that your memory is spot on — back in the day, everybody was really, really young.
You will see a 25-year-old Paul Ryan, early in his career as a, well, career politician, appearing on C-SPAN as legislative aide to then-Rep. Sam Brownback.
This is the sort of programming that people are talking about when they make fun of C-SPAN. If the date had been a decade or so earlier, I would have sworn all three of these kids — Ryan, the Democrat, and the moderator — were on Quaaludes. It’s like a contest to see which one can make the other two fall asleep first.
Of course, this is probably as excited as young Paul Ryan ever got, since the topics were the budget, Medicare and Medicaid. It’s… eerie to see him and these other two kids, dressed up like Daddy and looking and sounding every bit like participants in student government. I keep expecting the next topic to be the frat that’s on double-secret probation. Except that it never gets that interesting.
My favorite parts? When Master Ryan predicts Medicare will be “bankrupt” by 2001, and when he mentions a news story by “Knight Ridder,” which still existed then.
There will always be those who perceive violence in racial terms, from whites who are angrily convinced that the media underplay what they perceive as an epidemic of black-on-white violence to blacks who immediately call a protest rally when a Trayvon Martin is killed by a man with light complexion.
Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that from 1976 to 2005, white victims were killed by white defendants 86% of the time and black victims were killed by blacks 94% of the time.
Then there is the matter of who is dying. Although the U.S. murder rate has been dropping for years, an analysis of homicide data by The Wall Street Journal found that the number of black male victims increased more than 10%, to 5,942 in 2010 from 5,307 in 2000.
Overall, more than half the nation’s homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men…
The carnage is rendered more tragic, although not in the Greek sense, by the fact that most killings are over “nonsense,” as Hillar Moore, the district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish, put it in the above-referenced story.
Among the issues dividing teenagers and their parents, add whether to listen to music on YouTube or on CD.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. teenagers under the age of 18 say they use Google Inc.’sGOOG +0.65% video-sharing site to listen to music, more than any other medium, according to a new consumer survey from Nielsen Co., one of many challenges facing record companies as they transition into the digital world.
In addition to treating YouTube as a de facto free music service, young people said they are less inclined than those 18 years old and up to listen to CDs or the radio.
Neither age group reported making much use of Spotify AB, Rhapsody International Inc. or other on-demand streaming music services, though Pandora Media Inc.’s P -3.60%custom online radio service was among the five most-popular methods for both groups.
My first reaction was, who’s listening to CDs at all — aside from those burned to listen to in the car? And I see it’s clueless old people. In fact, older generations — from whom I’m disassociating myself as much as possible in my wording here — are more out of it than that:
In fact, among adults, cassette tapes remain more popular than many online music services, or even vinyl records, despite the latter medium’s purported comeback in recent years.
Just to make an excuse for adults here: I think that might be because so many of us these days are driving older cars. For instance, my wife drives a Volvo that she inherited from her father, and it has a cassette player but no CD player or MP3 jack. If our cars had turntables for vinyl, I suppose we’d sound cooler, but it would be rough on our record collections.
But back to the kids: Turns out they’re pretty smart. I discovered sometime back that YouTube is the quickest, easiest way to listen to almost any song, from any genre, for free. It’s not as easy as turning on one of your Pandora stations and letting it run, but at least you get to listen to exactly what you want to hear.
I wasn’t familiar with Newsday columnist Lane Filler. Maybe The State runs him all the time, and I never noticed before. But when my friends there ran him yesterday, I found a good reason why in the 7th graf:
And Romney dodged the splashy picks that could have backfired like a 1986 Yugo: South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who, honestly, makes Sarah Palin look presidential, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a smart guy who is, unfortunately, best known for a State of the Union rebuttal in 2009 that would have garnered last place at a grade school Optimist Club speaking contest.
It’s nice to see someone outside SC picking up on the obvious. This guy needs to ditch Newsday and head down to Washington. I don’t think they’ve gotten the word there yet.
I had to groan when I saw the headline saying that the Obama campaign was accusing political opponents of using “Swift Boat tactics.” That’s because, not having been in a coma the past eight years, I know that when Democrats say those words, they’re not referring to the use of light watercraft to fight the Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta. If only they were.
Instead, as we all know full well, they’re invoking charges brought by a group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which raised questions about John Kerry’s war service. Democrats to this day so deeply resent what that group did that they have turned “Swift Boat” into a verb, one that refers to actions they regard as mean, nasty, unethical, uncalled-for and generally beyond the pale.
I am unable to agree with Democrats on this because, well, that group raised questions I was wondering about myself (such as, where are the scars from those wounds that sent him home?). But as a nonveteran, I felt I had no moral standing to raise them. I mean, maybe he did get to go home quicker than other veterans, but he was still there longer than I was.
So I initially sort of appreciated veterans publicly asking those questions, no matter with whom they were affiliated. But in the end, that discussion got into a lot of petty back-and-forth accusations about exactly what happened when and who did what to whom, and the whole thing wasn’t really helpful, and just left a general sour taste behind. And I’d just as soon not have such things front-and-center in a presidential election.
But I don’t see it the way Democrats do. So I groaned when I saw the words.
But then I read on, and saw what elicited the phrase.
The Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund seems to exist primarily to call into question, as we head into the home stretch of the election, any credit the President might received for killing Osama bin Laden. (That is far from the only question it raises, but that’s the one with the emotional punch.) And that is just beyond cheesy. It’s too petty for words.
This is nursery-school playground-taunt territory. Clearly, whoever was president at the time this happened gets a certain amount of credit for what happens on his watch — just as he gets the blame when it goes wrong. Jimmy Carter didn’t make that Iran rescue mission fail, but he certainly took the rap for it.
Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did. The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not.
It’s easy to believe, in the moment he says that (at 6:55 into the above video), that this guy has been a Tea Party spokesman. He evinces that certain disdain-that-dare-not-speak-its-name that TPers seem to reserve entirely for this particular president.
But aside from the tone — I mean, come on. Nobody in the country is stupid enough to think the president personally suited up, went along on the mission and shot bin Laden himself, and no one in the country has tried for a second to make anyone think that. The simplest voter in the country would laugh at the proposition. So in what way do you suppose that the president is in any way trying to take anything away from the super-soldiers who carried out this amazing raid? Perhaps the most laudable thing the president is congratulated for having done was choosing to send in the SEALs as opposed to copping out with a bombing raid. And if you don’t think it took political courage to make that decision, you don’t know anything about politics or special ops, whatever your resume says.
I go further than that. My initial reaction was that hey, that Obama is a lucky guy to have been in charge on this particular watch. But as I learned more and more about the decision-making process that preceded the operation, I saw multiple points at which the wrong decisions could have been made, and POTUS made the right calls, even when very experienced smart people in his administration were doubting that was the way to go.
The bin Laden operation, furthermore, fits within an overall pattern that had distinguished the Obama administration well before that night in Abbottabad — a sharp increase in aggressively pursuing our nation’s enemies, in Pakistan and wherever else they hide.
Of course, the fig leaf this group is offering for its pettiness is that it is objecting to the very fact that I know as much about the long-term operation as I do. It’s accusing this administration of leaking government secrets for the purpose of its own political aggrandizement. (Which presents an interesting contradiction: If the administration is leaking actual, true intel, and that information shows the president in a good light, then how do you say the president doesn’t deserve credit for what happened?)
That’s a serious charge. I’ve seen no evidence that national security has in any way been compromised in this instance — but of course, I don’t have enough access to classified information to know for sure.
But I do know this: As I mentioned above, this president has been far more aggressive than any recent predecessor in using deadly force to take out terrorists, making George W. Bush look almost timid by comparison. While I have applauded the president for this, I acknowledge such an unprecedented pattern of aggression calls, in a liberal democracy, for a certain amount of sunshine. We need to know, at least in general, about the way the president makes decisions.
By the way, I’m not outraged at the parties who appear in this group’s video, which is the centerpiece of the campaign. I don’t doubt their sincerity. There is a fundamental cognitive disconnect between people who devote their lives to serving their country in the more sensitive parts of our national security apparatus, and people who are elected and directly accountable to the voters of this country. The national security types live by operational security, and have a tendency to see any kind of public disclosure of what they do as a close cousin to treason, rather than the exercise of political accountability. Political figures can indeed go too far in the service of self-interest. But even legitimate disclosure, the kind of thing a political leader should disclose, will not be acceptable to people who, just as legitimately, define their success in large part by their ability to keep secrets.
My beef is with the people who put this piece of emotionally-charged propaganda together, and released it at such a moment. The release of this video, at this time, would make the charges in the video itself about the president’s timing in announcing bin Laden’s death rather laughable. Except, you know, there’s nothing funny about it. (And I don’t even quite follow the logic that it was somehow politically advantageous to the president to announce the success of the operation immediately. If he’d done it a week later, as they suggest, he’d have gotten just as big a political boost.)
The amount of information that is appropriate for keeping a president accountable will always be debatable, and we should engage in it energetically, to the extent we can do so without damaging the very security we seek to protect (ah, there’s the ironic rub).
Security officials and members of both parties in Congress have sharply criticized leaks about classified operations under Mr. Obama, and some Republicans have complained about news briefings on the Bin Laden raid and assistance to filmmakers making a movie about the operation.
The next sentence reminds us of something else the group pointedly ignores:
But the administration has also overseen an unprecedented number of prosecutions for press disclosures, and in June, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. directed two United States attorneys to investigate leaks discussed in the Opsec video.
The petty way this group has gone about conducting its political offensive makes me less inclined to take it on faith that they know things that I do, and those things make the president look bad.
Perhaps the verb for this, going forward, should be “Opsecing.” No, that doesn’t look right. “Opsecking?” Nah. Still needs work…
It’s interesting — to me, anyway, as a longtime editor — to watch what’s happening as general-circulation newspapers do less of what they once did.
I recently had breakfast with Donita Todd, general manager of WIS, and her news director Rashida Jones (no, not that Rashida Jones, this Rashida Jones). They told me about some new things they were doing at the station, particularly their stepped-up investigative efforts.
But even if they hadn’t told me they were putting new effort into that direction, I would have noticed.
For instance, this morning, my attention was drawn (via Twitter, of course) to this story on the WIS website, by the station’s Jody Barr. An excerpt:
LEXINGTON COUNTY, SC (WIS) – A secret audio recording of Lexington town councilman Danny Frazier gives a detailed look inside an underground video poker operation working inside Lexington County. Frazier brags about his ability to operate illegal video poker sweepstakes businesses within Lexington County. A WIS investigation uncovers Frazier’s political connections and whether those connections are allowing him to continue doing business.
We obtained the recording from a source who secretly recorded a conversation with Frazier. The source posed as a businessman, interested in getting into the illegal video poker operation inside Lexington County. The source went undercover after fearing Lexington County law enforcement was purposefully ignoring and protecting Frazier’s operations. The recording links Frazier to at least two separate sweepstakes businesses, both near West Columbia.
The people who made the recordings tell WIS they have turned them over to state and federal authorities…
The recording indeed is fascinating. Of course, it raises a lot of questions in my mind that might not occur to some readers — questions the reporter would have had to answer for the story to get into any newspaper I ever edited.
We would have had a long, long conversation about this self-appointed Batman who went “undercover,” starting with the word itself. Can average citizens technically go “undercover?” Doesn’t the term refer to a law enforcement officer hiding the fact that that’s what he is? What does it mean when a layman does it? What are the implications? What sort of deception was involved, and to what extent does it expose the individual, or the media outlet that uses the product, to allegations of illegality? Who takes that upon himself, however lofty his motives? And speaking of that, what were his motives, and what does that tell us? (Ultimately, the test is whether the information is good, not the motives of the source. But knowing the motive could lead to relevant questions that I can’t even imagine at this point.)
And why are we concealing his identity? There may be a good reason, but I’d like to hear it.
I’d also like to know whether the recording, obtained as it was, could possibly have any value to the “state and federal authorities” to whom it was given. I don’t know enough to answer that question. Fortunately, it’s secondary to this story, but I do wonder.
There’s a Wild West sort of feel to this sort of investigative reporting, on its face. It reminds me of the way reporters so often are portrayed in fiction, starting with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen in the old “Superman” TV series. They were always taking it upon themselves to try to personally catch the bad guys, rather than simply report the story. Fortunately for them, Superman was always nearby to save them when the bad guys tied them up in an abandoned warehouse.
Of course, that’s only the way it looks to me from the outside. It could be that the folks at WIS who decided to go with this have very good answers to all of the questions I raise — I just can’t tell, as the reader.
There is one thing in the story that makes me feel better about reporting the contents of the recording — and I suspect is what made WIS management feel OK about the story — it’s that Danny Frazier, incredibly, “admitted to the recording.” Although I’m not clear on to what extent he did so, since he doesn’t admit to having said what the recording seems to show him saying. But let’s say he does confirm the legitimacy of the recording itself. This, of course, raises a bunch of other questions, such as: OK, if he knows the recording is legit, then doesn’t he know who was with him when he said those things? Does he not recognize the voice? In which case, tell me again why we’re not identifying the “undercover” guy…
Of course, to the casual reader, what we have here is a fascinating glimpse into the video poker bidness in 2012, and plenty of reasons to ask questions of Jake Knotts and Jimmy Metts. And that’s where Mr. Barr sticks to the book, asking those questions of each player and dutifully recording the answers. He got some great quotes:
The sheriff said he was too busy meeting and greeting voters to pay attention to who gave to his campaign, although the contributions were maximum contributions. “Very rarely do I look at the checks,” Metts said, “I do have access to who contributed to the campaign through the computer, but really and truly, I don’t go back and look at that.”
“If you held a shotgun to my head right now and told me you were going to pull the trigger unless I told you everybody who contributed to my campaign, you’d just have to kill me,” Metts said.
Several times during the interview, Metts denied any participation in or knowledge of any of the illegal video poker businesses in his county. “I know people say, in something like that breeds corruption, but I can tell you in no uncertain terms I am not a part of any Lexington County ring, I am not part of any illegal gambling. I don’t own. I don’t receive. I’m not involved. I’m not protecting anybody. As a matter of fact, [it’s] quite the opposite. I’ll put their [expletive] in jail.”…
Knotts admits Danny Frazier is a close friend whom he’s known for years, but denies any knowledge of protection for Frazier to continue to operate the illegal sweepstakes machines. “Do you have any involvement in what these tapes show that Danny Frazier may be involved in?” Barr asked. “None whatsoever,” Knotts replied.
“I’ve got contributions when I first ran, every time I’ve ever run and I don’t back away from it,” Knotts said of accepting campaign contributions from the video poker industry.
“If there’s any more money out there that any of those people want to send me, send it to me,” said Knotts. “I could take money from the devil and make it do God’s will.”
Bottom line, this new assertiveness by WIS, and by such others as the Free Times‘ Corey Hutchins, is bound to uncover a lot of fascinating stuff in our community going forward, however they go about it.
WIS is aggressively moving into the territory once held firmly by newspapers. For some time, of course, the text stories on TV websites have been more than mere come-ons for the video. And the networks, with their greater resources, have gone deeply into the realm of publishing the written word. But this sort of extended investigative report — 1,866 words, close to twice the length of one of my columns at The State — seems to go well beyond anything local television has attempted to do in the past.
Judge Joe Anderson (my fellow Rotarian) says Rachel Duncan can’t be held responsible for Tom Sponseller’s suicide. And I think he’s probably right. A good, dispassionate ruling.
Was the 2½-year sentence adequate? I’m sort of torn about that. On the one hand, I have a problem with crowding our prisons with anyone who isn’t violent, for any amount of time. Far more to the point is the restitution she’s been ordered to pay when she gets out. If I wanted anything to be harsher, it would have been upping that $100-a-month minimum, seeing how at that rate it would take her 306 to pay back what she stole. This sort of case poses the question we so often face — aside from prison, how do we punish people who can’t afford to make monetary restitution?
Make no mistake, I hold her responsible for what she did. But I do wonder whether she would have decided (over and over and over again) to do it had she not been in South Carolina in late 90s.
I had occasion to read up on gambling addiction a good bit back when that was one of our state’s hottest topics, and the thing about video poker is that it tended to ensnare people, particularly women, who would not have become gamblers through other forms of gaming. It was a combination of factors. First, if women are going to gamble, then tend to go for the more solitary forms that have a minimum of social interaction — which means they have less social stigma to overcome as they’re getting hooked. Then, there was something hypnotic and seductive about the electronic form of the game — the flashing lights, the instant gratification.
That would explain why such an addict might move from video poker, when it was no longer easily available, to online gambling. As did Ms. Duncan. No sports betting or poker night with the guys. Just a personal, private dive down the rabbit hole.
Now, you have to seek out video poker or its close relatives. Back when she got started, it was everywhere. In convenience stores, bars, restaurants — all over the place, just waiting for people with the right weakness.
As I said, she stole, and that is entirely her fault. But I do wonder whether she would have ever wanted to steal if it hadn’t been for the ubiquity of video poker at that time…
On Fox News, commenting on Joe Biden’s Danville “Put Y’all Back in Chains” gaffe, Sarah Palin observed: “If that’s not the nail in the coffin, really, the strategists there in the Obama campaign have got to look at a diplomatic way of replacing Joe Biden on the ticket with Hillary.”
It is seldom that you get such good quotes from the pot about the color of the kettle.
Then again, you know you’ve made a gaffe when Sarah Palin is suggesting you might have chosen your words more judiciously. That’s like Charlie Sheen suggesting you might have a substance problem.
But perhaps we should cut her some slack. Vice presidential candidates whose comments prompt everyone in the vicinity to wince uncontrollably for several minutes is a subject no one knows better than Palin. Maybe she and Biden were better matched than we thought.
After the selection of Paul Ryan to fill the VP slot on the ticket (prompting such exciting merchandise as this button!), it is hard not to think back to August 2008, when everyone was cheering Palin as a game-changer. And she was a game-changer, in the sense that Godzilla is a city-changer. Say what you will about Paul Ryan and the potential risks of having to engage in a Serious Mature Debate of his policies, everyone admits one thing about him: He’s no Sarah Palin. If anyone sets off the trademark “Mayday! Mayday! The Veep’s Saying Something” alarm this year, it’s Biden.
Well, nothing, strictly speaking. There’s no direct connection, anyway. But bear with me…
Some time ago, as you’ll recall, I expressed my pleasure when Rep. Ryan used the word “subsidiarity,” a favorite concept of mine arising from Catholic social teaching, coupled with my dismay at the odd way he used it. The word (to me) refers to the principle that in any system — governmental, economic, what have you — functions should be left to the smallest, most local unit that can competently perform them, with larger entities only performing the functions that can’t be carried out by the smaller units. Applied to government, that means the federal government should only perform those functions that can’t be effectively carried out at the state or local level, and so forth. It’s sort of related to what was for a time popularly called “devolution,” but with differences.
But fellow Catholic Ryan startled me by interpreting the principle as meaning functions should be performed by private entities other than public ones — which is convenient for him politically, but not the way I’ve understood it.
I’m not the only one who sees Ryan’s use of the term as misleading, if not outright wrong. I ran across this a couple of days back. Carrying it further, here’s a piece further explaining the problems with “small-government” libertarians trying to claim subsidiarity as their own. For one thing, it points out, “Subsidiarity is a communitarian philosophy.” Well, yeah.
But there there are those, including some Catholic clergy, who would defend the Ryan interpretation of subsidiarity. I was led to this knowledge by Paulie Walnuts.
I’m a big fan of the Internet Movie Database. I have the app on my iPhone, and can’t watch a movie on television without constantly turning to it to answer such questions as “Who’s that actress?” or “What else has she been in?” or “Was this directed by…?” Sometimes I go from there to Wikipedia for elaboration.
I read on, and was told that there’s a very interesting reason why he is so convincing as this sort of character:
Before turning to acting, Sirico was reportedly a fast-rising mob associate of the Colombo crime family, serving under Carmine “Junior” Persico, and had been arrested 28 times. There is a Sopranos reference to this fact when Paulie says, “I lived through the seventies by the skin of my nuts when the Colombos were goin’ at it.”[3] In 1967, he was sent to prison for robbing a Brooklyn after-hours club, but was released after serving thirteen months. In 1971, he pled guilty to felonyweaponspossession and was sentenced to an “indeterminate” prison term of up to four years, of which Sirico ended up serving 20 months. In an interview in Cigar Aficionado magazine, Sirico said that during his imprisonment, he was visited by an acting troupe composed of ex-cons, which inspired him to give acting a try.[4] According to a court transcript, at the time of his sentencing, he also had pending charges for drug possession.[5] Sirico appeared in a 1989 documentary about life, The Big Bang by James Toback, in which he discussed his earlier life.
Father Sirico
Interesting, but what does it have to do with the definition of “subsidiarity?” Well, continuing to read the “Background and Career” section, we see that “His brother, Robert Sirico, is a Catholic priest and co-founder of the free-market Acton Institute.”
Rule of Law and the Subsidiary Role of Government – The government’s primary responsibility is to promote the common good, that is, to maintain the rule of law, and to preserve basic duties and rights. The government’s role is not to usurp free actions, but to minimize those conflicts that may arise when the free actions of persons and social institutions result in competing interests. The state should exercise this responsibility according to the principle of subsidiarity. This principle has two components. First, jurisdictionally broader institutions must refrain from usurping the proper functions that should be performed by the person and institutions more immediate to him. Second, jurisdictionally broader institutions should assist individual persons and institutions more immediate to the person only when the latter cannot fulfill their proper functions.
On their face, I wouldn’t argue with those assertions, although it’s odd that subsidiarity is being described in terms of an individual’s relationship to the state, rather than between larger and smaller governmental entities. Quite Ryanesque. Here’s how subsidiarity is further interpreted by a writer on that site:
One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.
This is why Pope John Paul II took the “social assistance state” to task in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. The Pontiff wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility. This “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”
In spite of this clear warning, the United States Catholic Bishops remain staunch defenders of a statist approach to social problems. They have publicly criticized recent congressional efforts to reform the welfare system by decentralizing it and removing its perverse incentives. Their opposition to the Clinton Administration’s health care plan was based solely upon its inclusion of abortion funding. They had no fundamental objection to a takeover of the health care industry by the federal government…
So I read that, and I thought, “Where have I seen subsidiarity used that way?” Which brought me to the man of the hour. Paul Ryan would no doubt feel very comfortable with the ideas espoused by “Paulie’s” brother, or at least by the organization he heads. But that’s the only thing they have in common, that I know of. If you were hoping for something more, I’m sorry.
We think of Paul Ryan as an über-libertarian on fiscal issues and as a social conservative. What I didn’t know anything about until this morning was how he stood on the most urgent questions a commander in chief faces — which is pretty critical in the event that Romney is elected, and something happens to him.
One expected the opinion writers of The Wall Street Journal to be hugging themselves with pleasure over Ryan’s fiscal notions. But today, Bret Stephens writes in the Journal about a speech Ryan gave to the Alexander Hamilton Society last year in which he expressed himself on foreign policy. Here’s the speech, and here’s the column. An excerpt from the latter:
Here, in CliffsNotes form, is what the speech tells us about Mr. Ryan. First, that he’s an internationalist of the old school; in another day, he would have sat comfortably in the cabinets of Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. Also, that he believes in free trade, a strong defense, engagement with our allies—and expectations of them. Also, that he wants America to stay and win in Afghanistan. Furthermore, that he supports the “arduous task of building free societies,” even as he harbored early doubts the Arab Spring was the vehicle for building free societies.
It tells us also that Mr. Ryan has an astute understanding of the fundamental challenge of China. “The key question for American policy makers,” he said, “is whether we are competing with China for leadership of the international system or against them over the fundamental nature of that system.”
Within the speech itself, perhaps the most cogent observation is that the United States doesn’t have the realistic option of fading as a world power the way Britain did, and the way so many on the left and right would like it to do:
Unlike Britain, which handed leadership to a power that shared its fundamental values, today’s most dynamic and growing powers do not embrace the basic principles that should be at the core of the international system.
Now, that’s the sort of thing I agree with. What I don’t agree with is that we have to do all the things Ryan wants to do domestically in order to afford the kind of global position that we can’t afford to surrender. Which takes us into all sorts of other debates that I’m sure we’ll get into before the election…
Anyway, that’s where he loses me. What I didn’t get from the column, and did get from the speech itself, is that for Ryan, the need to maintain U.S. responsibilities in the world is yet another excuse for doing what he wants us to do on the homefront. Of this, I am unconvinced. I agree we have to get our fiscal house in order. I don’t necessarily believe his ideas are the way to do it. Bottom line, we get back to where we started — in his case, his view of America’s role in the world is that of an über-libertarian on fiscal issues…
Stephens is less divided in his admiration. In part, he admires Ryan for setting out clear ideas without any of the softened edges with which presidents must speak, giving little consideration to the fact that House members with no diplomatic responsibility are far freer to speak frankly on such matters.
The truth is, I have generally agreed with the actual actions Mr. Obama has taken as commander in chief (although my views on Afghanistan more closely track Ryan’s). And those speak louder than words, however stirring.
For instance, Stephens likes the way Ryan talks tougher about the Chinese. But it is Barack Obama who has shifted future defense planning toward the Pacific Rim with China in mind, and recently decided to send Marines to Australia in keeping with that strategy.
In any case, this is the beginning of a learning process about Ryan. Although I’m already inclined to agree with Stephens that, in terms of ideas at least, the GOP ticket seems upside-down.
I exchanged Tweets this morning with Paul Colford, director of media relations at The Associated Press. He was busily promoting the AP’s new U.S. Elections Style Guide, with tidbits such as this:
Election Day is uppercase; election night is not. See @AP’s new U.S. Elections Style Guide: http://bit.ly/Mrvs5u
I replied that I thought that had always been the rule, which caused Mr. Colford (see how I violated AP style there by calling him “Mr.”? I’m such a rebel) to respond that there was lots of other good stuff there.
I started looking into the subject, and saw that a whole new AP stylebook came out a couple of months ago, and I didn’t even know it. I’m not sure I even would have known it had I still been working at a newspaper. Aside from the fact that as editorial page editor I had long been deviating from AP style intentionally for years, I sensed that it wasn’t as big a deal as it had once been even among the mullahs of style orthodoxy.
(For those who have not spent their adult lives as journalists, perhaps I should explain: The AP stylebook is the guide to proper spelling and usage most widely accepted in print journalism. Newspapers that didn’t have their own full stylebooks — the vast majority — used it as their official bible, only issuing addenda for exceptions, local place names and the like.)
In my long-ago days as a copy editor (which was so long ago that I forget whether it is properly spelled that way or “copyeditor,” a lapse on my part that may be some sort of PTSD symptom), things were different. My colleagues and I who spent our days around the horseshoe-shaped desk at The Jackson Sun were really excited about the 1977 edition. We actually had a party at the managing editor’s house to distribute them. And there was much in this new release to satisfy the socially-challenged pedant. That was when the stylebook went, for the first time, from being a slim paper pamphlet that resembled the tracts that fundamentalists passed out with titles like “The Antichrist in Rome” to the thick, rich, spiral-bound volume that made it seem more like the Ultimate Answer to All Questions.
But that was then. In my last years at the paper, think I had one somewhere around my desk, but I almost never consulted it, and it was probably badly out of date. On the rare occasions when I looked something up to see what the style was so I could decide whether I wanted to follow it or not, I did so electronically. And yet I see one can still order the spiral-bound version.
Which is kind of nice. But it feels like almost as much an artifact of the past as those phone books that once so excited Navin Johnson.
Yes, for a presidential candidate who leaves everyone somewhere between cold and lukewarm, Paul Ryan is the perfect running mate: Someone beloved by both the Tea Party and the Club for Growth.
For those of you color-blind in that range, Nikki Haley is a Tea Party Republican, while Mark Sanford is a Club for Growth Republican. Nikki makes hearts go pitter-pat at snake flag rallies; Sanford sent shivers of pleasure down the spines of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. The shorthand distinction: One is populist, the other not.
By contrast, the least helpful, indeed most idiotic, thing I’ve seen on the Ryan selection was in the HuffPost: “David Axelrod: Paul Ryan Pick Evokes Memories Of Sarah Palin.”
That headline was a bit misleading. To his credit, all Axelrod was saying was that then, too, one saw excitement among the base. But what Axelrod is missing, or intentionally underplaying, is the breadth of Ryan’s appeal. Not just Tea Party — Club for Growth, too.
Of course, no one in his right mind would suggest Palin and Ryan live anywhere near each other on any measurement of intelligence or gravitas. The one famous for “I can see Russia from my house!” basically doesn’t live on the same intellectual planet as the one current officeholder in American who has ever, to my knowledge, used the word “subsidiarity” in a sentence — for which I honor him, even though his emphasis in using the word would not have been mine.
With Ryan, there’s a bonus, from Romney’s perspective: He gets the cultural conservatives, too, which is a whole other part of the base that casual observers sometimes erroneously lump in with the others. Since Romney isn’t beloved of any of these groups, Ryan brings much that he needs.
This morning, the Palmetto Family Council got so overexcited that it Tweeted this:
We now have a solid pro-life ticket for President… Mitt Romney Picks Pro-Life Rep. Paul Ryan as VP Running Mate…http://fb.me/DVLjuPF0
Um… are you sure about that folks? I mean let’s see… this is Monday… Is Romney pro-life on Mondays?
The Democrats seem a bit shaken up as well. I suspect that, however much they may trash the Ryan selection publicly, they know he’s about as good a pick as Romney could have made. The reasons they give to think otherwise are weak. Politico reported this morning that “On his three-day bus tour, Obama will hit Paul Ryan as a leader of GOP opposition to the farm bill…” To which my reaction was, um, isn’t that kind of a good thing?
The only gamble is, how well does Ryan play among us swing voters? That remains to be seen. But I suspect he’ll do as well on that score as anyone else Romney could have chosen that his party would have accepted.
This morning on the radio, I heard the question raised as to whether the killings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin should be considered an act of “domestic terrorism.”
Sure, I said to myself. And that would have been that, except that I then proceeded to think about it, and changed my mind.
“Terrorism” has to have a political aim — a goal to be achieved by sowing terror within a population. (Such as, for instance, trying to cow Americans to the point that we withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia, which was Osama bin Laden’s motive.) Without that, it’s something else.
The Oklahoma City bombing pretty much (although not perfectly) fits the definition because the conspirators — and the existence of multiple conspirators lends credence to the political aspect — were trying to send a message in response to Waco and Ruby Ridge. I’m not entirely clear what policy goal they hoped to achieve, but the use of mass murder to send a political message seems pretty clear.
We’ve heard about how the Sikh temple killer was a white supremacist, which nudges us toward politics, but that only suggests that if he was going to kill somebody, it seems likely he’d strike at nonwhites. Which he did. But that still suggests irrational personal animus more than saying he had some policy goal in mind.
There are those who would call it a “hate crime.” Well, they can do so without me. I could see it as a crime motivated by hate (one supposes some strong emotion was involved, although perhaps not), but I don’t hold with having a special category of crime based in the attitudes of the perpetrator, beyond such basics as whether the crime was intentional. We punish actions in this country, not opinions.
Attorney General Eric Holder seems to have wanted to cover all bases today, calling it “an act of terrorism, an act of hatred, a hate crime.”
Of course, his goal is to offer succor to mourners on behalf of the community, which means saying anything and everything that might express the country’s horror. If he were acting as a prosecutor in the case, we would have every right to demand that he be more precise.
And that’s the thing here that makes the search for motives, for terminology that will place a name upon these horrific crimes and thereby place them in a box of understanding — there will be no trial, no public proces of discernment and administration of justice. The killer robbed the mourners of that by killing himself.
On “Tell Me More” this afternoon as I was coming back from lunch, I heard a discussion that contained some foolishness (something to the effect that if it had been a dark-skinned man shooting up a bunch of white people, that would be terrorism), but also some wisdom — the point was made that people reach for an explanation like “terrorism” (or, I would add, “hate crime”) rather than random act of evil because that suggests there’s something we can do about it going forward. A political movement with a violent agenda is something you can take action against, and prevent further such acts. But an individual act of madness, or personal evil — how do you ward that off?
What we know is that there were six acts of senseless, premeditated murder. Which is more, far more, than bad enough. And in terms of how empowered we feel to deal with it, more horrible than anything else.
Spotify informs me that Darla Moore has subscribed to “my” playlist, “NPR Songs of Summer.” Of course, it’s not “my” playlist. It’s NPR’s.
For a moment I thought I’d discovered what Darla had been up to since Nikki bumped her from the USC board of trustees — listening to Adele, LMFAO, Taio Cruz, Gnarls Barkley, Simon and Garfunkel and the Stones. But then I realized it was another Darla Moore altogether — but one, it should be said, with pretty good taste, who also listens to Emeli Sandé, Kate Bush, R.E.M., Loudon Wainwright III, Beck, the Velvet Underground and the Psychedelic Furs, among many others, according to her public profile.
Which is aside from my point. The point is, I have a confession to share.
After having played them over a bunch more times, I realize I was wrong about some of those songs on the NPR list. Some of the recent songs I rated really low on my zero-to-five-stars scale are a lot better than I thought they were when I first rated them.
For instance… I wake up in the morning with LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” which has really grown on me, in my head.
And more dramatically, I originally rated Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” at two stars, which was ridiculous. I now consider it to be worth at least four, if not five. It’s amazing. I didn’t come to this decision because of seeing two of my older (male, amazingly enough) cousins dancing to it with abandon at a wedding a couple of weeks back — doing something that looked very like an Indian rain or war dance, which the song’s driving rhythm tends to abet.
Well, something comparably awesome happens, building irresistibly, and then exploding, every time, when Adele sings this part:
The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can’t help feeling
We could have had it ALLLLLLL…
It’s just amazing.
But it took time for me to fully realize it.
And it occurs to me that that is a large part of the difference, in terms of my appreciation, between recent songs and something like, for instance, “Honky Tonk Women,” with which I was saturated during the summer of 1969. (When I hear it, it brings one particular memory specifically to mind… driving down Highway 17 between Myrtle Beach and Surfside, passing by right where Tad’s used to be, telling my Uncle Woody — who’s just a little older than I am, and therefore sort of like an older brother — that that was just the best driving song ever. This was possibly influenced by the fact that I had just started driving.)
It’s not that I’m an old fogy — although I’m sure some of you will have your own opinions as to that. The thing is, I react to music much the same as I did in my youth. I certainly feel the same inside when I hear it.
But back in the day, we heard the songs so often, and they had a much better chance of growing on us. On TV, on the radio, walking down the street, coming from a juke box. Music was so common, and shared, and unavoidable. Grownups were able to mock The Beatles’ “yeah, yeah, yeah” because they heard it, everywhere.
There was one Top 40, and everybody was exposed to it. Now… music is more diverse, and specialized, and broken down. And I have the sense that you have to go out and seek it more than you do today. Even if it’s only clicking on a link from a friend via social media, you sort of have to seek it out.
Yeah, maybe it’s just because I’m not invited to those kinds of parties, but music just doesn’t seem as public and as ubiquitous as it once did. Is that a misperception? I don’t know.
I do know that music took a shift toward the private and esoteric and fragmented in the 70s, as we all became “album-oriented.” But then it came back together, became more democratic, in the 80s with MTV, to where most of us have a shared soundtrack for that era.
Now, just as people can choose highly specialized TV channels to watch — rather than having to be satisfied with three networks — they are more empowered to choose a specific musical direction, and have it be private, through their ear buds. Yes, it’s shared, but more person-to-person, rather than communally.
Or so it seems. As I say, I don’t go to parties where current pop music is being played, assuming such parties still exist. But then, I was a pretty antisocial kid, and didn’t go to all that many parties.
So what’s different? How do y’all see, or rather hear, the music scene today?
Paul Colford
