Just so I can say I posted something new today:
- Obama Seeks Congressional Authorization for ISIS Fight — Which includes, ahem, boots on the ground. Which was inevitable.
- SC House votes to ban abortions at 20 weeks — I’m going to make a sad prediction: We can debate this as long as we like, and no one’s mind will be changed, and no common ground will be found. I’d like to be wrong about that, though.
- SC Senator: Women Are “A Lesser Cut Of Meat” — When Will Folks reported that via Twitter, I supposed he must be bucking for Jon Stewart’s job. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Sen. Corbin is bucking for Jake Knotts’ old role as the Senate’s chief Sayer of Cringe-worthy Things.
Or whatever y’all want to talk about…
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Oh, and hey, anybody watching “Better Call Saul?”
I am. I bought the first episode on iTunes, and was pleased enough to buy the rest of the season, so I’m caught up now on the first two episodes.
I find it’s cheaper to buy the AMC series I like than to pay for full basic cable. Since AMC is pretty much the only thing on cable I want. I can wait for most of them “Mad Men,” “walking Dead” on Netflix, but some — such as “Breaking Bad” — I just go ahead and buy.
I’ll share some thoughts on “Saul” later, when I’m on my laptop. My iPad is great, but not for extended commentary…
Does anyone buy the crock of poo that the triple murder in Chapel Hill was motivated by a dispute over a parking space? Seriously how can anyone respect law enforcement when they come up with something as lame as that.
On the other hand does it really matter what the motive was? Not sure I’m an advocate of hate crime laws. He should receive the same punishment no matter what his motivation.
I’m with you there, Bud. Punish the crime, not the attitude.
But frankly, I think it’s just as likely that he killed them over parking as because they were Muslim. Each “motive” seems equally crazy to me…
Is it nutty that I can sort of see the parking excuse if he had only killed one, but three has to be Muslim-rage?
Well, maybe he killed one, then killed the others because they were witnesses.
I don’t know, but what I read was that this guy had a thing about parking, and was always giving people hell about it…
That seems so TV, but may well be true. If he killed the witnesses, though, why did he turn himself in?
This is why I lean to the right on gun laws and to the left on health care. Gun laws would not have saved these three people; accessible mental health care would have. A loved one–spouse, parents, sibling–should have gotten him into some sort of treatment for his anger.
I honestly believe that he killed these people over a parking space because (unlike television and movies) murder isn’t usually that interesting. I’ve seen murder cases about extraordinarily mundane things. For instance, I know of a case where a son killed his dad in an argument about repairing a ceiling light. Some people simply have low impulse control and kill people over what are ordinary, aggravating things.
I reserve the right to revise my opinion if different facts come out, but based on what I see, I think this is just a guy with low-impulse control.
And yes, you punish the action, not the thought. We shouldn’t criminalize the thought. It’s ok to hate someone, legally speaking. It’s not ok to murder them.
Yeah, and besides, when we say “hate” crime, we’re using “hate” very restrictively. I would assume that a majority of killers “hate” their victims, at least for a moment. “Hate crimes” are about punishing political attitudes, not a failure to have friendly feelings toward an individual.
In a way, we DO punish the broader sense of “hate,” in terms of the weight we give malice aforethought. But that’s really about intent to commit the act, not about punishing the perp’s attitudes about particular demographic groups. Which is grossly unAmerican. The amendment that the framers decided to add to the Constitution FIRST was about freedom of thought and attitude and belief, however objectionable your attitudes may be to other people.
Back to the parking space thing — I haven’t seen the stats, but aren’t many if not most murders about stuff like an argument over the remote control between a couple of drunks? Don’t most victims know their killers — in fact, are often related to them?
Yes, most victims know their killers.
I also disagree with special anti-gang legislation. We have laws about conspiracy, intimidation, RICO….we don’t need special gang laws.
I’m with you on this one. One broadcast said he had called the tow company so many times that they refused to come out anymore. Not all neighbors were affected by his rants but it seemed that he frightened some who lived closer to him. I think the religion issue came up because it was first reported that way. The three victims lived closest to the man. If the sister who was visiting came in her car, the shortage in parking could have been an issue. Still, I’m glad it is being thoroughly investigated in case he did have a particular problem with Muslims.
He did post a lot of pro-atheist, anti-theist rants on Facebook, though.
#2. Please parse this into something intelligible: From The State’s story – last line…
“Doctors performing those abortions would be required to choose a method that gives the fetus the best chance of surviving the procedure.”
Was this the writer or was this the legislative intent of the House? From where I sit, could be either. But wow, that’s some twistedness.
Yup…
How about discussing the bill floating thru the SC legislature to close SC State and fire everyone from the President on down? Anyone who claims racism must explain how it is racist to expect an institution to pay its bills.
Shuttering the school for two years is the worst possible idea. Either close it for good or do what is necessary to restructure/refinance the school as a viable institution.
The school is already on accreditation probation; closing the school for two years would mean the school would lose its accreditation for far longer than that. Without accreditation, students cannot qualify for government back loans. Without loans, the school won’t have any students.
As usual, the problem is that the Board of Trustees is appointed by the legislature (and geographically dispersed within South Carolina). SC State needs an empowered board comprised of higher ed and financial turn-around experts appointed without regard to race, politics, location or connection to SC Sate. If the state of SC cannot figure that out, then all we have is another Richland County Elections Commission debacle.
Who claims racism?
I agree that shuttering it for two years equals killing it. Faculty who can go elsewhere surely will, as will students. The rest–why are we paying [for] them?
I understand the deep history, yadda yadda, but as has been pointed out, Claflin is across the street, and SC is not hurting for HBCUs.
Who claims racism? Seriously? Everyone associated with the SC State as far as I can tell.
Hey, y’all, I’ve belatedly put up a post about that…
I should have included it in this thread, but I wanted to post something separate, and just couldn’t get to it yesterday. Or this morning…
THE STATE’s new format, with fewer days of the Commentary section, is probably the last straw; time to just go digital. I was reading the paper waiting for the doctor to see my 85 year old mother, and she was reading a magazine. The doctor, a specialist in gerontology no less, mentioned how rarely he saw patients or family reading print.
Yeah, we went digital when I spent a great deal of time sorting out the parts of the paper I could not careless about–the multiple sports sections, the advertising inserts, and that pile dwarfed what I did care about. Now recycling day is easier, and I read the e-edition on my mini at breakfast.
I never had any problem with that. Since early in my career, I read newspapers strategically. Even when newspapers were huge and chock full o’ content, there were usually only three or four pages I had to look at to make sure I was up on the news. And they were easy enough to find.
Now, I look at the front, the Metro front, the business page (because sometimes actual news gets buried there, and the edit page. That’s it. And of course, I didn’t have to look at the edit page when I was the editor.
Yes, there are some news stories on inside pages, but they’re national and international, and I keep up with those stories elsewhere (WSJ, WashPost, NPR, Twitter, etc.).
I learned so much about Columbia and the state from The State when we moved back–where to hike, history, when to do what in the yard (different from most national publications’ info), what cool shops there were. Now….
And Bob, I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on. From reading the announcement, they’re still doing that at the paper.
It doesn’t sound good. I felt pretty low reading it.
As concerned as I am about no op-ed page, it also bothers me somewhat for editorial not to be in the regular run of press with the news pages. It’s not like Cindi and Warren were doing many live editorials off the news, but this pretty much will make that impossible. Despite the comment about “percolating” opinion in the piece, I think that’s the wrong direction to be going in in the 21st Century.
But all of that said, I know how overworked Cindi and Warren have been. I know what it takes to produce those pages, and if you’ll recall, I’m the guy who ceased publishing opinion pages on Saturday (and stopped doing editorials on Mondays, replacing them with letters), back when we were dealing with staff reductions in the last couple of years I was there. I did it not because it was impossible to produce all those pages, but because I saw no way to do it WELL with such a reduced staff. And there were still three more of us then than there are now working on those pages. And Warren and Cindi have been running like mad trying to produce the same number of pages that I reduced us to at that point.
And is the Metro front now going to be inside every day, as it has been on Mondays and Tuesdays? I didn’t see an announcement about that…
Percolating makes bitter coffee. I bet it isn’t much better for editorials.
Well, actually it is. Time to think is definitely better. As practiced as I am at formulating opinions quickly, I’m better when I have time to think, and to kick it around with other people.
But these days, you have to acknowledge that opinion is expressed by most of the world instantaneously, and it’s important to be part of that conversation — at least reflecting what’s being said out there, even if you’re not ready to come out with your own official, institutional opinion yet.
When I was at The State, I avoided writing anything before it actually HAD to be written, and not just because I’m a born procrastinator. Whenever I DID write in advance (I spent many a fruitless Thursday evening staying late to finish a column in a vain attempt to make Friday easier), I usually scrapped it and replaced it at the last moment, for some combination of these reasons:
1. I didn’t like what I had written. This may be in part because, just as the Sundance Kid was better when he moved, I’m better when it’s got to be done NOW.
2. More ideas about what I had written had occurred to me, better ideas than what I had written. And I would just start over.
3. Events had made the piece less relevant (I had a horror of this, the idea of having wasted my time writing something too soon).
4. At the last minute, I just had a far fresher idea (another topic entirely) based on more recent events.
Consequently, even though I wrote on Fridays for Sundays, there was a certain timeliness to the columns.
But not everybody is comfortable working that way. And there were Fridays when I nearly despaired of inspiration. But something always came to me — I’m not saying it was always great, but it was what I wanted to say at that time. And I was usually happy with it looking back the next week.
By the way, there will still be op-eds on Sunday and Monday. I read past that in my first, panicky reading of the piece…
By the way, here’s what I wrote about previous cutbacks in our editorial offerings, here and here.
As was my style, I was pretty blunt about why we were doing these things:
And then, I tried to sweeten the news by offering what I could:
And we DID try really hard to make up for the print cutbacks with good stuff online. My Fridays were pretty brutal once I started posting all that extra copy, plus editing and posting an interview video, for the “Saturday Extra” online page — in addition to all the stuff I already had to do on Fridays, the hardest day of the week.
But I don’t recall getting any positive feedback about any of that stuff. Readers took an interest in my blog, but the “Saturday Extra” seemed to lay an egg…
Is The State Newspaper relevant, needed and appropriate? We are long-term subscribers and hate to see this kind of degradation. But we hang in because of (1) the ads, (2) the crossword puzzle, (3) the Sports Pages and (4) an occasional peek at the Editorial Page. We didn’t want to lay out bucks to subscribe to the Washington Post, but what real alternative did we have? Time and time again The State places Feature stories on their front page. The LA Times, Chicago Trib and the NY Times helps us keep abreast of what’s happening and thanks to the Drudge Re;port, we are also reading foreign news accounts. The State is being nudged out.
The State covers more local news than the Free Times. I honestly think they could model themselves on the Aiken Standard (which we called the “Substandard” when I was growing up.) Go hard on local, include statewide news. Figure folks get their national and international news somewhere that doesn’t crop the article mid-thought….
I received my bill last week. My rate went up from $55 and some pennies to $68.90 for 13 weeks. Did The State recently increase its subscription rates? I sure haven’t heard about it and there is nothing on the bill to indicate a rate increase. To me that is a pretty big increase. I guess that amounts to a $1.00 increase per week. Doesn’t sound too bad on the face of it until you realize it amounts to a $52.00 yearly increase. I do enjoy sitting at the table eating my breakfast while reading the paper. I do think The State should change the name of the paper. It is not a statewide paper like it used to be. Columbia Record comes to mind as a possible new name for the paper. Remember that paper?