No, I’m not posting this to poke fun at my former newspaper for the ungrammatical lede headline (of course, it should be, “…says he didn’t tell Loftis whom to hire…”). What drew me was how often the question, “Who is Mallory Factor?,” has been asked over the years.
In fact, I started a post in 2006 with those very words:
Who is Mallory Factor, whose guest column appears on the op-ed page today? And no, he’s not a character from a Douglas Adams novel, even though the name may remind you of “Ford Prefect.” (It did me, anyway.)
He’s a really, really conservative rich guy from New York who recently moved to Charleston. He’s also increasingly into politics. And, like Howard Rich, he’s increasingly into South Carolina politics.
On a bit of a whim, I asked Thomas Ravenel, another really, really conservative rich guy, if he knew Mallory Factor. I kind of had a hunch they might have managed to get together. And sure enough, they had. Here’s what Mr. Ravenel had to say. (Sorry about the way it cuts off too soon; that’s as much as will fit on a clip with my little camera — I still thought it was interesting. Especially the part about going to a roast for the guy who invented the Laffer Curve. You’ve really got to be a supply-sider to get invited to those kinds of parties.)
You have to watch the video. It features Thomas Ravenel talking about what “a funny guy” Mallory Factor is.
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The thought that his name this just this close to “malefactor” gave me pause.
Nice, Tim. I thought it was make=up tycoon Max Factor’s granddaughter, or the girl from Family Ties all grown-up.
Why do there always seem to be these shadowy out-of-state powerful business characters just out of the frame in South Carolina politics? Is it like that elsewhere?
Ravenel shore can torture them vahls.
Regardless whether it is Mallory Factor or malfactor, this is the second time in our state treasurer’s first year in office where there has been a suspicion that friends of his get “greased” to receive unearned public funds. The first one involved the attorney general and a longtime friend of the Cayce pest exterminator.
The Thomas Ravenel video appears by popular demand, in a way. That is, if Corey Hutchins of the Free Times asking me about it qualifies as “popular.”
Corey called me while I was having breakfast this morning, saying he was trying to find the video and having trouble. I told him where to find it and he promptly tweeted out the clip.
By the way, if you’d like to see some other video clips of Ravenel in rare form back Before the Fall, you can find them here. They became very popular on YouTube after the bust.
Ha! So much for me being the Wise Old Head giving tips to the youngsters… I Tweeted Adam Beam to ask whether he’d seen my video, and he said, yup, he had mentioned it in the story this morning.
That’ll teach me to read the whole story before I start handing out wisdom…
In fact, Mallory Factor is all over the place. Here he is being interviewed as an expert on presidential politics in SC on FoxNews.
Sic Willie sez, according to sources, it’s Trickki Nikki and the Sen. Ryberg guy from Aiken who have developed this plot thing to abort Loftis’ run against her in 2014.
The “plot” thickens.
http://www.fitsnews.com/2012/02/03/the-real-pension-pay-to-play/