Category Archives: Blogosphere

THAT’S kind of a cool, idiosyncratic ad…

Fenimore

Google Adsense gives me a lot of odd ads that I’d rather not see on the blog.

But I thought this one was pretty cool, and kinda weird — a James Fenimore Cooper ad?

I just flashed on my fave line in that movie with Daniel Day Lewis, when the British officer asks Nathaniel how he can possibly go to Kentucky when there’s a war on where he is, and the reply is, “Well, we kinda face to the north and real sudden-like turn left…”

Although, now that I think about it… Since this was set in Upstate New York, shouldn’t he head south and then turn right? Or head west and then turn left? Maybe the actor got confused because they filmed it in North Carolina, which would have made those directions perfect…

Wes Studi: One scary villain

I don’t know, but I liked the film for two reasons: One was the incredible menace of Wes Studi, who played Magua. That was one scary villain.

The second was how well Day-Lewis inhabited a character who is probably THE prototypical American character. There’s no one in literature more American, unless it’s Huck Finn. (That quote, displaying his utter lack of regard as to what a representative of the Crown thought of his doings, perfectly illustrated that.) How do the Brits do that, time after time? This may well be the ultimate example of the phenomenon.

Of course, not all the Google ads today are awesome. At the same time the Cooper one was showing, there was this across the top of the page….

No, not the great picture I took in Thailand. I mean the thing under it…

From John Spratt to Ed Jones: Twitter is awesome

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John Spratt with Mandy Powers Norrell and James Smith.

John Spratt in Lancaster Friday with Mandy Powers Norrell and James Smith.

I ran up to Lancaster yesterday to catch James Smith’s announcement of Mandy Powers Norrell becoming his running mate (an excellent choice, by the way — I’ll post video later). One of the highlights of the day was seeing John Spratt, whom I hadn’t seen in years.

So I looked at this Tweet from the AP’s Jeffrey Collins with interest:

True story _ the first time I called John Spratt’s DC office for a story in 1998, he answered his office’s phone. I may or may not have thought for a brief time all U.S. House members did that. https://t.co/ssRF5d0OTv

— Jeffrey Collins (@JSCollinsAP) May 11, 2018

That kicked off a digression in my head (sort of my default mode, really) and I replied with this:

Irrelevant memory: In the ’80s, I called Rep. Ed Jones’ office. The Tennessee congressman answered it himself. I asked him about one of his votes. He paused. Then he asked me to call back and ask his press secretary…

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) May 12, 2018

Rob Godfrey, whom you’ll remember as Nikki Haley’s press guy, joined the conversation:

sounds like a reasonable request. was congressman jones responsive to reporters on facebook and twitter back then?

— Rob Godfrey (@RobGodfrey) May 12, 2018

I laughed and replied that Ed Jones was a nice guy (“Mr. Ed’s” campaign slogan was “The congressman from the heart of the district, with the district at heart”), but thinking on his feet wasn’t his strongest suit. Then Meg Kinnard said:

He was the first in Tenn. to use digital media (radio) to methodically communicate a messages to his constituents. He would have been all about some Twitter and Facebook. 😉

— Meg Kinnard (@MegKinnardAP) May 12, 2018

Meg is originally from Memphis, and knows that neck of the woods. I decided to take a stab in the dark — Meg’s the age of my kids, but I thought just maybe we’d have an acquaintance in common:

Meg, it’s all well before your time, but did you ever know his press guy, Kelly Sharbel? Or as one of my editors called him (fondly, as I think he had worked at our paper), Kelly Sharbelly?

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) May 12, 2018

To my surprise, she replied:

Indeed! Kelly is a dear friend who’s helping us with our research on Grandaddy’s biography. He and his wife have actually retired to SC and live in Myrtle Beach.

— Meg Kinnard (@MegKinnardAP) May 12, 2018

Twitter is awesome! In what other way could I have possibly made a connection like that? I need to get Kelly’s contact info from Meg — assuming he even remembers me after more than three decades — so we can get a beer together next time I’m at the beach…

That’s “Mr. Ed” Jones on the right, and Kelly Sharbel in the middle. I’m probably somewhere nearby….

Open Thread for Tuesday, April 17, 2018

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Been busy today, but here’s some stuff to talk about:

Trump says U.S. and North Korea have had direct talks at ‘very high levels’ — Looking ahead, does anyone else get a chill at the idea of our hair-trigger lunatic sitting down with their hair-trigger lunatic and talking nuclear weapons? What could go wrong?
Templeton calls for return of firing squad — Finally, something she and I can agree on! Just kidding, sort of — gallows humor you might say (if she were trying to bring back hanging, which she might, given time). If I believed in capital punishment, I’d be for bringing back firing squads. But I don’t. Oh, I assume she’s not volunteering to be on the firing squad herself, is she? I ask because she doesn’t know how to fire the gun she carries with her….
IRS electronic filing system breaks down hours before midnight deadline — Doug, this is my little tax-day gift to you. In other absurdities, Trump Requests Extension to File 2017 Taxes…
NPR Newscaster Carl Kasell Dies At 84, After A Lifelong Career On-Air — Increasingly, the stars of NPR are retiring or dying… Robert Siegel… Tom Magliozzi…
Starbucks to Shut 8,000 U.S. Stores for Racial-Bias Training After Arrests — Please don’t say they’re shutting down my Starbucks… Please don’t say they’re shutting down my Starbucks… Please don’t say they’re shutting down my Starbucks… If they are, I’ll take my racial-bias training to go, thanks…

This is at the Gervais Starbucks. Interesting. You know, in some countries they assume you want to consume it on premises unless you say it’s to go….

Senator, how about giving the #FakeNews thing a rest?

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Certainly Lindsey Graham didn’t start this, but this Tweet of his was a sort of straw, with my patience being the camel:

#FakeNews https://t.co/VXlHiN7yDN

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 13, 2018

I had to respond to him thusly:

Senator, it would be great if you wouldn’t add to overuse of that term, which seems to mean whatever Trumpistas want it to mean. It is not “fake news” that the Russian military made that absurd claim. They did. And the AP is truthfully and accurately reporting that they did….

Yeah, I know what he meant: That the Russians were saying something untrue. Which of course should be obvious even to a child.

A responsible news source…

But things that should be obvious to children are not always obvious to Trump supporters, and when you attach that #FakeNews label to a link to an actual story from a responsible news outlet, you are adding to their delusion that actual news, from trustworthy sources, is what is “fake.”

And I think the senator was willing for them to take it that way, because he was in his “try to look like a friend of Trump” mode when he sent that out.

And that is unhelpful.

More than ever, responsible people should be helping their neighbors, and themselves, distinguish fact from fiction. And Lindsey Graham knows better…

Your Virtual Front Page, April 6, 2018 — Beach Edition

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Sorry I haven’t had a chance to blog. We’ve brought four of our grandchildren down to the beach for a couple of days, since they’re on spring break from school. That keeps you busy.

This will be an actual news-free post. Although maybe someone will take an interest in one of the things that have interested me the last couple of days…

I saw a whale from the beach for the first time ever! — This was pretty exciting, and totally unexpected, even though I’d read about sightings in the area. I’ve been coming to Surfside Beach for six decades, and I’ve never seen a whale out in the water before. Yesterday, we had taken the kids out onto the still-busted Surfside Pier (you can go out about halfway), and just as we got to the barrier that marked our limit, my wife said “Look at that black shape moving through the water!” It looked like it was just a foot or so beneath the surface, and it was moving at an amazing speed. It streaked past the end of the pier, maybe 100 feet away, and headed parallel to the beach toward Garden City. It looked to be about the size of a school bus. Within 10 or 15 seconds it was out of sight. Absolutely amazing.

Have you watched “Detectorists” on Netflix? It’s great — We watched both seasons recently, and it was fun. The comedy, about some Brits who are really, really into metal detecting, is written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, the guy who played Gareth Keenan on The Office. He costars with Toby Jones. In some ways it’s vaguely like “The Office” (we’re talking the original, not the American copy), only kinder and gentler and easier to watch. The humor is low-key and not as cruel — you don’t have to watch the over-the-top, painful humiliation of a David Brent. Anyway, yesterday on the beach we ran into a trio of kids who were real-life detectorists, searching the sand. At the very moment we met them, my grandson, 5, announced he’d just dropped his Lucky Penny. The detectorists pitched in and tried to help, but to no avail. Still, they were nice kids and we appreciated the effort.

Debris on the lawn.

Who even uses phone books anymore? — Later in the day, we were walking back toward the house when my wife remarked how something, perhaps a carelessly manned garbage truck, had strewn debris all down the street. Then, she noticed it was white plastic bags, and she supposed they were those freebie newspapers everyone throws away. Both guesses were wrong — they were phone books. Yellow-page-style phone books that probably no one on the street had asked for, and probably no one had ever used. But someone had convinced people to advertise in it, which is what such publications are about. Would it pay off for any of the advertisers? Seems doubtful. Who uses phone books?

Meanwhile, perfectly good books get thrown away — This was also yesterday. We were playing around on the public tennis courts when a lady from the Surfside library came wheeling out a loaded book cart, took them straight to a recycling bin, and threw them all away! After a moment, I went over to see what I could scavenge. By the time I got there, a lady who lived across the street had beaten me to it. This was a routine for her — she said they throw away books every week. Most, but not all, were books about writing — how to write a novel and such. I grabbed the two you see below. I thought my mom would enjoy having a manual to help her get the most out of her iPad. I couldn’t resist the title of the other one: As someone who has never been tempted to become a runner, it entertained me on a couple of levels. (No offense, if you own this volume…)

Tim Kelly on how he got fired by DHEC

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Do y’all remember Tim Kelly, pioneer South Carolina blogger? He was one of a number of folks who gave me pointers back when I started this nasty habit in 2005. His blogs, in his case from a liberal Democrat’s point of view, included “Crack the Bell” and “Indigo Journal.”

He sort of quit blogging there for awhile and tried going legit. He worked at ADCO competitor Chernoff Newman for quite awhile, then became chief spokesman for DHEC. Which lasted until he posted this on Twitter a few weeks back.

As he says now, in a blog post:

Its not the worst thing ever said about Donald Trump. It’s not even the most profane thing I’ve ever said about Donald Trump.

Tim Kelly

But he said it on the official DHEC Twitter feed, thinking he was on his own account: “But, oops, wrong browser window, and I was toast.”

Yeah, I’ve done that myself. Just not with such, ah, explosive content. In fact, that’s why I recently purged my iPad Twitter app of a couple of client feeds I had been managing. I’d discovered that occasionally the app would just spontaneously flip over to one of those other accounts without my knowing it. Which is kind of scary.

But Tim’s experience far exceeds any cautionary tales I can share from my own experience.

Ironically, Tim was surprised again by Twitter — he had forgotten that his long-dormant blog was set to post the headline and a link to each post automatically.

I say “ironically” because Tim was the guy who originally taught me that was possible. In fact, he’s the guy who talked me into going on Twitter. When I asked him why on Earth I’d want to do that, he said, “To promote your blog.” And then he told me how, and I started doing it right away.

Anyway, Tim thinks he may be onto a new line of work that he will find more personally rewarding than what he’s done in the past, even if he doesn’t get rich doing it. I hope that’s the case…

McMaster touts victory over his imaginary foe

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Speaking of “intellectually-bankrupt campaign materials,” this is the first thing you see at the McMaster for Governor site.

This bit of nonsense just sort of floored me last night:

South Carolina is one step closer to banning Sanctuary Cities and standing tall for the Rule of Law! Tonight our bill received key approval from House Judiciary Committee (1/)

— Henry McMaster (@henrymcmaster) March 20, 2018

I responded thusly:

A reminder, once again, to anyone living in a reality-based universe: There are NO sanctuary cities in SC. Henry’s like a guy standing on the corner of Assembly & Gervais, snapping his fingers and claiming it’s keeping the elephants away… https://t.co/r29zEWnwbU

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) March 21, 2018

I mean, come on, people — who can possibly take seriously, for even a second, the governor of South Carolina celebrating his great “victory” (or initial step toward victory) over a completely imaginary foe?

“What’s next?” my own representative, Republican Micah Caskey, asked. “Are we going to require cities to certify that they didn’t rob a bank?”

He added: “There is no one, other than politicians, who have suggested this is something we actually need and should waste our time on.”

And I would add, only a certain kind of condescending, pandering politician, completely lacking in shame.

This morning, Micah added this via Twitter: “Sanctuary cities are already illegal in South Carolina. (See SC Code Ann. 17-13-170 and 23-3-1100.) The governor should read more of our laws already on the books and less of his intellectually-bankrupt campaign materials.”

Amen to that. And I suppose he meant this sort of campaign material…

Death to emoji! Rage against the death of the word!

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This has engendered a certain amount of discussion on social media, so I thought I’d share it here as well:

OK, that’s it. I’ve had it with cutesy little emoticons in tweets. They are a barrier to communication — my eye glides over them as so much noise. Use your words. I will not go gentle into a post-verbal world…

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) March 18, 2018

Of course, I meant “emoji,” because I wasn’t just talking about faces. I had thought “emoji” was just the cutesy shortening of “emoticon” — and my purpose was to wage war on cutesiness — but Wikipedia said not to confuse them.

“Emoticons” are just the hypersimplistic, stylized representations of human facial expressions. And while I don’t much like them, they don’t irritate me the way other tiny images placed in Tweets and texts in place of words do. Things like slices of pizza and party hats and such…

Years ago, I read an article about how Umberto Eco — the semiotician who is best known as the author of The Name of the Rose — was predicting the advent of a post-literate society. This was a couple of decades ago, long before emojis. I seem to remember him talking about the Medieval days when, say, a pub called “The Fox and Hound” would mark itself with images of those animals instead of words, since the proprietor knew most prospective patrons would be illiterate.

Eco predicted we were headed back toward that darkness.

Lately, we hear regularly about the post-literate world that’s coming into being. Increasingly, our devices respond to voice and facial recognition more than typed input.

Well, I’m not going to sit still for the dying of the word. I’m going to rage, rage against it…

I don’t know what to do to please you, Google…

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They’re back at it.

Again, I’m getting these notifications from Google Adsense:

Dear Publisher,

This Google Publisher Policy Report gives you an overview of recent activity related to violations found on specific pages of your websites. As enforcement statuses may change over time, please refer to the “Page-level enforcements” section of the AdSense Policy Center for the current list of active violations.

Please note this report doesn’t cover violations that may happen on an overall site or account level. You may be notified by a separate email if site or account level violations are found. Ads will continue to serve where no policy violations have been found, either at the page- or site-level.

In the last 24 hours:

New violations were detected. As a result, ad serving has been restricted or disabled on pages where these violations of the AdSense Program Policies were found. To resolve the issues, you can either remove the violating content and request a review, or remove the ad code from the violating pages.

Further details on enforcements can be found in the AdSense Help Center. To learn more about our program policies, please view the AdSense Program Policies.

Kind regards,
Google Publisher Policy

Of course, none of those links will take you to a page that says, here’s the problem with have with this post. No, each time I get one I have to remember the roundabout, counterintuitive way I had figured out earlier.

After I do (remember it), I find myself once more at a notification that tells me they have a problem with this post — again — which of course is ridiculous. Here’s what they say about it:

https://bradwarthen.com/2010/07/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-this-cartoon/

Violations

Dangerous or derogatory content

Status

Restricted ad serving

Enforcement date

Mar 11, 2018

Past review outcome

Policy non-compliant (Mar 6, 2018)

How to resolve this

Click on the violation name to learn more about it. You have two resolution options:

Fix the violations and request a review
After you make adjustments to your page so that it’s compliant with AdSense policies, you can request a review.

Remove the AdSense ad code from the page
Pages without any AdSense ad code will be automatically removed from the Policy center within 7-10 days. No other action on your part is needed.

If you think that these policy violations do not apply to this page, you can also request a review. Reviews typically take 1 week but sometimes can take longer.

So again, I request a review from Google. The next day, they say my appeal has been denied, and absurdly, my post continues to be “dangerous or derogatory.” Which, of course, it is not. It is a post about something that someone, somewhere, thought was derogatory, and my post patiently explains why anyone who thinks that is mistaken. Which is the kind of thing you talk about on an opinion blog.

So I click on the “Request Review” again, my theory being that if I keep asking, an actual human will review the situation and realize that yes, this is the kind of thing one discusses on an opinion blog, and therefore there is nothing inappropriate about it.

But I get another robo-answer that I remain in violation.

So the status of that post will continue to be “Restricted ad serving.”

All right, fine. Who cares if Adsense ads don’t show up on that one post from more than seven years ago? I’m willing to leave it at that.

But Google isn’t. They keep sending me the notifications.

My next step — my only ethical option I can see — will be to see if I can “Remove the AdSense ad code from the page” without blowing up my blog or something. Something I do not know how to do. But I’ll try. And then see if they’ll leave me alone.

But if I can’t figure that out, what then? The notifications, of course, come from a “noreply” email address. So I can’t have a conversation with a person. Of course…

Open Thread for Tuesday, March 6, 2018

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James Smith speaking at Columbia Rotary Monday. I’m thinking maybe this picture was taken by his Dad, who is a member.

I haven’t given you one of these in awhile, so here goes…

North Korea Is Open to Ending Nuclear Efforts, South Says — Major breakthrough? We’ll see. Trump “reacted with guarded optimism.” For once, we’re in accord.
On the other hand. Putin is threatening us with new nuclear missiles — Yeah, this is several days old, but we never did talk about it. And it was kind of a biggie.
Kimpson: Reparations for slavery should be included in any new SC constitution — Not very likely, no matter how the delegates are chosen. But it does illustrate how a convention could go anywhere, far afield of the reform that convention advocates rightly hope for.
‘I don’t know what he’s going to tweet about,’ Haley says of Trump — Why on Earth would she? Who does? What interested me was her description of speaking to Trump as one might do to an unbalanced child before he addressed the U.N.: “OK now, Mr. President, you need to understand this is a serious crowd. They’re not going to rally. They’re not going to cheer. That’s just not who these people are. So don’t take it the wrong way. I said, ‘Just think of it as church.'” Because, you know, he needs someone to tell him that stuff. I just can’t believe we live in a world in which this guy is POTUS.
In bid for SC governor, Smith touts better teacher pay, new state energy policy — While Catherine Templeton was talking about making people stand for the National Anthem and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and pushing Nullification — in something her campaign characterized as a major policy speech — Smith was talking to Rotary about actual, you know, state policy. It sounds like he was addressing her directly when he said high-profile hot-button battles over cultural issues “don’t educate a child or pave a road or move our state forward.”
There’s just no end of weirdness in this world — I hope I don’t get in copyright trouble for sharing the picture below (I’ll take it down if told to), which is from a big Moonie religious ceremony last week celebrating marriage and semi-automatic weapons. But I felt you had to SEE it to fully feel the weird…

A word from this blog’s Shameless Commerce Division…

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From Anne Marie Eckstorm Green’s Twitter feed.

As y’all know, I don’t have a lot of ads on this blog because I hate the very idea of trying to sell anything to anyone at any time. For me, approaching a potential customer is like having an out-of-body experience. It feels most unnatural.

So generally, I don’t do it.

For the past month, I had this vague idea that since there was a special election to fill Rick Quinn’s seat, in the district right next to mine (in fact, my house was in that district back when Ted Pitts had it, but I got drawn out), I should probably find out who was running and give them my usual pitch (which isn’t exactly, “You don’t want to buy a campaign ad, do you?,” but it’s close).

But the date snuck up on me and I missed it. But now there are two people in a runoff, so I thought, here’s an opportunity. But I had no contact info. So I sent this to Anne Marie Eckstorm Green via Twitter. She doesn’t follow me (and why not?), so I couldn’t DM her, and now all the world can see my unabashed hucksterism:

@AMGreenSC From my blog’s Shameless Commerce Division: Congrats on getting into the runoff. Let me know if you want to buy a campaign ad on the blog. Pricing and analytics on request….

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) February 28, 2018

The other candidate, Chris Wooten, doesn’t have a Twitter feed, near as I can tell. So, if any of y’all know him, tell him he can buy an ad here. If he, you know, really wants one….

Oh, and speaking of shameless — yeah, I stole the name of my sales department from Click and Clack. What, you think I’m going to make the effort to come up with something original?…

From Chris Wooten’s FB page. Dude, where’s your Twitter feed?

If I go back to school, I want Noble to fill out MY report card

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This is a followup on a topic from yesterday — the one about Phil Noble’s attempts to hang the NRA around James Smith’s neck in the wake of last week’s school shooting in Florida.

Have you seen the bogus “NRA Report Card” Noble’s campaign created for Smith? It’s above. Phil tweeted it out with a volley of the angry, chip-on-the-shoulder, self-righteous rhetoric that has become the calling card of South Carolina’s own Bernie Sanders: “I’m dismayed by hollow, hypocritical words of condolences by politicians like James Smith. Smith has voted over and over again with the NRA, getting A ratings and now tries to fool people that he is on the right side….” And so forth.

Yep, James Smith has gotten good ratings from the NRA a couple or three times, generally because of voting on a noncontroversial bill along with pretty much everyone else in the Legislature, including Democrats Noble has supported in the past. One such item he mentioned when I asked him about it yesterday was a bill (I think it was this one) that said it you build a house way out in the country next to an existing shooting range, you can’t bring a nuisance action for noise against the owners and operators. That sort of thing.

The thing is, James Smith isn’t someone who blanches at the site of a firearm. He knows exponentially more about assault rifles with large magazines than most of the people who own AR-15s because he’s used them himself — in combat (you know, for the purpose for which such weapons were intended). The Democratic Party used to be full of guys like him. Not so much anymore. And no, the GOP doesn’t have a lot of room to brag on that score, either.

But still, there was something fishy about that “report card.” Rep. Mandy Powers Norrell, a Smith ally (which is to say, a normal, mainstream Democrat) decided to dig into those “grades.”

The phony report card cited two sources. One was the NRA itself, and since you had to be a member to look up the scores, she turned to the other source, VoteSmart.org. There, on the James Smith ratings page under the “Guns” heading, you’ll find the apparent source material for Noble’s “report card.”

The site said that in 2012, the NRA gave Smith a rating of 79 percent — which Noble recorded as an “A-minus.” I know South Carolina recently watered down the values of letter grades, but I hadn’t seen anything this lenient.

But that was nothing compared to Noble’s generosity in 2016. That year, the NRA rated Smith at 43 percent. Noble called that a “C.”

Rep. Norrell tweeted, “My kids would love it if those were C’s and A-‘s, but I know of nowhere that that’s the case.”

Yeah… I don’t know of any place like that, either…

THIS is what political exploitation of gun tragedies looks like

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I get up in the morning, I work out, I skim Twitter, I peruse several newspapers, and I get ideas that could be blog posts, but I fritter them away in Tweets before breakfast is over, and the blog lies fallow for much of the day.

So I’m going to start turning more Tweets into posts, so the conversation can occur here as well as there.

Let’s start with this one:

For all of you who accuse gun control advocates of exploiting a tragedy for political advantage: THIS is what that looks like, just FYI. You know, for future reference… https://t.co/l1NHmHjuy0

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) February 21, 2018

In case the Tweet I was retweeting doesn’t show up, here’s what I was talking about:

James should apologize for his record and everyone who has ever earned the endorsement of the NRA should wake up to the carnage they’ve contributed to facilitating. 3/3

— Phil Noble (@PhilNobleSC) February 20, 2018

Of course, I was far from the only one to react this way. A couple of other Tweets on the subject:

When questioned by AP about his voting record, @PhilNobleSC said that he supported the 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee even though Sheheen had gotten an “A” rating from the NRA two years earlier and also supported a guns-in-bars bill. My full story: https://t.co/Xy3mxBVpd8

— Meg Kinnard (@MegKinnardAP) February 20, 2018

To which Tyler Jones responded, “Egg, meet Phil Noble’s face.”

And an American Party candidate for the House had this to say:

I would like to thank @JamesSmithforSC for taking the high road these past few weeks. The Democratic primary is getting ugly fast.#Democrats #primary #SouthCarolina

— Ryan Cowsert (@cowsertforsc) February 21, 2018

OK, that should be enough to get y’all started…

(Late) Open Thread for Thursday, February 15, 2018

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I don't know what kind of tree this is, but it was nothing but blooms when I walked past it on the State House grounds today.

Don’t know what kind of tree this is, but it was nothing but blooms when I passed it on the State House grounds today.

Been busy today, but here are a few things to chew on:

America’s Failure to Protect Its Children from School Shootings Is a National Disgrace — A second-day angle, from The New Yorker. I spent some time today writing a post on this subject, but it’s not quite ready. I’ll try to finish it tomorrow.
The AR-15: ‘America’s rifle’ or illegitimate killing machine? — Why can’t it be both? With 8 million of these weapons designed for war are out there, I sort of think it is…
White House, Lindsey Graham go to war over immigration — Not literally war, of course, but they’re definitely not BFFs any more. Lindsey blew his stack over a truly puerile memo from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. It said his bill “would effectively make the United States a Sanctuary Nation where ignoring the rule of law is encouraged.”
Relic Room offers plan to display State House Confederate flag — At a tenth of a cost of its earlier plan, the museum hopes this will fly at the Legislature and it can get back to concentrating on actual military history.
Steve Bannon questioned in Mueller inquiry — He reportedly spent 20 hours with investigators this week.

Cayce chief’s Facebook post

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m not going to take this down for now, because if I did, the post correcting it would make no sense. But for the record: The chief wasn’t talking about Meg Kinnard at all. Mayor Elise Partin thought he was, and reached out to me to tell me about it, which led to this erroneous report….

Earlier today, I got a Facebook message from Cayce Mayor Elise Partin, asking the following: “Brad, have you seen the FB post by our chief? I just saw your post about the reporter. Wanted to make sure you had both sides.”

I had not seen it, and at first I had some trouble finding it. But the mayor, on her way into a council meeting, called me back and told me where to find it — on the city’s public safety Facebook page (I had looked on hers, and the city’s, and the public safety chief’s personal page).

Here’s his essay, which I urge you to go read in its entirety. Here are the sections that caused the mayor to reach out to me:

These types of incidents are very dangerous and must be controlled quickly and effectively. The goal is to “Control the Chaos” by stabilizing the scene and caring for the victims. In order to do this, certain procedures and rules must be put into place. This includes procedures for the media to be able to have access to the information they need for their stories….

Cayce police chief Byron Snellgrove

Again I feel that this incident ran very smoothly with so many entities involved and cooperating with each other. There are, however, a couple of tweets going out by a reporter about one of my staff making them leave the shelter and school district property. Let me make this very clear. The story is true! They were asked to leave because they were not abiding by the procedures that were put in place and were clearly explained to them and all the other media personnel that were at that location. By not staying within the boundaries that were outlined by my staff they were obstructing the flow of the operations at the shelter. They even attempted to get on a bus and do interviews with victims as they were leaving the shelter which slowed the process of the victims and their families getting where they needed to go. We received complaints on them from District 2 staff, victim’s families and even the bus driver of the bus that they attempted to gain access to. The procedures were made clear to them and they did not follow those procedures and when asked to stop they became aggressive with a school district official. They were, therefore, asked to leave.

I stated before that incidents like these are handled by “Controlling the Chaos”. Any disruption to this “Controlled Chaos” jeopardizes the operation and the care that the victims receive. I feel that cooperation between all agencies and emergency personnel in South Carolina is better than it has ever been and the way this accident was handled is proof of that. I feel the same way about our cooperation with the media. I respect the job they do and the fact that the media must sometimes be aggressive in getting the information they need for their story, however, ambush reporting and working outside of the boundaries and procedures that are put in place for an incident of this magnitude is simply unacceptable. So yes, they were asked to leave and I take full responsibility for the actions of my staff and, in this case, completely agree with them.

It may seem to some that the media outlets and Public Safety Agencies are often at odds with each other when it comes to information flow, however, it has been my experience that this is not the case and difficulties like these are rare. I would actually like to thank the media for the great coverage that they gave this major incident and for the needed information access that they provided to the public….

So there you have it. Frankly, I don’t think of this (or many things) in terms of “both sides.” There are lots of “sides,” multiple perspectives, on any event. I certainly didn’t see my earlier post featuring Meg’s video as one-sided, even though it was from her POV. I thought a fair-minded person could look at that video and feels sorry for Mr. Hinton trying to do his job while being chewed out by an angry reporter, just as much as a person who’s been there and done that (which I have, which of course colors my perspective) could identify with Meg’s frustration in trying to do her job. I think both of those things were true.

And I value the POV of the chief as well, and appreciate his presentation of his difference with Meg’s version within the context of an appreciation that the media folks there had a hard job to do, too.

Photo from Meg Kinnard’s Twitter page.