Category Archives: Coming Attractions

Is the Georgia invasion ‘McCain’s moment?’

You may note that the pundits most eager to write about Georgia and what it means are of the conservative persuasion. And there’s no question that they, at least, believe that moments like this one make McCain look like a more attractive choice for commander in chief. George Will wrote this:

Vladimir Putin, into whose soul President George W. Bush once peered
and liked what he saw, has conspicuously conferred with Russia’s
military, thereby making his poodle, “President” Dmitry Medvedev, yet
more risible. But big events reveal smallness, such as that of New
Mexico’s Gov. Bill Richardson.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Richardson,
auditioning to be Barack Obama’s running mate, disqualified himself.
Clinging to the Obama campaign’s talking points like a drunk to a
lamppost, Richardson said this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama’s zest
for diplomacy, and that America should get the U.N. Security Council
“to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some
restraint.” Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the U.N. for 19
months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.

This
crisis illustrates, redundantly, the paralysis of the U.N. regarding
major powers, hence regarding major events, and the fictitiousness of
the European Union regarding foreign policy. Does this disturb Obama’s
serenity about the efficacy of diplomacy? Obama’s second statement
about the crisis, in which he tardily acknowledged Russia’s invasion,
underscored the folly of his first, which echoed the Bush
administration’s initial evenhandedness. “Now,” said Obama, “is the
time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint.”

John McCain, the
“life is real, life is earnest” candidate, says he has looked into
Putin’s eyes and seen “a K, a G and a B.” But McCain owes the thug
thanks, as does America’s electorate. Putin has abruptly pulled the
presidential campaign up from preoccupation with plumbing the shallows
of John Edwards and wondering what “catharsis” is “owed” to
disappointed Clintonites.

In tomorrow’s paper, Kathleen Parker even more starkly — and more amusingly — contrasts McCain to both Bush and Obama.

Whomever you like for president, you gotta admit the KGB line is a good one. It’s a favorite of McCain’s, and we’re likely to hear him saying it more. His campaign is already putting out the line that events in Georgia have shown him to be "‘Prescient’ On Russia And Putin."

So how about it, folks? Does this affect your choice for November, and how? Does it make you more likely to vote for McCain — or for Obama? Or does it not affect your thinking one way or the other?

Yes, it’s grotesque to speak of such awful events in terms of its effect upon an election, but face it, folks: About all that you and I and the guy down the street can do in reaction to what’s happened is choose the guy who’s going to lead us in a world in which Russia knows it can get away with stuff like this.

Yeah, but what’s ‘normal?’

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Just now had to run downstairs to make a change in a Friday editorial because I got this release from DHEC to the effect that test results "from the Saluda River in Columbia indicate water quality has returned
to normal following the discharge of partially treated wastewater last
week."

DHEC further says it’s taken down the warning signs that everybody was ignoring, so I guess it has a lot of confidence in the tests.

Personally, I’m not going to run down the river and jump in quite yet, partly because of my heavy dignity as eminence grise of the editorial board, and partly because, after I dragged my old behind back up the stairs after updating the editorial I got to conjurin’ (which is "Firefly" talk for "figuring"): Do they mean "South Carolina" normal, or "states with the kinds of safeguards in place to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the first place" normal?

Mind you, I’m not putting the blame on DHEC here — or rather, I’m only assigning to them their fair share of it. The whole way we provide such basic local services as sewer in this state — a fragmented, often overlapping mishmash of local gummints, special purpose districts and private providers — is such a mess it’s hard for anybody to keep track of it.

Maybe Mayor Bob ought to go ahead with pulling his summit together. With all these little local fiefdoms along the river counting on its waters to attract untold wealth to the region, I expect they’ve all got some more conjurin’ to do.

(Oh, and for those of you who conjure that Mayor Bob, or someone in local gummint, should have been able to deal with this without meeting with a bunch of other folks — well, you just don’t understand how weak and fragmented local gummint is in our state. You can thank the Legislature for that, by the way. They never miss an opportunity to keep things this way.)

How do you say ‘So Gay’ in German?

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Cindi wrote a short editorial for tomorrow about the latest way that our state has found to waste "Competitive Grant" money. In case you haven’t read about it, Rep. Liston Barfield got 100 Gs to entertain German visitors to the Grand Strand, even though some local tourism officials said the money would have been better spent on advertising to promote tourism.

Wanting to jazz up the headline a bit, I sent her an instant message asking, "How do you say ‘So Gay’ in German?"

So far, she hasn’t replied. Maybe Herb can help us with that.

Obama as Mr. Darcy

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For tomorrow’s op-ed page I chose a Maureen Dowd column because I appreciated her insight that Barack Obama, in terms of his relationship with many American voters (particularly diehard female supporters of Hillary) is very much like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

This is dead-on, and it speaks to a truth that certainly should be universally acknowledged: Despite all the chatter about the deep meaning of Obama as the "first black candidate," there is nothing black about his image or persona. Can you think of a black man in literature or popular culture of whom Obama reminds you? Maybe Sidney Poitier in "To Sir With Love," if you stretch the point.

But when Ms. Dowd invokes the archetypically white, Anglo, rich, Establishment Fitzwilliam Darcy, I think, "Exactly."

Mind you, I like Mr. Darcy. When I saw the series that Bridget Jones went gaga over, I identified with him — with his negative aspects that is: his social awkwardness, his aversion to dancing, his refusal to be pleased, etc. (I am, I assure you, no Mr. Bingley.) My daughters identify me — far more accurately, in terms of the way they see me — with a different character altogether: Mr. Bennet. Perhaps if, like that gentleman, I had a study to retreat to, I would be unaware of both Mr. Darcy and Miss Jones. As it is, with so many daughters (and now, granddaughters) in the house, my life is richer. My DVD shelf includes both the definitive 1995 "Pride" and the inimitable 1968 "Where Eagles Dare," with the entire canon of "Firefly" thrown in to bridge the gap. How more well-rounded can a gentleman be, indeed?

But when Maureen tried to stretch the point and cast John McCain in "Pride" terms, her analogy broke down. She compared him to Mr. Wickham, which is not only a gross insult but has no ring of truth whatsoever. Mr. Wickham was what military men of his day would have called a "scrub." He would have garnered no respect in the gunroom of any ship in the Royal Navy in those days, for instance — yet that is precisely the sort of place where Mr. McCain would be most at home back then.

Basically, I don’t think you can find a McCain analogy in Jane Austen. The closest you could come would be the main male character in "Persuasion." At least he was a naval officer.

For that reason among others, I predict Obama will win the Chick Lit vote, hands-down.

Obamaweb

What did you think of Al Gore’s speech?

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On tomorrow’s page we’ll be running a Tom Friedman piece that holds up Al Gore’s speech as the kind that the actual current president of the United States ought to be making — and the kind that an Energy Party president would certainly make. Here’s how Friedman described it:

… If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.
Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.
Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem…

Me, I’m really busy trying to get pages out without Mike, which is not easy, let me tell you. But maybe y’all can go read Al’s speech and tell me what you think. All I know is that what I’ve heard about it — from Friedman and others who have filtered and condensed its points — sounds good. But maybe the devil’s in the details.

What do y’all think?

Would Obama victory be ‘bad for black folks’?

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My attention was just drawn to this item by Lawrence Bobo on TheRoot.com, headlined, "President Obama: Monumental Success or Secret Setback?" An excerpt:

To hear some barbershop talk, it is as if the racial progress in
America that Obama’s success has helped to crystallize also brings with
it a death knell for true racial justice. If Obama becomes the
president, every remaining, powerfully felt black grievance and every
still deeply etched injustice will be cast out of the realm of polite
discourse. White folks will just stop listening.

A
black president means that America no longer has any race problem to
talk about! It would mean there is no longer any special debt to
African Americans to be repaid! Kiss that 40 acres and a mule goodbye,
my friends (or that BMer and a Rolex in modern reparations exchange
units)….

I have two thoughts about this piece, if it’s OK for a white guy to weigh in on this:

Talk about what the election of Barack Obama as a black man means misses the point, since — as a lot of black folks asserted last year leading up to the primaries — Obama simply is not a "black man" in the sense that the phrase has meaning in American history, sociology and politics. I’ve got a column I’m planning on writing about that, after I read his autobiography on the subject. It will be headlined "Barack Like Me," and it will be rooted in the experiences he and I share spending part of our formative years in Hawaii (where race simply did not mean what it means here) and outside the United States — both in the Third World, in fact. None of these experiences are common to the sort of guy we describe when we say "black American." I hope to write that one before the summer is over.
Because the popular narrative of this is that Obama IS a black man (despite all the evidence I see to the contrary), that’s the way an Obama victory will play in the public imagination. And that WILL be a death knell to the kind of black politics of resentment and grievance practiced by Jesse Jackson and (even more so by) Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright and to some extent by black politicos here in SC (such as Leon Howard, who said the former superintendent of Richland 1 had to go because "He catered to white folks").

Mr. Bobo agrees with me on the latter point, by the way:

"The politics of the perpetual outsiders demanding inclusion will finally end (read: Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will get less face time). And good riddance (perhaps). We’ve come too far over too many years for shrill protest to still be our main political posture today, no matter how necessary and relevant in the past…."

Wrightetal

I’m not alone in seeing Bistromathic principles at work in modern finance

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Did you think I was being a tad hyperbolic (just to throw another mathematical concept at you) when I cited Bistromathics in explaining my confusion over the nation’s economic problems?

Well, I had to laugh just now reading tomorrow’s op-ed page, which contains this Paul Krugman column.

Paul Krugman is, according to his billing, an actual economist. Most of his columns might read as though they were written by a summer intern at the National Democratic Party — he is my nominee for Most Partisan Writer Currently Published in Major Newspapers. In fact, I had to double-check to make sure this column was actually written by Paul Krugman, since it did not blame anything whatsoever on George W. Bush. But it actually is a Krugman column. And he actually is an economist.

Anyway, the part of his column that grabbed me was this part:

The most important of these privileges is implicit: it’s the belief
of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure,
the federal government will come to their rescue.

This implicit
guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized.
If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits,
but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win,
tails we lose.

Such one-way bets can encourage the taking of bad
risks, because the downside is someone else’s problem. The classic
example of how this can happen is the savings-and-loan crisis of the
1980s: S.& L. owners offered high interest rates to attract lots of
federally insured deposits, then essentially gambled with the money.
When many of their bets went bad, the feds ended up holding the bag.
The eventual cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Did you get that? "Someone else’s problem…" As you and I and Zaphod and Ford all know, there is a concept involved in the understanding of Bistromathics called "recipriversexclusons," and recipriversexclusons are essential in the generation of an SEP field, or "Somebody Else’s Problem" field. What’s that? Must I explain everything? Oh, all right:

"An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t
let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem…. The
brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it
directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your
only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

So there you have it. And if you can’t see what I’m saying, just blame it on the recipriversexclusons.

‘Basic English’ little help on 2nd Amendment

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On tomorrow’s page we have a letter from someone on one side or the other of the 2nd Amendment debate (which side is irrelevant to my point) who writes "Anyone who has had any basic English course knows…," and then goes on to make some point or other about what he believes the Amendment to mean.

Here’s the problem with that: Basic English (or hyper-advanced English, for that matter) is little help in making clear sense of the 2nd Amendment. Read it — or try to: Those stray commas — you know, the ones after "Militia" and "Arms" — render it into gibberish.

I love commas; I truly do. I think the modern world is sadly lacking in commas. That’s why I loved this column by Robert Samuelson awhile back.

But apparently, they had a surplus of them in the 18th century — a regular plague, as with locusts. And they descended upon the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution, and left devastation in their wake.

‘Nuts:’ The cartoon Robert didn’t put in the newspaper

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As I’ve mentioned before, for a regular guy who makes his living as a satirist, Robert Ariail can sometimes get all sensitive and even shy. He hates criticism, particularly criticism arising from a misunderstanding of his work (if he meant to offend you, he’s OK with that).

And sometimes he decides that his cartoon ideas are inappropriate. Sometimes he’s onto something, or at least it’s debatable. Other times, he may worry a bit too much. You might say that, on the spectrum of cartoon sensibilities, he’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from this Dutch guy.

Anyway, his sensitivity on that point was one of the reasons why this cartoon didn’t make it into the paper. He was worried about the salacious nature of "nuts" the way Jesse Jackson had used it. But there were other reasons:

The simplest, and most obvious, was that he had an oversupply of cartoons, and we ran out of slots for running them in a timely fashion. There will even be on jammed onto our Monday letters page, which is unusual. If we still had a Saturday page, I probably could have argued him into using it there. But since I was out of space, when he said he’d just put it on his Web page, I left it alone. (In case you haven’t figured it out, we have different standards for what we’ll put on the Web, and what we deem paper-worthy. This is driven by factors ranging from the enduring concept of the "family newspaper" and the fact that on the Web, space is unlimited.)
He thought people wouldn’t get it, because it got so little coverage in the MSM, outside of Fox — and most of that coverage tiptoed around what he’d actually said. When he first mentioned this, I said that was an advantage if he was worried about salaciousness, since readers who had missed the reference would just take it on the level of saying Jackson and Wright are "nuts." Sure, that’ll offend some, but the offense is more in the realm of the kind Robert doesn’t mind, since that is exactly what he meant.
He lost some enthusiasm for the cartoon when he realized he’d misunderstood what Jackson had said. He initially thought he’d said, "Obama’s cutting off his nuts" by "talking down" to black folks. When he mentioned it to me, it caused me to say something like, "He’s cutting off some nuts, all right, and one of them’s Jesse, and he doesn’t like it." That inspired the above cartoon — Robert’s eyebrows shot up the instant I said it — and this blog post by me. But in the course of researching for a link for the blog post, I discovered Jackson had actually said something different — something more hostile, but something that didn’t quite fit as well the play on words upon which the cartoon is based.
He had another cartoon regarding what Jackson had said about Obama, and it was actually a better one, and it didn’t rely upon prior knowledge on the readers’ part. As it happens, we put it on the Sunday page, which is the biggest play we can give anything. You’ll see it tomorrow.

Seems like there were a couple of things that ran through my head in the couple of seconds after Robert told me he’d decide to use this on the Web only (and send it to his syndicate), but I’m forgetting them now.

(Trying to reconstruct one of those internal monologues this way is actually one of the fun things about blogging. Dostoevsky did this — far better, of course, but it appeals to me for the same reason. I pretty much fell in love with Crime and Punishment for good at about the point when Andrey Semyenovich Lebezyatnikov goes on and on about what ran through his head in a couple of seconds. I thought that was cool.)

Preview of Sunday page

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Kidding aside, I’ll put on my oh-so-serious editorial page editor’s hat for a moment (I don’t really have such a thing as an "editorial page editor’s" hat; that’s just a figure of speech — although I do have a very impressive Medallion of Office I wear on special occasions), and do something I haven’t done lately: Give you a preview of Sunday’s editorial page.

This is from the lead editorial, about the USC president decision:

… Harris Pastides was the one candidate named in recent months who not only understood and believed in these initiatives, but already had his sleeves up working to make them happen. As The State’s Wayne Washington reported Friday, in recent years, “Sorensen thought the big thoughts, and Pastides got the ball rolling.”
He may have been the comparative “insider” candidate, but he is not a “South Carolina as usual” choice. The Greek Orthodox New Yorker made his mark at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Athens in Greece and with the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, before coming here in 1998. He is comfortable in Washington’s corridors of power and among the bustling new technology spheres of India.
The challenge that now faces him as president is to bring the university’s promise from potential to tangible reality. To say that’s a daunting task is gross understatement, but obviously USC’s trustees believe he’s the one to get it done….

See? I told you it was serious. Then there’s my column, which analyzes the government’s decision to send us "stimulus" checks, and other questionable recent calls with regard to the economy:

… But then, I always had doubts about the whole scheme.
Sort of like with the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns. I’m not a libertarian, not by a long shot, but sometimes I break out with little itchy spots of libertarianism, and one of those itchy spots causes me to ask, Why am I, as a taxpaying member of the U.S. economy, bailing out something called Bear Stearns? I didn’t even know what it was. Even after I’d read about it in The Wall Street Journal, I still could not answer the fundamental question, “If you work at Bear Stearns, what is it that you do all day?” I understand what a fireman does, and if the fire department were about to go under, I’d be one of the first to step forward and say let’s bail it out. Of course, if the fire department wanted me to lend it $29 billion, with a “B,” I might have further questions. Yet that’s what we’ve done for Bear Stearns….

Be sure to read the paper Sunday.

Yessirree bobtail!

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Cindi’s got another column on tomorrow’s page that involves the S.C. legislative practice of "bobtailing." As usual, she uses the term as though it makes perfect sense, although it doesn’t.

Cindi defends the word as one that has meaning within the context of the State House, and she has enough of a point that I leave the term in when she uses it (Hey — you try to argue her out of it). Cindi uses the term because, as she put it, That’s what they call it, so that’s what it is. I’m grateful that in one recent column, she at least put the term, as used by S.C. lawmakers, in quotation marks.

Yes, if we’re going to describe what these folks do we need to use the lingo, but this is just an example of our lawmakers abusing language. They use the term to refer to ADDING something, or somethings, to a bill — something that doesn’t belong there. In the English language, the term "bobtail" indicates that something has been TAKEN AWAY — or mostly taken away.

To "bob" a tail is to cut most of it off. It applies to things other than hair, of course (I refer you to Fitzgerald’s "Bernice Bobs Her Hair.") A Bobtail Cat is so called because he has a mere stump of a tail.

Far more accurately descriptive is the "Christmas Tree" metaphor, of hanging amendments on a bill in the manner of ornaments. Unfortunately, in South Carolina, "bobtailing" is what they call it. I just thought I’d point out that they are WRONG to call it that.

What the Knotts endorsement is really about

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On today’s page, you saw our endorsement of Jake Knotts in the runoff in the Republican nomination in Senate District 23. You also saw Cindi Scoppe’s column that was her way of thinking through, and explaining to readers, what was for the whole board a difficult decision. (And despite the little bit of fun I had about DeMint "clarifying" things, it was and is a difficult one.)

It’s worth reading, if you only get one thing out of it: This isn’t as simple as being about whether this person is for vouchers (or, worse, tax credits) or that one is against them. This is about what video poker was about — whether a group that does not have the state’s best interests at heart is allowed to intimidate the Legislature into doing its will.

It’s easy to say that, but very hard to communicate to readers. It’s hard to understand if you don’t spend as much time as I have, and as Cindi has (and she has a lot more direct experience with this than I do) observing lawmakers up close, and watching the ways they interact, and the way issues play out among them. I know it’s hard for readers to understand, because all these years later, folks still seem to have trouble understanding what the video poker issue was about for the editorial board, and why we took the position we ultimately did (to ban the industry).

I know we’ll be explaining this one for the next 10 years, and possibly longer. It’s just tough to communicate, and made tougher in this case because video poker was at least unsavory on its face. The face of this campaign funded by out-of-state extremists appears to be perfectly nice, ordinary people like Katrina Shealy and Sheri Few.

But it’s not about them. And it’s not about Jake Knotts, either. It’s certainly not about whether one or two candidates who favor (or might favor) vouchers get elected to the Legislature. By themselves, those one or two candidates can’t change the fact that spending public funds on private schools is (quite rightly) an unpopular cause. What this is about is the fact that if Jake Knotts loses, Howard Rich and company win, and that will play in the Legislature this way: Our money took Jake down. We can do the same to you. And at that point, lawmakers who don’t believe in vouchers and know their constituents don’t either can be induced to vote along with those interests anyway.

We saw it happen with video poker — until the industry was put out of business, cutting off the flow of cash that was corrupting the legislative process. We’re seeing a similar dynamic here. And that’s what this is about.

Anyway, as I mentioned, Cindi had a column about that. On Sunday, I’ll have a very different column about this endorsement. At one point in the column, I refer to one of the big differences between our editorial board and Jake Knotts — his populism. So it is that I post the video below, which features Sen. Knotts talking about that.

Tom Friedman’s back, and he’s going to bat for the Energy Party!

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Tom Friedman is finally back after a four-month, book-writing sabbatical. The NYT said he’d be back in April, and he just barely made it! (Now I can stop fielding those phone calls from readers wanting to know what happened to him. Here’s a recording of one of those. )

And he’s coming out swinging… and best of all, he’s coming out swinging on behalf of the Energy Party (whether he knows it or not). His first column is headlined, "Dumb as We Wanna Be," and you’ll see it on our op-ed page tomorrow. An excerpt:

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit…

Go get ’em, Tom! That’s a very fine leadoff hit. Coming up to bat next, on the same op-ed page, will be Robert Samuelson, and he’ll bring Friedman around to score. His piece, succinctly headlined "Start Drilling," is the rhetorical equivalent of a hard line drive down the opposite-field line:

What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The truth is that we’re almost powerless to influence today’s prices. We are because we didn’t take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing to do: Start drilling.
It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves)….

Not start drilling as a substitute for conservation or the search for new fuels (as the ideologues of the right would have it, and the ideologues of the left deplore), but in addition to. Like I said, this is straight out of the Energy Party playbook (yeah, I know this started as a baseball metaphor, not football, but bear with me).

To reduce dependence on tyrannical foreign sources, to help out Mother Nature, to keep our economy healthy, to stoke innovation, to win the War on Terror, and make us healthier, wealthier and wiser, we should adopt the entire Energy Party platform. We should, among other things I’m forgetting at the moment:

Increase CAFE standards further — much further.
Raise the tax on gasoline, NOT reduce it, so that we’ll suppress demand, which will reduce upward pressure on prices, and we’ll be paying the higher amounts to ourselves rather than America-haters in Russia, Iran, Venezuela and yes, Saudi Arabia.
Use the proceeds for a Manhattan Project or Apollo Project (or whatever
else kind of project we choose, as long as we understand that it’s the
moral equivalent of war) to develop new technologies — hydrogen, solar, wind, geothermal, what have you — and shifting the mass of the resources to the most promising ones as they emerge.
Reduce highway speed limits to 55 mph, to conserve fuel and save lives (OK, Samuel? I mentioned it.) And oh, yeah — enforce the speed limits. The fines will pay for the additional cops.
Drill in ANWR, off the coasts, and anywhere else we can do so in reasonable safety. (Yes, we can.)
Increase the availability of mass transit (and if you can swing it, I’d appreciate some light rail; I love the stuff).
Fine, jail or ostracize anyone who drives an SUV without a compelling reason to do so. Possible propaganda poster: ""Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps."

And so forth and so on.

My point is, no more fooling around. It’s way past time to get serious about this stuff, and stop playing little pandering games. Let’s show a little hustle out there. And no dumb mistakes running the bases out there, fellas…

P.S. — The name of the book Mr. Friedman’s been writing, which will come out in August, is Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. So yeah, he’s got an economic stake in these concepts. Well, more power to him. There’s money to be made in doing the smart thing, and to the extent he can persuade us to move in that direction, he deserves to get his taste.Just to help him out, here’s video of him talking about these ideas. Here’s a link to his recent magazine piece on the subject.

Preview: Cindi’s column Sunday explaining restructuring

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Something John Rust — a candidate for the Republican nomination in S.C. House Dist. 77 — said during his endorsement interview earlier this week was very familiar. It’s something we hear all the time as to why some people oppose restructuring South Carolina government to put the elected chief executive in charge of the executive branch.

Cindi Scoppe explores this common misconception in her column coming up on Sunday. An excerpt:

When I finally managed to claw my way through my over-stuffed in-box, a reprise of the Rust message was waiting for me:
“I saw, again, in your column, a push for enhanced gubernatorial power in South Carolina. You made reference to a leader with bold ideas that don’t get watered down by the timid legislature. Were you implying that this would protect education from unwise budget cuts? If our present governor’s bold ideas were unchecked, a good portion of our education dollar would be paying private school tuition, even bright kids who read at age five would be getting systematic phonics instruction until they were nine, and Barbara Nielson (sic) would likely be State Superintendent. At least 25% of the income tax burden would have been shifted from upper-incomes to middle and lower incomes.”
Wow.
When you put it that way, no one in his right mind would want to “restructure” government…

You may be able to see where she’s going with that. If you can’t, you need to read the column on Sunday.

And before that, I’ll be putting video of the relevant part of the Rust interview on our new Saturday Opinion Extra…

In fact, you know what? Since y’all are like my extra-special friends and all, I’m going to go ahead and give y’all the video right now:

Robert Ariail video

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We’re launching two new Web features tonight — one is the Saturday Opinion Extra, which should show up at the top of the regular Opinion page at 12:01 a.m.

The other is the new site devoted to my friend and colleague Robert Ariail and his stellar work. Andy Haworth of thestate.com has done a nice video for that site to help us launch it. I invite you to watch it above, and then go check out the whole Ariail site.

Now, I’ll go back to watching the clock, waiting for the Saturday thing to launch. I think it’s ready…

On Saturdays, you’ll find us on the Web

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
SINCE YOU’RE reading this, we can assume you found us in our new location. Actually, Page D2 is sort of an old location for the Sunday editorial page. We were here for many years before jumping to the A section a little more than a year ago.
Being back on D2 feels like home to me; I hope it will make our pages more convenient each week for you as well.
But my purpose today is not to talk about a change already made, but one coming up. And this one is going to feel a lot less familiar to all of us.
Starting six days from now, we will no longer publish opinion and commentary pages on Saturdays in The State. Instead, we’ll unveil a new Web page featuring content of the sort that we would have published in the paper, only more of it. The new page will be called “Saturday Opinion Extra.”
Why are we doing this? Two reasons, which I’ll keep as simple as possible:

We have to cut costs.
There are things we can do online we can’t do in the paper.

Now, about the cost-cutting:
You may have read that newspapers don’t make as much money as they used to. We still make money, just not as much as the stock market demands. And when you’re a publicly traded company, you have no options: Making less money is something shareholders don’t stand for.
So you do two things: You work like crazy to bring in more revenue, which is not my department. And you cut costs, which does involve the editorial staff.
When we lost one writing position three years ago, we eliminated staff-written copy from our Monday pages. Now, faced with further reductions, we’re eliminating editorials from another day, plus eliminating two pages of newsprint a week.
But just as we replaced the staff copy with a lot more letters to the editor (one of the most popular features in the paper) on Mondays, you’ll get more content on Saturdays online than we could possibly put in the paper. For instance:

We get far more syndicated and local guest columns than we can fit on our op-ed pages during the week. On our new Saturday Web page, we’ll be able to give you several op-ed pages worth of columns from the likes of David Broder, Kathleen Parker, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Cal Thomas, Paul Krugman and Charles Krauthammer.
Add to that at least one column from a local writer, just as you would normally have received on Saturdays. But the particular columns we put online might be something you’d never have gotten in the paper. We often get more than one column in a month from such newsmakers as Gov. Mark Sanford (Columbia Mayor Bob Coble has submitted three this past month). But since space in the paper is at such a premium, we try to limit each writer to no more than one a month. We also turn down most columns that other newspapers have published. So we turn down some interesting, relevant columns — but finite space in the paper demands tough choices. Online space is virtually unlimited, so you’ll get additional chances to read what newsmakers, and others, are thinking.
You will see at least as many letters to the editor online as you would have received in the paper, with the added bonus that some of them will be letters held out for no reason other than that they were too long for our page, and didn’t lend themselves to trimming.
We regularly shoot video during editorial board interviews with newsmakers. I’ve been using some of it on my blog the last couple of years, but sporadically; the Saturday Opinion Extra page gives us a place to showcase some of the most interesting footage from the past week.
You’ll find links to such things as a new, improved page devoted to Robert Ariail’s recent cartoons, featuring such DVD-style bonus features as unpublished sketches, archives, and video of Robert talking about what he does. (There will also be links to recent posts on my blog, of course.)

That’s the content we’ll be starting with, and I hope you will suggest more.
This is a big and scary step for us in the editorial department. We have always published editorial and op-ed pages daily, and departing from that feels a little like stepping off something firm and secure into thin air.
But like skydiving, it’s also pretty exciting. Ever since the 1980s — since before there was a Worldwide Web — I’ve been interested in the potential of an electronic opinion forum, with immediacy and interactivity you can’t get on paper. That’s why I started the blog; this takes us another step.
Sure, we’ve let our paper content flow onto the Web for years, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface of what we can do there in the opinion realm. The editorial board needs to turn some attention to better serving the 800,000 unique visitors who come to thestate.com each month.
Please check out this new feature on Saturday, and let us know what you think of it. Even more than a published page, this new venture will always be a living work in progress, and I’m counting on our readers to help us shape it.

Until the new Saturday Opinion Extra page appears, please come to my blog to share your thoughts: thestate.com/bradsblog/. Or send us a letter at [email protected].

Katon’s response to Friday’s Sanford edit

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Be sure to check tomorrow’s op-ed page for Katon Dawson’s indignant response to Friday’s editorial. Here’s a taste:

The Governor and Republican legislators have made South Carolina a better place to live, work and raise a family. Not surprisingly, leaders and lawmakers across the country have taken notice of Governor Sanford’s leadership -– as they have taken notice of other great leaders in South Carolina like our U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint and the entire Republican team in Columbia.

Katon does his best, as a good party chairman should, to paint a picture of Republicans in South Carolina as one big family, with the gov and GOP lawmakers pulling in the same direction and things like that. And he does it as well as anyone might. Be sure to check it out.

Watch for endorsement, 3 p.m. Saturday

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There are several things I want to blog about this morning — from last night’s GOP debate, other things — but I’m out of blogging action for the next few hours. We’ve had our editorial board meeting to determine our endorsement. It started at 9:30, and ended 15 or 20 minutes ago, as I write this just before 11:30. There was a lot to discuss, even though to our great disappointment, not all of the candidates came in for face-to-face interviews. (I’m beginning to really, really hate this compressed schedule, which has pulled candidates in too many directions.)

Now I have an editorial to write, and my Sunday column, then I have to paginate the Sunday edit page, and get proofs to my colleagues before the day is over.

When I’m done with all that, I have an engagement with Andy Haworth of thestate.com to shoot a video of me talking about our endorsement.

That, and the endorsement itself, will be available Saturday afternoon. The endorsement will go up on thestate.com at 3 p.m. Saturday. (Actually, I’m just guessing that’s when the video goes up; I haven’t asked.)

The endorsement will be in the newspaper Sunday. Between now and then, though, I have a lot to do. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

Thompson’s chance to make a difference: Bow out, endorse McCain

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A NOTE ON THE NOTE: Thanks to John Bentley at the CBS blog for addressing the problem. All fixed now.

NOTE to visitors from the CBS blog: The blog item posted by John Bentley Saturday contained a serious error! This is Brad Warthen’s Blog, and as such, it only reflects the thoughts of Brad Warthen. The jottings you find here are in no way the opinion of The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper. For further explanation, note this item.

Eight years ago, Fred Thompson came for an editorial board visit after we had already endorsed George Bush, to tell us how wrong we were. We should have backed John McCain, he told us. I knew that, of course, but I sat still for his gruff advice as a sort of penance for my failure. I had tried hard (more about that in my Sunday column), but the consensus on our board had gone against me.

As futile as his gesture was at that point, I still appreciated Sen. Thompson’s position, as bad as it made me feel. McCain had been the man, and it was the nation’s loss that he was not elected in 2000.

Since he knew that then, and Sen. McCain is the same man he was, I’ve wondered all year why in the world Mr. Thompson even thought of running. As I said back in this column, he forgot to do one thing when he jumped in late: Tell us what it was he brought to the campaign that the candidates already running did not already offer.

Now, it’s my turn to return the favor and tell Fred Thompson something that he should already know: It’s time for him to do the principled thing again, and assert what he knew to be true back then: He should bow out, and support McCain. And he should do it now; now is when he can make a difference.

Sen. McCain is tied for first place in New Hampshire polls with a damaged Mitt Romney; Mr. Thompson is in single digits. By the time he comes South, all he will be able to do is be a spoiler, to pull just enough voters away from another candidate (and I suspect that candidate would most likely be his longtime ally McCain) to throw the victory to the surging Huckabee.

Nothing against Huckabee on my part; I just don’t see him as the alternative Mr. Thompson himself would prefer. Meanwhile, he has continued to express his continuing respect for Sen. McCain; this would be a chance to show he means it.

Speaking of Gov. Huckabee, his victory is his own. But he was not in a position to begin that rise, he was not in striking distance, until Sam Brownback gracefully departed from the race. They had both been drinking from the same well of voters, and Sen. Brownback clarified matters for them.

Quitting when he did was Sen. Brownback’s greatest contribution to this campaign, and was the best thing he could have done to serve the values and ideas he espouses. If Sen. Thompson wants to advance his own values, if he wants to make a difference and serve the country — or if he simply wants the gratification of being a player at all — he should get behind McCain now.

Which Democrat would the UnParty embrace?

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Joe Lieberman’s endorsement of John McCain dramatizes the Arizonans status as the one Republican most in tune with the UnParty. To quote from Sen. Lieberman’s statement:

"I know that it is unusual for someone who is not a Republican to endorse a Republican candidate for President. And if this were an ordinary time and an ordinary election, I probably would not be here today. But this is no ordinary time — and this is no ordinary election — and John McCain is no ordinary candidate.
"In this critical election, no one should let party lines be a barrier to choosing the person we believe is best qualified to lead our nation forward. The problems that confront us are too great, the threats we face too real, and the opportunities we have too exciting for us to play partisan politics with the Presidency.
"We desperately need our next President to break through the reflexive partisanship that is poisoning our politics and stopping us from getting things done. We need a President who can reunite our country, restore faith in our government, and rebuild confidence in America’s future.
"My friend John McCain is that candidate, and that is why I am so proud to be standing by his side today…"

Does anyone else on the Republican side have UnPartisan potential? Sure, to differing degrees. Rudy Giuliani has certain appeal across party lines, and one of our commenters had it right when he compared Mike Huckabee to Jimmy Carter (Lee didn’t mean it as a compliment, but that doesn’t make the comment less true).

But Lieberman definitely gave McCain a big leg up in this regard.

That said, who on the Democratic side is most likely to appeal to UnPartisans? This is a tricky question. David Brooks (who, as you will recall, wrote of the McCain-Lieberman Party last year) framed part of the dilemma well in a column that will run on our op-ed page tomorrow. One the one hand, Hillary Clinton has been a significant bipartisan force as a senator:

Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline.

All very true. On the other hand, Barack Obama is the guy who wants to be president of all of us, while Mrs. Clinton tends to attract those who want to "take back" the White House for their partisan faction:

Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.
But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

Then, of course, there’s Joe Biden, who has more experience working effectively across the lines toward pragmatic policies than either of them. Unfortunately, David Brooks isn’t writing about Sen. Biden, and too few are thinking about him. But he certainly deserves the UnParty’s careful consideration.

I’m sure that’s a great comfort to him, don’t you think?

bradwarthen.com

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