Category Archives: In case you wondered

Bad blood between Leon, Harpo?

Looking for something else, I happened to run into this old story from 1991. It's from Leon Lott's Miami Vice days as head of the narcotics squad of the sheriff's department. As many of you will remember, back then Leon had a rep as a bit of a cowboy (in addition to Sonny Crockett, Dirty Harry was invoked) who liked to kick down doors and drive hot, confiscated cars.

But what I had forgotten was that Dick Harpootlian — who was quoted in today's story being critical of Leon on behalf of his client, busted in connection with the Michael Phelps investigation — had such a beef with Leon back then, when Dick was the solicitor. Interesting back story. Don't miss the classic quote at the end from Leon: "I love narcotics." (OK, so maybe that's a little out of context.):

          THE STATE

NARCOTICS CHIEF SAYS
POLITICS COST HIM JOB
Published on: 03/09/1991
Section: METRO/REGION
Edition: FINAL
Page: 1B
By TWILA DECKER and JOHN ALLARD, Staff Writers
Illustration: Photo, bw

Caption: Lott to be reassigned

Richland County's vice Capt. Leon Lott, often compared to "Miami Vice" character Sonny Crockett, will be transferred out of the job he loves after criticism by 5th Circuit Solicitor Dick Harpootlian.

Harpootlian asked a circuit judge last week to void a deal made by Lott a year ago that dismissed charges against a father-and-son drug-dealing team, Fabian and Enrique Valencia, in exchange for information about drug deals in South Carolina.

Harpootlian said the deal, which hasn't resulted in any arrests in this state, never should have been made. Judge Carol Connor is still considering whether she'll void the agreement.

"I think the conduct of Capt. Lott in the Valencia case . . . gave rise to serious questions about his judgment," Harpootlian said. "He let two of the county's biggest drug dealers go free."

Surprisingly, Sheriff Allen Sloan, who had strained relations with Lott last year and threatened to move him to the burglary division, has come to Lott's defense and says the move has nothing to do with the Valencia case.

"That deal was sanctioned by (former 5th Circuit) Solicitor Jim Anders," Sloan said. "Leon thought it was a good idea, and he still thinks it was a good deal. I back the boy 100 percent."

Sloan said Lott has expressed enthusiasm about his new responsibilities as captain of administration and believes that it's time to move on after nine years of heading the narcotics division.

But a somber Lott, who said he had no choice but to accept the new job because he has three children and a wife to support, gave a different account of the move late Thursday night.

Lott said Harpootlian gave Sloan an ultimatum: Get rid of Lott or there would be "major problems" between the Sheriff's Department and the solicitor's office.

Harpootlian denies pressuring Sloan.

"It's unfortunate that Leon views everything in this sinister way," Harpootlian said. "That might be the way it works in the world of narcotics, but this is the world of professionals.

"It's the sheriff's prerogative to organize his office in a way that's going to be most conducive to a good working relationship."

Sloan said Lott will be in charge of training, the DARE program, drug testing of applicants and officers and recruiting and hiring. He also will be in charge of seeking grants.

Deputy Chief Fred Riddle, who, unlike Lott, dresses conservatively in a suit and tie each day, will have the narcotics division added to his responsibilities.

"This will assure a daily account of everything they do," Sloan said. "But I am not in the least bit discouraged or unpleased with Leon's performance."

Riddle, who will be Lott's supervisor, will continue to be in charge of investigations and administration.

Lott also was criticized by Harpootlian and several defense lawyers for failing to monitor his drug agents' deals, spending $18,000 on a Mustang chase car and requiring his officers to meet quotas.

"This constant pressure to meet quotas means quantity takes precedence over quality, which means you arrest someone in whatever way you can," said Leigh Leventis, a Columbia attorney.

"Unless you have assets to turn over or agree to work for them as a snitch, they say you're going to prison. The system has allowed all kinds of abuses," Leventis said.

But Lott denies enforcing a quota, saying the number of arrests varies from month to month. He also said in a recent interview that he keeps close watch on his 26 narcotics agents to make sure they're following the law.

"I control narcotics with an iron fist over my guys. I try to be aware of everything that goes on. They have high intensity to work and perform," Lott said. "We're out there working our butts off to do something about the drug problem."

Lott, who was voted South Carolina Law Enforcement Association officer of the year in 1989, said work has been the focus of his life.

"I love narcotics. I don't know what I would do if I was transferred," Lott said last month.

The editorial I didn’t write for tomorrow

My plans for the day had included writing an editorial on the stimulus bill currently stumbling its way through the U.S. Senate, but then I spoke to someone in Washington who said it COULD pass tonight. If I knew it were going to pass tonight, and had some idea how it would end up, I could write about how it and the House version should be reconciled. If I knew it WEREN'T going to pass tonight, I could write about what should happen to it in the Senate before it passes. Not knowing, and not having started writing (and having a bunch of other stuff I need to be doing today), we'll be going with a local piece that one of my colleagues has almost finished instead.

But here are some of the points that I would have wanted to make:

  • The House bill is a nonstarter. I thought David Broder did a good job of explaining how it got that way in his Sunday column. Nancy Pelosi has done another partisan number on the country similar to what she did on the TARP bill a couple of months back. And the Republicans were only too happy to oblige her by voting against it unanimously. That means the $300 billion or so in tax cuts that were there to garner GOP support is wasted money (they are far too small and unfocused to do the taxpapers any appreciable good, so their ONLY theoretical value was political), without even getting into the waste the Democrats added for pet projects. A mess that would prove to be an overall waste in the end. A lot spent without giving the needed boost to the economy.
  • Kudos to the moderates in both parties — Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine in particular — for working together to strip out some of the worst spending provisions. (As for our own Senate moderate — I'm thinking Lindsey Graham is supporting those efforts, based on statements I've seen, and if I were writing an editorial I would check to nail that down. But I'm not. I do know I haven't seen him mentioned in the national stories I've read.)
  • But as great as it is that we're getting rid of some of the worst spending ideas, is a SMALLER stimulus bill what we're aiming for? I don't often agree with Paul Krugman, but he IS a Nobel winner in economics, and I have found persuasive his arguments that Obama's proposed stimulus, even if all of it is properly focused, isn't big enough to give the jolt the economy needs. So rather than CUTTING stuff from it, should we not be trying to FOCUS the spending that's there into more productive channels? Such as, more shovel-ready infrastructure… In other words, it's good that the moderates want to prevent wasteful spending, but isn't the problem less the size of the stimulus (which as Krugman says, may not be large enough), but what it's being spent on?
  • The Buy American stuff — the latter-day Smoot-Hawley — should go. After a piece I read in the WSJ this morning, which sort of crystalized my half-formed thoughts on the matter, I'm more concerned about this than I was yesterday. If I had written the editorial, though, I'd have had to reach an agreement with one of my colleagues who is not as much of a free-trader as I am. Since I'm not writing the piece, we're not pausing in our work today to have that argument.

As you see, it would have been a fairly complicated editorial, pulling in many different directions, reflecting the complexity of the legislation and the lack of clear sense — on my part, on the Senators' part, on the House's part, on everybody's part (except for the ideologues who SAY they know what to do, but don't) — of exactly what will cure what ails the nation's economy.

Increasingly, I am pessimistic that what finally emerges and gets signed by the president will lead in any obvious way to the kind of dramatic improvement in economic activity that we need. That can further a crisis of confidence in everything from the new president to our ability to effect our own recovery in any way. And that can lead to depression, in more than one sense of the word.

(Oh, and before you comment that my thoughts on this are half-baked and incomplete — well, duh. I told you, this is the editorial I didn't write, so I haven't gone the extra mile of refining and reconciling these various points, as I made very clear above. Having done a bunch of reading and thinking about it, though, I thought I'd toss these points out for y'all to discuss. In case that's not obvious.)

An Edwards column I had forgotten

Looking in our internal database for something entirely unrelated (what I might have written in the past about Bill Clinton's Deficit Reduction Act of 1993, actually) I ran across a column from 2003 that I had forgotten about. It struck me as interesting for two reasons:

  • It's an unfortunate fact that if you search for "Brad Warthen" on the Web — I did it several days ago as a way of trying out the Grokker search engine — you run across a lot of stuff about a certain column I wrote in 2007 about John Edwards. That column drew 190,000 page views to thestate.com within the first week (not to the blog version — unfortunately, since the blog version was better). If you recall, it was about three incidents that, taken together, had persuaded me that John Edwards was a "phony." I didn't think all that much of the column when I wrote it, but it looks like it's going to dog me forever in what we once called Cyberspace. Anyway, this previous, forgotten column was the first time I had written about one of those incidents.
  • Criticizing John Edwards was not the point of the column. Oh, I was fairly dismissive of him; he never impressed me all that much. But the point was to criticize some young Republican protesters who had come to try to disrupt his campaign event.

Anyway, it's a mildly interesting footnote to something that caused a lot of hoo-hah, so I share it.

You'll note that I mention the very moment I later cited in the "Phony" column, and call Edwards on it for its general bogusness, which shows even then what an impression it made on me. Of course, I don't zero in on it quite as harshly as I did later, and the reason why is fairly obvious: The other two incidents had not yet happened, so while I had serious doubts about him, and especially about his populism, I had not yet put it all together and made up my mind fully about John Edwards. My impression had not yet, as I later wrote, "been reinforced with steel girders."

Anyway, here's the forgotten column:

EDWARDS HAS HIS FAULTS, BUT THE PROTESTERS MADE THEM HARD TO SEE
State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, September 21, 2003
Author: BRAD WARTHEN Editorial Page Editor

I DON'T GET protesters.
    I'm not talking about political debate, or dissent, or seeking redress of grievances. Those things are part of what our country's all about. They're what my job's all about. We definitely don't want to curtail any of that.
    And I believe that there are rare cases when taking to the streets – in an orderly, peaceful manner – is perfectly justifiable, even imperative. Laws would not have changed in the United States if not for the forceful, nonviolent witness of Martin Luther King and thousands of others.
    What throws me is people who whip up signs and take to the streets at the slightest provocation – or no provocation at all.
    I've expressed my puzzlement about such behavior at the dinner table, only to have one of my children make the very good point that of course I don't understand; I don't have to take to the streets because I have my own bully pulpit on these pages. True enough. But everyone has available more constructive means of political expression than making a public spectacle of themselves.
    Even revolutions can be conducted with dignity. Compare John and Samuel Adams. John, who started as an unremarkable farmer and lawyer from Braintree, Mass., persuaded the Continental Congress to formally declare independence. Cousin Samuel, by contrast, preferred whipping up mobs in the streets of Boston. Who accomplished more? I would say John.
    All of this is on my mind because I went to hear John Edwards announce his candidacy at the Russell House Tuesday. What did I see when I was there?
    Well, a lot of silliness, mostly. But it was to be expected. There are few things more unbecoming than a millionaire trial lawyer presenting himself to a crowd as the ultimate populist. Huey Long could pull it off; he had the common touch. So did George Wallace. But John Edwards is one of those "sleek-headed" men that Shakespeare wrote of in Julius Caesar. He may be lean, but he hath not the hungry look. Mr. Edwards is decidedly lacking in rough edges. Not even age can stick to him.
    His entrance was predictably corny. Other speakers had unobtrusively climbed the back steps onto the platform. Mr. Edwards snuck around to the back of the crowd, then leaped out of his hiding place with a huge grin and his hand out, looking for all the world like he was surprised to find himself among all these supporters. He hand-shook his way through the audience to the podium, a la Bill Clinton , thereby signifying that he comes "from the people." Watch for that shot in upcoming TV commercials.
    His speech was laced with populist non-sequiturs. For instance, he went way over the top exhibiting his incredulity at Bush's "jobless recovery," chuckling with his audience at such an oxymoron – as though the current administration had invented the term. (A computer scan found the phrase 641 times in major news sources during calendar year 1993 ; so much for novelty.)
    Despite all that, I came away from the event with greater sympathy for the Edwards campaign than I might have had otherwise. That's because he and his supporters seemed so wise, thoughtful, mature and dignified – by comparison to the protesters.
    These were, I assume, members of the University of South Carolina chapter of College Republicans, based on that group's stated intention to be there in force. I suppose I could have confirmed that by asking them, but like most of the folks there – Edwards backers and disinterested observers alike – I tried to ignore them. It wasn't easy. When one speaker praised Mr. Edwards, they would yell, "Bush!" When another said Elizabeth Edwards would be a fine first lady, they hollered "Laura!" The signs they carried were equally subtle. Some called the candidate an "ambulance chaser." Two were held side by side: One said "Edwards is liberal"; the other, "S.C. is not." Deep stuff. It apparently didn't occur to them that conservative people don't act this way.
    They settled down noticeably when Mrs. Edwards politely called for a display of "good Southern manners." But the heckling resumed when her husband started speaking. I had made the mistake of standing near the back of the crowd, and some of the young Republicans took up position behind me. Therefore, when the candidate noted yet again that he was born in Seneca, South Carolina, and a heckler hollered a sarcastic "No kidding," it was right into my ear. I was similarly well situated to get the full brunt when someone started shouting some of Mr. Edwards' more well-worn stump speech lines along with him.
    What makes people behave this way? Yes, they were young; I understand that. But why is it that political dialogue has degenerated to the point that even young people find it acceptable to act like this?
    Agree with him or not, John Edwards is running for president of the United States. Why can't people just let the man have his say? What compels them to rush out into public and show their fannies this way?
    Not that anyone did that literally, although there was this one young man off to the right of me who did lift his shirt to flash his ample belly at the rostrum. I have no idea what that was about. Maybe he had something written there; I didn't look that closely.
    What I did see was the huge, cherubic grin on his affable face. He was having a whale of a good time. I suppose I should be glad that someone was.

Write to Mr. Warthen at P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C. 29202, or bwarthen@thestate.com.

DHEC memo

Here's the full internal DHEC memo that I referred to in my Sunday column. Commissioner Earl Hunter sent it on Friday, Jan. 16. I got it second or third-hand, and consequently copied and sent it to DHEC spokesman Thom Berry to check its authenticity. Unfortunately, he was traveling and couldn't get to his e-mail. So I read portions of it to him on the phone, and he said he recognized it as a message Mr. Hunter had sent the previous Friday:

Good afternoon, staff.

    Let me begin by saying that I sincerely appreciate the positive way you have handled the budget balancing steps we've had to take to keep our agency afloat. And I especially appreciate the way you've continued to do your jobs with a sense of purpose and an emphasis on customer service. It's a testament to each and every one of you.
    Announcing furloughs just prior to the holidays was one of the most difficult tasks I have faced as Commissioner. I know all the members of the Executive Management Team feel the same way. I heard from many of you. The majority, very positive.  A few, very negative. Please know that I understand and can appreciate both reactions.
    Recently, however, I have learned of several unfounded rumors floating around that I am sure have caused concerns among many of you. One such rumor that I've been made aware of is that "an additional five or ten days of furloughs are forthcoming." I have also been told that some are saying that "the decision was made weeks ago" and that we are just delaying announcing this until the "right time." I ask that you pay no attention to these rumors.  They are just that…rumors…unfounded and untrue. Although allowed by law to implement up to 10 days during the year, no additional plans for furloughs have been or are being discussed.  If no additional budget cuts happen this fiscal year, it is my sincere hope and the current plan of EMT that no additional furloughs will be necessary this fiscal year
    On the budget front, the Board of Economic Advisors (BEA) met yesterday in Columbia.  According to news reports, collections for the months of October and November were actually ahead of revised projections by $30 million. Although $30 million in relation to the overall annual state budget is not a lot of money, it may be a sign that additional revisions downward of collection estimates may not be necessary. We hope that equates to no additional cuts for the remainder of this fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2009. The BEA will meet in February to review collections data for the holiday shopping season.
    On another note, several stories have been reported in The State newspaper and other media outlets recently regarding our agency being placed in the Governor's cabinet. Two business organizations, the SC Chamber of Commerce and the SC Manufacturers Alliance were reported as being supportive. Information I have received from both of those organizations contradicts those stories. Both may be coming out with formal statements of clarification soon. In addition, an article this week reported that our board chairman was also supportive. Chairman Aughtry has e-mailed and called me to let me know and let you know that he was misquoted. His statement to the media was simply that he felt that any change that would take politics out of the equation is worthy of consideration. He also let the reporter know that he was 100% supportive of the agency and its staff.  As usual, however, that statement wasnt included in the report.
    In closing, I ask that you all try to keep a positive attitude during these difficult time, and that you please not allow yourselves to be distracted by the media. We will be appearing before our House Ways and Means Budget Subcommittee next Thursday morning regarding next fiscal years budget, and plan to lay out for the members the effects of all three cuts our agency has taken thus far, as well as what further cuts would do and what our most pressing needs are — both for our agency and the people of this state  I will provide another update once that has concluded. Take care And thank you again for all that you do.

Earl

Please bear with me on these TypePad problems

This is just to let y'all know that I'm working hard to resolve these problems that some of y'all have identified on the blog (plus some I've discovered myself). I'm just not getting very far.

The problems result from recent changes TypePad has made to the blog platform. Among other things, they have arbitrarily decided that:

  • There will be no more than 50 comments on a post, which explains why some of y'all had so much trouble back on this one. This, of course, is totally unacceptable, since that's the point at which some threads on this blog are just getting warmed up.
  • A page, including archive pages, will not display more than 99 posts, even if I adjust my preferences to the highest setting. This leads to such absurdities as that fact that if you call up "January 2008" — a month in which I'm guessing (and since I can't pull up the whole month, all I can do is guess) you only get the month from Jan. 31 back to about Jan. 22. The first three weeks of the month — the height of blogging about the presidential primaries in S.C. — are unavailable.

Anyway, just to show you I'm trying, here are my communication threads with TypePad from the last few days:

On Jan 5, 2009 5:54:36 PM, you (Brad) said:

Two problems have cropped up in the comments on my blog in recent days.

First, the names of the commenters are no longer showing up as e-mail or URL links.

Second, quite a few of my readers are complaining that their
comments simply aren't showing up. As one of my regulars described the
problem, "Same for me. I see the comments count increasing on the 'Wall
St./Main Street' topic but don't see anything after your comment on
12/29."

I said I had no idea what was causing the problems, but I would report them…

On Jan 6, 2009 12:18:55 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the note. Can you provide us with a link to a post where
these things are happening on comments? They may be related to current
issues that we are working on, but it is helpful for us to see the
problem in action.

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

Thanks,
Melanie

On Jan 6, 2009 12:31:59 PM, you (Brad) said:

Here's one:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/12/when-wall-st-woes-hit-main-st.html#comments

Apparently, according to the counter (and this is supported
anecdotally by my readers telling me their comments haven't posted),
there have been 67 comments on that post. But only 25 show when I call
it up.

On Jan 7, 2009 12:12:23 AM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

All the comments are not displaying due to the missing tags for
comment pagination. With the new platform, the number of comments set
to display on each page is limited to 50. You can change the number of
comments set to display at Weblogs > Configure > Preferences.

Additionally, the templates for your blog will need to be updated with the new tags for pagination:
http://everything.typepad.com/blog/pagination.html

If necessary, we can update your templates with the new tags for you.

The commenter name will only display as a link in the footer if a
website URL is entered in the comment form if you have the
MTCommentAuthorLink tag set to not show the email address:
<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$>

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:31:10 AM, you (Brad) said:

Jen, that would be absolutely wonderful if you could do that for me.

On Jan 8, 2009 11:46:11 AM, you (Brad) said:

One
more thing. I went to Weblogs > Configure > Preferences, and
found a 50-POST limit, but saw nothing where I could set the number of
comments per post allowed.

FYI, I've had more than 300 comments on a post at times. It would be
better to have no limit at all — I don't want to frustrate my readers
— but if there has to be one, it should probably be 400 or 500.
Certainly not 50.

On Jan 8, 2009 7:32:59 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

At Weblogs > Configure > Feedback, you can change the number
of comments set to display on each page. Right now, we have a limit of
50 comments per page to improve page load times. We are looking into an
option for increasing the number of comments allowed, but we don't have
a timeline for when a higher number of comments per page will be
implemented.

All the templates have been updated with the new tags for
pagination. You can change the settings for the index pages at Weblogs
> Configure > Preferences. More information:
http://kb.typepad.com/id/72/

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 6, 2009 11:32:06 AM, you (Brad) said:

Long
ago, when I first started my blog (May 2005), I found a good workaround
for the fact that TypePad offers no convenient way to do HTML links or
formatting in comments. I did it by composing it as a new post,
switching to the HTML tab, then copying and pasting it with the coding
into the comment box.

It's very important to me to be able to do this, as my comments
frequently are about offering links in answer to readers' questions.

Anyway, one of several chronic problems I've found with this new
TypePad platform is that this no longer works. For instance, I just
tried to post this comment, with the second, third and fourth
paragraphs indented to indicate that they were quoted material. The
indents did not work when I copied the coded text into the comment.
Here is the coded text:

<p>As for Karen's suggestion that it "Mighta also been good if
someone had gone out and determined whether the place was 103,000,"
someone DID, allegedly. That's one of the many outrageous things about
this story:</p>

<p style="margin-left: 40px;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity, Michael T. Asher,
valued the house at $132,000. Mr. Asher says although he didn't
personally believe the house was worth that much, he followed standard
procedures and found like-sized homes nearby that had sold in that
price range in 2006.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "I can't
appraise it for the future," Mr. Asher says. "I appraise it for that
day."<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; T.J. Heagy, a real-estate
agent later hired to sell the property,
says he can find only one comparable house that sold nearby in 2007,
for $63,000.</p><p>So much for <em>that</em> check on the system…</p><p></p>

And you can read the comment, as published, near the bottom of this post:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2009/01/the-subprime-mess-in-microcosm.html#comments

On Jan 7, 2009 12:15:31 AM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

Only limited HTML is allowed in comments. It's likely you were using blockquote tags, instead of the indent tags, previously.

For instance to indent a quoted section of text, you would use blockquote tags similar to:

<blockquote>For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity,
Michael T. Asher, valued the house at $132,000. Mr. Asher says although
he didn't personally believe the house was worth that much, he followed
standard procedures and found like-sized homes nearby that had sold in
that price range in 2006.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "I
can't appraise it for the future," Mr. Asher says. "I appraise it for
that day."<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; T.J. Heagy, a
real-estate agent later hired to sell the property, says he can find
only one comparable house that sold nearby in 2007, for
$63,000.</p><p>So much for <em>that</em> check
on the system…</blockquote>

The p style tag is not supported in the comments field.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:29:53 AM, you (Brad) said:

So
what you're saying is, I'm going to have to start entering my HTML
coding MANUALLY, because my "compose" page won't code the thing right
any more?

I've got to say that this new platform has way more drawbacks than
it is worth. For three and a half years, I had this great workaround: I
could compose a comment in reply to my readers on the compose form, get
it to looking the way I want it on the Rich Text tab, with links and
indents and bullets, then copy the version with the coding from the
HTML tab over into my comment, and that worked fine.

Now you're saying that won't work any more? Do you have any idea how inconvenient this is?

On Jan 8, 2009 7:34:59 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

Thanks for your feedback. The blockquote tool has been removed from
the new editor, but we are looking into adding it back in the future.
In the meantime, the blockquote tags would need to be manually inserted
into your comments.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:25:40 AM, you (Brad) said:

Well, this is weird. I was trying to find something I wrote on my blog
last January, so I clicked on my "January 2008" link, and all I got was
what I posted on January 31 and January 30.

WHERE are the other 29 days of posts?

On Jan 8, 2009 11:42:06 AM, you (Brad) said:

An addendum:

I think I found the problem, but it is not fixable at my end.

I went to weblogs/configure/preferences and found that archives were
set to display no more than 10 posts at a time, which of course is
ridiculous. I sometimes post 10 times in a day. In January 2008 — the
month of the S.C. presidential primaries — I'm sure I posted more than
200 times, and probably closer to 300. I can't check now to see,
because THE MAXIMUM SETTING ALLOWED IS 50 POSTS.

Which is also ridiculous. You know what 50 posts gives me? It gives
me from Jan. 31 back to Jan. 22. So I call up the month, and 21 days of
the month don't show.

This is unacceptable, as are many other recent changes to TypePad.

On Jan 8, 2009 7:38:16 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

As mentioned previously, the blog had not been updated with the new
tags for pagination. When I updated the Individual Archives Templates
for comment pagination, I also updated the Main Index, DateBased, and
Category archives with the new tags. At the end of the pages, you will
now see a Next links to go to the next page of posts.

You can increase the number of posts set to display on each index
page to 100 posts by updating the MTEntries tag in the Main Index,
DateBased, and Category templates from:

<MTEntries>

to:

<MTEntries lastn="100">

Please note the maximum number of posts allowed on an index page is 100. If you enter lastn="999", only 100 posts will display.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 9, 2009 10:37:39 AM, you (Brad) said:

Jen,

I appreciate that you're trying hard to help me with this.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of solving my problem without a
policy change on TypePad's part.

And this really needs to change. It makes no sense to have, for
instance, a link on my blog's main page to "January 2008," when the
reader can only see a third or a fourth of the posts from that month
when he or she calls it up. I can't even see it myself, which is
particularly maddening, since the way I blog, I need to refer back to
what I've written in the past A LOT.

So basically I need to know where to go to lobby for this policy
change. A limit of 99 posts on an archive page, or a limit of 50
comments on a post, absolutely does not meet my needs, or my readers'.

So where do I go to express this?

Thanks again for your help thus far.

— Brad Warthen

Good news and bad news on health insurance

About the drugs…

I have good news and bad news from my own little private front in the constant battle to afford health care.

You probably don't remember this passage from my Nov. 26, 2007, column ("‘Health care reform?’ Hush! You’ll anger the Insurance Gods!"), so I'll repeat it here:

    Just the other day I went to my allergist’s office to get the
results of my first skin tests in 20 years. I’d been getting allergy
shots based on the old tests all that time, and my allergist, being a
highly trained professional, thought it might be a good idea to see if
I was still allergic to the same stuff. Actually, I can’t tell you for
sure that the shots ever helped. So why get them? Because my insurance pays for allergy shots, but won’t pay any more for me to take Zyrtec, which I know relieved my symptoms. The Insurance Gods say I don’t need Zyrtec.
…    Earlier this year, after surgery worked only briefly to relieve
head-pounding sinus pain, my surgeon gave me a prescription for Allegra.
I started to protest adding yet another drug to the 11 I was already
taking, counting the prednisone he was putting me on, but then he said
it was the generic version, so I said OK. My copay is only like $10 on generics; the Insurance Gods say generics are good.
    Then my pharmacy said my copay for my 30 generic pills would be $81.95. Stunned, I asked why? They shrugged and said no one knew; the Insurance Gods just said so.
I shut up and paid it, even though it meant delaying paying on my
mortgage or my electricity bill or some other frill. I think the pills
helped, but I certainly wasn’t going to get a refill.

Well, two good things have happened since then.

First, at the start of 2008, Zyrtec became available over-the-counter, quickly followed by the cheaper generic version, also available over the counter, so I've been able to supply myself with that for the past year at less than my co-pay would have been had my insurance covered it.

Unfortunately, the Zyrtec hasn't been helping all that much (and "helping" for me, with my extreme allergies, simply means keeping the ever-present symptoms down to a dull roar), even though I take twice the recommended daily adult dose every night (as my allergist told me to do).

So, on a whim, I asked him to write me a scrip for the generic version of Allegra 180, just to see what would happen at the pharmacy now that I have a different health care provider, and lo and behold — it went through, with only a $15 co-pay. So I said "fill it!" I'll tell you the results later, I've only taken it once so far.

That's the good news. Here's the bad…

The reason I was at the allergist yesterday is that I needed some Xopenex vials for my nebulizer to treat my asthma. I've been blessed the last couple of years by being almost completely free of asthma symptoms thanks to a miracle drug called Asmanex, of which I take two puffs nightly — and which, Thank The Lord, my insurance pays for, with a reasonable co-pay.

But the latest stage of this crud that I've had for three weeks is that ever since the weekend (about the time I was finishing the course of Levaquin, for the second stage of the crud, which was bronchitis), my bronchial tubes have been closing up on me even as the more obvious signs of infection subsided. A breathing treatment Tuesday night helped, but I needed refills. Rather than just calling in the refills, the allergist insisted I come in yesterday, and sure enough he told me what I didn't want to hear: I needed to do a course of prednisone.

He had me scarf down 60 mg. there in his office, and told me to take 20 mg more that night. Today, I scaled down to 40 in the a.m., and another 20 tonight. I'll repeat that tomorrow, then step down again the next day, and so on until I'm off it. You don't just go cold turkey off prednisone.

Now, I don't know if you've every had 80 mg. of prednisone rattling around in your skull, but that's just about enough right there to give you brief "Band of Brothers" hallucinations. And that's not the whole story.

Between the prednisone (which ought to have dealt with the worst of the asthma by tomorrow) and the Allegra, I forgot to get my Xopenex refill. I used my next-to-last dose last night, and called the doc back today, and they called it in.

But not so fast. They called me back minutes later, and said my insurance won't cover Xopenex. They had to go with the older, cruder drug, generic albuterol.

Now that's fine, except for one thing. Even when not taking prednisone, a dose of albuterol, administered via nebulizer machine, causes my heart to pound like I just ran about a mile. (If you take albuterol via the simple inhaler, it doesn't do that — but then, it does nothing for my asthma, either.) But I can live with that, because it opens me up. The only trouble is, if it's the middle of the night, I've got to sit up an hour or two until I calm down, because the pounding of my pulse through my throat and head against my pillow makes sleep impossible — pretty much the same as if I HAD just run about the block.

The nice thing about Xopenex is it has the therapeutic effect without the heart-pounding, so I can go to sleep within minutes after a treatment.

I asked my druggist, and he says Xopenex costs about twice as much. And of course, if my doctor and I jumped through a few more hoops and demonstrated that yes, we've tried albuterol, and yes, my doctor does have a legitimate reason to prefer that I use Xopenex because he is a trained medico and not a complete idiot (nor am I, but I doubt I could get them to believe that), they'd probably spring for the name brand. But of course, the business model of private, for-profit health insurance is to make you jump through enough hoops that you give up, and I had already spent WAY more time than I had time to spend on all this being-sick garbage this week. I've got work to do.

So I paid my $15 co-pay, took my albuterol and my nebulizer machine back to the office, and did a treatment sitting at my desk while reading The Economist. I started breathing a lot easier, and the only ill effect was that when I was proofing Robert Ariail's cartoon for tomorrow, I noticed my hand was shaking à la Tom Hanks in "Saving Private Ryan." But I could still lead my company up the beach.

Here's the thing about all this: If the insurance simply demanded double the co-pay for me to get Xopenex (the way they do with Asmanex), I'd probably just say the heck with it, give me the albuterol, and put up with the heart-pounding. I AM cost-conscious. (In fact, I tried to talk my primary-care doc into giving me the much-cheaper tetracycline for the bronchitis, but he insisted it wouldn't work but Levaquin would — my allergist agreed yesterday when I asked him the same question. I'm VERY cost-conscious, and am always asking about these things.)

But they don't do that. They get all "we-know-more-than-your-doctor" on me, and assume that I don't care about cost, and so they have to tell me what I can have and what I can't have. And frankly, that ticks me off. I've had asthma for 55 years, and I know what I need and what I don't need.

I know what you're thinking: If we had a single-payer National Health plan the way I want, the gummint might also tell me I can't have Xopenex. Maybe. Then again, if the gummint was the sole provider of coverage, the drug company would be MUCH more likely to figure out a way to offer it at a lower cost, since they wouldn't be able to play all these difference consumer groups with different payment rules against each other. If the gummint wouldn't allow it, they wouldn't sell ANY Xopenex.

Of course, if they COULDN'T sell it cheaper, we'd all have to take albuterol. But that wouldn't be the end of the world, either. It gets the job done — ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom…

Anyway, I think that explains the drug reference earlier. All perfectly legit, I assure you.

Today’s Will column, with links

The George Will column I put on today's page is one of his oblique ones — the closest thing to a point in it is what I said in the headline, which is that in a National Endowment for Humanities project, of all places, Mr. Will seems to have found what he regards as "A government program worth the money."

But the column caused me to look up some of the artworks he describes, and I enjoyed doing that. Of course, I couldn't reproduce them on the page itself, but I can run the column here with links, to make it easier for you to look at them yourself. Enjoy:

By GEORGE F. WILL
The Washington Post
In Winslow Homer’s 1865 painting “The Veteran in a New Field,” a farmer, bathed in sunshine, his back to the viewer, his Union uniform jacket cast on the ground, harvests wheat with a single-bladed scythe. That tool was out of date, and Homer first depicted the farmer wielding a more modern implement. Homer then painted over it, replacing it with what evokes a timeless symbol of death — the grim reaper’s scythe. The painting reminds viewers how much Civil War blood was shed, as at Gettysburg, in wheat fields.
    Homer’s painting is one of 40 works of art that the National Endowment for Humanities is distributing, in 24-by-36-inch reproductions, with teaching guides, to all primary and secondary schools and libraries that ask for them. About one-third of them already have done so, according to Bruce Cole, the NEH’s chairman.
    So as Washington’s dreariest year in decades sags to an end — a year in which trillion-dollar improvisations that will debase the dollar have been bracketed by a stimulus that did not stimulate and a rescue that will prolong automakers’ drownings — at the end of this feast of folly, consider something rarer than rubies. It is a 2008 government program that costs next to nothing — $2.6 million this year; a rounding error in the smallest of the bailouts. And “Picturing America” adds to the public stock of something scarce — understanding of the nation’s past and present.
    The 40 works of art include some almost universally familiar ones — John Singleton Copley’s 1768 portrait of a silversmith named Paul Revere; Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 “Washington Crossing the Delaware”; Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ bronze relief sculpture “Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Regiment Memorial” on Boston Common. But “Picturing America” is not, Cole takes pains to insist, “the government’s ‘top 40.’ ” Forty times 40 other selections of art and architecture could just as effectively illustrate how visual works are revealing records of the nation’s history and culture, and how visual stimulation can spark the synthesizing of information by students.
    The colorful impressionism of Childe Hassam’s flag-filled painting “Allies Day, May 1917” captures America’s waxing nationalism a month after entry into World War I. And it makes all the more moving the waning of hope captured in Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photograph “Migrant Mother.” This haunting image of a destitute 32-year old pea picker, a mother of seven, is a springboard into John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.
    One of the 40 images in “Picturing America” is more timely than Cole could have suspected when the project was launched in February. It is a photograph of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building.
    Built between 1926 and 1930 — between the giddy ascent of the ’20s stock market and the Crash — this art deco monument to the might of America’s automobile industry is decorated with motifs of machines and streamlining. There are winged forms of a Chrysler radiator cap; an ornamental frieze replicates a band of hubcaps. The stainless steel of the famous spire suggests the signature of the automobile industry in its salad days — chrome.
    To understand the animal spirits that drove New York’s skyscraper competition — the Chrysler Building was the world’s tallest for less than a year, until the Empire State Building was completed 202 feet higher — is to understand an era. Two eras, actually — the one that built the building, and ours, which has reasons to be reminded of the evanescence of seemingly solid supremacies.
    After seven years of service, Cole, the longest-serving chairman in the 43-year history of the NEH, is leaving to head the American Revolution Center at Valley Forge. America has thousands of museums, including the Studebaker National Museum (South Bend, Ind.), the Packard Museum (Dayton, Ohio) — yes, Virginia, there was a time when automobile companies were allowed to perish — the Hammer Museum (Haines, Alaska), the Mustard Museum (Mount Horeb, Wis.), and the Spam Museum (Austin, Minn.) featuring the sort-of-meat, not the Internet annoyance. There is, however, no museum devoted to the most important political event that ever happened, here or anywhere else — the American Revolution.
    Cole says there will be one, at Valley Forge. It will be built mostly by private money, for an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the sum of public money currently being lavished on corporations. Perhaps a subsequent iteration of “Picturing America” will feature a thought-provoking photograph of the gleaming towers that currently house, among other things, General Motors’ headquarters. Looming over Detroit’s moonscape desolation, the building is called the Renaissance Center. Really.

Write to Mr. Will at georgewill@washpost.com.

Governor working his (national) constituency

From time to time I mention the constituencies that our governor cultivates with a success that stands in sharp contrast to his inability (and/or unwillingness) to get anything done working with elected officials of his own party here in South Carolina. So you regular readers know what starry-eyed fans he has among the Club for Growth and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.

Between them, those two did all they could to construct an alternative universe in which Mark Sanford was seen as a viable second banana on the national ticket this year.Cato

But I have been remiss in failing to note that there’s another group out there that is a natural part of the constituency that our governor continues to cultivate: The Cato Institute, of course.

Guess where that libertarian think tank held its annual retreat? And guess who spoke to them, and got his picture featured as the dominant art on the organization’s most recent slick newsletter? You guessed it! Y’all are so smart!

Oh, as long as I’m keeping y’all up with the governor’s doings on the national front — and you’ll notice that he seems to be devoting a lot of energy to heading the Republican Governor’s Association, and writing for the WSJ, and speaking to Cato, and generally keeping his name out there (and quick, name three things he’s done for SC in the past month, or even ONE thing other than complaining about Mack Whittle, while he’s been doing all this national stuff) — I should give you a link to his latest op-ed piece in the WSJ, saying he does NOT want the federal gummint sending any bailout-style aid to SC.

You say I already TOLD you about that? No, this is ANOTHER piece in the same paper, saying the same thing. The only difference is that this time, he got another governor to sign it.

So that makes two brave boys standing on the burning deck…

Actually, though, I think maybe Gov. Perry deserves the top billing he got on this one. It’s a little better written, the cliches not nearly as shopworn as those in the piece the gov penned all by his lonesome. It’s also different in that it doesn’t engage in naked self-aggrandizement to the extent that the first one did. See if you agree.

My fan mail from the governor’s office

Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss the note of appreciation I received from the governor’s office for my Sunday column. It ran as a letter to the editor today:

Warthen column damages credibility
    When the facts aren’t on some people’s side, they try and change them to help win an argument. Unfortunately, that’s a model growing in popularity among this paper’s editorial writers.
    I’m writing of Brad Warthen’s latest Sunday rant, in which he lashes out at the governor over a recent column he penned for The Wall Street Journal.
    Congress is contemplating spending another $150 billion to $300 billion to “bail out” states. Every penny of that money will have to be borrowed, from places such as Social Security, or our grandkids, or such nations as China (to whom we already owe $500 billion). The governor is arguing that enough is enough, and that we have to quit piling on debt, no matter how well-intentioned the spending may be.
    You’d know all of this for yourself had Mr. Warthen possessed the courage to print Gov. Sanford’s column alongside his, and let you judge both pieces for yourself. Not doing so is the latest example of a growing lack of credibility on Mr. Warthen’s part, from endorsing one senator despite noting his history of flouting the law, to, on his blog, likening a school choice supporter to bin Laden.
    This editorial page was once respected as a voice for good government. Now, thanks to Brad’s childish screeds, fewer and fewer people are reading.

JOEL SAWYER
Communications Director
Office of the Governor
Columbia

Editor’s note: The State published the governor’s column on the Web. To read it and Mr. Warthen’s column again, go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

This letter put me in an awkward spot. It was sent to Cindi, but she’s out this week, so when he got her autoreply to that effect, Joel sent the letter to me. And the problem was that the letter needed editing, and it’s hard to work with the writer of a critical letter when you are the subject of the criticism. As editor, there were a couple of things I needed to accomplish:

  • I needed to make sure it was factually correct, so that when he criticized me or the paper for doing XYZ, XYZ was actually what we did. As you can tell from our letters on any given day, we thrive on being criticized. But I draw the line at taking criticism for something we did not DO, because that would give the readers an incorrect impression of what we went to all the trouble of putting into the paper to start with. For instance, when a writer says, "You were wrong to claim that Sen. Hiram Blowhard is a horse thief," but we didn’t say Sen. Blowhard is a horse thief, I’m not running it. If I DID run it, readers would naturally assume, "Well, they wouldn’t have run the letter criticizing them for calling him that if they hadn’t called him that." Unfortunately, the thing that Joel was misrepresenting about us was fuzzier than that. He was trying to make readers think that we had somehow done the governor wrong by not running his column in the dead-tree version of the paper. He was saying this despite the fact that he knows our standard is NOT to use that precious space for guest columns that have run elsewhere (every piece we run like that is another piece that was offered exclusively to us that we CAN’T run). The average Joe on the street could have made the mistake of saying what he said in the letter; he knew better. He also knew that we went to the trouble to publish the governor’s piece online (you’ll recall that in the past I’ve made the point here that our online version is the perfect place for columns by gummint officials — who send us a lot of submissions — that don’t meet our standards for the paper), promoting it from the newspaper on the day it ran, and providing a link to it in the footer of my column about it (why? because I wanted people to go back and read it). But Joel insisted upon accusing us of wrongdoing on this point, so I eventually shrugged and let it go — and resolved to state the fact of the matter in a neutrally-worded editor’s note (knowing, of course, that lots of readers will think publishing on the Web is inadequate; but at least this way they had the facts before them). There were other factual points that were easier to resolve — such as his originally having claimed that we acknowledged Jake Knotts was "a criminal" in endorsing him; I persuaded him to change that wording. But the business of how we had handled the governor’s piece was too central to his point.
  • Then there was the "courage" thing. I never could persuade him that some other word would make more sense to the reader — "courtesy" would have worked; even "decency" would have worked. I mean, what is the reader supposed to think I was afraid of? I wrote a whole column about the governor’s column, told you how to go read the governor’s column, provided links to it, but I was afraid of it? But I guess he thought I was just trying to censor his criticism of me rather than helping it be a more logical letter. So I let that go, too.

Anyway, we spent so many e-mails going back and forth on those points that I never even got around to such minor things as: When you say "the facts aren’t on some people’s side, they try and change them to help win an argument," and you suggest I did that, what do you have in mind? Name one fact I cited that was wrong. But it wasn’t worth it.

"Courage" is a word that is often misapplied to what I do. Truth be told, there are people who read a column such as the one Joel was criticizing and praise me for having the "courage" to write it — but that is utterly ridiculous. "Courage" doesn’t come into it, either way. I mean, what do I have to fear besides dealing with hassles such as that above? But I’ve heard that about columns I’ve written about governors going all the way back to Carroll Campbell. People seem to think I’m tempting the gods or something criticizing these guys. I don’t know.

What I DO know is that if you want to see courage, read Dr. Ray Greenberg’s piece on Sunday. Finally, we have the heads of major agencies having the guts to speak out about how we’ve hocked our future by failing to invest in the critical infrastructure of our society. State agency heads just don’t write columns like that, but he did.

And of course, the governor came down on him over it. Oh, he did it politely. His response (which Joel sent me in the same e-mail with his letter, and which I ran the same day as his letter, which makes his complaint about our not running the governor’s last column seem even more off-point — but I digress) was of course more polite than Joel’s. It’s too important to the governor to be seen as above the fray to write anything like what Joel did. At the same time, a public university president who dares to write anything like that motivated the governor to take him down a notch personally. Other uppity agency heads will take note. (The governor can’t do anything to Dr. Greenberg or to most agency heads, but that’s not the point — most of them don’t want to get into a spitting match with the gov; better to lay low.)

A couple of quick points about the gov’s piece about Dr. Greenberg (aside from the fact that his overall point was to defend the bankrupt notion of arbitrary spending caps):

  1. His utterly laughable attempt to be condescending to the MUSC president: "I certainly don’t begrudge him that view. Like any agency head, his
    role is solely to look out for his corner of state government and the
    tax dollars that are coming his way. On the other hand, we in the
    governor’s office have a very different role in looking after the
    entire state." Go back and read the piece by Dr. Greenberg, who runs an institution of higher learning that employs 11,000. Look at the concerns that the doctor expresses, and compare them to the narrow ideological points espoused by the governor, and judge which of them you believe is really thinking about the good of "the entire state."
  2. Second, the governor cites his favorite misleading statistic. The original text of his piece said, "Government in South Carolina costs about 140 percent of the national average, largely due to an unaccountable and inefficient structure." That is not true. I was able to make it technically (although still very misleadingly) true by the insertion of a single word: "State government in South Carolina costs about 140 percent of the national average, largely due to an unaccountable and inefficient structure." What’s the diff? State government in SC costs more per capita than state government in other states because of our almost unique system of the state performing lots of functions that local governments perform in other states — such as road maintenance, and owning and operating school buses. If you look at government overall, adding in our pathetically anemic local governments, we actually spend less than other states do on state and local government — or at worst, around the average (there are different ways to calculate it; some ways we’re right at the average, some ways we’re well below). A very important distinction, but don’t expect to hear this governor acknowledging it; the fiction that we — the state that won’t maintain its roads or guard its prisons or support its colleges nearly as adequately as other states do — spend too much on government is what he’s all about. Anyway, keep these two facts in mind, as Cindi explained in a recent column: We pay less per capita in state and local taxes than most of the country, and we pay less as a percentage of our income than most of the country. 

One last note, and this is one I DO deserve to be kicked for. The governor misspelled Dr. Ray’s name throughout his piece, and I’m just noticing it. Yes, it was the governor’s mistake, but I’m the one who had it last, so it’s my fault for not catching it.

Cindi’s ‘undecided’ column

    Cindi was off on Friday when I wrote my Sunday column, but asked me to fax it to her. She promptly told me that my original draft had described her role in the endorsement discussion inaccurately. I had correctly put her statement that she might sorta kinda be leaning to Obama AFTER she asked me whether a tie would prevent us from endorsing, but I had failed to get in the cause-and-effect relationship, which was that she wouldn’t even have said that much if I had said her vote would deadlock us. So we negotiated new language. But apparently I still didn’t fully communicate the depth of her neutrality, since some folks in their comments counted her as a pro-Obama vote. She insists, in this column and in private conversation, that she is still torn and undecided.

    I know from long experience with you partisans out there that you can’t possibly imagine that a thinking person could be undecided. And what’s particularly amazing in this case is that Cindi is seldom without a strongly held opinion. But be nice to her, folks. I understand her completely. I have decided whom to vote for in presidential elections more than once in the voting booth itself. So be patient with Cindi; she’s in an uncomfortable place. Also, I’ve probably already teased her about it more than a supervisor should.

    Anyway, add this to the overall endorsement package, along with the endorsement itself, my column, Warren’s column, and all the stuff that’s been said here on the blog.

Undecided, and awaiting an epiphany
By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE
Associate Editor
I BOUGHT myself two weeks by copping out when our editorial board decided whom to endorse for president. For all the good it’s done so far.
    One week to go, and I remain an undecided voter.
    I’ve never been in this position before. Never stayed on the sidelines in an important endorsement decision before.
    Oh, I’ve been undecided about what I would do in the voting booth. But that indecision wasn’t over which candidate to support; it was over whether I could hold my nose hard enough to cast my ballot for the candidate I agreed we should endorse, or whether to leave that race blank. What’s different this time is that I want to vote for both the candidates.
    Neither is clearly superior in my mind. Both John McCain and Barack Obama bring an approach to politics that is sorely lacking in Washington and, increasingly, throughout our nation. They see it not as a game to win — and certainly not as an opportunity to demolish “the other side” — but rather as a way to debate issues and reach conclusions that are best for our country. Both have shown they’re willing to look beyond party labels and rigid ideologies; Sen. McCain has a much clearer track record on this score, but at the same time, he  has strayed further during this campaign than has Sen. Obama. If for no other reason than their approach to politics, I believe that either man would greatly improve our nation.
    I much prefer Sen. McCain’s approach to foreign policy; not a week has passed since 9/11 when I have not bemoaned how much better off our country, and our world, would be had he been elected in 2000. But over the past year, we have watched Sen. Obama grow more responsible on the topic; he has demonstrated that he will surround himself with smart advisers, and Colin Powell’s decision to endorse him certainly has reduced my worries. I believe that either candidate would greatly improve our standing in the world, which would improve our world.
    I prefer Sen. Obama’s approach to domestic policy. He’s further to the left than I find comfortable, but I believe our nation has swung far too far right — dismantling regulatory systems, adopting policies that have produced the greatest wealth disparity in modern history between workers and executives; and say what you will about Sen. Obama’s health insurance plan, Sen. McCain’s would dismantle the very notion of “insurance.” (David Brooks’ fine column on the facing page does a much better job explaining where I’m coming from — on all but insurance — than I can.)
    What worries me is that a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress would swing the pendulum too far left — just as the Republican president and Congress swung it too far right. I do believe Sen. McCain would be far more willing to work with a Democratic Congress to make pragmatic changes than the current president ever has been, but I also believe that if the Democrats went too far, the voters would put Republicans back in charge of the House, the Senate or both in two years.
    I’m not sure that a more activist government isn’t what our nation needs right now. Both candidates have come to realize that we can no longer take such a laissez-faire approach to the financial markets. But we also need a president who believes in regulation even when the bottom isn’t falling out. One who believes the Consumer Product Safety Commission needs to actually look out for the safety of consumer products, rather than seeking to further dismantle the agency even when defective Chinese products are flooding our markets. One who believes the Agriculture Department should actually try to protect consumers from mad cow disease, rather than protecting the cattle industry from those who would protect us. I think Sen. Obama sees this; Sen. McCain, on the other hand, has a track record of pushing for deregulation, although he is much more a pragmatist than a devoted member of the Church of the Free Market.
    What I am not considering in making my decision is the venom being spewed by the so-called supporters of each candidate. Every new e-mail with the doctored photos and clumsily concocted “facts” about Sen. Obama’s alleged Muslim heritage pushes me a little toward voting for him — if only to disassociate myself from the racists who peddle such lies. But there are equal and opposing forces pushing me back toward Sen. McCain — most notably those self-satisfied souls who proclaim that the only reason anyone could possibly not vote for Sen. Obama is racism; what utter nonsense.
    These aren’t supporters. They are opponents of the other candidate, the other party, of anyone who doesn’t share their opinions.
    When Sarah Palin speaks glibly of Mr. Obama “palling around” with “domestic terrorists,” I am turned off; she’s counting on people assuming that he really is “palling around,” and doing it with Islamic terrorists. Sen. Obama and his campaign haven’t been nearly as misleading — you don’t have to be when you’re leading in the polls — although this “third term of George Bush” nonsense is wearing.
    What would help me decide? An epiphany, I suppose.
    But I’m not holding my breath. The last one of those I had was the sudden realization that there aren’t a lot of epiphanies to go around, that what we have to do is make a decision and act on it — act on it as though we had an epiphany.
    Fortunately, there’s no wrong decision this time around.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

Commenting on the endorsement

Mccain_endorse

Before I turn my attention completely to writing for Sunday’s paper, I’ll respond briefly to some of the comments offered this morning with regard to our McCain endorsement. I’ll start with something Phillip said (actually, his was the last comment when I started this response; several others have come in since then, but I’ll have to read them later):

P.S. Since Editor and Publisher’s latest count has not included the State, the State now becomes the 50th newspaper in the US to endorse McCain. 127 have endorsed Obama. In 2004 the count was virtually even between Kerry and Bush, and now nearly 30 papers that endorsed Bush in 2004 have endorsed Obama, whereas only a handful that endorsed Kerry 2004 have endorsed McCain. Again, more evidence that Obama’s appeal is broader across party and ideological lines and holds the greater promise of bipartisan leadership and unity.

Posted by: Phillip | Oct 24, 2008 9:10:17 AM

I should have added "the State’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that reality notwithstanding" to that last sentence.

Posted by: Phillip | Oct 24, 2008 9:12:46 AM

Phillip, I don’t understand why you would say that last part. Scroll to the lower part of this original post. The "reality" you say we "stubbornly refuse to acknowledge" is something I have cited over and over. It’s THE biggest reason why we strongly preferred Obama over Hillary Clinton. It’s what we mean in the endorsement you read today when we say, "Barack Obama is an inspiring and even transformational figure." What did you think that referred to?

And yes, I’m perfectly aware that most newspapers are endorsing Obama. In the rough draft of the editorial (before I cut it down to fit the space awaiting it on the Sunday page), I wrote "Like the many newspapers that have endorsed him, we, too, find him to be an inspiring…" But that was one of the more superfluous lines among the many that had to go in cutting out four inches from the piece. What other newspapers are doing is neither here nor there.

I do find it amusing that someone commenting on the previous post thinks it would have been more "courageous" to endorse Obama. Hardly. Going along with the crowd, particularly when they’re lining up behind someone you like very much, and who you fully believe is going to WIN, is the path of least resistance. Just think of all the very nice people, people whom I would love to please, who would be singing our praises now, while a few trolls under the bridge mutter inaudibly about how they knew we were "socialists" all along, and what do you expect from the "liberal media." We’d be praised for being "bold," for making an "historic break with the past," etc. Never mind that there would be nothing bold about it; it would just feel that way to a lot of people.

Add to this the fact that I gave up something very tangible and palpable, to me. Ever since I became editorial page editor in 1997, I have longed for the day that I could break the pattern of endorsing Republicans for president, if only because in some people’s minds, that makes us a "Republican newspaper," and I find it deeply distasteful to be called such names. Yes, I have been able to comfort myself by pointing to the substantial, documented falsehood of the label — most notably the fact that if you consider all of our endorsements (and we spend vastly more of our time on state and local races than we do on the presidential), more than half of them are for Democrats. But people attach an inordinate amount of importance to the presidential endorsement — so many people don’t pay attention to anything else — and there we have been trapped. We like SOUTH CAROLINA Democrats, not the national kind. People like John Kerry and even Al Gore, in running for national office, define themselves in ways that put them far to the left of the consensus of our editorial board, which is generally reflective of the political center in our state. (Ironically, in Gore’s case, he had earlier been a far more centrist politician, to the point that I enthusiastically supported an endorsement of him when he ran for the Senate in Tennessee.)

But Obama presented the chance I had awaited for so long. Here was a Democrat we could happily endorse, something we unquestionable would have done had he been up against Mitt Romney, or Rudy Giuliani, or Mike Huckabee — and certainly if he’d been facing the current president (something he likes to pretend he’s doing as we speak).

But he was up against the one Republican who happens to be the national political figure I respect and admire most, and have wanted to see in the White House for at least a decade. So his timing couldn’t have been worse.

Now, as to those of you who find it unthinkable that we didn’t write about the current economic situation, or that we DID spend a long paragraph on the Colombian Free Trade agreement, let me see if I can help you understand: First, I don’t give either candidate a leg up on the economic crisis. I haven’t been impressed that either of them has a better idea than I do of what to do going forward. Both of them backed the $700 billion rescue plan, and while I think they were right to do so, I just haven’t seen much to jump up and down about either way on this. Frankly, I worry that neither of them is up to the challenge, but that worry is poorly defined in my own mind. While economic policy was discussed in our board debate of this endorsement, it did not occur in a way that caused us to coalesce around a position. In other words, I could have spent precious words on the economy, but it would have been a digression from the points that actually contributed to our endorsement, and everyone would have found it unhelpful. Yes, I understand that people who favor Obama are somewhat more eager to discuss the economy than those of us who end up where I do on the question. Democrats love talking about the economy. And they will. But we endorsed McCain neither because of nor in spite of the candidates’ positions on the economy.

On the contrary, the Colombian Free Trade Agreement — which required a certain number of words even to explain to the reader, since it’s gained so little attention — had the virtue of being a sort of microcosmic way of explaining the sort of differences between the candidates that DID contribute to our endorsement. We were able to tell readers something they didn’t know, to examine the contrast between the candidates in terms of a subject that hasn’t been done to death. And for me, the moment when that came up in the third debate was a critical moment, a sort of epiphany, one in which my preference for McCain over Obama was clarified. As an explanation of an important difference between the candidate, one that bears upon their governing philosophies with regard to the global economy and their relative devotion to party orthodoxies, the portion of the editorial dealing with Colombian trade was far more explanatory than spending a comparable number of words rehashing the economic crisis, only to say in the end that on that issue, for us, it’s a wash.

If you haven’t figured this out about me and my leadership of the editorial board, let me state it overtly now: I see little point in telling you things you already know. To the extent that I am able, I wish to ADD to the conversation, not parrot what others are saying. Hence this countercultural blog, in which I fight against the tide of the Blogosphere as a place where polar opposites shout at each other. Similarly, my exploration of Colombian trade as opposed to platitudes on the economy sought to explore uncovered ground, to give people something additional to think about.

As for whether I should have cut something out of the editorial to make room for a digression about Sarah Palin (the omission of which Phillip found to be "astonishing" and "shoddy journalism") — well, I can perfectly understand why someone who thinks we should have endorsed Obama would want to bring that up. But since Sarah Palin did NOT contribute to the decision to endorse McCain, it’s hard for me to see why I would bring that up, explore the problems that she brings to the ticket, and then explain why we would endorse McCain anyway for those of you who don’t get it (and even after doing that at the expense of not giving you the reasons why we did endorse McCain, those of you who disagree would remain unsatisfied). Besides, it would have been a departure to say we’re endorsing someone because of, or in spite of, the vice presidential pick. I can’t think of when we’ve done that before (if you can, please point it out). Sarah Palin looms very large in the minds of two sets of people — the conservative Republican base that loves her, and the people who despise her and see her as sufficient reason NOT to vote for McCain. We are in neither category.

And by "we," I mean the official position that we ended up with as a board. As I write this, Warren Bolton is working (at my behest) on his column for Sunday expressing his dissenting opinion. He may explore the economy or go into the failings of Sarah Palin at length. I don’t know. But a column saying we SHOULD have endorsed Obama seems to me like a better part of the overall package in which to explore those avenues. The endorsement of McCain explores one part of the overall subject. Warren’s column explores another. My column — which I need to go write — will explore yet another.

In the end, the overall goal is to provoke thought — hopefully, thoughts you might not otherwise have had — among our readers regarding the presidential election. That’s what we strive for.

Our first endorsement ran today

A couple of weeks ago, I came up with the idea of doing something different with endorsements this cycle. Back during the campaigns for the June primaries, I became frustrated that we had so many candidates, and so little time and space, that we didn’t serve readers as well as we should have. After hours and hours and hours of interviews, research and discussion, in some cases our explanations of endorsements were absurdly abbreviated, in extreme cases amounting to less than a sentence. And as I’ve always said, to me the endorsement is ABOUT the explanation, so I was very dissatisfied. All of that work, and so little of it shared with readers.

So I said to my colleagues at the time, we either needed to do better in the future, or quit endorsing altogether. Our staff is too small to spend that much time on something that produces such thin gruel for readers.

Of course, being obsessive, we resolved to keep doing it, but do it better. Fortunately for that purpose, we had far fewer contested races to deal with in the fall. This fact is UNfortunate for democracy — the fact that primary contests are far more numerous than general election ones is a testament to the power of incumbency and partisanship in redistricting. But at least it offered us a chance to be somewhat more thorough in our presentation, to make it more reflective of our preparation.

A couple of weeks ago, I thought of a way to do even better: Do our endorsements earlier. In the past, we’ve held them as long as we can, given the number we have to do — the theory being that that’s when voters are paying the most attention. Also, it meant we had as much information as possible, preventing post-endorsement "surprises" about the candidates.

But I proposed to Warren and Cindi that we start doing them as soon as we can. It keeps them from being jammed up, thereby allowing us more space. It also frees us up as commentators. Increasingly, I have found it hard to write the summaries of interviews without going ahead and saying "this is the guy for us" or "no way on this one." You’ll note that I haven’t written anything from the interviews with the candidates in today’s endorsement of Anton Gunn, because the choice was so clear, and I hate to scoop my colleagues. Now, I’m free to go back and write those blog entries from the interviews — which I will, perhaps today — as well as to write columns. I suspect that Cindi and Warren will find additional things they want to say about their candidates once the ice is broken with an endorsement. Maybe not, but we’ll see.

In any event, I’ve been pleased with the first two endorsements (one running today, the other tomorrow), even if that’s all that is written. They flow better, they’re less cramped and hurried in their style. They’re more thoughtful. And that’s supposed to be the point — provoking thought.

Anyway, here’s the endorsement of Anton Gunn. More commentary on that contest will be forthcoming.

No more op-ed pages Mondays, Fridays

Well, there’s just no way to sugar-coat this, so I’ll go ahead and tell you what I’ll be telling you on the Friday editorial page:

No separate op-ed page today
     Starting today, The State will not have separate op-ed pages on Fridays and Mondays. This is a cost-saving measure, reducing our newsprint expenditure. Instead, we will frequently run a syndicated column on this page on Fridays, and a local guest column on the Monday letters page. We also invite readers to explore our offerings at thestate.com/opinion, and Brad Warthen’s Blog at blogs.thestate.com.

             — The Editors

This is a continuation of the painful recent cutbacks we’ve experienced in personnel and operational funds. As I’ve mentioned before, Mike Fitts’ departure brought the editorial staff down to less than half what I had at the start of this decade. Our elimination of Saturday pages earlier this year was a reflection of both the staff cutbacks — so few people can only do so much — and newsprint savings. This one is pretty much all about the newsprint.

You don’t like this? Well, guess what? I’m pretty sure I hate it a lot more than you do. All of us do. There’s nothing we can do about losing these pages, so we struggle constantly to figure out what we CAN do instead to keep serving readers. (What do you think this blog is about, for instance?)

Consider the earlier "cutbacks." When we eliminated staff-written editorials on Mondays, we gave you a full page of letters that otherwise would not have been published, and added the blograil feature. You’d be surprised how much staff time those take.

Then, when we eliminated the Saturday pages, we launched the Saturday Web-only super-op-ed page, with a whole lot more content than we could get into the paper (plus video). Yeah, that’s been an unpopular move with many — but the people who complain about the Saturday feature don’t seem to understand that it’s not a choice between that and having our pages in the Saturday paper, it’s a choice between that and nothing. And believe me, it takes a lot more trouble to produce that Web page than "nothing" would.

Now this, the loss of those half-pages on Monday and Friday. What that means is that on each of those days, we’re losing two columns (one syndicated, one local) and maybe a syndicated cartoon. So far, our best idea for compensating for that is to put a syndicated column on the Friday page whenever we don’t have an overriding staff-written column (and that’s happened about once a week in the past; this just pushes that event to Fridays), and put a local guest column on the Monday letters page. That means in both cases fewer letters.

It probably will NOT mean fewer staff-written columns. Our first and foremost priority is always South Carolina — you can get news and commentary about the rest of the world from a thousand sources, but what Warren and Cindi are able to say about local and state issues is something you can’t get anywhere else. But since we "frequently" have one weekday without a staff column — today’s page was an example of that — we’ll just try to push that vacancy to Fridays, and run a syndicated column there instead of the long letter and the secondary cartoon.

We’re still scrambling to figure out what else we can provide, and I’ve been really pleased at the initiative shown by my colleagues under these circumstances. Warren Bolton, who just became a proud Papa for the second time and took some family leave, surprised me with an editorial (which ended up on the Sunday page) and a column written from home last week. I’m grateful to Cindi for suggesting today (and making it happen, which is more valuable) that we post the Charles Krauthammer column that I almost used on the Friday page (we used Kathleen Parker instead) online. We’re going to have to start doing that more systematically, not just on Saturdays.

Robert Ariail today offered up an extra cartoon for the Monday letters page. Randle Christian, our letters editor, came to me while I was typing this post to suggest a better way to use the Web to provide more letters on the election. More work for each of them, of course.

There aren’t as many of us as there were, but I’m proud and privileged to work with each of the folks I have. They’re all striving harder than ever to fulfill our mission of providing a forum for discussing the issues of greatest importance to our community.

And we welcome your suggestions as to how we can do that better.

How Kristof arrived at the $17,000-an-hour figure

Just to show you I don’t just shovel this stuff into the paper…

You know the Nicholas Kristof column I bragged on, which calculated that Richard Fuld was making $17,000 an hour to run Lehman Brothers into the ground? Something started bugging me about the math when I was reading my proof, so I went to Mr. Kristof’s blog and posted the following:

URGENT QUESTION:

I’m the editorial page editor of The State, the newspaper in Columbia, SC. I’m using your column on tomorrow’s op-ed page.

But I have a problem: How did you arrive at $17,000 an hour from compensation of $45 million? That would work if it were $35 million (assuming a 40-hour week, 52 weeks a year, and how else would you do it?), but at 45, you’d have to assume he was working 51 hours a week, which is an odd assumption to choose.

I need a quick answer. I’ve got to let this page go….

— Brad Warthen, Columbia, SC

That was at 4:34 p.m. At 5:12, I got this reply:

brad, thanks for your note, which was forwarded to me.
    I used 50 hours a week and then rounded. Failing to round seemed to me to suggest a false precision when the whole effort is so rough….
    allbest, nick

So he was being generous and assuming Mr. Fuld was working better-than-banker’s hours (which is a pretty safe assumption, whatever else you say about the overpaid so-and-so). Ol’ Dick’s got no room to complain, then…

Makes sense to me. I pass this on in case you read the piece and wondered the same thing. 

Editing cartoons

You might wonder what my role is in Robert Ariail’s cartooning process. Well, I’m his editor, so my function is much the same as when editing text, only it’s pictures.

For instance, Robert had done a cartoon for tomorrow that — way back in a corner of the background — had a fire hydrant. But there was no dog in the cartoon. He had drawn a cartoon fire hydrant without a cartoon dog! Obviously, he had slipped a bit from being on vacation last week.

As soon as I pointed out the omission, he immediately went and fixed it. We must preserve the unities, you know.

And to think — there are people in this world who don’t think editors serve a useful purpose…

Did that mob look familiar?

Ariail_book

Students of Robert Ariail’s work may note that there’s something really familiar looking about that cartoon criticized on a local feminist blog.

Take a look at the cover of his last book, Ariail! There’s at least one particular character who appears in both. Of course, she appears in a lot of Robert’s cartoons, such as this one and this one and this one. He even has a name for her: He calls her "Auntie Bellum." She was to be a character in a comic strip that Robert and I kicked around a lot back in the 1990s, but never got around to developing (I haven’t given up hope of getting back to it, though).

Here’s how that cover developed: One day in 2001, Robert had another group of women angry at him — Muslim women who maintained that a gag he did about dress codes for pages at the State House (he’d drawn them in burqas) was anti-Islam. I said something like, "You’ve just got everybody on your case lately, don’t you — flag supporters, the governor, Democrats, Republicans, traditional Muslim women…." The drawing arose from that, and then Robert got to thinking that would be a good cover for a book….

You will note that women are not the only people who get really, really mad at Robert.

What I wrote about SPDs in 1991

Things don’t change in South Carolina; they just don’t. If you doubt me, read this piece I wrote in 1991. It was in connection with the 13th installment of the Power Failure project that I directed that year, when I was still in The State‘s newsroom. I quoted from it in my Sunday column.

For those of you who don’t remember, I spent that whole year (except for brief stints when I pulled away to help with our national desk with coverage of the Gulf War and the Soviet coup) running this project that delved very deeply into the fundamental, structural problems with government on the state and local levels in South Carolina. Before that, I had been The State’s governmental affairs editor. After, I took on other, temporary editing assignments as I awaited my chance to join the editorial board. Power Failure had pretty much ruined me for news work.

The piece I refer you to was a little invention of mine that I called the "thread." After the first installment or so of the series (there were 17), I realized that each installment threw an awful lot at people. I wanted to make sure that there was some consistent feature, from installment to installment, that linked that day’s installment with all the previous ones, making sure readers saw the themes that ran through them all. The threads were very short columns by me — about 11 inches long — that essentially answered the questions, What do I need to get out of this installment? How is it related to the rest of the series?

Anyway, I call your attention in particular to this passage. As I noted in my Sunday column, we always have to deal with supporters of SPDs acting like we’re after them personally when we criticized the continued existence of these anachronistic little governments. One of their favorite defenses is to cite the fine work they do providing needed services — as though the same services couldn’t be provided under more sensible governing arrangements. And yet, from the very start, I had anticipated and moved past such objections on their part:

Now before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: There are no bad guys here. Or rather, there might be a few bad guys here and there, but they’re not the problem.

There’s nothing sinister about special-purpose districts per se. They were all established with good intentions. They were set up to provide essential services to people who otherwise would have had to do without. Generally, they continue to perform those services.

The problem is that many — although not all — of them have outlived their usefulness, and their very existence means that government on the local level is more fragmented and less accountable than necessary.

That ran in our paper on Oct. 10, 1991.

Come to think of it, I’ll just make this easy for you and reproduce the whole "thread" for that day here, in case you’re at all interested:

THE STATE
HOW MANY GOVERNMENTS DO WE NEED?
Published on: 10/20/1991
Section: IMPACT
Edition: FINAL
Page: 1D
By Brad Warthen
Memo: POWER FAILURE: The Government That Answers to No One Thirteenth in a series

Do we really need this much government?
    Apart from the mess at the state level — such as an executive branch split into 133 completely independent entities — South Carolina has 46 counties, 271 towns and 91 school districts.
    And about 500 special-purpose districts.
    Maybe we do need this much government. But do we need this many governments, separate and frequently competing?
    Now before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: There are no bad guys here. Or rather, there might be a few bad guys here and there, but they’re not the problem.
    There’s nothing sinister about special-purpose districts per se. They were all established with good intentions. They were set up to provide essential services to people who otherwise would have had to do without. Generally, they continue to perform those services.
    The problem is that many — although not all — of them have outlived their usefulness, and their very existence means that government on the local level is more fragmented and less accountable than necessary.
    These districts are part of the legacy of the Legislative State, and point to some key characteristics of that odd system:

  • Legislative dominance. Until "Home Rule" was passed in 1975, only legislators had the power to solve local problems, such as providing services to unincorporated areas. Rather than empower local governments, legislators did what they always did — set up separate entities that drew their power from the lawmakers, not from voters.
  • Our rural past. Once, most people lived in the country. Now, most people live in or around towns. In many areas, more conventional elected local governments can provide the services SPDs provide — if allowed to. Special- purpose districts deny the urban present and affirm the rural past, as does legislative government itself.
  • That "personal" touch. Government by personal political connection is a hallmark of the Legislative State, and it finds expression here. Individual legislators protect and support special-purpose districts, and those interested in preserving the districts support the legislators.

    The bottom line is that, on the local level as well as on the state, policymaking and service delivery are fragmented, and we’re paying for more administration than we need. No one is in charge.
    Only the Legislature can solve this problem. It can start by setting up a procedure for dissolving SPDs, when and where warranted.
    Then, if it can stop listening to the interests who profit from fragmentation, it can do what voters said 19 years they wanted it to do — allow local government to be consolidated and simplified.
    According to the main lobbyist for the SPDs, "It appears that proponents of consolidation just want power." He’s right; they do. And so do the opponents.
    And so do the people, who have waited for it long enough.
All content © THE STATE and may not be republished without permission.
All archives are stored on a SAVE™ newspaper library system from NewsBank, inc.

Oh, one thing that has changed, slightly. The Legislature did, after this series, finally pass enabling legislation to allow for consolidation of governments. Not that we’ve seen that happen much since.

And we still have more than 500 SPDs. And still, no one knows the exact number.

Private clubs in Columbia TODAY

Remember that I told you last week that Clif LeBlanc was going to have a follow-up story on the Cap City Club anniversary, a piece that would tell us to what extent local private clubs have become less "exclusive" in the bad old sense over the past 20 years?

Well, he did, and I meant to ask y’all for your thoughts on it. Here’s a link to his story. Short version — most clubs are more open. At least one still has no black members.

If you go read Clif’s piece, and you’re so inclined, please come back here to discuss it.

One column or the other? Choosing between the day’s best for op-ed

When I choose syndicated columns for op-ed, I’m usually a stickler about one thing — it has to have just arrived. If it didn’t come in within the 24 hours since I last looked, I don’t consider it. Once passed over, permanently passed over.

For tomorrow’s paper, I broke my own rule ("Actually," as Dr. Venkman said, "it’s more of a guideline than a rule."), choosing a Kathleen Parker column I had passed on the day before.

Today broke a week-long pattern. Today, there was nothing new that stood out as worth publishing. But on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I had trouble choosing between two columns each day that stood out well above the rest, but for different reasons were equally appealing. Practically coin-toss decisions. Ms. Parker’s piece on the Saddleback Church "debate" was the one I almost chose on Wednesday for today, but didn’t. So I’m using it Friday instead of something newer.

Anyway, in keeping with my practice of using the blog to better explain how we do things around here (and one of the most common questions I get from the reading public is "How do you choose what you run on the op-ed page?"), let me tell you about the picks I agonized over. First, I should note that the process is about as selective as you can get, since we only have room for one syndicated and one local piece a day. (For that reason, I just have to shake my head over people who submit columns for selection, are not selected, and go about in the community complaining loudly that we "refused to run" their piece. What they fail to recognize, either intentionally or unintentionally, is that NOT being chosen is the norm. The one piece we choose out of many is the exception, not the rule.) Because we only have that one national or international piece a day, the only way to achieve any "balance" or diversity of opinion is over time, considering many days together.

Here were my three dilemmas, and how I resolved them:

  • Monday (for Tuesday’s paper) — Mondays tend to be a bit warmed-over, since even the "fresh" pieces were usually written the week before. One exception to that was Bill Kristol’s piece on the Saddleback Church event Saturday night. He had written it for Monday’s NYT (one of the drawbacks of using NYT columns is that they ALWAYS, even during the week, move long after our deadline — the NYT moves according to its own convenience, not that of paying subscribers — so the earliest we get to run them is a day after they were in the NYT), but it was still out ahead of any other columns I would see on the subject (Ms. Parker’s moved late Tuesday). Seeing the topic as fresh, and having missed the event myself, I leaned strongly toward using the Kristol piece. But I didn’t. Instead, I chose a column by Nicholas Kristof that did something I regarded as more important — reminded people dazzled by the glitz of the Olympics just how reflexively oppressive the Chinese government is. I was a little put off by Mr. Kristof’s gimmicky approach — pretending he wanted a license to protest, and having a videographer follow him through the process, a la early Geraldo Rivera — but his point was important. So I went with it, and put Mr. Kristol (with an L) in the queue for our Saturday online edition. (Also-rans from that day’s bounty, columns that didn’t make the initial cut, included ones from Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Kathleen Parker, Bob Herbert, Gail Collins and Derrick Jackson.)
  • Tuesday (for Wednesday’s paper) — The piece I almost ran was one by Robert Samuelson headlined "The Real China Threat," which was embargoed for Wednesday publication (unlike the NYT, the WashPost Writers Group moves its columnists in advance, so we can run them at the same time as their home paper itself). An excerpt: "Will China overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy? Well, stop worrying. It almost certainly will." He went on, in typical thorough Samuelson fashion, to explain exactly why and how. But I saved that one for Saturday (the theme would be just as fresh, and just as true, then), and chose instead a David Brooks column that made an observation about John McCain I had not yet seen — that not only was his approach to campaigning becoming less "maverick" and more conventional, but that it was working for him in the polls (an assertion that would be backed up in a WSJ/NBC News poll today). Aside from that, I just loved the lead anecdote expressing McCain’s usual approach to the hyperidiotic world of partisan politics:

        On Tuesdays, Senate Republicans hold a weekly policy lunch. The party leaders often hand out a Message of the Week that the senators are supposed to repeat at every opportunity. Sometimes there will be a pollster offering data that supposedly demonstrates the brilliance of the message and why it will lead to political nirvana.
        John McCain generally spends the lunches at a table with a gang of fellow ne’er-do-wells. He cracks jokes, razzes the speaker and generally ridicules the whole proceeding. Then he takes the paper with the Message of the Week back to his office. He tosses it on the desk of some staffer with a sarcastic comment like: “Here’s your message. Learn it. Love it. Live it.”
        This sort of behavior has been part of McCain’s long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship. In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity….

    (Also-rans from Tuesday: Cal Thomas, Tom Teepen, David Broder, Leonard Pitts.)

  • Wednesday (for Thursday’s paper) — This was the toughest choice of all. First, there was Kathleen’s piece, which I loved because of the way it ran against the pigeonhole that readers try to put her in. Rather than gushing about McCain’s (and Rick Warren’s) performance the way other "conservatives" had done, she criticized the whole affair as telling her more than she wanted to know about the respective candidates’ religious beliefs. It’s columns such as that one that move us forward, by making us think different thoughts (even though I don’t necessarily agree with her point). But in the end I went with the Tom Friedman column from that morning. It was just way too important, and he had accomplished something that was very difficult to do within the space of a single column. He explained very clearly why the U.S. and Saakashvili share blame for stupid courses of action leading up to the Georgia invasion, while making it VERY clear that Putin is the main bad guy and must be opposed with all the West can muster. Both Kathleen’s and Friedman’s pieces were of the sort that made you feel smarter for having read them. But no one had summed up the Georgia invasion as well as Friedman did. And besides, it had been awhile since I had picked a Friedman piece, leaving a palpable vacuum that only he could fill. (Also-rans: George Will, Maureen Dowd.)

So initially I had slotted Kathleen’s column to join the others on the Saturday list. But now I’ve pulled it back to run Friday.

One more point — you may have noticed that the way I use the Saturday online page is to run the very best pieces that didn’t quite make it — each of them better than everything else that moved that day (except for the one I did pick). That makes the Saturday Opinion Extra worth reading, which not enough people do. That’s my opinion, anyway.

Baby Rulers: 10 world leaders who would be younger than Obama

Foreign Policy magazine must be trying to shed its wonky rep (maybe it decided it can’t compete with Foreign Affairs on that point). It sent me an e-mail to tout its list of 10 national heads of state who are younger than Barack Obama would be if elected president.

Some of those on the list surprised me, such as Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia (40) and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia (42). I didn’t know they were such babies.

But the prize-winner is Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the King of Bhutan. He assumed the throne in December 2006, at the age of 26. What’s the secret of his success? "His father handed him the position," natch…