Category Archives: Legislature

Column on the Nazis and South Carolina

88 Replies

Nazis_111

Thanks to the flag,
we’ve got Nazis on our steps

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
HERE IS HOW one decent, earnest, sensible South Carolinian responded when I asked what he thought should be done about the Confederate flag flying on the State House grounds:
    “On the flag, it’s such a tough issue. I do think there’s some wisdom in the old adage: ‘The best thing about a compromise is that nobody’s happy.’ …. I’d hate to have a renewed flag debate suck all the political oxygen out of the state. I’m afraid that could happen, and there are many issues that need/require attention. So… my instinct would be not to revisit the issue at this time.”
    To which I impatiently reply, What political oxygen?
    What exactly are we getting accomplished in South Carolina these days? What are we doing to catch up to the rest of the country? We compromise on compromises until we accomplish nothing — witness the DOT “reform” staggering its pitiful way through the General Assembly. If we can’t even reform that, what can we do in this state?
    I’m sick of compromises. You know what the compromise on the flag brought us? Nazis, who believe, because of that flag, that we’re their kind of people.
    I have video on my blog (the address is below; please go check it out) of American Nazis standing on our State House steps and congratulating white South Carolinians for having the “guts” to fly that flag and tell anybody who doesn’t like it, especially those whiny black people, to go to hell. They are very happy with the compromise. Before, the flag was a little hard to see up on the dome. Now, as one speaker says in the video, it’s “in your face,” and the Nazis are loving it.
    One thing you have to hand to those pathetic losers who paraded around in silly costumes “Sieg Heiling” to beat the band on our state’s front porch Saturday: They just go ahead and say things that most South Carolinians won’t say out loud.
    Personally — and I hope you won’t think less of me for saying this — I’ve always kind of hated Nazis. Until this past weekend, that seemed like a fairly pointless emotion, sort of like hating Phoenicians. But it was sincerely felt. Neo-Confederates have their way of living in the past; this was mine. I felt that I had been born too late to fight the one thing that got my blood boiling more than anything.
    And yet there I was Saturday, surrounded by marching, shouting, racist, Jew-hating, uniformed jackbooted Brownshirts — and I had not the slightest urge to shoot any of them, except with my little Canon digital camera. I had a new urge, a powerful need to share what I was seeing with the world — particularly with my fellow South Carolinians, whose insistence upon flying that flag is what brought these guys out of their sad little holes of rejection all over this vast nation. They thought they were finally at home.
    “Look at the flag, guys!” said one as they marched under it, thrilled at having his fantasy come true. He had never expected to see such a thing on public, government-mandated display. He was like a pimple-faced guy who’d never had a date, suddenly presented with the most gorgeous woman he’d every dreamed of, naked and willing. The situation was positively pornographic.
    He had evidently never felt so welcome before. This was obviously a place that loved and valued white people. Oh, springtime for Hitler!
    He was pathetic. They were all pathetic. Needy, too. Their messages of racial hatred and division were interspersed with plaintive entreaties to onlookers (the white gentiles, of course) to join them, accept them, see them as brave and praiseworthy.
    I guess Hitler was sort of pathetic, too, seen in isolation — all those silly, over-the-top gestures at the podium. It was when you saw the thousands of perfect, ordered rows of mad followers willing to do anything he said that he succeeded in terrifying beyond imagination.
    John Taylor Bowles, the Nazi “presidential candidate” who spoke at the rally Saturday, is no Hitler. No oratorical panache at all. He looked like what he was — a pudgy, middle-aged, mild-voiced notary public who just happened to have a few extreme ideas about people who didn’t look like the kind of Master Race that he wanted to see himself as part of. (His Web site describes him as “a devoted fun loving father of three daughters” and claims membership in the AARP.)
    Sure, he’s one little whacko surrounded by two or three dozen “re-enactors” who like to play dress-up. But is he really that alone, that aberrant? How unusual is it today to hear indignant native whites talk about illegal immigrants the way he did?
    Bowles was so ordinary, so banal, so nonthreatening. He had no army of storm troopers before him that I could see. But as far as he was concerned, he did have an army. He was there because he thought he could see two or three million white South Carolinians who were very receptive to a message like his. What else was he to gather from the presence of that flag?
    One of the speakers said they would be back next year, and the year after that. They liked it here. Maybe we could do something to make them feel a little less welcome. Can you think of anything? I can.

See and hear Nazis praise South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag at http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2007/04/confederate_fla_1.html.

Nazis_005

Lawmakers dodge flag issue

27 Replies

Everybody thinks the flag’s an issue
except those who can act on it

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
‘I JUST WANTED to touch base with you and let you know I enjoyed your editorials this morning,” said the phone message. “You don’t have to call me back, but read ’em and thought you did a great job. Thanks.”
    Pretty routine, except that it was from a Republican S.C. House member, Ted Pitts — my own representative, as it happens — and the column and editorial were asserting the need to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds.
    Assuming this wasn’t just constituent service, I called to ask why he liked them. He was a little vague, saying “it’s a very interesting issue” with “an interesting dynamic,” but not taking a position.
I think he was feeling a little odd because after he had called me, he had found that he was about the only person in the State House who wanted to talk about the subject at all.
    “I just walked around and said, ‘Are we gonna talk about this?’ and to a man, there was just no interest,” he said. “There just seemed to be no appetite around here, from African-American members” or anyone else.
    “They don’t think it’s an issue right now.”
    But apathy has always been the Legislature’s way on the flag issue. Contrary to popular impression, it did not spend the 1990s (before Mr. Pitts was elected) discussing the issue — everyone else did. The apathy was even apparent during the all-too-brief debate in 2000 that left the flag in our faces, although it was removed from its position of false sovereignty.
    If the House hadn’t been in such an all-fired hurry, lawmakers could have dealt with the issue once and for all. A lot of people from all over the political spectrum were pushing them to get something done, and some of the main advocates — such as the S.C. Chamber of Commerce — believed that the put-it-behind-the-monument approach qualified as “something.”
    So they did that, quickly. If the House had discussed the issue more than one day, a proposal to strike the flag for good might have had a chance, but the leadership wasn’t willing.
    If you ask lawmakers about the flag, they’re aghast: Why ask them, of all people? Yet thanks to a law passed by the Legislature in 1995 (in response to an abortive attempt by then-Gov. David Beasley to exercise some leadership), only the Legislature can do anything with the flag. But they don’t even think it’s an issue.
    USC football coach Steve Spurrier thinks it’s an issue, but what does he know? All he knows is that the flag should not be there, and that it projects an absurdly and unnecessarily negative image of our state to the entire world.
    I heard from other people who don’t know any more than the old ball coach.
    One said,

   “I am one million percent behind you on the flag issue…. We should not be putting down anybody, just like your column says, we should just be doing it because it’s the right thing to do. I’m born, bred South Carolina, go back generations … but I could care less. I do miss ‘Dixie,’ now, it did make my skin crawl, but the flag doesn’t mean a damn’ thing… I think you’ll be surprised at the momentum can get going now. Good job.”

    As for e-mails, there was a problem: The special lowertheflag@thestate.com address I had set up malfunctioned for the first two days. But during that time, 39 people were determined enough to look up my personal address. Thirty were for taking the flag down; only nine seemed opposed to our message in any way — and a couple of those were fairly indirect in saying so. Not all, of course, were so shy: 

  “You know as well as I that this is not about the Confederate flag, it is about blacks — period! If removing that flag from the Statehouse grounds would cure the 70+% illegitimacy rate, children having children, the over 50% dropout rate and the substantial crime and incarceration rate within the black community, I would say remove it now but it will not and you and Spurrier know it!… You are simply using the flag issue as a diversion from the real issues I mentioned above.”

    More typical is this one:

    

“I grew up in this state and I am proud to be from here, but I am embarrassed by that flag and the people who support it. I travel all over the country for my work and every time someone asks me where I am from and I say SC, they bring up the flag. I have to defend myself and my state by saying not all of us are backwards and ignorant…. It is an insult to the troops fighting for our freedom today…. I will say it as plainly as I can: It is un-American to support the flag and what it stands for.”

    As of midday Friday, my blog had received 253 comments on the subject since Mr. Spurrier’s remarks. Few were vague.
    Rep. Pitts remains sort of, kind of uncommitted. “I feel kind of like an outsider looking in on this,” he said — which sounded odd for one of the 170 insiders who have the power to act on the issue. He explained: “It’s an issue that means very little to me — and, I think, to my generation.” Mr. Pitts is 35.
    “Our state shouldn’t promote anything that offends a large block of its people,” Mr. Pitts said, in his strongest statement one way or the other. “In 2007, we’ve got a lot of other issues to talk about, but why can’t we talk about this?”
    “It’s almost like we’re hiding from the issue.” I would have added that it’s exactly like it, but he was on a roll. “Let’s defend why it’s still flying there” if lawmakers believe it’s justified.
    “But let’s not just not talk about it.”
    If you’d like to let Mr. Pitts know that it’s an issue to you, let him know. Or better, let your own representatives know.

    Find out how to reach your representatives here and your senators here. If you don’t know who represents you, check here.

Big Tobacco strikes back!

3 Replies

An e-mail urges everyone to speak up for our right to decide, on the local level, whether we want smoke-free workplaces — and restaurants, for that matter:

Get on the phone, write a letter or get the email addresses at the link enclosed, or let me know & I will get them to you. Please forward this on to whomever you know who wants clean air & a safe workplace  for ALL South Carolinians. It is speak now or forever choke, stink & endure the cyanide, ammonia & other deadly chemicals that second-hand smoke carries with it.

Here’s the enclosed release that was mentioned. And here’s the State House link that the release mentions. And if you don’t know who your legislators are, click here.

OK, so maybe the message was a little over-the-top, but that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with the sentiment.

McConnell on why NOT to reform

16 Replies

Just wanted to make sure that you read Glenn McConnell’s otherwordly explanation as to why real reform of DOT is anathema to him, and therefore to his instrument, the S.C. Senate.

Then read the column by Cindi Scoppe that eerily foreshadowed this argument from Sen. McConnell. She says it ironically and critically; the senator from Charleston says it with utter sincerity and deadly certainty.

Fortunately for him (but not for the rest of us), the S.C. Senate is immune to lampooning.

Remember, children, here in the Palmetto Dystopia:

  • War is Peace
  • Freedom is Slavery
  • Ignorance is Strength
  • Glenn McConnell is a Champion of Restructuring

Don’t believe that last one, UnParty members? He just said he was. Can’t you read?

DOT reform prospects dismal

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Tom Davis put it well on the phone this morning when I asked how his world was going in general. The
governor’s chief of staff said some things were going well, but:

"DOT was a disappointment, obviously."

Tom_davisNo kidding. Tom said maybe it would be possible to get something halfway decent out of conference committee, but he shouldn’t hold his breath. With the Senate bill being less than useless and the House bill being, as he put it, "not as much as we would want, and not as much as y’all would want," we’re pretty close to being able to chalk up the DOT issue as a huge missed opportunity to improve the quality and accountability of government in South Carolina. My words, not Tom’s. He’s slightly kinder to the House plan than I am. For me, if you’ve still got a commission, you don’t have reform.

For a view that is a lot kinder to the House than either mine or Tom’s here’s the latest memo from Patty Pierce, who has been lobbying on behalf of the Coastal Conservation League‘s transportation reform coalition. The House approach is more or less just what the coalition wanted, which is one reason we don’t have reform. Both the private group wanting reform and the governor went to the table unwilling to fight for a straight Cabinet arrangement.

Anyway, that’s water under the crumbling, neglected bridge. Here’s what Patty had to say to supporters:

DOT
Reform Team,
In the
Senate: The Senate completed its work on S.355, the
Senate version of DOT reform, after four weeks of debate, and the bill has been
forwarded to the House for its consideration.  S.355 includes four of our DOT Reform
Coalition’s priorities, but overall this bill is NOT as strong the House DOT
Reform bill, H.3575, by Representative Annette Young (R-Dorchester).

In
terms of justifying and
prioritizing transportation projects, S.355 requires the DOT to craft
a “methodology for determining how to design the Statewide Transportation
Improvement Program (STIP) that includes the schedule of priorities for all
major construction and funds allocated to complete those projects”. In crafting the methodology the following
criteria—which our Coalition supports—must be
considered:

a)
Financial viability, including the life cycle analysis of estimated

Maintenance and repair costs over
the expected life of the project;

b)
Public safety;

c)
Potential for economic development;

d)
Traffic volume;

e)
Truck traffic;

f)
The pavement quality index;

g)
Alternative transportation solutions;

h)
Consistency with local land use plans;

i)
Environmental impact; and

j)
Federal requirements for designing and setting priorities for the
STIP.

We are thankful that S.355 includes the above criteria, but the
bill does not clearly state that all projects will be justified and prioritized
according to the criteria as our Coalition has advocated. Also, the methodology will be a DOT internal
policy document as opposed to a regulation as required in H.3575, the good House
bill.  H.3575, requires the DOT to
“establish a priority list within the STIP…when compiling this list of projects
or changing this list, the department shall use” the criteria that
our Coalition has advocated.

Public
hearings
are required in S.355 prior to adopting the “prioritization” methodology, prior
to adopting the STIP, and prior to moving forward with large road and bridge
projects; this last item was not included as a separate item in the bill as was
suggested to staff, so this section needs to be further improved. The additional public hearings required in
S.355 are great opportunities for the public at-large and individual communities
affected by major transportation projects to voice concerns/praise about the
proposed methodology, the STIP, and individual projects. Having real public
hearings where the public can address a panel and/or hearing officer regarding
projects is a great improvement over current DOT practices.

The
most troublesome aspect of S.355 is the creation of a new legislative review
process through the establishment of a Joint Transportation
Review Committee (JTRC)—a 10 member committee composed of 6
legislators and 4 public members. The
JTRC will review and comment on the “prioritization” methodology and the
STIP. After review of the STIP, the DOT
is then required to promulgate the STIP as a regulation which requires approval
by the General Assembly.  Establishing road and bridge project
priorities has always been the responsibility of the SC DOT.  This new review by the JTRC and mandated
approval of the STIP by the General Assembly could undermine the DOT’s objective
analysis of transportation projects guided by the criteria included in the bill
that should be used to justify and prioritize all STIP projects.

One
final concern is a provision that states “any project placed in the STIP at the
request of a metropolitan planning organization or council of government must
not be removed.” That means a community
that has proposed a project, may not later ask that such project be removed from
the STIP if the MPO or COG determines the project is no longer wanted or
necessary.  To remove a project from the
STIP, the General Assembly must adopt a new regulation, which could easily take
more than a year if this provision were approved in a final DOT Reform
bill.

In
terms of governance, S.355 allows the
current
DOT
Commission to remain in place until a
new 7 member Board is
established. All seven members would be
appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate.  Six members would
represent congressional districts, and one member would be appointed at-large
to serve as
the Board
Chairman.  The
Board would hire an at-will Executive Director to run the daily operations of
the DOT.

Also
in the Senate, Senator Ritchie (R-Spartanburg) recalled H.3575, the strong House
DOT Reform bill, from the Senate Transportation Committee and placed the bill on
the Senate’s contested calendar.  This
action by Senator Ritchie is very helpful. H.3575 may be a vehicle to move a DOT Reform bill forward this
legislative session in the event a conference committee (3 House members and 3
Senate members) gets bogged down in its negotiations. 

In
the House: One
minor glitch occurred last week just before H.3575 was adopted and approved by
the House. No need to worry. This will just give me one more thing to work
on next week. When the final amendment
was adopted during the House debate on H.3575, the amendment was not adopted as
a “perfecting” amendment, so two previous amendments hat had been approved by
the House were inadvertently deleted. First, the House approved adding Representative Loftis’ amendment that
required consideration of “congestion” to the list of criteria used to justify
and prioritize projects, which we support. Second, the House also approved our Coalition’s priority, “consideration
of alternative transportation solutions”. Unfortunately, I discovered this week that both of these amendments were
“accidentally” deleted in the final version of the bill, so I will work with the
House staff and Representatives to see if we can get these two amendments added
back into a House approved DOT Reform bill.

If
you have any questions about DOT Reform, or the two bills that have been
approved by the House and Senate, please do not hesitate to contact me. I’d be glad to help you.

I’ll
send out an update next week on the progress the House makes in regard to DOT
Reform. Until then, I’ll keep working to
encourage the House and Senate to include the strongest provisions of both DOT
Reform bills in the final compromise legislation.

Patty
Pierce
League
Lobbyist
pattyp@scccl.org

Abortion column

54 Replies

Abortion in America:
the antithesis of consensus

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE SOUTH Carolina General Assembly did a number of important things last week:

  • A House panel slam-dumped a proposal to keep the Barnwell nuclear waste facility open past 2008, sending a clear, 16-0 signal that our state does not want to be seen as the nation’s trashcan.
  • The full House dramatically rejected the latest attempt to slip tuition tax credits for the affluent and vouchers for everybody into the new superintendent of education’s public school choice bill.
  • The House missed a chance to meaningfully reform the state Department of Transportation, passing a bill that leaves an accountability-diffusing commission in the driver’s seat. The Senate did something much worse.
  • The House sent 4K back to a committee for further consideration. Remember last year, when it seemed we had a consensus that the state had a critical role to play in early education for the neediest children? That’s in danger now.

    Lawmakers did other things, such as move toward some improvements in DUI law, ditch the idea of a Confederate Memorial Month, and discussed requiring that women be shown an ultrasound before they get an abortion.
    That last one certainly caused a lot of talk. But our editorial board didn’t take a stand on the subject, and probably won’t. Why? We adopt editorial positions on the basis of consensus, and on abortion, our board is like America: We have no consensus. Abortion in America is the antithesis of consensus.
    Witness the insanity that Roe v. Wade imposed on our politics: You can’t be a Democratic nominee for president unless you’ll stack the Supreme Court to protect it, and you can’t be a Republican nominee unless you’ll stack the court to overturn it — as though there were nothing else to being president. And hardly anyone pipes up to say the court shouldn’t be stacked.
    Even if I believed abortion should be available on demand, I wouldn’t think it worth this price. But I don’t. For me, the only ethical position is that it should not be available at all except in a question of a life for a life.
    That doesn’t mean I’m for this bill. Or against it. Logically, it shouldn’t be causing all the fuss it is. But logic is out of bounds in abortion “debates.”
    Why do other abortion opponents bother with this? Do they really think the woman seeking an abortion doesn’t know what she seeks to do? Yes, they do.
    I’ve heard that said critically by opponents of this measure, which is ironic, because they have no more respect for the woman’s intelligence than advocates do. They not only think these images will give the woman information she doesn’t have, they don’t want her to have it. Feminists can be quite paternalistic.
    The measure doesn’t seem to me very likely to produce the effect that advocates seek and opponents fear. The ultrasound, the showing of the pictures, the hour’s wait, and the abortion itself would all occur at the same place — the abortion clinic. I imagine it being treated by all parties present rather like those stupid HIPAA documents we’re required to swear in writing we’ve examined:
    “OK, well, you’ve got to sign these — you’re over 18, right? Here are some brochures we have to give you, and some pictures we took you have to see. I’ll be back in an hour and get you to sign some more forms and we’ll be ready.”
    The fuss is even less logical when you look at the law being amended. Anyone seeking an abortion already must receive brochures about organizations that offer alternatives to abortion, and then wait an hour. Logically, anybody who wasn’t swayed by that is unlikely to be turned around by fuzzy images. But it’s not about logic, is it? There’s something about pictures.
    Given the irrational power of the graven image, it might save some lives, and for that reason I have no particular objection to the bill. I give little credence to arguments that it’s “coercive” or “burdensome.” I would hope that any medical professional about to perform an abortion would want to do an ultrasound anyway, as basic pre-op. If not, maybe “safe, legal and rare” isn’t so much about safe. Or rare. But if an ultrasound is done, why not show the images to the patient? You would with any other kind of procedure.
    If it does save a few lives, some will be miserable. If your mom can be persuaded whether you should live or not on the basis of some odd pictures, she’s not likely to be what you’d call a rock-steady nurturer — especially when you give her affection reason to waver, as even the best children do. That can make for a hell of a childhood. It’s no reason to have an abortion — there is a moral emptiness in saying that because a life is likely to be unhappy, that life should not be.
    But if you advocate for that life, if you pass a law in a frank bid to save that life, you have a burden of responsibility to do what you can to see that child has a chance for something better.
    If the state intervenes to urge that life into being, the state can’t just wait for these kids to show up at its prison gates.
    Any lawmaker who advocates this ultrasound measure should therefore be just as strong a proponent of early childhood education. He should beef up child protective services, and increase Medicaid coverage. Etc.
    Pro-choicers are so obnoxious when they sneer, “They don’t care about the child after it’s born.” What’s more obnoxious is that it’s so often true. In the second trimester, it’s lawmaker to the rescue; 10 years later, it’s “That’s not my child.”
    Why do “bleeding-heart liberals” not care about the most powerless? Why do anti-government types want government intervention at this time and this time only? You would think things would be the other way around.
    But nothing about the whole left-vs.-right divide in this country makes any sense. And it hasn’t, for the past three decades.

More on defeat of vouchers

167 Replies

Here’s the AP story on what happened. As I said before, dramatic stuff. It was truly a case of Capt. Smith of the 218th Brigade to the rescue of public schools:

{BC-SOU-XGR-Legislator-Guardsman, 1st Ld-Writethru,0321}
{SC legislator, Guardsman on leave from training casts key vote}
{Eds: Will be updated.}
{AP Photos SCMC101-103}
{By SEANNA ADCOX}=
{Associated Press Writer}=
   COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – A proposal that would help parents pay for private school tuition with public money was defeated Thursday by South Carolina lawmakers, the third consecutive year the idea has failed.
   The effort to defeat the plan was energized by a House legislator who flew home from Army National Guard training to argue against the proposal.
Captsmith   Army Capt. James Smith, on leave from Fort Riley, Kansas, told colleagues that voters decided in November they didn’t want school vouchers when they elected a Democrat to head the Education Department.
   Smith, a Democrat, is set to deploy to Afghanistan in a couple of months.
   "I’m here solely for the voucher vote," he said.
   Smith said he told his battalion commander Lt. Col. John Nagl that it was an important vote and was granted a day’s leave.
   "He said he didn’t want to stand in the way of Democracy," Smith said at the Statehouse, where he was flanked by his 11-year-old son, Thomas.
   House Minority Leader Harry Ott said he called Smith on Wednesday after Republicans proposed a plan that would allow students to transfer to private schools. The idea came as legislators debated a proposal to let parents enroll their children in any public school regardless of attendance lines.
   "I said, ‘Get home. We need your vote,"’ Ott, D-St. Matthews, said he told Smith.
   Smith told colleagues that when voters chose Education Superintendent Jim Rex – the only Democrat elected to statewide office – it showed they did not want public money going to private schools. Rex wants to give parents more choice by allowing them to send their student to any public school.
   Advocates of private school choice thought they had the votes Wednesday night, but Smith’s presence likely renewed Democrats’ efforts, said Denver Merrill, spokesman for South Carolinians for Responsible Government.
   "We’re inching along, and we’re not going anywhere," Merrill said.

The libertarian impulse doesn’t stand up all that well in the face of a
man so willing to lay his life on the line for the greater good. That’s
just a little too much moral force, I guess.

Vouchers dead, too — for now

11 Replies

Apparently, efforts to use our tax funds for private schooling have failed again, in a dramatic series of events this morning. I don’t have all the facts yet, but it seems that the following have happened:

A lot of big-time good news happening very quickly. More as I’m able to get to it.

‘Reform’ still an elusive term

1 Reply

The Coastal Conservation League’s Patty Pierce answered my message from yesterday thusly:

Brad,
    Brian White tried to do the same amendment that you are referring to at the Committee level because the staff drafted the bill incorrectly according to him.  Representative Lucas liked it this way, so he may have been the last legislator to speak to the staff when this section was drafted.  Nevertheless, Rep. White tried to get this corrected at the Committee level, but the Committee was tired and didn’t feel like talking about it that late night when they were trying to wrap things up on this bill, so he said he’d just do the amendment during the floor debate.  Everyone knew it was coming, and there was agreement on it.
    Personally, I think once the priorities are adopted that they should not be changed at all until the next time the priorities are supposed to be adopted by the Commission again.  Also, setting the priorities should also be the Commission’s job completely and not the Secretary of Transportation’s in the House bill, so I thought this was a good amendment. It kept the duties separated.  It didn’t make sense for the Secretary of Transportation to be able to reach across to the Commission and ask that the priorities be changed. The Secretary is supposed to run the day to day operations of the DOT in the House bill.  The Commission should set the transportation priorities.  I don’t like the 2/3rds vote to be able to change the transportation priorities, but I can sometimes see when I cannot be effective in changing the minds of some legislators, so I stayed out of this fight.
    I’m copying Elizabeth on this note to keep her in the loop.
    Send any other questions that you may have my way.  I’ll be glad to give you background material if it helps. 

patty

We may be miscommunicating here. I realize about what happened in committee. What I don’t understand is why, after working so hard to get sound priority-setting criteria in place, the League would go along with letting the commission — a commission, of all things, the very root of the current problem — toss the priorities any time 2/3 of them wanted to. At the very least, you would want them to have to wait until some other party — in this case, the secretary, who would supervise the people who actually have the wherewithal to set priorities on the basis of objective criteria rather than mere political whim — suggests the changes.

By eliminating that check, you place the commission just as much in the driver’s seat as it is now, setting all your vaunted reform at naught. And for this the league cast aside any thought of actual structural, fundamental reform?

Eliminating the commission — in any way, shape or form — is essential to accountability at this most unaccountable of agencies. Keep the commission, and you can kiss any other reforms you’ve worked for goodbye, because they won’t be around very long — especially if you agree to make it autonomous from the beginning.

The Dump is Dead, or at least it WILL be

5 Replies

Every once in a while, something good happens over at the State House, and in an overwhelmingly good way. The sort of thing that keeps us trying on all the frustrating issues where it’s hard to make progress.

The House Agriculture and Environmental Affairs Committee voted 16-0 NOT to extend the life of the Barnwell "low-level" nuclear waste dump.

The bill’s sponsor, who abstained from voting in the face of such a huge defeat at the hands of his own committee (he’s the chairman), was resigned, saying this was "democracy in action."

It certainly is. And no, I don’t think the dump presented a huge health threat to South Carolinians. Folks defending it have always acted like their opposition was based in a Luddite fear of technology and scientific ignorance.

The true objection to the dump’s remaining open — mine, anyway — has been based in the fact that this state decided a couple of decades back that it no longer wanted to be seen as the country’s nuclear wastebasket (we have enough image problems without that), and the fact that a political consensus has existed all this time to get our state OUT of the business, whatever it took.

As near as I recall at the moment, we would have been out of it long ago, if not for two factors:

  1. North Carolina kept backing away from its long-standing deal with us.
  2. The industry has managed to get pliable politicians to keep extending the dump’s life, time and time again.

Anyway, if you want to read more about it, here’s the AP story:

AP-SC XGR NUCLEAR WASTE LANDFILL
SC legislators say no to keeping nuclear landfill open to nation
By SEANNA ADCOX    
Associated Press Writer

COLUMBIA,
S.C. (AP) – South Carolina lawmakers defeated a proposal Wednesday to
keep a nuclear waste landfill open to the nation’s low-level
radioactive materials from hospitals and power plants.

A House
panel voted unanimously against the plan, which would have allowed
Chem-Nuclear to stay open to the nation until 2023. State law says
starting next year, the site can accept waste only from South Carolina,
New Jersey and Connecticut.

"I think we’ve put the issue to
rest," said Rep. Billy Witherspoon, who sponsored the bill. "It’s not
an environmental issue as so many people indicated. It’s an economic
issue."

Local officials fought to keep the 235-acre site open
to the rest of the nation, saying the landfill’s taxes, fees and
high-paying jobs are vital to the local economy. The site provides
roughly 10 percent of the county’s overall budget and pumps $1 million
a year into local schools. A portion of its disposal fees also has
contributed more than $430 million for school building projects
statewide.

Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican, praised the committee’s decision, saying the state needed to stick to its 2000 agreement.

"We
think this provides us with an important opportunity to move away from
economic development based on nuclear waste disposal, not just for
Barnwell but for the state as a whole," the governor said in a
statement.

Barnwell County Council Chairman Keith Sloan
compared the decision to the state telling the Charleston port, "’You
can accept freight from Japan but nowhere else.’"

"The lack of honesty and integrity and courage demonstrated with that vote is appalling," Sloan said.

Environmentalists have worried the site pollutes the underground rivers below.

The
landfill was last cited by state environmental regulators in 1983, for
improperly unloading a shipment. State officials test the soil, air,
surface and ground water four times a year, inspect shipments daily and
show up unannounced for semiannual inspections.

While tritium
has been found in groundwater, it has been far below regulatory limits,
according to the Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Sloan expected significant local budget cuts.

Ann
Timberlake, executive director of the Conservation Voters of South
Carolina, said the county was addicted to the landfill’s money.

"We didn’t view it as a vote against Barnwell but a vote for the citizens of South Carolina," she said.

Reform in dazzled eyes of beholder

11 Replies

Last night, the lobbyist for the Coastal Conservation League and its allies sent out this note to supporters about the House passage of the DOT plan that coalition had been pushing:

After
four hours of debate and consideration of 39 amendments, finally, the House
overwhelmingly approved the great DOT Reform bill,
H.3575, crafted by Representative Young and her AdHoc Transportation Committee by a vote of 104-3.

H.3575
has ALL 5 of our
DOT Coalition’s DOT Reform Priorities thanks to Representative
John Scott (D-Richland) Annette Young (R-Dorchester) and Christopher Hart
(D-Richland) who sponsored one final amendment this evening to require the DOT
to consider “reasonable transportation alternatives” prior to initiating new
construction of road and bridge projects. H.3575 also requires transportation projects to be justified and
prioritized according to engineering criteria, economic benefits, and
environmental impacts. Maintenance
funding is provided annually to address our $3 billion maintenance needs across
the state, and public hearings are required on large transportation
projects. WOW!

I’ll
set up a thank you note from our capwiz site, so we
can be sure to let House members know how much we appreciate their making reform
of the DOT a top priority this year. Please also help me thank Representative Young in particular for her
terrific leadership on this most important issue.  I am certain that we would never have achieved
the goals we set for DOT Reform without her constant efforts to push DOT Reform
forward every step of the way.

Thank
you Coalition members for all of your hard work on this issue and your support
through this rigorous process.  Our
Coalition could not have come this far without you!

Tomorrow
afternoon the Senate will continue debate on S.355, its
DOT Reform Bill. I am feeling very
hopeful about the Senate debate. I understand that amendments will be offered to
strengthen our Coalition’s priorities in S.355, and it seems Senators are
pulling together.  I’ll write again by
the end of the week with an update on the Senate’s progress.

Great
Job Everyone!
 

Patty
Pierce
League
Lobbyist
pattyp@scccl.org

Here’s my concern about that (aside from the fact that the coalition’s idea of great reform falls short of mine):

    But Patty,
didn’t they do a last-minute amendment that stripped out something that was
important to you? My understanding is that the amendment fixed it so that the
commission could change the priority list WITHOUT the recommendation of the
secretary. (This is something that apparently escaped notice in newspaper
reports.)
    It seems that
would pretty much undo the reforms y’all are seeking — not to mention not even
attempting to do what I see as essential. Even though it would take a 2/3 vote,
the commission would still be in the driver’s seat as to whether to continue
applying the reform y’all have worked so hard for.
    That’s the
trouble with these overly elaborate, fragmented governing structures — the
slightest change undoes all your efforts to change the way the agency does
business. That stuff is harder to hide with a Cabinet. That’s why structural
reform is, and has always been, the FIRST step — so you can enact deeper
changes with some hope that they will stick.
I wrote a note to Patty along those lines, copying it to Elizabeth Hagood. I haven’t heard back from them yet. For their sake, I’m hoping I heard wrong, or that they have a good reason to think it’s OK anyway (and aren’t just whistling in the dark).

I think what the House came up with was bad enough without the coalition’s agenda getting shafted, too. But that would be par for the course for the Legislative State.

 

REAL reform, but not really

3 Replies

Meanwhile, the House has also been jockeying about with DOT reform. It’s a little harder to tell the good guys from the bad with the game-playing going on in that chamber.

Rep. Tracy Edge (the main guy pushing the latest incarnation of PPIC today), put up an amendment Tuesday to abolish the transportation commission and make the DOT a Cabinet agency. He spent only a couple of minutes arguing for the amendment, and it certainly sounded cynical: If we’re going to reform the department, let’s have REAL reform. This is, after all, the man who recently told The Sun News "I have a hard time seeing that the system was bad for Horry County, so why change it?" And his amendment was offered right after he and others lost their attempt to let local legislators continue to select commissioners, rather than letting the full Legislature select them.

One other note: The amendment was inartfully drawn; it does not make clear that the governor can remove the secretary, although that is strongly implied. That probably wasn’t deliberate — merely a reflection of the author’s insincerity.

No one felt threatened enough by the amendment even to ask a question, much less speak against it. Rep. Cooper merely moved to table it, and the House complied. The vote is below, from the Journal.

Rep. EDGE explained the amendment.
Rep. COOPER moved to table the amendment.
Rep. EDGE demanded the yeas and nays which were taken, resulting as follows:

Yeas 71; Nays 36
Those who voted in the affirmative are:

Agnew                  Alexander              Anthony
Bannister              Battle                 Bowen
Bowers                 Branham                Breeland
R. Brown               Cato                   Chalk
Chellis                Clyburn                Cobb-Hunter
Cooper                 Crawford               Dantzler
Frye                   Funderburk             Govan
Gullick                Hamilton               Harrell
Hart                   Hinson                 Hiott
Hosey                  Howard                 Huggins
Jefferson              Kelly                  Kirsh
Leach                  Limehouse              Littlejohn
Loftis                 Lowe                   Lucas
Mack                   Mahaffey               McLeod
Miller                 Moss                   J. H. Neal
J. M. Neal             Owens                  Parks
Perry                  Pinson                 E. H. Pitts
Rutherford             Scarborough            Scott
Sellers                Shoopman               Simrill
Skelton                D. C. Smith            G. R. Smith
J. R. Smith            Spires                 Taylor
Thompson               Umphlett               Walker
Whipper                White                  Whitmire
Williams               Young
Total–71

Those who voted in the negative are:
Anderson               Bales                  Ballentine
Barfield               Bedingfield            Bingham
Brady                  Brantley               Ceips
Clemmons               Cotty                  Davenport
Delleney               Duncan                 Edge
Hagood                 Haley                  Hardwick
Harrison               Hayes                  Herbkersman
Hodges                 Jennings               Kennedy
Knight                 Merrill                Mulvaney
Neilson                Ott                    G. M. Smith
Stavrinakis            Toole                  Vick
Viers                  Weeks                  Witherspoon

Total–36

Response to Rushmore

3 Replies

I very much appreciate the insights provided by new correspondent Rushmore, who, based on intimate knowledge with the subject, begs to differ with some of my observations.

I have a few things to say in response to his/her last remarks on this post, and they’re sufficiently involved that I decided to make it a separate post, to raise the profile of this debate at a critical moment (DOT reform comes back up in the Senate Tuesday).

First, I want to say to Rushmore that I’m sorry if I seemed dismissive. I’m just extremely impatient because after all these years, we have a good chance to change, fundamentally, the relationship between this agency and the people of South Carolina for the better.

To toss aside that chance for the sake of promises that whoever runs it, it will make better decisions in a particular operational area is to miss the opportunity, and they don’t come around that often.

One can push new criteria for setting road priorities ANY time. It’s a highly worthwhile procedural reform, but it doesn’t have nearly the potential for sweeping, positive change that fundamental restructuring has.

The problem may lie in our metaphors. I’ve only met Elizabeth Hagood once, and was quite favorably impressed. Very smart lady. But she and I have gone back and forth on the suitability of her "fix the car" metaphor. As she put it in the video I posted:

If you’ve got a car that’s not working, and you change drivers, you’ve still got a car that’s not working.

She considers restructuring to be the equivalent of changing the driver. I don’t. I say that restructuring is a fundamental change in the kind of vehicle you have — as basic as shift from the internal combustion engine to electric (just to plug another of my videos).

By contrast, implementing new priority-setting protocols is more like deciding what sort of map you’re going to use in determining where the car is going to go. That’s very important, no doubt — no point in having a car if it doesn’t take you where you want to go.

But if I’ve got a chance to get a new car, a better car, that will better suit what a car should be — say, if I could trade in my ’97 Buick for a new Toyota Hybrid Camry (slobber) … well, I’m going to grab that chance, and talk about what sort of map to use and where I want to go after I leave the showroom.

The League and its allies determined early that they would, in Rushmore‘s terms…

… stay out of the debate over DOT’s
management restructuring because addressing this issue would place
conservation groups right in the middle of the eternal and ridiculous
turf war between the Senate and the Governor

That misses the point. The choice in restructuring isn’t between the Legislature and the governor and what they want. It’s between good government and bad, between an agency that is accountable to the people of South Carolina and one that isn’t. The idea that getting the structure of government right is "ridiculous" would be a terrible shock to James Madison.

Anyway, my great hope is that the folks in that coalition, and other reformers such as Vincent Sheheen, will give John Courson’s proposal — which now includes all the things the coalition has worked hard for — a serious look when he presents it again tomorrow.

Let’s not look a gift car in the mouth. Or grill. Or whatever.

Randy runs the stats for us

13 Replies

Our own Randy Ewart took a spreadsheet that I made available to y’all earlier and crunched the numbers for us a couple of different ways, helping us dig a little more deeply into the "Competitive Grants Program."

  • His first spreadsheet sorts the grants by awarded amounts over 100k, then by awarded amounts 100k or less. As Randy says, "This makes it easier to see all the awarded amounts."

  • He then sorts them by individual lawmaker, so you can more easily see who got what.

Thanks, Randy! We appreciate your time, and your expertise.

DOT reform column

17 Replies

Would-be DOT reformers
need to start pulling together

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE GOOD GUYS really need to pull in the same direction if we’re to get anything that even the most easy-going person in the world would call “reform” at the S.C. Department of Transportation.
    That hasn’t been happening:
    Last week, Sen. John Courson proposed an amendment that would simply have done the right thing:Courson
Put this executive agency in the governor’s Cabinet, making it directly accountable, without any frustrating filters or buffers of any kind, to the chief executive elected by the people of our state.
    He proposed “a clean, a very clear, a very simple bill.” It would have fixed the thing that is wrong with DOT — its commission — by doing away with it.
    If you try to run an agency through a group, a committee, a commission, you will once again get what we have: an entity with multiple entry and exit points for decision-making, so that you can’t track how something happened or didn’t happen and do something about it. Lawmakers who want this agency to continue to be their personal candy store are dead set on keeping this structure, preferably appointed by them. They might let the governor appoint the commissioners, as long as he can’t remove them.
    A commission can’t turn efficiently when it’s on a bad course. The inertial center of the General Assembly dreads changing direction more than anything.
    The House, and Senate committees, have tinkered and argued over the best way to continue to keep a commission and make it look like reform.
    Sen. Courson said to forget all that and make the agency accountable. Setzler_2
Twelve senators voted with him: Kevin Bryant, Chip Campsen, Ronnie Cromer, Mike Fair, Larry Grooms, Wes Hayes, Larry Martin, Harvey Peeler, Jim Ritchie, Greg Ryberg, Nikki Setzler and Lewis Vaughn — all Republicans except Sen. Setzler.
    That means the proposal was defeated, 26-13.Hayes

    Sen. Courson says he’ll try again Tuesday. Unless more reform-minded people work with him, the status quo will win.
    Sen. Vincent Sheheen wants reform. He is a sincere advocate of good government who comes from a line of good-government advocates. But he voted against the Courson proposal.
    “I try to approach government in a very pragmatic fashion,” he said. “Not in terms of what would be ideal.” He’s had the chance to observe South Carolina government his whole life, and he knows what an alien concept “ideal” can be to our state’s decision-makers.
    Besides, he’s not convinced that a Cabinet is “ideal.” If you make it too easy to change the agency, he believes it will lose “stability” and professionalism. He envisions a parade of political appointees passing through the director’s job.
    He would keep the commission for continuity’s sake, but let the governor both appoint commissioners and fire them at will.
    I tried to get him to convince me that you can’t have a parade of hacks with a commission, with the added problem of not knowing whose hacks they were, and I’m afraid he didn’t succeed.
    We agreed on one thing, though: “There are a lot of people who’d like to see nothing happen.” There are more of them than there are people like him. In fact, more people voted for the Courson plan than there are people like Vincent Sheheen.
    Patty Pierce lobbies for the Coastal Conservation League, which has taken a lead role in a broad coalition of groups “calling for real reform, including: making the agency accountable to the public, requiring that road projects meet a real public need and making sure that the most important projects are funded first.”
    That’s a lot to try to get at once, so the league and its allies have concentrated more on the public-need-and-priority stuff than on pushing an accountable structure.
    They would keep a commission, but insist on rational procedures for setting road priorities.
These good people have worked hard at this — through the House and Senate committees and now out onto the floor — and they were much taken aback by Sen. Courson.
    “His amendment completely struck the bill that we had been working on for four months,” said Ms. Pierce.
    As one who’s pushed the Cabinet approach for 16 years, I started asking why she thought any priority-setting criteria that they were promised would ever last past next legislative session, and various other cynical questions, so she referred me to Elizabeth Hagood, the league’s director of conservation programs.
Hagood_005
    She said it’s less a matter of the four months of work, and more a matter of the coalition having decided early to stay out of the politically divisive issue of who runs the agency, and concentrate instead on how it’s run.
    That seemed a shaky approach to me. If you have the wrong who, you’re much less likely to get the how that you are seeking. Wouldn’t a Cabinet appointee be far more likely actually to implement and stick to a rational set of priority-setting procedures? Isn’t it much easier for good-government types to nag, argue and embarrass a governor into doing the right thing? You can’t embarrass a commission.
    “I understand what you’re saying,” said Ms. Hagood. “Personally, I agree with what you’re saying.”
    Unfortunately, the league’s coalition consists of too many diverse partners who have agreed upon the course they are on: “We’re not set up to change direction in the 11th hour.”
    In other words… dramatic pause here… the league can’t change its direction and support the right plan because it’s run by a commission.
    I rest my case.

Who GOT the pork? Here’s who…

17 Replies

A good question was posed by bud on this last post. He asked for names. Well, at first I was at a loss, because if you want to know whom to blame for the "Competitive Grants" boondoggle, you pretty much need to blame the whole Legislature. They passed it. As for whose idea it was to start with, I still don’t know.

However, I can tell you which lawmakers were sponsors for each of these individual grants. When I set out to do this, I thought it would be hard. I thought I’d have to sift through individual grant applications to find the sponsors. I was prepared to do that.

But when I asked Michael Sponhour over at the Budget and Control Board how I might track down the info, he wrote back 11 minutes later to say,

Brad,
Here is an excel spreadsheet with all competitive grant
applications and awards with sponsors.
Let me know if you need anything else.
 
Mike

So that wasn’t so hard. Enjoy perusing.

The pork list

18 Replies

At Doug Ross’ request, here’s a link to the list (it’s a PDF file) of pork handed out through the Competitive Grants Program.

You can find it at the Budget and Control Board site, so it’s not hidden, but it’s not exactly advertised to the world, either. Trouble is, we sort of had to know it existed to look for it. We sort of had to piece this together from some oblique references made by lawmakers over the last couple of weeks.

And if you’re like this other guy and want to bid for YOUR piece of the pie, here’s the main page. But here’s hoping we can shut this down before you get your money.

Happy reading. Or unhappy reading, as the case may be.

By the way, Doug —  Cindi’s now done two columns on
this grant thing, there’s an editorial written and scheduled to run, and news has
done two articles, including today’s lead front-page story. I don’t know about news, but that’s more work than any of us in editorial ever did on any one outrage of Andre’s.

Anyway, thanks for raising the question about the list.

Keeping us safe from common sense

19 Replies

Vigilant S.C. lawmakers keep
us safe from common sense

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
IF YOU THINK lawmakers are going to do the sensible thing and ban smoking in restaurants statewide, you must not have lived in South Carolina very long.
    OK, but surely they’ll at least get out of the way of local governments and let them respond to the great majority of voters who want to dine smoke-free, and deliver waitresses, cooks and bottle-washers from having poisonous gases crammed down their lungs in their workplaces?
    You think they’d at least do that much, right?
    Where are you from, boy? Russia? London? New York City? I never heard such innocent foolishness. Let me lay some facts of life and slow, lingering death on you. I should start by debunking a myth or two.
    First, this absolute refusal to use common sense and protect the public from a ubiquitous carcinogen is not a Southern thing. It’s a South Carolina thing.
    I discovered this detective-style, which is always the best way. I went into a Longhorn Steakhouse in Savannah last month and asked for a seat in the nonsmoking section. The hostess brushed off my request with a dismissive, “There’s no smoking in Georgia, silly.” All right, she didn’t actually say “silly,” but she was probably just too busy, or trying to be nice, or something.
    It seems that back in 2005, Georgia lawmakers decided that kids who get dragged to restaurants by their parents, which for kids is enough of a bummer, shouldn’t also have to die of lung disease. So the state banned smoking in public venues that serve children. (At least one joint responded by banning children, but you’ll always have a few like that.)
    The proposal was introduced by a state senator who also happened to be a family physician, and he told everybody breathing smoke was bad for kids’ health. That seemed to do the trick.
    That would never sway our lawmakers, who are made of sterner stuff. Secession was bad for kids’ health, too, but what was that compared to our iron determination that nobody was going to tell a South Carolina white man what he could do with his property. No sir, not ever.
    FYI, you can’t smoke in restaurants in Arkansas, Florida or Kentucky, either, or in 18 other states, according to the Web site of Smoke Free USA.
    Our lawmakers aren’t going to let that happen here, though — not even on the micro level. They made sure of that more than a decade ago, when Spartanburg had the temerity to ban smoking in its restaurants.
    They knew they would never give in to common sense, but with the Spartanburg example out there, those other weak-kneed local governments, being so close to the people and all, would start caving left and right, giving votgers what they wanted.
    So they passed a law that said henceforth cities would not be allowed to ban smoking. Stupid and evil as it may be, you’ve got to admit this move was forward-looking, given the rash of attempted bans recently.
    Why don’t they want people to be allowed to ban smoking in their own communities? Is it self-interest; is it greed for the tobacco lobby’s money or anything like that? No, that’s another myth.
    Rep. Ralph Davenport, R-Spartanburg, showed how selfless backers of the pre-emption were when he indicated at the time (1995) that even though his asthmatic daughter was “crippled” any time she so much as walked through smoke, he saw no reason to be “eroding the free enterprise system.”
    You see, in South Carolina, smokers and business owners have rights; employees and other nonsmokers don’t. Never mind that there are a lot more employees than business owners, and three times as many nonsmokers as smokers. Think about it: If South Carolina started handing out rights to just anybody — such as duly elected local governments trying to protect the public health — there’s no telling where it would stop.
    But prophetic vision isn’t quite enough if one is going to keep protecting the prerogatives of a privileged minority — and if the Legislature knows how to do anything, it knows how to do that. You also need eternal vigilance.
    A couple of weeks back, a really wild and crazy thing happened — wild and crazy by Palmetto State standards, I mean. Sen. Vincent Sheheen, an idealist who, despite his youth, has been around enough to know the futility of such gestures, nevertheless proposed to revoke pre-emption. He proposed, as an amendment to a bill banning smoking on school grounds, the following:

    Notwithstanding any other provision of state law, a county or municipality may enact ordinances prohibiting or restricting smoking in businesses or establishments open to the general public.

    It didn’t ban smoking, or tell anybody to ban smoking. It merely got state government out of the way so that Greenville, Columbia, Sullivan’s Island and all those other communities could do what they have been trying so hard to do in response to demand from their citizens.
    The wild and crazy thing was that the amendment actually passed. But that was a moment of weakness by the rank and file. Before final passage of the overall bill, Senate leaders — and we call them that without a shred of irony, because the rest of the state follows where they lead — let it be known that the overall bill would be doomed if the amendment stayed. So it went away.
    What do you do with people like this? They not only won’t act in the public interest; they take extraordinary steps to make sure nobody else does so.
    In South Carolina, what we do with them is keep electing them. But I can’t tell you why.

Cash? Where? How can I get some?

5 Replies

One might have expected any number of responses, ranging from outrage to indifference, to Cindi’s recent columns about the outrageous way that lawmakers came up with to dole out millions in pork without the least chance of veto or any other form of accountability.

But I didn’t expect this response, even though I suppose I should have.

Cindi got an email this morning from an enterprising individual in the private sector, posing the following question:

Is it too late to
submit an application for the grants you mentioned in today’s paper?  If not,
how do I find out how to apply for one?
I am not making this up. Of course, you are now thinking, this is just somebody being ironic, right? Well, Cindi treated it as a serious question, responding:

I think I remember
that the application period is still open.  If you go to the Budget and Control
Board page on the sc.gov homepage (http://www.bcb.sc.gov/BCB/BCB-index.phtm),
there’s a link to "competitive grants" at the top of the rail on the
left.

We’re all about providing news you can use around here. She was, of course, curious to see what the guy would say next. His response:

Thanks and
I appreciate the quick response.

Now maybe he was just staying in character and keeping the gag going. But there are a lot of people in this world upon whom irony is utterly lost. If you don’t believe me, look at a lot of the feedback I get on this blog.

The virtues of Virtual Schools

46 Replies

South Carolina now has it’s very own version of the stem-cell debate — unfortunately.

The stem-cell fight, as we all know, isn’t about stem cells; it’s about abortion. Similarly, the virtual school fight has morphed into a surrogate for the "school choice" debate.

Consequently, the virtues, or lack thereof, of virtual pedagogy have been pushed to the back burner. But that’s what I’d like to talk about.

I have my suspicions about the efficacy of the whole idea. I think offering long-distance classes to kids who might not otherwise have access to such pedagogy sounds very good — after all, the greatest challenge in public education in this state is what to do about the kids who live in poor, rural, thinly populated districts that have trouble offering the quality found in the affluent suburbs.

At the same time, after about 25 years of witnessing the limits of electronic communication, I have my doubts. That’s about how long I’ve been dealing with e-mail in one way or another. I’ve also had some experience with teleconferencing, which is a tool of dubious value.

Yet I’m torn about it.

I know virtual schooling can’t be as good as being face-to-face with a teacher. At the same time, it sounds better than no access at all, which is the option many kids are stuck with. Question is, should finite resources be devoted to this approach, or would they be better spent on other priorities? I’m not sure.

We had a long discussion about it in yesterday’s editorial board meeting, and it was inconclusive. We’ll have to return to it to decide what to say. Of course, we discussed other aspects as well. We’re all over the place on the culture-war aspect (to what extent kids not in the public system should have access), but I’d like to address here the underlying question of whether this is a good approach to begin with.

We’ve all experienced the misunderstandings that can occur in what was once called Cyberspace; this blog serves often as a monument to that effect. Of course, some of the misunderstanding is willfully obtuse, but plenty of it is honest miscommunication between people who would be much more likely to have a meeting of the minds if they actually met.

You sit two people who’ve been speaking at cross-purposes down together — as when Randy Page and I had lunch recently — and you’re somewhat more likely to communicate effectively. Similarly, if the problem is that a given subject, or a given child, is hard to teach, do you do any good giving him or her a "virtual" teacher?

Of course, if you want to address the choice aspect, go ahead — but know that I’m not staking out a position on that myself, not yet. If you can get private school and home-school kids in without pushing some public school kids out, I’m for it. It depends on how limited the device is in terms of accessibility. I need to know more about the program, and one of my colleagues is looking into that.

I’m hopeful that we can have a debate here that we can all learn from each other. On this recent post, Randy and LexWolf gave indications of a willingness to carry on real dialogue about this and possibly other education issues. That sounds great to me. Let’s see how we do.