Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

SC Policy Council advocates spending (in other news, a cold snap in Hades)

Did a double-take when I read this on The Nerve, the S.C. Policy Council’s online publication that exists to tell us how awful government is:

Although S.C. Senate and House members apparently think nothing of giving their respective chambers a combined $5.4 million budget hike next fiscal year, their fiscal generosity hasn’t extended to victims of domestic violence or drunken driving.

As part of their proposed state budgets for fiscal year 2010-11, which starts July 1, both chambers would eliminate all general funding for prosecution programs for first-offense criminal domestic violence (CDV) and driving-under-the-influence (DUI) cases in the state’s magistrate courts, where most of those cases are heard.

The proposed budget hikes for the House and Senate chambers would more than pay for those programs….

Yep, the S.C. Policy Council is propagating something that at least implies that not spending on a government program is a bad thing.

Even more startling, the piece implies that federal stimulus funds served a useful purpose:

No general funds were appropriated for the programs this fiscal year, though the CDV program received $1.6 million in federal stimulus money, said William Bilton, executive director of the S.C. Commission on Prosecution Coordination, which disperses program money to the state’s 16 judicial circuits. He said his office plans to apply for the same amount of stimulus money for next fiscal year.

“When that runs out, it’s back to square one,” Bilton told The Nerve last week….

I hereby put the area’s animal hospitals on notice: They’re likely to get a rash of cases of dogs coming in with man bites.

Now, to be serious: I agree with the Policy Council that these programs should be funded. Whether it was a bad thing that the House and Senate budgets were increased, I don’t know. The piece, which made the case very well for spending on CDV, didn’t actually explain what the increases in the legislative budgets were for. I assume that if I did know, I’d still agree that the CDV program was a higher priority. But I’m still curious what the case, if any, would be for the legislative spending.

Nicholas Kristof is a traitor to his gender, God bless him

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My wife called my attention to this Nicholas Kristof column the other day. In describing it, she said Kristof had gotten fed up with an unpleasant truth about why aid efforts in poor areas of the world fail to save children: Their fathers blow what little money they earn on booze and prostitutes.

I just got around to reading it a few minutes ago. I expected a rant, an angry diatribe using the kind of slashing language that, well, that I tend to use when I’m fed up about something.

But no, Mr. Kristof was as carefully rational as ever. If anything, I think he undersold his point by being so mild about it. An excerpt:

… Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.

Because there’s mounting evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money educating their kids, one solution is to give women more control over purse strings and more legal title to assets. Some aid groups and U.N. agencies are working on that…

This tracks with what folks who give microloans to the poor in backwards parts of the world have learned: That if they want the loans to go to better the family’s plight, they need to lend the money to the mothers.

Nicholas Kristof, who uses his own bully pulpit to keep us mindful of the plight of the world’s least fortunate — and in doing so shows no respect for the orthodoxies of left or right — has now blown the whistle on guys everywhere. The man is a traitor to his gender. And God bless him for it.

I’m just not believing this stuff from Henry

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Shortly after I posted the thing about Henry’s “Vultures” ad, I came home, and in the mail was this flyer.

I’m just not believing Henry. He’s been such a sensible, grown-up attorney general after all those years of Charlie Condon’s pandering, and now this.

What office is he running for, anyway? Some office I’ve never heard of, some kind of super-sheriff to clean up Washington, and save it from Obama and the other godless commies?

“Our Founding Fathers Would Be Ashamed?” Yeah, I think maybe they would.

Let’s make the totally wild supposition, just for a moment, that the things he’s saying about Washington aren’t totally loopy. What on Earth does it have to do with the issues facing South Carolina?

Definitely not what we need in a governor.

I see that The State endorsed Vincent Sheheen Sunday, and made a good case. Presumably, that means the GOP endorsement will be this Sunday. The way things are going, I just don’t see how a credible case can be made for any of these folks. Not Henry, not in this mode. Not Nikki, the darling of BOTH the Tea Party and the Sanford crowd — and a sincere imitator of Sarah Palin. Certainly not Andre. That would seem to leave Gresham… who thinks we need an Arizona-style immigration law in SC.

I didn’t expect us to be here at this point. I figured by now, at least one of these folks would come across as acceptable, so that we could have a real choice in the fall. But most of them seem to be trying so HARD not to.

Have you seen that absurd McMaster ‘vulture’ ad?

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I hate to pick on Henry when he’s dealing with death threats — and I hope and pray that comes out OK for him — but I forgot to mention this after I saw it a couple of days back.

Have you SEEN that thoroughly outrageous new TV ad of his? After having put out a fairly reasonable piece recently (which contrasted nicely with some of the stuff his rivals were doing), he now comes out with yet another bid to out-extreme the other Republicans.

I would compare it to the infamous 1964 daisy petal/mushroom cloud ad, except it actually contains MORE radical distortion of reality. To quote from the text:

They’re circling…After bailouts and takeovers…The Vultures want more. Our healthcare… our hard earned money… our liberty. South Carolina’s sovereignty is under attack… by politicians preying on our freedoms. Henry McMaster is leading the fight for the conservative cause….

Say what? If I believed half this nonsense about the Dems in Washington (who are not, near as I can tell, running for SC governor, so why is Henry running against them?), I’d say it was time for SC to fire on Fort Sumter again.

But I don’t. And I don’t see how anyone could.

These are real people we’re talking about

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This morning, as I was headed to the office after breakfast, a guy on the elevator recognized me and introduced himself. It was a cousin of Will Folks.

Like Will’s Dad, whom I’ve also met, this cousin (whom I’m not going to name because I didn’t think to ask him if he’d mind, and it’s certainly not his fault that his cousin’s in the news) seems to be, and almost certainly is, a nice, reasonable guy who just lives his life and means no one any harm.

And chatting with him I was reminded again of how totally innocent people get splashed by these scandals that they have nothing to do with. Not that this guy complained about his cousin; he did not. But he spoke of how the family was having to make a special effort to keep their 97-year-old grandmother from seeing the news this week. And I sympathized.

I see this all the time, and to some extent, it keeps me grounded. When other people are gleefully chortling over the latest scandal, and presuming to assign the worst motives and actions to everyone involved and dismissing them as though they were abstractions — fictional characters invented for their entertainment or the furtherance of their cause — I remain conscious of the fact that they are real people. And they have connections to other real people who feel the heat from the spotlight.

We’ve all been guilty of such objectification of people in the news. For someone who’s spent a lifetime doing this, dark humor is a sort of defense mechanism against feeling too strongly the human tragedies that we deal in. But something has happened in recent years, with the ubiquity of sources of information, and with the removal of the last vestiges of respect for people’s personal lives: I’ve seen the average consumer of news, particularly the denizens of the blogosphere, become FAR more cynical than most news people.

One reason for that is that journalists actually know the newsmakers. Or writers do, anyway. I’ve noticed since early in my career that the biggest cynics in newsrooms are the editors who are tied to their desks. They see the people whose names appear in headlines as abstractions, as characters in stories, and nothing more. Reporters are more likely to have a complete, flesh-and-blood knowledge of those same people, and to care more about how what they write affects those people. This is at the root of the alienation between reporters and headline writers, for instance. Headline writers can get lazy and exaggerate; reporters have to deal with the fury of those who are mischaracterized.

Anyway, it’s considerations like this that make me absolutely hate stories such as this Haley/Folks mess, and wish I didn’t have to read or think about it (but since it bears on who will be our next governor, I can’t ignore it). I know Nikki. Yeah, I’ve been appalled at the change I’ve seen in her as she has been seduced by demagoguery. But I still hate to see her and her family in this fix. As for Will — well, he’s a somewhat less sympathetic character, no matter who’s telling the truth, and that’s because Will is one of those bloggers who show the most contempt for the human beings he writes about (like the ones I complain about so much). But Will is still a person, and there are other people who are certainly innocent in all this who are effected.

And while I don’t always succeed, I try to keep that in mind.

The REAL problems with illegal immigration

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To continue a discussion from a previous thread, and make it more visible on the blog…

The reason we can’t communicate meaningfully with the folks who are all worked up over the Mexicans is that they see the absolute opposite of what we’re seeing. We’re seeing thousands of people crossing the border to come here and work their nalgas off doing construction, picking crops and processing chickens — and more often than not, coming alone or in groups of workers who send all the money they earn by the sweat of their brows back home to their families. For some bizarre reason, a lot of people see the opposite — freeloaders coming here to sit around and soak up public services. Do they really not see the work these people are doing? Do they really not see that that’s why they’re here?

This is coming from people who have a worldview that I don’t share. It comes from people who have a hair-trigger response that makes them explode at the slightest suggestion that anyone — from Reagan’s welfare queens to these supposed Mexican freeloaders — might be getting something at the expense of the taxes they so hate to pay.

These are people who, when they were kids, were always complaining to the teacher about what Johnny at the next desk was doing (as in, How come Johnny gets to do X, and I don’t?), and the teacher would say, “What Johnny does is none of your concern; concern yourself with what you do.” Only they didn’t listen.

Anyway, this fundamental disconnect between folks who see the world that way and those of us who don’t (and who see hard workers, not freeloaders) prevents us from addressing the real problems inherent in illegal immigration. And there are real problems. It is unfair that some people play by the rules and can’t get into this country, or stay once they get here. It is a problem that we have millions of undocumented people in this country that we can’t keep track of, especially in a time when there are a lot of people from other parts of the world who would love to sneak in for purposes of terrorism. It is a huge problem that we’ve got a drug war practically causing the government of Mexico to collape (a war caused by demand on this side of the border), and occasionally that violence spills over. (For that matter, even if it doesn’t spill over, the fact that it’s happening right on our border is a problem for us, if only because it stimulates more illegal immigration.)

These are all things we need to deal with. But we can’t have a rational conversation with those who are just furious that any of those people are here at all. And we need to.

‘Ideas… having sex with each other:’ The collective, interactive nature of human progress

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There was a fascinating piece in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, which I particularly enjoyed because of the way it cut across the way we tend to group ideas, particularly political and philosophical ideas, in popular dialogue.

In particular, I liked the way it applied economics to evolution to explain how human progress — innovation, wealth production, and other blessings of modernity — is a collective, interdependent process:

The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead—because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

The piece started wondering why our ancestors, who could make tools for a couple of million years, didn’t really start to take off technologically or culturally until 45,000 years ago. The answer is that we are dependent on each other to move forward, and there have to be enough of us to reach critical mass if we’re really to take off.

The best part was right here:

But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.

In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur argues in his book “The Nature of Technology,” nearly all technologies are combinations of other technologies and new ideas come from swapping things and thoughts. (My favorite example is the camera pill—invented after a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.) We tend to forget that trade and urbanization are the grand stimuli to invention, far more important than governments, money or individual genius. It is no coincidence that trade-obsessed cities—Tyre, Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the places where invention and discovery happened. Think of them as well-endowed collective brains.

I like the way this celebrates human achievement — from science to culture to capitalism — while at the same time blowing apart the fantasy that so many (the Mark Sanfords of the world) harbor: That we function best as little individual islands left alone by society at large. We are all in this together, or we simply don’t progress.

I don’t know about you, but I find it far more elevating to think about ideas having sex than certain, um, people:

The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.

Reading all this caused me to have a depressing thought, however. I think these ways of looking at human progress may help explain why political ideas in this country seem so counterproductive, so mutually canceling, like intellectual dead-ends, with the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” locked in perpetual battle with each having a slight majority for a time, but no progress ever being made (by anyone’s notion of “progress”)…

I think it’s because our political ideas no longer “have sex” with one another, borrowing memes from each other and changing and producing new, more vibrant and robust, hybrid ideas. Not only do the ideas of today’s so-called “liberals” and so-called “conservatives” not only don’t jump into the sack together, they don’t hold hands, or even look at each other across a crowded room. They don’t even listen to each other, much less join to be fruitful and multiply productive new ideas.

Our political system, centered around a legislative process that depends on deliberation — with real debate between people listening to each other in good faith — can’t function with all the dancers standing on opposite sides of the dance hall and refusing to speak to each other.

Maybe I should start marketing my UnParty as a political/intellectual fertility cult, and sponsor monthly idea orgies. Or something.

Just a thought.

Chamber goes 100% for incumbents in House races

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This just in from the state Chamber of Commerce:

SOUTH CAROLINA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE ENDORSES HOUSE CANDIDATES AHEAD OF PRIMARIES

Columbia, S.C. – The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, the state’s largest broad-based business organization, is pleased to announce the endorsements of the following House of Representative candidates who have primary challengers.

District 2 – Bill Sandifer, (Oconee)

District 10 – Dan Cooper, (Anderson)

District 17 – Harry Cato, (Greenville)

District 26 – Henry Wilson, (Pickens)

District 35 – Keith Kelly, (Spartanburg)

District 36 – Rita Allison, (Spartanburg)

District 38 – Joey Millwood, (Spartanburg)

District 39 – Marion Frye, (Saluda)

District 41 – Boyd Brown, (Fairfield)

District 55 – Jackie Hayes, (Dillon)

District 61 – Lester Branham, (Florence)

District 62 – Robert Williams, (Darlington)

District 75 – Jim Harrison, (Richland)

District 80 – Jimmy Bales, (Richland)

District 83 – Bill Hixon, (Aiken)

District 84 – Roland Smith, (Aiken)

District 86 – Jim Stewart, (Aiken)

District 87 – Todd Atwater, (Lexington)

District 98 – Chris Murphy, (Dorchester)

District 106 – Nelson Hardwick, (Horry)

District 112 – Mike Sottile, (Charleston)

District 123 – Richard Chalk, (Beaufort)

“South Carolinians who want good jobs and a strong economy should proactively support pro-business candidates,” said Otis Rawl, president and chief executive officer of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce. “Candidates endorsed by the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce have demonstrated their support for priorities that support a strong economy and a competitive Palmetto State. These House candidates are committed to representing the people in their respective districts who each need good jobs, a competitive state economy and a pro-prosperity working environment to ultimately raise their individual incomes.”

The Chamber will issue further House endorsements after the primaries on June 8. In the race for governor, the Chamber has endorsed Gresham Barrett (R) and Vincent Sheheen (D). Visit www.scchamber.net for more information.

What do all of these candidates have in common? They’re all incumbents, or running in races without an incumbent. In District 26, incumbent Rex Rice is running for Congress; in District 87, Nikki Haley is running for governor; and in District 98, Annette Young is not seeking re-election.

It’s a shame the Chamber didn’t dig a little harder to make some real discernments (or at least give us some reasoning for its choices in the cases where there was no incumbent), because endorsements such as this WOULD mean more than usual this year, if they’d only put some thought into it. That’s because we won’t be getting an such fodder for thought from The State. This year, my former paper is only endorsing for governor, attorney general and 5th circuit solicitor, near as I can tell. And that leaves a big vacuum. I wish I could fill it, but I’m only one guy. And despite what that Lois Lane keeps saying, I am NOT Superman.

DOES this reflect our electorate, really?

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A friend passed me the above video with the commentary, “This is our informed electorate.”

But is it? Really? When I see these kinds of things, I wonder about the selection process. I wonder how many intelligent answers had to be ditched to produce this concentration of utter stupidity. For that matter, I wonder about the initial filter. If a person looks like he or she might have a clue, does the maker of the video simply move on?

If the guy with the microphone saw ME coming, would he bother with me? And if so, would anything I said make the video? Would he keep asking questions until he got me to slip up, hit a vacant spot in my memory, and use only that?

I know that if you ask a harder question out on the street — such as, who is your state legislator — the overwhelming majority of people will not know. I’ve tried sending out a reporter to do that, just to prove a point (namely, that executive power should NOT be vested in the Legislature). I’ve never tried it with easier questions, because I’ve never been interesting in trying to determine whether the man on the street is a COMPLETE idiot.

Finally, if this IS a true picture of the electorate — which I’m still doubting — does it delegitimize the whole republican experiment?

Vote for me, the liberal republican (or conservative democrat, if you prefer)!

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You know, I don’t know if I can abide seeing one more mailer (such as the one above that came in the mail today) or yard sign trumpeting to the world that the candidate in question is a “Conservative Republican.”

You know, as opposed to all those liberal Republicans running around over here in Lexington County.

This is not new, but in the era of Nikki Haley and the Tea Party (which I’m considering using as the name of my new band, if Nikki will agree to front it), I’m hearing it more and more. And in the more extreme cases, such as with Nikki herself, “Conservative” is being touted as something apart from Republicans, mere Republicans not being worthy, you see.

Set aside the appalling notion that to the voters these folks are reaching out to, ordinary South Carolina Republicans just aren’t right-wing enough. I mean, think about that for a minute…

That’s long enough. Thankfully, S.C. Democrats aren’t given to this sort of redundancy, this rococo gilding of the ideological lily. If I saw one sign in my community that claimed to be for a “Liberal Democrat,” I believe I’d run for the hills. That would be just one extremism too many for me.

Remind me, if I run for office, to put “liberal republican” or “conservative democrat” (note the lower case; God forbid I should be mistaken for an adherent of one of those granfalloons). And I think I’ll refer to my opposition as “fascist anarchists,” to use Ferris Bueller’s term.

Anything for a little variety.

Benjamin wants to put new law school on Main St.

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It’s going to be interesting having Steve Benjamin as mayor. His mind is just going a mile a minute spotting opportunities, making connections, such as this one reported by Mike Fitts:

Columbia already has the right major tenant to go into the former SCANA Corp. space on Main Street, according to mayor-elect Steve Benjamin: He wants the building to be the new home of the University of South Carolina School of Law.

Benjamin hopes the school could work out a long-term lease with the Palmetto Center, the building that now has about 450,000 vacant square feet in the heart of downtown. A long-term tenant such as the law school should be appealing to the owners, Benjamin said, and would keep the building in private hands and on the tax rolls….

If the school were there, it would be surrounded by the offices of many of the state’s biggest law firms and several courts, including the S.C. Supreme Court, Benjamin said.“It’s a perfect place for law students,” he said.

Benjamin said he has met with the building’s owner and real estate agent to pitch the plan. The building could be bought by a new owner and renovated for substantially less than it would cost USC to build a new school, he said.

Moving it there “would mean giving Main Street a big old shot of adrenalin,” Benjamin said. He compares the potential impact on downtown to what the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought to that city….

Already, this idea is creating a lot of buzz. Mandi Engram posted something about it on Facebook and has kicked off a lively discussion there.

What do y’all think?

About those races that are none of our business…

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As y’all know, I don’t hold with getting involved in other people’s elections. We’ve got enough to say grace over here in SC without worrying about whom other folks are electing in other states.

Besides, I think it’s beyond ridiculous to try to draw conclusions from afar, finding artificial intellectual constructs to impose upon those elections to draw conclusions about unrelated matters — such as the national mood, or what is likely to happen in races that are our business. Such as, a Republican wins a race in state X, and therefore the national electorate likes Republicans and woe unto Democrats everywhere. I happen to believe that people make up their minds for a host of complex reasons that can’t be fully divined even if you’re standing next to the voter at the time, much less from afar. And to draw a conclusion based on how 51 percent of the voters in some far-off place reacted to the very specific choice they had between two very specific candidates, when that result involved separate, independent decisions made by thousands of people you don’t even know, which means it involves millions of unknowable variables, is laughable. Or would be, if the oh-so-serious pronouncements that result weren’t so harmful to public understanding.

And yes, I DO struggle to analyze elections I AM following, and share my feeble reflections so that y’all can shoot at them and maybe, just maybe, that ferment will lead to some greater understanding for all of us going forward. But I am loathe to do it with races about which I know little that would not fit on a bumper sticker.

But since folks seem to love to discuss these things, rather than have y’all go off and discuss it at some unsavory blog where you might pick up some nasty social disease or something, I provide you with this safe environment to have your discussion.

Here’s a quick summary of what happened by a guy over at NPR, but I also provide these links to related stories in the NYT and the WSJ and The Washington Post:

The big news came in the Democratic contest for the Senate in Pennsylvania, where five-term incumbent Arlen Specter — who quit the GOP last year because he was not going to survive the primary — wound up losing anyway, despite the backing of President Obama, Gov. Ed Rendell and assorted party luminaries. Specter, 80, was never able to convince his new party that he was one of them. Much of the credit for that goes to a savvy media effort by his opponent, two-term Rep. Joe Sestak, who ran ads reminding Democrats that six years ago Specter was warmly endorsed by another president, George W. Bush, and that he spent years voting for Republican Supreme Court justices. Those Democrats with longer memories still harbored anger over the way Specter questioned Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas court confirmation hearings back in 1991.

Sestak received 54 percent of the vote to Specter’s 46 percent, ending Specter’s long career in politics. Specter, in conceding defeat, pledged to support Sestak in the general election….

If the Democratic Party establishment took it on the chin in the Keystone State, Republicans got the same message in Kentucky. There, local powerhouse Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, muscled out two-term Sen. Jim Bunning (R) from a re-election bid and helped install Secretary of State Trey Grayson as his would-be successor. But GOP voters weren’t buying, and instead gave first-time candidate and ophthamologist Rand Paul a smashing victory, telling McConnell and party leaders that the old way of doing things was no longer acceptable. Even though Grayson was not the incumbent, he bore the brunt of the anti-establishment anger. Paul, the son of Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, utilized his father’s sizable presence on the Web to make him financially competitive with Grayson….

The results were less definitive in Arkansas, but what happened there can’t be comforting to Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a two-term Democrat whose avowed centrism — in a state that gave Obama just 39 percent — didn’t go over well in the primary. She managed 45 percent of the vote, to 43 percent for Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. And because neither candidate received a majority — a third candidate, conservative businessman D.C. Morrison, pulled in about 13 percent — Lincoln and Halter continue their battle for three more weeks, in a June 8 primary runoff.

Have at it.

Cindi’s column: ‘The two sides of Nikki Haley’

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Just thought I’d bring to your attention Cindi Scoppe’s calm, rational, even-handed take on the Nikki Haleys we have come to know — the appealing, breath-of-fresh-air neophyte lawmaker (vestiges of whom we still see today) and the demagogic ideologue seeking to carry the Mark Sanford banner into South Carolina’s future (which we see far too much of these days).

The value in reading Cindi’s column is that it is rich in specifics, listing Nikki’s positions on quite a number of issues. That’s something you don’t get so much from me. I form a holistic impression of a candidate or an issue, and hold forth on the conclusions I’ve reached. Cindi shares her reporting, point by point. When we went into an editorial board meeting with a candidate, Cindi would have a list of specific questions, so that she could test the candidate against specific positions that we held. I would ask the candidate to start talking (telling us whatever he or she deemed most important), and I would ask questions suggested by what I heard. It made for good teamwork. Cindi made sure we touched all the important bases; I explored unanticipated territory to learn things we would not have learned taking the purely task-oriented approach.

So it is that I think it’s valuable for you, the wise reader, to set my own rambling gestalten observations beside Cindi’s businesslike approach as you move along your own journey in making up your mind about Nikki Haley.

So, without violating Fair Use (I hope), I invite you to go read Cindi’s entire column, which goes from the good…

… She is charming, engaging and smart. She is refreshingly passionate and energetic and not about to put up with the games at the State House. She can explain problems in a way to get voters fired up (“It’s just wrong; it’s wrong all day long,” she says of school administrators’ opposition to a bill that would cost them money by jerking the junk food out of schools). That’s no small thing in a state as apathetic as ours.

She’s all about comprehensive reform — of the tax code, of the executive branch of government, of the school funding system — and her support for those vital changes predates her campaign, and seems far more heartfelt than her GOP opponents….

… to the bad…

… These relatively minor misrepresentations are merely the ones that jumped out at me in a single meeting with our board, and this pattern is disturbingly similar to Mr. Sanford’s signature approach: Take a legitimate problem that’s a bit too complicated or wonky to appeal to the masses, and tart it up to make it look like something it’s not.

Ms. Haley is rigidly ideological. All the Republican candidates support taxpayer-funded “choice” for private schools, but only she would veto a bill expanding public school choice if it didn’t help prop up private schools. All opposed the federal stimulus, but only she opposed accepting the money that we’re on the hook to pay for regardless, because doing so blew the “opportunity” to force the Legislature to make structural reforms….

… to this conclusion:

…When I first met Ms. Haley in 2004, I found her a bit green. But she clearly had a good head on her shoulders and was one of the best new candidates we met that year. As I wrote in our first endorsement of her, she was “so focused on keeping an open mind and being persuaded by facts rather than personality, preconceived notions and party dogma that she’s bound to make smart choices,” and “what she calls a business-like approach strikes us as merely a commonsense, proactive approach that people of any political persuasion should be able to take for granted.”

I wish the Nikki Haley who’s running for governor reminded me more of that person and less of Mark Sanford….

Graham on his meeting with Elena Kagan

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Sorry I haven’t posted yet today, and now I’m rushing off to lunch. But to give y’all something to chew on, I thought I’d share Lindsay Graham’s fairly positive report on his meeting yesterday with Elena Kagan:

Graham Meets with Supreme Court Nominee

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today made this statement after meeting with Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Graham is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Ms. Kagan is not someone a Republican president would have chosen for a position on the Supreme Court. However, the questions the country and Senate will be required to answer are whether she is qualified for the job, possesses the appropriate temperament, and whether her judicial philosophy is within the mainstream of American jurisprudence. It is very important for a nominee to understand the difference between the role of a judge who interprets the law and an elected official who writes the law.

“We had a good meeting and discussed her qualifications and background in the law. We also discussed legal issues related to the War on Terror and positions she has taken in her position as Solicitor General. On many of these issues, we found common agreement.”

Judicial Experience:

“I do not believe that prior judicial experience is a prerequisite for sitting on the Court. Some of the most distinguished justices in history, such as the former Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist, did not have prior experience.

“However, Ms. Kagan’s lack of a judicial record will make the hearings even more important. Because she has no judicial decisions to review, her writings and opinions on issues regarding the law will be closely scrutinized. These documents will provide the committee and country a window into her judicial philosophy, qualifications and temperament.

On Military Recruitment:

“Ms. Kagan explained to me that any position she took regarding military recruitment at Harvard should not be taken as a lack of respect for the U.S. Armed Forces. She noted that her father was a World War II veteran. I take her at her word that she respects the military and our men and women serving in uniform.”

#####

Apparently, he did NOT ask her for her views on softball. That Lindsey Graham is all business…

On the other hand, these are NOT the kinds of ads you want to see from one who would be governor

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Yesterday, I praised Henry McMaster for his latest campaign ad. Yeah, the praise was pretty damned faint, and I disagreed strongly with a great deal of what he was saying, but at least it was done with a tone and attitude that made you feel good about South Carolina — or at least got the impression that Henry felt good about South Carolina. And that’s too rare these days from our friends in the GOP.

Take, for instance, the pair of videos unveiled today by the Nikki Haley and Gresham Barrett campaigns.

We have Nikki labeling her rivals with the GOP cusswords “Bailouts,” “Stimulus spending” and “Career politicians” — about as neat a job of giving opponents short shrift as I’ve ever seen (as if those terms sum up the totality of who these men are) — before going on to say, in that hagiographic way she has, that SHE is the one true “conservative.” Whatever the hell that word means anymore. (It certainly doesn’t mean what it did when I was coming up.)

Then we have Gresham Barrett promising to be the meanest of all to illegal immigrants (the scoundrels!), and pass “a common-sense Arizona law.”

Sorry, folks, but neither of these glimpses of your values or your attitudes toward the world in general make me feel good about the idea of you being my governor. Not that you’re trying to please me, I realize; but that’s all I have to go by…

The gross immaturity of the blogosphere (with emphasis on “gross”)

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So this morning I noticed that a certain Rep. Mark Souder from Indiana was resigning over an affair. None of my business, of course. I’d never heard of the guy, and who represents Indiana in Congress is no concern of mine. Of course, I knew that the blogosphere would go nuts over this, because it supposedly had to do with an extramarital affair, and if this guy were a Republican the liberal blogs would have a field day drawing absurd conclusions that this said something about all Republicans, and if he were a Democrat, the opposite reaction would ensue.

But then, I was briefly tempted to post when it occurred to me that I could say something like, “Good for you, Rep. Souder — not for the affair, but for the resigning.” As in, something a certain SC politician should have done last year, thereby sparing us from hearing how he spends his weekends on the Florida taxpayers’ dime.

I couldn’t even bring myself to give Mr. Souder even THAT much of a backhanded compliment when I saw what a mealymouthed, whiny, blame-every-else explanation as to why he was resigning (pardon the all-caps; they’re from the original):

IN THE POISONOUS ENVIRONMENT OF WASHINGTON DC, ANY PERSONAL FAILING IS SEIZED UPON, OFTEN TWISTED, FOR POLITICAL GAIN. I AM RESIGNING RATHER THAN TO PUT MY FAMILY THROUGH THAT PAINFUL, DRAWN-OUT PROCESS.

Not that there wasn’t a certain justice in what he said. As to that…

A little later, I saw a link to a Wonkette post that in part said the following (please excuse the language):

Indiana Republican and eight-term congressman Mark Souder is resigning immediately because he had sexytime with a woman who was not married-in-Christ to him. Souder just defeated a teabagger in the GOP primary, but with less than 50% of the vote, and eh we’ve never heard of this guy — Indiana’s third congressional district, we should pay more attention to this hotspot! — so let’s get to the crazy all-caps SORRY JEEBUS I PUT MY WANG IN ANOTHER LADY’S LADYPARTS. Also, he’s a wingnut who campaigned on the bullshit “I will repeal Obamacare,” so let the Devil take him!The Devil take you, Mark Souder, for your Infidelity Against God! The Devil take you!

I usually don’t look at the Wonkette, or any other blogs that embody everything I don’t want this one to be. But I found myself wondering, as I usually do, is this stuff written by maladjusted 13-year-old boys? You know, an adolescent too worked up to stop and think about anything but his desire to impress his peers with his pimply disrespect for the whole world. The proper medium for this form of expression is the bathroom wall of a middle school.

Aside from being foul-mouthed, aside from taking idiotic, raving, snarling, snorting joy in the pain of other human beings, it is painfully unimaginative. Yeah, I know the history of the Wonkette, and how it interspersed commentary with sexual meanderings the founder moved on, so it has a standard to live down to. But it does it so badly, in such a thoroughly off-putting manner.

I would weep for the independent blogosphere, if I had cause to expect better of it. The good news is that the bar is so low that it’s easy to raise the standard, which I will continue to endeavor to do in my own little corner, with your help.

Yes, Henry, THAT’s the way you do it…

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… you play the guitar on the M-T-V…

Oops, got off track there. Wrong video.

What I meant to do was applaud Henry McMaster for a positive campaign ad, which helps remove the bad taste from some of his Obama-and-his-allies-are-dangerous-radicals approach of late.

I don’t agree with everything Henry’s saying in this ad, titled “It’s time to show the world what South Carolina can do”:

I have a plan to put South Carolina back on the Path to Prosperity. We’ll grow small business with lower taxes and less regulation. Encourage innovation and recruit high paying jobs in emerging industries. Expand our ports and open our economic door to the world. Improve education with choice, accountability and higher standards. It’s time to show the world what South Carolina can do!

… especially the idea that “choice” is the very first thing our schools need. Or that “lower taxes and less regulation,” while laudable in themselves, will substitute for building the workforce that businesses want and providing the basic societal infrastructure they need. But what I like here is that Henry’s talking about SC presenting a positive face to the world (for a change), instead of making us look like the wacky extremists that too many think we are already.

He’s talking about what he’s FOR, rather than trying to resonate with negative people about what they’re against.

Good one, Henry!

What’s the difference between ugly good ol’ boy populism and Palin/Haley populism? Lipstick.

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Sorry not to be forthcoming with a post on the Sarah Palin/Nikki Haley event last evening. I’ve been too busy — my baby granddaughter spent the night with us last night, my youngest daughter came home from Charlotte and my wife and I had a lot of errands to run this morning (including, alas, taking her car in for several hundred dollars worth of repairs).

So I was living life instead of blogging. But I should add that I was glad I couldn’t post right away, because I’ve been… depressed… since that event. As I’ve turned over what to say about it in my minds (I almost corrected that to the singular after typing the S, but then realized that plural is correct; I am of several minds on all this), I’ve been unable to think of anything constructive to say. And even when I’m going to be scathingly critical of something, I want it to be for a purpose. I want there to be a constructive point in mind, something to add to a conversation that would help us all move forward somehow.

But I haven’t arrived. Instead, I’m feeling a level of alienation that would make Benjamin Braddock and Holden Caulfield seem happy and well-adjusted.

Part of it, but just a small part, is this problem I’ve been wrestling with of my increased sense of alienation from Republicans in general. I don’t like it; it runs against my grain. To react with constant negativity to Republicans and all their works suggest partisanship, an affinity for Democrats, to most people. Not to me — Lord knows, I still find the Democrats off-putting enough, and am still pleased not to identify with them either — but to other people. And when you write a blog, how you are perceived by others matters. But I can’t help it. While the Dems are merely no more irritating than usual these days, the Republicans have so aggressively, actively offended my sense of propriety and my intelligence as they have flailed about since the 2008 election, that even tiny things set me off now. I no longer have to see one of those maddening TV commercials — like the two I saw last night, Andre Bauer talking first and foremost about the need for smaller government (as if THAT were the main problem facing a state that’s laying off teachers left and right) and Henry McMaster talking about the “radicals” running Washington (as if that were any less crazy than the claims of the birthers). Now, just small things send me deeper into my funk. This morning I saw a sign for a candidate who had only one thing to say about himself, that he was a “Rock Solid… Republican” — as though that identification were sufficient, that reassurance that I am not one of them; I’m one of us. The sheer, obnoxious, impervious smugness of it…

(If I were a Democrat, I wouldn’t worry about this. They can console themselves with the fantasy that all they have to do is win the election, and their troubles are over. I’m always conscious of the fact that as many as 40 percent of voters would still be Republicans — just as between 30 and 40 percent are Democrats now, even with a Republican governing majority — and you’d still have to deal with them and reason with them if you really want to move our state forward. Especially in our Legislative State, you sort of have to build consensus to get things done. So when either party seems to be trying to drift beyond reason — say, when Dems were in the grips of Bush Derangement Syndrome — that worries me.)

But the alienation I’m feeling standing in that crowd of Haley and Palin supporters is different. Partly because these women aren’t positioning themselves as Republicans. On the contrary, they are relishing their animosity toward the people in their party who already hold a majority of public offices in this state. They are proud to antagonize and run against those Republicans with greater experience and understanding than they have. They turn their inexperience and lack up understanding of issues from a weakness into a virtue. Their fans cheer loudest when they hold up their naivete as a battle flag.

A little over a year ago, Nikki Haley was just an idealistic sophomore legislator who was touchingly frustrated that her seniors in her party didn’t roll over and do what she wanted them to do when she wanted them to do it. It didn’t really worry me when I would try to explain to her how inadequate such bumper sticker nostrums as “run government like a business” were (based in a lack of understanding of the essential natures not only of government, but of business, the thing she professes to know so well), and she would shake her head and smile and be unmoved. That was OK. Time and experience would take care of that, I thought. She was very young, and had experienced little. Understanding would come, and I felt that on the whole she was still a young lawmaker with potential.

I reckoned without this — this impatient, populist, drive for power BASED in the appeal of simplistic, demagogic opposition to experience itself. It’s an ugly thing, this sort of anti-intellectualism of which Sarah Palin has become a national symbol. This attitude that causes her to smile a condescending, confident smile (after all, the crowd there is on HER side) at protesters — protesters I didn’t even notice until she called attention to them — and tell them that they should stick around and maybe they would learn something. If a 65-year-old male intellectual with a distinguished public career said that to a crowd, everyone would understand it was ugly and contemptuous. But Sarah is so charming about it, so disarming! How could it be ugly?

Her evocations — echoed by Nikki — of traditional, plain values (and complementary exhibition of contempt for anyone who disagrees) seem so positive and good and right to the crowd that cheers such lines as Nikki’s about how good it is that traditional politicians are “afraid” (which, coming from different lips, would send a chill down spines). They don’t see the ugliness. After all, see how lovely the package is! See how they smile!

The thing is, I probably agree with these people about so much that they are FOR — traditional moral values, hard work, family, patriotism. And mine isn’t your left-handed liberal kind of patriotism (you know, as in “I oppose the war and criticize my country because I’m a REAL patriot,” etc.). No, in fact, my own kind of patriotism is probably even more martial and militaristic than that of these folks, if that’s possible, given my background. And I would never take a back seat to any of them in my belief in American exceptionalism. I may not like the smug way they talk about these things, but the values are there.

It’s the stuff that they’re AGAINST that leaves me cold. Paying taxes. Government itself. Moderation. Patience with people who disagree. Experience. Deep understanding of issues. They are hostile to these things.

And their certainty, their smugness, is off-putting in the extreme.

But as I stood there in that crowd and listened to the cheers at almost every questionable statement those smiling ladies muttered, I despaired of ever being able to explain any of this to these folks, of ever having a meeting of the minds. It’s THEIR alienation that makes me feel so alienated…

And that’s what has me down. I hope it will pass. But it wasn’t a good way to spend a Friday evening.

Knowing how to stand at the plate is a GOOD thing

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So the other day I saw this WSJ front page, and the thought I had immediately was, “Well, she certainly knows how to stand at the plate.” And I almost posted that, but then my threat receiver went off. I could see me getting it from the feminists on the one hand — “You mean, … for a girl’…” And yeah, I guess that’s what I did mean, so that was only going to lead to more trouble.

Then I’d get hit from another direction because somebody would say I was suggesting Ms. Kagan was a lesbian. Which would lead to a lot of “no I’m not, but what if I was; are you saying that would be bad” yadda yadda and I just didn’t want to go there. So, as happens with nine out of 10 ideas for blog posts, it got dropped.

Now, I see that the WSJ has gotten into hot water over the picture for that very reason (and yeah, I’m behind on this “news;” I just saw an old Drudge Tweet about it while looking for something about her views on the Bill of Rights, silly me):

A spokeswoman for the Wall Street Journal said today its cover art was not intended as innuendo about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s sexual orientation after the paper’s front-page use of an image of Kagan playing softball provoked a mixture of irritation and amusement from gay and lesbian advocates.

“It clearly is an allusion to her being gay. It’s just too easy a punch line,” said Cathy Renna, a former spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who is now a consultant. “The question from a journalistic perspective is whether it’s a descriptive representation of who she might be as a judge. Have you ever seen a picture of Clarence Thomas bowling?”

The vintage of the image, released by the University of Chicago, was a particular source of questions in the context of persistent, public chatter about the nominee’s sexual orientation. This isn’t exactly a whispering campaign, as the question — no longer particularly scandalous — has made it to the Washington Post and widely-read websites. White House officials have denied, on background, that Kagan is a lesbian.

“I think it’s strange that you’d go back 17 years to dig up a photo of someone who’s one of the most photographed women in the world today,” said Jenna Lowenstein, communications director for the National Stonewall Democrats.

“Personally I think the newspaper, which happens to have the largest circulation of any in the U.S., might as well have gone with a headline that said, ‘Lesbian or switch-hitter?'” grumbled the Dallas Voice’s John Wright.

The Wall Street Journal’s sister papers in the News Corp. empire are famous for cheeky cover photographs and thinly-veiled innuendo, and the Journal appeared to cross into the same territory earlier this year when it inserted a picture of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger into a photo array accompanying an article on feminine-looking men.

But Journal officials ridiculed a question about the image, which also appeared among other photographs in the Times’s coverage of Kagan.

“If you turn the photo upside down, reverse the pixilation and simultaneously listen to Abbey Road backwards, while reading Roland Barthes, you will indeed find a very subtle hidden message,” said Journal spokeswoman Ashley Huston.

“I think your question is absurd,” said Journal Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray in a separate email.

Oh, boy. All we need. Then I saw this from today, also brought to my attention by Drudge (who seems obsessed with the nominee’s sexuality):

By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2010 The White House ripped CBS News on Thursday for publishing an online column by a blogger who made assertions about the sexual orientation of Solicitor General Elena Kagan, widely viewed as a leading candidate for the Supreme Court.

Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration aide and Republican Senate staffer, wrote that President Obama would “please” much of his base by picking the “first openly gay justice.” An administration official, who asked not to be identified discussing personal matters, said Kagan is not a lesbian.

CBS initially refused to pull the posting, prompting Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director who is working with the administration on the high court vacancy, to say: “The fact that they’ve chosen to become enablers of people posting lies on their site tells us where the journalistic standards of CBS are in 2010.” She said the network was giving a platform to a blogger “with a history of plagiarism” who was “applying old stereotypes to single women with successful careers.”

Sheesh.

Back to the photograph: Personally, I thought it was a flattering picture that put her in a positive light. Hey, not enough people know how to address the plate properly nowadays, including a lot of guys. So put this in the nominee’s plus column, far as I’m concerned. I’d pick her for my team.

bradwarthen.com

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