Category Archives: Media

Guess I’ll be watching this convention on TV, too

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I'm hoping the Democratic Convention will be more engaging than this was.

I was at the movies with my younger son Sunday afternoon watching “The Bourne Legacy” (which I’m sorry to say I found far less engaging than “The Bourne Identity”), and the character played by Rachel Weisz had just been introduced when my phone started buzzing.

It was E.J. Dionne. I stepped out into the corridor to see what was up. He was just driving down from Washington, taking the scenic route through the Shenandoah Valley, one of the most beautiful drives in America (I drove that way many times when my youngest daughter was studying at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet). But E.J.’s not the kind of guy who finds pleasant vistas enough occupation for his hyperactive mind, so he wanted to chat.

The first thing he asked was whether I would be crossing the border this week, and I had to think a second before realizing he meant heading up to Charlotte.

Nope. I’m not. Or at least, I don’t think so. Ever since the DNC venue was announced a year or so ago, I had had it in my mind that since it was just up the road, I might bop up for part of it. But since that didn’t require any preparation, I made none. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I emailed Amanda Alpert Loveday with the SC party to see about credentials. That’s the way I had arranged it the couple of times I went to conventions before — just contact the state party, since it’s the state delegation I’d be following. But she said, “Press credentials were required to be requested by April and they are done by the Convention staff.” April? Like I’m going to prepare for an impromptu drive up to Charlotte in April?

I could still go. After all, when I’ve covered conventions in the past, I may have entered the actual hall where the convention was going on a couple of times total. But then, having those credentials did help get me into other places as well. Add to that the fact that the events worth being there for tend to happen early in the morning or very late at night — delegation breakfasts, and after-session social gatherings — and it just seems really inconvenient to try to cover any of it from home.

So I’m going to stick to Columbia, and watch the speeches on the Tube, just as I did the one in Tampa.

What do I expect to see? Well, I’ll tell you what I hope to see.

I hope to see a party that’s reaching out to independents and undecideds — a party that emphasizes things that pull Americans together — rather than a party that’s firing up its base with its ginned-up “War on Women” and other Kulturkampf flashpoints. You say there are no undecideds? Well, E.J. and I were talking about that, and he referred me to this analysis by ABC showing a large number of “persuadable voters:”

One in four registered voters may be persuadable in the 2012 presidential election – rich pickings if either Barack Obama or newly minted GOP nominee Mitt Romney can win their support. But doing so may be a challenge, requiring both subtle and substantive political persuasion.

That’s because persuadable voters, as identified in this analysis for ABC News, are less apt to be ideologically committed ones, and more likely to take middle-ground rather than strongly held positions on issues such as Obama’s job performance, Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan and their own partisan views.

Good to hear that I’m not alone. OK, we’re out here — so persuade us.

Dick Harpootlian says Jim Clyburn’s role in speaking tonight is to “excite the troops.” That’s exactly the sort of garbage I don’t want to hear. Guys, you don’t have “troops.” You’re not in a war. You are in a marketplace of ideas, and you’d better have some that are compelling to people outside that convention hall.

Anyway, that’s what I’m looking for. How about y’all?

Enjoying reading about the last time I was this ticked off

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At my desk at The State, evincing one of those moods./file photo from 2007

Today, grumpily wondering whether I’ll find the Democratic Convention next week as vapid, monotonous, insulting and obnoxious as I did the sliver of the GOP convention I listened to last night, I was reminded of column I wrote four years ago.

If past is prologue, it would seem the answer to my dreary question is “yes.”

That column, which ran on Aug. 31, 2008, was headlined, “Yelling at the television.” If you go back and read it, it will tell you what the rest of this week and all of next week will be like, if you find the parties as disgusting as I do.

A favorite excerpt:

What sets me off? Oh, take your pick — the hyperbole, the self-importance, the us-against-them talk, the stuff that Huck Finn called “tears and flapdoodle.”

Take, for instance, this typical bit from Hillary Clinton’s speech:

My friends, it is time to take back the country we love. And whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team. And none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. This is a fight for the future. And it’s a fight we must win together. I haven’t spent the past 35 years in the trenches… to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise…

Let’s deconstruct that a bit.

Take back the country? From whom? Did I miss something? Did the Russians roll right on through Gori and into Washington? No? You say Americans are still in charge, just the “wrong” Americans, of the wrong party? But your party controls Congress! Take it back from whom?

… a single party with a single purpose. Now there you’ve hit on the biggest lie propagated by each of the major parties, the conceit that there is something coherent and consistent about such loose confederations of often-incompatible interest groups. Did you not just spend the last few months playing with all the force you could muster upon those very differences, those very tensions — between feminists and black voters, between the working class and the wine and cheese set? What single purpose, aside from winning an election?

This is a fight… No, it isn’t, however much you love to say that. Again, I refer you to what the Russians are doing in Georgia — that’s a fight, albeit a one-sided one.

… that we must win together. Actually, that raises a particularly pertinent point, which is that the only “fights” that “must” be won are the ones in which “together” is defined as all Americans, or all freedom-loving peoples, whereas such divisive factions as your party and that other one that will meet in St. Paul militate against our being able to win such fights together.

I haven’t spent the past 35 years in the trenches… You’re absolutely right; you haven’t. So spare us the war metaphors.

… to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise… Like that’s what matters, the stupid party label. Like there isn’t more difference between you and Barack Obama in terms of philosophy and goals and experience and what you would bring to office than there is between John McCain and Joe Biden. Come on! Please!…

Sigh. Fume. Mutter.

Yep. I was thinking almost identical thoughts last night watching this convention.

I was pretty disgusted back then. Now, I enjoy reading about how disgusted I was. I always find that my writing improves with distance…

Yay! We can stop saying ‘presumptive’ now!

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Just got this bulletin on my phone from AP:

Republicans nominate Mitt Romney for president.

No, really. They interrupted my day to tell me that. I guess if you’re still out there in the MSM, and you’ve been forced by your cautious editors to type “presumptive” several hundred times in the last few months, this is a big moment.

Lots o’ skin: The State apparently trying to compete with Will Folks on HIS turf

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Combined, the two galleries from this event include more than 250 images.

That’s all I can conclude from the fact that this photo gallery from the “Bikini Contest Finals at Jillian’s” has been prominently displayed page on thestate.com’s home page for the past two days (that I’ve noticed).

There are actually two galleries offered, totalling more than 250 images. Most are less salacious than this one, which to me invokes the Bada-Bing.

Make of this what you will.

Oh, and yes, the thing about Fitsnews is a joke. People say that Will gets his traffic from the cheesecake pictures. I defend him, saying that Will is read by so many because he works hard to break news. That said, I did think of his site when I saw this.

Today is the second day this has been featured on the home page.

Yes, a conservative party would be good to have

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Vice President Thomas R. Marshall famously said, “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” Which is debatable.

Less questionable is what Tom Friedman asserted in his latest column, in which he argued that what this country could really use is an actual conservative party. I agree. (In fact, it’s sort of what I’m getting at when I talk about my Grownup Party.)

Nowadays, what was once a home for conservatives has been almost completely commandeering by radicals, he says, and he’s right. Conservatives, true Tories, don’t despise and tear at the basic fabric of civil society. On the contrary, they defend and maintain institutions (of which government is but one). They don’t attend rallies waving snake flags. That’s what revolutionaries do, which is where these latter-day folks got their flag, and the name of their movement. That’s fine if you want to be a revolutionary; it takes all kinds to make up a world. Just don’t call yourself a conservative. And don’t label actual conservatives as “in-name-only.”

Friedman suggests that a real conservative presence in our politics could help us deal meaningfully with the four great issues of the day, which he deems to be “the nexus of debt, taxes and entitlements…[;] how to generate growth and upgrade the skills of every American in an age when the merger of globalization and the information technology revolution means every good job requires more education; how to meet our energy and climate challenges; and how to create an immigration policy that will treat those who are here illegally humanely, while opening America to the world’s most talented immigrants, whom we need to remain the world’s most innovative economy.

He notes that there are real conservatives out there, with useful ideas to contribute with regard to these issues. Such as our own Bob Inglis, so recently ridden out of his party on a rail:

Imagine if the G.O.P. position on energy and climate was set by Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina Republican congressman (who was defeated by the Tea Party in 2010). He now runs George Mason University’s Energy and Enterprise Initiative, which is based on the notion that climate change is real, and that the best way to deal with it and our broader energy challenge is with conservative “market-based solutions” that say to the fossil fuel and wind, solar and nuclear industries: “Be accountable for all of your costs,” including the carbon and pollution you put in the air, and then we’ll “let the markets work” and see who wins.

I told Bob last time I saw him that a new party, a way of running effectively for office outside of the present ideological madness, is exactly what this country needs, so that we can elect more people like him. He listened politely enough, but I fear he’s had his fill of electoral politics for awhile.

Anyway, Friedman definitely is onto something here.

Our governor’s latest immature outburst

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Har-de-har-har-har.

This morning, Corey Hutchins Tweeted:

Cue the @BradWarthen blog post about the governor and Gina Smith three days from now…

Yeah. Good one. Ha-ha.

Here’s the thing, folks — I long ago decided that it was better to write about something out-of-cycle than it was never to address it. And them’s the choices you gets, folks, more often than not. Other bloggers, fearing to be seen as slow, will drop an idea after a couple of days. And of course I DO drop far, far more than I’d like. But if I get a chance to go back to something,  I do.

The great thing about blogging is that there are no space limits, so you can write about everything you think of, and not be limited to, say, one or two columns a week. The terrible truth about blogging is that it’s impossible to find the time to write about everything that you think of.

I discovered that almost immediately when I started doing this in 2005. The original idea is that I would put EVERYTHING on the blog — my notes from every editorial board interview (most of which never got a mention in the actual paper), every opinion idea that I had but didn’t have room for in the paper.

But that proved impossible. So now I get to the things I get to, and that’s it. The sad thing is, many of my best ideas for posts never get written, because they would take too much time, while I toss up little throwaway things just to keep the plates spinning.

But still, when the occasion arises later, I try my best to get back to the good stuff.

Oh, by the way, here’s the thing that Corey was referring to:

State reporter Gina Smith asked Gov. Nikki Haley during her Charleston press conference Wednesday if Haley’s ethics proposals were part of an anticipated reform package by lawmakers and the state Ethics Commission.

“Gina, I am not going to answer any of your questions,” Haley responded, moving on to take other reporters’ questions.

Asked why Haley would not answer Smith’s question, Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey responded: “The governor believes respect should be a two-way street.”

Yes, it is. And it would be nice if the governor would grow up and start answering reporters’ respectful questions with matching respect, both to them and their readers. A two-way street indeed.

As is her wont, rather than stand up and tell reporters why she is acting like a middle-schooler, our young governor took to Facebook to air her innermost feelings (and you know, that’s what it’s all about — Nikki’s feelings):

In response to my refusal to answer Gina Smith’s question today: she is the same reporter that 1)wrote a Front Page, Above the Fold story about me being indicted, with no truth what so ever. 2)She went on to write a story about my 14 year old daughter without having the facts, against the urging of SLED Chief Keel that said it was unprecedented to write about a governor’s child knowing the safety concerns. Respect is a two way street.

Our virtual governor, in her comfort zone.

There’s nothing wrong with negative campaigning

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This is a favorite topic of Cindi Scoppe’s; let me see if I can beat her to the punch in saying it in this cycle…

There is nothing wrong with negative campaigning. Not a thing in the world. In fact, if there’s something wrong with your opponent that the voters ought to know in making their choice, and there’s a reasonable chance they don’t know it, you do them a disservice by not telling them.

Something that used to drive me nuts in endorsement interviews is when I’d begin the process knowing little about either candidate, and I’d ask one of them to compare and contrast himself and his opponent. Sometimes, the question was as simple and innocent as, “I haven’t met your opponent yet. What can you tell me about him?” The candidate would get all lofty and self-righteous and say, “I’m not going to talk about my opponent.” My reaction to that was, well, then, why are you here? There have to be reasons why I should endorse you and not the other guy; if you’re not going to help me in discovering what they might be, then you’re wasting your time and, closer to my heart, my time….

What sets me off on this minor tirade is that about an ago in my car, I heard a discussion on NPR about negative campaigning. A caller said he had worked in a campaign, and complained that people seemed unable to distinguish between telling what’s wrong with one’s opponent and “negative campaigning.” Well, pal, there’s a reason they can’t tell the difference — there is no difference, if language means anything. Criticizing your opponent is being negative. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

What’s wrong is misleading, unfair, irrelevant, out-of-context campaigning, or campaigning that plays on the emotions of the electorate, rather than their reason, in a way that is detrimental to one’s opponent’s electoral chances.

For instance… one of the examples mentioned during the radio program was the Willie Horton ad. What was wrong with that? Well, a couple of things. One, it’s ridiculous to try to condemn a governor because one person let out of jail in a program he supervised committed a terrible crime. If that’s your standard, then we would never, ever let anyone out of prison again, given the recidivism rates.

Eddie Murphy as Tyrone Greene

But of course, that wasn’t what was really wrong with that ad. What was really wrong was that everyone involved knew that what was really going on here was an appeal to race — saying Dukakis is soft on those people, and don’t you know you can’t give ’em an inch! The picture said it all. It was such easily understood cultural shorthand. It was the very archetype of the Dangerous Black Criminal. Eddie Murphy mocked this iconic visage, so frightening to the white bourgeoisie, in the skit in which his character, Tyrone Greene, recited his poem, “Images.” (You know, the one with the refrain, “Kill my landlord.”)

To bring it to the present day, acceptable negative campaigning is for Mitt Romney to “blame” the president for Obamacare, and make it clear that he would try to appeal it. What’s not acceptable is repeatedly lying in saying that the president has tried to do away with welfare-to-work requirements (a false charge that employs another racial stereotype, by the way — the black president who wants to undo welfare reform).

Similarly it’s perfectly fine for Obama to accuse the opposing ticket of favoring tax cuts that he opposes (although I could do without the “for the rich” mantra; it gets old). What’s unfair is to blame him for that woman dying.

Sometimes, in my more quixotic and masochistic moments, I think about running for office. I think about, just as an example, running against Joe Wilson for Congress (I think of that because I have no major problems with how my county councilman or state legislators represent me). And I imagine how the campaign would go. And I’ll tell you right now, I’d say negative things (how could any writer of my blog doubt it?).

But I’d be fair. The way I would approach it would be beyond reproach, in my book.

I’d say, first, that I like Joe. He’s a likable guy, and he’s always been nice to me. He sincerely believes in public service, and loves, more than anyone else I’ve ever seen (even Floyd Spence) being a congressman.

But… he is a walking, talking, hand-shaking representative of what’s wrong with Washington. He is a perfect representative of the partisanship that tears our country apart and paralyses our national government. If Joe has ever had an original thought that didn’t come right out of the Republican (or more recently, Tea Party) playbook, I wasn’t around when it happened.

My beef with Joe isn’t that he cried out “You lie!” We all get carried away sometimes. Why once (although when I was only 4 years old), I yelled right out in church, interrupting the preacher, and to this day when I visit Bennettsville, old folks mention it when they see me. Joe got carried away, and he knew he’d done wrong, because he immediately apologized for it.

So I don’t blame him for yelling out, not much anyway. What I blame him for is his deliberate, shameless, continuing effort over the past few years to capitalize on that wrong thing he did, to boast about it and remind folks that he did it, so that they will send him campaign money. That continuing, unapologetic pandering to some of the worst, lowest-common-denominator impulses in our political life, is what I’m running against…

And so forth. See, that’s relevant criticism. And it’s negative. But there wouldn’t be anything wrong with it.

Slate missed a good, timely angle on Darla Moore

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Darla Moore announcing another multi-million-dollar gift to USC, shortly after Nikki Haley dumped her from the trustee board.

To us South Carolinians, Darla Moore was a logical choice to break the gender barrier at Augusta National. And then Condoleezza Rice was sort of a case of, well yeah, that makes sense, too.

But this wasn’t just a South Carolina story, and apparently folks elsewhere don’t all know Darla. Slate tried to address that with something headlined, “Mini-Explainer: Who Is Darla Moore, Augusta’s Other New Female Member?”

The item was long on “mini” and short on explaining:

We’re guessing you’ve got a rather good handle on exactly who Rice is. (Hint: She’s the former secretary of state.) However, you’re probably not as familiar with Moore, a South Carolina financier who is the vice president of Rainwater, Inc., a private investment firm founded by her husband, Richard Rainwater, an American investor worth about $2.3 billion by Forbes magazine’s latest count.

According to the University of South Carolina, where Moore graduated from and where the business school bears her name, she is also the founder and chair of the Palmetto Institute, which describes itself as a nonprofit think tank aimed at boosting the per capita income of South Carolina residents. She’s also served on the boards of USC and the New York University Medical School and Hospital and was named to Fortune‘s list of the top 50 “most powerful” American businesswomen.

Her husband is now mentally incapacitated, struggling with progressive supranuclear palsy, a disease that Forbes explains is often mistaken for Parkinson’s disease, and strikes just six in every 100,000 people. His family is now funding research into a cure for the disease. CNN Money has that story here.

I would have liked to have seen a mention of the last time Darla was in the news — when Nikki Haley dumped this woman for whom USC’s business school is named in favor of a white-guy campaign contributor no one had heard of.

It would have been a great opportunity to give the world just a little perspective on our “first woman” governor, on the eve of her big moment speaking at the GOP convention. And it would have presented such a relevant contrast between the sort of woman of achievement who gets invited to join a club like this, and the sort who doesn’t.

Nyah, nyah! Your Catholics are as bad as ours!

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A columnist in The Wall Street Journal (“Social Justice and Ryan the Heretic“) this morning took on liberal Catholics’ criticisms of Paul Ryan. For a moment, my heart leapt at the prospect of a discussion of the meaning of “subsidiarity” (hey, some people get excited that football season is coming; go figure) but it was not to be. This piece existed on a more modest intellectual plane. It was more in the line of, “Oh, yeah! Well, so’s yer mother!”

That is to say, the writer was accusing the left of adopting such a position.

Here’s how the piece concluded:

Unfortunately, suggesting that Mr. Ryan is a bad Catholic is the entire case. Stuck with the fact of Mr. Biden, who has long since made his peace with the party’s absolutism on abortion, progressive Catholics know that it would be laughable to try to present Mr. Biden as faithful to church teaching. They know too that clarity about church teaching does not work to their advantage. The only way to take on Mr. Ryan is to tear him down.

In the past, the liberal Catholic vision sought to inspire. Today, in the pages of the venerable lay Catholic magazine Commonweal, a blogger tries to diminish Paul Ryan by saying, “like the rest of us, he is a Cafeteria Catholic.” Surely it says something about a movement when its most powerful argument against an opponent is this: You are just as lousy as we are.

Think about that. In another age, Catholic progressives would have laughed at the suggestion that people were corrupted by reading certain works; now they believe Paul Ryan’s soul is in peril for his having read Ayn Rand. Before, they would not have feared science; now they insist that a program such as food stamps ought to continue ad infinitum without consideration of its effects. And while they believe that the pope and bishops have nothing of value to offer about the sanctity of marriage or the duty of protecting unborn life, when it comes to federal spending, suddenly a miter means infallibility.

But while columnist McGurn accurately pegs the liberals, he comes up with little substantive defense of Mr. Ryan’s rather odd interpretation of Catholic social teaching, beyond quoting a column by Ryan’s own bishop saying that unlike on abortion, Catholics might legitimately disagree “on issues such as how best to create jobs or help the poor.” I think the bishop has a point. But I’d still like to see a serious discussion of how well Mr. Ryan applies Catholic principles.

Lacking such a ringing endorsement, we are left to conclude, if this is all the evidence we go by, that there is no “good Catholic” to be found on either ticket.

But let’s be optimistic. Let’s say that Mr. Ryan and Mr. Biden reflect different sides of the faith. Put them together, and pare away their objectionable positions, and you have one pretty good Catholic.

Paul Ryan, back before his voice broke

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Here’s one of those videos that proves that your memory is spot on — back in the day, everybody was really, really young.

You will see a 25-year-old Paul Ryan, early in his career as a, well, career politician, appearing on C-SPAN as legislative aide to then-Rep. Sam Brownback.

This is the sort of programming that people are talking about when they make fun of C-SPAN. If the date had been a decade or so earlier, I would have sworn all three of these kids — Ryan, the Democrat, and the moderator — were on Quaaludes. It’s like a contest to see which one can make the other two fall asleep first.

Of course, this is probably as excited as young Paul Ryan ever got, since the topics were the budget, Medicare and Medicaid. It’s… eerie to see him and these other two kids, dressed up like Daddy and looking and sounding every bit like participants in student government. I keep expecting the next topic to be the frat that’s on double-secret probation. Except that it never gets that interesting.

My favorite parts? When Master Ryan predicts Medicare will be “bankrupt” by 2001, and when he mentions a news story by “Knight Ridder,” which still existed then.

National media starting to get a clue about Haley

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I wasn’t familiar with Newsday columnist Lane Filler. Maybe The State runs him all the time, and I never noticed before. But when my friends there ran him yesterday, I found a good reason why in the 7th graf:

And Romney dodged the splashy picks that could have backfired like a 1986 Yugo: South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who, honestly, makes Sarah Palin look presidential, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a smart guy who is, unfortunately, best known for a State of the Union rebuttal in 2009 that would have garnered last place at a grade school Optimist Club speaking contest.

It’s nice to see someone outside SC picking up on the obvious. This guy needs to ditch Newsday and head down to Washington. I don’t think they’ve gotten the word there yet.

WIS takes media convergence to a new level

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wistv.com – Columbia, South Carolina |

It’s interesting — to me, anyway, as a longtime editor — to watch what’s happening as general-circulation newspapers do less of what they once did.

I recently had breakfast with Donita Todd, general manager of WIS, and her news director Rashida Jones (no, not that Rashida Jones, this Rashida Jones). They told me about some new things they were doing at the station, particularly their stepped-up investigative efforts.

But even if they hadn’t told me they were putting new effort into that direction, I would have noticed.

For instance, this morning, my attention was drawn (via Twitter, of course) to this story on the WIS website, by the station’s Jody Barr. An excerpt:

LEXINGTON COUNTY, SC (WIS) – A secret audio recording of Lexington town councilman Danny Frazier gives a detailed look inside an underground video poker operation working inside Lexington County. Frazier brags about his ability to operate illegal video poker sweepstakes businesses within Lexington County. A WIS investigation uncovers Frazier’s political connections and whether those connections are allowing him to continue doing business.

We obtained the recording from a source who secretly recorded a conversation with Frazier. The source posed as a businessman, interested in getting into the illegal video poker operation inside Lexington County. The source went undercover after fearing Lexington County law enforcement was purposefully ignoring and protecting Frazier’s operations. The recording links Frazier to at least two separate sweepstakes businesses, both near West Columbia.

The people who made the recordings tell WIS they have turned them over to state and federal authorities…

The recording indeed is fascinating. Of course, it raises a lot of questions in my mind that might not occur to some readers — questions the reporter would have had to answer for the story to get into any newspaper I ever edited.

We would have had a long, long conversation about this self-appointed Batman who went “undercover,” starting with the word itself. Can average citizens technically go “undercover?” Doesn’t the term refer to a law enforcement officer hiding the fact that that’s what he is? What does it mean when a layman does it? What are the implications? What sort of deception was involved, and to what extent does it expose the individual, or the media outlet that uses the product, to allegations of illegality? Who takes that upon himself, however lofty his motives? And speaking of that, what were his motives, and what does that tell us? (Ultimately, the test is whether the information is good, not the motives of the source. But knowing the motive could lead to relevant questions that I can’t even imagine at this point.)

And why are we concealing his identity? There may be a good reason, but I’d like to hear it.

I’d also like to know whether the recording, obtained as it was, could possibly have any value to the “state and federal authorities” to whom it was given. I don’t know enough to answer that question. Fortunately, it’s secondary to this story, but I do wonder.

There’s a Wild West sort of feel to this sort of investigative reporting, on its face. It reminds me of the way reporters so often are portrayed in fiction, starting with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen in the old “Superman” TV series. They were always taking it upon themselves to try to personally catch the bad guys, rather than simply report the story. Fortunately for them, Superman was always nearby to save them when the bad guys tied them up in an abandoned warehouse.

Of course, that’s only the way it looks to me from the outside. It could be that the folks at WIS who decided to go with this have very good answers to all of the questions I raise — I just can’t tell, as the reader.

There is one thing in the story that makes me feel better about reporting the contents of the recording — and I suspect is what made WIS management feel OK about the story — it’s that Danny Frazier, incredibly, “admitted to the recording.” Although I’m not clear on to what extent he did so, since he doesn’t admit to having said what the recording seems to show him saying. But let’s say he does confirm the legitimacy of the recording itself. This, of course, raises a bunch of other questions, such as: OK, if he knows the recording is legit, then doesn’t he know who was with him when he said those things? Does he not recognize the voice? In which case, tell me again why we’re not identifying the “undercover” guy…

Of course, to the casual reader, what we have here is a fascinating glimpse into the video poker bidness in 2012, and plenty of reasons to ask questions of Jake Knotts and Jimmy Metts. And that’s where Mr. Barr sticks to the book, asking those questions of each player and dutifully recording the answers. He got some great quotes:

The sheriff said he was too busy meeting and greeting voters to pay attention to who gave to his campaign, although the contributions were maximum contributions. “Very rarely do I look at the checks,” Metts said, “I do have access to who contributed to the campaign through the computer, but really and truly, I don’t go back and look at that.”

“If you held a shotgun to my head right now and told me you were going to pull the trigger unless I told you everybody who contributed to my campaign, you’d just have to kill me,” Metts said.

Several times during the interview, Metts denied any participation in or knowledge of any of the illegal video poker businesses in his county. “I know people say, in something like that breeds corruption, but I can tell you in no uncertain terms I am not a part of any Lexington County ring, I am not part of any illegal gambling. I don’t own. I don’t receive. I’m not involved. I’m not protecting anybody. As a matter of fact, [it’s] quite the opposite. I’ll put their [expletive] in jail.”…

Knotts admits Danny Frazier is a close friend whom he’s known for years, but denies any knowledge of protection for Frazier to continue to operate the illegal sweepstakes machines. “Do you have any involvement in what these tapes show that Danny Frazier may be involved in?” Barr asked. “None whatsoever,” Knotts replied.

“I’ve got contributions when I first ran, every time I’ve ever run and I don’t back away from it,” Knotts said of accepting campaign contributions from the video poker industry.

“If there’s any more money out there that any of those people want to send me, send it to me,” said Knotts. “I could take money from the devil and make it do God’s will.”

Bottom line, this new assertiveness by WIS, and by such others as the Free Times‘ Corey Hutchins, is bound to uncover a lot of fascinating stuff in our community going forward, however they go about it.

WIS is aggressively moving into the territory once held firmly by newspapers. For some time, of course, the text stories on TV websites have been more than mere come-ons for the video. And the networks, with their greater resources, have gone deeply into the realm of publishing the written word. But this sort of extended investigative report — 1,866 words, close to twice the length of one of my columns at The State — seems to go well beyond anything local television has attempted to do in the past.

The new stylebooks are here! The new stylebooks are here!

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I exchanged Tweets this morning with Paul Colford, director of media relations at The Associated Press. He was busily promoting the AP’s new U.S. Elections Style Guide, with tidbits such as this:

Election Day is uppercase; election night is not. See @AP’s new U.S. Elections Style Guide: http://bit.ly/Mrvs5u

I replied that I thought that had always been the rule, which caused Mr. Colford (see how I violated AP style there by calling him “Mr.”? I’m such a rebel) to respond that there was lots of other good stuff there.

I started looking into the subject, and saw that a whole new AP stylebook came out a couple of months ago, and I didn’t even know it. I’m not sure I even would have known it had I still been working at a newspaper. Aside from the fact that as editorial page editor I had long been deviating from AP style intentionally for years, I sensed that it wasn’t as big a deal as it had once been even among the mullahs of style orthodoxy.

(For those who have not spent their adult lives as journalists, perhaps I should explain: The AP stylebook is the guide to proper spelling and usage most widely accepted in print journalism. Newspapers that didn’t have their own full stylebooks — the vast majority — used it as their official bible, only issuing addenda for exceptions, local place names and the like.)

In my long-ago days as a copy editor (which was so long ago that I forget whether it is properly spelled that way or “copyeditor,” a lapse on my part that may be some sort of PTSD symptom), things were different. My colleagues and I who spent our days around the horseshoe-shaped desk at The Jackson Sun were really excited about the 1977 edition. We actually had a party at the managing editor’s house to distribute them. And there was much in this new release to satisfy the socially-challenged pedant. That was when the stylebook went, for the first time, from being a slim paper pamphlet that resembled the tracts that fundamentalists passed out with titles like “The Antichrist in Rome” to the thick, rich, spiral-bound volume that made it seem more like the Ultimate Answer to All Questions.

But that was then. In my last years at the paper, think I had one somewhere around my desk, but I almost never consulted it, and it was probably badly out of date. On the rare occasions when I looked something up to see what the style was so I could decide whether I wanted to follow it or not, I did so electronically. And yet I see one can still order the spiral-bound version.

Which is kind of nice. But it feels like almost as much an artifact of the past as those phone books that once so excited Navin Johnson.

Never forget the lesson of video poker

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Cindi’s column today (“The danger of video gambling isn’t the gambling“) about the problem with video gambling in SC today contained a paragraph that she would keep on a SAVE/GET key* if she still had one:

Video gambling was born of corruption. A powerful state senator, who would escape federal extortion charges only by dying before the indictments could be issued, slipped what he called a “technical” change into state law that legalized one of the most addictive forms of gambling on earth. Over the next decade, the rogue industry grew into one of the most potent political forces in our state by ignoring what meager laws we had and pumping hundreds of millions of dollars of its ill-gotten gains into political campaigns. At its heyday, it was admitting to revenue equal to half the state budget. It managed to take out a governor and nearly take over the Legislature.

The “powerful state senator,” of course, was Jack Lindsay, of Bennettsville, my hometown. And the way he got the “technical” change into law was via a proviso. Provisos are of course a terrible way to make state law, precisely because they’re a great way to sneak something past one’s colleagues.

What a lot of my readers — such as Bud — fail to understand about video poker is that the problem wasn’t the gambling, per se. Although it was indeed a particularly insidious and addictive form of gambling. The reason The State‘s editorial board turned against it was the way we saw it undermine and corrupt the legislative process. Toward the end, it was rare for lawmakers ever to dare try to effectively regulate or tax it, because they knew they’d face well-financed primary opposition if they did. (Which is why in recent years you’d sometimes see references to “school choice” as a latter-day video poker.)

They looked upon the fate of David Beasley and trembled. And despite what our governor thinks, a trembling Legislature is not actually a “beautiful thing.”

Any questions for Pub Politics tonight?

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Screenshot from my 7th Pub Politics appearance, in October 2011, with Phil (left) and Joel (right).

Just got this Tweet from Pub Politics:

@BradWarthen any questions for @joeldavidsawyer or Phil Bailey for tonights #E122QA? Let them shower you with knowledge and wisdom.

Nothing comes to mind immediately, but I thought I’d check with y’all.

As you probably know, @joeldavidsawyer is the former Mark Sanford press secretary (post-Will Folks) who helped run the SC campaign of Jon Huntsman before going to work as a consultant with Wesley Donehue, for whom he sometimes subs on Pub Politics.

Phil Bailey, of course, is the other regular co-host, who also works for the SC Senate Democrats. He is no longer known by his Twitter handle because of, you know, the “Sikh Jesus” thing.

So… any questions?

Michael Rodgers’ letter to the editor

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Since I am no longer paid to do so, I seldom read letters to the editor any more. So I appreciate that our own Michael Rodgers took time to call attention to his letter in The State yesterday, so that I might share it. Here it is:

Modernize our S.C. government

Cindi Scoppe’s Thursday column, “Why Haley won some, lost some budget vetoes,” correctly declares that Gov. Nikki Haley’s request to change budget numbers would upend what a governor is. However, with the way our state government functions, Gov. Haley’s request is actually a clever response. In effect, she is asking for one seat at the table with the six-member legislative conference committee.

This is turnabout as fair play, because the Legislature gets two seats at the five-member executive committee called the Budget and Control Board.

Obviously, having an executive legislate is as wrong as having legislators execute. By separating the powers, we can modernize our state government. The Legislature should set the mission (general tasks) and the scope (total budget not to be exceeded), let the governor and her agency heads execute, and vet the results by having oversight hearings. Thus the Legislature will give the executive branch the flexibility needed to accomplish legislative goals more efficiently.

Michael Rodgers
Columbia

And here’s my favorite excerpt from the column to which he was responding:

USED WELL, THE line-item veto is a powerful weapon to fight budgetary logrolling. In fact, used well, it can empower legislators as much as it empowers governors.

Although House members can reject individual spending items when the House debates the budget and senators can reject individual items when the Senate debates the budget, the final version of the budget often bears little resemblance to those early plans. It is the work of a conference committee of three representatives and three senators, and it is presented to the House and Senate as a package: Lawmakers can accept the entire thing, or they can reject the entire thing. They can’t amend it.

The governor can amend it by deletion — within reason. She can’t strike words out of provisos to change their meaning, and she can’t change the numbers, as she now says she should be able to do, but which would upend the whole idea of what a veto actually is. And what a governor is.

But she can eliminate entire spending items and provisos, which set forth the rules for some of the spending. And by doing that, she gives legislators the opportunity to consider those items individually, without having to worry that voting against them would result in a government shutdown.

This doesn’t automatically bust up the vote-trading coalitions — you patronize my museum, and I’ll love your parade — and in fact it can strengthen them if a governor goes after too many parochial projects, as then-Gov. Mark Sanford discovered. And rediscovered. And never quite learned. But sometimes it shines enough of a spotlight on ill-considered expenditures to force legislators to back down…

Nice job of repairing the ol’ Special Relationship there, Mitt. You trying to restart the War of 1812?

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Well, you know how that awful Obama person went and insulted our Cousins across the water by dissing the Churchill bust?

Fortunately, Mitt Romney, a.k.a. The Mighty Mighty White Man, hopped across the pond to set things straight.

Above was the result. That’s from The Sun. Very lively newspaper industry they still have over there. Here’s more on the subject.

Anyway, the White House has really, really been enjoying this. And and at least one of Romney’s likely supporters is highly dismayed:

As Charles Krauthammer, who is probably Obama’s most vitriolic foreign policy critic on the right, put it, Romney really didn’t have to do much more than show up for the trip to be a success. Instead, he opened his mouth and undermined both of his goals. Whatever the right might say about the Obama administration damaging the “special relationship” between the U.S. and U.K., Obama has never caused an incident like the one Romney did yesterday. As an exasperated Krauthammer remarked last night, “All Romney has to do, say nothing. It’s like a guy in the 100-meter dash. All he has to do is to finish, he doesn’t have to win. And instead, he tackles the guy in the lane next to him and ends up disqualified. I don’t get it.”

The news story that was (in part) about itself

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You may or may not have seen that the finished version of the story about the ramifications of Nikki Haley’s daughter getting a PRT job finally appeared in The State today. Of course, it was far more involved and complete than the “draft” version that appeared inadvertently on the web pages of The Rock Hill Herald and (so I’m told) The Charlotte Observer last week.

In the end, the story turned out to be almost as much about itself as about the suggestion of nepotism.

While nothing can really erase the embarrassment for the newspaper of readers knowing about the story for a week before it appeared, the editors did everything they possibly could to make up for it. Most importantly, they thoroughly explored the ridiculous “controversy,” generated by the governor herself, about whether it should be published.

I particularly like the sidebar box that lists all the perfectly rational, professional questions that the newspaper had been asking the governor’s office from the beginning of this silly saga, followed by the immature, petulant, emotional statement from the governor’s office, refusing to answer those questions — all of which a public official who actually does believe in transparency would have answered immediately. Let’s quote that sidebar in full:

Questions, but no answers

Emailed questions sent by a State reporter to the governor’s office on Monday, July 16. (The State has removed the name of the governor’s daughter in the email exchange below.)

Here are my questions about (NAME REMOVED) Haley working at the State House gift shop:

When was she hired? When she did she start work? Will she continue to work at the shop after school starts?

What are her duties?

How many hours a week does she work?

How much is she paid?

Is this her first job?

Who does she report to? How many people work at the shop?

Was this job posted to the public? (If so, can I see a copy of the posting?)

Was the job budgeted? (If not, how was this job added and funded?)

Were work hours of shop employees adjusted to accommodate (NAME REMOVED)?

Why did her parents choose the gift shop as a place to work?

Some people might not think it’s fair for (NAME REMOVED) to have a job tied to a state agency where the director is appointed by her mother (PRT). Response?

If the governor’s office has concerns about (NAME REMOVED)’s safety, about the public knowing where she works, why does she have a job at one the state’s most-prominent and most-visited historical sites?

Would she have needed additional security if she got a job outside the State House?

The governor’s office response

Sent on Tuesday, June 17

What follows constitutes our office’s response for any story you plan to write regarding (NAME REMOVED) Haley.

Quote from Rob Godfrey, Haley spokesman: “The State newspaper – the reporter who wrote it, editors who approved it, and ownership who published it – should be ashamed for printing details of a fourteen year old’s life and whereabouts, against the wishes of her parents and the request of the Chief of SLED, who is ultimately responsible for her security. We have nothing more to say.”

Quote from South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel: “I have expressed my concerns, as of yesterday, that publication of information regarding minor children of elected officials creates problems for State Law Enforcement and its efforts to provide security for the children of this governor or any governor. In my 30 years-plus of experience at SLED, the security or activities of minor children of elected officials is something that the media in general has taken a ‘hands off’ approach to in reporting except as officially released by the elected official’s office.”

Did the newspaper manage to convey to you that it was going out of its way not to name the child, or do you need to get hammered over the head with (NAME REMOVED) a couple more times? No? OK, good, we’ll move on…

The story was unaccompanied by editorial comment (unless you count Mark Lett’s statement of the newsroom’s thinking on publishing the story), but for anyone able to put two and two together, the lesson to be learned here is obvious: This governor, when backed into a corner, will use hypocritical obfuscation in an effort to manipulate an emotional backlash reaction from her base so that she can hide behind it, rather than give straight answers.

Most telling on that score was the fact that Gov. Haley herself has consistently disclosed information about her children and their doings, even to providing the name of her daughter’s orthodontist — and yet has the nerve to (apparently) induce the head of SLED to say, absurdly, that disclosing that her daughter has a job that is just outside the governor’s office and protected by more than one layer of security somehow threatens her safety. Yes, any information published about any person’s whereabouts could, conceivably, make that person marginally less safe. So maybe the governor will think about that in the future when she posts on Facebook.

Substantively, in terms of the bare bones of the original story, what this story contained that last week’s draft did not were some basic facts that Nikki provided to the Charleston paper after refusing to answer The State (more petulance): such as her daughter’s hours, and what she was being paid. (Actually, the Charleston story turned out to be less about the governor, and more about the continuing, puzzling absence of the story from The State.)

No one who brought the draft story to my attention ever mentioned the one significant fact that was missing from it: What the child was being paid, or even whether she was being paid. This seems to be what held up the story. I think that’s a lousy excuse to hold the story– I would simply have written, we don’t know whether she’s being paid because the officials who should tell us refuse to — but it does seem to explain the delay. As soon as it had that information, from the third party, the paper ran the story.

Nikki Haley will continue, to the extent she acknowledges this story’s subject, to try to dupe her base into rage that the paper intruded on her child’s privacy.

But to anyone with even a rudimentary capacity for reason, it should be obvious that this story, now that it has finally appeared, is not about a child. It’s about the governor’s childishness.

Only Robinson Crusoe did it alone — and then only until Friday came along

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And note that not even he made the musket, or the hatchet.

Since I’m not at the paper any more, it fell to Cindi Scoppe to write this column that ran today, basically addressing the orgy of indignation among the libertarians who call themselves conservatives over President Obama’s unfortunate choice of words in explaining the painfully obvious fact that practically no one in our crowded, interdependent world achieves anything worthwhile alone:

A LOT OF what the president says and does is ripe for criticism. But what he said the other day about no one being an island, about how our parents and our communities and our teachers and mentors and, yes, our government all contributed to our success is not one of those things.

If you’re wondering who in the world would criticize such obvious commentary, it’s because you don’t recognize the full context of that bizarre, ridiculous, one hopes bungled quote that came in the middle of it: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”…

Of course business owners built their businesses — unless they inherited them or bought them from someone who did. Their initiative and hard work and luck set them apart.

As important as parents are to our success, one sibling can create a multi-billion-dollar business while another languishes on welfare. As much as we need good teachers, even the best have some students who drop out of school. Although government policy can give some businesses a leg up, others can go bankrupt even with too-generous government grants.

That’s because some people have initiative, and some do not. Some people are creative, and some are not. Some people are smart, and some are not. And while the schools can affect which group any individual is in, government does not eliminate those basic differences.

At the same time though, the vast majority of people who own businesses would not have been able to do that if we didn’t have a monetary system and a court system and roads and police and other functions of government. The vast majority of people who have any sort of success would not have it in a world without government. In fact, they wouldn’t have it if not for the peculiar kind of government that our country embraced from the start: self-government.

Can, and should, our government be more efficient? Of course so. Is there room to debate whether the government should bail out the banks or the auto industry or help pay for our medical care? By all means. Is there a legitimate question as to whether taxes are too high or too low? Certainly.

But the vast majority of Americans would not have the lives we take for granted — lives that are inconceivably luxurious compared to the lives lived by the overwhelming majority of people throughout human history — if it weren’t for our flawed but better-than-any-alternatives government.

Seems to me Cindi was being slightly over-cautious in saying that only “the vast majority of people” would have gotten nowhere without the basic conditions — civil order, rule of law, basic infrastructure — that are provided through the processes we call “government.” I suppose there are some to whom that doesn’t apply, but very few. It’s even harder to think of anyone who accomplished anything worthwhile completely and utterly alone — without anyone, whether you’re talking about government or not.

I suppose there’s Robinson Crusoe — that is, until Friday came along. This reminds me of an economics exercise we did in high school. We had to suppose we were stranded on a desert island, and we had to allocate our resources — which included time, and effort — so as to survive. This much time building a shelter out of available materials meant that much less time spent gathering food. X amount of time spent making a tool that would facilitate building that shelter cuts the construction time, leaving more time to weave a net to make fishing easier, etc.

A castaway who is completely alone can create something useful — to him, anyway — without anyone else’s involvement. But a business, in our crowded society? Well, to start with, you have to have customers. And then, depending on your business, there are suppliers, and vendors providing services that it would be inefficient to perform yourself. And as you grow, there are employees who become essential to your further growth, etc. Without the willing participation of those often vast networks of people, you can work and create all you want, but you’re not getting anywhere.

The extreme libertarians would put government in another category from just “people.” But in our system, the government and the people are the same thing. “Government” is just the word for the set of arrangements that we have among us, the people, for handling certain things that are best handled that way, such as building roads or deepening a port or passing and enforcing the laws without which the concept of private property is meaningless.

In fact, if I had a quibble with Cindi’s column, it would be that, in her litany of things for which government is essential, she kept referring to government as “it.” As in, “It creates and maintains a monetary system,” and “It provides a civil justice system…”

Given the screwy way so many of our neighbors these days think of government, that can be misunderstood as government being some separate entity that provides certain things to us, the people. But it’s not that at all. A better word than “it” would be “we,” because government is simply the process through which we create and maintain a monetary system, provide a civil justice system, and so forth.

Government does not give or take away. It’s just the arrangements through which we, the people, do certain things that we decide, through our system of representative democracy, are best done that way.

Driveby Beat, Hawaiian Style: Thanks for sharing, Burl!

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On a previous post, I noted that years ago I lobbied for creation of a “driveby beat” at The State — to have a reporter dedicated to answering people’s understandable curiosity about things they drove by and wondered about in the Midlands. It would have been a wonderful way to root the paper and readers solidly in the community, aside from telling people something they actually wanted, and occasionally perhaps even needed, to know.

Also, it would satisfy my own curiosity about a lot of things, which to my mind was, to a great extent, what reporters were for. There was always that.

Anyway, it never happened — although I saw that today, The State actually did have a story about what was going on at the State Fairgrounds, which I had driven by and wondered about just yesterday.

Anyway, when I brought it up, Burl Burlingame noted that he actually used to have such a beat, which was his idea (it must have been subliminal planted in both our brains at Radford High School) at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Here and here and here are some links.

And here’s an excerpt from his “Wat Dat” (I don’t think I’ll have to translate that pidgin for you) feature:

Somebody whose name we can’t read – but who does draw a nice map – was curious about a brown statue or chimney standing at the end of row of trees just north of the Mililani exit.
It is a statue, and it’s of a tree trunk, rising more than 30 feet above a circular grassy platform, which is in turn surrounded by a large gravel walkway, which is atop a tall wall – kind of a rounded ziggurat – which is accessed by a grand tile stairway, which is approached by carefully tended Japanese gardens, which are guarded by carefully repaired antique marble Chinese lions, which are flanked by enormous granite slabs, which cap hobbit-like stools and benches that seem to be made out of logs but are really cast cement, which are parked beneath a series of carefully tended trees, which have the names of local politicians inscribed upon signs at the foot of each.

The area is grand and imposing, and at the same time intimate and quiet. It’s also generally deserted, which adds to the otherworldly experience.

This is one of the WatDatiest of WatDats to come along in some time!

The site is the local mission of the Honbushin Honbu, a Shinto religious sect with nearly a million followers, mostly in Japan. There is also a mission in China…

The “sculpture” is a koa log that seems to be protected by a coat of brown paint. It’s called “GENTEN,” which, translated from Japanese, means roughly “starting point” or “origin.”

The sculpture represents nature and the unity of hearts, religions and countries that work toward peace. Honbushin missionaries regularly gather around the genten and pray…

Of course, in Hawaii, the stuff you drive by and wonder about has a tendency to be slightly more exotic than what we have around here…