Category Archives: The State

Preview of Sunday page

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

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

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

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

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

Be sure to read the paper Sunday.

The troubles with ethanol

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One reason we need to pursue every potential avenue in trying to achieve greater energy independence (and save the planet) is that some of the things we try are going to fail. Others are going to turn out to be bad ideas. The sooner we know that, the better.

Most of us now know that about ethanol. But in case you thought that the only reason why it’s a bad idea is that converting cropland to growing energy instead of food leads to famine for millions and higher food prices for everybody else (as if that weren’t enough), Venkat Laksmi provided a more complete list for us today on our op-ed page. An excerpt:

    …Ethanol is not a long hydrocarbon chain like gasoline, and as a
result it is only two-thirds as efficient as gasoline. In other words,
a gallon of ethanol will provide two-thirds of the energy of a gallon
of gasoline. Ethanol mixes with water, which is not the case with
gasoline, which means the transportation systems used for gasoline
(i.e. pipelines and trucks) cannot be used for ethanol.

    Additionally,
there is a lot of inefficiency in the production of ethanol. For
example, corn-based ethanol requires 54 percent of the energy to
process the corn into ethanol and 24 percent to grow the corn. As a
result, there is a return of only 30 percent or so of the energy,
making this inefficient as compared to conventional gasoline, which
produces five times the energy required to produce it, and even
biodiesel, with its 93 percent efficiency. Even though biodiesel is
efficient, it has a long way to go for large-scale production….

USC president: They’re doing it again

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As you saw in today’s paper, the USC trustees might, if they feel like it, tell us who their three "finalists" for president of the university are. Then they plan to make their final selection Friday.

In other words, they’re presenting us with the next thing to a fait accompli, with virtually no time for the community (and in this case, "community" includes the state of South Carolina) to react and offer input.

As it happens this is precisely what we told them not to do in this editorial on our June 22 editorial page.

Could it be that they ignored us, again? Naaahhhh….

Since we’re all being kept in the dark, here are my predictions of who the three will be. We’ll see how many I get right (probably none, but I have no money bet on this, so who cares?):

  1. Harris Pastides
  2. Andy Card
  3. A Woman. No, I don’t have a name; I’m just saying one of the three will be a woman.

Yeah, I got the first two from today’s story. Of course, they’re the two who’ve been most often mentioned in the past. But the very fact that we all think we have reason to believe those two are finalists probably means that they were long ago eliminated from consideration, just because the trustees want to rub our noses in just how much in the dark we are, and what little regard they have for us and what we think we know…

Last of the Cosmic Ha-Has

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Just got a note from Bill Robinson about the post featuring his farewell message:

Your post about me was truly "Cosmic." …. Ha-Ha!

Get it?

Indeed I do. At the going-away gathering for Bill and the other 10 on Thursday, it suddenly occurred to me that he was (by my reckoning, and I stand ready to be corrected) the last of the Cosmic Ha-Has in the newsroom.*

Bill thought for a moment, and realized I was probably right. He was impressed: "That’s sort of like being the last of the ’27 Yankees."

Sort of — if you really stretch the point.

The Ha-Has were a slow-pitch softball team that consisted mostly of guys who worked in The State‘s newsroom in the 1980s. It was a team that, had you seen it play, would have convinced you that here was a team totally focused on the pitcher of beer after the game.

Not that we didn’t have some serious players. I remember this one kid who worked in sports (guys who work in sports, being frustrated spectators, can be some of your most intense players of slow-pitch softball) who hit hard and was a super-fast base runner, something he was not modest about: "I’ll teach ’em to throw behind me," he fumed after the opposing team had tried, late, to throw him out on second, and he zoomed around for an inside-the-park homer.

But most players — while having a love of the game, and preferring winning to losing, so long as it did not involve violating the laws of physics — had a certain ironic detachment about the team and its chances. Hence the name.

I joined in the late 80s, which — if the original Ha-Has were the ’27 Yankees, and I ask you to indulge me for the sake of making a point — would have been more like the late Mickey Mantle era. My best hitting days (when I played for the Knights of Columbus team in Jackson, Tenn., in the 70s, it was a bad night that I didn’t go at least 2 for 4) were behind me. Even in slow-pitch, which is a small step up from T-Ball, I no longer had confidence in my ability to hit line drives wherever I wanted. I was an undistinguished member of the pitching line-up, who was happier playing catcher. The qualifications for pitcher in slow-pitch are to be willing to a) have guys hit the ball back at you really hard from alarmingly close range, and b) suffer the humiliation of streaks in which you cannot get the ball to fall through the strike zone from the approved trajectory, thereby walking several batters in a row.

(I will add that there is nothing more infuriating than pitching in slow pitch and being up against a strategic-thinking team that would just as soon walk in runs as get hits. The entire point of slow pitch is that anybody can hit. You’re supposed to put the ball in play. If you want to walk, you can, because the truth is that it’s a lot harder to loft a ball up in the air and have it drop through a strike zone than it is to throw it overhand. In fact, it’s easier to throw strikes underhand in fast pitch than it is to throw slow-pitch strikes. Having guys stand there and take balls was enough to make me want to bean the batter, but in slow-pitch, who’d notice?)

The greatest humiliation that the Ha-Has suffered during my tenure had nothing to do with my pitching ability, though. One year, we were in a commercial-industrial sort of league. You have not seen lopsided until you’ve seen a bunch of scribes, some of whom were possibly passable athletes in high school (and that’s the best you can say), up against a bunch of hairy mesomorphs who spend their days tossing anvils to each other or something. If you play, say, church-league, you might see one guy in a season hit the ball over the fence, and that guy will be legendary — at least, in the church leagues I’ve played in. Different story in commercial-industrial.

You may think I’m making this up, but it’s true. In one game that year, every single member of the opposing team hit at least one home run, and some more than one, before the game was over. I think the "mercy rule" — if you’re more than a certain number of runs ahead after a certain number of innings, the game is called — was eventually invoked. Either that, or the "mercy rule" was invented because of this game; I forget. Something had to stop it, because we couldn’t, and if things had kept going at that rate, one of those huge specimens would have keeled over from the sheer exhaustion caused by running around the bases.

Some Ha-Has who played with Bill back in the Golden Age:

  • Charlie Pope — Who now works in the Washington bureau of a paper from the Pacific Northwest. Charlie was The State‘s environment reporter back when I was his editor. In those days, Charlie’s favorite movie was "A Flash of Green," in which Ed Harris plays a reporter who writes about environmental issues, and at a climactic moment in the movie stuffs his editor into the trunk of a car. I don’t have a current picture of Charlie, even though he dropped by recently because his son was thinking of going to USC. But to me, Charlie always looked vaguely like Tommy Smothers. You know, the funny Smothers Brother, not the straight man. I don’t think I ever told him that, come to think of it…
  • Dave Moniz — A player with his own personal language. Once, as I ran out to start warming up in the outfield before a game, Dave greeted me with a chipper, "Key lid!" It took me a couple ofMoniz_2 minutes to realize he meant that he liked my hat. Dave is now a civilian PR guy for the United States Air Force, with a civilian rate that is the equivalent of a brigadier general. The picture here shows him from a recent visit to our editorial board, at which he was joined by two guys wearing Air Force "yoonies" which was the way Dave used to say "uniforms." (Teams that had nice uniforms had "key yoonies," and so forth.) Dave was our military reporter before leaving to do the same for USA Today.
  • Jeff Miller — Also went to Washington to work in another paper’s bureau, but now does something else, also out of Washington. Miller Which reminds me — I owe him a call back. Anyway, Jeff’s first job for me was covering the 1988 Republican presidential primary, for which we brought him up from the Newberry County bureau (the journalistic equivalent of AAA ball at the time). He was still covering politics last time I saw him. One of his colleagues took the picture at right, of Jeff and me on a New York street on the last night of the 2004 GOP convention. This picture reminds me, for some reason, of the opening credits of "Saturday Night Live."

And now Bill moves on. But the legend continues.

* Note that I said "in the newsroom." For those of you who are still confused about the difference between news and editorial, I haven’t worked in the newsroom since 1993, so I don’t count.

Robert’s great Energy Party cartoon

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July_4_cartoon

Over the weekend I neglected to mention (in connection with my Sunday column on the subject) Robert Ariail’s wonderful cartoon of July 4, which states the Energy Party position with the same incisive relevance as the original Ben Franklin cartoon that inspired him did the cause of the Revolution.

And I didn’t even put him up to it…

A colleague’s goodbye note

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My longtime colleague Bill Robinson (I was his editor about 20 years ago) was one of the 11 journalists who stepped forward to accept a buyout offer to leave the newspaper as a cost-cutting measure. Even though he had been looking at relocating anyway, I know it wasn’t an easy decision.

His — and their — last day was Thursday, July 3. After he had left for the day, Bill sent the following message to all the news and editorial employees at The State. While Bill is a little younger than I am (he was in high school during Watergate; I was in college and already working as a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal), the values he expresses are those that have inspired a generation of journalists in this country. It is in that spirit that I share Bill’s message:

Dear colleagues:
     Thank you for laughing at the silly story about my first two days as a reporter at old The Columbia Record 23 years ago. As Mark Lett knew, I wouldn’t pass on an opportunity to have a final word.
    However, after attending the past several Hampton-Gonzalez award events, I knew I would be unable to compete with the oratorical eloquence of Sammy Fretwell, Carol Ward, Allison Askins and Rick Brundrett.
    But I wanted to leave you with a final thought or two …
    Richard Milhous Nixon was the POTUS when I was in high school and as history books note, he had a little problem called Watergate.
    Actually, his problem was with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, or as my J-school law class professor used to call them, collectively: "Woodstein."
    They are the reason a lot of journalists of my generation entered the profession. Being a reporter, as Sammy noted in his acceptance speech, was an opportunity to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted" — and get paid for it.
    I remember vividly reading that whenever Nixon had to give a speech about Vietnam, he would order the White House theater to provide him a private showing of the film "Patton." Nixon apparently was enamored with the George C. Scott’s opening sequence speech to get him fired up.
    I say this for a reason. Over the years, when I felt like the job was getting me down, I would pop into my VCR a now well-worn tape of "All The Presidents’ Men." Not because I was emulating Nixon; I did it to remind me why I got into the business.
    It always provided me a pick-me-up.
    Over the next few days or weeks, as you contemplate the future of print journalism, I strongly recommend that you go rent a copy of All The Presidents’ Men.
    Newspapers have value in this country and you all are on the front line. I wish I knew a way to wake people up and remind them about the important work The Washington Post and New York Times did reinforcing democracy in the mid-1970s. But I don’t.
    The Fox News Channel or any of the other TV broadcasters are not going to do what you are capable of delivering. I will be watching from afar.
    Best wishes and thank you again for all the kind words of support and praise over the past several days.

Bill Robinson

I have my own copy of "All The President’s Men" on DVD. But that’s no compensation for the loss to this trade of a guy who knows what it means.

What you get for griping about my specs

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Cropspecs3

Somebody started griping, irrelevantly, about my big ol’ round horn-rims back on this post, which led me to
point out that I used to wear smaller, round wire-rims, which made me remember that there used to be a mug shot of me wearing those on file down in the newsroom, which caused me to go look for it (and not find it), which caused me to run across the mug I just put up on my blog to replace the offending one with the big specs that I actually wear every day.

I’m not absolutely sure, but I think this one was taken when I first arrived at The State, from the Wichita paper, in 1987.

But hey, you’re the one who didn’t like the accurate, up-to-date one with the glasses. Or one of y’all was…

Anyway, the "new" one is what I really look like… in the sense that a soft-drink still costs a dime.

Oldbrad_2

Jeanette McBride’s underwhelming endorsement interview performance

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Week before last, I posted video from our interview with the other local runoff candidate who should not have won but did — Gwen Kennedy. If you’ll recall, I said at the time that getting her to provide a rationale for her candidacy was "like pulling teeth."

Today — a bit late to do any good, but then I wasn’t able to accomplish much with Ms. Kennedy even though it was ahead of time — I provide a similar clip of Jeanette McBride, who just ousted longtime Richland County Clerk of Court Barbara Scott. Here’s what I had to say about that outcome in my Sunday column:

    In the primary on June 10, we endorsed incumbent Barbara Scott,
since — and we saw no clear evidence to the contrary — she was doing an
adequate job running the courthouse, collecting child support payments
and overseeing the other routine duties of the office. She was judged
clerk of the year by the S.C. chapter of the American Board of Trial
Advocates, which surely knows more about the quality of her day-to-day
work than we do.

    Before making that decision, we considered endorsing Gloria
Montgomery — who had worked in the clerk’s office for years and seems
to understand it thoroughly (certainly better than we or most voters
do) — or Kendall Corley, who offered some interesting ideas for
improving service.

    But we never for a moment considered endorsing Jeanette McBride.
That’s not because Mrs. McBride is married to former state Rep. Frank
McBride, whose political career ended in 1991 when he pleaded guilty to
vote-selling in the Lost Trust scandal. We didn’t consider her because
she offered us no reason whatsoever to believe that she would do a
better job than Ms. Scott. She didn’t even try. She did not display any
particular interest in what the clerk of court does at all.

    She said, quite simply, that she was running because she thought
she could win. She did not explain what went into that calculation, but
so what? She was right.

    Her victory will inevitably be compared to the defeat of Harry
Huntley — regarded by many as the best auditor in the state — in
Richland County in 2006. And it will be suggested that both of these
incumbents were the victims of raw racial politics. Mr. Huntley and Ms.
Scott are white; Ms. McBride and Paul Brawley are black. A candidate
who can pick up most of the black votes in a Democratic primary is
increasingly seen as having an advantage in the county.

    I hope voters had a better reason than that for turning out
qualified candidates in favor of challengers who seemed to offer no
actual qualifications. In fact, I’m wracking my brain trying to think
of other explanations. Ms. McBride, in her interview, didn’t help with
that. And Mr. Brawley didn’t even bother to talk to The State’s
editorial board, so I have no idea what sort of case he made to voters.
I hope he made some really compelling, defensible argument. I just
haven’t heard it yet.

Mrs. McBride was somewhat more forthcoming in her interview than Ms. Kennedy was, but still rather vague. She seemed to be going through the motions with fuzzy observations about the clerk’s office having poor communication, or not being "inclusive" enough. One was left with the distinct impression that she was running, not because she had any clue how to run the courthouse better, but because she believed she could win. And of course, she was right.

Note how, at the end of the clip, she brightens considerably as she explains, with a contented shrug, that "I think the people will elect me." And that seemed to be what really motivated her.

Boy, don’t I feel morally superior!

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Boy, did it make me feel good to get this message from a colleague urging all members of the newspaper’s senior staff to take part in our upcoming blood drive:

All: Please consider setting a good example and donating blood at The State’s drive next Wednesday, July 9, if you’re able. We have about a dozen time slots left to hit our target of 26 units. Clink on the link in the first item on the intranet to book an appointment that fits your schedule. Thanks…

I was able to respond that I gave already (although not at the office)! And it’s not just a line! It’s true!

Do I get a medal or anything, or do I just get to gloat?

Jim Clyburn begs to differ on earmarks

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Today’s op-ed piece by Jim Clyburn is one of those responses that make it hard to recognize the original piece to which they are "responding." In this case, a lot of that is a result of the personality and political style of the man whose name appears on the piece. I invite you to go read the original editorial.

Mr. Clyburn asserts that The State "doesn’t understand" earmarks, but doesn’t support that. In fact, it’s hard to square this assertion in his piece:

 The State editors’ position on earmarking is based on erroneous
reporting, a lack of knowledge of the facts and a disregard for the
constitutional authority granted to Congress to have power over the
purse. I have always said and will reiterate here that my personal
agenda is to improve the quality of life for the residents of the 6th
Congressional District.

… with this passage from ours:

Mr. Clyburn did not invent congressional earmarks — a point his critics
too often overlook. They are no doubt as old as our federal budgeting
process, and their largest growth spurt came while Republicans
controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency. In a perverse way,
the fact that he is the most successful earmarker in the S.C.
delegation speaks to his clout. And it’s hard to argue when he says he
is serving the best interests of his constituents by pumping federal money into a district that was drawn to include our state’s poorest areas.

Indeed, our editorial was less about Mr. Clyburn and his particular earmarks, and more about the fact that such a system exists.

To find our real area of disagreement, look to the headlines. The one on our editorial is "Clyburn earmarks a microcosm of broken system." The one on the op-ed is "Earmarks serve the public good." And once he gets past his inaccurate complaints about what we said, he gets to the core of the issue, which is that he believes the proper way to appropriate federal funds for infrastructure and the like is via the interested guidance of influential members of Congress, not "unqualified political appointees," which I suppose is the Democratic moral equivalent of the nonpolitical "bureaucrats" that Republicans gripe about. (If all else fails, Blame Bush.)

Finally, I must take issue with the assertion that “if programs that get funded through earmarks were strong enough to stand on their merits, there would be no need for the local congressman to stick a note in the budget demanding that they be funded.” Let’s take a recent Washington Post report that illustrates what happened last fiscal year when there was a moratorium on earmarks.

In the absence of congressional action, funds in the Transportation Department’s discretionary budget were allocated by unqualified political appointees at the department — with no background or experience in public transportation — who chose to spend nearly $1 billion of taxpayer money on toll road experiments in urban cities. All the money was spent on seven projects in five states, not including South Carolina.

No money returned to the national treasury. No investments in rural communities. No investments in mass transit. No equity or fairness. It was a case of the triumph of ideology over the public good. The year before, thanks to earmarks, the same pot of money was spent on 442 grants in 47 states, and this year it is being spent on 313 projects in 43 states — and South Carolina has benefited from these funds.

We disagree. Mr. Clyburn sets up a false choice — either the old way of doing things (disbursement by political influence, which benefits the district of a guy who now has loads of such influence), or wicked Bush Administration privatization schemes. (At least, that seems to be the case. I’m assuming here that the WashPost piece to which he refers is the March 17 one headlined "Letting the Market Drive Transportation; Bush Officials Criticized for Privatization." That seems to fit his description.)

The proper way to select priorities for spending transportation funds is to let the NONpolitical professionals — i.e., "bureaucrats" — choose the specific projects most needed across the nation, according to overall criteria established by the Congress. Or don’t spend the money at all.

South Carolina has had a century of trying it the Clyburn way — Mendel Rivers, for instance, was no slouch at throwing federal largesse in the Palmetto State’s direction — and we’re still poor, still lagging behind the rest of the nation. Mr. Clyburn believes his approach is different in that it directs the money to previously neglected areas and constituencies, and it is. But that doesn’t make his the best way for Congress to set federal spending priorities.

Will these fare better than ‘Nailed?’ Let’s hope so

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As you may recall, we have questioned whether the money  S.C. spends trying to lure movie productions here is well spent. The Commerce Department does not question it, however, even after "Nailed" had to leave town after running out of money several times. You have to wonder whether an employer that keeps failing to pay its employees is the kind of business you want in town, even if one of the employees it brings in is a total babe.

But the Commerce Department doesn’t wonder. Here’s a release I got today:

S.C. Department of Commerce Announces Two New Feature Films Approved to Shoot in the Palmetto State

COLUMBIA, S.C. – June 25, 2008 – The South Carolina Department of Commerce today announced two new feature films have been approved to begin filming in South Carolina in 2008.  Both productions are quality family entertainment that will offer a positive reflection of South Carolina.
     “Band of Angels” is a Hallmark Production directed by Bill Duke.  The film traces the history of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers from their roots as a struggling opera company to their early success as gospel and spiritual singers.  It is set post Civil War and will be shot primarily in and around Charleston.
     “Dear John” was written by Nicholas Sparks and is a New Line studios production with Production Designer Sarah Knowles.  New Line studios and Knowles both worked on “The Notebook,” which was filmed in South Carolina in 2003.  “Dear John” will be directed by Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Julia Roberts, Dennis Quaid and Robert Duval in “Something to Talk About,” which was also shot in South Carolina in 1995.
     “Dear John” is the story of a soldier who falls in love with a conservative college girl who he plans to marry, but time and distance take their toll on the fledging relationship.  If the production company opts to move forward, the film will be shot in multiple locations along the South Carolina coast.
     “Both of these productions were recruited under the incentive guidelines revised by the Department of Commerce and the Coordinating Council for Economic Development.  As a result, the state did a much better job of utilizing our crew base in South Carolina. The film recruitment success this spring should end the debate that South Carolina needs to pay more to recruit more films to the state. The goal relative to film recruitment should be to lower the negative fiscal impact and create jobs for South Carolinians.  The productions recruited since the first of the year are a step in the right direction to achieve both goals,” said Joe Taylor, Secretary of Commerce.
     “Even with the national writers’ strike slowing productions around the country in the fall of 2007, South Carolina enjoyed its strongest spring of film recruitment ever.  With four feature films and a television series, our resident crew base has been virtually fully utilized.  The focus of film recruitment should be employing South Carolina residents and keeping the South Carolina crew base working is the strongest measure of film recruitment success,” said Daniel Young, Executive Director of the Coordinating Council for Economic Development. 
     “The New Daughter” completed filming along the coast in May and “Nailed” has completed production in the Columbia area.  “Army Wives” is still in production filming in Charleston.
     “Band of Angels” is currently in preproduction and is scheduled to begin filming in South Carolina soon.  Individuals interested in applying for work on the production should contact the South Carolina Film Commission or visit www.filmsc.com.
     “Dear John” has been approved for film incentives by the Coordinating Council for Economic Development.  The production company is still finalizing details concerning the production including the exact schedule.
                -###-

Notice how Commerce worded that: “Nailed” has completed production in the Columbia area.

That’s a funny way of putting it, in light of the facts.

Of course, I’m sure that there was some positive economic impact while the production lasted. I hear, for instance, that a certain underground bar across from the State House got so much business from cast and crew — including at various times Paul Rubens and a guy who was in "X-Men" — that they recently they had to shoo out some of the "Nailed" folks so they could close the place.

But as much as I love movies — and I do — we on The State‘s editorial board remain unconvinced that money spent in this sector is worth it.

Updating how our endorsees fared

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Here’s the final count on how candidates we endorsed did in the primaries, now that the runoffs are over. You’ll recall that I wrote right after the primaries June 10 that, depending on how runoffs and recounts went, between 66 percent and 88 percent of our preferred candidates won their parties’ nominations.

In the end, the official count is 19 out of 24, or 79 percent. As usual, here’s my disclaimer: Endorsements are NOT predictions. They are about who SHOULD win, not who WILL win. But since there are critics out there who persist in saying erroneously that our endorsees tend to lose because we’re "out of touch" with the voters, and because there are others out there who are merely idly curious, I’ve started doing these counts the last few elections years. So there you go.

Here’s the recap:

WON — We endorsed Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who won easily.
LOST — We said Michael Cone was slightly preferable to Bob Conley. Conley won — slightly.
WON — GOP Rep. Joe Wilson. 
LOST —  We favored Democrat Blaine Lotz in the 2nd District, but he lost to the less experienced and less knowledgeable Rob Miller.
WON — Democratic state Rep. John Scott seems to have squeaked by Vince Ford.
WON — Democratic Sen. Darrell Jackson will keep his seat.
WON — Asserting that the pro-voucher/anti-government groups
that are trying to intimidate our Legislature would claim credit if so
powerful an incumbent as GOP Sen. Jake Knotts were defeated, we reluctantly backed Jake for the first time ever.
WON — Richland County Council Chairman Joe McEachern wins the Democratic nomination for the seat Mr. Scott is vacating (District 77).
WON — Michael Koska was much more knowledgeable than his opponent for the Republican nomination in District 77.
WON — Republican David Herndon survived his runoff.
WON — Democratic Rep. Joe Neal’s
(District 70) depth of knowledge in education and health care is
impressive, to us and to the voters.
WON — Democratic Rep. Jimmy Bales’
(District 80) work as a high school principal gave him the real-life
understanding of the challenges of educating poor children that most
legislators lack.
WON — Democratic Rep. Chris Hart
beat back an attempted comeback from the incumbent he beat last time in District 83.
LOST — Republican Mike Miller seemed to us slightly preferable to the incumbent in District 96.
WON — Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott,
a Democrat, won easily.
WON — Ditto with Lexington County Sheriff James Metts.
WON — Democratic incumbent Damon Jeter has the experience in Richland County Council District 3.
LOST — This was a double loss — first Johnny Bland in the primary, and then Kiba Anderson in the runoff. But it’s a bigger loss for the voters in Richland CountyCouncil District 7.
WON — Republican Val Hutchinson was the better candidate in Richland District 9.
WON — In Richland District 10, Democrat Kelvin Washington will keep his mother-in-law’s seat in the family.
LOST — Richland County Democratic Clerk of Court Barbara Scott lost in the runoff to perhaps her LEAST qualified opponent.
WON — Richland County Coroner
Gary Watts (Democrat)
WON — Lexington County Republican Auditor Chris Harmon
WON — Lexington County Republican Clerk of Court Beth Carrigg.

‘The Russert Miracles:’ Hitchens is one peeved atheist

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Christopher Hitchens is right about one thing — the media go nuts when somebody famous dies. Sure, report the news. Eulogize if appropriate. But don’t go on and on about somebody who is neither a member of the reader’s/viewer’s family, nor even a casual acquaintance. It’s just too much. (Today, it’s George Carlin, who, thanks to his having gotten us to snicker at dirty words, is now a "comic genius" and a "necessary iconoclast," whatever in the postmodernist world THAT means.)

This is a point of contention — mild contention, but contention nonetheless — between Robert Ariail and me. Robert comes into my office saying, "I know you don’t like these, but I was thinking of having (place name of deceased celebrity or newsmaker here) at the gate with St. Peter, and…" And I will groan or say, "Well, if you must, but don’t ask me to like it…" Personally, I want cartoons to be funny, and have a political bite. I’m not into maudlin.

So I can sort of dig where Mr. Hitchens is coming from. The difference between him and me is that he just can’t stand to let other people BE maudlin, and get on with his life — live and let live, would be the usual phrase. He has to complain about it. Just as he gets furious that other people believe in God, he can’t sit still until other people get over losing Tim Russert.

As usual, his piece in Slate is quite readable. But as commentary, it definitely breaks the "leave well enough alone" rule for getting along in civilized company. He makes like there are three "Russert miracles" he feels constrained to debunk, but I don’t think the first two really bothered him, especially since he LIKED Russert and had written nice stuff about him himself (he even got a tad maudlin). It’s really just the third one that ticks him off:

Last on the list of miracles (and do please beware anything that comes in threes) was the apparition of a huge and beautiful rainbow arcing over the Potomac as the mourners came up to the Kennedy Center rooftop for a reception. In the words of NBC News executive Phil Griffin, "After the magical experience of this service, to come out and see the rainbow and Luke at the bottom of it made the last dry eye weep." It was further pointed out that the last song at the memorial service had been "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Tim’s son, Luke, was quoted as asking, "Is anyone still an atheist now?"

Not pausing to answer that question, I think this media myth-making, however tongue-in-cheek some of it may be, helps our understanding of why people are theists. After all, just remember why we mourners of that day were gathered in the first place. One of our friends and colleagues had been struck stone dead by his coronary arteries, in the prime of life, at just the moment when he had been celebrating his son’s graduation. He had had everything to look forward to. For my part, I was distressed by all this, and sorry about it, which is why I donned a tie and went along to bow my head. But now I read that, because of room-temperature political politeness and the vagaries of the weather, I was supposed to have been grateful for the bereavement? What if it hadn’t been an election year? What if the network couldn’t have contacted a rock star? What if the sky had been merely sunny or had filled with lightning? Surely our mass media would adopt a tone of polite condescension if it was reporting on such primitive attitudes in the backlands of Alaska or Peru or Congo.

In other words, what got him was the usual thing.

But regarding the rest of it — I do take his point. I just try to be tolerant, and not rail against these things. What’s the point, other than to make other people in the world less happy, or less comforted, or whatever?

‘Top of the world, Ma!’

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Circledoug

That was the headline on this e-mail sent by blog regular Doug Ross. Here’s the text:

FYI, my picture is on the front page of the Sunday paper today… that’s
my son’s baseball team playing at Brookland-Cayce and that’s me sitting by myself down at the bottom of the stands behind home plate.   Some might say it’s my best side.  🙂

-dr

And that’s I believe, is the picture above. I doctored it Officer Obie-style, with a circle indicating Doug (I think). Doug, let me know if I’m circling the wrong guy.

Congratulations! Not even Grandmaster Bud has made the front page, so that’s saying something. Don’t ask me exactly what it says, but it must say something.

Oh, and for those of you who don’t recognize Doug’s movie allusion — it’s James Cagney in "White Heat." Here’s a clip.

What’s a ‘Good Old Boy’ to you?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MORE THAN THREE decades ago, I saw a “B” movie that was a sort of poor cousin to “In the Heat of the Night.” It was about a newly elected black sheriff in a racially divided Southern town, and the white former sheriff, played by George Kennedy, who reluctantly helps him.
    At a climactic moment when the two men seem to stand alone, a group of white toughs who had earlier given the sheriff a hard time show up to help. Their leader gruffly says that they’re doing it for the sake of the old white sheriff, explaining that, “You always was a good old boy.”
    Or something like that. Anyway, I recall it as the first time I heard the term “good old boy.”
    It got a good workout later, with the election of Billy Carter’s brother to the White House. But the first time I recall hearing it used prominently as a pejorative by a Southerner was when Carroll Campbell ran against the “good old boy system” in the 1980s.
    The usage was odd, a fusion of the amiable “good old boy” in the George Kennedy/Billy Carter sense on the one hand, and “Old Boy Network” on the other. The former suggests an uncultured, blue-collar, white Southerner, and the latter describes moneyed elites from Britain or the Northeast, alumni of such posh schools as Cambridge or Harvard. Despite that vagueness, or perhaps because of it, the term remains popular in S.C. politics.
    Which brings us to Jake Knotts, who represents District 23 in the S.C. Senate.
    Jake — pronounced “Jakie” by familiars — could have been the prototype for that George Kennedy character, had Hollywood been ready for something with a harder edge. He is a former Columbia city cop who by his own account sometimes got “rough.” He offers no details, but a glance at his hamlike hands provides sufficient grist for the imagination. According to a story said to be apocryphal, he once beat up Dick Harpootlian for mouthing off to him. (The mouthing-off part gives the tale credibility, and longevity.)
    After Jake was elected to public office, he further burnished his “rough” reputation with a legislating style seen as bullying by detractors, and tenacious by allies.
    This newspaper’s editorial board has always been a detractor. You see, we are high-minded adherents of the finest good-government ideals. Jake’s a populist, and populism is common, to use a Southern expression from way back. In our movie, we’re Atticus Finch to his Willie Stark. (See To Kill A Mockingbird and All the King’s Men.)
    We were against video poker; Jake was for it. We were against the state lottery; Jake was for it. We were for taking the Confederate flag off the State House dome; Jake was against it.
    We were for giving the governor more power over the executive branch; Jake was against it.
    In 2002, we endorsed a candidate for governor who agreed with us on restructuring, and didn’t seem like anybody’s notion of a good old boy. He styles himself as the antithesis of back-slapping, go-along-to-get-along pols, to the extent that he doesn’t go along or get along with anybody.
    That’s fine by the governor, because his style is to set forth an ideological principle, see it utterly rejected by his own party, and then run for re-election as the guy who took on the good old boys.
    Jake’s notion of the proper role of a lawmaker isn’t even legislative; it’s helping — he might say “hepping” — constituents on a personal level. This can range from the unsavory, such as helping out a voter charged with a crime, to the noble, such as paying out of his pocket for an annual skating party for kids who’ve gotten good grades.
    Jake’s slogan is “for the people,” as simple an evocation of populism as you will find. To him, theJake_sign
proper role of the elected representative is to make sure government “heps” regular folks rather than working against them.
    That means he will take a bull-headed stand against the concerted effort to undermine the one aspect of government that does the most to help regular folks — public schools.
    This brings us to what caused us to do something we thought we’d never do — endorse Jake Knotts, the sentinel of the common man who doesn’t give two figs for what we think the proper structure of government should be.
    We’re endorsing him because he stands against the Old Boy Network (see how different these terms are?) of wealthy out-of-state dilettantes who don’t believe in government hepping folks at all, and want to make our state a lab rabbit for their abstract ideology.
    We are not comfortable with this. We’ve had some terrific arguments about it on our editorial board. It was not one of your quick decisions, shall we say.
    Occasionally, when we have a really tough endorsement in front of us, I quietly call a knowledgeable source or two outside the board, people whose judgment I trust, to hear their arguments.
    On this one, I talked to three very different sources (one Democrat, two Republicans) who shared values that had in the past caused us to oppose Jake. All three said he had won their respect over time. All said he was a man you were glad to have on your side, and sorry to go up against. All three said that between Jake and his opponent who is backed by the governor and the Club for Growth and the rest of that crowd, they’d go with Jake.
    Not that they were proud of it. All three spoke off the record — one got me to say “off the record” three times. I complained about this with the last one, saying it was all very well for him to urge us off-the-record to endorse somebody on-the-record, and he said all right, he’d go public.
    It was Bob McAlister, Carroll Campbell’s chief of staff back in the late governor’s glory days of fighting “good old boys.”
    “I don’t agree with Jake on a lot of issues,” Mr. McAlister said, but “at least you don’t have to wonder where he stands on anything, because he’ll tell you.” In the end, “There’s a place in politics for his kind of independent thought…. I think Jake Knotts has served his constituents well.”
    In his own staid, doctrinaire-Republican kind of way, I think Bob was saying he thinks Jake is a good old boy.

Knottsjake_001

What the Knotts endorsement is really about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like pulling teeth: Interviewing Gwen Kennedy

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Trying to get Gwendolyn Davis Kennedy to provide a rationale for her Richland County Council candidacy was like pulling teeth. She basically could not provide any good reason why voters should elect her back to the body she left under a cloud a decade ago.

Ms. Kennedy is best remembered for a taxpayer-funded junket she and another council member took to Hawaii. And that’s about it, really. To get further details, I had to search the database, and came up with this editorial from our editions of Dec. 8, 1997:

We should have known Richland County Councilwoman Gwendolyn Davis Kennedy wouldn’t leave quietly after her failed re-election bid.
    At her last regular meeting, Mrs. Kennedy and three of her children were up for appointments to county boards or commissions. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. This is the same councilwoman who took a $3,000 jaunt to Hawaii on county money to a conference for Western counties only to return with nothing constructive to share. Then, faced with a runoff bid she wouldn’t win, she had a change of heart and admitted the trip wasn’t a good idea.
    Mrs. Kennedy obviously is intent on having a lasting impact on Richland County by getting family members appointed to boards. Sadly, other council members didn’t see the folly in it all and appointed two of Mrs. Kennedy’s daughters to positions. Kim Kennedy and Fay Kennedy were appointed to the Music Festival Commission and the Building Board of Adjustment, respectively.
    The lame duck council, four of whom are on their way out, might have selected Mrs. Kennedy and her son, a Richland County sheriff’s deputy, to a position had the two not withdrawn their nominations after they were challenged. Mrs. Kennedy had applied for a spot on the county Planning Commission and her son, Theodore Kennedy Jr., had applied for a position on the Building Board of Adjustment.
    This was an obvious attempt by Mrs. Kennedy to try to stack county boards with herself and her family members as she leaves the council. Council members should have known better and left all of these appointments to the next council.
    Shame on them all. It’s these sort of shenanigans that have residents angry over the way the county is operated. The new Richland County Council, the membership of which will be completed in tomorrow’s election, can’t be seated soon enough.

The good news is that the new council was somewhat better. No trips to Hawaii, anyway.

But the truth is that bad candidacies are frequently marked by the lack of good qualities as much as bad ones. And the things that strikes me as I review video of our interview back in April with Ms. Kennedy is her utter inability to articulate why anyone should support her.

Please excuse the length of the above interview. I just included a lot of unedited footage (except for transitions between my camera’s three-minute-maximum clips) so you could see — if you were patient enough — just how far you can go in giving a person every possible opportunity, without that person rising to it. It’s tedious, but telling. In fact, some of you who are accustomed to the contrived theater of TV interviews will wonder, "Why were you so patient and easygoing with this woman?" The answer is that, contrary to what many of you believe, we really do try to go the extra mile to allow candidates a chance to make their case in their own way — particularly the candidates who come in with apparently little chance of gaining our endorsement. Some candidates make the most of the opportunity, and are impressive — an example of that would be Sheri Few, who didn’t think we would endorse her but to her credit wasn’t about to make that decision easy on us. Ms. Kennedy made the decision very, very easy.

Unfortunately, Ms. Kennedy managed to squeeze past a couple of more attractive candidates to make it into a runoff next week. One nice thing about runoffs — it gives me time to present you with more info about the candidates that I was able to do during the crowded initial vote.

If you don’t have the patience to make it through the long video above, here’s a shorter and more interesting one. After having given her every opportunity to deal with her checkered past — a simple, "I did wrong when I was in office before, and have learned my lesson" would have been good — we finally had to confront her (politely, of course, that being Warren’s style) about the incident that lost her the position on council.

Basically, once she was specifically asked about "The Trip," she tried lamely to deflect. She tried to allege that the controversy was over her husband going, and that wasn’t at taxpayer expense. She noted that she’s been to Hawaii a number of times, and only once at taxpayer expense — as though that established anything other than the fact that she likes Hawaii. She tries to make us believe that she believes that if elected, we would falsely report that the European trip she’s saving up for was on the taxpaper’s dime.

But what am I doing describing it? Just watch the video.

Endorsing Jake: Damned if you do…

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Today’s endorsement of Jake Knotts for re-election has upset supporters of the governor, as well it might. To the only person who wrote to me directly, I responded that I thought we were quite clear in the editorial as to our reasoning: The governor’s voucher allies have become like video poker, a force that undermines democracy in our Legislature by intimidating lawmakers into doing things they would not otherwise do, and which their constituents would not want them to do.

In the latter years of the video poker era, lawmakers who opposed that racket were afraid to move against it, because they knew they would have well-financed opposition in their next primary. We’ve been seeing the same phenomenon with the voucher/tax credit thing, among Republicans at least. And the word was out that this race was the big test. It was clear that if the governor could take out Jake, no one was safe from such retaliation.

It was another one of those endorsements of the "we don’t much like this guy, but…" variety. Like George W. Bush in 2004.

Anyway, here’s today’s editorial, and here’s your chance to get your licks in…

Oh, and don’t forget — this is the only blog on which you can see video from interviews with all three candidates…

More of what I’ve really been doing

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Just so you know that I’ve been doing some actual work on these days that I’ve been tossing out pretty lightweight posts in a desperate effort to keep y’all interested, I’ll point first to our endorsements page, and then give you another quick gallery of pictures from the endless interview…

The pictures that follow are, respectively:

  • Rob Miller, Democrat, candidate for the 2nd Congressional District (Tuesday, May 27, 1 p.m.)
  • Blaine Lotz, also a Democrat, also a candidate for the 2nd Congressional District (Wednesday, May 28, 11 a.m.)
  • Jeanette McBride, candidate for Richland County clerk of court (Wednesday, May 28, 1 p.m.)
  • Lexington County Sheriff James Metts (Friday, May 30, 10:30 a.m.)
  • Phil Black, Republican candidate for the 2nd Congressional District (Tuesday, June 3, 3:30 p.m.)

And we have a couple or three or four more coming…

Here are the pics…

Millerrob_009

Lotzblaine_019

Mcbridejeannette_027

Mettsjames_029

Blackphil_003

The ‘tyranny’ of having to choose

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
OVER THE last 10 days, we’ve started running our endorsements of candidates for state and local offices in the June 10 primaries.
    Our choices are the end result of a process based in years, even decades, of observation of the issues and institutions involved — and in some case, long exposure to the candidates. The most visible and obvious part of the process is the candidate interview (we’ve done 41 so far). But the process doesn’t start, and usually doesn’t end, with that ritual.
    Sometimes, our editorial board will produce a ringing, enthusiastic endorsement of one candidate over his or her competition. Examples of that are the ones favoring John McCain and Barack Obama in their respective primaries back in January.
    Such clear, unequivocal choices are rare. Far more often, we’ll pick our way through a thicket of pros and cons.
    But we always try to choose in the end. That’s because one of these candidates is going to occupy the office, and that matters. It affects your life. It determines the laws you will live under, how those laws are enforced, and the taxes you will pay. On rare occasion in years past we have thrown up our hands and said “We can’t in good conscience endorse either of these candidates.” But that is a cop-out and a disservice to readers, and I regard each time it has happened as a failure.
    In fact, I suspect that the most difficult and uncomfortable endorsements are sometimes the most valuable, because you can see us wrestling more strenuously than usual with the very issues you must consider as the voter, whether you agree with where we end up or not.
    Consider this excerpt from our endorsement of Rep. John Scott last week for the Senate seat being vacated by Kay Patterson (his opponent is Vince Ford, longtime Richland 1 school board member):

    Mr. Scott is the fighter, the man with a chip on his shoulder who, although he understands the big picture, often gravitates to smaller matters. Mr. Ford is the consensus-builder, smooth and polished and focused on the big picture.
    Normally, with such similar positions on policy, the better choice for the gentleman’s club that is the state Senate would be the candidate with Mr. Ford’s profile….

    But in the end, there is probably no greater unresolved challenge in the Midlands than the failure of our largest school district to overcome its problems. If we endorsed Mr. Ford for higher office, at what point would we hold anyone accountable for the turmoil, confusion and failures of the district?
    We wouldn’t have been comfortable either way. But we made a choice, and we stated why; make of it what you will.
    To contradict a widely held assumption, endorsements aren’t about whom we like personally. If that were the case, we’d have endorsed Sheri Few for the Republican nomination to replace Rep. Bill Cotty in House District 79. She’s smart, energetic, personable, and understands how the Legislature works.
    She came in with a deficit on our scorecard — her vehement advocacy for vouchers and/or tax credits for private school tuition. That made the choice easy two years ago, when she ran against Mr. Cotty — one of the most dedicated and effective supporters of public education in the Republican caucus.
    But as important as that issue is, it doesn’t automatically trump everything. And during our interview this time, I found myself mentally building a case for endorsing Ms. Few. But then, she brought up the cigarette tax, in order to make sure we knew she would never increase it, even in order to lower another tax. The good that a higher cigarette tax would do, in terms of fewer teens hooked on tobacco, did not move her. Her dedication to the ideology of never, ever raising a tax under any circumstances reminded me of how shockingly rigid she is. I was reminded of something I had written on my blog after we met her in 2006, that “she clings firmly to ideology, even when it doesn’t seem to fit her own experience….”
    She has many traits that would make her an effective lawmaker. But effectiveness in the service of an ideology more extreme than that held by Gov. Mark Sanford would not be a good thing. So we endorsed the less experienced, less savvy David Herndon, who was motivated to run by his wish to stand against some of the worst things Ms. Few stands for.
    Other difficult choices lie ahead. We haven’t decided yet what to do in Senate District 23. There, the leading candidates are Jake Knotts, a populist with quite a few, shall we say, rough edges, and the much smoother, more conventional Republican Katrina Shealy, whom powerful interests are backing in an effort to take out Mr. Knotts for the sin of having made an enemy of our governor.
    That one won’t be easy. It’s the kind of choice that causes me to have to remind myself that we are blessed to have choices. As tough as some of them are for us — and more to the point, for you as the voter — the “tyranny” of having to choose is far better than the real tyranny of not having a choice.
    And please, don’t you cop out. Read our endorsements — and read the rest of the paper, and the mailings you get from the candidates. Go to candidate forums; debate the options with your neighbors. And then, whatever your decision, go out and apply it on June 10. Because in each and every case, one of these folks is going to win that office, and will be calling the shots for all of us until the next election.