Category Archives: Nikki Haley

Greenville News gets on Nikki’s case

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Don’t know whether you’ll be able to actually read this Greenville News editorial online (they make it hard), but here are excerpts:

Stop bashing state’s unemployed

The state’s more than 236,000 unemployed workers deserve better treatment than they have gotten in recent days from Gov. Nikki Haley. In her rush to score points with voters who mistakenly believe the unemployed have done something to earn their unkind fate, Haley used careless language to push a fundamentally flawed idea.

“I so want drug testing,” Haley was quoted as saying last week when discussing South Carolina’s stubbornly high unemployment rate that has gotten worse on her watch. “It’s something I’ve been wanting since the first day I walked into office.”…

Haley’s campaign mirrors those being run in a couple dozen states where some politicians are trying to convince people that drug-testing of the unemployed is needed to improve the nation’s wretched unemployment numbers. It’s an approach that simply defies the reality of what has happened over the past few years as the worst economy since the Great Depression has resulted in unemployment stuck near double digits.

This politically driven campaign ignores an important fact. Until the day they were handed their pink slip by companies looking to shore up their bottom lines, unemployed people actually had a job. And in much of America, those jobs came with a mandatory drug test before the job was filled and with other opportunities for random or for-cause drug tests during employment….

… Drugs were a factor in only about 1,000 of more than 400,000 unemployment claims, according to an Associated Press story from earlier this year.
Gov. Haley and other state leaders should focus on bringing more jobs to South Carolina and nurturing a system that better matches employers with workers. And they should stop this unseemly crusade of beating up on unemployed people just to score political points.
I’ll add a thought to that…
Who ARE these people with whom you can make political points by saying stuff like this? Who ARE these people who think of the unemployed as the undeserving “other”? It’s unimaginable to me. Well before I lost my 35-year newspaper career, I knew plenty of people who were out of work, across the economy, and plenty of others who were worried, and with good reason? Who lives in such a bubble that they don’t know all of these worthy, smart, hard-working people?
Oh, I know the answer to those questions. But I’m still incredulous that anyone could be so lacking in perception, and so mean-spirited. And I continue to be stunned that people such as Nikki Haley can appeal to such lowest common impulses and succeed in elections. And I’m sick and tired of this being the case. I want to live in a rational world.
And that’s the bottom line, really. I suppose it’s entirely about compassion in the case of people who are way nicer than I am. But I’m more about recognizing the things that are actually wrong with our economy, seeing how they affect us all, and seeing how even rational self-interest (altruism aside) requires us to address these problems realistically instead of acting like hermit crabs and reaching desperately for stupid excuses to dismiss what’s actually happening.

Nikki and the HPV vaccine

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If you’ll recall, Nikki Haley got into trouble for sorta, kinda, trying to do the right thing: Save girls’ lives by getting them vaccinated against the papillomavirus that causes most cervical cancers. Until she realized it might not be a popular move with political extremists.

Here’s CNN’s recap:

Columbia, South Carolina (CNN) — As the debate over Texas Gov. Rick Perry mandating the HPV vaccine continues between Republican presidential candidates, a woman whose endorsement is coveted by all them, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, has her own complicated history on the issue.

In 2007, shortly before Perry issued an executive order requiring that schoolgirls be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, or HPV, that causes most cervical cancers, Haley was throwing her support behind a similar bill in South Carolina. At the time she was in her second term as a state representative.

State Rep. Joan Brady introduced the Cervical Cancer Prevention Act in South Carolina, and the Republican corralled more than 60 legislators, including Haley, to sponsor the bill. Unlike the executive order for which Perry is taking heat, this legislative mandate did not include a provision for parents to opt out of inoculating their daughters.

Within months, fierce opposition mounted, and legislative records back up accounts from sources who recall sponsors “dropping like flies” before a unanimous vote killed the bill on April 18, 2007.

More than a dozen legislators formally requested to be removed as sponsors from the bill, but the future governor of South Carolina was not one of them…

[State Rep. Kris] Crawford, a Republican, said he is not so sure.

“There are exactly two groups of people who can claim they were against this giant overreaching of government — those who never sponsored the bill and those who were sponsors but subsequently removed their names from the bill when it was explained to be a boondoggle mandating vaccination of little 12-year-old girls against a sexually transmitted disease,” Crawford said. “Everyone else was either for the bill or riding the fence trying to claim victory regardless of outcome.”…

This is a pattern we’ve seen, of course — one in which our young governor blunders into a situation, can’t decide which is the safest political course for her, hunkers down and hopes to survive it, whatever happens to everybody else. By being on both sides, she hopes eventually to be on the winning side, and have some credit splash on her. It’s worked for her so far. As you’ll note, CNN is still calling her a “rising star.” Really.

But even some of the national media are starting to notice things.

Disregard for facts, contempt for the jobless

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SusanG brought this to my attention Friday, but what with the “little girl” flap, and the non-apology, I’d sort of had my fill of Nikki Haley gaffes that day before I got to it. In case you still haven’t seen was Susan was talking about, here’s an excerpt:

Nikki Haley’s Jobless Drug Test Claim Exaggerated

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) wants thejobless to pass a drug test before they can receive benefits, but she seems to have an exaggerated sense of drug use among the unemployed…

Haley said scads of job applicants flunked a drug test at the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation along the Savannah River.

“Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them — this was back before the campaign — when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test, and of the half that was left, of that 50 percent, the other half couldn’t read and write properly,” Haley said….

Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the River Site, told HuffPost he had no idea what Haley was talking about with regard to applicants flunking a drug test.

“Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test,” Giusti said. “At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive.”

The River Site doesn’t even test applicants. “We only test them when they have been accepted,” Giusti said.

A spokesman for Gov. Haley did not respond to requests for comment…

That’s some good reporting by HuffPo, although the headline was weak. If the body type was right, this was more than an “exaggeration.” Also, I’ve never heard SRS referred to on second reference as “River Site,” but whatever.

Gee, maybe if I’d given up some of those really heavy-duty drugs, I wouldn’t have been out of work for most of 2009, huh?

I’m really more than fed up with this stuff. You?

Here’s how our governor apologizes: It’s HER fault!

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Earlier today, I passed on a headline on the WIS site that said, “SC Gov Haley says she regrets ‘little girl’ remark.”

WIS later took down that headline because they realized what I did when I read their story. There was nothing supporting the implication of the headline, which was that the governor had apologized.

Later in the day, Gina Smith over at The State explained what had actually happened. Here’s the operative paragraph:

“The story painted a grossly inaccurate picture and was unprofessionally done,” Haley said in a statement. “But my ‘little girl’ comment was inappropriate and I regret that. Everyone can have a bad day. I’ll forgive her bad story, if she’ll forgive my poor choice of words.”

Yep. In her expression of “regret,” she went further in trying to insult the reporter.

That’s our governor. If she does something she shouldn’t obviously it’s someone else’s fault.

Check it out, guys! Girl fight! With Nikki Haley…

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A friend — a woman friend — passed on to me this item from The Post and Courier. She told me it might not appeal to me because it was “chick stuff” — that she nearly passed on it for the same reason (you’d have to know this woman, who in some ways thinks more like a guy than I do) — but that she thought it was worth a moment’s attention. An excerpt:

A lot of women are going to be disappointed with your comments on conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham’s radio show….

Maybe you were still feeling some fallout from reporter Renee Dudley’s story about your European job-recruiting trip funded by the taxpayers.

But that was no reason to say what you said.

Near the end of your interview, Ingraham offers this observation:

“This character at The Post and Courier clearly wants to portray you as someone hypocritical, that you’re not what you pretend to be.”

(No, governor, you’re doing a really good job of that on your own, actually, but that’s beside the point.)

You responded: “All I will tell you is, God bless that little girl at The Post and Courier. Her job is to create conflict, my job is to create jobs.”

Little girl?

The governor of the great state of South Carolina called another woman a little girl?…

Gee, all they had to do to get my attention was yell, “Girl Fight!” I would have come running. Any guy who’s ever been a third-grader would. We’d also be careful not to get in the middle of it…

Huntsman’s looking better — to me, anyway

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After I saw this today:

Huntsman won’t get endorsement from Haley

You should read her argument for this position. It’s, um, typical. She strings together a series of phrases that almost, but not quite, constitute complete thoughts. Oh, all right, here it is:

“Naturally, I’m going to go with someone that philosophically I agree with and Jon Huntsman is not it,” Haley said. “If you talk to him about things he knows about China and the economy, yes, that’s great stuff, but what I really want to get is a strong conservative who understands jobs and the economy matter, and it’s not what we say, it’s what we do and how we’re going to fix it.”

And it’s a beautiful thing, she forgot to say.

Dems keep cranking out those videos…

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Dick Harpootlian’s Democratic Party seems determined to pull us completely beyond the era of text-based press releases. At least it’s entertaining — sometimes. Above you have the state party’s most recent release. There was some text with it. Here you go:

Columbia, SC –  This weekend, the Charleston Post & Courier exposed shocking information about Nikki Haley’s taxpayer-funded European vacation. Click here to read the article.

Nikki Haley spent more than $125,000 of your tax dollars on this trip and with nothing to show for it.

SCDP Chairman, Dick Harpootlian, appalled by Tricki Nikki’s latest hypocrisy, released this video and the following statement in response to the Post and Courier article:

Where in the world is Nikki Haley? We don’t where she is, but we know where she’s not.  She is not fighting to improve education or to lower unemployment in South Carolina.  She is nowhere near any effort to improve health care desperately needed by many in our state.  The Post & Courier article shows once again that she only does what’s best for her and not the people of South Carolina.

Below is one that Dick sent out several days ago…

Something I changed my mind about…

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Occasionally, I get asked here whether I ever change my mind about anything. I don’t know why I get asked that; probably because of the very definite manner in which I present opinions that I have examined and tested over and over again. I have a certain tone, people tell me.

Well, yes — sometimes I do change my mind. Here’s something I changed my mind about some time ago…

On an earlier post, “Tim” changed the subject and brought up Trey Walker’s departure to become a lobbyist for USC:

Wasn’t one of [Gov. Haley’s] points in the State of the State to eliminate state employee lobbyists?
http://www.thestate.com/2011/09/02/1955609/haley-deputy-taking-usc-job.html

And that reminded me… Back when we I led the “Power Failure” project at The State in 1991, I was convinced that state agency lobbyists were a bad idea. And I described the badness of the idea in the same terms the libertarians use: It was wrong for the taxpayers to have to pay someone to lobby the Legislature to spend more tax money in their area. Of course, that was a gross oversimplification of what lobbyists do, but it seemed convincing at the time. In those days, I was occasionally guilty of thinking about issues not much more deeply than Nikki Haley does.

Speaking of which… most of the actual good ideas that Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley espouse — and they have advocated some good one — can be found in a reprint of the “Power Failure” project. In fact, in Sanford’s case, a lot of them seem to have come directly from just such a reprint that I sent him when he was first starting to run for governor. Then, for some time, I heard my own words out on the stump and then coming from the governor’s office (and some of you still wonder why I endorsed the guy in 2002).

Anyway, back to the topic…

Over time, I changed my mind about the state agency lobbyists. About lobbyists in general, but especially state agency ones. I changed my mind about a number of things after I moved from news to editorial. I thought I was a pretty thoughtful guy when I was in news. But after I had to write opinions every day that would be read by more than 100,000 people, people who would challenge every word, every concept, who would tear into any weakness in my thinking, I thought about things on a deeper level than I had before, taking more factors into consideration than I ever had before.

One of the factors was that, as I observed the Legislature more and more, I came to value more the input that only someone with intimate knowledge of an agency could offer to the legislative process. Let’s just say that the more I knew about our lawmakers, and the harder I looked into issues before taking a position, the less impressed I was with our solons’ understanding of what was going on. Having someone there who could say, “Here’s how this works” before they make a change affecting an agency is immensely valuable. And folks, it’s not always about spending. Often, it’s about whether the policies put into law help or hurt the agency’s ability to deliver its assigned service to the people of South Carolina.

Those guys over in the State House need all the relevant, well-informed input they can get. And if the lobbyists are any good, they are worth their salaries and then some.

Even Nikki Haley thinks so, since she said about Trey’s move, “He’s a talented, loyal and committed guy — and the University of South Carolina is lucky to have him.” Which I take to mean that she agrees with me that he’ll be worth his $135,000 salary there.

Once Trey gets on board, maybe when he makes his visits to the State House, he can drop by his former boss’s office and fill her in on what USC is all about, and how important it is to this state.

If he could do that, he’d be worth twice the pay.

So have y’all had enough Nikki Haley yet? If not, I’m sure there’s plenty more comin’ atcha…

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Just thought I’d ask because of stuff like this:

No thanks: Haley to reject fed health exchange funds

By GINA SMITH – [email protected]

Gov. Nikki Haley said she will let federal deadlines slip by and not accept millions in federal funds to help South Carolina set up its own health insurance exchange.

Health insurance exchanges, the centerpiece of federal health care reform, are online marketplaces, to be set up by each state, where the uninsured could compare insurance plans from private insurance companies and buy the one that best fits their needs. Uninsured people who meet certain federal poverty guidelines could buy coverage using federal tax credits.

The exchanges are scheduled to open in 2014 when the health care law goes into full effect. If a state has not made progress by Jan. 1, 2013, the federal government will step in.

But Haley and Tony Keck, whom Haley appointed to head the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, say the federal plan is not the right fit for South Carolina.

“The governor remains an equal opportunity opponent of ObamaCare, the spending disaster that South Carolina does not want and cannot afford,” said Rob Godfrey, Haley’s spokesman. “She and Tony Keck are focused on finding South Carolina solutions that provide our state with the most health at the least cost.”

What utter… never mind. Let’s move to our next slice of madness:

Haley on getting a photo ID: We’ll pick you up

By Seanna Adcox – Associated Press

COLUMBIA — Gov. Nikki Haley’s invitation Wednesday to voters who lack the photo ID necessary to vote under South Carolina’s new law echoed a rental car slogan.

“We’re picking you up,” she said.

The Department of Motor Vehicles has set aside Wednesday, Sept. 28, for anyone who needs a ride. Voters who lack transportation can call a toll-free number to arrange a pickup from a DMV employee, Haley said…

That one has been mocked by both Will Folks and Rachel Maddow (which is quite a range), and a whole lot of folks in between. And of course, when national TV gets involved, the whole state gets tarred (see video above):

Does the implementation of that law immediately make you think of 19th-century civil rights violations? Two, does the federal government have to step in to protect people’s rights? And three, does the governor have to make a pledge to personally attend to the transportation needs of every single state resident? If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, you just might be a South Carolinian…

And to dig back a few days, don’t forget this:

Gov. Nikki Haley and State Superintendent of Education Mick Zais repeated Monday they will not seek additional federal money for S.C. schools.

The recently elected Republican leaders emphasized their opposition after education groups said lawmakers should seek the money to save teachers’ jobs and create new education programs.

Just thought I’d check your attitudes on the pattern. If you detect one. If not, what are your thoughts on this “disconnected series of events?”

The alternative reality governor

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On an alternative Earth, with an alternative history, this is what we would be hearing from our governor as school started back. I got this from Vincent Sheheen earlier today:

This month Joseph, Austin, and Anthony went back to Camden High and Camden Elementary for the 2011-12 school year. We can’t believe we have two 15 year olds with their driving permits!

We are so blessed for our sons to attend the same schools as their father, grandfather and great-grandfather. South Carolina’s public schools have helped give our family the opportunity to succeed!

We are proud of our schools and thankful for the great teachers who care so much about our children. And we are proud to stand up to the extremist agenda that wants to take public dollars out of our schools and send them to private schools. Like Thomas Jefferson, we believe that a democratic nation cannot exist without a public commitment to education.
Thank you to all the teachers who have blessed our lives and the lives of our children- especially Rose Sheheen (Now better known as Mommia!)

So, join us in thanking a teacher- your child’s or grandchild’s or a teacher you know. Let them know how thankful you are for what they give.

All the best,  Amy and Vincent Sheheen

Alternative reality — that’s the ticket! Where’s Harry Turtledove when we need him? Outside of his kind of world, there’s little hope for South Carolina in the foreseeable future. No, he couldn’t actually change reality, but we could pretend for a while…

You need to be careful about your associations

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This devil’s bargain that the GOP has made with the Tea Party since the GOP’s traumatic loss in 2008 — which seems to have driven the party half-mad with grief, and into the arms of the snake-flag crowd — just looks worse and worse. And not just from the perspective of UnPartisans like me. I would feel a lot worse about it were I a Republican. I mean a real one — of the Lincoln, Eisenhower, or Reagan variety.

Of course, the Democrats are eating it up; they think it’s great — the crazier their opponents get, the better they like it.

For the rest of us, watching these extremists drag down the GOP in the debt “debate,” and the GOP still clinging hard enough to drag the country and the world’s economy down with it, is pretty agonizing.

And if you’re a Republican, this has to be really uncomfortable. First, they helped people like Nikki Haley roll right over the actual conservatives like Henry McMaster (and Bob Inglis, and others).

And then, you have to watch stuff like this Kershaw County “when to shoot a cop” thing just getting worse and worse. It gets hard to disassociate yourself from a guy like Jeff Mattox, as much as you’d like to.

Last night, the picture above cropped up in two places — in an e-mail from the Democratic Party, and in a post by Will Folks. It purports to show Jeff Mattox, the Kershaw County GOP co-chair and member of Kershaw County Patriots (which, according to the Camden paper, he calls a Tea Party group) with you-know-who.

If you’re a mainstream Republican, you cringe in private at Nikki Haley being your governor, if you’re paying attention. Now you have to face the fact that all this anti-government stuff takes you to some pretty crazy places. It’s a matter of degrees, a series of steps.

  1. One step: Mere anti-government rhetoric, with a hint of menace. Gov. Haley likes to say people in government “are incredibly scared and it’s a beautiful thing.”
  2. Another step: This Mattox guy “likes” the cop-killing post, but says he doesn’t really want to kill cops: “No. It’s just kind of a conversation.” Eloquent defense, huh?
  3. Next step: “Basic logic dictates that you either have an obligation to LET ‘law enforcers’ have their way with you, or you have the right to STOP them from doing so, which will almost always require killing them.”

And then you have cops in Kershaw County going around wearing body armor.

It’s all connected. And it’s no wonder that Matt Moore and others over at party HQ are trying to cut themselves off from the more extreme end of the rope.

We can go where we like, but Haley BFF Eleanor Kitzman is going to Texas

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The best historical marker in the world is on the Madison County courthouse square in Jackson, TN. It tells what Davy Crockett told a group of voters, standing in that spot, after being defeated for re-election to Congress:

You can go to hell, but I am going to Texas!

Today, we have a similar case in South Carolina. Eleanor Kitzman, head of the Budget and Control board and the most passionate, emotional defender of Gov. Nikki Haley I’ve run across yet, is leaving us to go work for Rick Perry:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The director of the South Carolina agency that oversees much of state government operations has resigned, six months after Gov. Nikki Haley picked her for the job, to take a role in government in her home state of Texas.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office announced Wednesday that Eleanor Kitzman will start her job as that state’s insurance commissioner on Aug. 15. Her term there is set to expire in February 2013.

“I’m confident that Eleanor’s expertise in the insurance industry will make her a strong advocate for insurance customers in Texas,” Perry said in a release.

Kitzman, a 54-year-old Houston native, did not immediately return messages Wednesday evening.

How furious was Kenny Bingham? See for yourself

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I wasn’t there when S.C. House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham tore into Nikki Haley on June 29, claiming her office misled lawmakers on the budget. But I had heard it was really something. After all, it got Kenny a standing ovation, which sort of tells you where our governor stands in the estimation of that Republican-dominated body.

Somehow, it didn’t occur to me to look for the speech on YouTube until someone mentioned it this week. I urge you to watch it.

By the way, for a fuller explanation of what happened, read Cindi Scoppe’s column of July 3.

Nikki Haley was at Rotary today, too

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OK, so Lee Bandy wasn’t the only person visiting Columbia Rotary today. He was just the one I enjoyed seeing the most. Nikki Haley made her first appearance at the club since back during the election.

As I said on Twitter, she gave a good speech, centered around her usual themes. She just gets smoother and stronger at that all the time. Guess I was wrong when I said she peaked that day with Sarah Palin; she has continued to maintain her speaking skills at a high level. So I guess it’s more accurate to say she reached a plateau on May 14, 2010. Either that, or this is another peak. If so, I’m not sure what put her in her Zone.

Certainly not audience reaction. The Rotarians applauded a couple of times — the biggest response was when she was sticking up for Boeing. But it was polite, not what anyone would call enthusiastic.

Speaking of polite, I thought you’d enjoy the above clip when our own Kathryn Fenner — who had publicly expressed uneasiness ahead of time about whether she would behave herself — challenged Nikki in a deeply respectful manner. Did it better than I would have. Whenever I’m confronted with any of Nikki’s bumper-sticker platitudes, which she pronounces with such deep conviction, I tend to go into pompous lecturing mode, as I did on this occasion (dang it; I can’t find a link to that video…) in response to her umpteenth repetition in my presence that the wanted to “run government like a business.”

What Kathryn responded to is, like the government-as-business thing (which tends to be spoken with the greatest enthusiasm by people who understand neither business nor government), a favorite of politicians of the libertarian-populist variety. It always goes something like, When families have a windfall, they save it rather than spending it. Which, of course, is nonsense. In hard times, families are more likely to spend a windfall on the necessities they’ve been deferring, such as that new roof on the house, or warm winter coats for the kids. Ditto with the related nostrum, When families fall on hard times, they tighten their belts. Yeah, of course they do — and at the same time they search frantically for ways to bring more revenue into the house. But people too seldom challenge these facile sayings, so it was good that Kathryn did so, and so very politely.

The speech itself, while well delivered, didn’t have anything in it that I found both new and interesting. I’ll be interested to see what the working media who were there lead with. I saw that Yvonne Wenger of The Post and Courier Tweeted this: “Haley unveils preliminary details on faith-based, community-based Neighbors Helping Neighbors program to get state engaged in meeting needs.” But there weren’t many such details. And that’s kind of a yawner. Republicans, even more mainstream Republicans than Nikki, are constantly trying to show they care by calling on churches to do what they don’t want government to do. You know, like maybe the churches aren’t actually trying now, and need the governor to tell them how.

Anyway, that was just in passing, in response to a question. Her main thrust was pretty much standard boilerplate, talking about what she saw as the main accomplishments of her first months in office — roll call voting, other stuff you’ve read about before.

It was interesting to see the rather substantial media contingent at the meeting — one of the larger such turnouts I’ve seen at South Carolina’s largest Rotary club. Their presence seemed to indicate they saw this as a bit of an event. I suppose the governor doesn’t get out much and speak to large groups here in the Midlands — I don’t know; I’ve never thought much about it. I know she talks to the media less than predecessors, which is probably why the press and broadcast types were dutifully lined up at the door waiting to catch her on her way out. (You’ll note on the video that she sort of promises to take questions from them later. I suppose she did. My ride left before that.)

I did have one small moment of epiphany during the Q and A, something that perhaps shed a light on why I don’t see things her way more often: “I’m a reality TV nut,” she said. Suddenly, a lot of stuff fell into place for me…

Seriously, though, I look forward to seeing what the reporters who were there get out of it.

“South Carolina’s Young Governor Has a High Profile… ” well, I can’t argue with THAT part

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Before we leave this subject entirely…

The governor’s memoir is one thing. We don’t expect much from it, and we probably won’t be disappointed. But there was a time when I expected something from the nation’s leading newspapers. I still do, from some. But it looks like The New York Times has fallen down on the job. Big-time.

I thought that maybe, after all the hagiographic, fawning coverage the national media had given our governor during the election campaign last year (“She’s a woman! An Indian-American woman! In the South! And she’s a reformer — she said so!”), that maybe the NYT was starting to get it when they subtitled a piece awhile back, with this bitter truism: “Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, doesn’t care what you think.”

But over the weekend, the Times came out with a piece that was worse, shallower, more sycophantic, than anything we saw last year. The lede:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Nikki Haley, at 39 the nation’s youngest governor, loves her iPod.

It gets worse from there. Get this:

She has built a governorship on aggressive budget cutting, a relentless pursuit of job growth and a cheerleader’s enthusiasm for a state that often finishes toward the back of the pack in education, economics and health.

“We are now what every state is going to want to look like,” Ms. Haley said in an interview in her office almost six months into her administration.

I don’t even know what it means. Does it mean that she cheers for the fact that her state “finishes toward the back of the pack in education, economics and health,” and that she thinks other states envy us because of that? The first part may be accurate, but could even Nikki Haley think the second part?

Check this:

She has repeatedly said she is not interested in being a vice-presidential running mate on the 2012 Republican ticket, but her name is already etched into the list of future party leaders.

And etched in our hearts, as well. And this:

Back home, legislators say her administration is a refreshing change from the tumultuous days of her predecessor, Mark Sanford, whose uncooperative relations with elected officials is legend around the Statehouse. She has also received good marks for fighting to lowerMedicaid costs and for many of her cabinet appointments.

No really, it actually says that. Whom did they talk to? Which legislators said she was a “refreshing change,” or any kind of a change?

Who wrote this? Rob Godfrey?

It ends with this standard from her stump speech:

“You can feel the energy. You can feel the buzz,” she said. “It’s because people are incredibly excited about their government and elected officials are incredibly scared and it’s a beautiful thing.”

And that’s really the way she thinks. So that part was right. It didn’t tell us anything new, but it was accurate.

Can’t Is Not a Contraction (and other options)

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Some of y’all, being a hard-to-please bunch, were apparently less than impressed by the planned title of our governor’s long awaited memoir, “Can’t is Not An Option.” As Tim said:

“Can’t is Not An Option”. I guess her editor and publisher don’t not believe in double negatives. Essentially the title means “Can is an Option.” More Sarah Palindromisms, inventing the language as you speak…

OK, so let’s see if we can do better. Here are some, for want of a better word, options:

  • Failure Is Not An Option — The original, as spoken by Ed Harris as Gene Kranz in “Apollo 13,” works a lot better. More compelling. Better use of the English language. Of course, it doesn’t work for Nikki Haley. In fact, it’s about as wildly inappropriate as you can get. The phrase epitomizes the can-do spirit of a man leading a bunch of government employees determined to work together to accomplish something remarkable. No way Nikki would want any part of that. In Kranz’ place, she would have insisted that NASA was the problem, not the solution, and would be going on about how the space agency needed to be run like a business as the spacecraft ran out of oxygen.
  • Can’t Is Not a Doctrine — I like it, but I think she would disagree.
  • Can’t Do Cooperation
  • Can’t is Not a Contraction
  • Can I Have a Conniption?
  • Canned Heat, Fried Hockey Boogie
  • Can It, Knothead Unction

OK, so I’m running out of actual ideas here, although I don’t see that necessarily as a disqualification.

What do y’all have?

I’m just trying to pass the time here. It’s SO hard waiting until January, when the book comes out.

Cindi Scoppe explains the state budget

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A couple of weeks ago, in response to some outrageous statement about the state budget put out by someone over at the Policy Council via Twitter — I forget now who it was, or what it was he or she said, but I think it was something like “this is the biggest budget ever” — I got worked up enough to go out and get some numbers showing what total nonsense that was. Because I knew we hadn’t caught up to pre-crash spending levels.

And I got the numbers, covering the last few years. And there were supporting documents, which are hard to link on WordPress (I usually go back and use TypePad on my old blog to link a file, then copy the code over here, which is tedious), and then there was the post itself to write talking about the numbers, and somewhere in the middle of it I fell asleep or something.

Oh, wait, I know — I sent Ashley Landess a Tweet asking her something about the numbers they had used, and while she answered my initial question, she didn’t (unless I missed it) answer a follow-up, and I used waiting for that response as an excuse to just let the whole thing drift, because I had satisfied my own curiosity and justified my own outrage (this is not, of course, the biggest budget ever), and it’s hard for me to maintain interest in numbers for very long. (By the way, I’m not blaming Ashley for not answering me a second time. In fact, maybe she did and it got lost in the ether. Nobody can watch that stuff all day, or read all of it, even when alerted to it.)

Then, a few days ago, Doug got on this kick of throwing HIS favorite numbers at us (similar to the Policy Council numbers, including federal spending and probably lottery money and the kitchen sink and all kinds of stuff that the Legislature has no control over, even though what we were talking about was the budget the Legislature was voting on), and did his usual thing of “Where are YOUR numbers?” and thumping his chest and all, and I thought about going back and digging up the real numbers and answering him, but I was then filled with ennui, because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, and I just wasn’t interested enough.

Because I know how bogus the whole conversation is. I experience state government. I follow what’s happening. I see the cuts, year after year. After all, we have 8,000 fewer state employees than in 1994, as Cindi Scoppe notes today (see, I just threw number at you, but I didn’t have to spend time digging them up, which is what matters to me)…

In fact, that is my purpose in posting on this subject. Cindi never gets bored looking at the budget, and she understands it better than most people, certainly better than most of the people who get to vote on it. Consider her an enabler of my fecklessness on the subject. I had her to worry about the budget for me for most of 22 years.

And she’s still doing it. In her column headlined “The fable of the spendthrift Legislature,” she summed it up pretty well. (It would have been a wonder if she hadn’t. The freaking thing was 30 inches long. But as I told her, “It read like 18.” Old editor joke.)

It’s worth a read. It puts things into perspective. It explains why it’s so bogus for Nikki Haley to perpetuate the myth (as did Mark Sanford) that the lawmakers are a bunch of spendthrifts out there “growing government” at a rate that exceeds the kind of bogus arbitrary caps that those two governors AND House leaders are always on about.

By the way, while the Senate won’t go along with arbitrary caps (thank goodness; they still believe in representative democracy instead of government by formula), in recent years we’ve stayed well within that population-plus-inflation formulation. The average annual increase in the general fund has been 2.4 percent since 1994 (the year the Republicans took over), including the non-recurring portion. The recurring part has grown by 1.8 percent a year.

And lawmakers are still appropriating less than they did five years ago. So these are not the biggest budgets ever.

Man, this is boring…

Can’t is not an option — except, of course, when you just can’t…

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I’m going to be on Pub Politics tonight (my sixth time!), and one of several topics the guys want to talk about is Nikki Haley’s book deal — which is a bit of trivia I had missed (I knew she was writing a memoir, but nothing about a “deal”), so I had to go look it up:

NEW YORK (AP) — South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has a book deal.

Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Group (USA), announced Wednesday that Haley’s “Can’t is Not an Option” will come out in January.

Haley, a Republican and tea party favorite, was elected last year. At 39, she is the country’s youngest governor and only the second Indian-American governor.

In an interview in March with The Associated Press, Haley said writing had been “therapeutic” and that she would cover everything from growing up in rural South Carolina to her contentious 2010 campaign, when she faced — and denied — allegations of infidelity…

I wonder whether anyone at her publisher’s will pick up, between now and the pub date, on just how unsuccessful Gov. Haley has been in achieving her goals, aside from the goal of getting elected. And when they do, will they push for a title change?

It’s just not hip and edgy to criticize Nikki Haley any more. What am I going to do now?

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Back in 2008 (when this was taken), before she reinvented herself and started running for offices for which she was completely unqualified, I used to write supportive things about Nikki Haley. Could I do so again?

I’m going to have to start sticking up for Nikki Haley. If I can possibly rationalize a way to do so.

The thing is, everybody — except the people on her staff who are paid to say otherwise — is criticizing her. Especially, of course, Republicans. Just as with Mark Sanford.

That makes criticizing Nikki Haley, well… popular. Like Reality TV. Like, you know, “The Situation.” This is disturbing. It is so uncool. So unhip.

More to the point, what’s the use of sitting down at a laptop to say critical things if everyone is doing it? It’s just… redundant. If you don’t have anything new or original to say, why write?

I mean, speaking of “The Situation,” look at this one:

  • The “Wide Chasm:” Kenny Bingham — the House Majority Leader, from Lexington County no less — got a standing ovation when he stood up to light into her in the House the other day, furious that GOP lawmakers had done what they thought she wanted, only to have her veto it. If senators had been there, they’d have applauded too. It’s taken Nikki WAY less time to alienate the State House than it took her predecessor.
  • The Departing SLED Chief: Reggie Lloyd says he totally blew off the gov’s effort to get him to refuse raises to hard-working, lower-ranking agents.
  • Michael Haley’s list: The SLED chief also said the “first man” presented him with a list of people he wanted Lloyd to hire as agents.
  • He can’t hold it back any more: After trying to hold it in for a year, Wesley Donehue has taken to expressing typical Republican frustration with the gov via Twitter: “Very proud of the SC General Assembly for overriding Gov Haley’s presidential primary veto today. Great work team!” And especially with her campaign manager… I mean, chief of staff: “This is what happens when your Chief of Staff isn’t from South Carolina. Everyone say THANK YOU TIM PEARSON!” Poor Wesley. He’s been trying to control himself for so long.

This creates a dilemma. Every once in a while, Nikki does something right. Should I just not mention her at all until those occasions arise?

Or maybe I should just try a little harder, and find ways to explain the problems with her leadership in original terms, ones that others aren’t thinking of. That could work…

Going through vetoes like a hot knife through butter

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Good thing that Adam Beam is really into Twitter, too. Because I have relied upon John O’Connor to keep me up on what’s happening at the State House.

And today, he’s Tweeting about lawmakers rapidly working their way through Nikki Haley’s vetoes. Eventually, he put it all together on thestate.com. (That is, he put together what they’d done so far. They appear to still be going.) An excerpt:

The House voted to override Haley’s veto of $56 million for K-12 education by a 97-8 margin. Members of the Republican-controlled House then voted 103-6 to restore $12.4 million for new school buses. Haley, also a Republican, had vetoed the money, saying she wanted to privatize the bus system. The House also voted to restore another $20 million for schools, 89-18, which Haley had vetoed.

In other overrides, the House voted to restore:

• $1.9 million for the state Arts Commission.

• Almost $6 million for S.C. ETV.

• $1.1 million for University Center in Greenville by 89-22.

• $594,000 for Greenville Technical College by 78-31.

• $1.4 million for a program to help students with the high school-to-college transition by 82-28.

• Some state financing for next year’s GOP presidential primary.

Sounds like lawmakers have gotten just about as impatient with Nikki as they had with her predecessor.