Category Archives: Out There

Occupy Columbia getting booted at 6 p.m.

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Waiting for the governor to make her move.

See update to this post in this comment below.

The buzz has been out there for a couple of hours. When I got wind of it, I walked down to the State House to see what was up.

The first person I ran into was Wesley Donehue, on his way back to his office at Donehue Direct across Gervais St.

“I guess I really stirred something up,” he said. I said something brilliant like, “Huh?”

Turns out Wesley’s the guy who sent out this letter from Sen. Harvey Peeler to Gov. Nikki Haley, in which he said,

I would like to know what the Budget and Control Board will be doing about the Occupy Columbia group…
If you drive past the State House you will see tables, sleeping bags, coolers, folding chairs and even a port-o-john. I do not know how these items do not invade the public health, safety and welfare of our citizens and visitors to our State House.

He said that “at the very least,” the group needs to complete an application for use of the State House grounds.

This stirred up the protesters considerably, and when I left them a few minutes ago, they were bracing themselves to be tossed out after the governor’s press conference at 4.

Walid Hakim, the only “99 percenter” I know, said his group would behave themselves peaceably.

But he also said, “I’m going to stay as long as I possibly can.”

I’m gonna run back down yonder and see what happens next.

Walid Hakim: "I'm going to stay as long as I possibly can."

Don’t you dare trash my Uncle Sam!

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This sort of thing has become routine, but I never cease to be disgusted by it.

To begin with, there is one thing that makes America special — “exceptional,” if you will — and that is our system of governing ourselves. It’s not our amber waves of grain or purple mountain majesties, as fine as those are. And it’s not that we are some master race — if anything, our glory is that we are a mongrel people. “We’re mutts” as Bill Murray said in “Stripes.”

What we are, what makes us special is that we are the country that made freedom work, on a grand scale. Over the course of two centuries, we steadily worked to perfect that, and we’re still working on it, to our great credit.

Therefore I cannot abide this constant, incessant, dripping, vituperative hatred hurled at American government by alleged “conservatives” — or for that matter by “progressives” who want us to believe that the system is stacked against the little man. But the attitude that government itself, the very notion of government, is an evil to be fought, overwhelmingly belongs to what we describe as the right these days.

Is there plenty wrong with the way our government functions? You bet. But a huge amount of the blame for that belongs to the extremists who want to possess Washington, and have no use for what anyone who disagrees with them wants. Each side jockeys constantly for absolute control of a system that was designed to accommodate the views of all. And no faction has been as vehement as those who hate government qua government.

That’s our fault, you know. We, the people. We keep voting for that garbage. Which is our right.

And the garbage will continue if we don’t stand against it. Which is not only our right, but our duty.

Today, I stand against something I saw in The Wall Street Journal.

The piece that it went with was unremarkable, the usual stuff you read on the opinion pages of the WSJ, containing such passages as this:

So why is our economy barely growing and unemployment stuck at over 9%? I believe the answer is very simple: Economic freedom is declining in the U.S. In 2000, the U.S. was ranked third in the world behind only Hong Kong and Singapore in the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by this newspaper and the Heritage Foundation. In 2011, we fell to ninth behind such countries as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland.

That didn’t bother me. Such assertions have become background noise. And while I object to the piece blaming government for everything (yawn!), I agree with the belief it is rooted in: That what America urgently needs right now is strong growth in the private sector. All for it.

No, what got me was the illustration that went with the piece. You can see it above: The shadow of Uncle Sam looming menacingly over ordinary citizens.

My Uncle Sam. Our Uncle Sam. The figure that inspired millions of us to take up arms, literally, against tyranny the world over. The greatest symbolic representation of the blessings of liberal democracy the world has known, with the possible exception of Lady Liberty. Being used to symbolize the “evils” of government. Being used the way cartoonists in this country used to use the shadow of the swastika, the Russian bear, or the hammer and sickle.

Once, Uncle Sam personified the very thing this writer advocates — America rolling up its sleeves, getting to work, exhibiting determined economic vitality in the service of us all.

Utterly disgusting. And yet, something that has become so routine that most won’t even take note of it. Which is why I just did.

Moderation, seen as a vice

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Shaking my head as I read this:

Huntsman tries to shed ‘moderate’ label

By GINA SMITH – gnsmith@thestate.com
Jon Huntsman’s S.C. advisors are pushing back on the “moderate” label that has dogged the former Utah governor in his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president.

“We have a story to tell about Huntsman that hasn’t been told yet,” Richard Quinn, a S.C. advisor to Huntsman, said Thursday as Huntsman shook hands and ate barbeque at a Columbia restaurant.

S.C. politicos increasingly agree the S.C. race will come down to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who consistently has finished in the top two in S.C. polls, and a “non-Romney” candidate, likely to be someone further to the political right of Romney.

That means a new narrative is needed for Huntsman who, rightly or wrongly, has been labeled as a moderate by many S.C. voters because of his stint as U.S. ambassador to China under President Barack Obama, his support for same-sex civil unions and his belief in global warming….

What has become of our nation when it is a virtue — a prerequisite, even — to be an extremist? This is not a good place to be, people. It’s like… civilization itself having a bad name.

Nikki Haley vs. Occupy Columbia: Pick your side

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Because I can’t. An excerpt from a release that just came in from Occupy Columbia:

On Thursday, Governor Nikki Haley said that unions are behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. We contest that accusation. This is a leaderless movement that welcomes participation from all groups, but neither bows down nor endorses any. We’ve publicly invited all people or organizations, whether they be Unions or the Tea Party, to come take part in a conversation about economic injustice and a system that is rigged to benefit the 1% at the direct expense of the 99%.

We challenge Governor Haley to produce evidence to back up her claim. If she would attend one of our General Assemblies (held every day at 10:00am and 7:00pm), she would realize that all decicions made by Occupy Columbia are voted on by those in attendence. We require a 90% threshold for consensus, and no group, Union or otherwise, has the ability to control that.

Whom should I back here? This is a toughie…

Seriously, though — I don’t think the gov should have said that about them, without justification. Shades of her tale about the drug-addled unemployed.

But then, I don’t agree with OC that Nephron locating here is a bad idea. The rest of the release:

On the other hand, it was the Governor herself who said, earlier this morning, that she is the “number one employee” of a pharmaceutical company and that their success is her “number one goal.” This company, Nephron Pharmaceuticals is the same company whose private jet she used to fly to a fundraiser in Dallas, TX last month, according to Fits News.

We had members in attendance for this morning’s announcement, one holding a sign reading “Who owns you?” Her number one priority should be the success of the people of South Carolina, not the non-body person that is a major pharmaceutical company.

By her statement, she is the personification of the merger of state and corporate interests. We applaud her bold honesty, but find it hard to believe that she can be expected to be accountable after such a declaritive pledge of allegiance to the highest bidder.

So I’m where I started, without a side. But that’s my usual position…

Dems, don’t repeat GOP’s Tea Party mistake

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When I saw this Tweet this morning,

PostPolitics

@postpoliticsPostPolitics

How the Occupy Wall Street movement could help Democratshttp://wapo.st/vIrMv8

My first thought was hopeful: By… making them look moderate by contrast?

But I was whistling past a political graveyard. I knew that’s not what I would find when I followed the link:

The Occupy Wall Street movement is very much in its infancy, and many Americans still don’t know what to think of it. But there is also growing evidence that it could become a boon to Democrats.

A new CBS News-New York Times poll shows 43 percent of people agree with the aims of the movement, while just 27 percent say they disagree.

Set aside the unanswerable question, “agree and disagree with what?” Read on…

This is ominous. Expect Democrats to start sounding much more like populist class warriors than they already do. Expect them to go gaga over this movement the way Republicans did the Tea Party in 2010. Expect there to be no candidates out there trying to appeal to sensible independents who just go to work every day and try to earn a living and hope and pray, often in vain, that their political leaders might approach things as seriously as they do.

Think I’m wrong? Well, Phil Noble — who seems determined to turn the old Third Way movement (in SC, at least) into a vanguard of the populist left — is now using his SC New Democrats as a megaphone for OWS. From his Facebook page:

OCCUPY IN SC NEWS 10/26…TOP STORY: ‘Meet Rick Perry” in Cola and Occupy media http://bit.ly/sP332P … STATEWIDE – Occupy Your State Capital, National event, Oct 29, 12 -3, Columbia http://bit.ly/nSYBGD … Occupy the Streets / Occupy the World Nov 11, http://on.fb.me/nkgtw6 … COLA – 10 days, State House Occupation continues, Site with daily schedule http://bit.ly/nVmW80 Media on Occupy at Rick Perry event http://bit.ly/sP332P …CHAS – GA will be at the ILA Hall on Morrison Dr at 6pm on ThursdayOct 27 …G’VILLE – Sunday Oct 30, McPherson Park at 2, Main Street march at 4 http://grnol.co/pCBBlQ Nov 7 Occupy Concert 7pm, The Handelbar http://bit.ly/rufODV media: http://bit.ly/tBbyuL … S’BURG – pix from recent events http://on.fb.me/nrgPgz … MYRTLE BEACH – GA Sat, October 29 • 2:00pm – 5:00pm Chapin Park http://bit.ly/usVR88 … GREER – March Nov 5, N Main & College 12am http://bit.ly/psITUI … CLEMSON – Event Oct 27, 12pm Bowman Field http://bit.ly/roRWaD NEW Facebook pagehttp://on.fb.me/r85P0d … AIKEN – 1st GA meeting, Sun Oct 30, 2:30- 4:30 at Odell Weeks Park http://bit.ly/vLXk7Y new Facebook pagehttp://on.fb.me/nD18hp … Cache of good Occupy designs http://bit.ly/pLV62r … SEND INFO to phil@philnoble.com

Yeah, I couldn’t make much out of that, either, but I get the general idea. He’s all for OWS, or at least wants to persuade them that he is.

Dang. There’s just not going to be anyplace for the rest of us to go, is there?

‘What do we want?’ ‘WE CAN’T TELL YOU!’

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I could have sworn I saw something similar to this on a promo for the Letterman show (“Top Ten Things Overheard at the Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations,” or some such), but couldn’t find it on the Web. In any case, partly inspired by that, but more by what I’ve seen and read in recent days, I Tweeted this this morning…

“What do we want? WE DON’T KNOW! When do we want it? DOESN’T MATTER! WE’LL STAY HERE FOREVER!”

And of course, it’s not just me. The NYT had this story on its site this morning:

Protesters Debate What Demands, if Any, to Make

In a quiet corner across the street from Zuccotti Park, a cluster of 25 solemn-faced protesters struggled one night to give Occupy Wall Street what critics have found to be most lacking.

“We absolutely need demands,” said Shawn Redden, 35, an earnest history teacher in the group. “Like Frederick Douglass said, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand.’ ”

The influence and staying power of Occupy Wall Street are undeniable: similar movements have sprouted around the world, as the original group enters its fifth week in the financial district. Yet a frequent criticism of the protesters has been the absence of specific policy demands…

In other words, they don’t know why they’ve spent the last five weeks of their lives doing this. At least, not in any way that could actually translate into results.

While the demonstrators’ goals are no clearer to me after having read that, my own opposition to the movement itself is a bit sharper.

One thing they seem to believe in, and which I strongly oppose, is direct democracy. One of the things that has prevented them from articulating aims is their insistence on everyone participating meaningfully in the decision.Which is impossible.  (They’ve tried it with Facebook, then decided not everyone is on Facebook, so that lacks legitimacy. Which shows how extreme they are in their democratic impulse.) Beyond the kind of painfully simplistic, bumper-sticker demands you hear in the kinds of chants I mock in my headline and Tweet above, a crowd can’t take a position on anything. And even on that mob level someone, or some few someones, have to come up with the idea to chant to begin with.

Where these folks are on the right track is in their sense that our representative democracy isn’t functioning as it should. But the answer is to fix the republic, not to abandon it for mob rule.

A mob cannot discuss, or refine, or incorporate minority ideas to achieve consensus. A crowd can’t deliberate or discern. Come up with an algorithm to assemble opinions from masses of people and synthesize a position, and you still won’t be arriving at anything like an intelligent decision. (Aside from placing a great deal of undemocratic power into the hands of the writers of the software.)

Good ideas for governing a multitude seldom spring, like Minerva, directly from the brow of an individual. They are even less likely to do so from a crowd. In either case, the idea should be tested, challenged and refined in debate. The problem in our republic today is that we don’t have real debate between people with differing ideas — we have shouting matches between irreconcilable factions who are not listening to each other. And a crowd on the street is just another set of shouters.

The thing is, you NEED a “1 percent” to arrive at properly nuanced decisions for a multitude. In fact, the decision-makers need to be fewer than that for anything larger than a village, or a neighborhood. It’s not possible for the 99 percent to all interact with each other meaningfully in arriving at an intelligent decision on a complex issue.

Speaking of which — something else I Tweeted about this morning: “I saw ‘the 99 percent’ demonstrating at the Statehouse. Apparently, there are fewer people in Columbia than I had thought.”

Actually, what you had there on the State House grounds the last couple of days was about the right number for making effective decisions for the entire state — if they had been selected in a manner infinitely better than self-selection, and also better than the way we’re choosing lawmakers now. Because that’s not working so well, either.

Someone responded to my latter Tweet this morning. It took him two posts to say it all:

I actually sympathize with the movement. They just can’t articulate. But damn, Columbia protesters are cringe-inducing.
to me, there are actually similarities between OWS and Tea Party. They know something’s wrong, but are too dumb to articulate.

Indeed. But it’s not that they’re too “dumb.” They could all be the smartest people in America, and it wouldn’t matter. A crowd can’t articulate anything — or if it can, the thing it articulates going to be too simple. That’s the problem with street protests.

Endorsements that don’t help Huntsman, but should

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Last night on Pub Politics, since Joel Sawyer was co-hosting, I brought up this Tweet from the day before in which Nicholas Kristof mentioned Joel’s candidate:

It’s odd to see Republicans struggling to find an electable candidate.They have 1: Jon Huntsman.They just don’t like him.

To me, that’s a fine thought with which I agree completely. I greatly respect Nicholas Kristof. But of course, with the great mass of GOP voters who seem determined in 2012 to run off a cliff together with the most Out There candidate they can find, it’s an invitation to like Huntsman even less. Because Kristof is a liberal. A very thoughtful, iconoclastic liberal (a guy who, for instance, persuaded me to have a big problem with Obama’s lack of support for the Colombian Trade Agreement in 2008) who is in no way like the ranting partisans of the left.

But that doesn’t matter. He’s a liberal, and that’s that. The kinds of Republicans who don’t like Huntsman — and there are a great many of them — are of the sort (and you find far too many such people in both parties) who are convinced that a person who leans the other way would only say good things about a candidate of their party as some sort of dirty trick meant to promote the weakest candidate.

That, of course, is extremely foolish in this context. If Kristof is up to anything underhanded in this instance (which he isn’t), it would be a sort of double-reverse move — I’ll praise the best candidate in their party so they’ll be sure not to like him.

This huge mass of post-2008 Republicans seem bound and determined not to nominate anyone who might win the general election. Which is very odd, given that they seem to dislike Barack Obama so much.

In 2008, a wonderful thing happened: Both parties actually chose the candidate most likely to appeal to the political center. I do not recall any time when that happened before in my adult life (or at least, I don’t remember the last time my own favorite candidates in both parties won their respective nominations).

At the time, of course, there was a faction that utterly rejected this approach, and for the longest time waged an “anybody but McCain” quest. (Ironically, the choice of the Right — such as Jim DeMint — was Mitt Romney, who this year is considered Mr. Moderate. Which shows you what’s happened since 2008.) Just as the more vehement partisans of the left insisted their party had to nominate Hillary Clinton.

Tragically, the conclusion that far too many Republicans have drawn from 2008 is that they were not extreme enough. (They fail to understand that McCain was defeated mainly by two factors: the collapse of the economy in mid-September, and his having chosen Sarah Palin as an attempt to please the very faction that didn’t like him.)

So they flit from Bachmann to Perry to, now, Cain. And in the polls, Romney remains bridesmaid to them all.

And they utterly ignore that there’s another moderate choice, one without Romney’s baggage: Huntsman.

Last night, when I brought of the Kristof Tweet on the show, co-host Phil Bailey (who works for the SC Senate Democrats) weighed in with how much he, too, liked Huntsman.

I don’t think that thrilled Joel, either.

Phil, I believe, really was employing the strategy of saying nice things about a strong candidate on the other side so that the other side wouldn’t like him. But don’t let that blind you to the fact that Huntsman is the candidate most likely to appeal to the center, and even to disaffected Democrats.

Another way Occupy Wall Streeters are like Tea Partiers (this one, anyway)

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I follow @riseofthecenter for obvious reasons, and was for a moment excited about this Tweet:

Absurd Statements from 99%ers Show How Out of Touch So Many of Them Are — http://ow.ly/6PJBx — #politics #news #cim #nolabels

… because it seemed that it would provide evidence confirming my prejudice that Occupy Wall Street equals Tea Party equals Something I Will Never Agree With.

You recall the video of outrageous things that people at a recent Tea Party event in Columbia believe, right?

Well, I figured this would be the mirror image.

But when I clicked on it, there was only one example of the absurdity the Tweet mentioned. And as much fun as it is to construct a universe from a single example, I restrained myself. But I did enjoy the one example:

Have you been seeing these pictures of people claiming to be among the 99% of people who aren’t… I’m really not sure, because I’m not any of the evil things they say about “the corporations”, and I’m for damn sure not one of them either.

This one is particularly amusing, in it’s ridiculous sense of entitlement:

Learning is free, if the person imparting the knowledge wants to give it to you for free… and there is a ton of stuff you can teach yourself if you go to the libraries out there (free) or internet (free, once you have access), but those pesky professors want to get paid to teach, those darn janitors want to get paid to clean the building at night, that evil corporation that makes the electricity that powers the lights expects to be paid for that electricity and administrators… those selfish evil people expect to get paid to sit in their cubicles and run the school.

How selfish of those people! This girl wants KNOWLEDGE, and by gawd the universe should conform to her wishes without expecting anything in return!

What a joke.

SC should ditch specialty license plates

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I was struck particularly by this passage in the AP story about specialty license plates in South Carolina:

There are 370 plates currently issued in South Carolina, and a bill in the Legislature next year could nearly double that to more than 700. While the proliferation may be well intentioned, law enforcement officers and the head of South Carolina’s Department of Motor Vehicles say the increased number of options make the plates hard for law officers to decipher…

Say what? MORE vanity plates? There’s not much in this world that South Carolina needs less.

And of COURSE they hamper law enforcement. Always have. Aside from giving us something perfectly stupid to have arguments about in the Legislature (allow this plate, not allow that one?).

Yet another of my pet peeves, and someone is, predictably, trying to make it twice as bad. And guess who it is — yep, Michael Pitts, the representative who suggested that South Carolina abandon the Yankee dollar as currency and replace it with gold and silver. That guy.

Folks, license plates distributed by the state are about identifying your vehicle for law enforcement purposes, and showing that you’ve paid your taxes. Period. They should perform those functions as plainly as possible, with a minimum of Mickey Mouse.

You want to express yourself, buy a bumper sticker. Or a sketchpad. Or start a blog. Or post a video on YouTube. Twitter and Facebook are freely available. Anything you choose. But don’t ask the state of South Carolina to do it for you.

We should be ditching specialty plates altogether, not adding new ones.

The worst thing about Haley’s chirpy greeting order is the insulting assumption that underlies it

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The worst thing about the “It’s a great day in South Carolina!” order isn’t the fact that it is so grating and insulting to the caller. Callers can shrug that off; if they really need to do business with the state, they’ll take a breath and go ahead (even while filing a mental note that they now think less of SC government than they did before).

The worst thing is the attitude that underlies the order, which was ably set out in the newspaper this morning by Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey:

“While the press focuses on the negative, the governor is changing the culture of our state.. She is proud of South Carolina, and while we have challenges, we are making great progress every day. The focus of this greeting is to have state employees pass along a positive attitude and ask the caller, ‘How can I help you?’ so that they remember – and the people know – that they work for the taxpayers. The governor has always said that it’s time for government to work for the people, and this is the first step.”

She’s changing the culture of our state…. It’s time for government to work for the people…

This is the first step.

Because, you see, that never happened before. It’s never occurred to any state employee that they serve the people of South Carolina. Ever. Nikki Haley invented it. Thank God for Nikki Haley, because not one single state employee in the history of South Carolina has ever considered serving the public, even for a moment. If any had, this would not be the “first step” in implementing this wonderful new day. And this is the first step.

Again, we are seeing what we get when a person who does not have a clue about an organization — what it’s for, whom it serves, what its personnel are like, how it works, how it should work — is placed in charge of that organization.

Tragically for all of us, that organization is our state government — an institution that the people of our state, perhaps more than the people of any other state in the union, badly need to be well-led.

But there’s more to it than that. Nikki Haley is merely a symptom of a sickness in the politics of our state. The sickness is a nasty attitude of despising those who serve the public — and despising them more and more as their jobs become more difficult.

She is now engaged in the process of tearing down that workforce. And the first step is humiliation.

Wow, he actually did say it. He actually did say he should not be taxed on that leftover $400,000

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

At first, I thought nobody would be as stupid as to actually complain about the idea of increased taxes by saying that he, personally, only had $400,000 left over after “feeding his family” and paying his taxes.

And indeed, when I watched the interview with this Tea Party guy John Fleming, I thought for a moment that I was right, that he was actually saying something different. I thought he was saying that he was talking about money he needed to invest in his business and create jobs.

But then… the guy has $400,000 left out of a $6 million business after he has paid all of his business’ operating expenses and his personal and business taxes and met his family’s needs? Really?

This isn’t a Silicon Valley entrepreneur from the late ’90s. He’s not exploring exciting new ways to transform our economy. Nor is he producing high-paying jobs with futures. This guy owns Subway franchises.

So you’re saying, you can’t contribute to paying down the deficit because it might… hamper your ability to open another Subway every year or so? And your failure to do that is going to kill the economy?

I suppose you could argue that he’s right. I could mount such an argument if forced to. But not even I would be persuaded.

Actually, was he even saying that? Since he is deliberately mingling his business revenues with personal income, it’s confusing. But another way to look at it is that he takes home $600,000, which seems to be a whopping 10 percent of his businesses’ total revenues. And then he seems to say that his family’s needs are fully met with one-third of that, and I suppose that’s true. A family could, just maybe, scrape by on 200k a year if they were really careful.

And then he’s got $400,000 left over. He’s making out like this is his businesses’ money rather than his money, but then he is deliberately confusing the two.

It just gets worse and worse…

Anybody else think Jim DeMint, the Man Who Would Be Kingmaker, has gotten too big for his britches?

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Or breeches, if you prefer to be proper. I just like using the colloquial version in this context.

I was not set off by the video above, but rather by this headline in the paper this morning:

DeMint mocks Obama in video, won’t attend speech

What I’m saying is that boycotting the speech is what gets me much more than the video, which is fairly run-of-the-mill, even tame. But the part where he won’t deign to listen to the president, after the president has already been dissed by the House, takes us to a new level.

Jim DeMint, between refusing to tolerate the presence of the president of the United States (perhaps our latter-day Wellington is frustrated not to have brought about Mr. Obama’s “Waterloo” yet) to his peremptorily summoning those who would replace the president before him, to be questioned one at a time like prisoners in the dock, seems to be trying to carve out a unique space for himself in American politics.

It seems to be a position something like that of a king (or something more powerful, a kingmaker). In any case, it’s nothing that our Framers envisioned in setting up this system of governance. It’s personal. It’s specific to him. And it answers to no one. We need to come up with a whole new system of political science (or at least, hark back to a very old one) even to come up with the terminology with which to explain what he is doing.

How does his pattern of behavior strike you?

The great part about this is, nobody cares now

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There was a time when this melodrama would have meant something. We live in better times now that ex-Gov. Palin seems to fascinate less:

At Palin’s Request, Tea Party Organizers Disinvite Christine O’Donnell

After days of drama, former Alaska governor confirms she will speak at Iowa rally.

If you’re a Tea Party organizer looking to fill the seats at an upcoming rally, the math is pretty simple: Sarah Palin > Christine O’Donnell.

So it should come as no surprise that when Palin threatened to sit out a Tea Party of America event in Iowa this Saturday unless the former GOP Senate candidate was disinvited, organizers quickly did what needed to be done.

“I had to cancel Ms. O’Donnell,” Tea Party of America president Ken Crow told NBC News.

She can’t upstate serious presidential candidates any more, so she is reduced to upstaging the poor little ex-witch wannabe…

I agree with Bachmann: God is definitely trying to send us a message

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Just read this a few minutes ago:

Bachmann Says Irene, Earthquake Were Messages From God

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of politicians,” the GOP presidential hopeful said over the weekend at a campaign event in Florida, the St. Petersburg Times reports. “We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”

I agree completely. God IS wondering what it will take. He’s all like,

Yo! Down there! What’ve I gotta do to convince you people that you’re totally screwing up the Earth here? Can you say, “global warming”? Can you say “hurricane hitting New York, of all places?” Can you say anything? More to the point, can you hear anything? I gave you ears! Or is it just that you don’t want to? I’m starting to have second thoughts about the Free Will thing…

And we’re all like,

Wha…? Did you hear somethin’?

Moammar and Condi, sittin’ in a tree

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I reTweeted something about this earlier today, but on the extremely likely chance that y’all missed it, I just had to share:

In the ruins of Gadhafi’s lair, rebels find album filled with photos of his ‘darling’ Condoleezza Rice

James Eng and David Arnott, msnbc.com, write:

“Deeply bizarre and deeply creepy.”

That’s how the State Department is describing a surprising find inside the compound of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi: a photo album with pictures of Condoleezza Rice.

Rebel fighters who ransacked Gadhafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound have been turning up some bizarre loot, including the Libyan leader’s eccentric fashion accessories and his daughter’s golden mermaid couch. The latest discovery is a photo album filled with page after page of pictures of Rice, the former secretary of state who visited Tripoli in 2008.

Poor Condi. How mortifying…

We gotcher treason right HERE, Mr. Texas!

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Folks on the left in South Carolina, few as they are, have really been cranking out some videos lately.

Now there’s this one, above, from SCForwardProgress, which rips into Rick Perry for calling our homeboy, Ben Bernanke, “treasonous.”

And yeah, I felt pretty indignant, too. Ben’s one of us. He’s from the county right next to mine. He worked at South of the Border when he was in school, for goodness sakes. And he was appointed by George W. Bush, not that Obama feller or any other blamed librul.

And of course, in all serious, speaking that way of the fed chair is in NO way appropriate coming from someone even thinking of becoming president of the United States. The remark was, not to put too fine a point on it, gross.

But on the other hand, if you’re surprised, you haven’t spent much time around the Tea Party. They talk like this.

(Oh, one last thought, about the latter part of that video. We SC boys aren’t in much of a position to get on other people’s cases for talking secession. Puts us at a disadvantage…)

This ultimate libertarian fantasy could make super-gory Reality TV — IF they’d allow the cameras

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I'm picturing sawed-off shotguns -- but no federal marshals like Sean Connery to stop you from using them as you like!

Bart had to know he was going to set me off on a laugh-fest when he shared this:

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”

Wowee. If you want to read the whole story, here’s where Bart got it. And here’s where they got it.

the part that really cracked me up about this particular libertarian fantasy is where they envision “looser building codes.”

You’re going to be living on, essentially, an oil platform — an extremely physically limited space — in the middle of the ocean? You’d better have the strictest building codes in the history of the world. In fact, while you’ve got me going — “building”? Really? You’re saying that these Überflakes would be able to take it into their heads to build new structures, according to the whims of each Ayn Randian individual, in a shared space that exists on the oceanic equivalent of the head of a pin?!?!?

For the engineering even to be feasible, you’d have to design the whole sovereign city-state all in advance, on shore. I’m talking physics here, not political philosophy. Sure, you could allow for expansion, but only within the context of the original design, or the whole thing would become untenable. A desert island, maybe — if it’s really huge, so these cranky individualists can spread out and not get on each others’ nerves. But on one of these tiny things? Really? You mean, somebody thought about this for more than five seconds, and is still considering it? And this guy gave them a million and a quarter?

But yeah, let’s roll with this! Go ahead and eliminate building restrictions entirely! Stick planks out over the edge like on a pirate ship and put condominiums on them! Who’s to stop you?

Combine that with the “few restrictions on weapons,” and these few individuals should be able to make a lot of money in the Reality TV market by putting cameras in every nook and cranny (if they can suppress their strong libertarian prejudices against such things — which I think they could for enough moolah, which libertarians crave). As entertainment, it would rival anything the Roman Colosseum ever dreamed up. And it would be perfectly legal! No one could say thee nay?

Imagine it, those of you who have actually been paying attention to the way humans behave in reality. Surely we’ve all encountered the phenomenon of neighbors suing each other over minor infractions of the neighborhood covenant. The ill will gets to bad that people move away from their dream homes. Imagine the tensions in this super-tight space — no rolling lawns to act as a buffer — with “looser building codes” and everyone packing an arsenal!

Sawed-off shotguns. That would be my weapon of choice in such tight quarters.

Anybody ever see “Outland,” with Sean Connery? It’s “High Noon” transferred to a mining colony on one of the moons of Jupiter. No ray guns, but sawed-off shotguns. (That was the touch that made the movie.) Awesome.

That’s what a Seastead would be like, as envisioned. Only without the federal marshal, which was Sean Connery’s role (and don’t ask me how a Scot got to be a federal marshal — it’s the future!). I suspect Thiel knew all this when he gave them the money. It’s pocket change to him, and maybe he thinks it would be fun to watch.

Nekkid woman on the corner in Colatown

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WIS says this picture was taken by Jessica Saleeby.

The problem with PETA is…

OK, one of the problems with PETA is… they’re so desperate to get your attention that you miss the point they’re trying to make.

Such as today, when a young woman showered naked on a corner in Five Points. Here’s a report from WIS:

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) – Two women from the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are showering nude on a street corner in Columbia today to highlight how they believe consuming water and adopting a vegan lifestyle helps the environment.

The naked women are showering behind a banner that reads, “Clean Your Conscience: Go Vegan! 1 lb. of Meat Equals 6 Months of Showers” at lunchtime in the heart of Five Points on Thursday.

PETA says it wants consumers to know that the best way to conserve water and to help the environment is to go vegan.

According to the group, going vegan is an “easy way to cut down on personal water usage, and it’s the best thing that anyone can do to help stop animal suffering.”…

No, it never explains the connection between meat and showering. So, the point is lost. There’s probably some sort of explanation somewhere, but we don’t know what it is at this point…

But hey, did you hear there was a naked chick on the corner in Five Points today?…

Slouching toward history’s first intentional Great Depression

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We’ve been here before, back in the late ’20s and throughout the ’30s. But this time, we’re going to do it on purpose.

There’s blame to go around, in the long view. The Democrats did their bit leading us up to this point, but they’ve been offering compromises lately, and occasionally even making sense. Here in the home stretch, most of the “credit” for a crash will belong to the Republicans and their Kool-Aid-drinking — I mean Tea-drinking — friends.

Yesterday, the five Republican members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation “distinguished” themselves by being the most obstinate state bloc in the GOP caucus. Not that the Boehner plan was anything to write home about, or anything likely to get us toward a resolution. Today, I see that Boehner’s doing better among his caucus, but for all I know, our guys are still firing on Fort Sumter. (Anybody see an update on the SC part? I haven’t yet.)

But after all the tears and folderol in the House, whatever they pass will be DOA in the Senate, where Reid has a plan of his own. I fail to see how these two plans lead us to an actual solution before Tuesday.

And here’s the thing, folks — it’s not good enough to raise the debt limit. The ratings agencies will still probably downgrade the nation’s (AND South Carolina’s) credit rating, which will likely take our already staggering economy (did I mention that the newspaper company that laid me off two years ago just posted a 2nd-quarter loss of 32 percent?), and knock it right down onto the mat. UNLESS we take serious steps toward getting the deficits under control. And that’s WAY harder than just raising the ceiling.

You’d think — what with the fact that about the only thing our state’s leaders have had to brag about for the last 20 years has been our vaunted AAA rating — that the SC delegation would want to do something positive toward averting this disaster, wouldn’t you? Well, so far, you’d be wrong.

You know what happened in the U.K. after the Conservatives — the real conservatives, not these ruffians over here who take pride in throwing the Tories’ tea into the harbor — took over the government? They cut spending, and raised taxes. I was there when the taxes went up (see, “The terrible, awful, horrible day that the VAT went up,” Jan. 4) Far as I know, England is still there. Scotland, too. Maybe even Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Nobody wants to raise taxes at a time like this. It can have a cooling effect. Nor does a sensible person want to see drastic spending cuts, which can do the same. But the alternative to doing both looks considerably worse at the moment. And wanting to do one without the other — no, insisting upon doing one without the other, no matter what — is a form of madness.

Just something to think about, guys. Here at the last minute.