Category Archives: Priorities

AARP survey shows support for entitlements

I recently said that, of all the advocacy groups that set up shop in the runup to the primaries back in 2007, the only one to return seemed to be ONE.

But another, AARP, has launched its own effort. It’s not as visible as those red T-shirts that Samuel Tenenbaum and his cohorts wore on AARP’s behalf four years ago, but it’s now noticeable. I had meant to listen in on a press conference call the nonprofit was having this morning about a new survey, but didn’t get back to the office from a speaking engagement in time to pull that off. But I can share the release that went with it:

Likely Republican Voters in First-in-the-South South Carolina Primary
Want Social Security, Medicare Protected from Deficit Cuts
AARP Releases Survey and Launches 2012 Republican Caucus and Primary Video Voter’s Guide

Columbia, SC – AARP today released survey results showing that by nearly 3 to 1 (68.5 percent for Social Security, 70.5 percent for Medicare), likely Republican voters in the South Carolina GOP Primary overwhelmingly oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to reduce the deficit.

AARP’s GOP South Carolina Primary Survey highlights the major disconnect between Washington and Republican voters in South Carolina who will be critical in determining the next Republican Presidential nominee. While the Washington talks about making a deal to cut Medicare and Social Security to meet their budget target, voters say they oppose cuts to the benefits they earned and need. Almost 600,000 South Carolina seniors received Social Security in 2010 and accounts for nearly 63 percent of the typical older South Carolina residents own income. Over 99 percent of South Carolina seniors are enrolled in Medicare.

“The results demonstrate that strong majorities of supporters for every Republican presidential candidate oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits,” said AARP South Carolina spokesman Patrick Cobb. “Conservative South Carolina voters and voters who agree with the Tea Party oppose cuts to these programs. The message these voters are sending is clear: Do not cut the Social Security and Medicare benefits they’ve earned.”

The survey interviewed 400 likely Republican primary voters (age 18+) in South Carolina with the mean age of 64 with 73.5 percent identifying themselves as “Conservative.” Conducted by GS Strategy Group with funding from AARP, the research has a 4.90 percent margin of error. Over 88 percent of voters said that Social Security benefits will be important to their monthly income in retirement and nearly all – 92.3 percent – say the strength and solvency of Medicare is essential to seniors’ health care security in retirement. When asked their preference on ways to cut government spending and reduce the deficit, respondents overwhelmingly say they prefer reducing U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan over cutting either Medicare or Social Security with 73.5 percent in favor of troop withdrawls to cut spending v. 8.5 percent preferring Medicare cuts, and 73.5 percent in favor of troop withdrawls v. 6.0 percent preferring Social Security cuts.

Respondents were asked which candidate they would vote for if the primary was held that day. The survey, conducted October 18-19, yielded the following results (by percentage):

· Cain 27.8 percent

· Romney 27.0 percent

· Perry 7.8 percent

· Gingrich 7.3 percent

· Paul 5.0 percent

· Bachmann 3.0 percent

· Huntsman 1.5 percent

· Santorum 1.3 percent

· Undecided 19.5 percent

AARP will provide information to its members and all Americans throughout the election season to help voters understand where the candidates stand on the issues that matter most to them and their families. As part of these efforts, AARP is launching its 2012 Republican Caucus and Primary Video Voters’ Guide on November 13.

The Video Voters’ Guide will feature one-on-one, unedited interviews with four of the top candidates on topics important to older voters, including: jobs and the economy, retirement security, Social Security and Medicare. The video will be mailed to Republican voters in the five early nominating states and will be available to all AARP members and the general public on www.aarp.org/youearnedit<http://www.aarp.org/youearnedit>, as well as through the AARP Bulletin.

The guide will feature candidates who registered at 5 percent or higher in an average of national polls. They include Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Congressman Ron Paul and Texas Governor Rick Perry. Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain and Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney declined repeated invitations to participate. Mediacom Communications will air the Video Voter Guide in its entirety on Sunday, November 13 at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

For more information on the survey or the Video Voter’s’ Guide, please visit www.aarp.org/youearnedit<http://www.aarp.org/youearnedit>.

AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with a membership that helps people 50+ have independence, choice and control in ways that are beneficial and affordable to them and society as a whole. AARP does not endorse candidates for public office or make contributions to either political campaigns or candidates. We produce AARP The Magazine, the definitive voice for 50+ Americans and the world’s largest-circulation magazine with nearly 35 million readers; AARP Bulletin, the go-to news source for AARP’s millions of members and Americans 50+; AARP VIVA, the only bilingual U.S. publication dedicated exclusively to the 50+ Hispanic community; and our website, AARP.org. AARP Foundation is an affiliated charity that provides security, protection, and empowerment to older persons in need with support from thousands of volunteers, donors, and sponsors. We have staffed offices in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

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Full disclosure: I am card-carrying member of the AARP, and the organization has advertised on this blog on more than one occasion.

About those parking garages…

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A colleague (not anyone with The State) asked me this morning what I thought about that parking garages story in The State Sunday morning:

Exclusive | USC garages $4 million in the red

Two parking facilities underutilized

By WAYNE WASHINGTON – wwashington@thestate.com

The University of South Carolina has spent $4 million over the last three years to cover deficits at a pair of underutilized parking structures built to serve the school’s Innovista research campus.

And it could be another half-dozen years before the garages break even, bringing in as much money as they cost the university each year in debt payments.

Combined, the Horizon garage on Main Street and the Discovery garage on Park Street bring in roughly $764,000 a year less in parking revenue than they were expected to generate, according to figures provided by the university.

USC contractually is pledged to use its “best efforts” to cover $1.4 million a year in debt payments on the two garages…

I had to confess I hadn’t read past the top of it, because it didn’t tell me anything new. I mean, we’ve been over this ground before, many times, right? I mean, the reason so many of y’all spit on the ground every time “Innovista” gets mentioned is because USC made the mistake of building those buildings right as the economy was about to crash — causing them to be under-occupied, and therefore for the parking garages attached to be underutilized.

I guess the news in this — the “Exclusive” news — is that there are some actual numbers attached to what we already knew. I guess.

I mean, this is the same ground I covered, yet again, in an exchange with Doug this morning. In an effort to rain on the Nephron parade, Doug wrote:

I really hope this doesn’t turn into another Innovista marketing hype venture like so many of the announcements made by USC over the past few years…

Of course, Doug was trying to head off exactly what I DO say about the Nephron deal, which is that it is one small step in the direction of success for Innovista. I responded to him thusly:

Let me say it again:
Innovista is not about those buildings.
Innovista is not about those buildings.
Innovista is not about those buildings.
Innovista is not about those buildings.
It just isn’t.

I curse the day those buildings were conceived, because they distracted everyone from what the Innovista concept is. It’s about all sorts of investments that will take place in all sorts of physical locations, mostly centered in an area bounded by the new baseball field and the State Museum along the river, and then up to Assembly Street — but NOT limited by that. It’s about leveraging that proximity to the University to promote high-tech development throughout the Midlands. Some will locate in the Innovista proper; some won’t.

As Innovista succeeds, many large and small investors will invest in all sorts of ways in infrastructure — from existing buildings to new. And the types of investors will include living space, restaurants and retail stores for the people who work in the research-related businesses there.

That’s IF it succeeds. Which is hard to do when so many people spit on the ground every time its name gets mentioned.

This IS a case of Innovista succeeding, by the way — one step in the right direction. A business first got involved with USC through Innovista, and is now expanding its business in our area, producing jobs that pay well. This is one of a number of ways that one would expect Innovista to contribute to our economy.

Back to the garages story. For me, the pertinent part, the real perspective on this, comes at the bottom, when Wayne quotes Don Herriott, the guy hired to clean up the Innovista effort after the last guy got pushed out the door:

… Don Herriott, director of Innovista, said the two 110,000-square-foot buildings already constructed are 40 percent occupied by researchers.

One of those buildings should be 60 percent occupied by early next year, Herriott said. The other should be 100 percent occupied in two to three years.

The economic downturn, which struck as the university was moving forward with Innovista, has made it difficult to get the other two buildings planned constructed, Herriott said.

Those buildings still could be erected at some time in the future, Herriott said. But rather than stick with its original, expansive vision of Innovista, USC officials are moving forward with a stripped-down plan that focuses more on selling the benefits of having a high-tech corridor and moving researchers into existing space.

“ ‘If you build it, they will come’ is not a business strategy,” Herriott said when he was hired last year.

Last week, Herriott said Innovista is coming together.

“It’s prime real estate,” he said. “There are people who want to have close proximity to the university.”

That’s the real perspective. That’s what’s happening here. And for my part, I look forward to Innovista — the real Innovista, not those stupid buildings — continuing to take off, to the point at which the $4 million shortfalls will look like a very small price to have paid.

SC Atty. Gen. Alan Wilson at Rotary today…

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“Ironically, I tend to look left,” said SC Atty. Gen. Alan Wilson at the Columbia Rotary Club today. “That’s a joke.”

He said that because he had already gotten a big laugh, unintentionally. Worried about his time, he had turned to tell our president that he was just going to speak a minute-and-a-half about Yucca Mountain before going to questions. Except that our president, Rodger Stroup, was on his right, and he turned the other way and said it to David Kunz, who was seated up there to do Health and Happiness. The laugh came when David said, very enthusiastically, “All right by me!”

But the rest of his speech went pretty well. Crawford Clarkson turned to me afterward to say it was one of the best speakers he’d heard at Rotary. And Crawford’s been in Rotary approximately forever. I said I didn’t know about that, but I thought he did well.

He did well because he spoke as something other than what detractors of his Dad might expect. Sure, he started out sounding a lot like Joe, looking around the room and recognizing his many friends. But that was cool. I’ve always liked that about Joe. He’s very sincere about it, and so was Alan. Alan was a bit cooler about it, in fact. Joe tends to be rather manic in his extreme excitement to be there as a congressman.

Anyway, as I said, some would like to think that Alan is another Charlie Condon. (Charlie, who is a perfectly reasonable human being in person out of the limelight, turned into a sort of pandering monster as A.G., pursuing one issue after another that seemed fabricated to further his political career.) But I haven’t seen that yet, and there was none of that in the presentation we got today. Charlie would have worked in the “electric couch” somewhere, but not Alan.

Wilson spent a large portion of his time simply talking about the routine work that the A.G.’s office does in the course of meeting its statutory and constitutional obligations — handling civil litigation, criminal prosecution, post-conviction relief, criminal domestic violence, etc. That he chose to do so, to explain his office in such professional terms rather than political ones, is to me worthy of praise. Perhaps because I’m always on the lookout for another Charlie. (Fellow Rotarian Henry McMaster was a welcome change from Charlie — and it should be pointed out, Henry was largely responsible for the emphasis on CDV. I’m glad to see Wilson is continuing to be interested in that.)

Then he got onto the controversial issues — the NLRB/Boeing thing (although in SC, that’s hardly controversial), the health care mandate, Yucca Mountain — and he fought his corner well on these. His point on each was that he approached them according to the law as he read it. Of course, I’m less likely to disbelieve him than some, since I see the first and third ones the way he does. I disagree strongly with him on the middle one (and the idea that he could be successful in pursuing severability appalls me), although I fear he may be right that in the end it will be settled by a 5-4 SCOTUS decision, one way or the other.

In supporting his assertion that for him it’s about the law and not political advantage, he cited the Cornell Arms case, in which a security guard shot and killed an unarmed man who he said he thought was threatening him. Wilson said some told him that “You’ll take heat” from 2nd Amendment advocates for supporting the government’s prosecution of the guard. But in his account, he said, “That’s irrelevant.” The man had served five years, and would have been released by the state Supreme Court had Wilson not filed for a rehearing. As John Monk (happy birthday, John!) reported after the meeting:

“This has nothing to do with the right to carry (guns), nothing to do with the gun issue,” Wilson said. “The defense has the right to appeal at each level of litigation, and the state has a right to ask the court to reconsider their decision.”

A good example for the point the A.G. was making. But whether you agree that he’s always representing the law rather than serving politics, I was impressed that he took no opportunity to posture before Rotary. There was no ideological cant about “big government” or, to cite something his predecessor sank to in trying to run for governor, about promising to protect us from Obama and his Washington “vultures.” He opposes the mandate and sees it as constitutionally unsound. Fine. I just disagree. At least he expresses himself like someone who respects the law, rather than an ideological ranter.

And that counts for a lot. Now, to be perfectly frank, his website seems a tad more self-promotional than his speech today (I went there to get y’all a link to look up more about these issues and his involvement with them). But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good speech. That it was, and well received.

Yep, they’re laughing at us in the UK, too…

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Rick Noble shared this with me today at Rotary, from The Economist:

IT’S a great day in South Carolina, and if you don’t believe it, ask Governor Nikki Haley. On September 27th the governor ordered the 16 directors of cabinet agencies under her direct control to change the way their employees answer the telephone. So now when phoning, say, the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services or the Department of Employment and Workforce, callers are supposed to hear this cheery greeting: “It’s a great day in South Carolina. How may I help you?”

Ms Haley says the new greeting will boost the morale of state workers and help her to sell the state. “It’s part of who I am,” she declares. “As hokey as some people may think it is, I’m selling South Carolina as this great, new, positive state that everybody needs to look at.”

The blogosphere has been inundated with people mocking the new salutation and proposing alternative greetings. One suggestion: “It’s still better here than Mississippi. How can I help you?” Another was more explicit: “Thank you for calling South Carolina where unemployment is high, morale is low and political leaders are very busy wasting your resources. How may I direct your call?”…

Man, I miss reading The Economist. I used to get it at the paper. But I’m already paying for too much other stuff that used to be covered by the paper, so that’s fallen by the wayside. (Man what DID I spend my salary on back when my club memberships and subscriptions were paid for?)

I used to know the South Carolina writer who wrote for The Economist. I sort of see (or imagine I see — “That blame media is SO bah-ussed!”) her political views in the particular facts chosen in this brief piece — and they are not views that are consistent with those of the editors of The Economist. But I’m not going to name her, because it might be somebody else by now, and then I’d look stupid. Or rather, stupidER.

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 USC biomass “travesty”

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Hats off to Wayne Washington (and his editor — I always like to remember the editors) for a rather overwhelmingly thorough report today on the mess that is the University of South Carolina’s biomass-to-energy project. An excerpt from the lengthy package in The State today:

On June 28, 2009, an explosion rocked the biomass-fueled power plant on the campus of the University of South Carolina.

The force of the blast sent a metal panel some 60 feet toward the control office of the plant at Whaley and Sumter streets, according to documents obtained from USC by The State newspaper through a Freedom of Information Act request.

No one was hurt, but USC officials were concerned enough about the “potentially lethal accident” that they ordered an independent safety review and, in a strongly worded letter to the company that had built the plant, made it clear that university staff would not be allowed back into the building until the review was completed.

The blast underscored what some USC officials privately grumbled about for years: That the plant has been a $20 million disaster, a money pit that was poorly planned and built by a company that had never constructed such a cutting-edge “green energy” power plant before.

Interviews with USC officials and a spokeswoman for the company as well as a review of more than 1,800 pages of documents show that…

Rich material for a discussion. Here’s how it is likely to go, although I look forward to unanticipated variations:

Some of you: Yet another example of USC wasting time and money on unproven, pie-in-the-sky energy alternatives and leaving us in a financial hole with little or nothing to show.

Others of you: What a classic case of the private sector not delivering — a Fortune 500 company that takes millions from a public institution and doesn’t get the job done…

To me, the whole mess is too complex for simple conclusions, but here’s a stab: Some USC officials under the last administration made an unwise, expensive deal, while at the same time trying to insulate us from loss by getting the company to guarantee savings. Then after that, everything went wrong.

But tell me what y’all think.

USA Today plays up SC lawmaker pensions

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Cindi Scoppe just got a little help.

For years, Cindi has been writing at least annually about the outrageous pensions that SC lawmakers give themselves. She just got some reinforcement in that crusade, with a front-page story in USA Today, which begins:

At age 55, South Carolina state Sen. David Thomas began collecting a pension for his legislative service without leaving office.

Most workers must retire from their jobs before getting retirement benefits. But Thomas used a one-sentence law that he and his colleagues passed in 2002 to let legislators receive a taxpayer-funded pension instead of a salary after serving for 30 years.

Thomas’ $32,390 annual retirement benefit — paid for the rest of his life — is more than triple the $10,400 salary he gave up. His pension exceeds the salary because of another perk: Lawmakers voted to count their expenses in the salary used to calculate their pensions.

No other South Carolina state workers get those perks.

Since January 2005, Thomas, a Republican, has made $148,435 more than a legislative salary would have paid, his financial-disclosure records show. At least four other South Carolina lawmakers are getting pensions instead of salaries, netting an extra $292,000 since 2005, records show.

And so forth and so on.

Increasingly, national media are discovering just how wild and wacky South Carolina is. On the one hand, it’s embarrassing. On the other, it’s nice to get the attention.

Who knows? Maybe the added exposure will help here at home. After all, last year, laudatory national coverage got Nikki Haley elected governor.

Expect Cindi to write about it more.

On Jim Clyburn, earmarks, race, and representing a poor district

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I’ve never liked one thing that traditionally has been core to the makeup of members of Congress: bringing home the bacon.

Yes, I know it’s a particularly honored tradition in South Carolina, from Mendel Rivers through Strom Thurmond and on and on. This state was devastated in The Recent Unpleasantness, and it was sort of natural in subsequent generations for folks to want their elected representatives to bring home Yankee bacon whenever possible.

Doesn’t mean that’s the right way to run a government. The federal government should look at the entire country and decide where it needs to build military bases or roads or bridges or place programs of any sort, according to which locations best suit the needs of the whole nation. Or where the greatest need for a particular service might be at a given time — such as disaster services. Largess should not flow according to which lawmakers has the most pull.

Congress has been so bad about this that when we decided we needed to close some military bases the nation no longer needed, we had to set up BRAC to prevent interference by individual members of Congress. It’s been a successful process, but the need for it testifies to a painful failure of our basic system of government.

Congressional pull is not the way to set priorities for our government. This is particularly obvious to a lot of people when we look at spending, but I’ve always been concerned that it’s just a bad policy all-around for making effective decisions for the country. And it disenfranchises Americans whose representatives have less pull.

So it is that I’ve been pleased (in general) with Jim DeMint’s efforts to stop earmarks (which are actually only a small part of the problem), and have never been much of a fan of Jim Clyburn’s more traditional bring-home-the-bacon approach.

But I’m not without sympathy for Clyburn. To explain why, I’ll share a story that at first may seem unrelated. I did not witness this, but I’ve heard about it.

A large part of why Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, as you will recall, was that he proposed to clean up government. No more Watergates. He promised, although we didn’t yet use this word for it back then, transparency. It was a huge deal; he was never going to lie to us. So after the election, there was a meeting in Columbia of people who had worked in his campaign in South Carolina. Probably a pretty big meeting, since back in those days, we actually had some Democrats in this state. And the Carter guy who was conducting the meeting told them that they shouldn’t expect any inside track on getting positions in the new administration. Everything was going to be open and aboveboard and a level playing field, and there was to be no smoke-filled room patronage.

One of the campaign supporters in the room, a local black leader who was then quite young (I’d want to talk to him and refresh my memory of the story’s details before using his name), protested, “But we just got into the room, and we just started smoking.”

Which was true enough. And more than once have I heard such protests from black politicians — now that we have some political influence, you want to weed such influence out of government.

Well, yes, I do. And I’m sorry some folks just got into the room, but we’ve had enough of that kind of politics.

Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to Jim Clyburn’s desire to get some federal investment into parts of the state that were bypassed when white politicians were grabbing federal resources for South Carolina. This isn’t about unsavory practices; this is about funds that will be distributed somewhere, so why not in your neglected district? Perfectly understandable. Even admirable. So while I am against, for instance, the bridge he wants to build between Lone Star and Rimini, I understand his desire to get some infrastructure into that area that might help economic development flow in behind it.

Against this background, I was interested in Warren Bolton’s column in The State today. I had actually missed it in a cursory skim through the paper this morning (I was conversing with several people while perusing), so I’m glad that my attention was called back to it by a release from, quite naturally, Jim Clyburn’s office. It was headlined, “Earmarks saving grace for Clyburn’s district.” An excerpt:

Frankly, I think the free-wheeling system that has allowed members of Congress to target pet projects for funding is too loosely monitored and arbitrary and, therefore, can be wasteful. But I don’t think that earmarks in general are bad; they can be used to make sure worthwhile projects are funded. In addition to a lack of transparency, the big problem is that the system doesn’t ensure that those important things get done.

But Mr. Clyburn didn’t invent this system. It was in place eons before he even arrived in Congress. Given that those in his district have grave needs that aren’t being met by the state, which has yet to come up with an effective way to address rural challenges that can’t be met by cash-poor local governments, he’s doing what he can.

It’s amazing to me how so many in this state can criticize Mr. Clyburn’s actions when they should be familiar with the challenge of rural South Carolina. While we get many letters to the editor from writers taking issue with Mr. Clyburn on legitimately debatable grounds, such as his positions on issues, his philosophy and even his use of earmarks, many others make statements and accusations that are just plain unfair, false and — quite frankly — racist….

I, like Warren, have fielded some of those calls — and emails, and letters, and blog comments. And while I may often agree with the person commenting that a particular spending proposal is a bad idea, it is disturbing to hear the undertone, the emotion that underlies the complaining. And Warren is right to use what he calls “the ‘R’ word” to describe this thing we hear. It’s the same undertone that I so often hear in the constant attacks on the very idea of public schools, or of government in general — because so many whites in our state, and in other parts of the country as well, have gotten it into their heads that government exists to take money away from honest, hard-working, moral, thrifty, sensible white people and give it, outright, to lazy, shiftless, no-good black people.

Not to put too fine a point on it.

Anyway, I’ve probably given you enough to discuss, but I’d like to point out another passage in Warren’s column:

I get lots of letters and calls from people who try to suggest that Mr. Clyburn can be a big spender and favor increasing taxes on the rich because he is insulated by voters in his “gerrymandered” majority-black district; some all but suggest that the congressman configured the 6th District himself.

But the truth is that Republicans in the S.C. State House gerrymandered the district in an effort to pack as many of the state’s black people together as possible so they could get as many Republicans as possible elected to Congress. That meant creating a majority-black district that has lots of rural areas that are heavily poor, undereducated and undeveloped. They’re areas that lack infrastructure such as water, sewer and roads — or libraries, theaters and bowling allies.

Amen to that Warren, and I’m glad to see you writing that, since I’m not at the paper to do it anymore.

I would amend his characterization of what happened slightly, though. I recall particularly what happened in the early ’90s in the Legislature: Republicans worked with black Democrats to draft a plan, over the resistance of the white Democrats who ran the SC House, that created several more majority-black districts.

Black lawmakers were frustrated with Speaker Bob Sheheen and other Democratic leaders because they were not willing to draw as many “majority-minority” districts as possible. The motivation of the Republicans was less direct. They had figured out that for every district you make majority black, you remove black voters from several other districts, thereby making those seats safe for Republicans, and unsafe for Democrats of any color. So, a tiny gain for those who wanted a few more black lawmakers, but a HUGE, strategic victory for Republicans who wanted to take over South Carolina.

Once that reapportionment plan was in place, the way to power was paved for the GOP. It put them in striking distance. They had big gains in the 1994 election. That, plus some key defections by white Democrats after the election (indeed, the earlier defection of David Beasley to the GOP had given them the head of their ticket), and we saw the Republicans take over the House in January 1995.

But I’ve reminisced enough. Time for y’all to have your say.

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…

Oh, no! I appear to be part of a trend…

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Tim brings this to my attention:

NEW YORK (AP) — The weak economy is hitting Americans where they spend a lot of their free time: at the TV set.

They’re canceling or forgoing cable and satellite TV subscriptions in record numbers, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of the companies’ quarterly earnings reports.

The U.S. subscription-TV industry first showed a small net loss of subscribers a year ago. This year, that trickle has turned into a stream. The chief cause appears to be persistently high unemployment and a housing market that has many people living with their parents, reducing the need for a separate cable bill.

But it’s also possible that people are canceling cable, or never signing up in the first place, because they’re watching cheap Internet video. Such a threat has been hanging over the industry. If that’s the case, viewers can expect more restrictions on online video, as TV companies and Hollywood studios try to make sure that they get paid for what they produce…

Tim was sympathetic in his comment about it, saying, “Don’t you hate it when you feel like just part of a trend?”

Yes, I do. Makes me feel… common. Low. Might as well start watching “reality TV” on my few remaining channels. That appears to be about all those channels show, anyway.

For the record, I have NOT moved home with my parents — yet. But I am one of those who is watching cheap Internet video instead of cable. I’m halfway through the first season of “Lost” on Netflix so far. The HD picture is awesome. “Lost” is… well, about like I thought “Lost” would be. I am not what you’d call enraptured. But at least I’m finding out what all the fuss was about. Sort of.

Tell Navin I’m not “somebody” any more

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Somebody tell Navin Johnson I just fell off the grid. I’m guessing I’m not a real person any more, because I no longer have a landline.

On Saturday, we called AT&T and dropped our home phone service AND more than 90 percent of our cable TV. We had just recently signed up for Uverse, and it included three months free HBO and several other services, and I was watching a LOT of HDTV. Too much.

I won’t be doing that anymore. Now, we have the local broadcast channels (which I almost never watch), and a few random junk channels. There’s no HD (and I can hardly bear to watch standard def anymore), no 24-hour news channels, and no sports. The latter two aren’t much of a loss for me. I recently discovered I will watch sports in HD, when I didn’t before, just for the spectacle — about as clear a case of the medium being the message as one is likely to find. And y’all know how I hate 24/7 TV “news.”

What does get to me is losing all the movie channels. The things I tended to watch the most were American Movie Classics (“Mad Men!” — which I won’t get to see at all now!), Turner Classic Movies, TBS and TNT — along with FX and a few others. And the HBO selections were pretty dazzling. Since we signed up for AT&T last month (after dropping Time Warner), I had spent a LOT of time on HBO. When I wasn’t watching a movie, I was recording one, or two, or three, on the DVR.

But part of the point here was that I was spending too much time on TV, period. I’ve got shelves of books I want to read and haven’t touched. I need to get to them. What has worried me lately is that I didn’t even want to get to them, as much as I should. Sure sign of brain rot.

What else did we give up? The phone number we’ve had since moving to Columbia in 1987. The one our kids had growing up. The one that was the reference point for so many different kinds of accounts all over town. I’m bracing myself for the first situation in which someone is calling up my account and says “What’s your home phone number?” And I have to say I don’t have one. (I also worry that someone might NEED to reach me, and has no way of finding me other than through published listings.) Now, I realize that’s not any kind of deal to my kids or their contemporaries. None of them live at home, and not one of them has a land line. But a land line — as irritating as it was, since nothing came in on it but telemarketers — was one of those things that said you were a grownup, you were rooted, you were established. I think that’s why so many people who HATE answering their land lines on the rare occasions when they ring still pay that monthly bill. Not doing so would make them feel — insubstantial, ethereal, not really there.

But NOT paying a bill for something I wasn’t using just didn’t seem a smart option anymore, so we pulled the trigger on the service.

There were a number of factors in the decision:

Too much TV. The temptation to watch it was too great. I was losing sleep staying up watching it — that happens when what you’re into is movies.
I was paying for Netflix, and wasn’t watching it at all any more. And didn’t want to give that up. And since I still have the Internet, I can still stream that, and that provides more TV than I’ll ever need.
The upcoming deadline for dropping the AT&T service without penalty. We had 30 days since we signed up, and about a week left of that. So a decision needed to be made.
The S&P downgrade of the U.S. credit rating. OK, that’s an oversimplification, but that was sort of the last straw. It was really a) our failure really to recover from the 2008 crash; b) my getting laid off in 2009; c) the fact that, after a reasonably encouraging start, it seems harder to sell ads on my blog, which beyond the way it hurts my bank account, is indicative to me of people being tighter and tighter with their money; d) the political failure to come to grips with debt last week, and knowing that even if we had, it would have meant cutting more spending and raising taxes, which both tend to cool the economy; e) the turmoil in markets Thursday and Friday, which to me reflected less the usual fact that traders are feckless, fearful jitterbugs, and more the larger situation; f) the debt crisis in Europe and its long-term implications; and g) the downgrading of the credit rating. I didn’t figure any of us was going to be making any more money anytime soon, so spending all this on HD movies (as cool as they are) and telemarketing calls was ridiculous.

As you can see, it takes a lot to make me give up my HD.

I got up Saturday morning thinking that if we were going to move before the AT&T deadline, we had to move soon. And then, right after writing this post about the S&P thing, I told my wife I thought we needed to do it. She got on the phone immediately, because as far as she was concerned, we just had all that stuff for me, anyway.

Here’s the really bad news in all this: You know how much I saved? About $64 a month. That’s all. Which is why so few people actually take this step. Our bundle — high-speed Internet, phone, TV — was $150 a month. You would think you could get Internet service and the local broadcast channels (which is probably about 5 percent of what I was getting) pretty cheap, right? But the new total is $86. My wife — who writes the checks at our house — is pleased with that. I am not. I feel like I’ve given up so much, they should probably be paying ME for the loss.

But I guess that’s not realistic.

While WE waste time on the stupid debt ceiling…

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Bud has a legitimate desire to read more about the debt debate here. And if I can when I get done with ADCO stuff today, I’ll have something to say about the embarrassing behavior of South Carolina’s House Republicans.

But in the meantime, I’ll take just a second to express my utter frustration that we’re having such a big fight over THAT (which we should have been able to work out in a few hours, long before now), when there are things such as this going on in the world:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. for the first time formally accused Iran of forging an alliance with al Qaeda in a pact that allows the terrorist group to use Iranian soil as a transit point for moving money, arms and fighters to its bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Treasury Department outlined on Thursday what it said was an extensive fund-raising operation that uses Iran-based operatives and draws from donors in oil-rich Persian Gulf countries such as Kuwait and Qatar. The Treasury said it had sanctioned six al Qaeda members for allegedly overseeing this network.

The U.S. has long been concerned about alleged Iranian support for the terrorist group, though Iran and al Qaeda hold differing interpretations of Islam and divergent strategic interests.

But Tehran, anticipating the U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, has been moving increasingly to assert its regional influence. Iran has helped smuggle sophisticated weapons into those countries to hasten the withdrawal of American forces, the U.S. says—a charge Tehran has denied….

That was the lede story in the WSJ today. But this idiotic ideological garbage over debt is sucking up all the oxygen…

It’s so hard for families to make a dollar, and so easy for the private sector to take it away

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Last night, my wife showed me a letter from The Wall Street Journal telling me that my subscription price is going to more than double. Guess that hacking scandal really has put ol’ Rupert in a bind, huh?

Then, just moments ago, I received this from Netflix:

Dear Brad,

We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.

Your current $14.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:

Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 2 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $11.99 a month

Your price for getting both of these plans will be $19.98 a month ($7.99 + $11.99). You don’t need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.

These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.

You can easily change or cancel your unlimited streaming plan, unlimited DVD plan, or both, by going to the Plan Change page in Your Account.

We realize you have many choices for home entertainment, and we thank you for your business. As always, if you have questions, please feel free to call us at 1-888-357-1516.

–The Netflix Team

Hey, I just switched from the three-movies-out-at-a-time plan to the two-movies one because I didn’t LIKE spending something like 19 bucks a month on it…

Good thing I know that the private sector is driven by such wonderful motives as customer service and efficiency. Otherwise, I’d be a little bit ticked right now.

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.

“The Brad Show:” SC GOP Chairman Chad Connelly

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Welcome to another guerrilla edition (as in, shot by me out in the field rather than the studio) of “The Brad Show.”

Our guest today: Chad Connelly, the new chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party.

I spoke with Chad over at the party HQ this morning. Since this was my first sit-down with him, I wanted to cover the bases — ask him to talk a bit about his background, etc. So we did.

But the hot topic — and if you can’t wait to get to it, it starts at 4:15 on the clip — was Gov. Nikki Haley’s threatened veto of funding for the SC GOP presidential primary in January.

Some highlights of that discussion:

He said there will be a presidential primary here, “no matter what.”
He said presidential primaries are so important that next time the Democrats have one, he’d be the first to support their bid for similar funding.
Total cost is a million dollars. Or maybe 1.5 million.
He expects to speak with the governor about it, and try to impress upon her the importance of the funding, this week. He’ll also be talking with legislative leaders.
Can General Assembly override a veto? “Yes,” he said.

Enjoy the show. This one is actually a bit shorter than most, which I hope you will appreciate. I asked about as many question as usual, but Mr. Connelly is a very focused speaker, which I guess adds up since that is his profession. It’s not that his answers were so short. It’s just that he said what he had to say to answer me, and stopped. Not many people do that.

It’s OK, Mr. President; you don’t have to have a position on this — in fact, please don’t

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Just got this little email update from the WashPost:

—————————————-
Politics News Alert: White House calls Rep. Weiner’s actions a ‘distraction’
June 13, 2011 11:32:22 AM
—————————————-

The White House says President Obama believes Rep. Anthony Weiner’s actions have been “inappropriate” and a “distraction.”

But spokesman Jay Carney wouldn’t say whether the president thinks the New York Democrat should resign — something other Democratic leaders have called for.

Wow…

I’ve been bemoaning for years the degradation of the presidency to the point where we expect the president to take a position on EVERYTHING that happens, whether it bears on his job responsibilities or not. I think the moment where it first hit me how bad it got was when I was watching a guy on a cable news station standing outside the White House with a microphone on the night of the Columbine shootings. This guy kept coming back on to assure us that the president would soon have a statement. And I’m like WTF? In what sense is a shooting at a high school in Colorado the responsibility of the president of the United States? Why on Earth would I expect him to say anything about it, or care what he said? I wrote a column about this at the time.

By comparison, though, Bill Clinton making sure to vibrate to the correct emotions over Columbine was the height of relevant leadership, compared to the White House being expected to have a position on some wanker who sends dirty pictures to women. We’ve really sunk low now.

If you have trouble seeing this, try for just a moment to look at the world the way I do, instead of the way the Beltway media does. To me, being the “leader of his party” is NOT a role I expect or want my president to play. To me, playing that role is actually inimical to the one that he is paid to perform.

So please, Mr. President: Don’t have an opinion on this. Ignore it. It’s beneath you personally, and certainly beneath the dignity of your office. Stick with the “inappropriate” and “distraction” thing, if you must say anything. Those characterizations are at least accurate.

A video interview about comprehensive tax reform

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Recently, I interviewed (for Alan Cooper’s MidlandsBiz) Michael Fanning of the Olde English Consortium about the need for comprehensive tax reform in SC. It’s an old favorite cause of mine, and he speaks about it ably, so if you have ANY interest in such wonkish-but-important things, you might want to watch.

Here’s the link, in case you have trouble with the embed.

An idea that is, was, and always will be bad

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Unfortunately, the “defund the schools” crowd was encouraged by the margin of the annual defeat of their execrable tuition-tax-credit proposal:

Nearly all lawmakers have their minds made up at this point on the topic, which repeatedly has surfaced since 2004 when school choice advocates, led by South Carolinians for Responsible Government, first introduced a school tax credit bill.

But advocates say they will continue the fight.

“We’re gaining ground every year,” said state Rep. Bill Herbkersman, R-Beaufort, a tax credit supporter. “This was the closest vote yet.”

The death knell for this year’s bill was its price tag, according to several lawmakers….

The price tag, of course, is not the reason why anyone with even the slightest sense of responsibility to South Carolina should vote against this thing. The reasons are… you know what? Never mind. I got fed up with repeating all the reasons why this is an awful idea years and years ago, really by the time I started my old blog. It’s just so totally without merit. And it’s dead for this year now, so why even bother looking up the links to when I said it all over and over before, much less repeating myself?

But I know that next year, we’ll have the whole ridiculous argument again. You know why? Two reasons:

There’s a whole cottage industry of interest groups that are funded specifically to push this.
The extremes of the Republican Party have begun to become the core, with recent gains by the Tea Party. Hence the close vote this time, several months after the Tea Party achieved its zenith.

So I’ll just gather up all the painfully obvious arguments against sometime between now and then. Might as well. It’s not like we’re ever going to spend serious time in the Legislature discussing anything that might actually improve the quality of education in South Carolina — like school district consolidation, or empowering principals to hire and fire freely, or merit pay.

No, we’re just going to keep having this same pointless, monotonous argument over and over, year after year. And getting nowhere.

The math doesn’t quite work either way…

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Friend of mine shared this link with me today…

First, there’s plenty to be embarrassed about, as a South Carolinian, in this video — the main thing being that Sen. Mike Fair is struggling, and failing, to justify his concern about the “danger” of Sharia law being established in South Carolina. It sort of reminds me one of the first corny jokes I remember hearing as a little kid: Man stands on a street corner, snapping his fingers. Cop comes up and threatens to run him in for loitering. Man says, “I’m not loitering. I’m snapping my fingers to keep the elephants away.” Cop says, “There are no elephants around here!” Man says, “I’m doing a good job, aren’t I?”

Against the background of that, his hyperbolic statement that “99 percent probably” of all terrorist acts since the Lebanon Marine Barracks bombing have been carried out by Muslims seems unremarkable. It’s one of those things that “everyone knows,” and he’s just being sloppy. But since the folks doing this report saw fit to dispute it very explicitly, using figures that also seemed a bit dubious, I decided to take a closer look. The report says:

Fair’s calculation, that nearly every single act of terrorism for the past couple of decades was committed by Muslim men, is off base. In reality, in the last ten years alone, nearly twice as many terrorist plots were hatched by non-Muslims in America than by Muslims.

Hmmm. And that period doesn’t even include Oklahoma City. Follow that link and you go to a previous report, which says:

Since the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, Muslims have been involved in 45 domestic terrorist plots. Meanwhile, non-Muslims have been involved in 80 terrorist plots.

… and then in turn provides a link to this report, by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, that seems in a quick review to fairly assess the number of terror plots hatched by each group. It even gives nonMuslims a break by not counting eco-terrorism.

But then I got to thinking… Muslims make up six-tenths of one percent of the U.S. population. So that means that there are more than 99 times as many non-Muslims as Muslims in the country. But only twice (actually, a little less than twice) as many “terror plots” are hatched by nonMuslims. So… less than 1 percent of the population, but hatch 36 percent of the terror plots. So that means … and my math may be wobbly here, because of assumptions I’m making to come up with a number … Muslims are involved in terror plots about 60 times as often as you would expect, all other things being equal.

It gets extra muddy after that. Fair is talking about worldwide, and the study is about U.S. threats. And it is counting Muslim incidents regardless of whether the plotters are U.S. residents or not.

But there does tend to be, apparently, a higher proportion of plots hatched by Muslims than non, as percentages of the population, in this country. Just way less than 99 percent.

I digress, though. Bottom line, even if Fair were right, taking preemptive action to prevent the establishment of Sharia law in South Carolina, or fretting about prayer shawls in public places, is ridiculous.

I just can’t prove that mathematically. But the burden should be on him to prove that what he’s talking about is an actual problem.

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