Category Archives: South Carolina

Hurrah for Columbia’s (eventual) smoking ban, but delay is inexcusable

Too late! Columbia City Council already approved the delay.

Now, to take a step back — it’s wonderful that the decision has finally been made — and look, it was by 5-2, not the expected 4-3

But it’s bad that the current unconscionable state of affairs will continue for three more months. There’s just no excuse for that.

One of my colleagues disagreed with me on that point this morning, saying that it’s reasonable to wait and implement it at the same time as Richland County. But that’s ridiculous. One would only do so out of an abstract sense of administrative tidiness. There is no advantage to be gained by waiting for the county that is not outweighed by the wrongness of exposing city workers to carcinogens for three more months, after you’ve already decided that it’s right to protect them.

There is NO safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. And since any exposure greater than zero is unsafe, three months of unnecessary exposure is unconscionable.

For that matter, since Richland is expected to have a final vote on the subject by June 17, why can’t that ban go into effect July 1? It took what — three days after the referendum (a far less tidy and less predictable instrument than a council vote) for stores to start selling beer on Sunday in Columbia. If you know you have the votes, and you’re working toward it, how much gearing up is necessary to say smoking is now banned in the county? Why can’t it be in effect immediately? I’ll be told time is necessary for notification, but you know, you don’t have to penalize anyone who wasn’t notified yet (like there’s any bar or restaurant owner who won’t know about it the day of the vote, which seems highly unlikely). Enforcement will never be perfect, any more than enforcement of the law against murder is perfect (I mean direct, overt, immediate and obvious murder, as distinguished from the slow kind of forcing people to breathe smoke day after day). Most of the effectiveness of such an ordinance will result from the voluntary cooperation of law-abiding people. There is no reason not to let that begin immediately.

What next — postpone again to wait for Lexington County, or for Cayce and West Columbia. The town of Lexington is now thinking about discussing a ban. Must Columbia wait for them, too? It would make just as much sense to wait for them — especially for Lexington County — as for Richland. That is, unless you argue that waiting for Richland makes sense because Columbia is located within that county — but if that’s your argument, Columbia’s ban is superfluous, unless incorporated areas were to be exempted.

This delay is ridiculous, and it is wrong.

DON’T POSTPONE SMOKING BAN!

Employees of restaurants and bars in Columbia have breathed other people’s poisons far too long.

Thanks to the evil and stupidity that dwells in the hearts of too many state lawmakers, restaurant workers have already become two years more likely to die of lung cancer, emphysema or heart disease.

There is NO excuse for exposing them for three more months.

Don’t even propose it, Mayor Bob. Don’t.

‘Fun Guy’ keeps McCain campaign in stitches making fun of how we talk in S.C.

Actually, it’s more accurate to say that he keeps the McCain campaign in stitches encouraging contests to see who can sound more like our own Henry McMaster:

    Mr. Duprey, who also describes himself as "chief morale officer," goofs off a lot — mimicking a flight attendant, for instance, as she demonstrates the safety features of the aircraft. After Sen. McCain won Wisconsin, Mr. Duprey greeted him wearing a giant Cheesehead. One recent day on the McCain plane, Mr. Duprey organized a contest among reporters to see who could best imitate the southern drawl of South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster.
    "He’s a fun guy," Sen. McCain said in an interview. "He makes everybody feel good."

The thing is, around here, there’s nothing unusual about the way Henry talks. No, I don’t talk the way he does, but plenty of folks his age or older who grew up in Columbia do — smart, well-educated folks, too.

Maybe Henry thinks it’s funny, though — I haven’t asked him. I’ve been in meetings all day, and just remembered this from having read it this morning in the WSJ, and thought I’d share it with you.

A brief political history of the PACT

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
ONE WHO TRIED to decipher what happened in the S.C. Senate last week with regard to the PACT — that’s “Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test” to the uninitiated — can be forgiven for being confused.
I certainly am.
    Start with a press release from Sen. Greg Ryberg, which said in part, “PACT is dead…. the bill we passed today kills it as of July 1, 2008.” He said “the creation and administration of our statewide assessment test belongs with the people at the State Department of Education, the State Board of Education and the Education Oversight Committee (EOC) whose sole focus is education and not the General Assembly. I am glad that we have left it in their hands.”
    This was confusing to me because I was here when the PACT was created to measure whether schools were successfully meeting educational standards set in the Education Accountability Act, which the Legislature passed at the behest of business leaders who wanted a better-trained work force and conservative Republicans who were determined that if money was going to be spent on public schools, the schools were by golly going to meet objective standards. The EAA created the EOC and charged it with making sure the DOE (had enough initials yet?) did what the Legislature insisted be done.
    So yeah, if the PACT is to be changed, it’s the bureaucrats’ job to do it. But it’s the Legislature’s job to tell them to do it.
    More confusingly, this is exactly what state Superintendent of Education Jim Rex wanted the Legislature to do. “Teachers and parents are clamoring for these changes, our students need them and our state deserves them,” Mr. Rex said in his own release. “It’s really gratifying to see the Senate make such a strong statement with its unanimous vote.”
    In case the elected officials don’t have you confused enough, the chief organization devoted to diverting public education funds to private schools declared Friday that “The PACT is an expensive and outdated test that lacks the child-specific diagnostic data required by teachers. Unlike tests used in other states, PACT is South Carolina specific, and doesn’t provide educators with a comparison of our schools to regional and national test scores.” SCRG went on to charge that “Superintendent Rex was unwilling to replace PACT on his own,” and celebrated the idea that “final passage of this Senate bill will force him into action.”
    Action that he’s been begging for authorization to take.
    It might be instructive at this point to note that the Senate is run by Republicans, as is the House, which earlier passed legislation authorizing a revamp of the PACT, while Mr. Rex is the state’s highest-ranking elected Democrat. These fact are not at all important to me; I see them as an asinine distraction. But to the players, party considerations are of the utmost importance.
    Republicans are terribly worried at the moment that Mr. Rex will challenge their divine right to the governor’s office by seeking that position in 2010. In fact, some see his insistence that a PACT replacement be in use by a year from now, rather than a year later, as a ploy on his part to give a boost to his campaign. In other words, these Republicans suspect him of being too anxious to replace the PACT, other Republicans see him as too reluctant (or say they do), while Mr. Rex sees his level of enthusiasm for replacing the PACT as being, like the Mama Bear’s porridge, just right.
    How did we get here?
    I already mentioned above how the EAA, and its child the PACT, came into being in the late 1990s. Far from being some sort of oversight, the point was to have a South Carolina-specific test, to measure whether the specific standards our state adopted — some of the highest standards in the country, by the way — were being met by the schools. The point was to make sure the schools didn’t let any students fall through the cracks.
    This Republican-driven reform was never welcome among what critics are pleased to call the “education establishment,” or among Democrats, the party most closely identified with said establishment. But Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum, elected in 1998, had to accept the whole shebang as a fait accompli.
    Teachers complained about the PACT from the start. One of their main complaints was that the test (actually, a battery of tests, but let’s keep it simple) was not useful to them in helping individual students. Of course, it had never been intended for that purpose, but it was a complaint with great appeal across the political spectrum. Even SCRG, which is certainly no friend of public school teachers, took it up.
    Add to that the fact that schools felt so much pressure over the PACT that they inflicted pressure on the teachers who then transferred the stress to the students, and before you knew it, it appeared that all teaching ceased in the last weeks of each school year while everyone involved participated in a mass panic attack over the test.
    It is a great shame that teachers have been so conscious of this pressure, and a greater one that students have. This was, after all, about helping the students by making sure the schools, as institutions, did not fail them.
    So it’s good that a bipartisan consensus emerged this year to change the PACT into an instrument that would hold schools accountable, while providing in addition an instrument that teachers can use for timely diagnosis and remediation.
    But it’s bad that partisan craziness has made it so hard for voters and taxpayers — the folks to whom the system was to be held accountable — to tell whether that is happening.

Sheri Few touts ability to raise funds as advantage in House 79 primary

Fewsherri_024

A
lthough she was a candidate for the GOP nomination for this seat two years ago, this is the first video I’ve posted of Ms. Few — in fact, I don’t think I shot pictures of her either, since I didn’t post any at the time. She was the second candidate to come in for an interview in 2006, and it apparently had not yet dawned on me to take my camera into those meetings for blog purposes.

This time around, I have an embarrassment of riches — so many images and clips on candidates that they keep threatening to crash my laptop. And yet, they’ve been coming in so fast I haven’t had time to post many on the blog. But at least I’m doing this one. (Truth be told, if I weren’t under the gun to produce a video clip of something for the Saturday Opinion Extra by midnight, I wouldn’t be doing this one, either — it’s been a tough week, and hours to go before I sleep.)

In this clip, Ms. Few is talking about her proven ability to raise money, which she suggests (and she’s probably right) is considerably greater than that of her two opponents, David Herndon and Tony Lamm.

Up to now, contributions to her campaigns has been a source of controversy, since she attracts a considerable amount from out-of-state sources pushing private school "choice." But she says Republicans should consider that the party is in danger of losing the seat currently held by Bill Cotty, and that the likely Democratic nominee — Anton Gunn, who played a key role in the Barack Obama campaign in South Carolina — might be able to raise some out-of-state money of his own.

Here’s the clip:

Maybe not dead so much as completely different

Jim Foster over at the state Department of Education sent out this release, which is a tad more informative than Mr. Ryberg’s:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, May 15, 2008

Senate gives key approval to bill that would
replace PACT, reform 1998 accountability law

COLUMBIA – The South Carolina Senate today gave unanimous
second-reading approval to legislation that would replace PACT while
making significant changes to South Carolina’s overall student
assessment and school accountability systems.

“Teachers and parents are clamoring for these changes, our students
need them and our state deserves them,” said State Superintendent of
Education Jim Rex.  “It’s really gratifying to see the Senate make
such a strong statement with its unanimous vote.”

After receiving a routine third reading, the Senate-amended version of
H.4662 will return to the House next week for its consideration.  If the
House declines to accept the changes made by the Senate, the bill would
head to a conference committee.

One key difference, Rex said, is that the Senate bill mandates a
replacement for PACT by spring 2009.  The House bill would replace PACT
in 2010.

“Everyone agrees that we need to replace PACT as quickly as possible
with a system that’s more useful to teachers and informative for
parents,” Rex said.  “I hope the House will see that we don’t need
another year of PACT before we start using something that works
better.”

Both versions of the legislation would make the first significant
changes to South Carolina’s Education Accountability Act since it was
approved by the General Assembly 10 years ago.  That law mandated annual
PACT testing for 380,000 students in grades 3-8 and the publishing of
annual school report cards.

H.4662 is based on recommendations from two statewide task forces
appointed by Rex last summer – one for testing and one for
accountability.  Those groups, which met numerous times over the late
summer and fall, included representatives from local districts and
schools, teacher and school administrator organizations, the South
Carolina School Boards Association, the General Assembly, the Education
Oversight Committee, the State Board of Education, business groups, and
colleges and universities.

The Senate version of the legislation would:
●    Eliminate PACT and replace it in 2009 with new end-of-year
accountability tests that feature “essay” exams in March and more
easily scored multiple-choice exams in May.  Schools would get final
results within a few weeks of the May tests, compared to late July with
PACT.
●    Revise the content of annual school report cards to make it more
understandable and useful for parents, while simultaneously making
certain that any revisions are in full compliance with the federal No
Child Left Behind Act.
●    Support voluntary “formative” assessments in English
language arts, mathematics, science and social studies.  These tests
would provide teachers with immediate feedback on individual students’
strengths and weaknesses and allow them to customize instruction based
on those needs.
●    Eliminate burdensome paperwork requirements for teachers.
●    Bring South Carolina’s student performance targets into
alignment with other states.
●    Review the state’s school accountability system every five
years to be certain that it’s working efficiently and effectively.

Trouble is, and contrary to wildly popular belief, the PACT was never intended to be "useful to teachers and informative for parents." There are other devices for doing those things. The purpose of PACT was to enable policy makers to determine whether schools and districts were succeeding at teaching the standards that were created to make education in South Carolina more useful in the sense of producing an educated populace.

It was the end result of the Accountability Act. The idea was to determine what kids should be learning (the standards, which are some of the highest in the country), and then have a device to let the lawmakers who passed the Accountability Act see whether the schools and districts were getting the job done in the aggregate.

It was the creation of business leaders who said graduates didn’t have the skills needed in the workplace, and conservative Republicans whose attitude toward education was that they didn’t want to appropriate all that money for it without some objective measurement of whether goals were being met.

Anyway, I thought somebody who actually remembers what this was all about should mention that. So I did.

Ryberg: PACT is dead

Greg Ryberg wants to claim credit for doing away with the PACT test. Witness this release:

Senator Greg Ryberg today hailed an agreement between himself and senate leaders to eliminate PACT and move forward on a new accountability system for South Carolina. “PACT is dead,” Ryberg said. “The bill we passed today kills it as of July 1, 2008.”
    Ryberg added that, “Other senators, Republicans and Democrats, agreed with me that the creation and administration of our statewide assessment test belongs with the people at the State Department of Education, the State Board of Education and the Education Oversight Committee (EOC) whose sole focus is education and not the General Assembly. I am glad that we have left it in their hands.”
    Ryberg also welcomed the decision to remove mandatory formative assessment testing for six and seven year-olds. He said that, “I opposed the 100% increase in standardized testing for our youngest students, and I thank the senators who worked with me to prevent that extra burden upon them.”
    Ryberg noted that it is now time for the superintendent, the State Board and the EOC to get to work and move us forward. “I encourage the superintendent, the State Board and the EOC to act now that the General Assembly has spoken.”

I’m not at all sure what he means by saying first, it’s dead; then saying this is in the hands of the state DOE. It reads a little like, I’m sick and damned tired of hearing about this thing, so YOU deal with it. But Sen. Ryberg is generally not the shirker sort, so I reject that interpretation and await another.

Perhaps elucidation will be forthcoming.

God Bless E.W. Cromartie

Say what you will about the guy — and we’ve had a few things to say about him on the editorial pages of The State — but he just saved a lot of lives by switching his vote on Columbia’s smoking ban. By this change, he now forms a majority for a total ban, which is the only rational and moral approach:

Councilman to switch vote on smoking ban
    City Councilman E. W. Cromartie said this morning he is now supporting a total smoking ban for Columbia, all but ensuring the a ban that includes bars will pass when council votes next week.
    Cromartie, the most senior member of council whose district includes the bars and restaurants of the Vista, announced his decision during a public hearing today on the smoking ordinance.
    “As the capitol city, we are leaders. We have to lead,” Cromartie said.
    Opponents of the ordinance like Tony Snell, who owns Club Fusion in the Vista, are not giving up.
    Cromartie has agreed to meet with Snell next week.
    Snell meanwhile is mounting a campaign to have Mayor Bob Coble recuse himself from the vote, since his law firm Nexsen Pruett represents tobacco companies
    “If the mayor recuses himself, it becomes a split vote and it is defeated,” Snell said.
    Discussion of a banning smoking in bars reignited recently after Cromartie said he might reconsider his vote. A ban in public places, including restaurants, was passed in 2006. Bars, defined as businesses that make 85 percent of their revenue from alcohol sales, were excluded at that time.
    Cromartie and council members Daniel Rickenmann, Kirkman Finlay and Sam Davis voted for a compromise plan to exclude bars.
    Coble, Anne Sinclair and Tameika Isaac Devine voted against the compromise.

— Adam Beam

So God bless him for that. If he never does another good thing as councilman, he’ll deserve credit for this one…

Now we just need Richland and Lexington counties and other governments in our politically fragmented community to go along. But this is a start.

Lindsey pandering for McCain

Grahammccain_2

Someone pointed this out to me yesterday, but I was having so much trouble getting ANYTHING to post I gave up on the blog for the day. Now that things seem to working again…

We know that Lindsey Graham’s best buddy in the Senate is John McCain. And predictably (but sadly), Lindsey is walking point for his party’s presumptive presidential nominee on his worst idea ever — the summer-long gas tax holiday:

Gas tax holiday to be introduced by Graham
By Doug Abrahms
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said he will propose suspending the federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon for the summer in a measure on the Senate floor as early as next week.
    "On a very short-term basis, I think Sen. (John) McCain’s got a really good idea — relieve that tax," said Graham, R-S.C.
    The idea also has been widely touted by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Democratic candidate Barack Obama has dismissed it as a political gimmick that will not solve the real problems of soaring demand and dwindling supply.
    Although presidential candidates have been talking about the gas tax holiday for weeks, there has been no vote yet.

Long-term, short-term, it’s a horrible idea, that goes precisely in the wrong direction.

CORRECTION TO PREVIOUS: Earlier at this point in the post, I said Jim DeMint was with Graham and McCain on this. Wesley called from DeMint’s office Wednesday to say that’s not true. So I’m sorry about that. It just goes to show, I guess, that you can’t believe everything you read. More about that later.

Remember, of course, that Hillary Clinton’s on their side on this. The only presidential candidate talking like a grownup on this issue is the youngest of them all, Barack Obama.

The Obama Effect

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
WEEKS SUCH as the one just past — in which I am still mired as I write this — do not lend themselves to complete, extended thought of the sort that leads to coherent columns.
    But when have I ever let that stop me?
    We’re in the middle of candidate interviews for the June primaries — 50-plus meetings with folks seeking their respective parties’ nominations for the state House, state Senate, county councils, sheriff, clerk of court, and on and on ….
    But as disparate as these candidates and their goals and issues may be, sometimes themes emerge, or seem to emerge.
    Here’s one, which I’ll call The Obama Effect, just to have something trendy to call it.
    There’s nothing new about this effect, of course, and I certainly didn’t discover it. But I have been tracking it since last July, when I wrote a column headlined “Obama, the young, and the magic of Making a Difference.” I wasn’t sure what I was describing then. I’m not sure now, either. It’s an amorphous phenomenon, or set of phenomena — but one of considerable force in spite of, or perhaps because of, that lack of easy definition.
    It’s the thing that led to nearly half a million people coming out to vote in the S.C. Democratic presidential primary in January, which is all the more extraordinary when you recall that there had been a very hotly contested Republican presidential primary just the week before, and that no one who voted in that was allowed to vote in the other. The turnout on Jan. 26 was double that of the 2004 Democratic primary. Republicans, after 20 years of touting the growing pull of their party, actually saw participation decline from their last contested presidential primary. This is less because of a decline in GOP fortunes in the state, and more because of an indefinable something over on the Democratic side.
    Detractors mock the phenomenon for the very fact that it is so hard to describe. “Hope” for what? they say. What kind of “Change”? Satirists have no end of fun mocking media types — people who make their livings describing things — for failing to explain why they’re going gaga. None of that diminishes the power of the thing.
    Still, I thought it had rolled on to other states beginning in February. But then we started these interviews, and I began to see a certain something — something I couldn’t quite put my finger on — cropping up on the county and legislative district levels.
    We’re used to candidates coming in with definite reasons for seeking office. Challengers speak of their enthusiasm for a certain cause, or describe in excruciating detail their indignation over having sought help from their representative and found him or her insufficiently responsive (a very common reason to run for office). Incumbents speak of needing just a little more time to accomplish that same thing they wanted to accomplish the last time they ran, and the time before that. And so on. After a few election cycles, you can finish the candidates’ sentences for them.
    But this time, we met some first-time candidates in Democratic primaries who didn’t seem to have a particular reason for filing, beyond a newfound enthusiasm for public service itself. Their reason for being in our interview room was ill-defined. I wrote a summary of one such interview on my blog, which led a curmudgeonly reader to complain that “those bromides tell us exactly nothing” as to what this candidacy was about. But I had included this clue: a quote from said candidate to the effect that this was “an exciting year, an historical year” to get involved….
    Not long after that interview, Associate Editor Cindi Ross Scoppe wondered aloud why some of these folks were running, and I ventured the hunch that this was a case of The Obama Effect. She said I had no objective, quantifiable reason for saying that. And she was right, of course.
    A few days later, Richland County Council Chairman Joe McEachern — who’s running for the seat currently held by Rep. John Scott, who’s running for one held by Sen. Kay Patterson — made no bones about it: There was an Obama Factor pulling in folks who had never previously given any consideration to public life. He and other more experienced hands were fielding a lot of questions from enthusiastic people wanting to know exactly how to go about getting involved.
    All of the aforementioned candidates have been black Democrats. But it fell to a white Democrat, Rep. Jimmy Bales, to spell out the thing more overtly. He said he’d like to see his party increase its numbers in the S.C. House, and “this might be the year this happens.”
    “If Obama were the nominee,” he said on May 1, “and if Democrats would come together… I believe that he would come close to carrying this state,” and would in addition have the effect of increasing the number of Democratic S.C. House members — not so much to a majority, but to a less anemic minority. Say, from 51 members out of 124 to 58. He says this dispassionately, calmly, without any signs of hysteria. It’s just that the candidacy of Barack Obama has made some previously unlikely things seem attainable.
    No, I can’t prove it. Nor can I quantify it. But there’s something there, and it’s happening down on a much more local level than has been widely documented so far.

Senate Dist. 21: A ‘debate’ between Wendy Brawley and Sen. Darrell Jackson over his position on school ‘choice’

This is one of my better little videos from endorsement interviews lately.

Wendy Brawley of Richland One school board, who is challenging Sen. Darrell Jackson for the Democratic nomination in Dist. 21, is going after the incumbent hard, and has a bill of particulars as to how she believes he’s looked after his own business more than the people’s. An example: Her accusation that he favors private school vouchers.

Sen. Jackson argues back strongly, point by point. I think it’s a video worth watching, especially if you live in that lower-Richland and Calhoun County district.

Low-def license plates

What do y’all think of those flat, fakey, counterfeit-looking S.C. license plates — not that I’m trying to influence your decision or anything.

The first few times I saw one, I thought, "Wait a minute…" and went out of my way to pass the cars bearing them, so as to look at them from the side and confirm the fact that the things are completely two-dimensional, and do indeed look like something somebody ran off on a $29.95 inkjet printer — you know, one of those they sell you because the replacement cartridges cost more than the machine itself.

Out of sheer self-respect, a convict might ask the parole board NOT to release him if he thought people out on the street might think he had anything to do with producing anything so sorry-looking.

Or maybe I’m overreacting. What do you think?

How they voted on the cigarette tax

Here’s the Senate vote to pass H.3567, which increases cigarette taxes by 50 cents per pack, with half the revenue going to expand Medicaid coverage, and half to give tax credits to low-income workers to help them purchase medical insurance.

Passage of the bill (H.3567):
Ayes 33; Nays 11; Abstain 1

AYES
Alexander          Anderson               Ceips
Cleary               Cromer                  Drummond
Elliott                Fair                       Ford
Gregory             Hayes                    Hutto
Jackson             Knotts                   Land *
Leatherman       Leventis                Lourie
Malloy               Martin                   Matthews
McGill                O’Dell                    Patterson *
Pinckney            Rankin                  Reese
Scott                 Setzler                  Sheheen *
Short                 Thoma                  Williams
Total–33

NAYS
Campsen            Courson                Grooms
Hawkins             Massey                 McConnell
Peeler                Ritchie                  Ryberg
Vaughn               Verdin
Total–11

ABSTAIN

Bryant
Total–1

*These Senators were not present in the Chamber at the time the vote was taken and the votes were recorded by leave of the Senate, with unanimous consent.

Cindi, whom we can thank for looking up the above while I was in yet another candidate interview, says other votes that might interest you would include:
1. Amendment P-1, to raise the cigarette tax by $1; tabled 31-13
2. Amendment P-4a, remove the provision that automatically increases
the tax each year by the rate of medical inflation. The Senate refused
to table that amendment 24-18, and then passed it on a voice vote.
Senators who voted "aye" voted to eliminate the inflation index.
    These votes can be found in the Senate Journals of May 7 (P-1) and May 8 (P-4a). Go to http://www.scstatehouse.net/html-pages/sjournal.htm to find the Journals, and then search for the amendments.)

The Obama Effect: Democrats’ chances in the S.C. House

   

Here’s a video I prepared for publication on the Saturday Opinion Extra page for this week. It’s from an endorsement interview with Rep. Jimmy Bales, who’s being challenged in the Democratic primary for District 80 by Stanley Robinson.

Mr. Bales mentioned in passing in the first minute or so of the interview that he hoped Democrats would pick up a few seats in the S.C. House this year. Not quite hearing him, I asked a little later whether he had said he thought Dems might regain a majority.

Actually, he did think there was an outside possibility of that, but mainly he was hoping his party would find itself in a better tactical position with a few more seats. He mentions some districts in particular where he thought Democrats might prevail.

Here’s the kicker — he’s pinning his hopes on Barack Obama. This is a theme I’ve been running into, in various forms, in these interviews so far. The Obama Effect ranges from motivating folks who were previously uninterested in politics to run. And it prompts Mr. Bales to hope to get closer to 58 Democrats in the House, from the present 51. This depends, of course, on Mr. Obama being the nominee — as does so much else.

The Democratic Presidential Primary back in January created a lot of excitement, and we’re still seeing the effects.

A little bit of inside baseball: On the video, you’ll hear Cindi jumping in to make sure I have it right, and won’t go hog-wild on the "Democratic Majority" theme. She has nothing to worry about; I’m a professional.

Free Thomas Ravenel

Ravenel2

Did I get your attention? I expect I did. Well, calm down. I’m not here to praise Thomas Ravenel, or defend him.

But I am here to raise the question: Why do we want to pay to feed, clothe and house him for the next 10 months?

This brings me to the larger question — one of the biggest facing the state of South Carolina, in fact: Why do we want to imprison nonviolent offenders? Sure, we may do it cheaper than any other state in the union, but even then it’s a huge waste of resources that could be better spent. And our cheapskate, insecure way of running prisons is going to bite us in the long run (actually, it already does, in terms of recidivism rates).

This is a recurring theme. Today, we raised the question on the local level — Columbia is finally having to own up to the fact that its penchant for locking people up for more offenses than the county does actually costs money.

Of course, T-Rav is neither state nor local, but we pay federal taxes, too. And it’s hard to imagine a better example of someone who could have paid another way. If you have a multi-millionaire partying on cocaine, why not give him a multi-million-dollar fine? As the sage Billy Ray Valentine said, "You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people." In other words, why isn’t he paying us, instead of the other way around?

That would make a lot more sense than sending him off to commune with Kevin Geddings in Georgia.

Here’s a free psych eval: It you’re planning to whack Jesus, you’ve got problems

Yes, I know that’s an insensitive headline on a number of levels, but sometimes I lose patience with quiet, sober discussions of whether someone has psychological problems when the naked fact is staring us in the face. Take this kid who wanted to blow up his high school. An investigator says he has owned up to planning to kill Jesus. Specifically:

    Townsend testified Schallenberger told a Chesterfield County sheriff’s
detective that "once he got to heaven, he was gonna kill Jesus or
something like that."

We’re going to be paying money to determine whether this kid’s got mental problems?

Killing Jesus in heaven? That’s less likely than Sollozzo getting to Don Corleone when he’s in his bedroom inside the family mall on Long Island — not gonna happen.

Yeah, I know that we’re talking legal definitions of insanity, and that involves all sorts of "how-many-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin" distinctions. But my point is that we know this kid is messed up, deeply and profoundly and tragically. And thank God his parents were alert enough to stop him. The problem, the thing that causes us to call in the experts, is that society still has trouble making up its mind about whether an insane person is culpable. In a sense, almost anybody who commits murder or plans to do so is in a psychologically abnormal state — either temporarily, through anger or fear, or permanently, such as in the case of a psychopathic personality. So we come up with all these rules and tripwires and technicalities, whereby it takes dueling experts and something akin to a coin toss to decide whether the person in question is legally insane according to the ultimately arbitrary rules that we’ve come up with.

The fact is, only God knows to what extent another human being is culpable — no matter how many tests or guidelines or whatever we set up. If we really think we know, we’re crazy. In the end, about all we can do is act to prevent crimes. Which, in this case, seems to have happened. Not that anybody is likely to pat himself on the back over it.

His poor parents…

Payday lenders reduced to quoting McGovern

This release came in today from the Community Financial Services Association (Tommy Moore’s employers), which among other things cited the organization’s Quote of the Month:

“Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don’t take away cars because we don’t like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don’t operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.”

George McGovern
Former South Dakota Senator
1972 Democratic Presidential Candidate
Wall Street Journal

… which of course reminds me of something I didn’t like about McGovern, and which I had forgotten until I read that piece in the WSJ recently. Actually, it’s a problem I had with the Left of those days — they were way anti-government. We have a letter on tomorrow’s edit page from one of those people who considers motorcycle helmet laws to be the first step to totalitarianism (I am not making this up). Such folks would have been at home in the Left in 1972.

And such people are not considered to be liberals any more — in fact, some of the most fiercely anti-government types now actually claim to be "conservatives" — which of course is one of the many reasons why I insist that the "liberal" and "conservative" labels haven’t made sense for some time.

That aside, I find myself wondering — whom is this quotation intended to persuade? Certainly not the GOP majority over at the State House. Maybe Tommy and the gang thought sending this out to the "liberal" media might have a salutary (from CFSA’s point of view) effect.

If so, it didn’t work in my case. But maybe I’m not typical.

The latest COLA outrage

Recalling that many readers were understandably appalled at the recent move by lawmakers to sweeten their own pension deal, which was already sweeter than Aunt Joy’s Cakes, I thought you might want to discuss today’s editorial.

It’s about something that is, if anything, even more outrageous than what Cindi brought to your attention several weeks back. Last week, after the embarrassing glare of publicity had caused them to drop their own pension cost-of-living increase, they killed the underlying legislation to give a COLA to state retirees just because it didn’t have their sweetener in it anymore.

Or, as we described it in today’s editorial:

IT WAS NO BIG surprise when legislative leaders tried to sneak through a generous perk for themselves on the back of an important bill to stabilize the State Retirement System and protect tens of thousands of state retirees. Sweetening up their own pension system is something lawmakers try to do periodically, and they always do it quietly.
    But what happened last week, after the House had reversed course and rejected the new legislative perk, reached a new low, at least in terms of what lawmakers have done out in the open: The Ways and Means Committee voted 13-11 to kill the underlying proposal, which guarantees 2 percent annual cost of living adjustments for state retirees. Representatives didn’t kill the bill because they thought it was a bad idea. They killed it because they weren’t going to get their perk.

Anyway, I thought I’d provide this space for y’all to discuss this…

Preview: Cindi’s column Sunday explaining restructuring

Something John Rust — a candidate for the Republican nomination in S.C. House Dist. 77 — said during his endorsement interview earlier this week was very familiar. It’s something we hear all the time as to why some people oppose restructuring South Carolina government to put the elected chief executive in charge of the executive branch.

Cindi Scoppe explores this common misconception in her column coming up on Sunday. An excerpt:

    When I finally managed to claw my way through my over-stuffed in-box, a reprise of the Rust message was waiting for me:
    “I saw, again, in your column, a push for enhanced gubernatorial power in South Carolina. You made reference to a leader with bold ideas that don’t get watered down by the timid legislature. Were you implying that this would protect education from unwise budget cuts? If our present governor’s bold ideas were unchecked, a good portion of our education dollar would be paying private school tuition, even bright kids who read at age five would be getting systematic phonics instruction until they were nine, and Barbara Nielson (sic) would likely be State Superintendent. At least 25% of the income tax burden would have been shifted from upper-incomes to middle and lower incomes.”
    Wow.
    When you put it that way, no one in his right mind would want to “restructure” government…

You may be able to see where she’s going with that. If you can’t, you need to read the column on Sunday.

And before that, I’ll be putting video of the relevant part of the Rust interview on our new Saturday Opinion Extra

In fact, you know what? Since y’all are like my extra-special friends and all, I’m going to go ahead and give y’all the video right now:

Trying to keep up with candidate interviews

Not that y’all are likely to care, but I thought I’d clarify something. I’m backdating some posts — specifically, the ones that I’m doing on our state primary endorsement interviews — just to try to keep them in the order in which we conducted them.

For instance, I just posted this item about Michael Koska, a Republican running in S.C. House Dist. 77. I dated it as Tuesday, because that’s when the interview happened. I have one more to do from that day — Republican Mike Miller, who’s running against Kit Spires in District 96.

Since I did those, we’ve had two more — Republican John Rust and Democrat Joe McEachern, who are both running in District 77, like both Mr. Koska and Benjamin Byrd, whom we interviewed last week. Messrs. Rust and McEachern were today.

This is a classic illustration of the principle I’ve often cited about blogs — you can either have experiences worth blogging about, or you can blog. It’s often impossible to get them both done in the same day.

I’m gonna try to get one more of these done before Mamanem send out a posse and drag me home for the night. But I know I’m not going to get done with all these before I have two more interviews tomorrow.

Sigh.