Category Archives: South Carolina

God doesn’t want me blogging this week

Don’t believe me? Well, here’s the evidence:

The place where I used to blog when I was here closed. It was a coffee shop called Jacob’s Java. Actually, it was only sorta kinda nominally a coffee shop. They didn’t care whether you bought anything. But it had free wi-fi, and you could sit there as long as you like, as there was never any danger of being in the way of actual customers. The reason this was so was that it was a front for a commercial bakery. The local building codes required that there be a retail business in that location, so they put a coffee shop in front of the bakery to cover that technicality. Anyway, after Jacob’s Java closed last year, I was driving past and saw the owner of the NEW business, a sub shop, out doing something to the facade. I asked whether he, too, would have free w-fi, and he said no.
Before I came down here, I contacted Tim Kelly, who I knew from Twitter had been here last week (social media is such a wonderful surveillance tool; it makes each of us into a Big Brother), to see if he’d found a replacement spot to blog. He said all he’d found was McDonald’s. Well, McDonald’s isn’t a very conducive environment, and it’s not nearly as convenient to the house anyway, and I’m mainly here to spend time with my family, not run all over creation to try to blog amid the Big Macs. So that was out.
My wife’s brother and sister-in-law are here with their kids, and the second night we were here the sister-in-law went on a quest for wi-fi. She thought she’d found it in a Dunkin’ Donuts the next town over, but she could never get connected.
Then, yesterday, my oldest daughter arrived with her little netbook that is perpetually connected via Verizon. So I sat down with that and put up the post about Vincent Sheheen slam-dunking Nikki Haley on her chosen issue, having just read the e-mails that informed me of those developments. But then my daughter told me she gets a finite amount of data per month on her account, so that option was out.
Then, my middle daugher informed me that last time SHE was here, the sub shop — which was formerly Jacob’s Java — DID have wi-fi. Which made perfect sense; I guess the owner wised up. So I went there midafternoon yesterday — to find that it had closed at 2.
My daughter said she found yet another place, although it was a restaurant where you feel funny just sitting there and not ordering a meal. But I filed that as a backup option.
Then today I went to the sub shop. I offered to buy coffee, but was told “We’re not a coffee shop anymore.” Yeah, I know. But she didn’t mind me using the wi-fi — though it was lunchtime, the place was deserted — so I set up. And realized I had not brought my power cord. It was back in Columbia. Fine. I would blog fast. But then my laptop had issues, and I had to reboot once or twice, and after doing all that STILL wasn’t connected. So I left in frustration.
But my wife had suggested something as I walked out the door today — the public library! Doh! How could I have not have thought of that? Wonderful government services are always there when the cold, heartless marketplace lets you down! So I came here to the library, and… still couldn’t connect. Then I realized what I had been too flustered to realize at the sub shop: You have to take the steps to connect to the router first. I’ve grown so accustomed to having that set up to happen automatically at the places where I usually use the laptop, I had forgotten something so basic. So now I’m up and running.
But my battery is running down, and it occurs to me that I might need it for something urgent. So this it it for now.

As I said, God doesn’t want me blogging this week. And I’m fine with that. I’ve spent all my time with my family, and that’s better any time.

Way to go, Vincent. Can you catch up now, Nikki?

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I’m glad to see Vincent Sheheen took my advice. OK, so maybe he didn’t do it because I advised it; likely he figured it out for himself.

In any case, I was glad to see this release come in on my Blackberry today:

VINCENT SHEHEEN RELEASES SENATE EMAILS

“Sheheen calls on Haley for transparency and full disclosure.”

Camden, SC—-Today Vincent Sheheen, candidate for governor, released his legislative emails for the public to review. He released information from both the L Drive and the G Drive for his Senate office.

In releasing his emails, Vincent stated, “ In order to restore trust, honesty and integrity to our state, we as candidates must be transparent in our actions. Today, I have released my legislative emails and I challenge Representative Haley to do the same. Candidates must practice what we preach. It is about a true and open government.”

This keeps Vincent way out ahead of Nikki on the transparency front — you know, the issue that she chose to run on…

She’s probably starting to regret making a big deal of this issue. Today, her campaign released some tax records, although not for the full 10 years that Sheheen has released. And even though she picked the years she released, she has revealed a record of late filings and having to pay fines. From the AP story:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee Nikki Haley has repeatedly paid late fees and penalties for not paying her income taxes on time. Tax records released Wednesday by Haley’s campaign show she and her husband filed more than a year late on two occasions. They have not filed by the usual April 15 deadline since they began owing money five years ago.

No wonder she’s such an anti-tax zealot. She has so much trouble paying them.

The state Democratic Party is of course loving this; they’ve put out a release to chortle:

“Nikki Haley not only refused to release 10 years of tax returns to match Vincent Sheheen’s record of transparency, her attempt to save face has backfired,” said Fowler. “At no point in the past five years has Ms. Haley paid her taxes on time, but she’s running for office citing her experience as an accountant and claiming to be a fiscal conservative. If this is how she manages her own books, imagine what she has in store for South Carolina. This reeks of the worst kind of hypocrisy.”

So now we’re all left waiting to see the rest of those tax records — and the e-mails, of course. There are shoes left to drop in this saga…

Just ran into Nikki Haley. She looked well…

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I ran into Nikki Haley at lunch today, at M Vista on Lady Street. She was there with Rob Godfrey and Tim Pearson of her campaign.

I think it was the first time I’d conversed with her since that time at Starbucks on Gervais shortly after the 2008 election. That day, she had a young woman in tow whom she introduced as being “with my campaign,” and I thought that was odd. The ’08 campaign was over, and it was early for a House candidate to be having meetings about the next campaign. I was probably the most shocked guy in South Carolina when it came out a month or two later than she was running for governor — it just seemed so totally unlikely that she would see herself as ready for that. It was the beginning of me seriously wondering about Nikki…

Anyway, Nikki was pleasant and charming as always when I went up to chat with her today. I don’t think Rob or Tim were all that thrilled to see me, though. They certainly didn’t smile, but then we guys don’t, do we, under such circumstances? Nikki did, but then ladies do.

We didn’t talk shop. She did the standard thing polite people do when other topics are awkward — she asked after my family. Then she asked how I was doing, and I told her that I was with ADCO and having lunch with my colleagues over there, and gave her one of my ADCO cards. She said I was probably glad not to be at the paper any more, and I thought that was perceptive of her. Or a good guess. Maybe it was just an understated slap at the paper; I don’t know. So I asked how she was holding up, and she said great, and I said something about how things had probably gotten a lot less crazy in the last few weeks, and she agreed. And then she asked me again about my family. So I began to dismiss myself, thinking I should wish her all the best but wanting to be honest, and ended up saying something totally inane like, “Well, as long as you’re enjoying yourself; that’s the thing…”

My ADCO friends thought it odd that I had gone to speak with her. Maybe they thought I was showing off, as in That Brad! He’ll just do any crazy thing! But that’s because they only know about Nikki and me through what I’ve written on the blog lately. They don’t realize that I’ve known her for years, and we’ve always had a very cordial relationship. I’ve happily endorsed her twice — in 2004 and 2008 (those were the only elections in which she had opposition), and always enjoyed chatting with her. I always had good hopes for her — before she embarked on her quest to become the new Mark Sanford and darling of the Tea Party, South Carolina’s answer to Sarah Palin. Which is deeply unfortunate.

So it was nice to see her, even though there was that slight awkwardness.

Mike Fitts’ piece on Sheheen and the Chamber

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The lead story in the latest print version of Columbia Regional Business Report was about the S.C. Chamber of Commerce’s historic decision to endorse a candidate in the governor’s race — specifically, Vincent Sheheen. I can’t link you to the full piece because for some reason it’s not online. But Mike Fitts shot me a copy of his piece to save me all that nasty typing as I give you this excerpt:

Chamber weighs in on governor’s race

Executive summary: Frustration with Gov. Mark Sanford has helped prod the S.C. Chamber of Commerce to give its first gubernatorial endorsement, to Vincent Sheheen.

By Mike Fitts
mfitts@scbiznews.com

There was one overriding factor that prompted the S.C. Chamber of Commerce to make an endorsement for the governor’s race for the first time: the gridlock around the current occupant.

A large majority of the members of the chamber’s board, which is made up of more than 50 business executives from across the state, thought that it was time for the chamber to do its first endorsement in a statewide race. The view that Gov. Mark Sanford had failed to get things done for eight years was a major driver in that decision, said chamber CEO Otis Rawl. The business community “didn’t make much headway” with the governor’s office during his term, he said.

“Our board didn’t want that to happen again,” Rawl said…

Here are some things that interested me about the piece:

The fact that it was for the first time. That hadn’t fully registered on me. It seems to me a reflection of business leaders’ realization that sitting on the sidelines has led to stagnation in South Carolina’s political leadership. Rather than let another do-nothing governor get elected on the base of ideological slogans, they wanted to act to get some real leadership.
Although I’d read it before, I was struck again by the vapid immaturity of the Haley campaign’s response: Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey had said to the AP: “The state chamber is a big fan of bailouts and corporate welfare, so it’s no surprise that they would prefer a liberal like Vincent Sheheen over a conservative like Nikki Haley.” I wonder if Nikki opened her secret meetings with business people with those words. If she truly believed in transparency, if she really wanted to let those people know what her campaign stood for, she would have. A response like this confirms that the Chamber chose wisely.
A factor in the Chamber’s decision was that Sheheen, rather than resorting to ideological slogans, had more specifics about what he’d do to build our state’s economy: “Sheheen offered better answers on keeping the state’s ports successful, building up the state’s infrastructure and improving the state’s workforce, which is vital to keeping such employers and Boeing and BMW happy, Rawl said.”
Sheheen also made the case — and this should truly be the measure of this campaign — that unlike Haley, who has built her brief career on fighting against the Legislature, he could actually get his plans acted upon: “It’s OK to rail against the good ol’ boy system, Rawl said, but a governor has to be able to get legislation thru the General Assembly.”
Then there’s the execrable Act 388, which distorted our whole tax system — putting an excessive burden on businesses and renters, and shifting the load for supporting public schools onto the volatile, exemption-ridden sales tax — for the sake of the subset of homeowners who lived in high-growth areas. Vincent did what he could to stop it; Nikki voted for it.
The vote of confidence by the Chamber’s board was huge and dramatic. They didn’t even wait for the GOP runoff to be over before 75 percent of them voted to support Sheheen in the fall. As for the broader membership, there has been “scattered pushback” from some individual members, but nothing to make the Chamber leadership (which has not been given to taking such risks) sweat. Which is truly remarkable with such a broad, conservative membership as the Chamber’s.

Finally, the thing that got the Chamber to take this unprecedented step was the fact that this election is so pivotal, a fact that I started writing about before I left the paper (which is normally LONG before I would focus on something like this). South Carolina simply cannot continue to drift while our elected leaders play ideological footsie (when you go to that link, scroll down to “Sanford on Fox 46 times”) with national media. We have to get serious. That’s a conclusion that the Chamber has reached as well.

Robert Ariail’s new gig!

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I know y’all will all join me in congratulating the Spartanburg Herald-Journal for having the good sense to hire my great friend Robert Ariail.

As Robert says, “I think the Herald-Journal is showing a lot of faith in the future of newspapers and of editorial cartooning.” Indeed. At a time when papers are jettisoning cartoonists left and right — in fact, ALL of my cartoonist friends have been laid off over the last couple of years — this is a tremendous expression of right-thinking. It shows Spartanburg understands what newspapers are about.

Unlike me, who after 35 years of newspapering have moved on to do new things, Robert never lost faith in his desire to keep doing what he does best — what he indeed does better than practically anyone else in the world.

This is very good news.

Richland Dems can’t count either!

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Ya gotta love it.

Just now, I received a fund-raising message from Richland County Democrats that boldly asserts in the headline:

Get Active! 99 Days to the Election!

OK, so that means Richland Democrats agree with Nikki Haley, but disagree with Rob Miller, as to how many days there are until the election. Right?

Yo! Boyd! Get a calendar!

So which was it — 99 days or 100?

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Meant to raise this question yesterday, which would have been less confusing, but when it occurred to me last night I didn’t feel like breaking the laptop back out, so here goes.

On Monday, I received a release from the Rob Miller campaign headlined “99 Reasons,” and beginning this way: “It seems far away now, but we are just 99 days from ending Joe Wilson’s congressional career.”

OK. Aside from that sounding excessively optimistic, it wasn’t particularly interesting. So I set it aside.

Then I got a release from the Nikki Haley campaign headlined “100 days,” and saying essentially that that was how many days were left. How she arrived at the number is further confused by this boldfaced passage:

Yesterday marked a significant milestone in our campaign — there are only 100 days left until Election Day.

So does that mean they were counting from “yesterday,” which would have been Sunday? If so, why does the sentence go on to use the present tense, saying “there ARE only 100 days left”? One is left to conclude that the Haley campaign was saying there were still 100 days left.

Was she counting Monday itself, as a way of asserting her wish not to waste a day? Perhaps. But I’m left with the impression, once again, that these Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on anything. But I set that aside, too.

Then last night, just before 10 p.m., I got a release from Karen Floyd headlined “99 Days of Bad Ideas” and just chock full of the sort of ranting nonsense you expect from parties:

We’re going to hear from liberals like Joe Biden, who just stopped in to raise money for John Spratt, saying that we should have spent even more “stimulus” money. We’re going to hear fromCongressman Spratt himself that the budget he wrote is actually fiscally responsible, although we all know it increases our debts and puts our nation at risk. We’re going to hear from Rob Millerthat it’s okay for candidates to accept millions of dollars from liberal Washington special interest groups. We’re going to hear from Vincent Sheheen that English doesn’t have to be our state’s official language and that tax cuts won’t create jobs and grow our economy. We’ll hear from Matt Richardson (he’s the liberal running for Attorney General, in case you’ve never heard of him) that we don’t need to stand up to the federal government when they step on our rights every other day. We’ll even hear from their US Senate candidate who believes action figures of himself will fix our high unemployment rate.

Why don’t they just save themselves trouble by typing “liberal” once and then just pasting it into the text over and over? “Liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal…” It would make as much sense, and be just as relevant. They could italicize some of them and boldface others, for variety. “Liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal…” If they don’t think variety is ideological heresy, of course.

And where on Earth did they get the thing about English as an official language? What does that have to do with anything? And is that really the best they can come up with as an indictment of Vincent?

Anyway, the thing that interested me was that Karen Floyd was siding with Rob Miller on the number of days left. Just goes to show that there is room for finding common ground across the partisan divide. And it demonstrates how out of touch Nikki is, even with her own party.

Yes, that last sentence would have had a smiley face after it if I did smiley faces.

Alvin Greene not really anything new for SC

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At lunch today, I said something about “Mad Men,” and a lady friend mentioned that one of the actresses from the show was on the cover of Playboy. This grabbed my attention, although I calmed down a bit when she told me it was NOT Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan Holloway. Yes. I was disappointed, too. But I wanted to know who it was, and was already trying to think whether an actress from “Mad Men” being on the cover would be a good enough excuse to buy a copy, the way I justified to my wife buying the Jimmy Carter interview edition (think, honey — all those interesting articles!), while the lady did some hunting on her iPhone — and came up with the picture.

And as I looked, and admitted I didn’t recognize her, but might if given the opportunity to study additional photos more closely, she said, “You know, this is what Alvin Greene got arrested for.”

Which is true. And in fact, the more I think about it, that arrest is perhaps the one thing that explains why we’re so flabbergasted that he is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. There are other things. His unemployment, for instance. But I was unemployed for a year, and I’d vote for me. The fact that he lives with his Dad? Why wouldn’t a single, unemployed guy, recently out of the Army, stay with his aged father? As for being out of the Army: Sure, we don’t know why he was involuntarily released, but is it all that unusual to have unanswered questions about a candidate’s military service, if he even has any? Do we really know where W. was when he was supposed to be on Guard duty? Has anyone yet learned exactly where and how John Kerry was wounded to get those Purple Hearts that were his early ticket home? Mr. Greene was honorably discharged, and how much else to we need to know.

OK, so he’s no public speaker, and his grasp of the issues is unimpressive. Whoop-te-doo.

Allow me to remind you that this state’s last Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate was no great bargain either. Remember Bob Conley? He, too, was a bit on the flaky side. Sure, he actually had some campaign materials, but they reflected a set of values that seemed oddly out of place in a Democrat, and would make a reasonable person wonder how in the world he won the nomination.

Here’s what I wrote about him in The State’s endorsement of Lindsey Graham:

Bob Conley is one of those anomalous candidates who occasionally step into political vacuums — a nominal Democrat who takes the position of the angry right wing on immigration and would abolish the Federal Reserve. His Web site touts words of support from Ron Paul and the wife of Patrick Buchanan.

Bob Conley

In fact, he sounded for all the world like he was running under the Tea Party banner, before we’d even heard of the Tea Party. For more about Bob and his views, check this campaign flier.

He was fringe. He was out there. He was nobody’s concept of a Democrat. In fact, the few views that Alvin Greene has expressed are a far better fit for the party. So how did this guy win the nomination? The same way Alvin Greene did. Zero attention was paid to the race beforehand because Lindsey Graham, like Jim DeMint today, seemed like a sure bet (once he got past the extremists in his own party in the primary). So voters went into the booth without crucial information — and inexplicably, inexcusably voted for someone they knew nothing about. Sound familiar?

It could just as easily have been Alvin Greene — and this time, it was.

There is very little new in this situation. So the guy faces charges from showing pictures to a co-ed? Hey, he could have been an ax murderer for all the voters knew.

So why are we so worked up about Alvin Greene, as though nothing like this has ever happened before? Here’s my theory: The national media had their eyes on SC because of the craziness surrounding Nikki Haley, and just before they turned away, they went “Hey wait — and these nuts also elected some guy they’d never heard of…?” And from that, another star was born.

Silly national media. They didn’t realize we do this all the time.

… but no pledges, please, Vincent

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Having praised Vincent Sheheen for challenging Nikki Haley to actually be transparent for a change (since that’s, you know, her platform), I’ve gotta say I’m with Nikki on this:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Vincent Sheheen has signed a pledge, promising to make an effort to appoint qualified women to senior level positions on state boards and commissions if he is elected.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley declined to sign the pledge.

Like Nikki, I wouldn’t sign the pledge, either.

Now settle down, ladies. (If you’re OK with me calling you ladies.) Nothing against hiring women.

The problem is the pledge.

My objection may seem a bit wonkish and technical, but please attend:

I believe candidates should not sign pledges about what they will do or not do in office. The cause doesn’t matter; the problem is the pledge itself. It undermines the integrity of the political process. Candidates may speak of general intentions, but specific promises — particularly when taken to the extreme of putting them in writing — are a bad idea.

It is essential to self-government, and particularly to our system of representative democracy, that once in office a public servant should study the actual situation that he faces in office (which can never be accurately, fully anticipated before the election), and engage as an honest, unencumbered agent in deliberation with others to reach a decision about what to do.

You think this is just a fine point, a mere ephemeral abstraction? Well, you liberals applauding Vincent for this stand should take a moment and contemplate the severe damage done to South Carolina by the fact that Grover Norquist got so many GOP lawmakers to sign his anti-tax pledge. It has made comprehensive tax reform impossible, and led to a downward ratcheting of tax revenues that had nothing to do with the state’s actual spending needs, and everything to do with Norquist’s aim of shrinking government to the point that he can drown it in a bathtub.

But whether you like the aim of the pledge or not, they are a bad idea — that includes the pledge that Democrats were passing around awhile back to promise to spend more on education — because they shackle an officeholder from dealing in the future with the actual, practical situation that lies before him.

So Vincent — please do express your desire to see more qualified women serve in your administration. That’s great. But no pledges, please.

Good move, Vincent. Now release your e-mails, too

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Finally, after a couple of weeks hiatus, there’s a sign of life from the Sheheen campaign, and it’s a good one. Vincent released his last 10 years of tax records, and challenged Nikki Haley to do the same.

Normally, this kind of gesture wouldn’t mean much to me. But it means a lot in the context of this particular contest. As you may recall, refusing to release the last 10 years of her tax records is one of several rather glaring ways in which the Republican running on a “transparency” platform has refused to be transparent. Only after Gresham Barrett pressured her into releasing the last three years (saying, when asked by The State, that releasing 10 years would be an “excessive” amount of transparency) did we learn that she had previously failed to disclose that Wilbur Smith had paid her$42,500 for her influence.

So laying his tax records out and challenging Ms. Transparency 2010 to do the same is perfectly appropriate, and a service to the voters.

Now I’d like to see him release his publicly-issued e-mail records. That is, if he hasn’t done so already (I didn’t get a release on the tax records and had to read it in the paper of all things, so for all I know I missed one on the e-mail records, too). There is no way that a candidate running entirely on trying to tear the veil of secrecy from the Legislature should be hiding her e-mail records behind a special exemption to FOI law that lawmakers carved out for themselves. No way at all.

I did think this was of note:

The couple’s charitable giving has risen as they earned more money. The couple reported charitable donations of $1,025 in 2000, or 1.4 percent of their income. In 2009, the couple reported $7,301 in charitable donations on $372,509 in income, or 2 percent of their total earnings.

Haley and her husband, Michael, earned a combined $196,282 in 2009 and gave $971 to charity, or one half of one percent of total earnings.

Yeah, OK, so he’s giving more than Nikki, but 2 percent is pretty sad. Maybe this doesn’t include giving to the church. I mean, we Catholics are notorious for not tithing but come on, Vincent.

At least he’s not hiding the fact, though.

But first, Graham gets cheap shot from the left

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Today everybody and his brother in the national media is writing about how Lindsey Graham can expect attacks from the right wing of his own party for voting to confirm Elena Kagan.

But they reckoned without him getting hit by a cheap shot from the left — from the S.C. Democratic Party, specifically:

DeMint and Graham Place Partisanship Over SC

COLUMBIA-Today South Carolina Senators Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint held tight to their Republican Party principles by voting against legislation to restore unemployment benefits to workers who have been out of work for more than six months. Despite the senators’ efforts to continue a Republican filibuster of the bill, the measure passed 60-40.

South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler called Graham and DeMint’s votes shortsighted and wrong.

“It’s shameful that Senator Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint would ignore the needs of thousands of hardworking South Carolina families for the sake of partisanship. We can’t afford to play politics in a state where the unemployment rate continues to be well above the national average. Our senators should have stood with their fellow Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and done the right thing for South Carolina,” said Fowler.

Really. Not a word about his courage in voting for Kagan — nothing about the actual news that he made today. No, the Democratic Party — being a political party, and therefore incapable of mastering anything more complex than “him Republican; them all alike” — attacks him with the slur of saying he’s no less a knee-jerk ideologue than Jim DeMint.

And that’s outrageous.

Graham’s vote for Kagan, in his own words

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To follow up on the previous, here’s how Lindsey Graham explained his vote for Elena Kagan for the court.

I have defended, and will defend, our senior senator for his thoughtfulness, while at the same time being mortified that it is necessary to defend someone for acting with intellectual honesty and not acting like a partisan automaton. What has our country come to that this sort of thought-based action has to be defended? What happened to us that such principle has become so rare?

In any case, he defends himself better than I could.

I like in particular that he gave a Federalist explanation for his decision. It harks back to a time when intelligence and principle were not rare at all in this country:

Graham Supports Kagan Nomination

WASHINGTON – Citing the Constitutional and historical role the Senate has played in Supreme Court nominations, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today said he would support the nomination of Elena Kagan.

“No one, outside of maybe John McCain, spent more time trying to beat President Obama than I did,” said Graham. “But we lost and President Obama won.”

Graham cited Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Number 76 in listing the reasons he would vote for Kagan. Graham noted Hamilton wrote, “To what purpose then require the cooperation of the Senate? I answer that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though in general a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the president, would tend generally to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from family connection, from personal attachment, and from a view to popularity.”

“The Constitution puts a requirement on me, as a senator, to not replace my judgment for the President’s,” said Graham. “I’m not supposed to think of the 100 reasons I would pick somebody different. It puts upon me a standard that stood the test of time: Is the person qualified? Is it a person of good character? Are they someone that understands the difference between being a judge and a politician? And, quite frankly, I think she’s passed all those tests.”

“Are we taking the language of the Constitution that stood the test of time and putting a political standard in the place of a constitutional standard?” asked Graham. “Objectively speaking, things are changing, and they’re unnerving to me. The court is the most fragile of the three branches. So while it is our responsibility to challenge and scrutinize the court, it is also our obligation to honor elections, respect elections, and protect the court.”

“I view my role as a United States Senator in part by protecting the independence of the judiciary, and by making sure that hard-fought elections have meaning in terms of their results within our Constitution,” said Graham. “At the end of the day, Ms. Kagan is not someone I would have chosen, but I think she will serve honorably.”

#####

Sanford Redux? Let’s pray not. But the long knives ARE likely to come out for Lindsey

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First, the good news: As the one most thoughtful and principled Republican in the United States Senate — a guy who will fairly consider Democratic court nominees, just as he demands the same intellectual honesty from Democrats with Republican nominees — Lindsey Graham today became the only GOP senator to vote Elena Kagan out of committee.

Sure, some of the Republicans who voted against her and Democrats were voting for were voting their convictions, too, but the only person you KNOW was doing so was Lindsey Graham, because there was nothing in it for him politically. Except for the respect of us UnPartisans, and we’re not that powerful a lobby.

So, for the sin of being thoughtful and intellectually honest and really meaning it when he says elections have consequences and presidents’ choices, if qualified, should be given respect by the opposition, back home the yahoos are lining up to run against Lindsey Graham in the 2014 primary.

Really. Because this is South Carolina, where we don’t wait around for crazy; we grab it by the throat and ride it to death.

And of course the national media, from the MSM to Jon Stewart, have come to expect crazy from us, and have even started trying to anticipate it.

Which is why today, on the very day of the Kagan vote, we already have The Washington Post’s Chris Cilizza speculating about which Republicans will line up to run against Lindsay.

Frankly, I think it’s an overreaction. I suspect that when all is said and done and four years have passed Lindsey will — if he still wants the seat — face only marginal opposition from within his own party. But given what the nation has seen from the GOP within SC in recent months, who can blame Cilizza for compiling this list?

* Katon Dawson: The former chairman of the state Republican party would have the financial network and connections in the state to make a serious run at Graham. And, he may be looking for a next act after losing out on the Republican National Committee chairmanship in 2009.

* Jeff Duncan: Duncan, a state representative, is the odds-on favorite to replace Rep. Gresham Barrett in the 3rd district this fall. (Graham held that same Upstate seat before being elected to the Senate in 2002.) That would provide a real geographic base from which to run in four years time.

* Mark Sanford: Yes, that Mark Sanford. The soon-to-be-former governor has made clear to political insiders that he is interested in a return to politics and targeting Graham in 2014 might give Sanford enough time to rehab his badly damaged image.

* Trey Gowdy: Gowdy is a heavy favorite to come to Congress this fall after he crushed Rep. Bob Inglis (R) in a primary in the strongly Republican 4th district. He gets rave reviews from smart political people in the state but it remains unclear whether the Senate is an office he covets.

* Mick Mulvaney: Mulvaney, a state senator, is currently running against Rep. John Spratt (D) in the 5th district. Win — or even lose — and he’s likely to be in the Graham primary mix.

* Tom Davis: Davis is a state Senator from Beaufort (in the Lowcountry). He’s also a close ally of GOP gubernatorial nominee Nikki Haley. If Haley is elected governor this fall, her allies will be in the catbird’s seat for offices down the line.

“Yes, THAT Mark Sanford.” Just sends chills down the spine, doesn’t it? It that man’s political career is not over, then there is no justice in the political world. And between the kind of insanity that has some Republicans who would actually vote for him again (and you know there are a lot of them), and enough people on the Democratic side who would and did vote for Alvin Greene, it would pretty much end my faith in democracy as a positive force in South Carolina.

But you know what’s really awful about this? With Lindsey Graham, South Carolina has the best representation in the U.S. Senate that it’s had in my lifetime. Representation that, for once, we can truly be proud of. And the very idea that anyone would want to take that away from us is appalling.

But that they would be motivated to do so by his acting like a rational human being is what really provokes despair.

Here’s hoping that when all is said and done, this kind of doomsday thinking about SC is wrong. But recent history is not reassuring.

Let’s just say it over and over:

This is nothing but wild speculation from an outsider… This is nothing but wild speculation from an outsider…This is nothing but wild speculation from an outsider…This is nothing but wild speculation from an outsider…This is nothing but…

SC GOP having absolute cow over Pelosi’s $2k

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You may have noticed something about South Carolina Republicans this year — even the ones who have good sense, like Henry McMaster: They’re all about national politics, and not at all about South Carolina.

So it is that you have Henry’s ridiculous “Vultures” ad. And with Nikki Haley, it pretty much seeps into everything she does. For instance, a routine release from her campaign yesterday began:

Friends,

Across this country, we’re seeing people waking up and taking their government back. We certainly saw it in South Carolina last month …

Now let’s set aside the ridiculous demagogic “taking their government back” construction, which makes zero sense. I mean, really — give us some examples of these instances you refer to, because I’d like to see what this business of “taking back government” looks like, how it plays out in the actual world, what sorts of results it produces.

No, my point is that the frame of reference, the point from which the release begins, is national politics — specifically, a national ideological movement. From this point of view, what happens in and to South Carolina only makes sense within the framework of the latest national ideological fad.

But things like that actually almost make sense set against the paroxysms that have been engendered by a campaign contribution made to a South Carolina congressional candidate by Nancy Pelosi. Various Republicans have today gone wild over this. They just can’t believe their good fortune. Instead of having to play their usual game of pretending that South Carolinians like Vincent Sheheen and John Spratt are liberals in the modern meaning of the term, they actually have an actual liberal touching South Carolina politics. So of course they are jumping up and down with joy and making mighty mountains out of Nancy’s molehill. They are ecstatic, and like many people who are beside themselves with happiness, they have gotten rather silly about it. For instance:

Under the headline, “MATCH PELOSI: Let Her Know She Can’t Buy America,” Joe Wilson says, “Nancy Pelosi gave $2,000 to Rob Miller, so we’re asking you to help Joe raise $2,000 today and every day until August 1. Send a strong message to Nancy Pelosi that we’re going to protect conservative leaders and TAKE BACK CONGRESS!” There’s that “take back” construction again (which sort of makes you want to ask, “What did you do with it when you had it last, Joe?”). Then there’s the utter overkill of it. Nancy gives 2 Gs, so the natural response is to raise that much every single day! Somebody needs to take a chill pill.
On a special, rather comical-looking Web page called “Washington Liberals” and in a related release, State GOP Chair Karen Floyd exults: “Nancy Pelosi is building a team of like-minded liberals and pouring millions of dollars into South Carolina,” continuing, “You’re next up to bat. Will you let Nancy Pelosi buy South Carolina or will you knock her plan out of the park?”
Then, on Twitter, the Blogosphere’s own Wesley Donehue put out Tweet after Tweet pumping the Wilson effort, with items such as “Will you help us raise $2,000 today to match Nancy Pelosi’s donation to Rob Miller?” followed by “Dang! Already half way there after just 20 minutes. Help us hit just $2k for @congjoewilson.”

Which means people are actually giving actual dollars in response to this utter nonsense. What kind of a sap do you have to be to fall for this flapdoodle?

Now as y’all know, I have no truck with folks interfering in the politics of other people’s states. When folks from here get worked up about elections elsewhere that are none of their business, I call them on it. So for the record, I’d greatly prefer that Nancy Pelosi stay the hell out of our South Carolina elections. Of course, there are levels of egregiousness in outside interference. Speaker Pelosi acting in a fairly modest way upon her desire to keep a majority so that she can keep her job is unseemly. Howard Rich pouring a fortune into South Carolina, not for a national issue, but in an effort to impose his ideology upon the South Carolina Legislature, is an outrage. That distinction made, we can do without your involvement, Nancy.

But the really interesting thing here is the way Republicans overreact when they finally, finally get the smallest excuse to make a South Carolina contest about national politics. Since they have no ideas for helping South Carolina move forward, they invariably fall back on the Washington boogey man. And when a prominent Democrat actually plays along with their narrative, they are absolutely thrilled.

Cindi’s column on Lost Trust, 20 years on

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I missed Cindi Scoppe’s column over the weekend reminiscing about Lost Trust (which broke 20 years ago Sunday) until a reader mentioned Cindi’s “shout-out” to me:

If anything happened in the next year that wasn’t related to the sting, I can’t remember it. While I dissected the ethics proposals, my editor Brad Warthen led the newsroom on a yearlong examination of how the Legislative State produced not only corruption but a hapless government that answered to no one — laying the groundwork for one of the primary focuses of our later work on this editorial board.

Pushed along by Lost Trust, Gov. Carroll Campbell and Brad’s “Power Failure” series, the Legislature voted two years later to hand a third of the government over to the governor. Lawmakers unleashed the powerful State Grand Jury to investigate political corruption cases. They passed a reporter shield law after a judge ordered me and three other reporters held in federal custody for two days for refusing to testify in a corruption trial.

It was interesting to read Cindi’s memory of that from her perspective. I had forgotten a lot of the intrigue that my reporters — particularly Cindi — had to go through to find out what was going on. But then, I was mostly experiencing it second-hand, being the desk man that I was. Cindi and the others would come in with this stuff they had garnered in encounters reminiscent of Bob Woodward’s meetings with Deep Throat in the parking garage, and we’d figure out which outrageous items were worth pursuing to try to confirm immediately and which ones to set aside. And then, how in the world to nail down the relevant ones.

For me, at the epicenter of The State‘s coverage, it was a time for keeping a couple of dozen plates spinning, and was a daily challenge to an editor managing finite resources in the midst of stories that seemed to have an infinite number of branches, each one of which was a hot story in itself.

Mind you, Lost Trust wasn’t the only government scandal breaking that summer. We had the final act of the Jim Holderman collapse, a purchasing scandal involving a major agency (I don’t even remember which one now), the head of the Highway Patrol directly personally interfering with the DUI of the head of the local FBI office, and those are just the things that I remember sitting here. There was more. Fortunately, the governmental affairs staff in those days amounted to something (I may have been slightly down from my 1988 high of 10 reporters, but not by much), but there’s only so much that even that many people can do when so much is popping at the same time — and during the time of year when things are usually quiet.

And Lost Trust itself, alone, without those other scandals, would have totally consumed us days, nights and weekends. A full 10 percent of the Legislature indicted? Heady stuff.

We were well out ahead of the competition most days, and I felt proud of my team — Cindi and the others. Then the executive editor, who was new in the job (Gil Thelen), one busy day stopped by my desk to say it was all very well and good that we were staying ahead of the story and beating everybody on it, but what about the future? What, out of all this mess, might we be able to offer readers to give them the sense that something could be done about the dysfunction of SC government? I probably stared at him like he was a lunatic for wanting me to think about anything ELSE on top of the mad juggling I was doing at the moment, but I did think about it. And the result was the Power Failure series. I spent a year on it, supervising reporters from across the newsroom in producing a 17-installment opus that explained just how SC government was designed to fail.

And as Cindi notes, the themes developed at that time resonated through my work, and hers, for my entire 15 years on the editorial board.

Alvin Greene’s speech — full video, via CNN

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Back on an earlier post Bud asked:

Did anyone see the Alvin Greene speech? I missed it but the accounts I’ve read suggest it was pretty disturbing.

This prompted me to go find the video for you. I first watched The State‘s version, which had a slightly better angle, but which did not offer the imbedding option (which is short-sighted, if you ask me, but hey, sometimes newspapers are short-sighted; ahem). So you’re getting the CNN version, and you’re grateful for it, aren’t you?

And yes, Bud. It is indeed disturbing.

‘Finish Him Off’: Things getting rough in the 2nd District

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Whoa! Not to be outdone by the “You Lie!” guy, his opponent in the 2nd Congressional District is getting a bit overwrought in his rhetoric. I just got a fund-raising release from the Rob Miller campaign urging supporters to help “finish him off” — referring to Joe Wilson. In fact, that was the headline on the e-mail: “Finish Him Off.”

Totally aside from the implied violence of the phrase, there’s the additional problem of inaccuracy. It invokes a picture of Joe lying on the ground at death’s door awaiting the coup de grace. But near as I can tell, Mr. Wilson is poised to do what he usually does — get re-elected.

Why does it have to be a “hate crime?”

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OK, I’ve ignored it and ignored it, but now that there’s going to be a march tomorrow, I have to ask:

Why does it have to be a “hate crime?”

I mean, set aside the usual grim joke, as in: You mean, as opposed to those love crimes in which someone is shot and then dragged behind a truck for 11 miles?

And set aside the weirdness of the emergence of a group calling itself the New Black Panther Party, which hearkens back to a day long before the term “hate crime” was invented. It seems… anachronistic, out of sync.

I’m just asking, why does it have to have the political element of being called a “hate crime”? Why not just prosecute the perpetrating to the nth degree? I mean, if this guy’s guilty, he’s at least going to spend the rest of his life in prison, right?

As you know, one of the few things I agree with libertarians about is that in THIS country, there should be no such thing as a “hate crime.” The idea of punishing the political intent behind a crime — essentially, punishing thought, however represensible — is utterly and completely unAmerican. The only way thought or intent should come into the prosecution calculation is in trying to determine whether the perpetrator meant to do what he did, and understood what he was doing.

And yes, I know the answer to the question I pose in my headline above; I just consider it to be insufficient. The answer to “why must it be a hate crime” is that it’s deeply important to a lot of people to feel singled out to be victims of heinous crimes on the basis of accidents of demography to know that society disapproves of such mistreatment. But the legitimate way for society to show that is by fully punishing the actions, not by outlawing the abominable attitudes.

Punish the crime. Not the fact that the person who did it is a hateful bastard. That’s for God to deal with, not the state.

Nikki’s business meeting in Greenville

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Still haven’t heard from anyone who attended Nikki’s meeting today to shore up her business relations, but The Greenville News took a stab at finding out what happened at a similar meeting up their way.

An excerpt:

Republican gubernatorial nominee Nikki Haley has met privately at least twice with Greenville business leaders and assured them she would seek a better relationship with lawmakers than Gov. Mark Sanford, her political ally, and would champion economic development more fully than he has.

Haley arranged the meetings – including one here Tuesday and a similar one in Columbia today – at a time when some business leaders, long disappointed with Sanford, are considering whether to take a cue from the state Chamber of Commerce and rally behind Haley’s Democratic opponent, state Sen. Vincent Sheheen.

The first question for Haley at Tuesday’s meeting at The Loft at Soby’s was whether she would govern as Sanford has, said Lewis Gossett, president of the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance.

Haley “basically made the point that she would be her own person,” said Gossett, who lives and works in Columbia but stopped by the meeting while in Greenville for a personal appointment.

Gossett said members of the manufacturers’ alliance have been “frustrated” with Sanford and “want to know are we going to see a spirit of cooperation in Columbia?” He said some of the alliance’s members support Haley and some Sheheen.

Trav Robertson, spokesman for the Sheheen campaign, said Haley would indeed govern like Sanford, who Robertson said tried to derail plans for Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research when he first took office in 2003.

“Who carried Sanford’s water in the Legislature? It was Nikki Haley,” Robertson said. “Who was the first person Nikki Haley thanked when she won the nomination? Mark Sanford. So make no mistake. It’s one and the same.”

Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey said business people in the Upstate were interested in meeting Haley and it was natural for her to meet with them.

On the one hand, I’m almost inclined to excuse these secret meetings on the grounds that a lot of business people won’t show and say what they really think in a public forum.

But then I think, NAAAHHHH. No way should Ms. Transparency get away with this, and here’s why: According to this story, she’s telling these business people how normal and cooperative and constructive she’ll be in working with lawmakers, unlike her mentor Mark Sanford. She’s saying things sufficiently reassuring that some are coming away deciding to back her.

For her to say things that would be persuasive to sensible, pragmatic business people (who are fed up with that ideological firebrand Gov. Sangfroid), it seems to me that she would have to say things that are pretty different from what she says in front of her Tea Party fans. With them, she definitely doesn’t say, “No way I’ll be like Mark Sanford.”

But doing it in private allows her to get away with that.

Did anybody go to Nikki’s meeting?

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Since I got uninvited from the meeting at which Nikki Haley was to woo business support today, I’m wondering… Did it even happen, or did it get canceled or postponed? Who showed up? What was said? Did she make any progress against Vincent Sheheen’s Chamber support?

I drove past the Wilbur Smith building a little after noon, and about all I can report is that they certainly weren’t spilling out onto the sidewalk. But then, I wouldn’t really expect them to. It’s a big building.

Anyway, if you were one of the Elect who attended, drop me a line at brad@bradwarthen.com. I’d love to hear how it went.