Category Archives: Today on our opinion pages

Krauthammer strikes blow for Energy Party

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Only this morning did I remember something I meant to call to your attention Sunday: Charles Krauthammer’s column espousing the central tenet of the Energy Party, which is: When it comes to Energy, Do Everything.

An excerpt:

    But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who’s against properly inflated tires? Let’s start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. (“Inflate your tires. Victory or death!”) Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.
    Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs). The consensus in the country, logically unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have a problem that’s been killing our economy and threatening our national security. And no one measure is sufficient.

How is it that the major political parties are getting away with their usual ideological garbage on Energy in this election — the Democrats refusing to produce, the Republicans refusing to conserve. It is patently obvious to anyone possessed of common sense that — in this particular economic, political and global moment especially — our one hope is to Do It All?

Are you a locavore?

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Emile DeFelice, sometime contributor to this blog, said it this way: "Put Your State On Your Plate."

Hugh Weathers, the man who beat Emile to remain state agriculture commissioner, has a more succinct way of putting it: The word, he says, is "locavore."

Read about the concept, and what South Carolina is doing to promote it, in Mr. Weathers’ op-ed piece today, if you haven’t read it already. Then take the challenge — eat local for a day.

Then, do it again.

Do YOU hang with people “like yourself?”

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First, read this lead paragraph from Robert Samuelson’s column today:

    People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the
celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people
favor friendships with those who share similar backgrounds, interests
and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations
and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is
nearly universal. It’s human nature.

Then share with us your answer to this question: Is this true for you?

I ask that because what Samuelson is saying is accepted as Gospel, as an "of course," by so many people. And you can find all sorts of evidence to back it up, from whitebread suburbs to Jeremiah Wright’s church to the book that inspired the column, The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.

The thing about this for me is this: I don’t know any people like me. I don’t have a group of people who look and act and think like me with whom to identify, with the possible exception of my own close family, and in some respects that’s a stretch — we may look alike and in some cases have similar temperaments, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to being alike, say, in our political views.

Oh, but you’re Catholic, you might say. Yeah, do you know what "catholic" means? It means "universal." At the Mass I attend, we sometimes speak English, sometimes Spanish, and throw in bits of Greek and Latin here and there. The priest who often as not celebrates that Mass is from Africa. We live in, I seem to recall my pastor telling me, 35 zip codes. There are black, white and brown people who either came from, or their parents came from, every continent and every major racial group on the planet. My impression, from casual conversations over time, is that you would find political views as varied as those in the general population. Sure, more of us are probably opposed to abortion than you generally find, but that’s not a predictor of what we think, say, about foreign policy.

Yeah, I might run into someone occasionally who shares my background of having been a military brat. But beyond a comparison of whether you ever were stationed in the same places, there’s not a lot to hang a sense of identity on.

I belong to the Rotary Club, which means I go have lunch with 300 or so other people who also belong to that club once a week. I can’t think of any attitude or opinion I have as a result of being a Rotarian, nor — to turn that around — did I join Rotary because of any attitude or opinion I held previously. I joined Rotary because Jack Van Loan invited me to, and my boss — two publishers ago, now — said he wanted me to join. Wait — there’s one thing that’s different: I started giving blood as a result of being in Rotary. But I don’t feel any particular identification with other people who give blood, or any particular alienation from others who DON’T give blood, the selfish cowards (just kidding).

That’s not to say anything bad about Rotary, or anything good about it. It’s just not a predictor of my attitudes. I suppose people who have an objection to singing the National Anthem and "God Bless America" every week might stay away, but that still leaves a pretty broad spectrum of life here in the Columbia area. Rusty DePass, who worked hard for Rudy Giuliani last years, plays piano at Rotary. Jack, longtime comrade and supporter of John McCain, is our immediate past president. Another prominent member is Jim Leventis, who is the godfather of Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, the filmmaker Alexandra. No one of them is any more or less a Rotarian because of his political attitudes.

(I can think of one superficial way in which an outside observer might see sameness at Rotary — a lot of the men in the club are of the 6% of American men who still wear a suit to work every day, although plenty don’t. And it’s whiter than South Carolina, but that seems to go with the suit thing.)

I’m a South Carolinian, but I’m very much at home in Memphis, and have grown quite comfortable during frequent visits to central Pennsylvania, where the Civil War re-enactors wear blue uniforms.

I cannot think of five people not related to me, with whom I regularly congregate, who share my "backgrounds, interests
and values" to any degree worth noting.

Anyway, my point is that all of this is a barrier for me to understanding people who DO identify with large groups of people who look alike and/or think alike and/or have particular interests in common that bind them as a group and set them apart from others. If I tried to be a Democrat or a Republican, I’d quit the first day over at least a dozen policy positions that I couldn’t swallow. And I don’t see why others do.

Maybe I’m a misfit. But the ways in which I’m a misfit helped bring me to supporting John McCain (fellow Navy brat) and Barack Obama (who, like me, graduated from high school in the hyperdiverse ethnic climate of Hawaii). McCain is the "Republican" whom the doctrinaire Republicans love to hate. Obama is the Democrat who was uninterested in continuing the partisan warfare that was so viscerally important to the Clintonistas.

Coming full circle, I guess I like these guys because they’re, well, like me. But not so most people would notice.

It’s going to be interesting, and for me often distressing, to watch what happens as the media and party structures and political elites who DO identify themselves with groups that look, think and act alike sweep up these two misfit individuals in the tidal rush toward November. Will either of them have the strength of mind and will to remain the remarkably unique characters that they are, or will they succumb to the irresistible force of Identity Politics? I’m rooting fervently for the former, but recent history, and all the infrastructure of political expression, are on the side of the latter.

Do YOU feel sufficiently stimulated? ’Cause I don’t…

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
WHAT DID you do with your “economic stimulus” check from the government? Did you spend it in a suitably patriotic manner, doing your bit to kick-start the good ol’ U.S. economy?
    You did? Are you sure? I just ask because, as a member of the U.S. economy, I’m feeling a little understimulated.
    But then, I always had doubts about the whole scheme.
    Sort of like with the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns. I’m not a libertarian, not by a long shot, but sometimes I break out with little itchy spots of libertarianism, and one of those itchy spots causes me to ask, Why am I, as a taxpaying member of the U.S. economy, bailing out something called Bear Stearns? I didn’t even know what it was. Even after I’d read about it in The Wall Street Journal, I still could not answer the fundamental question, “If you work at Bear Stearns, what is it that you do all day?” I understand what a fireman does, and if the fire department were about to go under, I’d be one of the first to step forward and say let’s bail it out. Of course, if the fire department wanted me to lend it $29 billion, with a “B,” I might have further questions. Yet that’s what we’ve done for Bear Stearns.
    Apparently Bear Stearns is a financial institution that the federal government considers “too big to fail,” which makes me wonder, if it’s too big to fail, then why does it need to be bailed out?
    But things like this always perplex me. I am not an economist, nor a financial expert, which I’m told is different. Nor am I any kind of a businessman. At my house, I am not allowed to try to balance the checkbook.
    Anyway, while I’m still pondering why you and I and the guy down the street lent $29 billion to bail out this Bear Stearns, along comes Congress and the president wanting to send somewhat more modest checks to you and me and that same guy.
    I’m all for Democrats and Republicans setting aside pointless bickering to do something for the good of the country, but when the economy’s going into the tank, and the Democratic Congress and the Republican president are racing to see which of them can send us the biggest check, sort of like the Three Stooges all trying to get through a door at the same time, I begin to have doubts.
    I start to think, “With the national debt at — wait a sec while I go check the Internet — 9 trillion dollars, and climbing at a rate of more than a Bear Stearns bailout every month, the government is going to send several hundred dollars to every household in the country?”
    It seems that everybody in Washington was acting along the same lines of reasoning as when, in response to attacks upon this country more deadly than Pearl Harbor, we were told to go out and shop, instead of buying bonds or rationing gas or something that would have made sense to an earlier generation. And now, six-and a half years into the War on Terror, some of us weren’t shopping hard enough. So to help us get back into the fight, the government decided to send us all some more ammunition.
    As it got closer to time for me to get my ammo, my martial spirits rose, and I started thinking this was a better and better idea. If my country needed me to shop, I was going to make sure every shot counted. So I did some research.
    Finally, a suitable target presented itself. Week before last, we all went to Memphis for a wedding. The wife and I stayed with Mary, one of her best friends from high school.
    My wife has always held Mary up as one of the smartest in her class — not only a scholar, but a woman of great good sense and practicality. Mary had recently earned some extra money, and had spent it on a 42-inch, 1080-resolution flat-panel HDTV set. It had cost her $800 at Sam’s Club. I studied this item very closely while we were there, flicking back and forth between ball games on the HD channels and the same ball games on mere mortal channels, and came to the inescapable conclusion that Mary was indeed the smartest in her class, and had made an excellent investment — way better than the Bear Stearns thing.
    So by the time we got back from Memphis, I was all in a sweat to get that stimulus check, which would amount to $1,200.
    But when it came, do you know what we spent it on? A hospital bill. Not a hospital bill for major surgery or life-saving emergency treatment, because none of us had needed that, thank God. No, this was for a few X-rays for my daughter’s sprained ankle — for my baby, who was temporarily off my insurance but was covered by a separate policy that we were paying $117 a month for, which seemed like a really good deal until she needed some actual routine medical care.
    When you have five kids between the ages of 19 and 31 in the United States of America, you spend a lot of time holding your breath until they get safe jobs with their own group medical insurance. Two of mine have achieved that status, and both know they’d better not try to actually stimulate the economy by starting their own businesses or anything, because their Dad would have a stroke.
    All of this gets me to thinking… If Congress really and truly wants to help the U.S. economy, maybe, just maybe, it should pass a National Health Plan along the lines of practically every other developed nation on the planet, instead of sending me a check that would barely cover two months worth of premiums on health insurance for my wife and me and only one of my children.
    So Congress, I appreciate the thought, but I’ve got to tell you: Sending me $1,200 to throw into a debt hole that I wouldn’t have if I lived in any other industrialized country just doesn’t cut it.

Get stimulated at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

‘Nuts:’ The cartoon Robert didn’t put in the newspaper

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As I’ve mentioned before, for a regular guy who makes his living as a satirist, Robert Ariail can sometimes get all sensitive and even shy. He hates criticism, particularly criticism arising from a misunderstanding of his work (if he meant to offend you, he’s OK with that).

And sometimes he decides that his cartoon ideas are inappropriate. Sometimes he’s onto something, or at least it’s debatable. Other times, he may worry a bit too much. You might say that, on the spectrum of cartoon sensibilities, he’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from this Dutch guy.

Anyway, his sensitivity on that point was one of the reasons why this cartoon didn’t make it into the paper. He was worried about the salacious nature of "nuts" the way Jesse Jackson had used it. But there were other reasons:

  • The simplest, and most obvious, was that he had an oversupply of cartoons, and we ran out of slots for running them in a timely fashion. There will even be on jammed onto our Monday letters page, which is unusual. If we still had a Saturday page, I probably could have argued him into using it there. But since I was out of space, when he said he’d just put it on his Web page, I left it alone. (In case you haven’t figured it out, we have different standards for what we’ll put on the Web, and what we deem paper-worthy. This is driven by factors ranging from the enduring concept of the "family newspaper" and the fact that on the Web, space is unlimited.)
  • He thought people wouldn’t get it, because it got so little coverage in the MSM, outside of Fox — and most of that coverage tiptoed around what he’d actually said. When he first mentioned this, I said that was an advantage if he was worried about salaciousness, since readers who had missed the reference would just take it on the level of saying Jackson and Wright are "nuts." Sure, that’ll offend some, but the offense is more in the realm of the kind Robert doesn’t mind, since that is exactly what he meant.
  • He lost some enthusiasm for the cartoon when he realized he’d misunderstood what Jackson had said. He initially thought he’d said, "Obama’s cutting off his nuts" by "talking down" to black folks. When he mentioned it to me, it caused me to say something like, "He’s cutting off some nuts, all right, and one of them’s Jesse, and he doesn’t like it." That inspired the above cartoon — Robert’s eyebrows shot up the instant I said it — and this blog post by me. But in the course of researching for a link for the blog post, I discovered Jackson had actually said something different — something more hostile, but something that didn’t quite fit as well the play on words upon which the cartoon is based.
  • He had another cartoon regarding what Jackson had said about Obama, and it was actually a better one, and it didn’t rely upon prior knowledge on the readers’ part. As it happens, we put it on the Sunday page, which is the biggest play we can give anything. You’ll see it tomorrow.

Seems like there were a couple of things that ran through my head in the couple of seconds after Robert told me he’d decide to use this on the Web only (and send it to his syndicate), but I’m forgetting them now.

(Trying to reconstruct one of those internal monologues this way is actually one of the fun things about blogging. Dostoevsky did this — far better, of course, but it appeals to me for the same reason. I pretty much fell in love with Crime and Punishment for good at about the point when Andrey Semyenovich Lebezyatnikov goes on and on about what ran through his head in a couple of seconds. I thought that was cool.)

The troubles with ethanol

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One reason we need to pursue every potential avenue in trying to achieve greater energy independence (and save the planet) is that some of the things we try are going to fail. Others are going to turn out to be bad ideas. The sooner we know that, the better.

Most of us now know that about ethanol. But in case you thought that the only reason why it’s a bad idea is that converting cropland to growing energy instead of food leads to famine for millions and higher food prices for everybody else (as if that weren’t enough), Venkat Laksmi provided a more complete list for us today on our op-ed page. An excerpt:

    …Ethanol is not a long hydrocarbon chain like gasoline, and as a
result it is only two-thirds as efficient as gasoline. In other words,
a gallon of ethanol will provide two-thirds of the energy of a gallon
of gasoline. Ethanol mixes with water, which is not the case with
gasoline, which means the transportation systems used for gasoline
(i.e. pipelines and trucks) cannot be used for ethanol.

    Additionally,
there is a lot of inefficiency in the production of ethanol. For
example, corn-based ethanol requires 54 percent of the energy to
process the corn into ethanol and 24 percent to grow the corn. As a
result, there is a return of only 30 percent or so of the energy,
making this inefficient as compared to conventional gasoline, which
produces five times the energy required to produce it, and even
biodiesel, with its 93 percent efficiency. Even though biodiesel is
efficient, it has a long way to go for large-scale production….

Jim Clyburn begs to differ on earmarks

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Today’s op-ed piece by Jim Clyburn is one of those responses that make it hard to recognize the original piece to which they are "responding." In this case, a lot of that is a result of the personality and political style of the man whose name appears on the piece. I invite you to go read the original editorial.

Mr. Clyburn asserts that The State "doesn’t understand" earmarks, but doesn’t support that. In fact, it’s hard to square this assertion in his piece:

 The State editors’ position on earmarking is based on erroneous
reporting, a lack of knowledge of the facts and a disregard for the
constitutional authority granted to Congress to have power over the
purse. I have always said and will reiterate here that my personal
agenda is to improve the quality of life for the residents of the 6th
Congressional District.

… with this passage from ours:

Mr. Clyburn did not invent congressional earmarks — a point his critics
too often overlook. They are no doubt as old as our federal budgeting
process, and their largest growth spurt came while Republicans
controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency. In a perverse way,
the fact that he is the most successful earmarker in the S.C.
delegation speaks to his clout. And it’s hard to argue when he says he
is serving the best interests of his constituents by pumping federal money into a district that was drawn to include our state’s poorest areas.

Indeed, our editorial was less about Mr. Clyburn and his particular earmarks, and more about the fact that such a system exists.

To find our real area of disagreement, look to the headlines. The one on our editorial is "Clyburn earmarks a microcosm of broken system." The one on the op-ed is "Earmarks serve the public good." And once he gets past his inaccurate complaints about what we said, he gets to the core of the issue, which is that he believes the proper way to appropriate federal funds for infrastructure and the like is via the interested guidance of influential members of Congress, not "unqualified political appointees," which I suppose is the Democratic moral equivalent of the nonpolitical "bureaucrats" that Republicans gripe about. (If all else fails, Blame Bush.)

Finally, I must take issue with the assertion that “if programs that get funded through earmarks were strong enough to stand on their merits, there would be no need for the local congressman to stick a note in the budget demanding that they be funded.” Let’s take a recent Washington Post report that illustrates what happened last fiscal year when there was a moratorium on earmarks.

In the absence of congressional action, funds in the Transportation Department’s discretionary budget were allocated by unqualified political appointees at the department — with no background or experience in public transportation — who chose to spend nearly $1 billion of taxpayer money on toll road experiments in urban cities. All the money was spent on seven projects in five states, not including South Carolina.

No money returned to the national treasury. No investments in rural communities. No investments in mass transit. No equity or fairness. It was a case of the triumph of ideology over the public good. The year before, thanks to earmarks, the same pot of money was spent on 442 grants in 47 states, and this year it is being spent on 313 projects in 43 states — and South Carolina has benefited from these funds.

We disagree. Mr. Clyburn sets up a false choice — either the old way of doing things (disbursement by political influence, which benefits the district of a guy who now has loads of such influence), or wicked Bush Administration privatization schemes. (At least, that seems to be the case. I’m assuming here that the WashPost piece to which he refers is the March 17 one headlined "Letting the Market Drive Transportation; Bush Officials Criticized for Privatization." That seems to fit his description.)

The proper way to select priorities for spending transportation funds is to let the NONpolitical professionals — i.e., "bureaucrats" — choose the specific projects most needed across the nation, according to overall criteria established by the Congress. Or don’t spend the money at all.

South Carolina has had a century of trying it the Clyburn way — Mendel Rivers, for instance, was no slouch at throwing federal largesse in the Palmetto State’s direction — and we’re still poor, still lagging behind the rest of the nation. Mr. Clyburn believes his approach is different in that it directs the money to previously neglected areas and constituencies, and it is. But that doesn’t make his the best way for Congress to set federal spending priorities.

The ‘Jewish lobby’

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Check this letter on today’s page:

Hollings speaks truth about Middle East
    I agree with former Sen. Ernest Hollings on his answer, as stated in the June 15 State, to James T. Hammond’s question, “How do you think our policy in the Middle East should change?” Sen. Hollings said, “Settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and 80 percent of the problems will disappear.”
    In order to solve a problem, all facts must be truthfully presented. As long as it is considered anti-Semitic to state true but politically incorrect facts about Israel, it is impossible to solve the Middle East problems. If we want to solve these problems, get rid of the Jewish lobby (the biggest lobby in Washington), and get the facts on the table.
HARRY L. NORTON SR.
Summerton

I bring it up to suggest that Mr. Norton should check out this piece in Foreign Affairs that I mentioned previously. It makes it pretty clear that U.S. support for Israel — whatever you may think of it — has long been based in widespread support among NON-Jews in this country. Argue that this nation should take a harder line on Israel if you like. But to complain about the "Jewish lobby" is to miss where most of the support of current policy is coming from.

What the Knotts endorsement is really about

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On today’s page, you saw our endorsement of Jake Knotts in the runoff in the Republican nomination in Senate District 23. You also saw Cindi Scoppe’s column that was her way of thinking through, and explaining to readers, what was for the whole board a difficult decision. (And despite the little bit of fun I had about DeMint "clarifying" things, it was and is a difficult one.)

It’s worth reading, if you only get one thing out of it: This isn’t as simple as being about whether this person is for vouchers (or, worse, tax credits) or that one is against them. This is about what video poker was about — whether a group that does not have the state’s best interests at heart is allowed to intimidate the Legislature into doing its will.

It’s easy to say that, but very hard to communicate to readers. It’s hard to understand if you don’t spend as much time as I have, and as Cindi has (and she has a lot more direct experience with this than I do) observing lawmakers up close, and watching the ways they interact, and the way issues play out among them. I know it’s hard for readers to understand, because all these years later, folks still seem to have trouble understanding what the video poker issue was about for the editorial board, and why we took the position we ultimately did (to ban the industry).

I know we’ll be explaining this one for the next 10 years, and possibly longer. It’s just tough to communicate, and made tougher in this case because video poker was at least unsavory on its face. The face of this campaign funded by out-of-state extremists appears to be perfectly nice, ordinary people like Katrina Shealy and Sheri Few.

But it’s not about them. And it’s not about Jake Knotts, either. It’s certainly not about whether one or two candidates who favor (or might favor) vouchers get elected to the Legislature. By themselves, those one or two candidates can’t change the fact that spending public funds on private schools is (quite rightly) an unpopular cause. What this is about is the fact that if Jake Knotts loses, Howard Rich and company win, and that will play in the Legislature this way: Our money took Jake down. We can do the same to you. And at that point, lawmakers who don’t believe in vouchers and know their constituents don’t either can be induced to vote along with those interests anyway.

We saw it happen with video poker — until the industry was put out of business, cutting off the flow of cash that was corrupting the legislative process. We’re seeing a similar dynamic here. And that’s what this is about.

Anyway, as I mentioned, Cindi had a column about that. On Sunday, I’ll have a very different column about this endorsement. At one point in the column, I refer to one of the big differences between our editorial board and Jake Knotts — his populism. So it is that I post the video below, which features Sen. Knotts talking about that.

Can we drive 55? OK, how about 70?

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We all know how frustrated Energy partisan Samuel Tenenbaum gets about his perfectly sensible suggestion that we save the country and the planet, and save ourselves some bucks, by driving 55 mph. He keeps hoping his moment will arrive — will we get sensible at $5 a gallon? Or will it be $6?

Anyway, I was reminded of all that by this letter this a.m.:

Keeping to speed limit will save on gas

Apparently the high cost of gasoline is not yet a problem for the people of South Carolina.

Every
driver knows that higher speeds reduce fuel efficiency. Yet traffic on
our interstate highways continues to roll about 10 mph over the speed
limit.

STEPHEN D. KIRKLAND

This raises the question: Do you think we can summon the political will in this state to enforce the speed limits we have now? The reason traffic "continues to roll about 10 mph over the speed
limit" is that we all know that the de facto speed limit is 10 mph over — and maybe more like 15.

Maybe we can start the movement here. How about it? Can some of y’all who get SO worked up about illegal immigration "because they’re breaking the law" get worked up by speeding? After all, this isn’t just about not having the right paperwork; speed kills.

If we can tap into an emotional well like that, we can save lives, save money, flip the bird to Chavez and the House of Saud and save the planet. Sounds like a good deal.

Does the New England Journal of Medicine know about this breakthrough?

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All of y’all who get worked up about having Spanish-speakers around will love this letter on today’s page:

    I am sick and tired of the wailing and gnashing of teeth by some business owners and Chambers of Commerce over the new immigration law.
    I don’t normally put much faith in our legislators, but they hit a home run for a change. I only wish the law had been implemented earlier.
    My company hired a Hispanic three years ago who used falsified documents. He worked two weeks, suffered an aneurysm and our Workers’ Compensation Commission, in its infinite wisdom, ruled it was job-related and awarded him $175,000. As a result, my workers’ compensation insurance increased dramatically.
    If this law had been in effect three years ago, it would have saved me a lot of money and much grief. As a result of this incident, we now use the federal electronic database and verify every new hire.
    My advice to all the malcontents: Make sure your employees are in this country legally or hire U.S. citizens.

So it turns out that illegal immigration causes aneurysms! Who knew?

Isn’t that just like those Hispanics? They come up here and take jobs just knowing they’re going to have an aneurysm, no doubt as a result of the very act of wading across the Rio … The nerve of these people.

Remember, hire U.S. citizens (or, if you must, legal aliens), because they don’t have aneurysms.

Did you go vote? Less than 90 minutes left

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Go vote, people. In all too many of these races, the primary is all there is; this is the election.

If you forget what you’re voting on, here’s the recap of our endorsements, and a link to the endorsements themselves. Whether this helps you remember who you wanted to vote for or wanted to vote against, just go vote.

Here’s the brief endorsement recap from today’s paper:


The State’s
endorsements
IT’S PRIMARY DAY — the only chance voters will get to pick who represents them in many offices. Here’s a recap of The State editorial board’s endorsements:
— Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the quintessential conservative Republican, is an erudite advocate of reason and sound policy, taking courageous stands that make him a leader in the Senate. Michael Cone appears to be the stronger of two weak Democratic candidates for the same office.
— GOP Rep. Joe Wilson is dedicated to the service of the 2nd Congressional District, and his views come closer than his opponent’s to those of his constituents.
    Democrat Blaine Lotz, also seeking the 2nd District seat, is an Air Force veteran and former assistant secretary of defense, and well grounded in both foreign and domestic issues.
— Democratic state Rep. John Scott and his opponent have similar positions, and electing his opponent to succeed Sen. Kay Patterson in District 19 would seem like a reward for the unacceptable state of the Richland 1 schools he has overseen for 16 years.
— Democratic Sen. Darrell Jackson (District 21) understands our state’s challenges and is focused on fixing the way we fund education, and improving public health and financial literacy. He has a good track record of working across party lines to get things done.
— The pro-voucher/anti-government groups that are trying to intimidate our Legislature would claim credit if so powerful an incumbent as GOP Sen. Jake Knotts (District 23) was defeated, strengthening their hand in a battle that goes far beyond their immediate issues.
— Richland County Council Chairman Joe McEachern, a Democrat running to succeed Mr. Scott in House District 77, would work to free local governments from the constraints of meddling legislators, overhaul the broken tax system, restructure state government and provide a good public education for all children.
    Michael Koska’s campaign for the Republican nomination in District 77 grows out of his grassroots involvement in local transportation issues. He would be more effective than his off-putting opponent.
— Republican David Herndon seeks to replace Rep. Bill Cotty in District 79 to make sure an avid voucher proponent doesn’t win. He is committed to improving the public schools, in part to strengthen the economy, and he’s fairly knowledgeable about tax policy.
— Democratic Rep. Joe Neal’s (District 70) depth of knowledge in education and health care is impressive, and he fights effectively for equal educational opportunity for children regardless of their address, to force attention to the medical needs of those too sick to care for themselves and to promote civil justice.
— Democratic Rep. Jimmy Bales’ (District 80) work as a high school principal gave him the real-life understanding of the challenges of educating poor children that most legislators lack; and he appreciates the need to overhaul our tax system and to give the governor more control over state agencies.
— Democratic Rep. Chris Hart (District 83) is focused on the big picture that his challenger shows little interest in, and he is committed to creating a stronger public education system to help transform our state.
— Republican Mike Miller understands our state’s problems, wants to bring more services to District 96 rather than more parades and seems more supportive of improving public schools than the incumbent.
— Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, a Democrat, established a cutting-edge DNA testing lab, has been in the forefront in the battle against gangs and engages citizens through his innovative community advisory board and community policing programs.
— Lexington County Sheriff James Metts, a Republican, is an accomplished, experienced law enforcement officer who has implemented groundbreaking programs.
— Democratic incumbent Damon Jeter has the experience and broader focus to make him the better choice in Richland County Council District 3.
— Democrat Johnny Bland has been active in the community and area schools and outshines his opponents in Richland Council District 7.
— Republican Val Hutchinson, running for re-election in Richland District 9, is an effective leader who has promoted good growth, called on developers to help provide infrastructure, opposed the proliferation of billboards and objected to an unneeded baseball park.
— In Richland District 10, Democrat Kelvin Washington has a firm grasp of issues, understands how county government works and would hit the ground running.
    There’s no good reason to elect ministerial positions with no policy-making duties. With competence as the only relevant question, we see no reason to fire any of these incumbents on the ballot today: Richland County Democratic Clerk of Court Barbara Scott and Coroner Gary Watts, and Lexington County Republican Auditor Chris Harmon and Clerk of Court Beth Carrigg.

Endorsing Jake: Damned if you do…

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Today’s endorsement of Jake Knotts for re-election has upset supporters of the governor, as well it might. To the only person who wrote to me directly, I responded that I thought we were quite clear in the editorial as to our reasoning: The governor’s voucher allies have become like video poker, a force that undermines democracy in our Legislature by intimidating lawmakers into doing things they would not otherwise do, and which their constituents would not want them to do.

In the latter years of the video poker era, lawmakers who opposed that racket were afraid to move against it, because they knew they would have well-financed opposition in their next primary. We’ve been seeing the same phenomenon with the voucher/tax credit thing, among Republicans at least. And the word was out that this race was the big test. It was clear that if the governor could take out Jake, no one was safe from such retaliation.

It was another one of those endorsements of the "we don’t much like this guy, but…" variety. Like George W. Bush in 2004.

Anyway, here’s today’s editorial, and here’s your chance to get your licks in…

Oh, and don’t forget — this is the only blog on which you can see video from interviews with all three candidates…

We CAN drive 55

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My best-known Energy Party think-tank fellow called yesterday pretty excited that Tom Friedman had mentioned our 55-mph speed limit plank. The column in question appeared on our op-ed page today. Here’s the passage in question:

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 mph, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from, what he called, our “addiction to oil.”

That was just a portion of the overall message of the column, which is that our nation’s strategic failures — chief among them the failure to adopt a rational energy policy (or any energy policy, really) after 9/11 — have left the nation in a multifaceted bind that is going to be phenomenally difficult, if not impossible, to get out of.

“Call it the triple deficit,” said Mr. Rothkopf. “A fiscal deficit that will soon have us choosing between rationed health care, sufficient education, adequate infrastructure and traditional levels of defense spending, a trade deficit that has us borrowing from our rivals to the point of real vulnerability, and a geopolitical deficit that is a legacy of Iraq, which may result in hesitancy to take strong stands where we must.”

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.

The metaphor is inadequate, because one, just one, of those shovels would be energy policy, of which 55 mph would be just one essential facet among many. In fact, that one facet could be a bellwether as to whether we have a chance, even a very slim one, to turn things around. To have any hope, we’re going to have to achieve a phenomenal bipartisan consensus to do everything envisioned in the Energy Party Manifesto. And let me say it one more time: That’s just to have an outside chance.

You don’t want to slow down to 55? Guess what, neither do I. But if we’re not willing to do that, something that is such a minor sacrifice as that, then forget the rest. Our nation is doomed to accelerate into decline.

To hear the voice of one American who is flat ready to do what it takes, listen to the audio  of Samuel Tenenbaum’s phone message.

Now, as Jimmy Malone said to Eliot Ness (in the story, anyway): "What are you prepared to do?" And if your answer is that you are prepared to do that which is convenient, that which pleases you — ideologically, or economically, or in whatever way — I ask, "And then what are you prepared to do?"

Join the movement. Join the Energy Party, before it’s too late for America.

Go into Burma with guns blazing

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Alternative headline for this post, for those of you who thought that one a bit too lurid:

I’m down with R2P

I refer here to the alleged United Nations principle of "responsibility to protect," which Trudy Rubin wrote about in her column on today’s op-ed page. I say alleged because it’s one of those things the U.N. talks about, but doesn’t do. To help you catch up, here’s an excerpt from the column:

What do you do when the world is lined up to help more than a million desperate people hit by a cyclone, and Myanmar’s hard-line junta blocks that help?
    That is the unprecedented situation confronting the United Nations, Western aid agencies and humanitarian organizations. No one has ever seen anything like it….
    So should, or can, U.N. member states force the junta to accept the world’s outstretched hand?
    Ironically, U.N. members adopted a concept back in fall 2005 that would seem to answer that question. At the urging of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the General Assembly endorsed the following principle: The international community has a “responsibility to protect” civilians when their governments can’t or won’t stop genocide or crimes against humanity — even if this means violating a country’s national sovereignty.
    This concept, known variously as “humanitarian intervention” or by the abbreviation “R2P,” has gone nowhere. It has not proved useful in dealing with the quasi-genocide in Darfur. Authoritarian regimes view R2P as a potential cover for Western military efforts at regime change.
But if it ever had any relevance, the concept ought to apply to the horrific situation in Myanmar…

Trudy says that this situation would not involve regime change, but hey — wouldn’t that be a wonderful byproduct?

Unfortunately, instead of using our military proactively to shove thugs and tyrants out of the way so we can help our people, we’re still arguing over whether we should have gone into Iraq. In other words, instead of expanding our capacity to project force — the way China’s doing like gangbusters — we’re arguing about whether to make use of the military we have.

Not only can we not get off the DIME as the world’s one (for the moment) superpower, we can’t even decide to use the "M."

So the dying continues in Darfur. And Myanmar, a.k.a. Burma.

They euthanize horses, don’t they?

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As Bill Murray said so wisely, in "What About Bob?":

There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don’t. My ex-wife loves him...

But I’m here to tell you about another dichotomy that may constitute a much greater cognitive divide:

  1. Really serious animal lovers.
  2. The rest of us.

Robert Ariail has been hearing today from some folks who love animals — horses, especially, I suppose — the way Bob Wiley’s life loved Neil Diamond. Maybe more so.

The category that consists of "the rest of us" is large and broad. I suspect it’s the majority, but I don’t know, and I’m certainly not going to claim that it is, much less imply that greater numbers have any moral significance, because I’ve noticed that members of the other group of people can get very indignant. I just know that this group of people includes Robert, and me, and lots of people who range all the way from folks who like animals just fine (which includes me, and probably Robert, although I don’t know, because I haven’t been interested enough to ask, which is probably proof positive that I’m not a member of that other group of people) to those who have outright hostility toward other life forms (include, quite often, other people).

I am often even fond of animals. I like dogs, in the aggregate. I don’t much like cats. I’m not actually hostile to cats; I’d just rather not be around them (and not just because I’m severely allergic to them). They just, for me, lack something that dogs have — let’s leave it at that.

Some of you may remember a column I wrote about a dog of which I was very fond. Some folks projected some of themselves onto that column, thinking that I, too, must be a really serious animal lover. But compared to the folks I mean when I say "really serious animal lovers," I definitely am not.

I do not consider this to be a moral failing on my part. I am not ashamed of it. I say this to draw a distinction between the way I may feel about myself with regard to other human beings. I frequently have occasion to chide, berate and even be ashamed of myself because I have failed to be insufficiently thoughtful of other people and their needs and wants and interests. But aside from feeling a little bad if I forget my dog’s dinner time until WAY late in the evening, I can’t say that I have such pangs with regard to animals. I just go ahead and feed him, and pat him on the head and say, "Sorry, boy," and leave it at that. This is of course facilitated by the fact that the dog forgives me COMPLETELY, which is one of the great things about dogs. Just try getting away with that with a cat, for instance.

I have also felt bad when I’ve lost my patience with my dog — hollering at him to "cut it out" on occasion when he scrabbles at the door with his claws. I feel bad about that because my wife tells me I should, so I do.

But that’s about it.

I don’t feel what one correspondent said I should feel about Robert’s cartoon today: "Shame, shame, shame." In fact, I was puzzled at the assertion.

I’ve had a busy day today. I didn’t see that message until this afternoon, but it immediately reminded me of something that Robert had said to me this morning as I was on my way into a meeting with a candidate: He said some folks were really getting on him about today’s cartoon, the way they had about that Obama cartoon recently. I sort of said, "Uh-huh" or something, but as I went into my meeting I tried thinking about it, and tried to imagine what the widely misinterpreted Obama cartoon and this one had in common, and I couldn’t. I just came up dry.

Several hours later, when I saw the messages I got from a couple of readers — including our regular Randy — about it, I was bewildered again. I had to ask, "OK, I give up — what is it that upsets you about the cartoon?"

Then I went and looked at Robert’s Web site and saw the comments and figured it out — but I don’t think I would have guessed otherwise. Then I came back to my blog, and saw that Randy had confirmed the impression I had just gained: "The cartoon makes light of the horrific pain and suffering of an animal."

Personally, I don’t think it makes anything of "the horrific pain and suffering of an animal" one way or the other. It basically just takes the "beating a dead horse" expression, links it to an event in the news, and uses it to say — very accurately, I believe — that that’s what Hillary Clinton’s doing with her insistence upon continuing to pursue a nomination that is out of her reach.

And I know this for sure — the cartoon itself does not do any harm to any horse or any other animal. It doesn’t even hurt their feelings, on account of — and I hope nobody thinks I’m stereotyping animals or anything here — they don’t read the paper.

All it does is upset some people — some of them very, very nice people (perhaps I should even say MOST of them are very nice people) — because the death of this horse the other day was apparently an event that was freighted with strong emotions for them. At least, that’s what I gather. Since it was not a particularly emotional event for me, I can only surmise this. It’s not that I don’t think it’s sad for a horse to be put down; it is sad. But that’s about as far as it goes with me. It was not a shocking event. If you put horses that have been bred for speed rather than durability under that kind of stress, this can happen. And when it does happen, as the saying goes, they DO shoot horses. Sad, but not what you’d call shocking, and not something I’m going to be brooding about the next day.

I’ve seen things in the news since that race that are a LOT more awful and tragic. Take, for instance, all the dead and displaced in the country formerly known as Burma. But you know what? Nobody — not one person, that I’ve seen — has criticized Robert for "making light of the horrific pain and suffering" of as many as 100,000 Burmese under the dual tragedy of the cyclone and their oppressive, uncaring dictatorship. And yet, one could as easily have drawn that conclusion from this cartoon as the animal lovers did with this one.

And I reflect on this, and there seems to be something wrong here, and it’s not with Robert…

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Free Thomas Ravenel

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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.

The latest COLA outrage

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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…

How lawmakers voted on their pension COLA

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Cindi sent me the following stuff to post as a supplement to her column today:

    Here’s the recorded vote from last Wednesday, when the House sent the bill that contained the legislative COLA back to committee, in hopes that the committee will remove the legislative COLA and report the bill back out, so it can be passed. This is a convoluted way of doing things, but it’s the only option representatives had available at this point other than 1) killing the entire bill or 2) passing it.
    A yes vote was to send the bill back to committee. A no vote was to allow it to pass with the legislative COLA included.
    The bill is H.4673.

Yeas 58; Nays 51

Those who voted in the affirmative are:
Agnew                  Allen                  Anthony
Ballentine             Bannister              Bedingfield
Bingham                Bowen                  G. Brown
Cato                   Chalk                  Coleman
Crawford               Delleney               Erickson
Frye                   Funderburk             Gullick
Hagood                 Haley                  Hamilton
Harrell                Harrison               Haskins
Hiott                  Hodges                 Hutson
Kelly                  Kirsh                  Leach
Limehouse              Lowe                   Lucas
McLeod                 Miller                 Mitchell
Moss                   Mulvaney               Neilson
Owens                  E. H. Pitts            Rice
Sandifer               Shoopman               Simrill
D. C. Smith            F. N. Smith            G. M. Smith
G. R. Smith            J. R. Smith            Spires
Stavrinakis            Talley                 Thompson
Toole                  Walker                 Witherspoon
Young

Total–58

Those who voted in the negative are:

Alexander              Anderson               Bales
Battle                 Bowers                 Brady
Branham                Brantley               Breeland
R. Brown               Clemmons               Clyburn
Cobb-Hunter            Cooper                 Daning
Dantzler               Duncan                 Gambrell
Govan                  Harvin                 Hayes
Herbkersman            Hosey                  Howard
Jefferson              Kennedy                Littlejohn
Loftis                 Mack                   Mahaffey
Merrill                J. H. Neal             Ott
Parks                  Perry                  Phillips
Pinson                 M. A. Pitts            Scarborough
Scott                  Sellers                Skelton
Stewart                Taylor                 Umphlett
Vick                   Weeks                  Whipper
White                  Whitmire               Williams

Total–51

Legislators about to sweeten their perk (quietly)

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As the week drew to an end, it became more and more apparent that, tied up as I was getting the Saturday Opinion Extra thing done, any column that I did was going to be a rush job and probably not worthy of a Sunday.

Fortunately, Cindi Scoppe already had a column done that was better than either of the ideas I was kicking around (one would have been about the continuing dialogue we’ve had here about the cognitive divide between black and white over the Rev. Wright, the other would have been a look at the Pennsylvania primary, leading with an anecdote from when I was up there recently).

Cindi had written again about the absurdly generous pensions that S.C. lawmakers provide for themselves out of our pockets. More particularly, it was about the fact that they are about to vote themselves an increase in those pensions without so much as a debate.

    But the House is poised not only to approve the plan this week, but to do so without a bit of debate. That would have happened on Thursday, but for a procedural delay. And the Senate might not be far behind.
    Representatives are poised to act without so much as acknowledging what they’re doing. That means some legislators won’t realize what they’re doing — and with a few exceptions, those who do realize what they’re doing can get away with claiming ignorance.
    Or rather they could have. The purpose of this column is to make sure everybody — not just voters, but legislators as well — knows what’s happening, so there can be no claims of innocence.

Follow the link to read the rest of it. Along with the column was this informative box:

How generous is it?
• For every dollar state employees contribute to their pensions, the taxpayers kick in $1.27; for every dollar legislators pay into their system, taxpayers pay $3.91.
• The average pension for career state employees is $17,536 — 53 percent of their final salary. The average pension for our part-time legislators is $18,218 — or 102 percent of their pay.
• Former legislators can buy “service credit” at the same super-subsidized rate after they leave office. A legislator who leaves office after eight years can buy credit for $2,280 a year for the next 22 years, and then collect an annual pension of $32,980. He will recoup his “investment” in three years, and clear $33,000 a year in profit for the rest of his life.
State employees get no subsidy if they buy additional credit after they quit working.
• Former legislators can start drawing a full pension at age 60. That means an extra $91,000, on average.

It occurs to me that after reading this stuff, you might want to contact your representatives in the Legislature. To find out how to do that, go to www.scstatehouse.net and select “Find your legislator” on the left. Or call 1-888-VOTE-SMART.