Over the weekend one of my favorite columnists (Tom Friedman) wrote about one of my favorite SC politicians (Lindsey Graham). The subject is the Energy Party-certified energy/climate change compromise that Sens. Graham, Kerry and Lieberman are working on. The result is worth reading. An excerpt:

We start with politics. The Republican Party today has a major outreach problem with two important constituencies, “Hispanics and young people,” Graham explains:“I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are 30 or younger this climate issue is not a debate. It’s a value. These young people grew up with recycling and a sensitivity to the environment — and the world will be better off for it. They are not brainwashed. … From a Republican point of view, we should buy into it and embrace it and not belittle them. You can have a genuine debate about the science of climate change, but when you say that those who believe it are buying a hoax and are wacky people you are putting at risk your party’s future with younger people. You can have a legitimate dispute about how to solve immigration, but when you start focusing on the last names of people the demographics will pass you by.”

Another:

Remember, he adds: “We are more dependent on foreign oil today than after 9/11. That is political malpractice, and every member of Congress is responsible.”

And one more:

“We can’t be a nation that always tries and fails,” Graham concludes. “We have to eventually get some hard problem right.”

As for the part where he said, “I am now semicool,” well you’ll just have to read the piece to find it.

Seems that Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball has downgraded John Spratt’s chances for re-election:

SC-5 (John Spratt-D)
Rating Change: Safe D to Leans D

Rep. John Spratt finds himself in good company as a long-time Democratic congressman from a Republican district suddenly endangered in this newly-Republican national environment. Republicans had been trying to push him to retire and while it looks like he has rebuffed those attempts, his political future is still less than certain. After voting for the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and the House health care bill, Spratt has drawn a strong Republican challenger. State senator Mick Mulvaney was named by Time Magazine as one of the top ten GOP challengers most likely to become the next Scott Brown, pulling off a surprise Republican upset. This will be House election number fifteen for Spratt, the chairman of the House Budget committee, and he has won every way imaginable. In 1994, though, his margin was just four percent and 2010 could turn out to be at least as close, if not closer.

Sounds to me like that’s not based on much other than buzz. After all, the Republicans have been trying to write Mr. Spratt’s political obituary for quite a few cycles.

And that’s a bad thing, and one of the things that’s wrong with political parties. The thing is that John Spratt is one of the smartest, most competent members of the U.S. House of Representatives, an asset both to his home state and to the nation. And he is a moderate, no Nancy Pelosi or even Jim Clyburn. But the Republicans don’t care about that. They want more Republicans, and they think that seat should be “theirs.” So they throw a certain amount of resources at Mr. Spratt every two years, with little regard to whether the district will get better representation, so long as he is replaced by someone with an “R” after his name. (And I say that with no particular reflection one way or the other about Sen. Mulvaney. I don’t know him. But thus far I have no reason to believe he would provide better representation than Mr. Spratt, and the general trend has been to line up candidates without regard to their quality.)

But you say, that’s what parties are for, right? To provide alternatives, to try to win seats? Precisely. They do so without regard to the quality of the incumbent. They are mindless about it. If a representative has a safe seat you won’t see this kind of effort exerted, even if the incumbent is a total loss. But Rep. Spratt is an excellent representative, so it’s rather galling to see him constantly endangered simply because Republicans see an opportunity.

I wouldn’t mind if the opportunity were that Mr. Spratt is a weak representative. But this happens purely because of the mindless math of partisan wrangling, not for reasons bearing upon the job Mr. Spratt has done. And that’s what gets me.

Oh, and for those who want an example where Democrats have bugged me doing the same thing, look no further than Jim Manning‘s unfortunately successful bid to unseat Mike Montgomery in 2008.

That was, without a doubt, my biggest disappointment in that election (yes, bigger than McCain losing, because after all, I liked Obama, too). Mike Montgomery was to Richland County Council what Mr. Spratt is to Congress, only perhaps more so: One of the smartest, most competent, hard-working members. And he was unseated by a guy who had only two arguments for his candidacy, one of them exceedingly narrow (about a portion of the district rather than the county as a whole) and the other being the simple fact that he had a “D” after his name.

Mike Montgomery’s loss was Richland County’s and it happened purely because of partisan math, not because of the quality of the job he had done. And I hate it when that happens.

This from Burl Burlingame in Kailua, in the path of the tsunami:

Hmmmm … the newspaper hasn’t asked me to cover the tsunami, so I guess I’ll ride it out at home. We’re only about five feet above sea level, but we’re inland, so if it whacks Kailua, we likely won’t get any wave action but we might get flooded. Filling containers with water. Boiling eggs for when (not if) the power goes out. Getting stuff off the floor. Wondering and watching.
When the 1986 tsunami was imminent, the paper sent me to Ala Moana Beach Park. It was blocked off, but when I told the policeman I was press, he just smiled and told me to enjoy the beach. I went out on the beach, prepared in case the shorebreak started to recede to beat it. My car was left running and pointed away from shore. I stood on the sand for a long time and not much happened. When the time passed, I tried to leave and discovered that the police had bungled the Waikiki evacuation so badly that traffic was gridlocked. That became the story.
Well. I’ll file this note. And hope there will be updates …
9:44 — Guy on TV noted that folks should be careful because “THERE WILL BE NO ONE AVAILABLE TO SAVE YOU.”
9:45 — Stores are limiting SPAM sales to two cases — cases! — per customer.
9:46 — TV guy: “It’s not a wave! The entire ocean is moving ashore!”
9:50 — We’re relying on TV. Alas, the TV newsroom cutbacks are showing.
9:51 — I’m going outside and do some woodworking instead of sitting on my hands. But I’m enough of a journalist nerd to have already recharged my cameras.
11:00 — Boards I primered yesterday are sanded and put away, so the driveway is clear. Ladder to roof in place. Should I take a shower?
11:08 — Hilo is still standing.
11:14 — My daughter’s workplace at Kailua Beach Park is keeping its employees in place.
11:23 — Giant wasp invades Hilo! Oops, never mind. Regular-sized wasp on weather camera.
11:25 — TV guy refers to a swimmer in Hilo Bay: “What an idiot!”
11:35 — The water is trickling in and out on Hilo Bay. Like a quick tide.
11:45 — Beach in Hilo has disappeared.
11:52 — Will there be mail delivery today?

So he’s riding it out at home? I’m thinking he should head for Pali. Or maybe Diamond Head, if you think it’s tall enough — and not the crater, either. That little concrete pillbox from WWII (is it still there?) on the tip of the highest part of the rim should be an awesome vantage point.

But as I type this, time for moving to another position may have run out…

Ever since I saw the news about the tsunami headed for Hawaii at 410 mph, I’ve been trying to reach our friend and Mid-Pacific correspondent Burl Burlingame to see if he has headed for high ground. I’ve tried Twitter twice, and even called what I think is his home number…

Initially, since I heard about this this morning, I was worried that he would still be asleep given the time difference. But now he’s certainly up…

I’m thinking he’s probably been called into the office to help cover this, but I don’t know that.

So far, no acknowledgement from Twitter, Facebook, e-mail or either his or my blog. And I just got a recording at the phone number.

I’ll let y’all know if I hear from him.

Meanwhile, in checking Twitter I saw that he had sent me this direct message:

BurlB I may be joining you out on the street: http://www.starbulletin.com/news/20100226_Sign_of_the_times.html

I wrote back that I would same him a space on my corner, but in the meantime ARE YOU ON HIGH GROUND?

(And yeah, that’s kind of an old picture, but that’s what he looked like when I knew him.)

I continue to find myself baffled by the way rigid ideologues look at the world, particularly those who are chasing the Tea Party vote.

A little while ago I got this release from Nikki Haley’s campaign manager:

“The Fight for the Right”

February 26th, 2010Friends,

Hope all is well. Things are going great on the campaign front – Nikki’s message of real conservative reform is catching fire all across the state, and your support is a huge part of that.

The Myrtle Beach Sun News recently sat down with both Nikki and Gresham Barrett – and since there’s been some back-and-forth between the two campaigns recently, I thought you might find their take on the two interesting:

“For people who share a party, the stylistic differences between [Haley and Barrett] could hardly be more striking.

Haley, an accountant, presents herself as a far-right reformer, cast in a mold similar to the Mark Sanford of eight years ago. She has two primary claims to conservative fame (both of which may strike some voters as somewhat abstract, as Sanford-style issues often can): a successful but politically costly fight last year to put state legislators’ votes on the record, and her opposition to South Carolina’s use of $700 million in stimulus money to shore up shortfalls in its 2009 and 2010 budgets. …

While Haley shares Sanford’s ideology, however, she seems to lack his idiosyncrasies. The governor’s sometimes-distracted demeanor starkly contrasts with Haley’s fastidious, alert style, and it’s tough to imagine her toting piggies onto the Statehouse floor. ‘The accountant in me doesn’t have time for finger-pointing and fighting,’ she said.

Barrett hails from the high Upstate, the tiny town of Westminster, which he points out is about as far as you can get in South Carolina from Myrtle Beach. He’s cut from mainstream conservative cloth, building a career on core Republican issues: pro-life, pro-gun, pro-business and pro-military.

In fact, in today’s anti-partisan political climate, Barrett’s biggest liability may be his vote for the 2008 bank bailout. …”

You read that right, Congressman Barrett voted FOR the colossal waste of taxpayer dollars that was the bank bailout – and he would do it again, as you can see here (click to play):

That passage is followed by a video clip you can find at the link.

First, Nikki Haley is not a person who, a year ago or more, I would have associated with the term “rigid ideologue.” And yet this is the way she is painting herself now. More remarkable than that, she is going far out of her way to say, Look at me! I am THE Mark Sanford candidate in this race! Doesn’t seem wise to me.

But then, I tend to think of conservatism in old-fashioned ways. In my day, a conservative wanted to be the one who was seen as “pro-life, pro-gun, pro-business and pro-military.” And yet the Haley campaign seems to think it’s a good thing that rival Gresham Barrett is seen that way, while she is seen (they, in defiance of all reason, seem to hope) as the anti-gummint extremist (that is to say, the Sanford candidate).

I mean, is it supposed to be a positive good to be compared to “the Mark Sanford of eight years ago”? Do they actually think that pre-Argentina, the gov was A-OK? That he wasn’t a dangerous flake all along? How do they figure? Do they really not get it that the problem is his world view? Do they truly not see that the selfishness that caused him to spend Father’s Day in Argentina is merely a logical outgrowth of his quirky, self-centered Ayn Randian political philosophy?

I find it all hard to follow. It baffles me. When did the world get this crazy?

Just saw on Twitter that Dwight Drake is making some hay from the story in The State today about the ways prominent Republicans have embarrassed South Carolina lately:

The list of GOP failures grows. It really is time for a change. We need new leadership and a new direction for SC now. http://bit.ly/dAyn3X

A bit of an oversimplification, of course, but he might as well make the most of the opportunities the GOP is handing him.

In fact, the story — which isn’t actually ABOUT recent embarrassments as it’s about results of a poll showing that South Carolinians are embarrassed, and it sort of infers the rest — misses a lot of good examples. Such as the latest from Rep. Mike Pitts.

As y’all know, as an UnPartisan I hate making fun of one party without making fun of the other just as much. Unfortunately, the Democrats just haven’t come through with nearly as much foolishness lately, while it seems the GOP is having daily strategy sessions to come up with creative ways to help the Dems.

I mean, we have Robert Ford with his campaign based on video poker, but that’s about as silly as it gets. Which, as John Cleese would say, is not particularly silly. Perhaps Sen. Ford can get a government grant from Washington (where Democrats offer a bountiful feast of silliness, keeping up admirably with the GOP) to develop it.

By the way, go read that story in The State, and you’ll see why I made the transition to opinion writing long ago. The news pages of newspapers still cling to this notion that they must never make an actual observation, no matter how obvious. No, they have to get someone else to do it. So it is that while the blogosphere has pulled no punches in documenting the foolishness of S.C. politicians (and yes, the prime examples are Republicans), MSM news folks have to resort to the awkward expedient of getting someone else to say the obvious. And so they have to construct a story telling you that a poll is saying something that you knew already.

And it’s really, really awkward. Always has been. That’s why I left newsrooms behind at the end of 1993. Couldn’t stand the stiltedness anymore.

As I may have mentioned, I sent e-mails to several friends with experience with endorsements to see what they thought about whether bradwarthen.com should endorse candidates in the upcoming elections.

One of those I contacted was my old shipmate Mike Fitts (not to be confused with Mike Pitts, please). As I said back when Mike left the paper, he was always very good at helping us focus our discussions when we were trying to make up our minds about something. In fact, the examples I cited of Mike doing that had to do with endorsements. So I was particularly interested to read this reply from Mike:

I think you should continue to give your opinions on the candidates in your conversational, bloggy way. Hold forth your view and let the discussion roam with your readers.

Don’t think you should do a formal ‘endorsement,’ though. Why shove yourself into that formatted box in a free-form medium such as a blog? ‘Endorsement’ sounds stilted coming from a newspaper, much less a blog. It also has the risk of making you look like a man in a suit standing outside the gates of his former employer, waiting to be let back in…

And you know, I’m starting to lean in Mike’s direction on this.

As he usually does, he’s put his finger on a couple of key points. The official endorsement is a stiff, formal affair, as rigid in its way as the welcoming ceremony for an admiral coming up the starboard side (these nautical references are for Mike’s benefit, by the way). All man-ropes and sideboys and the stamp and clash of Marines presenting arms while the tropical sun turns their faces as red as their uniforms, constrasting sharply with the pipeclayed white of their belts…

OK, I’ll stop now.

Back to the topic: Endorsements are institutional. One of my grimmer duties as editorial page editor (as grim as ordering a dozen lashes for a defaulter — oops, there I go again…) was insisting that we endorse in all contested races, no matter how much work or stress in coordinating schedules (most elections called for more than 50 interviews; each one required coordinating my schedule with the candidates plus at least one other board member, and on the bigger, statewide or national, races, the entire board). And then there was the painful process of dragging the board through making the more difficult decisions, the ones we’d sooner let lie. Because the principle was, since one of these people was going to be elected, and since the voters had to choose, so did we.

And while we were always honest with readers about our chosen candidate’s drawbacks, and the opponent’s good qualities, there was something a bit forced and stiff about many endorsements: We hereby dub thee… and so forth.

Which is a very newspaperish, a very “leading voice in the community” kind of thing.

Very unblog-like.

Meanwhile, a blog is free-form. On a blog, even when I was with the paper, I let my hair down and said what I thought more freely than I did in the paper — which caused zampolit Cindi and others to call me to my duty, to remember that all that I said reflected upon the board and its dignity, etc.

Well, I’m not being paid to be that any more.

So what I’m leaning toward is just being very frank with y’all about what I think about candidates (as always), without requiring myself to go through that formal, pompous, “ta-da!” moment that is an endorsement, with all the attendant hoopla and hype.

That’s what I’m thinking right now, anyway…

That video on my last post brings to mind the farcical instance in which Sen. Glenn McConnell decided to switch to a nylon Confederate flag on the State House grounds.

Here’s what I wrote about that at the time:

These colors don’t run, but they’re made of the same stuff as pantyhose

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

Oh, I wish I was in the land of nylon;
Old times there are not . . .

* . . to pile on?
* . . four miles on?
* . . a trial run?

Help me. I’m trying to adjust to an entirely new conception of the Old South, and it’s not easy.

It turns out that, contrary to popular misconceptions that it was technologically disadvantaged, the Confederacy was way ahead of its times – at least in the production of synthetic fabrics. There’s no other way to explain the fact that some of the foremost keepers of the Confederate flame – including at least one real stickler for authenticity – have insisted that the cotton flag flying behind the soldier monument on the State House grounds be replaced with a banner of nylon.

Sen. Glenn McConnell owns a Civil War memorabilia shop in Charleston, and is known for three great passions: the South Carolina Senate, Civil War battle re-enactments and the Confederate submarine Hunley. This is a man reputed to own and frequently wear more than a dozen different, meticulously accurate, Confederate and Union uniforms.

To the best of my knowledge, not one is made of nylon.

And yet he thought it best to replace the cotton flag with a nylon one for a couple of reasons. One was that the cotton one didn’t fly as well in the breeze. I’ll come back to that. The other was that the colors on the cotton flag ran in the rain. “You get pink stars and everything,” he told The State‘s Valerie Bauerlein. “We shouldn’t be flying a flag like that.”

“We shouldn’t be flying a flag like that.” That sounds like what I used to say about another Confederate flag that used to fly over our State House. You remember that flag. It went up in 1962, ostensibly to commemorate the centennial of the war, and failed to come down in 1965.

That flag had a lot of problems, not least of which being the fact that it was absurd to fly a relic of history over our present-day seat of government. It wasn’t even an accurate relic. It wasn’t square, like the flag that most South Carolinians fought under with the Army of Northern Virginia. It was rectangular – like the battle flag of the Army of the Tennessee, or the Confederate naval jack. Or the “Rebel Flag” that was so popular among white supremacists through much of the 20th century.

So, after years of arguing, we South Carolinians came up with a compromise that fell far short of pleasing everybody, but which at least made some sense: We would fly a scrupulously accurate Army of Northern Virginia flag behind the monument on the State House grounds honoring all the South Carolinians who fought and died for the Confederacy.

No, the bill authorizing the change said nothing about cotton. It didn’t have to. But everyone had reasons to assume it would be.

The actual flags issued to Confederate soldiers to carry into battle were made of cotton bunting. If cotton was good enough for them, why isn’t it good enough for latter-day Confederate wannabes?

The flag that flew over the State House all of those years with the approval of Sen. McConnell and others was made of the same stuff. If it was good enough to fly there for 38 years, why isn’t it good enough now?

Does it really matter whether the flag is made of cotton or nylon? Maybe not. But you would think it would, for two reasons. The first is that some participants in the debate who wanted no flag on the grounds gave in to this compromise because they had been assured quietly that an authentic flag would not be too conspicuous; it would only wave in the strongest of winds.

The second is that it is completely ridiculous to say you can better honor those who fought for the land of cotton with a nylon flag, which once again calls into question the motives of those who have advocated flying the banner: Is it really about honoring ancestors, or is it about defiantly waving a red flag in the faces of people who don’t want to see it?

Sen. John Courson is another “War Between the States” enthusiast. He was also the chief author of the 1994 Heritage Act, which was the basis for the compromise of 2000.

He said he recalls no “specific discussion” in 2000 as to what the flag would be made of, but adds that “I assumed when I drafted the Heritage Act that we’d use a cotton bunting flag.” Over the six years it took to settle this issue, he took an authentic Army of Northern Virginia flag from his office to many meetings on the issue, to show what he had in mind. What was that flag made of? “It was absolutely cotton,” he said.

I asked him whether he wanted to see a nylon flag flying at that monument. “No,” he said. He had a number of good reasons, chief among them the fact that he has respect for the war dead and for history, and, “Cotton is authentic.”

Besides, he said, “I’m a Southerner; I like cotton.”

Precisely.

That column ran on Dec. 9, 2001. Yes, in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks on this country, as Americans were fighting in Afghanistan, Sen. McConnell was obsessing over whether the Confederate battle flag flew visibly enough on our Capitol lawn, and whether the stars were pink.

By the way, Sen. Courson had good reason to oppose this move. He was indeed very invested in the idea that the flag would be made of a heavy cotton fabric, and not only for reasons of historical accuracy. In the days leading up to the now-infamous compromise of 2000, he led me out onto the State House grounds one bright afternoon and directed my attention to the monument, where the flag would go. He asked me to imagine a flag that was sufficiently heavy that it would be visible only in the strongest of winds. It wouldn’t be in anyone’s face. It would just be a historically accurate tribute to war dead. Most of the time, no one would realize what it was if they didn’t already know.

Sen. Courson kept his word on that. But others had other things on their minds. Such, on occasion, is the honor of would-be Confederate gentlemen.

And if the gentleman wishes to seek satisfaction, his seconds can find me at my club on almost any weekday morning.

Back on this previous post someone happened to mention that Stephen Colbert (that discriminating TV journalist who gets all his S.C. news from yours truly) once interviewed Maurice Bessinger about race relations, BBQ sauce and Confederate tube socks.

Michael Rodgers of “Take Down the Flag” responded with this helpful link, and it was sufficiently, uh, enlightening that I decided to embed it here.

Now you know, folks — leading South Carolinians were embarrassing us on “The Daily Show” long before Mark Sanford started crying for himself in Argentina.

To paraphrase the point that Mr. Colbert makes on the video, with a Rebel Yell, they cry more, more, more. And they just never stop…

All right! The Energy Party’s moment has arrived! Roger Ebert, via Twitter, just brought this wonderful news to my attention:

G.M. to Close Hummer After Sale Collapses

By NICK BUNKLEY

Published: February 24, 2010

DETROIT — Hummer, the brand of big sport-utility vehicles that became synonymous with the term “gas guzzler,” is being shut down after a deal to sell it to a Chinese manufacturer fell apart, General Motors said Wednesday….

First, Maurice lowers the Confederate flag because he can’t afford it any more, and now Detroit drops the Hummer! Maybe market forces work in favor of the best of all possible worlds after all…

Now, we won’t have to enact the more draconian measures of the Energy Party platform, such as:

* Either ban SUVs for everyone who can’t demonstrate a life-ordeath need to drive one, or tax them at 100 percent of the sales price and throw that into the win-the-war kitty.
* If we don’t ban SUVs outright, aside from taxing them, launch a huge propaganda campaign along the lines of “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” Say, “Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps.” (OK, hot shot, come to my blog and post your own slogan.) Make wasting fuel the next smoking or DUI — absolutely socially unacceptable.

My UnParty would have been even harsher:

Since we are at war and they are helping the enemy, build internment camps for Hummer drivers. (OK, scratch that; just make the Humvee like automatic weapons — banned for all but military use. In fact, what was wrong with the Jeep?)

Doug and my other libertarian friends will say this proves how we don’t need gummint to get good stuff done, that the market will take care of all. Let ’em say it. There’s glory enough in this moment for all of us.

Seriously, folks, this is wonderful news. The world just got a little bit more rational, and how often does that happen?

Four days ago, back on this post, Burl wrote the following:

The rest of the country is worried about money, but South Carolina will be OK because you’re getting rid of currency, thanks to Mike Pitts.

And I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. But I was busy at the moment, and let it pass.

Then today, my brother sent me this item from The Onion:

Lawmaker Seeks To Ban U.S. Currency

Mike Pitts, a representative in the South Carolina legislature, has proposed a law that would replace dollars with gold and silver in his state. What do you think?

Dana Asquith,
Systems Analyst
“My only hope is that they offer a favorable exchange rate with Confederate bills.”

Mark Bonnie,
Barber
“I’m fine with it just as long as those fools at CVS melt me down the correct amount of change for once.”

Samuel Briottet,
Apothecary
“Sing ho, for the glories of bimetallism! With South Caroline on the side of Free Silver, there’s no stopping us from repealing the Coinage Act and putting William Jennings Bryan in the White House in 1896! Huzzah!”

… and asked me whether it was based upon a true news item.

So I started looking, and yes indeed it’s true. Rep. Mike Pitts, R-Laurens (not to be confused with my representative, Ted Pitts, who is a sensible fellow), apparently not satisfied with the generous portion of retro-foolishness in the recent Nullification Act of 2010, has indeed proposed that we ban the Yankee dollar in favor of gold and silver.

Next, I fully expect him to read William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech in its entirety in the House chamber. Remind me to miss that.

Speaking of missing things, though… As a reader of The State (and The Wall Street Journal, but that’s less to the point at the moment), I did not know about this. Was it in the paper and I missed it? If so, please send me the link.

Note that I had to be informed of this by two out-of-state sources, Burl in Hawaii and The Onion. And apparently it was getting such good play out of state that Burl just assumed we knew what he was talking about. To their credit, some folks such as Adam Fogle over at TPS had reported it (in fact, I think he might have broken it). But nothing in my capital city paper, which makes me feel kind of weird. Here’s hoping y’all will embarrass me by showing me where it was in the paper and I missed it.

Mind you, this is just the sort of thing we would have ignored in editorial when I headed that department, because it is a bill that’s going nowhere, so why burn one of our few editorial slots on that when there’s so much foolishness that IS likely to pass? But one would at least expect a take-note-of in the news pages, if only to put what the rest of the country is saying about us in perspective.

And what they are saying, of course, is there go those idiots in South Carolina again, living in the 19th century. If Jon Stewart hasn’t commented on it yet, I’m sure he will. But what can we do?

A friend just brought my attention to this startling news:

The South’s most notorious barbecue joint is warning customers they’ll have to buy more pit-cooked pork if they ever want to see the Confederate flag fly again.

Maurice’s Gourmet Barbeque’s Maurice Bessinger, who hoisted the stars and bars over his nine Columbia-area restaurants on the day, almost a decade ago, when South Carolina permanently lowered the Confederate flag from its capitol dome, told a local television station this week that he could no longer afford to keep his controversial flags flying — and it’s not for the reasons you’d think.

Bessinger’s empire, built on a secret recipe for yellow sauce and his reputation as an old-style Southern charmer, was once the nation’s biggest commercial barbecue operation. But his open embrace of a symbol indelibly associated with slavery disgusted many of his customers and dismayed most of his business associates. Walmart pulled his Southern Gold sauce off its shelves, and, according to Bessinger’s autobiography, Defending My Heritage, the company lost 98 percent of its wholesale business.
Still, Bessinger claims he isn’t trying to woo back barbecue fans who were repelled by his rebel politics. He’s instead blaming the recession for the rising cost of dry cleaning.

“Bessigner says the flags cost too much money to maintain,” a report on WLTX’s website explained.

The Confederate flag will still wave over two Maurice’s locations, but the South Carolina state flag will fly at the other restaurants in the chain. According to the WLTX report, the Confederate flags will return if “the economy picks up.”

Wow. An interesting bit of rationalization. And an interesting, and positive development.

Of course, it raises new questions: Why keep it up at two locations? Which locations, and why those in particular? Does dry cleaning cost less at those locations? What?

Anyway, this is an interesting juxtaposition of the marketplace of ideas and the just plain marketplace.

Also, an interesting media question arises: WLTX reported this five days ago, and I still haven’t read it in The State? Or anywhere? Did y’all know about this?

Did someone check it out and find it to be a hoax? If so, wouldn’t THAT have been worth reporting? Interestinger and interestinger…

Sparkle Clark, Steve Benjamin, Aaron Johnson, Joe Azar, Gary Myers, Irwin Wilson and Steve Morrison

Tonight I dropped by the mayoral forum being sponsored by Sustainable Midlands at 701 Whaley. I only stayed through the opening statements and first question (which is all my colleague from The State stayed for, and he was getting paid to be there, so get outta my face), but I thought I’d give you the benefit of that little bit.

In fact, if you click on this, you get the full audio of the candidates giving their opening statements. It lasts 12 minutes and 43 seconds.

And here are the shorthand brief impressions I took away from each on that part of the program:

• Sparkle Clark — She said she was a tree-hugger — said it a couple of times — and that she was so into flora that she persuaded her postmaster (she’s a postal worker) to let her keep a plant at work. She maintains a wildlife habitat in her yard.
• Steve Benjamin — Hit themes of reform and fiscal responsibility, but quickly moved to environmental issues, spoke of need to “preserve God’s land for our children.”
• Aaron Johnson — Said he was “just friends” with trees, that he was getting close to one oak, but hadn’t met her parents yet. Mr. Johnson sort of sees himself as the Groucho Marx of the mayoral campaign, or so I gather.
• Joe Azar — Cited his credentials as having run a bicycle shop, and not having gotten a driver’s license until he was 23. He bragged about using paper campaign signs with wooden stakes (as opposed to plastic and metal), and he urged the other candidates to follow suit (Mr. Johnson volunteered that he couldn’t afford signs, and got another laugh).
• Gary Myers Jr. — Basically stuck to his usual generic self-introduction of himself as a Columbia native who had distinguished himself as an Army officer, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He didn’t really tailor his spiel to this event.
• Irwin Wilson — Says he would make sure the city employees charged with keeping air and water clean did their jobs. Far as trees were concerned, he said “Where I’m from, we cut down trees for heat.” But he’s for replenishing them.
• Steve Morrison — Had the most programmatic opening, ticking off several priorities if elected: Clean water (dealing with stormwater and sewer water); green economic development; mass transit; sustainable energy and green buildings; trees and walkable streets.

That’s all for now. I’m going to go eat grab a few minutes of downtime before hitting the sack.

Burl Burlingame got me to start following Roger Ebert on Twitter, back when I put out the call for interesting Twitterers to follow.

Then, today, Roger Ebert put me onto Spoken Verse, by Tom O’Bedlam, a site he says he checks daily. The Tweet in question:

This man and his voice have created a site to which I must daily go. http://j.mp/cX2jkv

I can see why. I was pulled in not only by the words, not only by the voice, but by the use of the Hopper paintings. Here’s something Mr. Ebert wrote about that site.

And here is “Tom’s” commentary on the above clip:

“To Speak of Woe that is in Marriage” by Robert Lowell (poetry reading)

I did two readings of this poem, a few days apart. It’s so short that I have given them both to make a small point. When I try to read a poem again, perhaps to correct a fault – I misread “swaggering” as “staggering” the first time – it still sounds much the same. I hear a voice in my head – and when I read aloud I’m reproducing that internal voice as well as I can. I can’t read it differently.

Emphasis tends to impose unintended meaning on poems, so I go for normal expression, clarity and even enunciation of the words.

Americans habitually use more emphasis: Fox News presenters emphasise almost every word – without any nuances of speech. THIS IS LIKE READING ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. To British ears this makes them less credible than if they delivered the message calmly. I suppose Americans are used to it.

The criticism I get (only from Americans) is that I sound too serious or sinister – oddly enough, usually when the poem actually is serious or sinister. Maybe it’s because British actors are cast in serious and sinister roles in the movies. The British have a similar problem with American voices in that they sound inconsequential, insincere and over-excited.

Your internal voice isn’t my internal voice. If my reading sounds wrong to you then record your own, more cheerful, American version using all the emphasis you want. And, if you sound to me like Little Miss Perfect doing her Party Piece, why should you care what I think? It’s a more interesting world because we don’t all like the same things or share the same tastes.

With reference to “the climacteric of his want”, the word “climacteric” in men can refer to an overcompensation for the falling off of sex drive in middle age, now called a “mid-life crisis”. He may have been thinking of another quotation from Schopenhauer, “A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.” You can try to do whatever you’re motivated to do – but you can’t change what you’re motivated to do. You can’t even understand your motivations: they’re inherited.

“Human relationships depend on the exchange of small tokens of mutual concern, most of them counterfeit” Schopenhauer didn’t actually say that but he might have done.

The paintings have nothing to do with the poem and are just there for atmosphere. They are by Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) They are called Room in New York, Eleven am, Room in Brooklyn, Morning in a City and Summer Interior.

Just listening to that one clip made me feel way literary.

Your Humble Correspondent, Robin Gorman, Jack Van Loan, Steve Benjamin and Eva Moore. (Photo courtesy of Bob Ford)

Note the similarities between the photo above — taken by Bob Ford at the Benjamin Kaffeeklatsch I wrote about Friday — and the one below (which you’ve seen many times before). See how I’m hunched over in the same attitude of intensity over my notes, just working away. I think I’m even wearing the same sweater vest.

Now, what is the big difference?

Simple: In the photo below, I’m being well compensated for my diligence — which is a good thing, seeing as how this meeting was at about 7 or 7:30 a.m. on MLK Day 2008. The rest of the building was empty, but our boardroom was a hive of activity, since that was the time Barack Obama had agreed to accommodate our request for an interview.

But above, I’m working for the blog, which has not paid me one red cent to date.

So what keeps me going? Inertia? Can I just not stop doing journalism after all these years? Habit? Compulsion? Whatever it is, I’m not at all sure it’s healthy… Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work…

With the Columbia mayoral election coming up rapidly, and state primaries not far behind, I’ve been pondering the Big Question:

Should bradwarthen.com endorse?

On the one hand, I think, Duh, of course I will. But that’s sort of habit speaking, a matter of inertia: I’ve been endorsing candidates in elections so long that I think that’s the purpose of interviews. If I’m not going to endorse, what’s the point?

On the other hand, I think, I no longer have the obligation to endorse the way I did with I headed The State’s editorial board, so that’s one headache I can dispense with.

There are pros and cons, and here are a few of them (I’m sure there  are others I’m forgetting):

Pros

• Knowing you have to endorse, and justify it to your readers, focuses the mind wonderfully on what’s going on in a given election. You have to examine the candidates and the issues on a deeper level than if you were merely tossing out random comments. Questions occur to you that simply wouldn’t occur otherwise, and you have to press to get them answered. The process therefore adds value for readers.
• Not endorsing is wimping out. I’ve said that for years as editorial page editor, and meant it. To offer opinions from day to day, and then not offer an opinion about the one major political decision that we all get to make, is to wimp out, and fail to do all you can for readers.
• If anything, a blog is a better forum for endorsements than a newspaper. Here’s why: As I’ve explained over and over in recent years, the point of an endorsement isn’t to “tell you how to vote.” It’s to present a well-constructed argument as to why one candidate is better, which readers can set alongside all the other arguments they see on the subject. Through this dialectic the reader thinks harder about the decision he ultimately makes as a voter, and democracy is served. On the blog, the discussion that the endorsement engenders is (virtually) immediate and in more-or-less real time, and therefore livelier.
• I suspect — I don’t know this, but I suspect — that The State isn’t going to do as many endorsements as it has in past year, because of time and staff constraints. If so, that leaves a hole that I can at least partly fill.
• It would certainly be easier to have consistency of voice in the endorsements, since I would be the sole decision-maker. (I’m not sure it would make the choices easier, though — I’m capable of having terrific arguments with myself. The nice thing about being on an editorial board is that if I’m ambivalent about a choice, I can solve the dilemma by going along with the consensus. No more. I’d have to make the decision myself, which would involve an additional level of self-discipline.)

Cons

• This is an opinion blog, but it also reports. And I know from feedback over the years that the endorsements by the editorial board create problems for the reporters down in the newsroom. The endorsements have zero to do with them, but they have trouble convincing the candidates — or at least, the less sophisticated candidates — of that. And suddenly they have barriers to contend with they wouldn’t have otherwise. How much harder would my job as blogger become if I started endorsing?
• I would have to write all the endorsements myself, whereas at The State I wrote very few of them. I attended all the interviews (I was the only member of the board who did, because I thought that continuity was important — I was the element that ensured a consistency of voice) and presided over the decisions we made, often dictating the language for the endorsement editorials, but I had other people to write most of them — people who had researched those races more thoroughly than I had. So aside from all the work this would create, to what extent could I maintain quality?
• This is related to the first “con.” It is my intention to start running advertising on my blog, and I expect that a lot of that advertising would be from political campaigns. The same sort of conflict arises as with the reporting function. I would no more be insulated from the “advertising department” of the blog than I am from the “newsroom.” What difficulties would this create? Frankly, I don’t think it would create any for me — I’m enough of a jerk (actually, I’m freakishly independent-minded, but that would sound like self-praise, so I just said “jerk”) that I don’t mind a bit endorsing the opponent of a candidate who just spent a lot of money with me. I wouldn’t give it a second’s thought. But it would certainly engender doubt and confusion in the minds of others.
• Above, I listed being the sole decision-maker as a “pro.” It’s also a “con.” With an editorial board, you have ballast — you have a group of smart people steadying you and keeping you from going off on a wild hair, or a wild hare for that matter. As my former colleagues can tell you they pulled me back from the brink a lot. On the other hand, maybe if I went over the brink occasionally it would lead to more interesting, and therefore more productive, discussions…

I’ll think of some of the other pros and cons later, but I think those are enough for a conversation starter. For some of the columns I’ve written in the past explaining about endorsements from the newspaper perspective, look back here.

Sorry to be several days late with this; I’m finding that I’m so busy during the week that I have to wait for the weekend to actually post the stuff I gather, through interviews and covering events, during the week.

In the video clip above you’ll hear Brent Nelsen, a Furman political science professor who’s running for state superintendent of education, talking about his three top issues. It’s unedited except for a bit where I come on as narrator and explain that, having led him on a brief digression about his academic field, I cut out an even longer digression where I started telling him about a movie I saw. These things happen with me in interviews, and there’s no point tormenting my readers with them.

The video clip is a little noisy — I shot it at the Gervais Street Starbucks between 4 and 5 Thursday afternoon — but you should be able to hear him fairly clearly. Anyway, his top three areas of interest, which he explains more thoroughly on the video, are:

1. He wants to bolster and increase the availability of public school choices.
2. He wants to deregulate classrooms, to give teachers and principals more room to be creative and innovative.
3. He sees education as a parnership between the state and communities, with families playing an important role as well.

After that last point I said he was sounding kind of communitarian, and I think maybe he thought that was a bad thing coming from me (when, as you know, it’s high praise), so he immediately said that there are significant market elements to his plans, such as pay-for-performance (which I support as well, so that doesn’t get him off the hook on being communitarian).

So I asked him about the one issue that has warped recent superintendent elections. Noting that he was stressing public school choice, I asked him about the private — about tuition tax credits and vouchers and the like.

“I want to solve problems in failing districts,” he said, meaning that he wants to exhaust public remedies first. Actually, not so much all public remedies — he wants to try public school choice first.

Then, rather than tuition tax credits or vouchers, he would allow for scholarship programs to private alternatives. The money for the scholarship programs would come from private sources, which would get tax breaks. You may recall that was an element of some of the voucher bills of recent years.

A word about public school choice. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s rather limited as a “solution.” I think most forms of public school choice are fine and dandy to experiment with. But as an alternative to fixing the problem schools, the concept bothers me. Fine, say I, give kids an alternative. But don’t act like you’ve solved the problem, if there’s still a messed-up school that the kid is transferring away from. Fix the problem; don’t waste money continuing to operate the failed school AND the alternative.

So I challenged Mr. Nelsen on that point, and he said he wouldn’t just abandon the failed schools. He would want to set up Rapid Reaction Teams of top educators to go into such schools and fix them.

You may recall that Mr. Nelsen toyed briefly with the idea of running for governor before deciding to aim for superintendent. He is running, by the way, as a Republican — as are Kelly Payne, Mick Zais, Elizabeth Moffly and Gary Burgess. Frank Holleman is the lone Democrat. So far, no UnParty candidates.

Oh, one last thing: Sorry about having misspelled his name the other day. I’ve corrected it now.

Actually made it through all three movies I had from Netflix this weekend, which is remarkable. Three quick reviews:

1. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog — This was irresistible on several levels. First, it had “blog” in the title. Second, it was a Joss Whedon creation. Third, the clip I had seen on YouTube had a really catchy song, “Freeze Ray,” which I haven’t been able to get out of my head. And you know, I have to say that in a way the piece captured the virtual world we bloggers inhabit with a weird kind of accuracy: I dream of UnParty glory, Dr. Horrible dreamed of being admitted into the Evil League of Evil. Very reminiscent. But unfortunately, I felt super-cheated at the end for two reasons: It was only 40 minutes long, and the ending was hard to take. Burl says he liked the ending, I guess because he enjoyed the way Whedon had pulled people in and then twisted their expectations. Me, I didn’t enjoy it. Needless to say, “Firefly” is safe in its place as my favorite Whedon vehicle.
2. Surrogates — This one seemed to have possibilities, as a Bruce Willis action vehicle. But my advice? See “Live Free or Die Hard,” and skip this one. Interesting premise — a world in which people lie on couches vegging out while their lives are lived for them by mechanical surrogates. Trouble is, it didn’t bother to answer the question: Why go to the trouble of buying a lifelike robot (which I sense was sort of a person’s biggest capital expense, possibly exceeding buying a home) to live your life through, rather than living it on the Web via an avatar? I mean, aren’t we already a step BEYOND this sci-fi premise, with our social media and constant ignoring of real life for keeping up with Twitter? Why send out robots to act out these things you can just handle online? Is the audience not supposed to think of this? Because of that consideration, this was like an attempt to imagine the world we actually live in today, through the technological imagination of the 1950s. Disappointing.
3. Adam — This was a quiet little offbeat romance about a girl who falls for a guy with Asperger’s. My expectations were low from my point of view; I had mainly gotten this because I thought my wife might like it. But I have to say that it was the least disappointing movie of the weekend. We both enjoyed it, and I recommend it. Spoiler alert: This one actually had a similar ending to “(500) Days of Summer,” but lacked the unbelievability flaw of the one I wrote about last week.

I thought I had found B.J. Boling in a terrible inconsistency on Facebook last night, when I read this:

B.J. became a fan of Marco Rubio.

I immediately responded:

OK, BJ — how could you possibly be a fan of the guy who’s running AGAINST the guy who was such a key endorsement for McCain at such a critical moment?

You see, B.J. was McCain’s press guy in South Carolina during the 2008 campaign. B.J. to me embodied the sensible wing of the Republican Party, that part of it that would cling to reason and moderation in the face of any challenge. During the dark days when McCain appeared to be out of the running for the nomination, and his campaign operation all but shut its doors, B.J. soldiered on (see my video from back then, headlined “McCain goes to the mattresses“). And he did a good job. He was helpful to me as a journalist on a number of occasions — getting me on the bus for an interview, getting my questions answered and all that.

And at a time right after B.J. and company had won the South Carolina primary, when the extremists in their party were determined to do anything to stop the McCain momentum, Charlie Crist‘s support was key to his winning the Florida contest, after which the extremists were on the run.

So it was particularly distressing to see a guy like B.J. endorsing a hero of the Tea Party element, a guy who is out to defeat Crist, a guy carrying a banner that in part is meant to communicate the message that the GOP shouldn’t ever nominate a guy like McCain, but stick only to the most strict ideologues.

I thought, is the whole party now going the way of Jim DeMint? Are there none of the Lindsey Graham variety left?

But B.J. who now works for Gresham Barrett, settled my hash in short order. He answered me,

I have a very good reason. I noticed Rubio was at 24,999 fans and I had the chance to be number 25,000. Opportunities like that don’t come along every day.

So I was all ready to laugh it off, saying how can I argue with such devastating logic, when someone else (one Carl Clegg) commented,

Thanks, Brad for pointing out the reason I am a Marco Rubio fan.

So I can no longer laugh it off, can I?

Kathryn Fenner likes to say that since Brad left the paper, he’s leaned more toward the Democrats. Not so. But my departure from the paper has happened to coincide with a terrible trend: While Democrats engage in about the same ratio of foolishness to wisdom as usual, the GOP has been energetically engaged in a pogrom to rid itself of anyone who is not a stark, raving partisan ideologue who would never, ever work with a Democrat, no matter the circumstances.

See, the thing is, there’s as much to complain about with regard to Democratic rule as ever. But increasingly, the Republicans seem determined to make switching back to them, or even trying to work with them, unthinkable. And that’s not good for the country.

Having mentioned my speech to the local chapter of the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association, I thought I’d go ahead and share with you the first part of my remarks, which as you can see I tailored to my audience:

First, I want to apologize for showing up at a Navy event wearing vaguely Army colors [brown camel coat, green shirt]. I don’t know what I was thinking when I got dressed this morning. I do know better, having grown up in the Navy. In fact, I’d like you all to meet my Dad, Capt. Don Warthen, USN, ret.

I never rose above the rank of dependent in the Navy myself, but the values that were instilled in my have informed my work over the years. Although I refuse to subscribe to either the liberal or conservative worldview, a couple of years back, I wrote a column headlined “Give Me that Old-Time Conservatism,” meaning the kind that I felt John McCain embodied (as opposed to that of a Mark Sanford or a Sarah Palin). I ended it this way:

By now some of you think I have it in for all things “conservative.” I don’t. I just grew up with a different concept of it from that which has in recent years been appropriated by extremists. I grew up in a conservative family — a Navy family, as a matter of fact. To the extent that “conservative ideas” were instilled in me, they weren’t the kind that make a person fume over paying his taxes, or get apoplectic at the sound of spoken Spanish. They were instead the old-fashioned ones: Traditional moral values. Respect for others. Good stewardship. Plain speaking.

And finally, the concept that no passing fancy, no merely political idea, is worth as much as Duty, Honor and Country.

That column ran on Feb. 3, 2008.

I’m very fond – obsessively fond – of Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring tales about Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I got my Dad to read them, and I urge any of you who haven’t to do so. Those novels recreate a wonderful world that has in it many things that resonate with me. One of them is the way Jack always refers to the Navy as “the Service,” and he’s always about what’s best for the Service. It’s a different Navy and a different century, but that’s the way I always heard of the Navy referred to growing up. In our household, it was The Service – and all that implies.

Jack Aubrey lives in dread of being without a ship – of being cast upon the shore on half pay, with no chance to distinguish himself, not to mention no chance to get prize money (different century, indeed).

Well, I can really identify. After 35 years of “the Service” of newspapers – 22 of it at The State – I found myself suddenly thrown upon the shore essentially on half pay, if that.

How did this happen?

After that, it was essentially the same speech I gave to the Five Points Rotary last fall (picking up after the anecdote about getting my thumbnail polished). Both groups had asked me to explain what on Earth was happening to newspapers. Both groups were largely made up of avid newspaper readers who were distressed that I was no longer at the paper, but even more distressed over what was happening to newspapers that would cause that to happen.

By the way, about my “on the shore on half pay” analogy — I almost used instead the plot of The Reverse of the Medal, in which Jack was actually thrown out of the Service for a crime he didn’t commit. In some ways, that was a better analogy, since I was out of my newspaper’s service for good, and would likely have to become a privateer (go into PR or advertising or consulting or some other line of work aimed at the private good of the client), since there was no point in joining another Navy, all of them being in decline.

But on an emotional level, it didn’t work. There are some things I miss about working at the paper — while I used to HATE the daily, repetitive tyranny of having to get the pages out (just as I would get interested in something new and exciting to work on, the blasted proofs would land on my desk, and there went the rest of the day), once I didn’t have that I missed it: How on Earth do you know you’ve done your job that day if you haven’t published another newspaper? It’s weird for me to work on things that aren’t due for days, weeks, even months…

But other than that, this is nothing like what Jack experienced when he was cashiered. He was crushed; his reason for living had gone away. For me, though, I still had a blog — and for the last few years at the paper, doing a blog was the most fun part of the job. In a way, I guess that’s sort of like privateering, too. You’re still at sea doing what you love, but not in the service of a large institution. There’s greater freedom in it, as Jack discovers when he gets his heart’s desire and is reinstated (in The Thirteen-Gun Salute) to the far more rigid Navy.

No, I haven’t mourned. I’ve worried about money; I’ve felt ill-at-ease at times. But I don’t have that terrible sense of loss that I’ve seen in some friends. The last few months have felt more like an interlude before another adventure, so being on the shore on half-pay (which is pretty much what my severance check amounted to, stretched over the time since I left) between ships seems to match it better. Only with a twist: Working at the paper was like being in the modern Navy. All I could get was my salary. Whereas being free to freelance feels more like the Navy of Jack’s day, with injections of prize money here and there, depending upon my enterprise and skill. No salary, but prize money. It’s interesting.