Steve Benjamin holds forth at the Gourmet Shop as Eva Moore of the Free Times listens.

Today, at the invitation of my good friend Jack Van Loan, I attended another Kaffeeklatsch with Steve Benjamin at the Gourmet Shop. He said many of the sensible things he’s said in the past about TIFs (he doesn’t think the city should go it alone) and restructuring (he’s for strong mayor, but believes this system can be made to work better).

But he waxed most rhetorical when talking about public safety making the point that there’s not much sense in having a municipal government if it can’t protect its citizens. And he disagrees sharply with Kirkman Finlay III, who he says maintains that the police department is fully funded. Mr. Benjamin says that may be, but it’s not funded at a level that Chief Tandy needs to protect public safety.

He got a little apocalyptic painting a picture of what might happen if, God forbid, there were a Columbine at a local high school. It would be especially horrible, he asserted, because the city police are ill-equipped.

I enjoyed his comparison of the city’s SWAT team vs. the well-equipped warriors of Leon Lott’s sheriff’s department:

Our SWAT team doesn’t have an armored vehicle. They have a bread truck. They have the same truck you see Merita driving around in… We’re not equipped.

He went on to paint a formidable portrait of how sheriff’s deputies are equipped:

His officers … carry 40-cal. Glocks.
They have 17 bullets per magazine.
They’re allowed as many magazines as (inaudible).
They carry two backup weapons if they’re certified…. three firearms at any given time.
They have assault rifles.
They have shotguns, all of ’em, in the trunk of their car…
The sheriff’s department has a helicopter, has a boat, has an armored vehicle…

Our SWAT team doesn’t have cars. So if there is a critical incident, at a Dreher, or a C.A. Johnson, they’ve all gotta go back to the police department, load into the bread truck, and then go out there.

He then said that with such a delay, perhaps an hour, the carnage at the local Columbine would be horrific.

Well, I think he made his point strongly. But what I went away with was a mental picture of the terrible might of the sheriff’s department.

You don’t want to cross those guys.

Here’s audio, by the way.

.

Has Jim DeMint utterly and completely lost it? Saying the president of the United States is trying “to sell socialism,” and that this country — “this country,” as Jack Nicholson kept saying in “The Departed,” not freaking Red China — is “teetering toward tyranny?”

Can it be that an actual sitting United States senator from our very own state has actually embraced, actually believes, Ruby-Ridge-style paranoid nonsense? Does he actually hear the black helicopters overhead? Are the jackboots kicking down the door of his mind as he speaks?

I mention Ruby Ridge deliberately, because it led to the Oklahoma City bombing. And on the same day a man got so fed up with the IRS that he flew a plane into a building, I believe it is the height of irreponsibility for another man who is in a position of great responsibility to be whipping up the already inflamed passions of the Tea Partiers.

It’s one thing to hear this sort of pooge from some poor lonely loser whose only social interaction is calling into late-night talk radio, but to hear it from a well-off, well-paid, secure man who’s got a pretty darned good life right here in the Land of the Free? That is profoundly disturbing.

Jim DeMint has for some time been noteworthy for saying outrageous things in that mild, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth way of his. If you hear him say it, it generally doesn’t sound as extreme as seeing it in black and white.

But now, he’s using these phrases in front of rallies, making the crowd roar. Now, he’s really gone too far.

Yet mark my words — to him right now, nothing has ever felt more right. I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen some really mild-mannered people find out that if they say certain things in front of an angry, beyond-reason crowd, he will be awarded by adulation. And he finds that he likes this. (Crowds are, almost by definition, beyond reason. They CAN be reasoned with, but it’s much easier, and in the short term more rewarding, to play to the crowd’s darker undercurrents, to stroke the lowest common denominator, to make the crowd say “Yeah!”)

I’ve even experienced it myself. Everyone who’s done a certain amount of public speaking can sense when the audience is with him. You have an immediate-feedback reinforcement loop going. I’ve noticed my tongue getting gradually a little sharper, in speaking of some recent political foolishness, because I sensed how much the audience was digging it.

How much more rewarding must the frisson, the rush, be when you just cast all common sense to the winds and go for the gut with abandon?

Jim DeMint is finding out. And apparently, he’s digging it.

Brent Nelson, Furman poli sci prof and candidate for state superintendent of education.

And when I say Nelsen and the Navy, I don’t mean Nelson’s Navy — although I did find myself talking about the Napoleonic Wars at one point.

This was another one of those days that was rich in material to blog about… with no time to blog. Which is the way the world seems to work. I’ll try to catch up and post fully on some of these things later.

• The day started at a 7:30 a.m. breakfast hosted by the Columbia Regional Business Report. Midlands mayors Bob Coble, Elise Partin and Randy Halfacre were the speakers. Fortunately, my old shipmate Mike Fitts wrote about that at that journal’s site, so you can read about it there.
• Then, hungry as a Hobbit after fasting on Ash Wednesday, I dropped by the Cap City Club for second breakfast, right before they stopped serving. Hey, I pay for it by the month; might as well get my money’s worth, eh?
• Then I went to ADCO and, among other things, worked on my remarks for my noon speaking engagement.
• Then at noon, I went to the Summit Club to speak to the Naval Academy alumni association. They wanted me to talk about what’s happening to the newspaper industry. Folks often want me to talk about that, which is good because it’s something I know a lot about. My preparation was mainly to come up with some nautical stuff for my intro; I don’t want to come across as a mere landsman. But as usual, I kept it short so we could spend most of the time on questions and answers. I’m always more comfortable answering questions than speaking from prepared remarks. (By the way, I ran into Gordon Hirsch’s Mom there. I told her to tell him we miss him on the blog.) This, by the way, was the part of the day when I actually did talk about Nelson’s Navy, if only briefly. I’ll explain later how I worked that into a talk about the newspaper industry.
• Then, I went over to ADCO and started to do some actual work, but then at 3:55 I had to split to go to Starbucks…
• … where I met with Brent Nelsen (pictured above), the Furman professor who is running for the GOP nomination for superintendent of education. We had a good talk, which I will right about when I’m not too tired to do the subject justice. We spent a good bit of time talking about school choice, with me trying to make sure I understood where he stood. But we also had a nice, long digression talking about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and the vagaries of E.U. politics. Dr. Nelsen is a political scientist, and his specialty is European politics. I don’t often get to discuss such things with people who run for political office in SC, so that was nice.
• Then I went back to ADCO and did some more actual work.
• Then I came home to play with the twins, who are spending the night with us tonight. Which is wonderful.

I’ll try to do some blogging tomorrow.

Mayors Bob Coble of Columbia, Elise Partin of Cayce and Randy Halfacre of Lexington.

Here’s something for y’all to discuss….

I’ve felt pretty good about the way things have gone on the blog since instituting the latest civility regime. As you’ll recall, I threw out some bad actors, and just went to a zero-tolerance policy on overt hostility and ad hominem stuff. And according to the feedback I’ve gotten, people really, really like the result. So do I. People feel free to be themselves without being harassed off the site, and that’s a good thing.

But then, a couple of weeks ago after Rotary, I got into a long conversation with Kathryn Fenner and Hal Stevenson, and they both urged me to go the next step and allow only comments from folks who sign their real, full names. (At least, that’s the way I remember it. I know Hal was pushing the idea, and I seem to recall Kathryn supporting the idea. Correct me if I’m wrong.) Kathryn was speaking as a regular contributor; Hal was speaking as a person who won’t comment unless I DO go to such a system.

I’ve seriously considered it. On the one hand, I don’t want to shut out loyal regulars like bud. On the other hand — most of my regulars have (at my persistent urging) gone to using their real, full names. Which I deeply appreciate. Maybe I should put my policy where my appreciation is. Maybe it would bring out some other people and enrich the conversations here. Then again, maybe it would chase away more people than it attracts. But the main question is, is it the right thing to do? The blogosphere is different from Letters to the Editor in the paper. Yet I have in some ways deliberately run counter to the conventions of the blogosphere (such as aggressively differentiating this site from the hyperpartisan ranters that dominate the medium), and I’ve been pleased with the result.

Anyway, I had meant to pose this question at the time, and forgot. My recent exchanges with one Walter, who is one irritating little poke away from being banned, have brought it back to mind for me.

What do y’all think? And I particularly am interested in the thoughts of my regulars, as well as folks who have held back because I DON’T have such a policy.

Let me hear from you. And if you don’t want to say it in front of everybody, my e-mail is brad@bradwarthen.com.

“Walter” — a commenter who may be the blog unperson “Bill” but who is being tolerated for now as long as he behaves himself (and so far he’s skirted the edges of incivility, but hasn’t quite yet caused me to pull the lever to the trapdoor under him) — taunted me back here about my clip-on sunglasses, to which I replied:

I’ll have you know that when I was a kid, I thought flip-up sunglasses were the coolest thing, because MLB outfielders wore them for dealing with pop-ups.

I’m no longer under the illusion that they are cool, but they certainly are practical. A year or two ago I sat on my prescription Wayfarers (which WERE cool) one too many times, and they broke right across the nose bridge. So I turned to these as a cheap replacement.

And wouldn’t you know it, the one image of me that has appeared most in state AND national media is of me unconsciously wearing my flip-ups at the infamous Sanford press conference. If I’d known how often variations of that image would appear (there I was on Barbara Walters’ recent “Jenny” special — she also used the clip of me saying, “Governor, are you going to resign?” as an intro to a discussion of political fallout) — if I had been aware I was being photographed at all — I’d have taken the things off. Without them, I’d have looked pretty natty (by my standards) in my bamboo-fiber jacket and hound-dog bow tie. There I was, the sharpest-dressed guy in the room, and the flip-up shades are all anybody sees…

And that got me to thinking, nostalgically, about my Wayfarers.

I got my pair of genuine “Blues Brothers” shades as either a birthday or Father’s Day gift back in the mid-80s. They were purchased from a mall kiosk in Wichita, Kansas. Sometime later, I had prescription lenses put in.

I miss them, but couldn’t quite justify the expense of replacing them even when I had a high-paying job. I just don’t spend money like that; never have.

By the way, the photo above was taken at the Gettysburg battlefield in June 2007. I had become separated from my family, and was killing time messing with my camera while sitting under a tree waiting for them. By the way, as further evidence of how cheap I am — I bought those sandals at Wal-Mart (the same place I got my flip-up shades) for $6. It was such a good deal, and they were so comfortable (every bit as sturdy and comfortable as the $100-plus sandals they imitate), that I bought two more pair and put them in my closet. And I’m still (in the appropriate season) wearing the first pair.

Not much chance of this blog supplanting The Shop Tart among those who love to shop, huh?

Occasionally, Mark Sanford is right. And frequently, Barack Obama is wrong. But it doesn’t often happen simultaneously, on the same issue.

I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to find an actual justification for the administration’s decision to shut down the nation’s one and only solution for nuclear waste — that is, a justification more legitimate and compelling than “Harry Reid has promised the NIMBY home folks to close it.” But I haven’t found it. If you have such a link, please share it.

In the meantime, read this New York Times editorial that explains how the Obama administration is doing just what it so often criticized the Bush administration for doing: Ignoring science for political reasons. An excerpt:

The administration’s budget for the Energy Department raises a disturbing question. Is President Obama, who has pledged to restore science to its rightful place in decision making, now prepared to curtail the scientific analyses needed to determine whether a proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada would be safe to build?

It’s particularly ironic that the administration is doing this just as Obama — who has been sadly ambivalent on nuclear power (one reason why he didn’t get the Energy Party nomination) — announces that the government will provide loan guarantees for two plants in Georgia. So he’s going to back building the plants (a good thing), while pulling away the nation’s one and only solution for dealing with the waste they will produce.

So it is that, in opposing the administration on this, Mark Sanford is on the right side of an issue. It’s been awhile, so make note of this day.

Actually, it seems to be more than one “someone.” It must be a full surveillance team, like Toby Esterhase’s lamplighters, or that Mossad team that took out the Hamas guy the other day. Particularly impressive is the one above, in which I appear to have been photographed while I was conducting surveillance on someone else. These people are good. This is no amateur operation…

One of the more interesting — and to a privacy freak (which I certainly am not), more disturbing — aspects of social media is this thing where someone sends you a message saying something cryptic such as:

Patty tagged a photo of you in the album “Birthday-album 2010 (1)”.

And you click and find your mug on a calendar, and you click again, and eventually you find a photo of yourself you didn’t know someone was taking, or one that you posed for and forgot about, such as the one below of me with the mayoral candidates.

And then you keep clicking, and you find picture after picture of yourself in wildly different contexts, from a candid at some political event (such as the one at right of Boyd Summers and me chatting about all the white folks at a Tea Party event) to a lineup at a family gathering in Maryland.

It’s strange and sort of wonderful. You feel yourself Connected To All Things. Or at least like a character in Antonioni’s “Blow-Up“…

That, as devotees of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series well know, is a traditional benediction spoken upon parting in Spanish-speaking cultures. It’s a way of wishing someone well, all new things by definition being bad.

It’s a window into a reflexively conservative culture, conservative in ways that English speakers can’t really conceive, lacking the vocabulary. English speakers may try to be conservative, but they speak a dynamic, world-shaking, innovating kind of language that doesn’t lend itself to a static culture.

I suspect that perhaps my own ambivalence toward change may arise from having spent a significant portion (2 years and 4.5 months, longer than I lived anywhere else growing up) of my formative years in Ecuador. I both get a warm feeling from that phrase, Que no haya novedad, while at the same time taking as much delight in novelty and innovation as anyone. There was a quiet, old-fashioned continuity there to which I became accustomed, it felt natural. But when I came back to the states, I got extremely high on the fast-moving popular culture. I reveled in it in a way that’s hard to describe, because I had come from a place that lacked it. I remember getting EXTREMELY excited about the new TV season that started in the fall of 1965 (“Green Acres,” “Lost In Space,” “I Spy” and so on). It was like an entire universe had been brought into being, and every sense I had was switched on to maximum sensitivity to take it all in. I was utterly uncritical; it didn’t matter whether these new things were of high or low quality; I just enjoyed the rush.

So today I both love exploring the new (blogging, social media, the latest gadget) and cleave lovingly to the traditional (the written word, standard spelling, etc.).

These thoughts are provoked by a piece in Salon to which Kathryn Fenner directed me that muses about the cultural roots of conservatism among English speakers, inadequate as it is. An excerpt:

This myth of primordial English liberty rhymed neatly with radical Protestantism. According to dissenting Protestants, the true church was the earliest church. Christianity had been corrupted over time, and Reformation required a restoration of the early, pure practices and beliefs of the apostles.

Put the myths of the ancient constitution and the early church together, and you have a view of history as decline from an original state of perfection, in politics and also in religion. Innovation is equated with tyranny in politics and heresy in religion. Virtue consists of defending what is left of the old, more perfect system and, if possible, restoring the original government or church. Progress is redefined as regress — movement away from the wicked present toward the pure and uncorrupted past.

This way of thinking is more or less extinct in Britain, its original home, but it became an important part of the political culture of the British North American colonies that won their independence from the mother country. Having become Americans, the former British colonists found it easy to replace the ancient constitution of the virtuous Anglo-Saxons with the 1787 constitution of the virtuous Founding Fathers, who were quickly elevated to the status of demigods like the legendary King Alfred.

I found the premise intriguing, if only in that this writer found yet another way of being dismissive of the poor, unhappy Tea Partiers. Liberals will always sneer at right-wing populists, and sneering is unbecoming. I find it offputting, anyway. So it’s refreshing when someone sneers in a new and fresh way.

Personally, I find the tea partiers off-putting as well, but I find much about what this writer describes as the “progressive” alternative unappealing as well. Consider this excerpt:

You see, while I don’t for a moment identify with the Tea Partiers (and my disapproval extends all the way back to the original of the species, Samuel Adams), at the same time I look upon the early republic as an ideal, and tend to believe the country’s been going to hell in a handbasket ever since Andrew Jackson was elected. Of course, within that there is a wide latitude. Just to be clear, I look back fondly upon John Adams more than Thomas Jefferson (who thought we should have a new revolution every generation). But you know, even if I lived back then, I couldn’t have subscribed to a party. I liked Adams, but not the rest of the Federalists. I liked Madison (when he was in Constitution-writing mode), but not the radical yahoos of his party. I liked Jefferson, when he was working with Adams, but not so much when he wasn’t. It’s complicated. In fact, think about it — both the “progressives” who think the Constitution should be a living adapting document and the Tea Partiers embrace Jefferson (while neither, alas, would give J. Adams his due).

And the problem with Tea Partiers is that for them, it’s not complicated.

I was really taken aback this morning when I looked at my newspaper and saw on the front page that Sen. Evan Bayh would be quitting the U.S. Senate.

Wait, let’s double-check: Yep, it’s a South Carolina newspaper. And no, this is not one of our senators. Ours are still Graham and DeMint, and we only get two. This is… well, I don’t know much about him other than his Birch Bayh‘s kid.

And I care about this why, exactly?

Oh, I knew without reading it why someone my assume that I would care — inevitably, the story would contain much mumbling about the balance of power between the two parties in Congress.  But since I really couldn’t care less about which of these worthless parties holds a majority, this story means less than nothing.

No, excuse me — it’s about which party holds a supermajority, since we have to be able to shut off debate. That’s the way the Congress “works” now. I mean, God forbid there should be a debate, actual interaction, a prolonged deliberation in which minds could be changed. Seriously, I do not get this horror of filibusters. If the people who’ve spent the last few months wringing their hands over whether they have enough votes to shut off a filibuster had just thrown their bill out on the floor and let the opposition filibuster away, it all would have been over long before now.

And if you’re one of those people who thinks it matters which party holds the edge, think: What difference have you seen it make, one way or the other, in recent years?

Earlier today, as I was performing the mundane task of filling out some forms, I was lifted out of the ordinary by a sequence of three songs that played on Pandora, on my Donovan channel (today just felt like a Donovan day, as opposed to an Erik Satie or Scarlatti or Solomon Burke or The Clash or Blood Sweat and Tears kind of day, to name some of my other channels):

1. “Writer in the Sun” — This sent quite a chill, and not just because of the song’s inherent haunting quality. I first heard this when I was 15 or 16, under unusual circumstances. One day in my social studies class at Robinson High School in Tampa, my teacher for some reason decided to bring in a turntable and play some records while we read. Maybe he wanted some down time; maybe he wanted to demonstrate to us what a cool teacher he was. Anyway, it was the first time I had ever heard the album “Donovan In Concert,” and something about it, something about hearing those sounds from the Anaheim Convention Center bouncing off the quiet classroom walls, flipped a switch and put my mind into an altered state — and without smoking banana peel. Donovan had meant nothing to me before that day, but I would go out and buy that album, and that same state of calm alertness would come over my mind whenever I listened to it subsequently. Anyway, it really struck me as ironic that, having drunk a couple of cups of coffee on an empty stomach, sitting in a dry, quiet office as the rain fell outside, 40 years later, I would find myself clicking into that same state of mind listening to this studio version of a song on that album. And it hit me suddenly — I may not be sitting in the sun, but in a sense I am a “retired writer.” It may be only technically — I took early retirement from the paper several months after being laid off (which brings me the lordly pension of about one-seventh of my salary at the paper) — and I may have no intention of actually retiring, as a writer or as anything else, for another decade and more, but it still struck me as terribly relevant. I could sense the distance in time traveled since that day in 1968 or 69, but feel at the same time like no time had passed at all. Must be the caffeine on the empty stomach.
2. “Let It Be” — Quite possibly my favorite pop song of all time. It’s from about a year after the Donovan incident. Also fraught with meaning. Quick anecdote — the year it came out I was singing in a youth choir at the base chapel at MacDill AFB, with a decidedly non-angelic group of friends (in retrospect it’s surprising some of those people were involved in anything like that) — and we persuaded the adult who ran the group to let us sing “Let it Be” during a chapel service. Anyway, one of the Air Force chaplains refused to let us sing it because it had — gasp! — Catholic overtones (perhaps this was the genesis of my later conversion). Mind you, this was a generic protestant group. And our adviser wasn’t inclined to fight about it because she had heard — gasp again — that “Mother Mary” could be a reference to the dreaded Mary Jane. If only she knew that my friend Jack always had a couple of joints in the cigarette pack he kept in his shirt pocket during choir practice. Anyway, awesome song. Hard to believe that Paul McCartney wrote and sang that at about the same time as the insipid “Long and Winding Road.” Did he know the difference at the time?
3. “Just Like a Woman” — To the extent that Dylan had a song that effect that same “click” in the head as “Writer” and “Let It Be,” this would be it. Powerful evocation of Everywoman in a young man’s head, and what that means.

After that, the songs got pretty ordinary. I eventually switched off the channel. But there for a few minutes, it was pretty special.

Occasionally here at bradwarthen.com I rebel against the tyranny of constant talk of politics and bring up something enjoyable — to me, at any rate. So it is that I share this brief discussion of two movies I saw over the weekend.

First, I ran across “The Graduate” on the telly Friday night. I found it just as Benjamin was meeting Mrs. Robinson at the Taft Hotel for the first time. Of course, I watched it to the end, in spite of our electrical power flickering off briefly every few minutes as the snow fell. It was wonderful, as always, verifying again why it’s on my all-time Top Five list. While watching it, I felt moved to live-Twitter it, as follows:

• One of my favorite product placements — Ben in “The Graduate” drinking an Olympia (a beer that is no more)…
• Watching “The Graduate” on TCM: I know she’s horrible & sad, but I think Mrs. Robinson is great… 8:51 PM Feb 12th from web
• Katherine Ross was perfect as Elaine Robinson — a girl you immediately fall in love with; you can’t help it… 9:03 PM Feb 12th from web
• Is “The Graduate” so great because of the Simon&Garfunkel songs, or are the songs so great because of the movie? 9:21 PM Feb 12th from web
• Here comes Richard Dreyfuss’ one line in “The Graduate:” “Should I get the cops? I’ll get the cops…”    9:26 PM Feb 12th   from web

Anyway, my point is, the next night we watched a new flick that makes reference to “The Graduate.” It was “(500) Days of Summer,” which I had ordered from Netflix because I thought my wife would like it. I try to sandwich some of those in between “Surrogates” and “Black Dynamite” and the like, so I can think of myself as a little less of a selfish jerk than I am.

Anyway, “The Graduate” is used early in the later film to express the fact that the male lead is a hopeless romantic. There’s a reference to the fact that when he was young, he saw “The Graduate” and completely misunderstood the ending, or something like that (a reference I didn’t quite understand — I suspect the writer of this flick would think I misunderstood it as well). But the two have more in common than that. That’s because the newer one features Zooey Deschanel. In her own way, she possesses the same quality I described above with regard to Katharine Ross.

From the moment you see Katharine in “The Graduate,” there is no doubt in your mind as to why Ben would fall for her, in spite of his promise to Mrs. Robinson. There’s no way he could help himself. Every guy who saw her as Elaine fell for her immediately — more quickly than Ben, who had to see her tears in the strip club first. She just had this quality. It’s not just beauty in the esthetic sense, or sexual appeal — although she had plenty of both. There’s just an immediate tenderness she evokes. You want to take care of her, cherish her. It’s hard to explain. Do you know what I’m describing?

My point is that Zooey Deschanel possesses a similar quality — in a quirkier, more modern, semi-ironic way. You understand completely why the young man in “(500) Days” falls for her. How could he not? And it is that quality that does this film in in the end. Because Ms. Deschanel has that appeal, the movie is a failure.

Spoiler alert! That is to say, it’s what makes the film work all the way up to the ending. You can say that the first 499 of the 500 days are well worth watching, as fine an offbeat little romantic comedy as you are likely to find these days. And it’s all because of her. She, as “Summer,” makes you cheer on the protagonist as he tries to win and keep her, because that’s what you’d do in his place. That Zooey Deschanel has this quality was achingly evident since the very first film I saw her in — “Almost Famous.” When Russell enters William Miller’s home and sees his sister, it nearly derails him from his purpose in being there, quite understandably.

But at the end, when — spoiler alert again! — he fails to win her, you’re left hanging. And the attempt at the end to suggest that he’ll be OK because he meets a new girl is completely and utterly unconvincing. That’s because the girl he meets in the last scene is merely beautiful. You could even argue that she’s more beautiful than Zooey, but what of it? She’s utterly forgettable. She’s beautiful in the sterile way that Bo Derek was beautiful in “10.” Like a mannequin. You don’t fall for her at all, and there’s no way you can believe she will replace the girl he’s been mooning over for the past 90 minutes.

Endings like that make me angry. The thing is, though, it may work as a chick flick, because my wife didn’t see the problem. She thought the ending was just fine. I think that’s because, identifying with the woman, she was satisfied because the woman was fine in the end, and was willing to accept the writers’ word that the guy was fine, too. Or maybe you have to be a guy to understand the Zooey/Katharine thing.

My question is, did any of y’all see it? And do you get what I’m complaining about?

I need to watch “Surrogates” now, to cleanse the palate…

One good thing about my interview Wednesday morning with Steve Morrison — I chose the table we sat at, so I had plenty of sunlight on my subject, and I was able to get better pictures with my Blackberry than I got with Kirkman Finlay III. One bad thing was that the Capital City Club was noisier, so my audio isn’t as good. Oh, well.

Ever since I first heard that this Steve (as opposed to the other Steve) was thinking of running, I’ve wondered: Why did he get in it so late? Was he not concerned that he would split the portion of the electorate that would otherwise have gone to Steve Benjamin, thereby throwing the campaign to Kirkman Finlay, with whom I would assume he would not agree as much politically?

To begin with, Mr. Morrison doesn’t think he’s getting into it all that late. He thinks a 100-day campaign, which is the way he’s thinking of it, is just about right.

He said he had three considerations in mind when deciding whether to run:

1. Would it be OK with his family? And his wife Gail and the rest of the family seem to buy into what he’s trying to do.
2. Would he divide the city racially? After talking about it to a lot of friends both black and white, he decided it wouldn’t. (This may sound kind of like the question I had, but it isn’t the same. I wasn’t just wondering about the “black vote” vs. the “white vote.” I was also thinking of the Shandon vote, the Rosewood vote, the Heathwood vote, the University Neighborhood vote, and so forth. Not my problem, but it just struck me as interesting that Mr. Morrison should enter only after Bob Coble was out of it, thereby meaning Mr. Benjamin would pretty much have those areas sewn up.)
3. Could the mayor, in this form of government, make a difference? He decided he could.

He said he entered the race because the community was looking for “independence” — which, looking back at my notes, I suspect he meant “somebody who isn’t connected so strongly to payday lending,” but I
might be misreading that. Anyway, he saw himself as someone who had worked successfully in business (he was one of the top five people at PMSC in the Larry Wilson days) who was independent of special interests.

As for splitting the “Steve” vote, he said he thought he might have as much in common with Mr. Finlay as with Mr. Benjamin — as a top business executive who has worked with the business community extensively, as one who understands budgets, as a respecter of the taxpayers’ money.

That reminded me of something: The first time I ever had an encounter with what has come to be known as the Don Tomlin group — the faction in city politics that has backed Mr. Finlay and Daniel Rickenmann and Brian Boyer (the candidate who unsuccessfully opposed Belinda Gergel two years ago) — Steve Morrison was a member. In fact, he reminds me, he helped to found the Foundation for Columbia’s Future along with Mr. Tomlin and Gayle Averyt.

And while I think of Steve Morrison the way I came to know him — as chairman of the Columbia Urban League board, as lead attorney for poor school districts — he does have goals in common with the Tomlin folks:
“The commonality was good government, sound management,” he said.

Unfortunately, he says things got polarized along liberal-conservative lines, and so the group hasn’t accomplished the things he’d hoped.

All that aside, he’s running because he’s tired of things not getting done in Columbia:

• The bus system is still a mess, and no one knows how to pay for it.
• The riverfront hasn’t developed as promised.
• The city has “been dithering about strong mayor” for years and won’t put it on the ballot.

He believes he has the leadership and managerial skills to get things on track. As he points out, his law firm has a larger budget than the city, and PMSC was seven times as large in his time there.

For an audio sample from the interview:

Just click on this link.

Let me know if you have any trouble with the audio. On it, you will get a sample of how Mr. Morrison’s mind works as he explains why the riverfront TIF is not a good deal for Columbia at this point — especially with the city having to go it alone.

Finally, a disclaimer — aside from the fact that Steve Morrison and I served together on the Urban League board, he has quite recently served as my attorney. Not a big deal, but I thought you should know. Aside from that, having known him for years, I’ve heard him give quite a few quietly compelling speeches, and asked him why he didn’t run for office. He always shrugged it off — until now.

Being in a sort of multimedia mood today, I thought I’d go back and share some audio from my breakfast with Kirkman Finlay III the other day.

Here’s the audio. Just click on it.

I hope that works OK for you. Let me know if you can’t get it to play.

This is from the very end of the interview. The grill room at Cap City had thinned out and gotten fairly quiet, so the quality is pretty good. Also, knowing he was being recorded, Kirkman sort of gave a summing up of what he had already said, and did a good job of getting his main points across concisely.

You’ll hear him making his point about 75-100-125, and also griping about being called “Chicken Little,” and saying other things I mentioned on my previous post.

Here’s hoping you find it edifying.

Well, this is interesting.

I just ran across the stats from my OLD, abandoned, derelict blog (floating, rotating in space like one of those wrecks that our heroes pick over on “Firefly“) — while looking for something else — and discovered that in the last 30 days, it’s had 6,520 page views.

It’s had 180 today alone.

All this despite the fact that I haven’t posted anything there since … let’s see… March 19, 2009.

Admittedly, there’s a lot of good stuff there in the archives, stuff to which I frequently refer people. I appreciate that my friends at The State keep it running (and why wouldn’t they, since that provides more entry points for thestate.com and its advertising?).

Maybe most of those page views are from me linking folks to old stuff that I prefer not to repeat. Or maybe… and here’s the poignant interpretation… it’s readers who haven’t heard the news, groping about trying to find me. I hope they do.

Apparently, they ARE finding me, because I see my traffic on my current blog is now averaging about 96,000 page views a month, which is more than twice the traffic I was getting on my old one at the time I left the paper. That is gratifying indeed, since I may be on the verge of selling advertising myself…

Thanks for reading. Keep it up. But hey, folks, lookee — I’m over HERE now!

As I mentioned on a previous post (the one with the picture of Leona), one of the things I did last night was drop by Capt. Smith‘s office for an event he was having for Frank Holleman, who is running for state superintendent of education.

He talked about his experience as U.S. deputy secretary of education (under his old boss Dick Riley) and reasons why he’s running.

Actually, James himself wasn’t there until just before I left (although you can sort of halfway see him in the last second of the video) — he was tied up in court. But a number of other key Democrats were there, such as the Fowlers. Not very many, though, as I think you’ll see if you watch at least a couple of minutes of the video (to where I panned the room). There were quite a few more people at the Steve Benjamin thing I went to at Marvin‘s house right after this.

I just went ahead and gave y’all the whole speech he made to the room, because I just haven’t had time to edit it down. This is probably more than you want, but there it is. Just one of the things we do for you here at the blog of record, where you get all the news that gives you fits.

A big attaboy to Jake Knotts for changing his mind:

State Sen. Jake Knotts, R-Lexington, once an outspoken opponent of strong state highway-safety laws, Wednesday made a stunning announcement:

He was wrong to oppose a tougher seat belt law in 2004 and 2005. And this year, Knotts said, he will push a measure to ban both cell phone texting and use of hand-held cell phones by motorists.

“I was wrong,” Knotts said during a Senate subcommittee meeting, saying he now is convinced the 2005 law that requires all South Carolinians to wear seat belts, which he fought so hard against, is saving lives.

And Knotts – known for his libertarian, anti-regulation views – said Wednesday he does not want to be wrong on cell phone use by motorists, calling it a deadly distraction…

Note that I praised Jake just now “for changing his mind,” not just for supporting this particular bill. I think the bill itself sounds fine, although I wish the local news media would take a little of the time they’re spending on this simplistic, easy-to-understand issue (which increasingly these days is the only kind of story that the strapped, overworked media go after) and devote it to something like the state budget crisis, or something I don’t understand.

That aside, though, when somebody as stiff-necked as Jake changes his mind about something, particularly in a positive direction, it’s an occasion for celebration. I don’t know what precipitated this — maybe his enmity toward the governor has caused him to see the problems with his own instinctive libertarianism — but I’d really like to see more lawmakers develop the habit?

Why? Because the deliberative process that representative democracy depends upon assumes that people can change their minds. That representatives, rather than being mindless automatons punching whichever button they promised to press when they ran for office, over and over, will actually engage an issue, spending the time on it that we who sent them don’t have to spend, and learn and grow and yes, sometimes change their minds. Otherwise, what’s the point of a debate?

Of course, actual “debate” is a bit of an anachronistic concept in our hyperpartisan modern politics. Lawmakers — especially on the national level — don’t debate; they posture. They issue pronouncements meant not for their fellows in the chamber (who are as often as not absent) but for YouTube. The purpose is to cheer for their team or blast the other team, and use the speech as a fund-raising device.

Having actual debates, and lawmakers willing to be swayed if the debate is good enough, would be the salvation of our system of government. So when I see a guy like Jake willing to change his mind, I have hope…

This morning, I had breakfast with Steve Morrison (the way I did with Kirkman Finlay III the day before). I didn’t get time to blog about it, but I will.

Then, between 5:30 and the time I went home, I:

• Dropped by an open house at the Capital City Club. As a board member, I was there to schmooze with new members and potential new members. I ran into my financial adviser, and made an appointment to see him next week. We really must talk… Drank half a beer.
• Dropped by James Smith’s office for an event he was having for Frank Holleman, who’s running for state superintendent of education. Shot some decent video, but was too exhausted when I got home to edit it. Chatted briefly with Mark Quinn from ETV, who said I need to come on the show sometime soon, which I’ll be glad to do. He also expressed interest in covering the cigarette tax smackdown I’m refereeing Friday. I gave him a contact name. Drank two ginger ales.
• Dropped by a fund-raiser for Steve Benjamin at Marvin Chernoff’s house. A decent crowd. Ran into Leona Plaugh, and just had to ask her why on Earth she wanted to get involved with city government again (she’s running for Kirkman’s seat). Ate some barbecue. Drank one beer. Had a little more barbecue. (This is starting to sound disturbingly like Bridget Jones’ Diary. Must stop.)

Had an interesting chat with Leona. Her answer, by the way, was that she feels like, city finances being as they are, she should run. As she said, she knows more about the city budget than anybody, possibly including Kirkman.

Leona, if you recall, was the city manager before Charles Austin. She left under a cloud, but you know what? I always had the impression that Leona knew what was what, and she acted the way she did because in Columbia, city manager is a completely unmanageable job, with seven bosses constantly interfering.

Since she left city employ, she’s been running “an exclusive management and marketing company for corporate entertainment producers.” I said that sounded way more fun than taking Kirkman’s place on the council. I didn’t fully understand what she does — she stopped me before I could pitch a movie idea to her — but she did mention having produced an event in Vegas that featured the Guess Who and William Shatner. That definitely sounds like more fun than city council. Beam me back to Vegas, Scottie — that’s what I’d say.

Anyway, today was a perfect example of what I frequently observed — if you get out there and experience enough things to be worth blogging about, you don’t have time to blog about them…

Had a good chat yesterday over breakfast with Kirkman Finlay III. The conversation was of a much higher quality than the photo above, for which I apologize. We were in a dark corner of the room, and my Blackberry just needs loads of light to get anything decent. Memo to self: Get a better shot of Kirkman next time you see him.

One thing the picture accomplishes, though: You see that stack of papers in the foreground? Those are Mr. Finlay’s city budget spreadsheets, without which no meeting with him is complete. They loom large in his legend.

Kirman Finlay is the fiscal watchdog on Columbia City Council. He has been coming to see Warren Bolton and me for years with these spreadsheets he compiles on his own, showing us the trends and making dire projections, so much so that (as Kirkman reminded me several times) Warren once referred to him as “Chicken Little.” The thing is, Chicken Little turned out to be right; Columbia’s financial sky was falling.

The last couple of years, in which the city of Columbia couldn’t tell you how much money it had (which always turned out to be less than it thought it had), when accounting was so out of control that the city was paying the same bills two or three times, have been Kirkman Finlay’s moment. And now he’s seeing whether that moment can be parlayed into a term as mayor.

Mr. Finlay is a master of ominous-sounding pronouncements. Here’s one from our breakfast yesterday: “There’s a sound in the background of metal on stone. It’s the ax.”

He says it’s “time to restructure state government,” and when he says it he’s not talking about strong-mayor or anything like that. He’s using “restructure” the way corporate budget-cutters use terms like “right-sizing.” He means reshaping our assumptions about what city government can do — downward. He repeatedly says Columbia is a $100 million-a-year city (in revenues) that wants to be taxed like a $75 million city, and wants to spend like a $125 million city. Noting the various surpluses that the city has blown over the past 8 years, he asserts that essentially the city overspends at a steady rate of $15 million a year. And it’s time, he says, to wake up and realize this can’t continue, which means “less employees, less generous benefits and entire lines of business (meaning services) disappearing.”

Once we’ve exhausted the potential in his spreadsheet, which takes a while, he draws a chart that has crime climbing the y axis and cost increasing along the x axis, and points out that while you want to be in the “low-cost, low-crime” quadrant, it’s acceptable to be in the “high-crime, low cost” quadrant (because you can do something about it) or the “low-crime, high-cost” quadrant (because it means you’re doing something, and it’s working), but Columbia is in the “high-crime, high-cost” quadrant — which means crime is rampant and we’re out of potential to beef up what we’re doing about it.

“When we go to debate, nobody wants to talk about” the financial crunch the city is in — and he finds this frustrating. “To sit there and say we’re going to do more,” as he suggests other candidates do, “is silly — or financially reckless.”

He said back when he was accused of being Chicken Little, he was only complaining about relatively minor fiscal excesses — the equivalent of the “Holiday Ten” pounds people put on, and then start losing in January. “But what we have now is a broken business model,” a far deeper, more structural problem.

If Councilman Finlay has a limitation, it’s that he embodies the fiscal watchdog role so well at the exclusion of anything else. It’s a good thing to have somebody like that on the council. And it’s good to have somebody running for mayor who demands of the others, “How are you gonna pay for it?” But he is so about no and can’t do it and can’t afford it that he never gets around to talking about what we can do or should do. He fails to inspire or motivate. (Unlike his father, who inspired us to make the Vista happen.) A guy who’s always about the current fiscal crunch, who spends his spare time crunching numbers to prove it will always be like this, isn’t a guy you want leading your team. That’s the guy the leader hires to keep him grounded. But you want the leader to be enthusiastic about something. Kirkman Finlay is enthusiastic about dampening enthusiasm. And I think that’s going to do him in in this election.

Scary stats: Contemplating, with trepidation, a Finlay spreadsheet.

I enjoyed seeing the above ad in the paper today on a number of levels.

• First, it’s good to see Lindsey Graham getting props from any corner for his courageous stance on energy and climate change. It’s ridiculous for such a sensible course to have to be considered “courageous,” but we live in a world in which if a Republican does something sensible (that is, if he endorses the Energy Party platform), and he does it with a Democrat, folks in his party want to ride him on a rail.
• Second, I always like it when political actors, whether they are individuals or groups, step outside the boxes that the arbiters of our simplistic yes-or-no politics would put them in. Having the Christian Coalition endorse this isn’t shocking, given that many conservative Christians these days are embracing our obligation to act as stewards of this planet God put us on — but it’s gratifying nonetheless. (Of course, this ad didn’t stress the environmental part, just the energy part, but they could have picked any number of other Republicans to praise for favoring drilling for oil. A statement like this is a tacit endorsement of all that Sen. Graham is trying to do with Sen. Kerry.) We’re talking about an organization that has a fund-raising appeal on its Web site that says “Will You Stand With Us As We Stand Against The Left?,” nevertheless spending money to praise a senator who’s being pilloried by the right for working with the “opposition.”
• Finally, I’m happy for my friends at The State that they landed a full-color, almost-full page political ad. Too many of those dollars go to TV.

For years, I’ve relied upon the Sound Recorder application to edit and post sound clips for my blog — from phone messages such as this one from Jim Rex to excerpts from interviews, such as this one with John Edwards. Sound Recorder came free with Windows — it was one of those simple things you take for granted, like the calculator or Freecell — and it met my needs.

But now Bill Gates has gone to messin’. My laptop runs on Windows 7, which has a lot of nifty bells and whistles, but either won’t do certain things I took for granted in XP, or makes it a lot harder to do them. For instance: Windows Movie Maker worked fine in XP and even Vista. But with Windows 7, I had to go out and download Movie Maker via something called “Windows Live” (the purpose of which I have yet to figure out), and what I ended up with was less functional, and far less intuitive, than the old version. But I can still edit videos, after a fashion.

But yesterday, after a breakfast interview with Kirkman Finlay III, I went to edit a short clip I recorded using the new digital recorder I got for Christmas — and I find that there is no way to “open file” on the new, “improved” version of Sound Recorder. It assumes that all you will use if for is to record sounds, not edit sounds you already have.

Which is irritating.

So last night I edited the clip on Sound Forge on my desktop at home — which I got with my USB turntable I got for the previous Christmas — and one I get that Finlay post written, I can include the audio.

Then this morning, I broke my fast with Steve Morrison, and also recorded part of the interview. And once again, I’m faced with waiting until I’m home to edit it…

Not wanting to accept that, I went to the Sound Forge site and am as I type this downloading a free trial. (Unfortunately, I can’t just put the software I already have on the laptop, because I can’t find the disks.) Which I hope won’t get me into a situation where a month from now, when I’ve forgotten this, they suddenly debit my account for $54.95.

Dang. Why do people have to mess with stuff that works, and has worked for years?