Maybe now that Obama has pulled Joe Biden back into the spotlight, some of you may want to look at some of the video clips of our editorial board interview with him back in October, when he was still trying against all odds to be at the top of the ticket.
Then, we have him sharing his thoughts on Iraq. Joe was the one Democrat with an actual plan for what to do in Iraq.
Here he is answering the question I’d promised Samuel Tenenbaum I’d ask, about lowering speed limits to 55 mph to help us toward energy independence. (His answer was disappointing.)
Over the next few days, I’ll try to find time to mine the rest of my video to see if there was anything that didn’t seem interesting then that is more interesting now that he’s the running mate.
Tom Davis dropped by to see Cindi and me Tuesday morning — his first visit since the one I wrote about back here and here — and we talked about a number of things.
Tom, you will recall, is the governor’s former chief of staff who is now the GOP nominee for what is for the moment Catherine Ceips’ Senate seat.
Anyway, one thing Tom talked about was progress that’s been made on the Jasper Port deal. Tom continues to believe that his ex-boss, Mark Sanford, doesn’t get enough credit for bringing the deal with Georgia along to this point (even though my former colleague Mike Fitts did a column awhile back pretty much covering Tom’s talking points on the subject).
But Tom expects that years from now, when some of the more southern Corridor of Shame counties have benefited greatly from the economic development the projected port will bring, Mr. Sanford will get the credit, and deservedly so. This, he says, will be Mark Sanford’s legacy.
It will also be, if it turns out as hoped, Tom Davis’ legacy. He was, near as I could tell, the most ardent advocate for the Jasper Port in the Sanford administration, and the one who worked hardest to make it happen. I think you can probably see some of Tom’s passion about the subject in the above video.
Forgive me; I was remiss in not posting the video about Columbia’s "hot" new slogan earlier.
Well, there it is. Hot, huh? Did you like my headline? Get it? How does cola taste when it’s hot? You know, sweet but flat… Oh, come on, people, work with me here! I feel like Dr. Evil having to explain his equally stupid pun about the "caliber" of the FemBots…
Anyway, I think it’s been trashed enough already — more cleverly by some than by others. I sort of liked this one in a letter in today’s paper:
So, the board of the Midlands Authority for Conventions, Sports and
Tourism is replacing the brand “Riverbanks Region: Where Friendliness
Flows” with “Columbia: The New Southern Hot Spot”?
Man, oh man, where do we find these Slogan Shoguns, and at a mere $75,000 a pop, to boot?
I
bet a nice little motto lotto run by The State, offering a prize of,
say, a $5 Dollar General gift certificate, would have produced a better
tag than “Southern Hot Spot” (Am I the only one who thinks our new
brand sounds more like a civil disturbance in Nicaragua than a
professional tourism promotion? No? Oh, well.)
But anyway, just
to illustrate my point, here are a few off-the-cuff ideas my Great-Aunt
Eula anted up during her latest weekly bridge club party, even though,
in a bit of unfortuitous timing, she was the Dummy at that precise
moment: (1) “Columbia: The Gem of a Notion,” (2) “Columbia:
Capital-Sized & Southern-Prized” and (3) “Columbia: The 4,352nd
Wonder of the World.”
You go, Auntie Euly — straight to your
local Dollar General, an actual Southern Hot Spot, by the way — and get
you something real nice with that prize money.
MIKE SHEALY Leesville
As I said, I’m not going to trash it any myself, though. Too easy, and too trendy. I’ll leave it to y’all.
On thing that intrigued me in the news story, though — the suggestion that it sounds better if you’re not from here (“What attracts (planners) might not necessarily attract local people,”
said Bob Livingston, one of two Lexington County members on the
nine-member board.)… So if that’s true, it’s impossible for the people paying for the study to judge whether it’s any good or not. Do I have that right?
Sheesh. Still trying to catch up with my external e-mail address from the last few days, I’m just seeing this release from the Obama camp that came in Monday:
Obama Campaign Features Washington’s Biggest Celebrity in New Ad: “Embrace”
CHICAGO, IL – The Obama campaign today released a new 30-second television spot highlighting the record of the biggest celebrity in Washington, John McCain. The ad entitled “Embrace” addresses the numerous ways in which the special interests in Washington have embraced John McCain and how McCain has hugged right back, employing lobbyists in top positions and giving tax breaks to oil and drug companies, instead of working to ease the burden on middle-class families.
The ad will begin running on national cable on Tuesday.
You can read Obama’s plan to restore faith in Washington HERE.
You can call the "celebrity" stuff back and forth mere excessive cutesiness (although some partisans like to see wickedness beneath it all — when done by the other side, of course). But this video goes over the top (or under the bottom) by using the very favorite anti-McCain image of the Hate-Bush crowd. Obviously, anyone who would EVER give the president of the U.S. a hug is evil, right?
From MoveOn.org I expect this stuff. Not from Obama himself, even sheathed in "cuteness." Sheesh.
Our Sunday lead editorial will be about the Lexington/Richland District 5 school board’s conspiracy of silence over the resignation of Superintendent Scott Andersen. As I was editing it earlier today, it occurred to me that I had video of the superintendent together with his board at a time of perfect unity — just under a year ago, when they came to visit us to promote the bond referendum that failed last fall.
I had posted video from this meeting before, but the clips concentrated entirely on the board members. They, after all the ones who are elected and therefore directly accountable to the people (or should be, their recent secrecy to the contrary). And the thing that impressed us was their unanimity on the bond referendum. None of us could remember when the District 5 board had been so unified about anything, so that was where the news lay.
But I remember having the impression that the unanimity might have resulted in part from a good selling job by the superintendent. Superintendents work for boards, but all of them strive to lead their boards when they can. And when they lose that ability, they are often on the way out.
In the above clip, watch for two things:
Mr. Andersen’s breezy confidence as he makes his pitch, even to the point of joking about his having "skipped over the price tag." This was obviously a guy who was comfortable in front of his board members.
His board was comfortable with him, chuckling and joshing about the fact that "Scott’s not from around here," after the superintendent had explained his ignorance about a piece of property the district had been interested in (ignorance that critics of the board had misinterpreted as a deliberate attempt to deceive, according to Mr. Andersen).
To help you remember, I’m imbedding below the old clip from that meeting as well, with the board members speaking.
Let’s credit Adam Fogle — the guy who started it all when he broke the story initially — with bringing to my attention the clip of Stephen Colbert explaining in no uncertain terms why his native state and mine is so not gay, no matter what those British ad wizards may say.
This should settle the matter, as I can hardly imagine a more authoritative source. He knows what’s what. Remember, this is a guy who gets all his South Carolina news from Brad Warthen’s Blog:
Since yesterday, I’ve seen the question posed several different ways, both mockingly and in dead seriousness: Does Mark Sanford’s blank-out on CNN (now being compared unfavorably to the Miss Teen USA contestant from SC), hurt his chances to be John McCain’s running mate?
Let me pause now and count to ten before answering that. In fact, let’s discuss an unrelated point, which is that I wouldn’t be able to answer the question either. It’s not the sort of question I think about. If you asked me to say what was different in the economic policies of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, or John Kerry, or Alfred E. Neuman, I wouldn’t be able to answer you on the spur of the moment, and in fact would probably spurn the question as unimportant to me. Sanford’s problem is that he lacked the cool or presence of mind to do that. Perhaps he didn’t think he could get away with it. That’s too bad for him, because insouciance is what he does best, and once you take it off the table, he’s got a problem.
Now, as to our main point? Who out there still thinks Mark Sanford’s got a snowball’s chance on a Columbia sidewalk of being asked to carry John McCain’s freaking luggage, much less be his running mate? Didn’t we beat this horse to death some time back? And then beat it again? And again? What’s it doing clop-clopping down the street in the middle of summer?
I’m beginning to lose patience on this point, the whole concept is so offensively stupid.
Here’s a corollary to that: The presumption in Wolf Blitzer’s question is that Mark Sanford is somehow well situated to speak as an apologist for Sen. McCain. This is almost, but not quite, as idiotic as the idea of his being a running mate. There is probably no Republican in South Carolina LESS invested in the McCain campaign than Mark Sanford. This is the guy who expressed his "support" in the most insulting way possible, AFTER it no longer mattered — and after the other two most prominent Republican officeholders in the state had put their reps on the line for their chosen candidates.
I wouldn’t ask Mr. Sanford if he knew how to SPELL "McCain," much less ask him to defend his policy positions. Maybe that’s why I’m not in TV news…
For a very short news item in today’s paper, this one raised more than its share of questions and observations:
The New Yorker pouring money into South Carolina’s political races in a
push for school choice says he won’t give up anytime soon.
“I
am not going away, and my groups are not going away,” real estate
investor Howard Rich says in a video released Thursday by South
Carolinians for Responsible Government.
The Rich-funded school
choice group taped the conversation at the Columbia home of state
Republican Party chairman Katon Dawson on Monday. The GOP has written
into its platform support for school choice, vouchers and tax credits.
Of course, we all knew about what the first sentence says — this is one New Yorker who doesn’t give a flying flip what people in South Carolina think or want; he’s determined to make us do what he wants. His way of doing that is to finance misleading campaigns ostensibly based on other issues, since his issue doesn’t sell with the voters, until he gets enough people in the Legislature to back his boy Mark Sanford, and he can remake South Carolina to his liking.
As for the other two grafs:
Does this sort of behavior remind you of anybody? You know, a guy with deep pockets, an extreme vision of how the world ought to be, and the willingness to go to extreme lengths to make it so? A guy you never see, except that periodically he puts out these videos through his faithful followers, and the message in the videos is along the lines of "I’m still alive, and still committed to the cause, and I’m not going away?" Isn’t there somebody this reminds you of? Sheesh. Some of y’all were so sensitive about the link I put on that last sentence, that I cut it out, even though it was simply a straightforward link to what this video reminded me of. So I’ll try the subtle approach, and ask YOU again: What does the above description remind YOU of? (Man — if a guy can’t do free-association type HTML links, what’s the point in blogging?)
This was taped at Katon Dawson‘s house, and with his willing participation? Katon, the chairman of the same party that most of Howard Rich’s targets are in — the very lawmakers he wants to take out — is part of the Howard Rich conspiracy? If I’m one of a number of GOP officeholders this guy has paid for lying ads about, I’ve got a lot of questions to ask Katon right about now. I don’t have a lot of respect for political parties anyway, but even I thought they didn’t do stuff like this to each other. If you’re chairman of a party that is split between Mark Sanford and Jim DeMint on one side, and Lindsey Graham and the majority of legislative incumbents on the other, in what way is it considered kosher to do something like this?
Howard Rich was in town, and he didn’t drop by to see me or even call? Kidding aside, there are a lot more straightforward ways to get your message out than funneling money through surrogate entities and taping subterranean videos. That is, if you are at all interested in open, honest political debate. Which some people aren’t.
How come I can’t find the video on the SCRG Web site? Am I looking in the wrong places?
Week before last, I posted video from our interview with the other local runoff candidate who should not have won but did — Gwen Kennedy. If you’ll recall, I said at the time that getting her to provide a rationale for her candidacy was "like pulling teeth."
Today — a bit late to do any good, but then I wasn’t able to accomplish much with Ms. Kennedy even though it was ahead of time — I provide a similar clip of Jeanette McBride, who just ousted longtime Richland County Clerk of Court Barbara Scott. Here’s what I had to say about that outcome in my Sunday column:
In the primary on June 10, we endorsed incumbent Barbara Scott,
since — and we saw no clear evidence to the contrary — she was doing an
adequate job running the courthouse, collecting child support payments
and overseeing the other routine duties of the office. She was judged
clerk of the year by the S.C. chapter of the American Board of Trial
Advocates, which surely knows more about the quality of her day-to-day
work than we do.
Before making that decision, we considered endorsing Gloria
Montgomery — who had worked in the clerk’s office for years and seems
to understand it thoroughly (certainly better than we or most voters
do) — or Kendall Corley, who offered some interesting ideas for
improving service.
But we never for a moment considered endorsing Jeanette McBride.
That’s not because Mrs. McBride is married to former state Rep. Frank
McBride, whose political career ended in 1991 when he pleaded guilty to
vote-selling in the Lost Trust scandal. We didn’t consider her because
she offered us no reason whatsoever to believe that she would do a
better job than Ms. Scott. She didn’t even try. She did not display any
particular interest in what the clerk of court does at all.
She said, quite simply, that she was running because she thought
she could win. She did not explain what went into that calculation, but
so what? She was right.
Her victory will inevitably be compared to the defeat of Harry
Huntley — regarded by many as the best auditor in the state — in
Richland County in 2006. And it will be suggested that both of these
incumbents were the victims of raw racial politics. Mr. Huntley and Ms.
Scott are white; Ms. McBride and Paul Brawley are black. A candidate
who can pick up most of the black votes in a Democratic primary is
increasingly seen as having an advantage in the county.
I hope voters had a better reason than that for turning out
qualified candidates in favor of challengers who seemed to offer no
actual qualifications. In fact, I’m wracking my brain trying to think
of other explanations. Ms. McBride, in her interview, didn’t help with
that. And Mr. Brawley didn’t even bother to talk to The State’s
editorial board, so I have no idea what sort of case he made to voters.
I hope he made some really compelling, defensible argument. I just
haven’t heard it yet.
Mrs. McBride was somewhat more forthcoming in her interview than Ms. Kennedy was, but still rather vague. She seemed to be going through the motions with fuzzy observations about the clerk’s office having poor communication, or not being "inclusive" enough. One was left with the distinct impression that she was running, not because she had any clue how to run the courthouse better, but because she believed she could win. And of course, she was right.
Note how, at the end of the clip, she brightens considerably as she explains, with a contented shrug, that "I think the people will elect me." And that seemed to be what really motivated her.
On today’s page, you saw our endorsement of Jake Knotts in the runoff in the Republican nomination in Senate District 23. You also saw Cindi Scoppe’s column that was her way of thinking through, and explaining to readers, what was for the whole board a difficult decision. (And despite the little bit of fun I had about DeMint "clarifying" things, it was and is a difficult one.)
It’s worth reading, if you only get one thing out of it: This isn’t as simple as being about whether this person is for vouchers (or, worse, tax credits) or that one is against them. This is about what video poker was about — whether a group that does not have the state’s best interests at heart is allowed to intimidate the Legislature into doing its will.
It’s easy to say that, but very hard to communicate to readers. It’s hard to understand if you don’t spend as much time as I have, and as Cindi has (and she has a lot more direct experience with this than I do) observing lawmakers up close, and watching the ways they interact, and the way issues play out among them. I know it’s hard for readers to understand, because all these years later, folks still seem to have trouble understanding what the video poker issue was about for the editorial board, and why we took the position we ultimately did (to ban the industry).
I know we’ll be explaining this one for the next 10 years, and possibly longer. It’s just tough to communicate, and made tougher in this case because video poker was at least unsavory on its face. The face of this campaign funded by out-of-state extremists appears to be perfectly nice, ordinary people like Katrina Shealy and Sheri Few.
But it’s not about them. And it’s not about Jake Knotts, either. It’s certainly not about whether one or two candidates who favor (or might favor) vouchers get elected to the Legislature. By themselves, those one or two candidates can’t change the fact that spending public funds on private schools is (quite rightly) an unpopular cause. What this is about is the fact that if Jake Knotts loses, Howard Rich and company win, and that will play in the Legislature this way: Our money took Jake down. We can do the same to you. And at that point, lawmakers who don’t believe in vouchers and know their constituents don’t either can be induced to vote along with those interests anyway.
We saw it happen with video poker — until the industry was put out of business, cutting off the flow of cash that was corrupting the legislative process. We’re seeing a similar dynamic here. And that’s what this is about.
Anyway, as I mentioned, Cindi had a column about that. On Sunday, I’ll have a very different column about this endorsement. At one point in the column, I refer to one of the big differences between our editorial board and Jake Knotts — his populism. So it is that I post the video below, which features Sen. Knotts talking about that.
Trying to get Gwendolyn Davis Kennedy to provide a rationale for her Richland County Council candidacy was like pulling teeth. She basically could not provide any good reason why voters should elect her back to the body she left under a cloud a decade ago.
Ms. Kennedy is best remembered for a taxpayer-funded junket she and another council member took to Hawaii. And that’s about it, really. To get further details, I had to search the database, and came up with this editorial from our editions of Dec. 8, 1997:
We should have known Richland County Councilwoman Gwendolyn Davis Kennedy wouldn’t leave quietly after her failed re-election bid. At her last regular meeting, Mrs. Kennedy and three of her children were up for appointments to county boards or commissions. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. This is the same councilwoman who took a $3,000 jaunt to Hawaii on county money to a conference for Western counties only to return with nothing constructive to share. Then, faced with a runoff bid she wouldn’t win, she had a change of heart and admitted the trip wasn’t a good idea. Mrs. Kennedy obviously is intent on having a lasting impact on Richland County by getting family members appointed to boards. Sadly, other council members didn’t see the folly in it all and appointed two of Mrs. Kennedy’s daughters to positions. Kim Kennedy and Fay Kennedy were appointed to the Music Festival Commission and the Building Board of Adjustment, respectively. The lame duck council, four of whom are on their way out, might have selected Mrs. Kennedy and her son, a Richland County sheriff’s deputy, to a position had the two not withdrawn their nominations after they were challenged. Mrs. Kennedy had applied for a spot on the county Planning Commission and her son, Theodore Kennedy Jr., had applied for a position on the Building Board of Adjustment. This was an obvious attempt by Mrs. Kennedy to try to stack county boards with herself and her family members as she leaves the council. Council members should have known better and left all of these appointments to the next council. Shame on them all. It’s these sort of shenanigans that have residents angry over the way the county is operated. The new Richland County Council, the membership of which will be completed in tomorrow’s election, can’t be seated soon enough.
The good news is that the new council was somewhat better. No trips to Hawaii, anyway.
But the truth is that bad candidacies are frequently marked by the lack of good qualities as much as bad ones. And the things that strikes me as I review video of our interview back in April with Ms. Kennedy is her utter inability to articulate why anyone should support her.
Please excuse the length of the above interview. I just included a lot of unedited footage (except for transitions between my camera’s three-minute-maximum clips) so you could see — if you were patient enough — just how far you can go in giving a person every possible opportunity, without that person rising to it. It’s tedious, but telling. In fact, some of you who are accustomed to the contrived theater of TV interviews will wonder, "Why were you so patient and easygoing with this woman?" The answer is that, contrary to what many of you believe, we really do try to go the extra mile to allow candidates a chance to make their case in their own way — particularly the candidates who come in with apparently little chance of gaining our endorsement. Some candidates make the most of the opportunity, and are impressive — an example of that would be Sheri Few, who didn’t think we would endorse her but to her credit wasn’t about to make that decision easy on us. Ms. Kennedy made the decision very, very easy.
Unfortunately, Ms. Kennedy managed to squeeze past a couple of more attractive candidates to make it into a runoff next week. One nice thing about runoffs — it gives me time to present you with more info about the candidates that I was able to do during the crowded initial vote.
If you don’t have the patience to make it through the long video above, here’s a shorter and more interesting one. After having given her every opportunity to deal with her checkered past — a simple, "I did wrong when I was in office before, and have learned my lesson" would have been good — we finally had to confront her (politely, of course, that being Warren’s style) about the incident that lost her the position on council.
Basically, once she was specifically asked about "The Trip," she tried lamely to deflect. She tried to allege that the controversy was over her husband going, and that wasn’t at taxpayer expense. She noted that she’s been to Hawaii a number of times, and only once at taxpayer expense — as though that established anything other than the fact that she likes Hawaii. She tries to make us believe that she believes that if elected, we would falsely report that the European trip she’s saving up for was on the taxpaper’s dime.
But what am I doing describing it? Just watch the video.
A reader who is also a political consultant enjoyed this dig at lobbyists, and brought my attention to the above video from The Onion, titled "Are Politicians Failing Our Lobbyists?"
Personally, I prefer the print version of the The Onion. This particular clip’s not all that funny to me, because it’s no more stupid than the actual talking head discussions I hear whenever I’m tied down and forced to watch 24/7 cable TV "news."
OK, technically this wasn’t our last interview, but it is that last one from which I have video. As we neared the end (I lost count somewhere around 45 interviews, but there weren’t more than a handful after that), we had to do some of them (Buddy Witherspoon, Joe Wilson and Bob Conley) by phone.
You may not have heard much about Phil Black, who’s running against Joe Wilson in the 2nd congressional district. He’s not one of your big-budget candidates, and by his own account he’s pretty much been treated like "a red-headed stepchild" at party functions.
But I think you’ll like him. I did, when I met him Tuesday. I particularly liked his willingness to think outside his party’s box. He’s a single-payer health care guy, like me, and he actually has an intriguingly creative idea on how to deal with illegal immigration.
So, Doug Ross will say, why didn’t you endorse him? Why did you go with the incumbent, yet again? Doug won’t like my answer, which is this: Yep, I really liked Mr. Black. But I’ve never seen him hold public office (he’s serve on two school boards, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time), so I’ve had no opportunity to observe from experience whether he would really be the smart, down-to-earth regular guy he seems to be, or whether he just makes a good first impression.
With Joe Wilson, you know what you’re going to get. And there’s great truth in what Mr. Black says about him: "Joe Wilson is a fine individual, (but) Joe Wilson is a career politician."
But I’m just not prepared to send a guy as far away as Washington when I’ve never had a chance to observe him on the job.
See, Doug? I told you you wouldn’t like it. Anyway, watch the video. Get to know Phil. Joe you know already. Make up your own mind.
You may or may not have noticed that we never took an editorial position on the 5 Points South project — the six-story private development that would include two stories of city parking. There were plenty of words on the editorial page on the subject, both pro and con — just not from us. There were letters and op-eds, but no editorial.
This is because we had no consensus on the subject. The problem was me. I didn’t like the project. Why? It just seemed too tall to be right there. It didn’t move me to know that there were other buildings even taller just a block or two away. This would loom right over the heart of Five Points — right over the new fountain forming a gateway at Saluda and Blossom. Besides — and I realize this is purely a personal whim, so I wouldn’t have taken an editorial position on the strength of this; it just didn’t help — I don’t like parking garages. I’ll park half a mile a way and walk rather than get tangled up in a parking garage. Something about the tediousness of getting in and out of them. I like to know I can make a quick getaway, or something. I don’t know what it is.
Other members of the board thought the project was fine, but it wasn’t a burning issue to them. That is to say, they didn’t favor it strongly enough to push me on it. And they had their hands full, as did I. We were in the midst of endorsement season, and unfortunately, state primaries come along concurrently with the last few weeks of the legislative session — a doubly busy time for us. So basically, no one had the time to do the research to overcome my objections. So we neither came out for it or against it.
In the last couple of weeks before the city’s final decision (which came Wednesday — it was approved), advocates for the project asked to come in to talk to us. With the pace of interviews we were dealing with (and remember, with our present staffing levels, we all work a full day getting the pages out without any meetings), we weren’t sure whether it would be time well spent, given how far apart we were on it.
But all of that is hard to explain, so Warren and I agreed to meet with the group on Monday. The delegation included Anne Sinclair from city council, our own James D. McCallister (who I believe is associated with Loose Lucy’s — correct me if I’m wrong, Don), Duncan McRae from Yesterday’s, longtime Five Points leader Jack Van Loan, developer Ron Swinson and city and Five Points Association staff.
I asked them all my questions, and I was satisfied with the answers. The parking is needed, not everyone has my aversion to garages, and the setback should avoid looming over the entrance to Five Points excessively. It means a lot that the businesses most likely to be loomed over want it.
James brought up a good point about "Five Points" as a concept being something that some of us react to emotionally and sentimentally. I acknowledged that to me, that wasn’t even Kenny’s, but the Winn-Dixie. And does it really make sense not to have secure parking for patrons and employees because I don’t want a building taller than the Winn-Dixie?
So that leaves, what? Residential neighbors who don’t like it, right? That’s something that should be respected, but does it outweigh the legitimate reasons set out by the advocates?
With the decision coming up on Wednesday, I huddled with Warren and Cindi to see whether they thought we should take a position before the meeting. At the same time, I made the point that while I had been won over, I didn’t like the fact that there wasn’t time left to spend equal time with opponents. (If I had thought they would be that persuasive, we would have tried earlier to make provision for that.) We decided, in light of what we already had planned to say editorially on Tuesday and Wednesday, not to leap to a conclusion editorially at the last moment. Warren did write a column mentioning the project favorably for Wednesday’s paper, but mentioned MORE prominently the smoking ban, which we were already on record as strongly for.
Why a post on why we didn’t take a position, when we take very clear positions on bigger, more controversial issues than this all the time? Well, I just wanted to post the video of James et al., and this provided the excuse.
That makes three of our regulars who have now been featured in picture (and now video) on the blog — Doug Ross, bud, and James.
There have been times in the past that I’ve heard parts of it, but this time, I sat back and listened to Jake Knotts tell his full story of how he grew up in Columbia.
He was offering it as an explanation of his values, a way of telling us why he approaches things the way he does.
Look at it any way you like — as the inspiring story of how a populist rose up from the poorest corners of our capital city, or how hard times made a "rough cop" and bull-headed hard case of a state senator.
Either way, it’s interesting, and worth watching the video. This is from an interview Tuesday morning in our offices. Once Jake had told his story, we of course launched into the usual questions.
Although she was a candidate for the GOP nomination for this seat two years ago, this is the first video I’ve posted of Ms. Few — in fact, I don’t think I shot pictures of her either, since I didn’t post any at the time. She was the second candidate to come in for an interview in 2006, and it apparently had not yet dawned on me to take my camera into those meetings for blog purposes.
This time around, I have an embarrassment of riches — so many images and clips on candidates that they keep threatening to crash my laptop. And yet, they’ve been coming in so fast I haven’t had time to post many on the blog. But at least I’m doing this one. (Truth be told, if I weren’t under the gun to produce a video clip of something for the Saturday Opinion Extra by midnight, I wouldn’t be doing this one, either — it’s been a tough week, and hours to go before I sleep.)
In this clip, Ms. Few is talking about her proven ability to raise money, which she suggests (and she’s probably right) is considerably greater than that of her two opponents, David Herndon and Tony Lamm.
Up to now, contributions to her campaigns has been a source of controversy, since she attracts a considerable amount from out-of-state sources pushing private school "choice." But she says Republicans should consider that the party is in danger of losing the seat currently held by Bill Cotty, and that the likely Democratic nominee — Anton Gunn, who played a key role in the Barack Obama campaign in South Carolina — might be able to raise some out-of-state money of his own.
Today, I forgot to bring my camera to work. Normally, I remember all my school supplies (mainly because I keep them in the briefcase out of which I live), but this morning I left my Canon PowerShot A95 on the kitchen table.
Since I had two interviews this morning — with Vince Ford, who’s seeking Kay Patterson’s Senate seat, and Rep. Joe Neal, defending House District 70 — I had to stoop to a desperate measure: I used the Sony Model DCR-SR40 camcorder that the nice folks at thestate.com gave me awhile back.
This is a pretty cool video camera, with a built-in 30-gig hard drive. It shoots pretty nice video, with MUCH higher resolution than my little Canon, which is actually intended to shoot still pictures.
There’s just one little drawback — its format is (as near as I can tell) MPEG-4, and I do not have any software that can edit MPEG-4 video. Nor can I convert these files into a format that I CAN use. That means the only way I can share video with you is if I keep it really, really short and load it onto the blog unedited, as in the clip you see above, which as short as it is, almost crashed our VMIX thingie when I loaded it.
That’s not terribly helpful when I want to share video with you from interviews that last 30 or 45 minutes or more.
This, I suspect, is the reason why the nice folks gave me this camera — they couldn’t figure out what to do with the files, either.
Anyway, I’ve wasted absurd amounts of time searching the Web for help with this problem, looking for codecs and such. Apparently, I am the first person in the history of the world to have this problem, because I’m not running into any helpful support out there.
I even got desperate enough to e-mail Sony for help, and did so, after getting through all the barriers manufacturers erect to letting you ask a direct question. Here’s the only answer I’ve received so far:
Thank you for contacting Sony.
This message confirms that your e-mail has been received and your request is currently under review. Thank you for your patience as we strive to provide you with the best service and support possible.
First off, I should say that this is PRET-ty weird. If you will be offended by extremely ironic humor in the representation of some pretty grim events of recent history, you shouldn’t watch the video. I found a lot of it offensive myself. But if you are morbidly fascinated by how the other half (the half that has LOTS of time to waste, enough to shoot hundreds of photographs of hamburgers in various poses) expresses itself, you might want to glance at this.
One of our regulars sent me the clip as an e-mail, so I won’t say who it was, but here’s how the thing was explained:
Food Fight is an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.
There is a cheat sheet for those of you who want to have your food allusions explained, although it’s recommended that you try to follow it on your own first.
There is also, for the history-deprived, a breakdown of the battles and events depicted, at the bottom of this Web page. As you will see, the humor that is employed in this animated feature is rather, um, tasteless. Even literally — the food that is depicted is quite unappetizing. But I share it anyway — you certainly don’t have to watch it.
Charles Krauthammers’ column on our Sunday op-ed page makes reference to the Saturday Night Live skits mocking the media’s fawning over Barack Obama. An excerpt:
Real change has never been easy. . . . The status quo in Washington will fight. They will fight harder than ever to divide us and distract us with ads and attacks from now until November. — Barack Obama, Pennsylvania primary night speech
With that, Obama identified the new public enemy: the "distractions" foisted upon a pliable electorate by the malevolent forces of the status quo, i.e., those who might wish to see someone else become president next January. "It’s easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit for tat that consumes our politics" and "trivializes the profound issues" that face our country, he warned sternly. These must be resisted. Why? Because Obama understands that the real threat to his candidacy is less Hillary Clinton and John McCain than his own character and cultural attitudes. He came out of nowhere with his autobiography already written, then saw it embellished daily by the hagiographic coverage and kid-gloves questioning of a supine press. (Which is why those "Saturday Night Live" parodies were so devastatingly effective.)…
That prompted me to search for and find the skits, which I had not seen. They are funny. Not Akroyd-Belushi funny or anything, but amusing by the standards of latter-day casts. The funnier (and longer) one is the second one, at the bottom of this post.
Of course, the mockery isn’t one-sided. There’s also a funny send-up of Hillary Clinton being petulant about how Obama is treated and received. If you think that’s over-the-top, here’s a link to a real-life video in which, ironically enough, Hillary invokes the SNL skits, but only after whining in a particularly passive-aggressive manner about always having to answer the first question — acting a lot like her mimic in the skit. And I don’t think she’s kidding…
