Category Archives: Working

Lee Bandy was at Rotary today!

I was blessed with a pleasant surprise today at the Columbia Rotary Club meeting — Lee Bandy! He was there as a guest of member Joe Jones.

It was awesome to get to see Lee, my good friend and longtime colleague — tanned, rested and ready. More than two decades ago, the guy had to put up with me as his editor, and he’s never held it against me.

For you youngsters, Lee was the dean of SC political journalism until his retirement four or five years ago. Who replaced him as dean? Well, they retired the position.

Cindi Scoppe explains the state budget

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A couple of weeks ago, in response to some outrageous statement about the state budget put out by someone over at the Policy Council via Twitter — I forget now who it was, or what it was he or she said, but I think it was something like “this is the biggest budget ever” — I got worked up enough to go out and get some numbers showing what total nonsense that was. Because I knew we hadn’t caught up to pre-crash spending levels.

And I got the numbers, covering the last few years. And there were supporting documents, which are hard to link on WordPress (I usually go back and use TypePad on my old blog to link a file, then copy the code over here, which is tedious), and then there was the post itself to write talking about the numbers, and somewhere in the middle of it I fell asleep or something.

Oh, wait, I know — I sent Ashley Landess a Tweet asking her something about the numbers they had used, and while she answered my initial question, she didn’t (unless I missed it) answer a follow-up, and I used waiting for that response as an excuse to just let the whole thing drift, because I had satisfied my own curiosity and justified my own outrage (this is not, of course, the biggest budget ever), and it’s hard for me to maintain interest in numbers for very long. (By the way, I’m not blaming Ashley for not answering me a second time. In fact, maybe she did and it got lost in the ether. Nobody can watch that stuff all day, or read all of it, even when alerted to it.)

Then, a few days ago, Doug got on this kick of throwing HIS favorite numbers at us (similar to the Policy Council numbers, including federal spending and probably lottery money and the kitchen sink and all kinds of stuff that the Legislature has no control over, even though what we were talking about was the budget the Legislature was voting on), and did his usual thing of “Where are YOUR numbers?” and thumping his chest and all, and I thought about going back and digging up the real numbers and answering him, but I was then filled with ennui, because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, and I just wasn’t interested enough.

Because I know how bogus the whole conversation is. I experience state government. I follow what’s happening. I see the cuts, year after year. After all, we have 8,000 fewer state employees than in 1994, as Cindi Scoppe notes today (see, I just threw number at you, but I didn’t have to spend time digging them up, which is what matters to me)…

In fact, that is my purpose in posting on this subject. Cindi never gets bored looking at the budget, and she understands it better than most people, certainly better than most of the people who get to vote on it. Consider her an enabler of my fecklessness on the subject. I had her to worry about the budget for me for most of 22 years.

And she’s still doing it. In her column headlined “The fable of the spendthrift Legislature,” she summed it up pretty well. (It would have been a wonder if she hadn’t. The freaking thing was 30 inches long. But as I told her, “It read like 18.” Old editor joke.)

It’s worth a read. It puts things into perspective. It explains why it’s so bogus for Nikki Haley to perpetuate the myth (as did Mark Sanford) that the lawmakers are a bunch of spendthrifts out there “growing government” at a rate that exceeds the kind of bogus arbitrary caps that those two governors AND House leaders are always on about.

By the way, while the Senate won’t go along with arbitrary caps (thank goodness; they still believe in representative democracy instead of government by formula), in recent years we’ve stayed well within that population-plus-inflation formulation. The average annual increase in the general fund has been 2.4 percent since 1994 (the year the Republicans took over), including the non-recurring portion. The recurring part has grown by 1.8 percent a year.

And lawmakers are still appropriating less than they did five years ago. So these are not the biggest budgets ever.

Man, this is boring…

O’Connor to explore new journalistic frontier

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John O'Connor, looking all self-conscious at the Capital City Club this morning, on account of someone taking his picture. I need to come up with a sneakier way to do that.

More than 2,200 Twitter followers have been sorry to hear that John O’Connor is leaving The State. But they needn’t worry. He’ll keep Tweeting. He just might have to change his avatar.

John is moving to Tampa to work for NPR. The really cool thing about this is that it’s a new initiative. Not many journalists get to plow new ground. Oh, sure, there are thousands of us blogging and Tweeting away out here. What I mean is, not many of us get to try something new and get a steady paycheck for it.

NPR is hiring people to cover specific issues on the state level. John will be covering education in Florida. The emphasis will be on computer-assisted reporting — lots of number-crunching, to measure what is working and what isn’t. Florida has the reputation nationally of being willing to try anything, and it has: vouchers, charter schools, teacher evaluations (which may or may not be connected to merit pay; I’m not sure), and so forth. Currently, it’s doing all these things under one of the most unpopular governors in the country, so it’s quite a political stew. Although John will be concentrating more on the policy and the numbers than on the politics.

This will mean a lot of people (even more, he hopes) will continue to follow his Tweets, since the nation watches Florida on education policy. He will probably still have something to say occasionally about SC, since he’s been here for eight years and has been at the middle of so much here, covering the State House.

John will supplement his radio reports with a blog, which I will make sure to add to my blogroll as soon as it’s up and running.

He’s really pumped about the new opportunity, not least because the Orioles train in Sarasota (John’s from Baltimore). I look forward to watching him have great success in this cool new endeavor.

In case you wondered — Adam Beam (another of The State’s most aggressive users of social media) is moving from City Hall to cover John’s State House beat. And veteran Clif LeBlanc is taking Adam’s place covering the city.

Apparently, the NLRB is trying to save the country from us stupid Southerners

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Meant to share this with you the other day when I saw it. It was an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, sticking up for the NLRB for attacking Boeing’s plans to produce Dreamliners in SC:

We should be aghast that Boeing is sending a big fat market signal that it wants a less-skilled, lower-quality work force. This country is in a debt crisis because we buy abroad much more than we sell. Alas, because of this trade deficit, foreign creditors have the country in their clutches. That’s not because of our labor costs—in that respect, we can undersell most of our high-wage, unionized rivals like Germany. It’s because we have too many poorly educated and low-skilled workers that are simply unable to compete.

We depend on Boeing to out-compete Airbus, its European rival. But when major firms move South, it is usually a harbinger of quality decline. Over and over as a labor lawyer in the 1980s and ’90s, I saw companies move away from Chicago, where the pay was $28 an hour, to some place in South Carolina or Louisiana where the pay was about half that. While these moves aggrieved me as a union lawyer, it might have consoled me as an American if those companies went on to thrive globally.

But too often, alas, it was the beginning of the end, as it was for Outboard Marine Corporation, where I once represented workers. In the 1990s the company went from the high wage union North to the low wage South and was bankrupt by 2000. There are reasons workers in the North get $28 an hour while down in the South they get $14 or even $10. Adam Smith could explain it: “productivity,” “skill level,” “quality.”

Here is yet another American firm seeking to ruin its reputation for quality. Why? To save $14 an hour!…

This gross insult not only to SC workers, but to the ability of our technical college system to train them (which the system is perfectly capable of doing — ask BMW), is apparently supported by nothing more substantial than the fact that in SC, we will work for less money. I don’t suppose you can be in actual need of a job unless you’re a stupid Southerner, huh?

This was so over-the-top that I found myself wondering: Did the WSJ deliberately pick this piece because it was so ham-handed, just to make the NLRB’s case look worse than it already did? Surely not.

Anybody besides me remember this?

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Yeah, I’m still here. Been really busy with ADCO work. Maybe that’s a good sign for the economy. I don’t know; too soon to tell.

Anyway, we’re working on a couple of thing with environmental themes, and today I was brainstorming with our Creative Director (speaking of creative directors, I’m trying to carve out a niche in the ad game where all I do is what Don Draper does, which is look briefly at the product of someone else’s hard work and say, “That doesn’t work” — kind of like I used to do at the newspaper — then I’d have a drink and take a nap in my office), and… where was I before that parenthetical?

Oh, yeah. So suddenly it hit me. There’s no widely-understood symbol for environmental concerns. Not a single one, that could suggest everything — clean air and water, recycling, concern about climate change, conservation, carbon footprint, etc. Oh, you can do a stylized picture of a tree. Or the whole Earth, as seen from space (satisfied now, Stewart Brand?). But those could mean different things. And the recycling arrows are too specific. There’s the word, “green,” and you can do various visual things with that, but… there’s no one, shorthand symbol.

Then suddenly I thought of the theta symbol. But then I remembered it had been something like 40 years since I had seen that one used. But when it was used, it was used to express the whole shooting match. It was to environmentalism (which was a word we did NOT yet use, as I recall) what the peace symbol was to the antiwar movement.

I’m guessing people were turned off by the symbol’s association with death — which was, as I recall, one reason why it was used as a symbol for the movement. It was a warning that we were poisoning the Earth.

In any case, I once had a T-shirt with the above “Ecology Flag” on it. (Which the Web teaches me was created by artist Ron Cobb — not to be confused with the notorious SC lobbyist — in 1969.) At about the same time, I had a Kent State-themed one that was plain white in the front, with a big target on the back, with the word “Student” under it. I wore that around the USC campus in the fall of 1971 — my one semester as a Gamecock. Other kids wore garnet and black; I preferred to be different.

But I digress. Do any of y’all remember the theta being used to express ecological sensibilities, or am I alone here?

Recalling the national overreaction to that Edwards column

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A few days ago, Mike Fitts posted this on Facebook:

This seems like a good day to re-post my former boss’ column, written not all that long ago in the summer of 2007, about his gut feeling that John Edwards was “a big phony.” Got Brad Warthen national attention then, but all too obvious now.

Which I thought was nice of him to remember. I suppose it was because a certain person was back in the news…

Mike linked to the version at thestate.com, which is appropriate because that’s the one that got all the page views — 190,000 the first day, as I recall. Totally screwed up the stats for the paper’s website for the next year. Whenever the online folks presented stats at senior staff meetings, they had to explain, “We’re actually doing well, it’s just that is looks down because we’re up against that Edwards column of Brad’s…”

I was jealous of that traffic; it certainly would have been cool if it had gone to my blog. That would have been a huge hit — like months worth in a day. (Back then, I only got about 20,000 or 30,000 page views a month. You may be surprised to know that today, my traffic is closer to 200,000 a month — sometimes more, sometimes less.) Also, the version I had posted on my blog was better. I had written the column at home on my laptop and didn’t realize how long it was, and had to chop it down much more than I would have liked to get it into the paper. The version on my blog — the “director’s cut” — was shorter than the original, but quite a bit longer than the paper version. My point came across better in the blog version, because the anecdotes weren’t quite as truncated.

But still, the lesser version created a weird sort of splash. Still does. I got a letter just a week or two ago from a reader who says that he was an Edwards supporter and gave me grief in a letter at the time (I don’t recall), and is sorry now. But a lot of smart people didn’t see the problems with this guy at the time. In fact… I’ve told y’all before how I talked myself hoarse in a three-hour meeting to get the board to endorse Lieberman in the 2004 primary, right? What I may not have mentioned was that a couple of my colleagues wanted to back Edwards, and I was determined not to let that happen — so determined that I just won my point by exhausting everyone. I’m very glad not to have an Edwards endorsement on my record. (By the way, when people give me a hard time for how horribly Joe did in that primary, I have a ready answer: “Yeah, the voters went with Edwards. I’m more satisfied than ever that I was right.”)

I was shocked at the reaction the column got. It was just something I had had on a back burner for months. I had said something on my old blog about Edwards being a phony, and readers demanded to know what I meant, and when I realized how many words it would take to explain (being based on several encounters with the guy), I told them I would do a column sometime. I had been on vacation the week before I wrote this, and for one reason or another decided to take one more day — the following Monday — off as well. Feeling guilty, I told my colleagues that to make up for it, I’d whip out a column over the weekend, so nobody else would have to write one for Tuesday. This was an easy one to do, the “legwork” for it having been done inadvertently years before. So I dropped by the office Sunday just to check my memory on a couple of dates and such, wrote it that night at home, and turned it in on Monday morning — and didn’t think about it any more.

Then, the next morning, two people stopped me on the way into the building to talk about the column, and the reaction that was already manifest. I think Drudge had already picked it up. Later in the day, the column — or rather, the Edwards campaign’s reaction to it — was the LEDE political story on the Fox News site. As the week wore on, I was about worn out with media interview requests. I did as many as I could, including Dennis Miller’s show, which was fun. It was a day or so before I had any actual contact with the Edwards campaign (it led to no more than a lunch with the lovely Teresa Wells, in which she told me how wrong I was and I told her that no, I wasn’t). But I had heard that Mrs. Edwards, among others, had gone somewhat ballistic.

The media reaction surprised me. I hadn’t thought much of the column myself, and it was some time later before I figured out why the reaction was so much bigger than anything I could have imagined: The thing is, I had SO completely dismissed Edwards in my mind by that time. I had decided years earlier that I didn’t take him seriously, in spite of his having won the primary here in 2004. So who cared what I thought of him at that point, right? I mean, the column was still worth doing on a day when I just needed a column because he WAS still in the news. But I was convinced the nominee was going to be Obama or Clinton. And I just wasn’t seeing the enthusiasm for him in SC that had so alarmed me in 2004.

But a lot of folks, including national media, were very much taking him seriously still. Hence the reaction… And when I saw how the news stories about it were written, I realized: Oh. Everybody’s thinking, the editorial page editor of the largest newspaper in a state where Edwards HAS to win has just totally dismissed him. That’s the deal. The situation reminded me of that Mark Twain quote: “I was born modest; not all over, but in spots; and this was one of the spots.” It was one of those rare occasions when other people thought my opinion was a bigger deal than I thought it was. Doesn’t happen much.

I was reminded of this when the Mark Sanford Argentina thing broke. Sure it was a big story here, and pretty big nationally as well. I got that. But there’s a difference between a big story that everybody talks about, and something important enough to be the lede story in The New York Times. I’ve written before how the NYT has a VERY conservative, old school idea about its lede position — which I respect. As a front-page editor back in the 80s, I’m kind of old-school myself. There is a huge difference between the most interesting story of the day and the most important. Sometimes, the same story is both. This was not one of those times. I expected it to be a big story above the fold in The Times — maybe with a picture. But no, it was a simple, sober, one-column lede story. Which startled me.

Remember, I was helping out The New York Post on that one. (By the way, my first interaction with the Post had been when they asked to reprint the Edwards column. Dig the headline they put on it.) A story under my byline led that paper. But that was to be expected. That was the Post. I thought the NYT would have a greater sense of perspective — yes, interesting scandal, but not that earth-shattering, I thought they’d harrumph.

Here’s why I was wrong: Again, the national media were overestimating a South Carolina political figure. Since I knew Mark Sanford well, I didn’t take any of that “presidential contender” garbage seriously. The NYT did. Hence this wasn’t just a juicy scandal to them. It was a contender’s White House chances being dashed.

It’s interesting when you suddenly see things from another editor’s perspective…

Doug Nye, and the things we remember…

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A few days ago, I saw on Facebook where a mutual friend had visited Doug Nye, and he wasn’t doing well. And I thought, “I need to check on him,” and now he’s gone. My mom called me last night to say it was announced at the USC baseball game…

It’s funny the things you remember about people. Doug was a great guy to talk to about all sorts of things, and not just westerns. To many people he will be remembered as the Father of the Chicken Curse, in terms of having popularized the concept. There are complex permutations on the Curse beyond what Bill Starr wrote about this morning that I could get into, but that’s not what I remember best about Doug.

Here’s what I remember best, and most fondly: Doug and I had a number of conversations sharing our childhood memories of watching “Spaceship C-8,” a kiddie show on WBTW out of Florence, hosted by the late “Captain Ashby” Ward, who was also the news anchor. I really didn’t have all that many specific memories about the show (Doug, being older, remembered more), despite having spent many an hour watching it during the summers I spent with my grandparents in Bennettsville. (Doug watched it from another end of the coverage area — I want to say Sumter.) But I enjoyed talking about it with Doug on multiple occasions.

It was about way more than one kid’s show; it was about remembering an era, a time before media saturation. A time when WBTW was the only station you could reliably get clearly in B’ville with a home antenna (WIS also came in, depending on the weather). Then, in the late 60s, along came cable to small town America, LONG before it came to cities. That way, you could get all three networks, plus some duplicates from different cities. There was less demand in cities, because they could already get three or four channels.

Consequently, we spent an awful lot of time doing stuff other than watching TV, or engaging any other mass medium. A time that in many ways was about as close as Huck Finn’s fictional existence as it was to what kids experience today.

Odd, I suppose, that the thing I would remember best from knowing the longtime TV writer was talking about days that were practically pre-TV. But that’s what I remember. It won’t really mean anything to you, I suppose, but I’m confident it would make Doug smile.

I remember that, and the fact that, as I said, Doug was a great guy to talk to about anything. Always a ready grin (that’s why I know he’d smile at my trivial remembrance), the kind of naturally affable guy who you took a moment to chat with rather than just rushing past in the course of getting through a day’s deadlines. He stood out among newspapermen that way. Not that newspapermen were so awful; I just mean Doug stood out. Which is why so many will remember him fondly.

“Again with the negative waves, Moriarty!” (Redux)

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Yeah, I used that headline once before. But I’m making the point again.

This morning’s lead headline in The Wall Street Journal was tiresome:

Economic Outlook Darkens

Markets Stumble as Factories, Hiring Slow Down; Biggest Drop in Stocks in a Year

The drumbeat of bad news about the U.S. economy got louder on Wednesday, rattling financial markets and driving stocks to their biggest drop in a year.

The U.S. factory sector, which has been an engine of the recovery, notched its biggest one-month slowdown since 1984 as companies hit the brakes on hiring and production. Another report showed private-sector hiring dropped precipitously in May, prompting economists to ratchet down their expectations for the closely watched nonfarm payrolls report due on Friday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 279.65 points, or 2.2%, to 12290.14, its biggest point decline since June 4 of last year. Investors piled into the safety of Treasury bonds, sending yields on the 10-year note below 3% for the first time this year. Yields move in the opposite direction of price….

Sheesh. I’m not going to go on and on about my own unified field theory of the economy (after all, I couldn’t even get y’all to watch that hilarious Keynes and Hayek rap video), but in a nutshell it is this: All the bad economic indicators result, at some point down the line, from someone having a lousy attitude.

That applies whether you’re talking the stock market, or manufacturing figures, or retail sales, or jobs, what have you. We start tightening up, and things get as bad as we thought they were, or even worse.

So snap out of it, people! I’m a veteran of the front lines of this singularly monotonous war, and have no glory or medals to show for it. Just a lot of PTSD. Don’t need any more, thanks…

NLRB gives GOP chance to clearly be the good guys

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Yes, I know that was a split infinitive, but I like it that way.

I was glancing over this story on the front page this morning:

WASHINGTON — Business leaders and Republican politicians Tuesday accused President Barack Obama of punishing GOP states by trying to block Boeing from opening an aircraft plant in South Carolina.

… and it struck me what a gift the NLRB had given the Republican Party in South Carolina.

By doing something SO outrageous, so without justification, and so profoundly harmful to South Carolina (if successful), the NLRB has given our state’s Republicans an issue to rally around and present themselves clearly as champions of the state’s best interests.

This doesn’t happen often. Usually, the GOP has to manufacture nonsense to fulminate about, such as “the looming specter of Obamacare” or something equally ridiculous. But this is real, it has substance, and it is clearly an attack upon the economic well-being of South Carolinians.

No wonder Republicans are rallying together, forgetting their pettier differences, to make as much noise about it as possible.

Of course, there is some overreaching, with Jim DeMint accusing the president of the United States of “thuggery.” Because, you know, wishing for his “Waterloo” isn’t malicious enough. But that’s Jim DeMint. On the whole, this makes Republicans look good, and far less silly and ideological than usual. (YES, there are some big ideological issues at stake in this matter, but you don’t actually have to care about them to care about the outcome.)

As for Mr. Obama — it’s pertinent that Nikki Haley has asked him, personally, to weigh in on this. (Which I don’t believe he’s done yet, Mr. DeMint. If he has, someone please send me a link.) Not that he’ll want to. As much as I like Mr. Obama, we all have our faults, and one of his biggest is his unwillingness to oppose Big Labor, which crowds him into some really ridiculous positions, such as his longtime, indefensible opposition to the Colombia Free Trade agreement.

This issue puts the president right where the SC GOP wants him. Since, you know, they mean him ill and want him to look bad. More to the point, it puts them in the position to look very good.

Me, I don’t care who looks good, as long as the bid to derail this project fails.

Yeah, that was me on the radio again

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The last couple of days, I’ve been getting compliments about my performance on Michael Feldman’s “Whad’Ya Know?” over the weekend — two or three people at Rotary yesterday mentioned it, and I just got a Facebook message from Bill Day in Memphis.

Thing is, that was a rerun — from April 2009. This is the third time they’ve run it, and I haven’t heard it on the radio yet (although I have listened to parts of it online).

That would be sort of interesting to hear again. I might go back and listen online sometime. That was in the first weeks after I was laid off, during the period that Mark Sanford was trying to deny South Carolina the stimulus money we would all be eventually paying for (and before he went to Argentina), and as I recall we talked about those things. I imagine that now it would sound kind of like a time capsule.

Anyway, I had a good time doing it.

NLRB launches attack on Boeing, SC

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Well, here’s a nice acid test on how you feel about unions and economic development. See what you think of this:

NLRB files complaint against Boeing over N. Charleston plant

By Matt Tomsic
[email protected]

The National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint today, calling for Boeing to open a second 787 final assembly line in Washington state to remedy what it calls an illegal transfer of work to non-union facilities in North Charleston.

Boeing is building a multi-million dollar facility near Charleston International Airport to complement its first final assembly line in the Seattle area.

The board is pursuing an order to require Boeing to maintain a second assembly line in Washington state, though the complaint does not ask for the line in South Carolina to be closed, according to a news release from the NLRB….

You know, I’m not sure the federal gummint wants to pull something like this on SC so soon after the anniversary of our firing on Fort Sumter.

Nice of the NLRB not to “ask for” Boeing to shut down in SC. No, it’s just saying the company has to open a line it doesn’t need.

Wow. I’m with Lindsey Graham on this one:

“This is one of the worst examples of unelected bureaucrats doing the bidding of special interest groups that I’ve ever seen,” Graham said in a statement emailed from his office. “In this case, the (National Labor Relations Board) is doing the bidding of the unions at great cost to South Carolina and our nation’s economy.”

Another great opportunity to help Harvest Hope

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Did you see the Steven Mungo op-ed in The State Sunday? In it, he explains why he and his family are such staunch supporters of Harvest Hope Food Bank and its vital mission of feeding the increasing numbers of hungry folks in the Midlands and beyond. And they don’t just do it as a feel-good thing:

We all do this not just because it sounds like a worthwhile cause, but because we believe Harvest Hope gets the job done. It’s efficient and effective.

Harvest Hope is a very lean organization, as I have learned from closely observing it. It actually does better than give a dollar’s worth of aid for a dollar’s donation. If everybody ran their business the way Harvest Hope does, a lot fewer of us would have gotten in trouble when the recession hit.

Don’t know if you heard (even though I was Tweeting it out every day), but the $150,000 match offered by the Mungos was double-matched as of April 1. And that’s a tremendous response by the community. Of course, it gets Harvest Hope less than a fourth of the way to the $2 million it needs.

So it’s great to see that another prominent local business has stepped to the fore to make an offer identical to that of the Mungos:

Harvest Hope Announces New Matching

Campaign by Southeastern Freight Lines

(Columbia) Harvest Hope Food Bank announces the beginning of a new matching campaign sponsored by Southeastern Freight Lines. The generosity of Southeastern Freight Lines will result in a $150,000 contribution to Harvest Hope once the food bank reaches $300,000 in donations.

Southeastern Freight Lines is headquartered in Lexington and has more than 6,600 employees. “Our commitment to employees has enabled the company to build a culture of customer service excellence over our 60-year history, and we are just as committed to the communities we serve,” said Tobin Cassels, president of Southeastern Freight Lines. “We recognize the enormity of Harvest Hope’s mission and want to do our part in making sure hungry families in our community have a safety net to give them hope. We are proud to work with Harvest Hope in an effort to put food on the tables across 20 counties.”

In March Harvest Hope announced that the combination of an increase in service demand and operating costs combined with a decrease in donations had resulted in a financial crisis and they issued an appeal to the public for funding help to raise $2 million. Almost immediately, Mungo Homes staked a $150,000 matching campaign if Harvest Hope could double that amount in donations.

On Friday, April 1 Harvest Hope’s donations reached $306,293.67 which qualified them for Mungo Home’s $150,000 matching donation. With over $450,000 in donations, Harvest Hope is now almost ¼ of the way toward their $2 million goal.

Harvest Hope wishes to thank Mungo Homes for their continued generosity, and is pleased to announce that Southeastern Freight Lines has stepped up to help them achieve their funding goal. With the completion of Southeastern Freight’s generous matching campaign Harvest Hope will have achieved half of its $2 million dollar funding goal.

About Southeastern Freight Lines

Southeastern Freight Lines, a privately-owned regional less-than-truckload transportation services provider founded in 1950, specializes in next-day service in the Southeast and Southwest and operates 76 service centers in 12 states and Puerto Rico. Southeastern has a network of service partners to ensure transportation services in the remaining 38 states, Canada, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Mexico. Southeastern Freight Lines provides more than 99.35% on-time service in next day lanes. A dedication to service quality and a continuous quality improvement process that began in 1985 has been recognized by more than 300 quality awards received from customers and associations. Southeastern Freight Lines subsidiary, Southeastern Logistics Solutions, provides expedited service and multi-modal transportation services across the nation through strategic capacity partnerships. For more information, please visit www.sefl.com.

For more information about Harvest Hope’s mission to feed the hungry in 20 South Carolina counties, visit www.harvesthope.org.

That was announced last week, and since then $42,405 has been contributed toward the $300,000 needed to match. This is good progress, but we as a community have a long way to go to meet the huge need.

For more background on Harvest Hope’s critical need, read my former post on the subject. And going forward, watch my Twitter feed for updates…

Which of these best exemplifies the uninhibited nature of the genre?

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Really, really, REALLY have to get a bunch of nonblog stuff done today, and don’t know when I’ll get back to you. So while I’m doing it, ponder the question I just posed on Twitter:

What’s the best full-momentum, unleashed rock ‘n’ roll song: Seger’s “Katmandu,” CCR’s “Travelin’ Band,” or Elvis’ “Hard-Headed Woman”?

Why those three? Well, I was coming back from an errand with a cup of Starbucks, and “Katmandu” came on the radio. And I thought, what’s better — at what it does — than that? And the answer quickly came — “Travelin’ Band” and the best of all, “Hard-Headed Woman.”

Oops. I just gave away the answer. Well, my answer. This is one of these things where opinions are just that, without anyone being right (and despite what some people think, not everything is like that). So I’m really interested in what you think, as your opinions on the matter are just as valid as mine (he said with an air of self-congratulatory generosity and a tone of condescension).

Bonus question: To follow the Hornby orthodoxy, what other two songs sharing those characteristics would fill out the Top Five?

Congratulations, Innovista, on landing Ann Marie!

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A little earlier, I sent an e-mail to Ann Marie Stieritz congratulating her on her new job:

Ann Marie Stieritz has been named director of business solutions for Innovista at the University of South Carolina.

Stieritz has worked in the S.C. Technical College System for the past four years, most recently as vice president for economic development and workforce competitiveness.

Her responsibilities will include recruiting high-tech businesses to the Midlands and serving as the liaison between USC’s researchers and the business community.

Don Herriott, director of Innovista partnerships, said, “I have worked with Ann Marie on various boards and projects. She has demonstrated exceptional capability and leadership in her role at the South Carolina Technical College System, especially in her economic development and workforce development programs. I am confident that she will provide the industry connectivity that Innovista needs.”

Stieritz has a background in education, workforce and economic development. At the S.C. Technical College System, she has overseen the system’s two nationally recognized economic and workforce development programs, as well as other statewide initiatives that have enhanced the state’s competitiveness through education and training, USC said.

She is former statewide coordinator for 12 Regional Education Centers, which coordinate education, workforce and economic development with business and industry initiatives to develop education and workforce readiness strategies…

But then I realized that I had it all wrong! Congratulating Ann Marie was as wrong-headed, as déclassé, as congratulating the bride on her engagement.

Actually the congratulations are due to Innovista. So, Innovista, I give you joy of your new hire.

Don Herriott was a good call. He did what he should, immediately shifting the conversation about a couple of buildings to the much, much broader concept about what the juxtaposition of an urban research university and all this undeveloped land overlooking a river can add up to.

So is this. Ann Marie’s intelligence and drive will be just what Innovista needs for this movement to take off. I look forward to watching her make that happen.

It’s a pretty big alumni club

Stuff I keep meaning to get to…

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I’ve mentioned this before; it’s the central conflict in blogging, or at least the greatest frustration: If you just sit at your keyboard all day, consuming the proverbial coffee and skittles, you can stay completely on top of what you want to say — posting 10 or more times a day, keeping your readers engaged and building your readership.

Trouble is, you won’t have a lot of value to contribute. If, on the other hand, you’re getting out and interacting with the world, reading, talking to people, covering events and otherwise accumulating knowledge and experience that would add value to the blog, would make your posts more informative and up-to-date… then you don’t have time to blog.

Back when I was at the paper, I felt this most keenly during endorsement season, when I was doing as many as four endorsement interviews a day. No, I wasn’t getting out, but people who WERE getting out, knocking on doors in the community and listening to thousands of people, were coming to me and answering any questions I chose to ask. (And my favorite questions, in terms of the interesting answers I’d get, were the open-ended ones, such as, “What are you hearing out there?”) This, combined with what I myself was hearing in the community, added all sorts of context to the positions we would take. But most of what I learned in those interviews just went into my notebook and stayed entombed there. Maybe, maybe a line or two of the unique insights gained from talking to that person would make it into the endorsement editorial. Maybe (because a lot more went into the decision than what was learned in an interview). The rest would collect dust. And I thought that was a waste. It’s one of the reasons that I started blogging: to have a place to put that stuff.

But… I could never keep up with the pace. There just were not enough hours in the day. I would set out each election cycle to file a moderate-sized report on each interview, such as this one and this one and this one and this one, sharing with people the unique stuff that added depth and context to our understanding of the candidate. But the pace of interviews was such that I always fell behind. I’d start doing wrapup posts or columns to merely acknowledge that the interviews took place, but even that would eventually become too much, given everything that I had to do in a day. Once or twice, in desperation, I just put up a bunch of pictures from the interviews I’d been in, as useless as I knew that was (I was just doing it to offer an excuse, showing readers how BUSY I was) I would always intend to get back to posting that stuff, but at some point (say, election day), it all became moot and I had to move on.

I face similar frustrations today. Right now, I’ve got four good posts dying on the vine because I didn’t have time to post about them (each required a little legwork — an extra interview, or time spent listening to a recording to get some key quotes right — that I could not find time for in the day or two that I SHOULD have posted them). And in the meantime, I post a lot of silly, inconsequential posts that I DO have time for, but aren’t nearly as worthwhile.

In one form or another, I still hope to get to all of them. But until I do, I’ll just briefly acknowledge them here:

Something about nuclear energy policy in the wake of the Japan disaster. Bottom line, we can’t abandon nuclear, and shouldn’t. Meant to get this discussion started the week of the quake. But every day since then, there is SO much more I need to read and consider before I frame it, and it just gets harder and harder. I keep collecting links, saying “gotta read that before I write it,” and it gets harder and harder to get to.
Copper theft. This one hit home a couple of weeks ago when ADCO’s air conditioners were destroyed for some copper coils, and I interviewed Chief Randy Scott about the overall issue, and he mentioned a bill in the Legislature related to the problem, and I’ve been meaning to get with the sponsor and chat about it, and it hasn’t happened. And Chief Scott’s probably wondering why he made time for me, since I haven’t written about it.
Bob Inglis. I mentioned that I was going to speak at that conference at Furman, at the Riley Institute, about politics and media, way back on St. Patrick’s Day (another thing I need to get to — take down that out-of-date ad about the event). It was a good event, but the best part was NOT the panel I participated in. The best part came after, when Vincent Sheheen and Bob Inglis (whom Inglis referred to as the contenders for president of the Local Losers Club) sat with Mark Quinn and talked about the state of politics in SC and the nation. I was particularly impressed by some of the stuff Inglis said — Inglis has always impressed me, even when (perhaps I should say, especially when) I disagree with him. But I need to go back and transcribe part of the recording, because there’s a whole section of what he said I want to post. Haven’t gotten to it. But as old as this is, what he had to say remains highly relevant.
Energy conference at Moore School. Last week, Lindsey Graham and the UK Minister of Energy and Climate Change were at USC talking Energy Policy. The minister, Greg Barker, had interesting things to say about how the Tories rebranded themselves as pro-green, and what they’re trying to do about it, and Graham had some things to say about how it would be nice to be able to get things done in Washington the way they do in London (he seemed particularly wistful about the ability in a coalition government to work across party lines without getting keelhauled by one’s own party for it). All very interesting from an Energy Party perspective. I was there for the whole thing, shot lots of pictures and videos… and haven’t gotten to it, mainly because there’s too much to get to. Big irony here is that I helped (slightly) the British consulate spread the word about this among media types — and haven’t written about it myself.

Now, some wag will say I could have gotten one of those things done in the time it took to gripe about not having the time to get them done. Nope; this was quicker. And I just accomplished the task of putting extra pressure on myself to write one or more of these at some point.

Or maybe it’s all in vain; I don’t know. But I keep trying.

Filling young minds with wisdom (lots and lots and lots of it…)

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Busy day — speaking this morning, speaking tonight. Yakkety-yak. In fact, if you’re the last-minute type, you might want to attend the Politics and Media Conference at The Riley Institute at Furman tonight. I’m on a panel with some media types, followed by another panel with Bob Inglis and Vincent Sheheen. In fact, I’d better run if I’m going to get up there (no Virtual Front Page today, I’m afraid). They’ll feed me if I get there in time. But before I go, about this morning’s appearance…

Kelly Payne, the former state superintendent of education candidate who teaches a “Current Issues” class at Dutch Fork High School, is one of those… intense kinds of teachers you may remember from your own schooldays. A teacher with certain expectations. I remember them, because slackers like me tended to run afoul of them sometimes.

Anyway, Kelly asked me to come out today for a second time to speak to her class, so I guess it went OK the first time. I wanted to go straight to questions and answers, knowing the kids would have questions (I prefer that as a speaker; I don’t have to think as hard), but she asked me to talk for a few minutes first about “SC Politics,” so I started speaking nonstop about why we’re so different, why people say “there’s the South, there’s the Deep South, and there’s South Carolina,” starting with Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke and the colonial period an The War and what followed, generally explaining to them in FAR more detail than they want to know why we have some of the problems we have, and why we are SO resistant to changing that fact, and…

… once they were good and glassy-eyed, I asked them to throw their questions at me. Because I knew they had some. In most high school classes I’ve spoken to (admittedly, I don’t do it often; I generally shy away from anything earlier than post-grad, because there’s only so much of that bored-kids look you can take), you can wait awhile for a question.

But not Kelly Payne’s class — because of what I said about intensity, and expectations and such.

I knew there were questions because they were printed out on the lectern in front of me, pages of them, with kids’ names attached. They were to ask them in order. So we got started. Unfortunately, the 90-minute class was over before we could get to all of them. In fact, we only got to the first eight. I like to give thorough answers. Anyway, here are ALL the questions, since they bothered to compile them:

Hailey

1. Explain the difficulties you’ve experienced in transitioning from being a full-time journalist to your current activities.

Horace

2. Since you were last here the media hasn’t made much progress in gaining the public trust. What will it take for it to improve at doing so?

Venisha

3. When you were an editor at the paper, did you have other editors to check your grammar and spelling to keep you from making mistakes?

Hannah Jane

4. How significant a factor are your feelings about a topic when you write a story? If you’re really angry or really happy about a topic do those emotions impair your objectivity?

Jaquarius

5. How can social media be an effective tool in reporting? What social media platforms do you use (e.g., texting, Twitter, Facebook) to deliver news content?

Ruby

6. What do you miss most about your old job at the paper?

Eric

7. Do blogs really move public opinion or do they just provide “some fun” for people in the Echo Chamber to take anonymous shots? Is there any way to assure a little more fairness in blogs?

Taylor

8. What do you think about requiring public officials who hire bloggers to shill for them to disclose those relationships in order to improve transparency and increase public trust?

Katherine

9. If elected officials make blog comments hiding behind assumed names, wouldn’t the publics’ interest in transparency and its desire for more civil conversation be better met by calling on those public officials to “man-up,” take ownership of their comments, and stop hiding behind assumed names?

Kelsi

10. How do you rationalize disagreements between your religious convictions and

your political beliefs? (i.e., gay rights)

Marshall

11. What should the response of the United States be to Gadahfi’s suppression of his own people?

Taylor

12. You’ve criticized the Governor for her appointment on the USC Board of Trustees. Please explain why you don’t believe that election outcomes matter.

Katherine

13. You seem very focused on the need for the Governor and her team to guard against “gender politics” yet your profession admonishes society on the need to be “gender sensitive.” Please explain this dichotomy.

Kelsi

14. Eleanor Kitzman recently spoke to our class and we loved her. Why do you criticize her for defending the Governor’s honor and performance given the Governor selected her for that position?

Lexie

15. Why do you think being loyal to the Governor makes Eleanor Kitzman disloyal to the other four Budget & Control Board members?

Shaun

16. The Governor has talked about more transparency with legislative votes and the Treasurer has talked about “calendar transparency.” Which of these ideas do you think is the most sophomoric?

Christian

17. Given that Senator Sheheen and the Governor are about the same age, why is he more appealing to young people?

Kenneth

18. What do you think should be done to keep deep pockets from having an excessive influence on election outcomes? (i.e., Bloomberg, Schumer, candidates supported by Howard Rich, etc.)

Christie

19. How soon do you think it will be before we see meaningful restructuring in state government?

Ben

20. Which of our Constitutional Officers would it make more sense to appoint? Explain your reasons.

Hailey

21. What’s your opinion of eliminating the Budget & Control Board and replacing it with a Department of Administration reporting to the Governor?

Andrew

22. Give the best reason to support and the best reason to oppose the Voter ID Bill?

Kenneth

23. Please explain the post you recently wrote on daylight savings time.

Evan

24. What is the legacy you hope to leave?

25. What do you think about paying teachers based on classroom outcomes?

26. Why are the two major political parties so segregated along racial lines?

27. How can South Carolina Republicans be so diverse as to have elected two Republican Senators that are so different in their ideology? (Lindsey Graham, Jim DeMint….earmarks)

28. I’m optimistic about the next generation of public servants — my fellow classmates and me– who will soon by making decisions that impact our daily lives. What advice can you give us as we move in this direction?

Frankly, with that many questions, I could have talked for a month. But it was great. Been pressed for time, I was really antsy this morning about all I had to do, and ran late and got lost (turns out that Kelly Payne doesn’t teach at Dutch Fork Middle School, which I went to first — they have a nice office — even though I’d been to the right place previously), and I was rattled.

But driving away, I felt nice and relaxed. Ninety minutes of high-speed, non-stop, stream-of-consciousness talking does that for me. It probably doesn’t do all that much for the people listening (so it’s nice when they HAVE to sit there and listen, or get a flunking grade), but I find it… calming. Probably why Freud was such a hit back in the day.

If I don’t hit the road, they won’t feed me in Greenville. As Vincent Sheheen’s Uncle Bob always used to say to bring interviews to a sudden stop: Gottagobye.

And yes, that IS a picture of me, speaking to the class last year, in the upper left-hand corner. Kelly's like that. Very thorough.

By the way, I’m available for that Aflac gig

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Don’t think it would have occurred to me to wonder about this at any point in my newspaper life, but now that I’m into the whole marketing/PR/Mad Man thing now, I find myself wondering about stuff like this…

So I hear that Aflac has fired Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of their duck. You know, the one that says “Aflac!” Here’s something about it, although you’ve probably already heard:

He’ll quack for Aflac no more.

Insurance giant Aflac axed comic Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of its iconic duck yesterday after he posted jokes on Twitter about the quake and tsunami in Japan.

“I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘They’ll be another one floating by any minute now,’ ” was among the dozen tweets Gottfried fired off over the weekend….

I first heard about it at breakfast this morning, and didn’t think anything of it (no skin off my beak), then heard it again at ADCO later, and at that point thought, “Wait a minute…”

Why, I wonder, did they turn to Gilbert Gottfried to do the Aflac duck to begin with? I mean, he’s moderately famous, although irritating, and you pay a premium for that. Agents to feed and all. What was the value they got from that?

Because, while I was well aware of the ad campaign — it’s memorable, and sort of clever in an absurd way — I never knew that that was Gilbert Gottfried doing it. Sure, when you hear it, it sounds like Gilbert Gottfried… but it sounds like Gilbert Gottfried when I say “Aflac!” in a nasal quack, too. (Brian from ADCO agreed when he heard me do it at lunch today. I don’t just say these things, people; I check to confirm first. Back off; I’m a professional.)

It really doesn’t take any special talent. And unless they were getting a bounce from people knowing it was Gottfried, why pay him to do it?

So… here’s what I’m thinking. If Aflac is hard up, I’ll do the duck voice for them from now on. I might even do it at a discount from what they were paying Gottfried. And I won’t make horrible jokes about the poor Japanese, or any other suffering people.

I can use the phone to get that new iPhone or HTC Thunderbolt (which I think is coming out Thursday!) or whatever I get to replace my moribund Blackberry, which is definitely on its last legs. So this couldn’t have happened at a better time.

I hope I’m making this offer in time, before they line up someone else… You gotta move fast these days…

Daylight Savings Time is unnatural, decadent and depraved!

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OK, now it’s what… not quite 10 a.m…. and I’m running out of steam. Feel the need for a nap. Stopped myself at two mugs of real coffee this morning, figuring I’ll need some later and not wanting to overdo, peak too soon with the caffeine, but now that I’m finally ready to really get started on the day — breakfast, meetings, etc., out of the way… here comes the drowsiness.

Got up this morning in the dark. Shaved, showered, dressed, headed out to the truck to drive to work. Still dark. Took a seat by the window at breakfast downtown, overlooking the city… still dark. Could hardly read the paper. I was halfway done eating before the sun had completely popped above the horizon.

Part of it’s my fault. Decided to give up sleep for Lent. That is to say, decided instead of beer or whatever this time, I would finally start getting up about an hour earlier. Yeah, I know, you’re thinking that Lent isn’t really for self-improvement, New-Year’s-resolution, been-meaning-to-do-that kinds of things, but at Ash Wednesday mass I thought it through, got all the theology worked out in my head (don’t ask me to explain it all; just trust me — it made sense at the time), and this is what I’m doing. Too late to do beer instead at this point.

But the REAL culprit, the one I’m choosing to blame, is my old nemesis Daylight Savings Time.

I’ve always hated it. Sure, I suppose it’s great for people who live for several hours’ yard work after getting home from the office, but I am NOT one of those people. I wish I were. My wife would think more of me if I were, and no one’s opinion of me matters more, but I’m not. Not that fond of sunshine at all, in fact, which is not something I want to admit, what with all that “They that do evil fear the light” propaganda, but it’s true. Sun comes out, my wife looks for sunny spot in the yard and gets to work. I say, “I have to go out in THIS? Where are my flip-up shades?” Me, I love English weather; I think it’s encoded into my gene structure. Clouds, light mist. And it’s good for the crops.

Speaking of crops, it occurs to me that if we were all farmers, we wouldn’t have Daylight Savings Time. What would be the use of it? You have to get up and milk the cows in the dark anyway, and the sooner the sun rises after that, the better. You work the same number of hours regardless, so what does it matter what the clock says? No, DST is a manifestation of this modern economy, a perversion of the natural order. And I, for one, do not have enough generations of evolution behind me to adjust to it.

The thing is, it divorces clock time from any tenuous connection it has to the natural world. Clock time is a fiction, an imposition of false order on reality. Unlike the year, the day, and in some cases the month, clock time — hours, minutes, seconds — have NO basis in reality, aside from the rough relationship between a second and a heartbeat.

There’s only one way it makes sense, and that’s if noon is at the moment that the sun reaches its zenith. We should do like on the old sailing ships. The captain should assemble his midshipmen on the quarterdeck, have them all shoot the sun with their sextants, and when someone says “I make it noon,” and others confirm, the officer of the deck tells the quartermaster “Make it so,” and your day is based in something real. Turn the glass and strike the bell.

Without that, it’s just a lie, every time we allow our lives to be governed by the clock in any way, shape or form while we are in this unnatural state. A lie I can actually FEEL in my bones. And we’ll all be living this lie until the autumn.

Just to say something you don’t hear all that often

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The quixotic demonstration at the State House yesterday by citizens sick of seeing our state’s infrastructure rapidly eroding under the stewardship of shortsighted politicians was of course an exercise in futility.

But I’m no stranger to that. A few minutes ago, looking for a link for a previous post that needed one, I went back to the last week of posts on my old blog I had at the paper, and ran across this forgotten item — which, as it happens, was day after the post in which I announced that I had been laid off:

Good job rejecting the tuition caps

This might sound strange coming from a guy who was already counting pennies (or quarters, anyway — I miscounted how many I had this morning in my truck, and ended up with a parking ticket because I didn’t have enough for the meter), with my two youngest daughters still in college. And now I’m about to be unemployed.

But I’m glad the House rejected tuition caps at S.C. colleges and universities. I have an anecdote to share about that.

Remember the recent day when college students wandered the State House lobbying lawmakers on behalf of their institutions. They wanted the state to invest in higher education the way North Carolina and Georgia have. Either that day, or the day after, I had lunch with Clemson President James Barker, and he told me an anecdote he had witnessed: He said the students were pressing a lawmaker NOT to support the tuition caps, because they were worried about their institutions being even more underfunded — they hardly get anything from the state — some are down below 20 percent funding by the state, and the rest has to come from such sources as tuition, federal research grants and private gifts. Eliminate the ability to raise tuition, and the institution’s ability to provide an excellent education is significantly curtailed. If we want lower tuitions, the state should go back to funding higher percentages of the schools’ budgets, the way our neighboring states with better higher ed systems do.

The lawmaker listened to the kids, and then said with great condescension, maybe you kids don’t care if tuition goes up, but I’ll bet your parents would like a cap. He thought he had them there, but the kids set him straight: None of their parents were paying the bills. These kids were working their way through schools and paying for it all themselves. And they didn’t want to see the quality of what they were working so hard to pay for be degraded by an artificial cap on tuition. The lawmaker had not counted on getting that answer.

I wish I had been there to see it, because I’ve been in a similar place before. Back in 95 or 96, Speaker Wilkins had brought his committee chairs to see us, and I started challenging the wisdom of their massive rollback of property taxes paid for school.One of them allowed as how he bet I was glad to get that couple of hundred dollars I didn’t have to pay. And I answered him that I was ashamed that I was paying so little through my property tax to support schools that I knew needed more resources. He said smugly that he was sure I wouldn’t want to give it back. I told him I didn’t see as how there was any channel for doing that, but if he could point me to the right person who would take my money and see it gets to the right place, I would pay the difference. He didn’t have a good answer for that.

It would be great if our lawmakers would stop assuming that all of us in South Carolina are so greedily shortsighted that we can’t see past our personal desire to pay less money, and that we are corruptible by a scheme to starve colleges of reasonable support.

Reading that now, with all that’s happened since — the rise of the Tea Party, the eagerness of Republicans, demoralized after their 2008 defeat, to embrace destructive extremism (and of course, what happens to the Republican Party as happens to South Carolina, which it dominates), the election of Nikki Haley over more experienced, less extreme candidates of both parties — it reads like thoughts from another century. And, of course, another place.

Imagine, even dreaming of our state caring enough about education to invest in it the way our neighboring states have, much less suggesting that we do so. How anachronistic can one get? All that’s happened since then is that South Carolina has run, faster every day, in the opposite direction — with out elected leaders firmly convinced that that is not only the right direction in which to run, but the only one.

bradwarthen.com

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