Category Archives: Working

We’re nowhere near Barstow, but the drugs have begun to take hold

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Just glanced out my window while cross my office to my desk, as the sun was setting, and could have sworn the 101st Airborne Division, circa 1944, was drifting down from the sky over the Congaree River.

Turns out, upon a double-take, it was just some small scraps of dark cloud that happened to be roughly WWII-era parachute-shaped, in the same sense that the beacon at Castle Anthrax was grail-shaped ("Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot!")

More about the drugs later. And yes, the headline is a Fear and Loathing reference.

A visit from the speaker

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Well, it's begun.

The Legislature convenes next Tuesday, and in anticipation of that, House Speaker Bobby Harrell came by to see us yesterday afternoon.

On his mind were the following:

  • Number one, the economy. Emphasizing the state's alarming unemployment rate, he said he recently met with Commerce Secretary Joe Taylor to express the speaker's willingness to provide him with whatever tools he needs. After I brought up his past criticism of the agency, Mr. Harrell insisted that we not report him as being critical of Commerce now. The closest he came to anything disparaging was the observation that Commerce had been "scoring points, not winning the game" lately. Other than that, he was Mr. Supportive.
  • Employment Security Commission. You may recall that before Christmas, Mr. Harrell said, "It is inconceivable that Governor Sanford hasn’t already made this
    request of the federal government, and it would be tragic if he allows
    jobless benefits to run out, particularly at this time of year." Now he was at pains to point out that he believes the agency should supply the info the gov wants, and he said he'll sign a letter next week calling for an audit. This is not inconsistent; it's not far from our position — yes, the agency should provide such info readily, no, the governor shouldn't play "chicken" with unemployment benefits.
  • Cigarette tax. As one who once opposed the increase outright, Mr. Harrell now counts himself among those reconciled to its inevitability. The sticking point, as always, is what it should be spent on. (As you now, our position is that whatever you spend it on, it should be passed, because it undoubtedly will reduce teen smoking.) He noted that he supported the governor's veto last year on that score. He would like to see the money (and the federal Medicaid match) spent on making health insurance more available to small businesses. He said Oklahoma has recently shown a way to do that — it would require a waiver from the feds.
  • Education funding formula. My notes were sketchy here, but he was talking about revamping the whole funding system. I'll check with Cindi later to remind me what he said about this; in the meantime consider this a placeholder — I mention it only so that you know it was one of the things that was on his mind. All my notes say is "Education formula… The whole pot… They've been melting… a lot." And I confess that makes little sense to me, much less to you.
  • Roads. He wants more money for road maintenance, but he does not want to raise the gasoline tax, which is how we fund roads in SC. He would instead devote car sales taxes — what little we get in sales tax, given the $300 cap — to roads. He did not specify what he would NOT fund from the general fund to do that.
  • Restructuring. He promised to push for a Dept. of Administration.
  • Tax reform. He said a BRAC-style tax reform commission would be a good idea, but he offered two amendments to what biz leaders have advocated. Rather than have no legislators on the commission, he would have about a fourth of the panel be lawmakers. His reasoning is that lawmakers could school other members as to the feasibility of the ideas (which sounds suspiciously like a way to keep out good ideas the Legislature doesn't like, but maybe that's just me and my suspicious nature). He also said that rather than making it impossible for lawmakers to amend the plan, he would allow for amendment with a big supermajority — say 75 percent. His stated reasoning on that is to prevent some minor technical flaw from sinking the whole plan. He believes the supermajority requirement would eliminate the danger of narrow interests killing the overall plan. One more point on tax reform: He thinks it should be done in two stages — deal with the host of sales tax exemptions first, then the rest of the tax structure.

Those are the main topics he brought up. In answer to questions, he said:

  • A payday lending bill — one to more tightly regulate the industry, but not out of existence — will likely come out of the session.
  • He likes the governor's idea of eliminating the corporate income tax — an idea he traces to Ronald Reagan (at which point all Republicans murmur "Peace Be Upon Him" or something equally reverential). But he doesn't like the idea of eliminating economic incentives.
  • In response to our noting that the governor seems to want to step up his voucher efforts, the Speaker said he's supportive, but doesn't think it will pass.
  • Roll call voting. He defended his rules change to increase transparency, which he believes addresses the "key concerns" — such as spending legislation, the budget overall, anything affecting lawmakers' pay or benefits, ethics or campaign finance and the like. He totally dismissed the idea that his handling of Nikki Haley and Nathan Ballentine was out of line, or anything personal. As for his not telling Nikki in person he was kicking her off the committee, such has "always been done by sending a letter."
  • Cindi was just starting to ask about the one thing liable to occupy most of the House's energy this year — passing a budget in light of plummeting revenues — when the Speaker said he had to leave for another interview for which he was already late (Keven Cohen's show). Rest assured Cindi will follow up. (If I'd realized how short on time we were, I would have insisted we start on that overriding topic earlier.)

One more thing worthy of note: This was the first time Mr. Harrell asked to come in for a pre-session board meeting. Predecessor David Wilkins did it as a more or less annual ritual, bringing his committee chairs (including Mr. Harrell) along with him.

They threw away my Obama bottle!

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My brother, who will be 50 on his next birthday, still complains about the tremendous financial reversal he suffered when Mom threw out his baseball cards.

Well, I can top him on that: I returned from vacation, and the new cleaning people who started here last week had thrown out my Barack Obama water bottle! So much for my best opportunity to get rich on E-Bay.


You may or may not be aware that all things Obama are hot. You would definitely know this if you 
worked here and saw the people lined up in our lobby to buy copies of the Nov. 5 front page pictured at right. And that was just a reproduction of a page ABOUT Obama.

So just imagine how much I could have gotten for a water bottle with actual Obama DNA on it. I had picked it up when I was gathering up my stuff from the table after our editorial board interview on Jan. 21 of last year. Actually, I wasn't entirely clear on whether it was HIS water bottle or MINE. But then, the photographic evidence indicates I was drinking coffee, while he was drinking water (from my special Initech cup from "Office Space"), not water, so it was most likely his (of course, I also have a photo below in which he had no water bottle before him, but what are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?). The photo above, by the way, is a blown up detail from the wider shot back on this post.

Anyway, I had left it on a credenza on the other side of my office, and it had sat there unmolested for 11 months. Every once in a while I'd look at it and wonder what I should do with it, then promptly forgot about it.

When I went on vacation Dec. 26, I cleaned up my office. My desk was spotless. There was no debris apparent anywhere — except for that old water bottle, which I no longer noticed. But obviously our new cleaning people did. They were getting paid to clean the office, and that was the only thing that looked out of place to them. Just my luck. (I only realized it was gone when I used a water bottle to water a dying plant — which I see the cleaning people or somebody had also trimmed back from where it had been trailing on the floor, and started to leave the bottle next to the plant, but thought that wouldn't be tidy, and happened to think of the Obama bottle…)

Weirdly, they left an empty water bottle on my window sill that says "Galivants Ferry Stump, May 1, 2006" on it. I guess it was more obviously a souvenir.

Of course, it might not have been the cleaning people. But I don't think my Mom has a key to my office, so they're at the top of the list. And there's nothing I can do about it, because they have a perfect comeback — it looked like trash. In this sort of dispute, the authorities never side with the pack rat…

Accidents WILL happen

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Don't take that headline as me brushing off the seriousness of the problem. Just take it as an opportunity to quote Elvis Costello.

We'll have a correction on tomorrow's editorial page for the second day in a row. I can't remember the last time that happened.

When I first came to editorial in 1994, I thought it a bit much that ALL editors in the department read proofs every day. It didn't seem efficient. By the time I became editor in '97, I had come to value the process for two reasons: It kept everyone plugged in and gave them ownership of what was on the pages (the great danger in newspaper work, since so many things happen at once, is to be so caught up in what you're doing that you miss the overall picture). And it made the editorial pages the cleanest in the paper.

The value of it is underlined in circumstances such as this, when one person is both doing the initial pre-production edit of the copy, and is then the only one reading proofs. The error in Sunday's editorial (corrected on today's page) is sufficiently complicated and esoteric that I can't say I would have caught it myself even if fully staffed, although the initial writing error — the conflation of two projects in the town of Lexington; one public, the other private — is almost certainly the product of the writer working at quadruple pace to crank out editorials to leave behind.

But today's error simply would not have happened if — as was the case not too long ago — there were five senior editors reading proofs. Instead of just me, and I'm the same one who read it on the front end.

Yes, thank you — I know Harvey Peeler introduced the roll-call-voting proposal, not his brother Bob. I know Bob's not in the Senate. I know both guys, and know the difference between them. Got it. Nobody else needs to call to inform me. (Someone just came into my office to tell me while I was typing this.) Thanks. The correction will be in the paper tomorrow.

Now can I get back to doing my best to put out the rest of these pages without errors?

(And oh, yeah — I still feel like total crud, Ferris. I've got a call in to my doctor to see if he'll call in an antibiotic. My chest hurts from the congestion. Oh, didn't I mention that? Yeah, the stomach crud became respiratory crud over the weekend. Still running low fever each night, coughing all day. Taking all sorts of drugs for the symptoms — Oh, look, it's time to take them again — yippee!)

NYT sees Columbia as microcosm of economic decline

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Don't know how I missed the story in yesterday's New York Times about the job fair in Columbia — headlined "Reeling South Carolina City Is a Snapshot of Economic Woes" — but in case you did, too, here it is. And here's an excerpt:

    As the American economy sinks deeper into one of the more punishing recessions since the Depression, frustration and fear color the national conversation.
    This city in the center of South Carolina is an ideal listening post. According to a range of indicators assembled by Moody’s Economy.com — from job growth to change in household worth — this metropolitan area came closer than any other to being a microcosm of the nation over the last decade.
    This is now an unfortunate distinction. Some 533,000 jobs disappeared from the economy in November, the worst month since 1974. In South Carolina, a government panel is predicting that the state’s unemployment rate could reach 14 percent by the middle of next year….

Alone

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Assuming I set it up right, if you send me an e-mail this week, you'll get this:


Welcome to my
special Christmas week AUTOMATED MESSAGE.
 
First, I am
alone in the office this week, and spending all of my time editing and preparing
for publication material left behind by my vacationing colleagues. This is like
doing the work of five jugglers simultaneously, so please bear with
me.
 
If you intend
for your message to be considered for publication as a LETTER TO THE EDITOR,
please resend it to [email protected].
 
If you are
submitting a potential GUEST COLUMN FOR OUR OP-ED PAGE, please resend it
to Cindi Scoppe at [email protected]. This will
NOT be considered until Ms. Scoppe returns on Dec. 29. All local op-ed
columns for this week have already been selected and
edited. 
 
If you wish
to register a comment that is not for publication in the paper, I urge you to
post it on my blog, http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.
 
Any messages
requiring a response from me, Brad Warthen: I beg for your patience. I am
extremely unlikely to be able to respond this week. If you MUST have a reply
this week (and we're talking emergency here), leave a phone message at (803)
771-8468, and I will get back to you when I'm able.
 
— Brad
Warthen


The last couple of weeks of the year have always been a high-wire act, even when we had adequate staffing. It's simply the best time for people to TAKE off, and it's when they WANT to take off, so we try to make that happen as much as possible. But these days, even one person being off one day puts us in emergency mode. This is so far beyond that, it defies description.

Which is my way of saying to YOU, don't look for a lot of blogging from ME this week. The only other person in the editorial offices this week is Randle, who handles letters, and as soon as she has prepared enough letters for publication to get me through the week — sometime Tuesday, we hope — she'll be gone, too.

I'm sort of in Chuck Yeager mode — as I climb into the cockpit alone, my last colleague hands me a sawn-off length of broom handle and says, "Just stick 'is in the handle and WANG it down with yer good arm…"

To which I can only say, "Thanks, Buddy…"

Woodward reports passing of ‘Deep Throat’

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This from The Washington Post:

'Deep Throat' Mark Felt Dies at 95
By Patricia Sullivan and Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 19, 2008; Page A02

W. Mark Felt Sr., the associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal who, better known as "Deep Throat," became the most famous anonymous source in American history, died yesterday. He was 95….

As the second-highest official in the FBI under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover and interim director L. Patrick Gray, Felt detested the Nixon administration's attempt to subvert the bureau's investigation into the complex of crimes and coverups known as the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

He secretly guided Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward as he and his colleague Carl Bernstein pursued the story of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office building, and subsequent revelations of the Nixon administration's campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies.

Another little irony. Even as newspapers are collapsing left and right — without asking for a bailout from anybody, I might add — we have these little reminders of why they're important to our democracy. The day The Chicago Tribune files for bankruptcy, we learn that the crooked governor saw the paper as enough of a threat that he wanted to get rid of the editorial board. The following week, we lose Deep Throat. And Woodward writes the story. Just like that last scene in the movie, as Nixon is being inaugurated again on the TV, and in the background Woodward and Bernstein are typing away on the stories that will bring him down. Whatever happens, we keep on writing.

So far, anyway.

Did you hear the fifes playing "Yankee Doodle" in the background during that speech? Just call me the Oliver Wendell Douglass of journalism.

Love in the Time of Stomach Crud, by Gabriel Garcia Warthen

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Miss me? Well, I can hardly blame you; I miss myself. I've taken a sort of time out from time the last couple of days.

It started over the weekend. My wife stayed up almost all of Saturday night coping with what she initially assumed to be food poisoning — on top of a bad cold that had plagued her all week. So on Sunday morning, I headed to Mass alone. This was, ironically, the Sunday that my column about taking care of my twin granddaughters ran. On my way to St. Peter's, my daughter calls me and says she and her husband were stricken by the same crud, so could I come help with the babies?

So I dropped by the church to tell them someone would have to sub for me as eucharistic minister, and went and got the twins and took them to my house again — I figured they were better off in a big house with one sick person than a small house with two.

We kept them overnight, and I returned them to their parents Monday morning before spending the day at work.

I took off Tuesday and Wednesday as planned. But instead of spending them Christmas shopping and/or going out to cut a tree and/or helping my son-in-law with the remodeling project, I spent the two days in a timeless fog, watching one old movie on the boob tube after another. This may seem like a total waste, but I actually accomplished something remarkable: I slowed down time.

When I was young, time passed slowly. I can vaguely remember the days when I was paid on an hourly basis, and I would keep looking at the clock and marveling at how slowly the hands moved. Starting in my early 20s — as work got more interesting, as children came along and grew up at light speed, followed by grandchildren, life was on fast-forward. On Tuesday and Wednesday, it crawled again. There's nothing like fever, pain and nausea, combined with helplessly waiting for one old movie to end and another one to come on (because you feel too weak to put in a DVD), to make life seem longer than it is. I could have sworn that one of those old movies on Wednesday lasted about a week.

I seem to recall that one of the characters in Catch-22 — Dunbar, I believe — cultivated boredom and misery as a way of making life seem longer. It may not be worth it, but I'm here to testify that it works.

Anyway, I came back in to work this morning, and I wrote an editorial for tomorrow's paper which I'm probably not going to want to save as one of my most stellar literary moments, but hey, I got it done — and that's saying something when I haven't had a meal since Monday, and frankly can't ever imagine WANTING one again. Yesterday, I had a little Jello, and a handful or so of dry cereal — and regretted it. Today, just a small serving of Jello, which I don't think did me any good. (Speaking of which, do you have any idea how many commercials on television have to do with food? Way, WAY too many, that's how many.) Since then, I've just been drinking water, which does NOT leave me hungry for more, no matter what Nicholas Kristof said in his column today.

I'm going to see if I can make some progress on a Sunday column, and then head back home, and hope and pray I can muster the strength to come in and do what MUST be done on Friday. Looming over me is the fact that everyone is off next week in the editorial department except me and our part-timer who handles letters. Cindi and Warren are leaving behind a week's worth of copy, but there are a certain number of things that have to be done each day for these pages to come out, and I'll be doing all of them. So I need to recover some strength for that.

Consider this your heads-up that I won't be posting all that much in the coming days.

Getting into the proper spirit

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Cuties_026

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
EVERY YEAR AT this time, I have to admit that I have failed yet again to get into the proper spirit of Advent — that is, I admit that when I find time to think about it at all.
    This is not my fault. Advent — which the church tells us Catholics should be a time of quiet, contemplative reflection and anticipation — couldn’t possibly come at a worse time. I mean, it’s just before Christmas! I don’t know about you, but the month for me consists of longer hours than usual at work — backing up co-workers taking those vacation days they have to take or lose (and which they richly deserve, let me piously add) — with every minute of nights and weekends taken up with social obligations, pageants and other things you’re too harried to enjoy the way you should, and the patriotic imperative of shopping more than you do in all the other 11 months combined.
    When our kids were little, my wife would gather the family each evening — when I got away from work early enough, even I took part — for a little Advent wreath-lighting ceremony at our kitchen table. Just thinking about that, and how long ago it was, makes my heart hurt — which is not very descriptive, but I can think of no better way to put it. Sort of the way Scrooge felt witnessing Christmases Past. Lately, I have only been mindful of Advent during one hour on Sunday, with the church’s much-bigger wreath up there next to the altar. I think, one, two, three candles… must be the third Sunday of Advent… I wonder if I could swing by Harbison on my way home….
    That’s the extent of my mindfulness of the season.
    On Monday — as the U.S. economy continued spiraling downward, the University of South Carolina announced its plans for $39 million in budget cuts, a state panel called for K-12 teachers’ salaries to be frozen, Congress and the White House furiously negotiated a doomed bailout of Detroit automakers, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (in his last hours of freedom) dared the feds to listen in on his conversations, and the odiferous mess at the Columbia sewer plant continued to reek — it suddenly came to my attention that I had three weeks of vacation coming to me that I was going to lose, which happened to be more time than there was left in our fiscal year. Which was neither here nor there; I knew we were far too busy for me to take any of it off, so nothing to be done about it…
    … when suddenly, a voice somewhere deep inside me said, Dammit, I’m gonna have me some down time during Advent if it kills me — which is not exactly the attitude that the church prescribes, but it was as close as I was going to get. I saw that nobody else in my department was off on Wednesday and Thursday, so on Tuesday I whipped out an editorial against the Detroit bailout deal, told everybody I’d see them Friday, and took off before anyone had recovered enough from the shock to stop me.
    What did I do with the time? This is the good part: I spent the days taking care of my 11-month-old twin granddaughters. One of them had scared us with a bout of the croup earlier in the week (one visit to the doctor, another to the ER) and still had a raspy cough, their mother (my oldest) had to get back to work after taking off those days, my wife was jammed up with commitments and suffering from a bad cold herself, and my son-in-law was in a neck brace from falling off of scaffolding remodeling their house. I won’t tell you what was happening with the rest of our four kids, except to say everyone had a lot to deal with — some of it very painful and difficult, and too personal to go into. But for once, I was able to be there for my family for at least one of the many things they needed that week — which I think was a bigger shock to them than to the people at work.
    Here’s what I did on Wednesday: I got up earlier than I do on workdays. I took my older granddaughter, who had spent the night with us, to her house to change clothes, then to school. I picked up the twins and took them to my house. I fed them breakfast, one in my lap and the other sitting in the busy saucer play station thingy — one spoonful for you, and one for you…. I changed their diapers. We played with blocks on the living room rug. I changed their diapers again. I carried them upstairs for their naps. When they woke up, I changed their diapers again and took them on a quick walk around the block (the most exercise I’d had in weeks) before mixing up their lunch. My mom dropped by (normally, I never see my parents during the work week) and fed one while I fed the other. We played peek-a-boo, which convinces them I’m the world’s greatest wit for having thought it up. I fixed them some bottles, and my mom and I held them while they drank them dry (these are the world’s most cooperative babies; they eat what you feed them, and go to sleep at nap time). I changed their diapers again, and carried them up for their second naps, and then their mother came to get them.
    On Thursday, we did the same, with slight variations. Each time at the end of the day, my daughter thanked me for keeping them, which means that she had it exactly backward.
    No, it wasn’t a time of quiet prayer and contemplation. And yet, it was. Those two days grounded me in a kind of physical, emotional and spiritual sanity that was, for me in December, an altered state. I can’t really explain it. Let’s just say that when I got back to work and found that the world was still talking about Rod Blagojevich and the Detroit bailout, and our state budget was being cut another $383 million, with the brunt hitting education and health care, I longed to be doing something that made as much sense as changing a poopy diaper. Or better yet, two of them. Changing dirty diapers makes sense, to the changer and the changee, and the process is far less objectionable than looking at, or thinking about, Gov. Blagojevich.
    You know what? Nobody else is off this coming Tuesday and Wednesday. Don’t look for me here on those days.

Get into the spirit at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Cuties_007

Today’s computer puzzler

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Last week, the folks in our Information Services department came up with a new — well, it’s new to me — laptop to replace the one that got stolen, the one I’d had ever since I started this blog. Which is great; they’ve even programmed it to do cool and mysterious things my old one never dreamt of.

But there’s one problem — whenever I’m typing, suddenly my typing cursor will jump, without warning, from where I’m TRYING to type to some other random part of the page, either in the middle of some previous sentence or out of the text box completely. This happens two or three times per sentence, and it’s sufficiently maddening that, as you might have noticed, I didn’t post at all yesterday.

The only "explanation" I could offer is that the typing always leapt in the direction of wherever the mouse pointer was at that moment.

The folks in information services figured it out today — the problem is that the laptop has a touchpad, and I’ve never gotten used to the things, so I plug in a USB mouse. The problem is that the heel of my hand, or ball of my thumb, or whatever you call the parts of the hand near the wrist, keep brushing against the touchpad. Every time that happens, it’s the equivalent of a mouse click, so the typing cursor jumps to where the mouse pointer is, if you can follow that.

So all I had to do was go to the control panel, and deactivate the touchpad. Simple. Obvious. I should have thought of it.

Only one problem: There’s nothing in the control panel about the touchpad. And nothing down in the right-hand corner of the taskbar, either (I’m running Windows XP). As far as this computer is concerned, it doesn’t HAVE a touchpad. Except that it does.

I’m sure the folks in IS will figure this out on Monday. In the meantime, I’ve got a piece of cardboard over the touchpad, and that’s working. But I was wondering — between now and then, does anybody out there have any suggestions for turning the blasted device off?

I missed my chance, Jerry!

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Last week, I meant to react to this news …

About 20 DHEC and EPA agents raided the city’s sewer plant at 8 a.m.
Thursday, armed with a search warrant, weapons and wearing bulletproof
vests — just as parents were dropping off their children at nearby
Heathwood Hall Episcopal School.

… by saying that if it had been ME raiding that place, I don’t think I’d have worried about bulletproof. Bullets wouldn’t have been my main concern. I’d have gone for a hazmat suit. But that’s me.

But forgetting to say that until now at least gave me the excuse of using that headline about "missing my chance."

Now that we’ve had fun, I’ll raise the serious question: First the police department messes. Then the inability to close out the fiscal year because no one knew how. (Or was it the other way around?) Y’all know I like ol’ Mayor Bob, but one begins to wonder if there’s anything the city knows how to do right. I guess I’ll just use it as another excuse to push for the strong-mayor system that would at least give Columbia voters someone to hold accountable.

Now we’re REALLY in trouble: The WSJ quotes ME on the economy

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Just this morning, after taking two days off, I pondered my three-day growth, and the overused disposable razor by the sink (I really need to buy some more this weekend), and thought this would be a perfect time to grow the beard back, just in time for Christmas. But then I thought it might confuse the twins as to who I was, and no amount of convenience was worth that.

So I shaved, and then came in to work, to find that my boss, Publisher Henry Haitz, had e-mailed me a story from The Wall Street Journal, which started like this:

Growth Area: Beards on Laid-Off Executives
Released From Staid Offices, More Men Free Their Facial Hair; the Professorial Look vs. ZZ Top

By CHRISTINA BINKLEY
    Call it the face of freedom.
    After Jorge Hendrickson lost his job at a Manhattan hedge fund three weeks ago, he stopped shaving. "I’ve shaved for so long, and it’s nice to be able to look at the positive side" of losing a job, says Mr. Hendrickson, 24. "I’m changing my lifestyle while I can."…

This, of course, is not the kind of message you want to receive from your boss after taking a couple of days off (and almost deciding to grow your beard back), on the same day you read that David Stanton — the only person at WIS I could name, a guy who went to work there the same year I joined The State — has been unceremoniously laid off.

But then I saw Henry’s note at the top of the e-mail, which read "Assuming you saw this in wsj yesterday, 4th para from the bottom….." Here was the graf to which he directed me:

Ben Bernanke’s furry jawline gives the Fed chairman the look of a trustworthy intellectual. But Brad Warthen, editorial page editor for The State, a Columbia S.C., newspaper, recently pondered what would happen if Mr. Bernanke were to shave. "Could this be the bold stroke that is needed to jolt the economy back to where it should be?" Mr. Warthen posited in his blog.

So now you know the economy is really, really in trouble. The collapse of credit markets, the swan dive of the Detroit Three automakers, the apparent refusal of consumers to spend on Christmas, on and on –all that was just preliminaries.

It has now come to this: The venerable Wall Street Journal quoting my meanderings about what the Fed chairman’s facial hair might mean in terms of the world economy’s future direction. Sure, Bernanke is from South Carolina — from the Pee Dee in fact, just like me — and that gives me special insight, but still…

The time has come to curl up into a ball and pull the blanket over your head. It’s the only rational response…

Some things that I ‘watch with horror’

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First, a warning — I’ve posted some disturbing images at the bottom of this post. They are painful to look at. If you wish to avoid them, do not scroll down!

Following up on my Sunday column, it occurs to me that it might be helpful to elaborate a little more on the proper meaning of "watched with horror." If you’ll recall, the NYT used that phrase to refer to such practices as scanning telecommunications for terrorists without proper authorization, and imprisoning supposed terrorists at Guantanamo.

In the column, I gave examples from history of things that are more properly "watched with horror," if the words are to mean anything — the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden, and the like. I included some from recent years — genocide in Darfur and 9/11 — but perhaps not enough. I can make it much more immediate than that.

The terror attacks in Mumbai are certainly something I "watched with horror," both from a personal and geopolitical perspective. Just days before it happened, my Dad had been reminiscing about having Shore Patrol duty in Bombay during his Navy career. That meant digging sailors out of some pretty sleazy dives, but it also meant staying at the Taj Mahal hotel. It was a shock to have that place suddenly in the news, and for something so horrific.

Two weeks ago, my brother was over there on business — and of course, he would have been a target had he been there still. As my father would have been, long before. That was underlined for me in a sidebar piece the WSJ ran Friday, accounting for the employees of various international firms in Mumbai.

Stan Dubinsky from over at USC sent me an e-mail that had been sent out by Hesh Epstein, the Chabad rabbi here in Columbia, about the young Chabad rabbi and his wife killed by the terrorists — presumably for the "crime" of being Jewish. I took a lecture course a couple of years back given by Rabbi Epstein (about Jewish beliefs regarding the Messiah, it was fascinating), and was deeply impressed by his devotion and scholarship. If it had been Hesh over there instead of that young man and his wife… the tragedy would have been far more personal. As it is, it’s bad enough.

Too much personal? Then consider the overall death toll, and the geopolitical implications — India is blaming Pakistan, and both countries have nukes.

I think what got me to thinking about the personal angles was Nicholas Kristof’s column yesterday (beware the image if you follow the link!), which I chose this morning to put on tomorrow’s op-ed page, and which started like this:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Terrorism in this part of the world usually means bombs exploding or hotels burning, as the latest horrific scenes from Mumbai attest. Yet alongside the brutal public terrorism that fills the television screens, there is an equally cruel form of terrorism that gets almost no attention and thrives as a result: flinging acid on a woman’s face to leave her hideously deformed.

Here in Pakistan, I’ve been investigating such acid attacks, which are commonly used to terrorize and subjugate women and girls in a swath of Asia from Afghanistan through Cambodia (men are almost never attacked with acid). Because women usually don’t matter in this part of the world, their attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled. It’s a kind of terrorism that becomes accepted as part of the background noise in the region…

This is something I "watch with horror," without even having to see it. Unfortunately, I DID see it, in a photograph with Kristof’s column online. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen such images. I had run across the ones you see below (with their original captions) a week or two ago when I was looking for something to go with a previous Kristof column, and had searched the AP archive for "Pakistan" and "women." The images all moved on the wire earlier this year.

This is the kind of thing that I believe the phrase "watched with horror" should be reserved for. And that’s my point in posting these images. I almost put them in the paper, but I thought Kristof’s column communicated the horror fully enough. As you know, one thing I use the blog for is to post things I don’t put in the paper. Maybe I was wrong to balk at doing that. But as hardened as newspapermen are supposed to be, I hesitate even now to post them here. And yet, these pictures aren’t as bad — that is, the injuries aren’t as recent — as the cases Kristof wrote about.

Kristof and his wife received the Pulitzer for reporting on the democracy movement in China years ago. He deserves another one for telling these women’s stories — as he has done for the powerless (so often women) in Darfur and elsewhere. By horrifying decent people everywhere, he performs a great service.

Acidburns1

Irum Saeed, 30, adjusts her scarf as she poses for a photograph at her office at the Urdu University in Islamabad, Pakistan, Thursday, July 24, 2008. Irum was burnt on her face, back and shoulders with acid thrown in the middle of the street by a boy whom she rejected for marriage 12 years ago. She has undergone plastic surgery 25 times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Irum is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Acidburns2

Shameem Akhter, 18, poses for a photograph at her home in Jhang, Pakistan, Wednesday, July 10, 2008. Three years ago three boys threw acid on her. Shameem has undergone plastic surgery 10 times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Shameem is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Acidburns3

Attiya Khalil, 16, poses for a photograph at her home in Lahore, Pakistan, Wednesday, July 9, 2008. Attiya’s face was burnt with acid thrown by relatives of a neighbor boy whom she rejected for marriage around 3 years ago. She has undergone plastic surgery three times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Attiya is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

The failed hyperbole of the past eight years (column version)

45 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
QUICK, WHO said this?

    “Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power.”

    I’ll give you some hints:

A. Oliver Stone
B. MoveOn.org
C. An overexcited intern at the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee
D. The New York Times

    The answer is “D.” Yes, I’m sorry to say that overwrought purple prose was the lead sentence last week in the lead Sunday editorial of the paper I was so recently congratulating for having the good sense to back the Columbia Free Trade Agreement. (And they made so much sense that day.)
    Editorial writers — particularly at one of the best papers in the country — are supposed to use words with care and discrimination. Some say I occasionally fail to do that. For instance, some say I was mean, nasty and ugly to Gov. Mark Sanford in my column last week. Go read the letter to the editor from the governor’s press aide that ran in Wednesday’s paper (as always, you will find links to that, and the NYT piece, and any other linkable item mentioned in this column, in the Web version on my blog — and the address for that is below). An excerpt:

    This editorial page was once respected as a voice for good government. Now, thanks to Brad’s childish screeds, fewer and fewer people are reading.

    And yet… I challenge you go find anything that I said in that column that comes anywhere near the unsupported, gross hyperbole of “watched in horror” or “trampled on the Bill of Rights.”
    So does President W. get all excited and whip off a letter to protest to the NYT? I doubt it. Nah, he just spends the week working with Barack Obama as though he were already in office, as though they were co-presidents — which, by the way, is exactly what he should be doing, in this extraordinary economic crisis. (I wonder: If this period of cooperation between the president and president-to-be does not lead to economic miracles, will someone look back on the interregnum in January and denounce “the failed policies of the past eight weeks?”)
    Democrats are thrilled that at long last, Bush will no longer be in office. Me, too. He can’t leave soon enough. But I’m even more thrilled that after January, I won’t have to listen to any more semi-deranged yammering about the guy. You know that I never liked him — he’s the guy who did in my guy (remember John McCain?) in the 2000 S.C. primary. But I have never, ever understood why some hate him so much. The Bush haters can’t simply say, “I disagree with Mr. Bush and here’s why.” They have to go way beyond reason in condemning him absolutely in terms that render him utterly illegitimate.
    Get a grip, people. It’ll be over soon.
    Oh, and for those of you who will say, “But the Times went on to support its statement” — no, it didn’t. Sorry, folks, but his playing fast and loose with federal law regarding wiretapping, to cite one example given, just doesn’t amount to “trampling on the Bill of Rights.” He should have worked from the start to change the law rather than skirting it (as our own Lindsey Graham and others urged), but he did nothing to instill “horror” in a rational person. You “watch in horror” as a gang of thugs rape and murder an old lady — you merely disagree with something so bloodless as monitoring telecommunications without proper authorization.
    Not following me? OK, here are some more things one might “watch with horror:” The My Lai massacre. The butchery in Rwanda in the 1990s. Gang-rape and mutilation of women in Darfur. The Hindenburg disaster. The Twin Towers falling on 9/11. The Japanese reducing Pearl Harbor to a smoking ruin. Men, women and children being herded into the Nazi death camps. The Bataan Death March.
    Get the idea? To apply those words, “watched with horror” to, for example, “the unnecessary invasions of privacy embedded in the Patriot Act” (you know, a law passed by Congress, which Congress can change at any time) as the Times did is to suck all of the meaning out of those words. Once you use those words to describe imprisoning terrorists (real or imagined) at Guantanamo (the main sin listed in the editorial), they no longer have force. If you watch that “with horror,” what words do you use to describe the fire-bombing of Dresden?
    People should not fling words about so carelessly. As a professional flinger of words, I know.
    Now I’ll fling a few more for you Democrats who are watching with horror as I “defend” the outgoing president (when what I’m really doing is defending the language): Folks, settle down. I get it; you don’t like the guy. You like Barack Obama. Well, so do I (he was, after all, my second choice for president). I expect that I, too, will prefer an Obama administration to the past eight years. He’s off to a good start.
    But before we say goodbye to this era, let’s resolve in the future to do what Sen. Obama does so well — speak with sanity and moderation, and mean what we say.

Read the Times piece and more at thestate.com/bradsblog/ .

DHEC response to news series

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Someone just today brought my attention to the Web page full of material that DHEC posted in response to the series that Sammy Fretwell and John Monk down in our newsroom recently did.

The very first item, written by board chairman "Bo" Aughtry, says it "was submitted to the newspaper’s editorial offices Nov. 20." This is the first I’ve heard about it. I’m worried that they might have sent it to Cindi, who is off this week. And here it is 6:23 p.m. on the night before Thanksgiving.

I’m going to try to reach the appropriate people to see whether they had meant to submit it for publication, although I don’t know how much luck I’m likely to have tonight — or any time before Monday. We’ll see.

In the meantime, here’s the full text of that item:

Imagine.
That’s the word The State used to begin its eight-day assault on the Department of Health and  Environmental Control.  So let’s imagine.

Imagine a newspaper that reports  only select facts they decide are important.

Imagine a series with misleading conclusions arrived at through
innuendos, dredging up stories from more than 20 years ago, most of
which have been refuted, and reporting them inaccurately again.

Imagine a newspaper whose reporters have traded objective reporting
for “gotcha’” journalism and half-truth mudslinging, while at the same
time so enamored with itself that it takes three paragraphs to pat its
reporters and photographer on the backs.

Imagine no more. That publication  exists as The State and
there are others who obviously work in conjunction with them on
misrepresentation of fact after fact in an effort to make an agency,
its employees, commissioner and board look bad, in an attempt to
advance its own political agenda or to seek some journalism award.

If anyone  knew all the facts in any of The State’s stories, it would take a very good imagination  to accept their conclusions.

Based on my experience and observations, I find these attacks not
only misleading but unjust. Since I became chairman of DHEC’s governing
board in 2006, I have been continually impressed with the diligence,
commitment and dedication of those employees, certainly including
Commissioner Earl Hunter, with whom I have dealt. Is the agency
perfect? I know of no organization made up of 4,200 employees that can
boast perfection but this one is very good.

Do not misunderstand, I fully believe that DHEC, like any public
body, is accountable to the citizens it serves. Accordingly, it is
subject to responsible, accurate criticism if it fails our citizens.
Yet, for The State to criticize this agency with articles
that are portrayed as complete fact but which are based only on a part
of the story, is, in my opinion, quite irresponsible.

The fact of the matter is that The  State and most of
those quoted in their series, need DHEC. They have decided that this
agency is the villain and they are the self-anointed righteous
vindicators protecting the public. Truth is they’re more interested in
protecting their bottom line, billable hours or such political clout as
they think they may possess, seemingly caring not a whit for the truth,
only for what advances their own motives.

This newspaper, like others, imposes word count restrictions on any
external responses to their reporting whether it be my response here or
a letter to the editor. Because of those constraints, refuting the many
accusations in this series would require more space than what is
readily available here. For our perspective on this series and the
subsequent editorials that I’m sure will appear, I invite you to our
Web site at www.scdhec.gov.

Now here’s a fact you don’t have to imagine. In the midst of state
budget reductions and fewer staff doing more work, we’ll spend taxpayer
dollars laying to rest these ridiculous and self-serving allegations.
Trust me when I tell you the taxpayers of this great state have paid
quite the tab in the last eight months as staff have had to stop what
they were doing to respond to question after question, some of which
were asked multiple times in a thinly-veiled attempt to get an answer
the reporters wanted, not the full facts of the matter. The  State’s
reporters spent some four hours with Commissioner Earl Hunter in
face-to-face interviews, only to have things misrepresented to the
majority of readers who never make it past the headline and first three
paragraphs. 

Imagine? No. I believe this newspaper is doing a disservice to its
readers in casting as fact what is actually subjection, to DHEC
employees and their families through the creation of undeserved public
doubt, and to the taxpayers of South Carolina in wasting tax dollars
through unnecessarily protracted interrogation.

Paul “Bo” Aughtry is chair of  the S.C. Board of Health and Environmental Control

My fan mail from the governor’s office

11 Replies

Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss the note of appreciation I received from the governor’s office for my Sunday column. It ran as a letter to the editor today:

Warthen column damages credibility
    When the facts aren’t on some people’s side, they try and change them to help win an argument. Unfortunately, that’s a model growing in popularity among this paper’s editorial writers.
    I’m writing of Brad Warthen’s latest Sunday rant, in which he lashes out at the governor over a recent column he penned for The Wall Street Journal.
    Congress is contemplating spending another $150 billion to $300 billion to “bail out” states. Every penny of that money will have to be borrowed, from places such as Social Security, or our grandkids, or such nations as China (to whom we already owe $500 billion). The governor is arguing that enough is enough, and that we have to quit piling on debt, no matter how well-intentioned the spending may be.
    You’d know all of this for yourself had Mr. Warthen possessed the courage to print Gov. Sanford’s column alongside his, and let you judge both pieces for yourself. Not doing so is the latest example of a growing lack of credibility on Mr. Warthen’s part, from endorsing one senator despite noting his history of flouting the law, to, on his blog, likening a school choice supporter to bin Laden.
    This editorial page was once respected as a voice for good government. Now, thanks to Brad’s childish screeds, fewer and fewer people are reading.

JOEL SAWYER
Communications Director
Office of the Governor
Columbia

Editor’s note: The State published the governor’s column on the Web. To read it and Mr. Warthen’s column again, go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

This letter put me in an awkward spot. It was sent to Cindi, but she’s out this week, so when he got her autoreply to that effect, Joel sent the letter to me. And the problem was that the letter needed editing, and it’s hard to work with the writer of a critical letter when you are the subject of the criticism. As editor, there were a couple of things I needed to accomplish:

  • I needed to make sure it was factually correct, so that when he criticized me or the paper for doing XYZ, XYZ was actually what we did. As you can tell from our letters on any given day, we thrive on being criticized. But I draw the line at taking criticism for something we did not DO, because that would give the readers an incorrect impression of what we went to all the trouble of putting into the paper to start with. For instance, when a writer says, "You were wrong to claim that Sen. Hiram Blowhard is a horse thief," but we didn’t say Sen. Blowhard is a horse thief, I’m not running it. If I DID run it, readers would naturally assume, "Well, they wouldn’t have run the letter criticizing them for calling him that if they hadn’t called him that." Unfortunately, the thing that Joel was misrepresenting about us was fuzzier than that. He was trying to make readers think that we had somehow done the governor wrong by not running his column in the dead-tree version of the paper. He was saying this despite the fact that he knows our standard is NOT to use that precious space for guest columns that have run elsewhere (every piece we run like that is another piece that was offered exclusively to us that we CAN’T run). The average Joe on the street could have made the mistake of saying what he said in the letter; he knew better. He also knew that we went to the trouble to publish the governor’s piece online (you’ll recall that in the past I’ve made the point here that our online version is the perfect place for columns by gummint officials — who send us a lot of submissions — that don’t meet our standards for the paper), promoting it from the newspaper on the day it ran, and providing a link to it in the footer of my column about it (why? because I wanted people to go back and read it). But Joel insisted upon accusing us of wrongdoing on this point, so I eventually shrugged and let it go — and resolved to state the fact of the matter in a neutrally-worded editor’s note (knowing, of course, that lots of readers will think publishing on the Web is inadequate; but at least this way they had the facts before them). There were other factual points that were easier to resolve — such as his originally having claimed that we acknowledged Jake Knotts was "a criminal" in endorsing him; I persuaded him to change that wording. But the business of how we had handled the governor’s piece was too central to his point.
  • Then there was the "courage" thing. I never could persuade him that some other word would make more sense to the reader — "courtesy" would have worked; even "decency" would have worked. I mean, what is the reader supposed to think I was afraid of? I wrote a whole column about the governor’s column, told you how to go read the governor’s column, provided links to it, but I was afraid of it? But I guess he thought I was just trying to censor his criticism of me rather than helping it be a more logical letter. So I let that go, too.

Anyway, we spent so many e-mails going back and forth on those points that I never even got around to such minor things as: When you say "the facts aren’t on some people’s side, they try and change them to help win an argument," and you suggest I did that, what do you have in mind? Name one fact I cited that was wrong. But it wasn’t worth it.

"Courage" is a word that is often misapplied to what I do. Truth be told, there are people who read a column such as the one Joel was criticizing and praise me for having the "courage" to write it — but that is utterly ridiculous. "Courage" doesn’t come into it, either way. I mean, what do I have to fear besides dealing with hassles such as that above? But I’ve heard that about columns I’ve written about governors going all the way back to Carroll Campbell. People seem to think I’m tempting the gods or something criticizing these guys. I don’t know.

What I DO know is that if you want to see courage, read Dr. Ray Greenberg’s piece on Sunday. Finally, we have the heads of major agencies having the guts to speak out about how we’ve hocked our future by failing to invest in the critical infrastructure of our society. State agency heads just don’t write columns like that, but he did.

And of course, the governor came down on him over it. Oh, he did it politely. His response (which Joel sent me in the same e-mail with his letter, and which I ran the same day as his letter, which makes his complaint about our not running the governor’s last column seem even more off-point — but I digress) was of course more polite than Joel’s. It’s too important to the governor to be seen as above the fray to write anything like what Joel did. At the same time, a public university president who dares to write anything like that motivated the governor to take him down a notch personally. Other uppity agency heads will take note. (The governor can’t do anything to Dr. Greenberg or to most agency heads, but that’s not the point — most of them don’t want to get into a spitting match with the gov; better to lay low.)

A couple of quick points about the gov’s piece about Dr. Greenberg (aside from the fact that his overall point was to defend the bankrupt notion of arbitrary spending caps):

  1. His utterly laughable attempt to be condescending to the MUSC president: "I certainly don’t begrudge him that view. Like any agency head, his
    role is solely to look out for his corner of state government and the
    tax dollars that are coming his way. On the other hand, we in the
    governor’s office have a very different role in looking after the
    entire state." Go back and read the piece by Dr. Greenberg, who runs an institution of higher learning that employs 11,000. Look at the concerns that the doctor expresses, and compare them to the narrow ideological points espoused by the governor, and judge which of them you believe is really thinking about the good of "the entire state."
  2. Second, the governor cites his favorite misleading statistic. The original text of his piece said, "Government in South Carolina costs about 140 percent of the national average, largely due to an unaccountable and inefficient structure." That is not true. I was able to make it technically (although still very misleadingly) true by the insertion of a single word: "State government in South Carolina costs about 140 percent of the national average, largely due to an unaccountable and inefficient structure." What’s the diff? State government in SC costs more per capita than state government in other states because of our almost unique system of the state performing lots of functions that local governments perform in other states — such as road maintenance, and owning and operating school buses. If you look at government overall, adding in our pathetically anemic local governments, we actually spend less than other states do on state and local government — or at worst, around the average (there are different ways to calculate it; some ways we’re right at the average, some ways we’re well below). A very important distinction, but don’t expect to hear this governor acknowledging it; the fiction that we — the state that won’t maintain its roads or guard its prisons or support its colleges nearly as adequately as other states do — spend too much on government is what he’s all about. Anyway, keep these two facts in mind, as Cindi explained in a recent column: We pay less per capita in state and local taxes than most of the country, and we pay less as a percentage of our income than most of the country. 

One last note, and this is one I DO deserve to be kicked for. The governor misspelled Dr. Ray’s name throughout his piece, and I’m just noticing it. Yes, it was the governor’s mistake, but I’m the one who had it last, so it’s my fault for not catching it.

Gee, I don’t even want to talk with Geithner…

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Geithner

Just got this e-mail:

Hi
there,
My name is Jen
Parsons, I’m with Ketchum PR.
I wanted to see if
you’re doing any profiles on Tim Geithner.  We work with
Keith Bergelt, the CEO of Open Invention Network, and
he worked with Geithner in the early 90’s while they were in Tokyo.  Keith can
offer some good insight into Geithner’s work style, career ambition,
etc.
Let me know if you’d
like to chat with Keith.

Thanks,
Jen

Now, that’s service for you. Unfortunately, I don’t even know what I’d ask Geithner himself if I were to have a few minutes of his time. For me, the broad, high-altitude overview Obama provided today regarding economic policy was way more detail than I need.

So no, I don’t need to talk to somebody who just used to work with Geithner.

When I receive a shotgun release like that, especially on Thanksgiving week — when we tend to be more shorthanded even than the skeleton crew we normally have, and I’m cranking as hard as I can with routine, boring tasks that you do NOT want to hear about, just getting the pages out, without even thinking about interviewing or writing, even about subjects I know something about, much less the new Treasury secretary, I find myself wondering whether people who send out releases like that have the slightest idea what’s going on out here in newspaperland. The answer comes quickly: Probably not.

Sorry about the length of that sentence. I didn’t have time to write short ones.

 

Do I HAVE to go back to writing about Sanford?

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Well, it was nice while it lasted — writing about the presidential contest between two guys I liked. It was the first time in my career that had happened, and I got as excited about it all as anyone did, I suppose.

But now I turn back to South Carolina, where our last election for a chief executive was between Mark Sanford and Tommy Moore. Fortunately, we don’t have Tommy to kick around any more, since he went to work for his pals in the payday industry.

But we’re stuck with Mark Sanford. I was unpleasantly reminded of this by the op-ed piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal last week. It was classic Sanford posturing, another sequel of his personal movie, "Me Against the Big Spenders." It was headlined "Don’t Bail Out My State." It’s filled with the kind of self-aggrandizing, Look At ME stuff that drives others at our State House bonkers.

Anyway, I wrote about it for Sunday, but I’ll have you know I didn’t enjoy it. The prospect of anything positive happening at the State House is just so dim, that it’s depressing.

Back on this post, Doug asked who I believed in the conflict between Nikki and the speaker. Oh, Nikki, of course, I said.

That doesn’t mean I don’t fully understand how it must frost the speaker to see members of the House joining the governor in his holier-than-thou posturing. But you see, like the broken clock, sometimes Sanford postures in favor of the right thing. That’s one of the really disappointing things about him. He’s made so many enemies in the Legislature that it has doomed the causes he was right to advocate, such as government restructuring. We’re at the point now that we’re WAY past the Legislature’s ingrained resistance to reform. Now, they’ll oppose it just for the pleasure of frustrating HIM. It’s an unhealthy situation for us all.

And Nikki’s campaign for recorded votes is the right thing. Sure, there might be practical reasons against making ALL votes recorded, but the House can do an awful lot better than it does.

Yesterday was a good day, ’cause I got to write about Joe

13 Replies

Lieberman_democrats_wart

What with my department being down from four editorial writers (we call ’em "associate editors") to two, I’m having to write more editorials myself these days.

That means more editorials on national and international subjects. It’s best for metro subjects to be handled by Warren Bolton, and state topics by Cindi Scoppe. Those are their areas of expertise. That just leaves the rest of the world to me.

It also means you’ll read more editorials with UnParty themes, because that’s what I’m interested in. Hey, you want editorials from me, I’m going to write them whenever possible on stuff that interests me, Al Franken. Or whoever I am.

Hence today’s piece about Joe Lieberman. John McCain robbed me of the chance to write lots about my man Joe during the election when he picked You Know Who from the frozen tundra. Think what a fine time I would have had.

But this week’s events gave me the chance to write about Joe anyway. And that’s a good thing.

Nikki vs. the Speaker

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One day last week (I’m thinking it was Monday the 10th), Nikki Haley called to say she wanted urgently to talk with me. She came by later that same day. With her approval (she had initially asked just to speak with me), Cindi Scoppe sat in with us. (I TRY not to meet with sources alone, on account of the fact that it’s pretty much a waste of time if someone OTHER than me needs to write about the subject, which is usually the case. Also, in case the meeting leads to an editorial, it helps if more than one board member hears the pitch.)

She didn’t want us to take notes, though, so what I’m writing here is from memory. At the end of our meeting, she agreed to go on the record — which meant that, since Cindi and I had to get back to work that day, Cindi had call her back another day and go through the whole thing AGAIN in order to write her column today, which  I hope you read. Antsy sources can be a problem that way.

Cindi’s column deals with the main conflict between Rep. Haley and her leadership in the House. This post is to provide some additional context from what she said — according to my memory (Cindi and Rep. Haley are welcome to berate me for any errors, which I will be happy to correct). Mind you, since I’m writing neither a column nor (perish the thought) a news story, I’m NOT spending a week running down reactions from other parties the way Cindi had to do to write her column. If anyone, including Speaker Harrell or Harry Cato, would like to ADD their comments to this post, they’re more than welcome. I’m just trying to offer as faithful an account of what Rep. Haley said as I can, before I forget it entirely.

When she first called to request the meeting, she didn’t tell me what it was about, but referred to what had happened when she ran against incumbent Larry Koon back in 2004. She mentioned that again when she arrived. In retrospect, I see only two things the previous incident had in common with this: Both were instances in which Ms. Haley felt embattled, and in both cases she was initially reluctant to go on the record. There was a third potential commonality: I DID write about what happened in 2004, and she seemed to hope I would see my way clear to do so this time. For what it’s worth, here’s a copy of what I wrote in 2004.

Anyway, last week Nikki began her tale by harking back to her chairmanship of the subcommittee that tried to pass a payday lending reform bill. What she tried to do did not go far enough in the opinion of this editorial board — she wanted regulation, not a ban. She can present all sorts of pro-biz reasons WHY regulation is better, and did so at the end of this video I posted here back during the recent election. Probably the most pertinent part is the very end of the video, when she says she had really, really wanted to pass a bill, and so had others on the subcommittee who had worked hard on it — but that was not allowed to happen. That struck me as interesting at the time, but she added to the story last week. She said the bill died after she was called in to meet with the speaker and Chairman Harry Cato and another member of the leadership (I want to say Jim Merrill, but I could be misremembering), and she was told that’s not what they wanted.

But that anecdote was sort of a warmup. She says that’s not why she’s at odds with the leadership now. She says the current conflict is all about her having become a champion, over the summer, of the notion that all House votes should be recorded. That led to various machinations aimed at denying her the chairmanship of the LCI committee, culminating in the speaker wanting to change the rules so that HE appoints committee chairs directly. Currently, the speaker appoints members to the committees, and the members choose their chair.

Speaker Harrell, as you’ll see in Cindi’s column, disputes Rep. Haley’s version of events, and says she’s making herself out to be more important in all this than she is. But they agree about one thing: The House leadership didn’t like it a bit when she went gallivanting about the state with the governor promoting her recorded-votes bill. Note that he says he’s for more recorded votes and all that (you may recall his recent op-ed on the subject). He prefers to portray Ms. Haley’s main sins as being a) working with the governor, and b) setting herself up as holier-than-thou.

Another House member who’s apparently gotten a bit too big for his britches in the leadership’s view is Nathan Ballentine, who has been writing about this all on his blog, here and here. He’s not the only one, by the way. So has Earl Capps, here and here. So has Will Folks.

Interesting, huh?