Category Archives: Working

Excuse me for getting all earnest, but how can we interact more meaningfully here?

69 Replies

And yes, I mean "earnest" and not "Ernest" like in my last post, although if you'd like you can attribute the seriousness of my message here to the influence of my serious new notebook.

Anyway, I wrote the following as a followup comment on my otherwise silly, fun post on Tina Fey, and it occurred to me I should elevate it to a separate post and see if we can get a good dialogue going on the subject here. Rather than rewrite it, I repeat myself:

Funny thing is, I used to not like Tina Fey — or Jimmy Fallon, or,
going way back before them, Dennis Miller — in their Weekend Update
days.

As y'all know, I like to have fun and kid around, but I do
take the news and the issues of the day seriously, and at some point I
get turned off by people who day in and day out sneer and make jokes of
serious issues. I mean, let's have fun and kid around, but when one's
entire diet of commentary consists of such junk food, and it's all
about mocking and never taking anything seriously, I think it has a
corrosive effect on society. Taken at it's extreme, I think it has
helped raise a generation that has trouble respecting anyone and
anything in politics. The constant drip, drip of smarmy satire adds to
all the partisan attack politics and tactics of personal destruction to
prevent us from coming together to solve the problems we have in common
— which is what representative democracy can be all about.

Needless
to say, I have NO appreciation for Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. And
while I enjoyed meeting and kidding around with Stephen Colbert (see video), I can't get into his shtick, either.

But
even though the Palin gag was pretty hard-hitting satire, it was so
enjoyable that it caused me to have a soft spot for Tina I didn't have
before.

I should also mention that I revised my opinion of Dennis Miller just from the couple of brief spots I've done on his radio show.
I had always thought of him as just too much of a wise guy, too
impressed with his own snarky cleverness, to be borne. But he's
actually deeper than that, and pleasant to talk to.

Of
course, this is just a corollary to something I've found about life —
almost anyone is a more likable, admirable person once you get past the
shorthand, bumper-sticker version of that person. To know a person is
to appreciate him or her more. Maybe this sounds trite, but in our 24/7
headline news/blog world, we increasingly go by the bumper sticker, and
don't get into people deeply enough to appreciate them.

And just
to get WAY philosophical on you…. One of my great disappointments
with this blog is that I had hoped, by having this forum for going way
beyond what I'm able to say and explore in the paper, I could forge
some avenues where I could have more meaningful exchanges with my
readers and fellow citizens about the important issues of the day —
and the people who are important players in those issues.

Unfortunately,
the resistance to that is just tremendous. So much of what passes for
dialogue here remains on the superficial, partisan, shorthand,
bumper-sticker simplistic level. I try to say something to provoke
thought, and somebody gives some standard, boilerplate ideological
response, and someone else shouts the established bumper-sticker
counter to THAT, and off we go on the kind of pointless partisan
merry-go-round that you can read or hear anywhere in the blogosphere or
on 24/7 talking head "news." And what is the point in that?

I
draw hope from the fact that occasionally, we get to the point where
some actual,  mutually respectful dialogue occurs between people who
HAVE gotten to know each other beyond the surface here. I see this
particularly with Phillip and Herb and Karen and a handful of others —
and in the past (although, unfortunately, not so much lately) from you,
Randy. I even get an encouraging word now and then from bud or Doug.

I just wish I knew how to build on that. I'm open to suggestions.

Maybe I need to make this a separate post…

… which I just did.

How about it? Do you see any way we can start having conversations here that matter?

Stepping forward into the past: My cool new Moleskine notebook

6 Replies



As you may have gathered, I'm a bit of a gadget guy. One of the reasons I blog is for the opportunities it gives me to mess around with cameras and PDAs and laptops and the various ways you can use them to produce text, sound, video, etc. This very night, in fact, I'll be trekking out to the Verizon store to get a Blackberry to replace the Treo I use for work. That Blackberry will be, as my Treo is now, a place for working with e-mail, my calendar, my contacts, as well as providing another browsing platform and a backup camera. Oh, yeah, and a phone (although I use the current one least for that).

But at the moment I am most enchanted with a piece of low-tech, retro equipment that my youngest daughter was so thoughtful as to give me for Christmas, ignoring my hint for a new insulated coffee travel mug. She gave me a Moleskine notebook — specifically, a Moleskine Reporter Ruled Notebook. You may have seen them in bookstores. They're advertised as the notebook of Hemingway and Picasso. In years past, I had thought of buying one (I was a great admirer of Hemingway in my youth, and he had something to do with my choice of career). But I couldn't justify the expense. After all, I get all the reporter's notebooks I need for free at work, right?

But I misunderestimated, to use a bit of Bushspeak, the magic of a really nice, classic, classy notebook in one's pocket. I just started carrying it yesterday, and it's already affecting how I work — for the better, I think. Since the notebook itself is special, it makes me think a little more carefully about what I choose to jot down. And it also makes me WANT to come up with stuff that's worthy to write in it. It's a motivator in the way a blank screen on a laptop or a PDA is not. It's like, I don't know, working on a painting or something — the sense that what I write here stays here, is permanent, has a life, and if this notebook is dug out of an old box in an attic by one of my great-grandchildren, they will read what I am writing today.

I find myself thinking I need to get a better pen to write in it with.

The book itself is esthetically appealing — you can see why Hemingway might have wanted to carry one around the Montparnasse or to the bullring or the front or whatever. It's a perfect size for the hand and the suitcoat pocket. It's black. The paper is of high quality. It has that cool, built-in elastic band to secure it with, giving a feeling of completeness and accomplishment when you finish a note and get ready to put it back in your pocket. Using it is just an appealing tactile, visual and interactive experience all around.

And it's making me more efficient, of all things. Y'all know how I tend to start my day with breakfast downtown, where I pore over The State and The Wall Street Journal and whatever I else I have time to look at over my coffee. Well, I get a lot of ideas while doing that, but too often, by the time I get back to the office, and have my morning meeting, and then start dealing with the e-mail that has to be read and the copy that has to be moved and talking with Robert about a cartoon and so forth and so on, next thing you know it's past lunch and my ideas of the morning are long forgotten.

This morning, I had a column idea for Sunday of the classic ephemeral sort that would be likely to evaporate long before I had time to start on it — bits and pieces from different stories I was reading in the paper. Wanting to hang onto the thread, I thought of sending myself some notes by e-mail on the Treo. But that is cumbersome at best, typing on that little thumb keyboard, and it lends itself only to the shortest of reminders. But then I remembered the notebook. So I sent myself an e-mail that simply said:

Hope springs, even in South Carolina politics

See Moleskin notebook

Then I opened my notebook and filled two pages with an outline for the column, an outline that would be just waiting for me to flesh out at my first opportunity (which, as it happens, did not arrive until mid-afternoon). Since I all too often don't write the first word of my Sunday column until midday Friday, this put me more than a day ahead on one of my must-do tasks of the week. Consequently, I might have a chance to write an extra column to run Tuesday (a page that has to be done this week because of the MLK holiday), one that occurred to me as I was doing the final editing on the Tuesday editorial (about the Obama inaugural).

A classic, simple black notebook. What an ingenious device for enhancing personal productivity. What will they think of next?

S.C. voters back increasing cigarette tax to national average — more than ever

33 Replies

The South Carolina Tobacco Collaborative released its new poll today showing support for increasing the state's lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax to the national average is higher than ever:

Overwhelming
Majority of

South
Carolina

Voters

Favor Increase in
Cigarette Tax

 

New Poll
Shows Overwhelming Support for Cigarette Tax

To Reduce
Youth Smoking and Address the State’s Healthcare
Needs

 

Columbia
(January 14, 2009) – Nearly
three-quarters of South Carolinians (74 percent) favor a proposal to raise the
state cigarette tax by 93 cents per pack to help fund programs to reduce tobacco
use among kids as well as programs to increase access to health care for South
Carolinians, according to a new poll released today. A majority of voters (60
percent strongly favor the 93-cent
increase.

 

The poll found that there is no
difference in support between a 93-cent and 50-cent increase. Support for both
specific cigarette tax increases is broad-based, and cuts across party, regional
and ideological lines.

Danny
McGoldrick

, Vice President for

Research

at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids noted,
“From a political standpoint, it’s clearly
‘in for a penny; in for a pound.’ This is because opposition to the cigarette
tax is low and essentially identical at the two levels, while the revenue and
other benefits dramatically increase with the higher
tax.”

 

The survey
of 500 registered

South
Carolina

voters, who are likely to vote, was released
today by the South Carolina Tobacco Collaborative in conjunction with the
Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and the American Cancer Society. In announcing its results, the
campaign declared the cigarette tax a win-win-win for

South Carolina

. An
increase in the state’s cigarette tax is a win for public health because it will
reduce smoking, particularly among kids; it’s a win for the state’s fiscal
health because it will raise more than $175 million in new annual revenue for
the state; and it’s a win for lawmakers who support it because of overwhelming
voter support.

 

Strong voter
support is evident among virtually every political and demographic subgroup of
voters in the

Palmetto

State

, as large majorities of Democrats
and Republicans, men and women, young and old, and residents of all parts of the
state support the tax. “The cigarette tax is clearly not a partisan issue,” said
McGoldrick. “The proposal has tremendous support across party lines and across
the state.”

 

Tobacco-caused
costs add more than $960 million per year to tax bills in the state – or more
than $560 for each

South
Carolina

household. “By increasing the cigarette tax,

South Carolina


will reduce smoking, save lives and help offset the health care costs caused by
smoking,” said Dr. Anthony Alberg of the Medical University of South
Carolina.

 

“Youth
smoking is an epidemic, and increasing the cigarette tax is a proven strategy to
protect thousands of

South
Carolina

kids from tobacco addiction,” said Alberg.
“

South
Carolina

has the nation’s lowest cigarette tax rate at
just 7 cents per pack and the lowest funding for prevention programs. We have
failed to take this important step to fight the epidemic. Among the options that
are on the table, increasing the cigarette tax is clearly a preferred solution
to making sure the state can balance the budget while funding important
priorities.”

 

 

In this
difficult economic environment, there is no support for any type of tax increase
in

South
Carolina

, with one exception – an increase in the state
cigarette tax. All other spending reductions or tax increases tested fall
flat.

 

Support for
a 93-cent increase in the state cigarette tax crosses party and ethnic lines,
with 73 percent of base GOPers, 86 percent of white Democrats, and 72 percent of
African Americans backing an increase in the state cigarette tax. Regionally,
support for a 93-cent cigarette tax increase is also strong across the state.
Support is stronger in the Lowcountry (80 percent favor) and Midlands (78
percent favor), but is also high in the Upstate (71 percent favor) and

Pee Dee

regions (67 percent favor). The
“weakest” subgroups – African American women and

Pee
Dee

voters, still back a cigarette tax increase by more than a 60
percent level.

 

In terms of
the specific cigarette tax increases tested by Public Opinion Strategies,
intensity is stronger for the 93-cent tax increase (60 percent strongly favor)
than for the 50-cent tax increase (54 percent strongly favor). Both proposed
increases receive strong support across party and ideological
lines.

 

The poll
found that a 93-cent cigarette tax increase is politically safe for legislators.
More than half (53 percent) of voters are more likely to support a candidate who
supports a cigarette tax increase, while just 14 percent are less likely.
Support remains high among base GOPers (50 percent more likely) as well as among
very conservative voters (51 percent more likely). Opposition among these groups
is low – just 12 percent of base GOPers are less likely, as are just 14 percent
of very conservative voters.

 

When asked
to choose, a significant majority of voters agree that revenue from a cigarette
tax increase should be used to reduce tobacco use, especially among children,
and to expand access to health care (62 percent), rather than to reduce other
state taxes (34 percent). Fully 83 percent of the electorate say they are
concerned about the problem of smoking and other tobacco use among young people
in South Carolina, with more than half (55 percent) of the electorate very
concerned about this issue.

 

Large bodies
of economic research, numerous expert panels, experience in other states, and
even reports from the tobacco industry have concluded decisively that price
increases effectively reduce smoking, especially among youth. The U.S. Surgeon
General, in the 2000 report, Reducing Tobacco Use, concluded that raising
cigarette taxes is widely regarded as one of the most effective tobacco
prevention strategies and that cigarette tax increases would lead to
“substantial long-run improvements in health.”

 

According to
the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a 93-cent increase in

South Carolina

’s cigarette tax would prevent more than
63,600

South Carolina

kids alive today from
becoming smokers and prompt 33,500 adult smokers to quit, saving 29,200

South Carolinians

from a premature,
smoking-caused death. The additional revenue from 93 cents per pack would
provide the state with an immediate boost of more than $175 million in revenue
in the first year alone.

 

“The
evidence is clear that increasing the price of cigarettes is one of the most
effective ways to reduce smoking, especially among children and pregnant women,”
said Jim Bowie, Executive Director of the South Carolina Tobacco Collaborative.
“Preliminary evidence confirms that every state that has significantly increased
its cigarette tax in recent years has enjoyed substantial increases in revenue,
even while reducing cigarette sales.

South Carolina

has nothing to lose and
everything to gain from raising its cigarette tax.”

 

The South
Carolina Tobacco Collaborative is a coalition of health, education, community,
business and faith organizations dedicated to raising the state excise tax on
cigarettes and other tobacco products to protect our kids. The Collaborative’s
more than 30 member groups, including the American Cancer Society, American
Heart Association, American Lung Association of South Carolina, South Carolina
Cancer

Alliance


and American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, support the 93-cent increase
in the cigarette tax to help prevent kids from starting to smoke and to fund
healthcare programs.

 

The survey
was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies. The statewide poll has a random
sample of 500 registered likely

South
Carolina

voters and was conducted December 9 and 11,
2008.  The poll has a margin of error of
+/- 4.38 percentage points.

So I guess I'm not the only one getting impatient on this.

Meanwhile, we had our lunch with the governor today. This subject came up, and basically he backs the idea of going a third of the way to the national average — if it's offset with a tax cut he wants. If it's NOT offset by the tax cut, he'll veto it again. But you probably knew that without my telling you.

Lunch was nice, by the way. Joel saw to it I had a nice grilled fish fillet with salad, and that the dressing didn't do me in. I appreciate it.

Regarding patience (as a virtue)

1 Reply

Among the things in my electronic IN box this morning was this forwarded message:

—–Original Message—–
From: Tom Fillinger
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 6:10 AM
To: StateEditor, Columbia
Cc: Warthen, Brad – External Email; Scoppe, Cindi; Bolton, Warren
Subject: Sweet Irony

RE Fuming With Impatience
 
Brad Warthen's editorial, 01/11/09, p. D2 – Fuming With Impatience.
 
Food For Thought, 01/11/09, p. D3 – "Patience is the companion of wisdom" – – St. Augustine.
 
The reader may draw their own conclusions.
 
In Grace,

Tom Fillinger, CEO
IgniteUS, Inc.

 

… to which I replied as follows:

Thanks. So far my
wife, Robert Ariail and you have all pointed this out to me. So you're in good
company.


Video returns: Excerpts from Harrell interview

7 Replies


Have you noticed that it’s been awhile since I posted video? Like, since the election? Well, there’s a simple explanation: As I told you at the time, my laptop was stolen from my truck on election night. That meant I lost both all of my raw video from those last weeks before the election, AND the platform on which I produced the clips for posting.

I got a new laptop (well, it’s new to ME) over the holidays, but was too busy either to shoot or to edit anything, what with folks being on end-of-year time off and such around here.

But we’re back, with this extended clip from the interview with Bobby Harrell Tuesday. It’s from near the end of the interview, when he was defending his record on roll-call voting, and how he treated Reps. Nikki Haley and Nathan Ballentine in connection with that.

If all you want is the stuff about Nikki and Nathan, it starts about 3 minutes and 18 seconds into the video (it starts with a question from me; you can probably hear the effects of my cold on my voice). Were I a TV “journalist,” that’s all I would have given you — the controversy, the sexy stuff. And admittedly, it IS the more interesting part.

But I decided to be all wonky and include Bobby’s extensive explanation before that of HIS position on transparency in voting, and what he’s tried to do about it. You’ll note, if you watch all of it, that at one point he handed us a document in support of what he was saying. Below you will find a photograph of that document. I hope you can read it OK.

Anyway, video is back. Enjoy.

Good news and bad news on health insurance

31 Replies

About the drugs…

I have good news and bad news from my own little private front in the constant battle to afford health care.

You probably don't remember this passage from my Nov. 26, 2007, column ("‘Health care reform?’ Hush! You’ll anger the Insurance Gods!"), so I'll repeat it here:

    Just the other day I went to my allergist’s office to get the
results of my first skin tests in 20 years. I’d been getting allergy
shots based on the old tests all that time, and my allergist, being a
highly trained professional, thought it might be a good idea to see if
I was still allergic to the same stuff. Actually, I can’t tell you for
sure that the shots ever helped. So why get them? Because my insurance pays for allergy shots, but won’t pay any more for me to take Zyrtec, which I know relieved my symptoms. The Insurance Gods say I don’t need Zyrtec.
…    Earlier this year, after surgery worked only briefly to relieve
head-pounding sinus pain, my surgeon gave me a prescription for Allegra.
I started to protest adding yet another drug to the 11 I was already
taking, counting the prednisone he was putting me on, but then he said
it was the generic version, so I said OK. My copay is only like $10 on generics; the Insurance Gods say generics are good.
    Then my pharmacy said my copay for my 30 generic pills would be $81.95. Stunned, I asked why? They shrugged and said no one knew; the Insurance Gods just said so.
I shut up and paid it, even though it meant delaying paying on my
mortgage or my electricity bill or some other frill. I think the pills
helped, but I certainly wasn’t going to get a refill.

Well, two good things have happened since then.

First, at the start of 2008, Zyrtec became available over-the-counter, quickly followed by the cheaper generic version, also available over the counter, so I've been able to supply myself with that for the past year at less than my co-pay would have been had my insurance covered it.

Unfortunately, the Zyrtec hasn't been helping all that much (and "helping" for me, with my extreme allergies, simply means keeping the ever-present symptoms down to a dull roar), even though I take twice the recommended daily adult dose every night (as my allergist told me to do).

So, on a whim, I asked him to write me a scrip for the generic version of Allegra 180, just to see what would happen at the pharmacy now that I have a different health care provider, and lo and behold — it went through, with only a $15 co-pay. So I said "fill it!" I'll tell you the results later, I've only taken it once so far.

That's the good news. Here's the bad…

The reason I was at the allergist yesterday is that I needed some Xopenex vials for my nebulizer to treat my asthma. I've been blessed the last couple of years by being almost completely free of asthma symptoms thanks to a miracle drug called Asmanex, of which I take two puffs nightly — and which, Thank The Lord, my insurance pays for, with a reasonable co-pay.

But the latest stage of this crud that I've had for three weeks is that ever since the weekend (about the time I was finishing the course of Levaquin, for the second stage of the crud, which was bronchitis), my bronchial tubes have been closing up on me even as the more obvious signs of infection subsided. A breathing treatment Tuesday night helped, but I needed refills. Rather than just calling in the refills, the allergist insisted I come in yesterday, and sure enough he told me what I didn't want to hear: I needed to do a course of prednisone.

He had me scarf down 60 mg. there in his office, and told me to take 20 mg more that night. Today, I scaled down to 40 in the a.m., and another 20 tonight. I'll repeat that tomorrow, then step down again the next day, and so on until I'm off it. You don't just go cold turkey off prednisone.

Now, I don't know if you've every had 80 mg. of prednisone rattling around in your skull, but that's just about enough right there to give you brief "Band of Brothers" hallucinations. And that's not the whole story.

Between the prednisone (which ought to have dealt with the worst of the asthma by tomorrow) and the Allegra, I forgot to get my Xopenex refill. I used my next-to-last dose last night, and called the doc back today, and they called it in.

But not so fast. They called me back minutes later, and said my insurance won't cover Xopenex. They had to go with the older, cruder drug, generic albuterol.

Now that's fine, except for one thing. Even when not taking prednisone, a dose of albuterol, administered via nebulizer machine, causes my heart to pound like I just ran about a mile. (If you take albuterol via the simple inhaler, it doesn't do that — but then, it does nothing for my asthma, either.) But I can live with that, because it opens me up. The only trouble is, if it's the middle of the night, I've got to sit up an hour or two until I calm down, because the pounding of my pulse through my throat and head against my pillow makes sleep impossible — pretty much the same as if I HAD just run about the block.

The nice thing about Xopenex is it has the therapeutic effect without the heart-pounding, so I can go to sleep within minutes after a treatment.

I asked my druggist, and he says Xopenex costs about twice as much. And of course, if my doctor and I jumped through a few more hoops and demonstrated that yes, we've tried albuterol, and yes, my doctor does have a legitimate reason to prefer that I use Xopenex because he is a trained medico and not a complete idiot (nor am I, but I doubt I could get them to believe that), they'd probably spring for the name brand. But of course, the business model of private, for-profit health insurance is to make you jump through enough hoops that you give up, and I had already spent WAY more time than I had time to spend on all this being-sick garbage this week. I've got work to do.

So I paid my $15 co-pay, took my albuterol and my nebulizer machine back to the office, and did a treatment sitting at my desk while reading The Economist. I started breathing a lot easier, and the only ill effect was that when I was proofing Robert Ariail's cartoon for tomorrow, I noticed my hand was shaking à la Tom Hanks in "Saving Private Ryan." But I could still lead my company up the beach.

Here's the thing about all this: If the insurance simply demanded double the co-pay for me to get Xopenex (the way they do with Asmanex), I'd probably just say the heck with it, give me the albuterol, and put up with the heart-pounding. I AM cost-conscious. (In fact, I tried to talk my primary-care doc into giving me the much-cheaper tetracycline for the bronchitis, but he insisted it wouldn't work but Levaquin would — my allergist agreed yesterday when I asked him the same question. I'm VERY cost-conscious, and am always asking about these things.)

But they don't do that. They get all "we-know-more-than-your-doctor" on me, and assume that I don't care about cost, and so they have to tell me what I can have and what I can't have. And frankly, that ticks me off. I've had asthma for 55 years, and I know what I need and what I don't need.

I know what you're thinking: If we had a single-payer National Health plan the way I want, the gummint might also tell me I can't have Xopenex. Maybe. Then again, if the gummint was the sole provider of coverage, the drug company would be MUCH more likely to figure out a way to offer it at a lower cost, since they wouldn't be able to play all these difference consumer groups with different payment rules against each other. If the gummint wouldn't allow it, they wouldn't sell ANY Xopenex.

Of course, if they COULDN'T sell it cheaper, we'd all have to take albuterol. But that wouldn't be the end of the world, either. It gets the job done — ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom…

Anyway, I think that explains the drug reference earlier. All perfectly legit, I assure you.

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

2 Replies

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

10 Replies

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!

19 Replies



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

11 Replies

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

18 Replies

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

14 Replies

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 stateeditor@thestate.com.
 
If you are
submitting a potential GUEST COLUMN FOR OUR OP-ED PAGE, please resend it
to Cindi Scoppe at cscoppe@thestate.com. 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’

11 Replies

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

6 Replies

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

16 Replies

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

20 Replies

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!

4 Replies

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

34 Replies

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’

8 Replies

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/ .