Category Archives: Working

What I wrote about SPDs in 1991

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Things don’t change in South Carolina; they just don’t. If you doubt me, read this piece I wrote in 1991. It was in connection with the 13th installment of the Power Failure project that I directed that year, when I was still in The State‘s newsroom. I quoted from it in my Sunday column.

For those of you who don’t remember, I spent that whole year (except for brief stints when I pulled away to help with our national desk with coverage of the Gulf War and the Soviet coup) running this project that delved very deeply into the fundamental, structural problems with government on the state and local levels in South Carolina. Before that, I had been The State’s governmental affairs editor. After, I took on other, temporary editing assignments as I awaited my chance to join the editorial board. Power Failure had pretty much ruined me for news work.

The piece I refer you to was a little invention of mine that I called the "thread." After the first installment or so of the series (there were 17), I realized that each installment threw an awful lot at people. I wanted to make sure that there was some consistent feature, from installment to installment, that linked that day’s installment with all the previous ones, making sure readers saw the themes that ran through them all. The threads were very short columns by me — about 11 inches long — that essentially answered the questions, What do I need to get out of this installment? How is it related to the rest of the series?

Anyway, I call your attention in particular to this passage. As I noted in my Sunday column, we always have to deal with supporters of SPDs acting like we’re after them personally when we criticized the continued existence of these anachronistic little governments. One of their favorite defenses is to cite the fine work they do providing needed services — as though the same services couldn’t be provided under more sensible governing arrangements. And yet, from the very start, I had anticipated and moved past such objections on their part:

Now before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: There are no bad guys here. Or rather, there might be a few bad guys here and there, but they’re not the problem.

There’s nothing sinister about special-purpose districts per se. They were all established with good intentions. They were set up to provide essential services to people who otherwise would have had to do without. Generally, they continue to perform those services.

The problem is that many — although not all — of them have outlived their usefulness, and their very existence means that government on the local level is more fragmented and less accountable than necessary.

That ran in our paper on Oct. 10, 1991.

Come to think of it, I’ll just make this easy for you and reproduce the whole "thread" for that day here, in case you’re at all interested:

THE STATE
HOW MANY GOVERNMENTS DO WE NEED?
Published on: 10/20/1991
Section: IMPACT
Edition: FINAL
Page: 1D
By Brad Warthen
Memo: POWER FAILURE: The Government That Answers to No One Thirteenth in a series

Do we really need this much government?
    Apart from the mess at the state level — such as an executive branch split into 133 completely independent entities — South Carolina has 46 counties, 271 towns and 91 school districts.
    And about 500 special-purpose districts.
    Maybe we do need this much government. But do we need this many governments, separate and frequently competing?
    Now before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: There are no bad guys here. Or rather, there might be a few bad guys here and there, but they’re not the problem.
    There’s nothing sinister about special-purpose districts per se. They were all established with good intentions. They were set up to provide essential services to people who otherwise would have had to do without. Generally, they continue to perform those services.
    The problem is that many — although not all — of them have outlived their usefulness, and their very existence means that government on the local level is more fragmented and less accountable than necessary.
    These districts are part of the legacy of the Legislative State, and point to some key characteristics of that odd system:

  • Legislative dominance. Until "Home Rule" was passed in 1975, only legislators had the power to solve local problems, such as providing services to unincorporated areas. Rather than empower local governments, legislators did what they always did — set up separate entities that drew their power from the lawmakers, not from voters.
  • Our rural past. Once, most people lived in the country. Now, most people live in or around towns. In many areas, more conventional elected local governments can provide the services SPDs provide — if allowed to. Special- purpose districts deny the urban present and affirm the rural past, as does legislative government itself.
  • That "personal" touch. Government by personal political connection is a hallmark of the Legislative State, and it finds expression here. Individual legislators protect and support special-purpose districts, and those interested in preserving the districts support the legislators.

    The bottom line is that, on the local level as well as on the state, policymaking and service delivery are fragmented, and we’re paying for more administration than we need. No one is in charge.
    Only the Legislature can solve this problem. It can start by setting up a procedure for dissolving SPDs, when and where warranted.
    Then, if it can stop listening to the interests who profit from fragmentation, it can do what voters said 19 years they wanted it to do — allow local government to be consolidated and simplified.
    According to the main lobbyist for the SPDs, "It appears that proponents of consolidation just want power." He’s right; they do. And so do the opponents.
    And so do the people, who have waited for it long enough.
All content © THE STATE and may not be republished without permission.
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Oh, one thing that has changed, slightly. The Legislature did, after this series, finally pass enabling legislation to allow for consolidation of governments. Not that we’ve seen that happen much since.

And we still have more than 500 SPDs. And still, no one knows the exact number.

Forget business. In S.C., it’s always personal

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    “Forget about business; it’s personal.”
— what Michael Corleone would have said in “The Godfather,” had he been a South Carolinian

EVERY WORD of the following paragraph, which I wrote in 1991 about our state government, remains true today:
    Government by personal political connection is a hallmark of the Legislative State, and it finds expression here. Individual legislators protect and support special-purpose districts, and those interested in preserving the districts support the legislators.
    Special purpose districts are difficult to talk about to anyone who is not personally involved with them. A quick primer:
    Until 1975, county councils did not exist in South Carolina. State legislators ran everything; lawmakers from a given county made all the local decisions that in most other parts of the country would be made by local government. They provided local services such as recreation, sewerage and fire protection with tiny, ad hoc mini-governments called “special purpose districts.” The districts generally did not follow county lines; often there were several for the same purpose within a county.
    Even after county councils were formed in the ’70s, lawmakers refused to do away with SPDs, leading in many cases to conflict and duplication, and to confused lines of responsibility (confusing to the average voter, that is; insiders knew how things worked). There are more than 500 SPDs in the state today. No one knows the exact number, not even the S.C. Association of Special Purpose Districts.
    The continued existence of these extra little governments, which derive their power from the Legislature, is one of the ways that state lawmakers keep county government weak and ineffective.
    If SPDs ceased to exist today (not likely, by the way), some would and should quickly be reconstituted because they address purposes that go beyond the reach of a single county — such as the body that governs the Columbia airport, or Riverbanks Zoo. But most need to be eliminated, and their duties absorbed by elected city and county governments.
    Whenever we on this editorial board say this, folks who work for or derive some measure of power from SPDs get very upset with us. They take it very personally. But for us, it’s not personal; it’s strictly business — the business of good government.
    In America, we like to say that we have a government of laws and not of men (or of women, either, if you want to be pedantic about it). But our small state’s Byzantine governing arrangements militate in the opposite direction.
    I was reminded of this when the head of the state association of SPDs, Mike Hancock, came to visit us last week. His purpose was to let us know that the folks who run SPDs weren’t monsters; his goal was easily achievable because we’ve never thought anything of the kind — we just disagree with them. But while he knew he wasn’t a monster — in point of fact, he seems a very nice man — he apparently wasn’t so sure about us. He admitted to being uneasy, apparently because he did not have a personal relationship with us. To address that, he had brought along his attorney, Jay Bender, who just happens to be this newspaper’s longtime attorney. Personal.
    Mr. Hancock did try to establish something of a bond at the start of our conversation, reminding us that several years back when my colleague Cindi Scoppe and I spoke to the SPD association, he moderated, and did his best to prevent us from being ridden on a rail. I had not remembered his being there. The only person I clearly remember by name from that confab was a lady who asked us to do that gig — an old and dear friend of my longtime friend and colleague Lee Bandy. Personal.
    At one point in the conversation, we were talking about the fact that under current law, it’s impossible to eliminate one SPD; you’d have to disband them all (which, once again, isn’t about to happen). Cindi noted that this will continue to be the case unless Chief Justice Jean Toal gets another ally on the Supreme Court who believes the state constitution allows the SPDs’ individual dissolution. Personal.
    A moment later, Mr. Hancock was expressing uncertainty about his association’s legislative strategy (chief goal: protecting SPDs), noting that with Bill Cotty retiring, he didn’t even know who his own state representative was going to be, which put him at a disadvantage. Personal.
    But in South Carolina, Mr. Hancock and his association truly have the advantage in their campaign to preserve SPDs.
    It’s like with the adjutant general. Every other state in the union holds to the principle that military officers should be apolitical. But in South Carolina, we elect the head of our National Guard. That is unlikely to change because lawmakers defer to the preferences of Guard members, and Guard members generally tend to be closely tied to their current commanding officer (which is how it works in banana republics; the U.S. military avoids this by transferring officers frequently), who is always totally invested in the system “that brung him” — popular election. Personal.
    Similarly, with more than 500 SPDs, there are thousands of people personally invested in their continued existence. This makes for a huge constituency for the status quo. There are, after all, only 46 counties.
    Mr. Hancock has nothing to worry about, no matter what we busybodies on the editorial page may say about SPDs. He seems to be a very nice guy, and he’s allied with a lot of other nice folks. And over at our State House, it’s always personal.

Had you heard McCain had taken the lead (according to Zogby)?

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Well, I had seen the WSJ/NBC poll showing a dead heat, and the Winthrop/ETV poll showing McCain with a big lead in the South (big surprise, huh?), but having fallen behind in my e-mail, I had missed this until Kathleen Parker’s latest column brought it to my attention:

Reuters/Zogby Poll: McCain Makes a Move, Takes 5-Point Lead Over Obama – Video Commentary By John Zogby Available Now

Obama loses ground among Dems, women, Catholics & even younger voters

UTICA, New York – As Russian tanks rolled into the Republic of Georgia and the presidential candidates met over the weekend in the first joint issues forum of the fall campaign, the latest polling includes drama almost as compelling – Republican John McCain has taken a five-point lead over Democrat Barack Obama in the race for President, the latest Reuters/Zogby telephone survey shows.

McCain leads Obama by a 46% to 41% margin.

And McCain not only enjoys a five-point edge in a two-way race against Obama, but also in a four-way contest including liberal independent candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr, the poll reveals. In the four-way contest, McCain wins 44% support, Obama 39%, Barr 3% and Nader 2%.

This latest Reuters/Zogby poll is a dramatic reversal from the identical survey taken last month – in the July 9-13 Reuters/Zogby survey, Obama led McCain, 47% to 40%. In the four-way race last month, Obama held a 10-point lead over McCain.

That’s according to Zogby.

Do you find this surprising? I did.

One column or the other? Choosing between the day’s best for op-ed

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When I choose syndicated columns for op-ed, I’m usually a stickler about one thing — it has to have just arrived. If it didn’t come in within the 24 hours since I last looked, I don’t consider it. Once passed over, permanently passed over.

For tomorrow’s paper, I broke my own rule ("Actually," as Dr. Venkman said, "it’s more of a guideline than a rule."), choosing a Kathleen Parker column I had passed on the day before.

Today broke a week-long pattern. Today, there was nothing new that stood out as worth publishing. But on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I had trouble choosing between two columns each day that stood out well above the rest, but for different reasons were equally appealing. Practically coin-toss decisions. Ms. Parker’s piece on the Saddleback Church "debate" was the one I almost chose on Wednesday for today, but didn’t. So I’m using it Friday instead of something newer.

Anyway, in keeping with my practice of using the blog to better explain how we do things around here (and one of the most common questions I get from the reading public is "How do you choose what you run on the op-ed page?"), let me tell you about the picks I agonized over. First, I should note that the process is about as selective as you can get, since we only have room for one syndicated and one local piece a day. (For that reason, I just have to shake my head over people who submit columns for selection, are not selected, and go about in the community complaining loudly that we "refused to run" their piece. What they fail to recognize, either intentionally or unintentionally, is that NOT being chosen is the norm. The one piece we choose out of many is the exception, not the rule.) Because we only have that one national or international piece a day, the only way to achieve any "balance" or diversity of opinion is over time, considering many days together.

Here were my three dilemmas, and how I resolved them:

  • Monday (for Tuesday’s paper) — Mondays tend to be a bit warmed-over, since even the "fresh" pieces were usually written the week before. One exception to that was Bill Kristol’s piece on the Saddleback Church event Saturday night. He had written it for Monday’s NYT (one of the drawbacks of using NYT columns is that they ALWAYS, even during the week, move long after our deadline — the NYT moves according to its own convenience, not that of paying subscribers — so the earliest we get to run them is a day after they were in the NYT), but it was still out ahead of any other columns I would see on the subject (Ms. Parker’s moved late Tuesday). Seeing the topic as fresh, and having missed the event myself, I leaned strongly toward using the Kristol piece. But I didn’t. Instead, I chose a column by Nicholas Kristof that did something I regarded as more important — reminded people dazzled by the glitz of the Olympics just how reflexively oppressive the Chinese government is. I was a little put off by Mr. Kristof’s gimmicky approach — pretending he wanted a license to protest, and having a videographer follow him through the process, a la early Geraldo Rivera — but his point was important. So I went with it, and put Mr. Kristol (with an L) in the queue for our Saturday online edition. (Also-rans from that day’s bounty, columns that didn’t make the initial cut, included ones from Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Kathleen Parker, Bob Herbert, Gail Collins and Derrick Jackson.)
  • Tuesday (for Wednesday’s paper) — The piece I almost ran was one by Robert Samuelson headlined "The Real China Threat," which was embargoed for Wednesday publication (unlike the NYT, the WashPost Writers Group moves its columnists in advance, so we can run them at the same time as their home paper itself). An excerpt: "Will China overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy? Well, stop worrying. It almost certainly will." He went on, in typical thorough Samuelson fashion, to explain exactly why and how. But I saved that one for Saturday (the theme would be just as fresh, and just as true, then), and chose instead a David Brooks column that made an observation about John McCain I had not yet seen — that not only was his approach to campaigning becoming less "maverick" and more conventional, but that it was working for him in the polls (an assertion that would be backed up in a WSJ/NBC News poll today). Aside from that, I just loved the lead anecdote expressing McCain’s usual approach to the hyperidiotic world of partisan politics:

        On Tuesdays, Senate Republicans hold a weekly policy lunch. The party leaders often hand out a Message of the Week that the senators are supposed to repeat at every opportunity. Sometimes there will be a pollster offering data that supposedly demonstrates the brilliance of the message and why it will lead to political nirvana.
        John McCain generally spends the lunches at a table with a gang of fellow ne’er-do-wells. He cracks jokes, razzes the speaker and generally ridicules the whole proceeding. Then he takes the paper with the Message of the Week back to his office. He tosses it on the desk of some staffer with a sarcastic comment like: “Here’s your message. Learn it. Love it. Live it.”
        This sort of behavior has been part of McCain’s long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship. In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity….

    (Also-rans from Tuesday: Cal Thomas, Tom Teepen, David Broder, Leonard Pitts.)

  • Wednesday (for Thursday’s paper) — This was the toughest choice of all. First, there was Kathleen’s piece, which I loved because of the way it ran against the pigeonhole that readers try to put her in. Rather than gushing about McCain’s (and Rick Warren’s) performance the way other "conservatives" had done, she criticized the whole affair as telling her more than she wanted to know about the respective candidates’ religious beliefs. It’s columns such as that one that move us forward, by making us think different thoughts (even though I don’t necessarily agree with her point). But in the end I went with the Tom Friedman column from that morning. It was just way too important, and he had accomplished something that was very difficult to do within the space of a single column. He explained very clearly why the U.S. and Saakashvili share blame for stupid courses of action leading up to the Georgia invasion, while making it VERY clear that Putin is the main bad guy and must be opposed with all the West can muster. Both Kathleen’s and Friedman’s pieces were of the sort that made you feel smarter for having read them. But no one had summed up the Georgia invasion as well as Friedman did. And besides, it had been awhile since I had picked a Friedman piece, leaving a palpable vacuum that only he could fill. (Also-rans: George Will, Maureen Dowd.)

So initially I had slotted Kathleen’s column to join the others on the Saturday list. But now I’ve pulled it back to run Friday.

One more point — you may have noticed that the way I use the Saturday online page is to run the very best pieces that didn’t quite make it — each of them better than everything else that moved that day (except for the one I did pick). That makes the Saturday Opinion Extra worth reading, which not enough people do. That’s my opinion, anyway.

What would we do without those wonderful media watchdogs?

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Speaking of self-absorbed… Just got this e-mail from Romenesko with PoynterOnline — a site about media on the subject of media — with a link to a media site reporting on what media watchdog groups say about the media.

Did you follow that? You could leave out a couple of the "medias," and you’d still probably get the idea.

Anyway, Romenesko somewhat whimsically reported on both of the following at the same time:

  • The conservative Media Research Center claims that not only do the media obsess about Obama, but "34 percent of the stories about Obama were positive and 5 percent negative. The rest were characterized as neutral."
  • Set that alongside this report from the liberal Media Matters, telling us that "for more than a decade, John McCain has been the media’s favorite
    politician. Even conservatives have long acknowledged that McCain
    enjoys a special place in the hearts of the Washington press corps."

Yadda-yadda.

People see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear. I’ve had fun with these "media watchdog" groups on the blog before.

Want to know the truth? The "media" — to the extent that you can talk about anything so diverse and numerous — like Obama. They also, to the same extent, like McCain. The "favorite" of most media types won both parties’ nominating contests.

Hey, even I like ’em both — and I am very seldom in tune with the "collective wisdom" of the MSM.

Did anybody besides Republicans watch that ‘debate’ Saturday night?

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Saddleback

You may have noticed that I write more lately about what various pundits are saying, comparing and contrasting and noting trends. That’s because I inherited one of the main tasks that Mike Fitts used to take care of — choosing syndicated columnists for our op-ed page. Therefore every day, I’m more conscious than usual of what all the major writers are saying, as opposed to just the ones that happened to grab my attention that day.

And I notice things. For instance, last week I was noticing that the columnists most eager to write about what the Soviets — dang, Russians (there I go again) — are doing in Georgia were the "conservatives." (Since then, Paul Krugman and Trudy Rubin have weighed in.)

I should pause at this point to explain the unfortunate fact that pretty much all major columnists are labeled — either by their syndicates, by the papers that run them or by themselves — as "liberal" or "conservative." Many are marketed this way (which is one reason you’ll never see me syndicated — I have no niche). There are some who resist this nobly. David Broder, for instance, has so much of the reporter in him still that his writing is remarkably even-handed. He is "moderate" in pretty much every sense. But hold a gun to an editor’s head and force him to choose, and he will describe him as "center-left" Similarly, Robert Samuelson approaches his subjects with such an academic detachment (I say "academic," although it is my rough impression that these days such detachment as Samuelson’s is rare in academia), particularly with regard to economics, that he does not fit comfortably in one camp or the other. But force it, and I suppose he is "center-right." Maureen Dowd is an equal-opportunity insulter, but would you ever call her "conservative?" No.

Anyway, this week I’m noticing that those who either lean right or are unabashedly "conservative" and/or Republican keep bringing up this forum that John McCain and Barack Obama participated in at Saddleback Church Saturday night. I gotta tell you I missed it. My wife and I did a rare thing that night — we got dressed up and went out. Specifically, we went to the Cap City Club’s 20th Anniversary Gala, but for us it was an excuse to celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary, which was on Sunday. When we got home, I watched a little bit of the Olympics, and saw Michael Phelps make sports history (although not in high definition).

Apparently, most of America was doing the same, including all left-leaning pundits. I say that because I’ve seen the following three descriptions of the event, all of them saying both that the event was well-run, and that McCain came off looking better than Obama did:

  1. William Kristol’s column in the NYT Monday:

        While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn’t enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching — and for me yielded three conclusions.
        First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates….
        Second, it was McCain’s night….

  2. This typical piece in the WSJ today, which essentially trashed what was revealed about Obama during the event:

    On Saturday night at the Saddleback Church in Southern California, Rick
    Warren showed Jim, Gwen, Tom, Bob and Co. what a presidential moderator
    can accomplish when he makes the debate about the candidates and not
    himself….

  3. A column by Cal Thomas, meant for Tuesday publication:

       The "civil forum” featuring presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain may not have been as exciting as Michael Phelps winning his eighth Olympic gold medal, but it was civil and it was a forum from which emerged useful information.
       McCain had the most to gain. Judging by the applause, he won the night among evangelical voters….

So my question now is this: Did any Democrats or liberals watch this event? Did they, too, think Rick Warren did a great job? Did they think their guy did better than McCain, or do they think the less said, the better? So far, I have no indication.

Any of y’all who saw it, help us out here.

Jim Rex on public school choice

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Obviously, this was not a good day to leave my camera at home. First the interesting James Smith speech, then Jim Rex visited us to report on his first year in office.

He talked for some length about his initiatives pushing public school choice. He had a lot to say about it, some of which I captured on my phone above (sorry again about the quality).

I haven’t really had time to go through all my notes yet from this meeting. When I do, maybe I’ll find the beginnings of a column; I don’t know. But in the meantime, I’ll share his response to my expressing one of my big reservations about school "choice," whether it’s public or private.

Specifically, I worry that there’s no way to administer choice so that everybody has access to it (which is why I’m always preaching that we need to improve ALL the schools). In a state where the Legislature won’t even come up with enough money to pay for the gasoline for buses to go where they go NOW, how are kids who don’t have middle-class Moms with a minivan to run them to a program 20 miles away supposed to avail themselves of these opportunities.

Rex had a fairly decent reply to that. He said that if you start a good program — say, single-gender programs — in a few schools, parents across the state will demand the same opportunities, and soon you’ll see it in every corner of the state. In the case of single-gender, the program started in a handful of schools, and this year is in 250. Of course, single-gender is a low-cost kind of "choice" to offer. It’s a little harder to ramp up such programs as Montessori.

But he’s committed to this course.

Again, sorry about the video quality. You know where my usual camera (which by the way is my own personal camera, not the newspaper’s) was? I’d left it at home where I’d taken some pictures of my twin grandbabies, who are — no offense intended here — WAY more photogenic than Jim Rex and James Smith. For proof, see below. (And that’s just ONE of them. I could have shown both, but I didn’t think y’all could stand that much cute.)

Tiptoes

Fabulously Hot

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Being shorthanded and having much to do, we don’t have as much fun as we used to in our morning meetings — gotta get out, get to it. But silliness can insinuate itself no matter how brisk and businesslike we are, especially if we try to go a little too fast.

This morning, as he was quickly moving through a list of things he might write about, assuming we achieved consensus on them, Warren mentioned the new "Fabulously Hot" slogan for the Columbia metro area.

Wait, I said — I think you’re confusing this promotional campaign with another one.

Of course, the real challenged faced by the Midlands isn’t communicating a clear, unified sense of place to the rest of the world. For folks who are not here, we are Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. Whether we are in Cayce (slogan: "Lebensraum"), Irmo ("Where Referenda Go to Die") or Richland Northeast ("Halfway to Florence"), folks elsewhere see us as being in Columbia.

The problem is that we can’t get our act together to capitalize upon that, or accomplish much anything else, because of our balkanized system of many tiny, competing governments. As Warren said later in the meeting: Sure, it’s hot — thanks to all the friction between the many little governments.

The blog as a work-around device

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For years I’ve been functioning at a two-computer workstation for various reasons.

Since I blog, I do most of my browsing on the laptop, which runs Windows XP. That way, whether I’m here or not, I’m using the same platform when blogging. Gradually, I’ve started using it for other things — for PhotoShop (both for blog and newspaper use), for editing video, for storage (it’s connected to an external hard drive), and even for my office e-mail. For some reason, Outlook has never run right on my desktop.

My desktop runs Windows 98, because it is what we call a "pag station" (for "pagination"). That’s the machine I have to use to write columns for the paper, and to edit my colleague’s stuff, because it’s the only platform I have that runs DewarView, and that’s our system that connects text to pagination. Finally, it’s the machine on which I run QuarkXPress, which is the pagination software. I can put a page together, hit a button (several buttons, really) and out comes a page-size negative downstairs, from which the plates that go on the press are made. All that stuff was written for Windows 98.

Anyway, sometimes I need to get information from one platform to the other, and you know what the easiest way to get that done is? Post it on the blog (as a draft if I don’t want it public yet), then go to the other machine and call it up on the browser. In fact, I’ve gotten so used to doing this that I don’t use a flashdrive or anything like that anymore. If I want to keep working on something at home that I was doing on the desktop (say, the speech for the Cap City breakfast, which I wrote at the office the night before), I put it on the blog.

So anyway, Cindi sent me a contribution for the blog rail we run in the paper on Mondays. Trouble is, she sent it as e-mail. So I’m posting it on the blog, so I can turn to the machine four feet away and put it in a Dewarview file (after, of course, washing it through Notepad to get rid of the invisible Web coding). Here’s what she sent me, from Paul Hyde’s blog:

Howie Rich trashes S.C. public education
    Howie Rich, the rich New Yorker who’s trying to buy the S.C. Legislature, hates public education.
    At least that’s the impression you get from hearing him speak.
    Rich, who spent a half million dollars in our state’s primary election trying to put school voucher advocates in the S.C. Legislature, drips elitist contempt for S.C. public schools.
    In a fawning interview (posted on You Tube) with S.C. Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson, Rich describes public education supporters this way:
    "The other side is in it for one thing – taxpayer dollars. They love it every year when the Legislature gives them more money for what they call ‘education.’"
    What they "call ‘education’"? (In the interview, Rich supplies the quotation marks with his curled fingers.)
    Well, that’s a nice slap in the face to 46,000 dedicated and hardworking South Carolina public school teachers, not to mention hundreds of thousands of parents and other supporters public schools.
    Contrary to what New Yorker Rich suggests, teachers and administrators in our state do not become educators for the sole purpose of lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars.
    On the contrary, most educators dedicate their lives to trying to help 700,000 South Carolina young people become thoughtful citizens and productive members of society.
    That’s not "education," in the sense intended by Rich’s sarcastic quotation marks.
    That really IS education, in the most profound sense.
    Rich shows his disgust and disrespect for public education and its supporters through name-calling. His favorite labels: the "educrat establishment," "the opposition," "the other side" and "the monolithic institution."
    No one disputes that public schools have problems. But South Carolina teachers and administrators deserve better than to have their hard work, sacrifices and commitment dismissed with the sneering contempt that Rich so richly displays.
    Has the man ever met a South Carolina teacher?
    Does Dawson, the GOP state chairman, and Gov. Mark Sanford – who recently called Rich a "patriot" – really want to align themselves with an extremist who has such a nasty attitude toward public education?
    Rich spent a lot of money in the primaries through about two dozen companies. Some South Carolinians are beginning to examine the legality of that.
    You can bet Rich plans to spend a lot of money in the general election here.
    In the interview, Rich admits to ideological motivations.
    "You might call it ideology," says Rich. "I believe in something strongly and I want to make it happen."
    So much for why Rich wants to impose his will on South Carolina.
    But does it matter to Rich what South Carolinians want for their own schools?
    Most of us in this state attended public schools. Many of us know teachers and some of us have family members in public education. Many of us have children in the public schools.
    We know first hand of the dedication and hard work of educators.
    We know also that public education is one of the sturdy pillars of whatever prosperity we as individuals and as a state now enjoy.
    Sorry, Howie, but we South Carolinians are not about to roll over and play dead while you trash our public schools.

Actually, I guess I could have just sent myself the link. But she sent me the whole thing, so there it is… Now I’m going to go get it on the other machine…

Supt. Scott Andersen and Dist. 5 school board in better days

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Our Sunday lead editorial will be about the Lexington/Richland District 5 school board’s conspiracy of silence over the resignation of Superintendent Scott Andersen. As I was editing it earlier today, it occurred to me that I had video of the superintendent together with his board at a time of perfect unity — just under a year ago, when they came to visit us to promote the bond referendum that failed last fall.

I had posted video from this meeting before, but the clips concentrated entirely on the board members. They, after all the ones who are elected and therefore directly accountable to the people (or should be, their recent secrecy to the contrary). And the thing that impressed us was their unanimity on the bond referendum. None of us could remember when the District 5 board had been so unified about anything, so that was where the news lay.

But I remember having the impression that the unanimity might have resulted in part from a good selling job by the superintendent. Superintendents work for boards, but all of them strive to lead their boards when they can. And when they lose that ability, they are often on the way out.

In the above clip, watch for two things:

  • Mr. Andersen’s breezy confidence as he makes his pitch, even to the point of joking about his having "skipped over the price tag." This was obviously a guy who was comfortable in front of his board members.
  • His board was comfortable with him, chuckling and joshing about the fact that "Scott’s not from around here," after the superintendent had explained his ignorance about a piece of property the district had been interested in (ignorance that critics of the board had misinterpreted as a deliberate attempt to deceive, according to Mr. Andersen).

To help you remember, I’m imbedding below the old clip from that meeting as well, with the board members speaking.

Well, it matters to THEM

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Someone in the comments back on this post asked,

Why does it matter whom Mr. Warthen and his shrinking enterprise endorse for President?

Of course, there is no modest way for me to answer such assertions. I can only say that it mattered enough to Barack Obama and John McCain to make time to come see us and seek that endorsement. Also to Joe Biden, Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback.

Hillary Clinton opted not to come see us. Whatever happened to her anyway?

Build a better blog, and they’ll beat a path to your door

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One of the cool things about blogging is that so much of the time, you don’t even have to go look stuff up or ask questions in order to provide relevant content for your readers — your subjects will do it for you.

Increasingly, I find that about all I have to do is wonder aloud about something on the blog, or poke a little fun at something I know little about, and suddenly those involved with the issue will be reaching out to shower info on me from across the nation — info from their point of view of course, but that can be helpful. I don’t even have to contact them; they find me.

For instance, today alone, I:

  • Heard from the campaign of the Senate candidate in Texas who I said might be Energy Party material. Responding to my crack that his position lacked details, his campaign sent me a PDF file with more info. But then, inexplicably, they asked me NOT to post the PDF, urging me just to write about it or excerpt it. I wrote back asking why CAN’T I post it, and I’m waiting hear back on that.
  • Got a mea culpa from the author of the release from musicFIRST about the omission I had joked about.
  • Got a phone message from the OPPOSITE side of that issue — the radio people who don’t WANT to pay those performers what they want. Here’s the audio clip of that.

If anything else interesting comes in with little or no effort on my part, I’ll be sure to share it.

RichCo Council agrees with us on sales tax hike

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The proposal to put a local penny sales tax increase for Richland County transportation needs on the November ballot presented us with a dilemma as an editorial board. Some of the main points to consider:

  • With the vehicle tax expiring in October, some way to continue funding the Midlands bus system was needed.
  • The road work identified in the plan a citizen study group came up with DID identify real needs — although the road construction, along with bike paths, etc. — were in our minds mere sweeteners (in this plan, that is) to draw more votes for the bus funding. There is indeed a need for some road construction, and MUCH road maintenance, not only in Richland County, but across our state. That has been neglected by our Legislature, which has also refused to reform the DOT, making us reluctant to see any additional funding passed, since it would pass through such an inefficient and unaccountable agency.
  • With the tax swap of last year, the Legislature has already put far too much stress on sales taxes, and too little on other mechanisms such as property and income. Another penny would exacerbate an already serious problem. It’s not as bad here yet as Tennessee, but we’re getting there.
  • The Legislature — see how often the Legislature is the source of problems? — has given local governments no better options for funding local needs.
  • Putting the question on the ballot is not the same thing as supporting it.

So, faced with all that and more, we noted the problems with a sales tax increase in our Tuesday editorial, although we reluctantly granted that at this point, perhaps the only way forward was to go ahead and have the referendum. Then, when it failed, the council would know it had to find another way to fund the buses.

Now that it has voted down even having the referendum (which we did not think the council would do, or I  didn’t anyway), the county has reached that point even more quickly.

The best option at the moment would seem to be continuing the wheel tax, while looking for a longer-term solution to paying the county’s share of operating the inadequate transit system that we have.

OK, who dropped the Agent Orange?

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Herbal2

Remember how I told you about the Vietnamese cilantro that was taking over the little herb garden I had planted in my office in an effort to make it look a little less bleak?

Well, I actually took another picture of it a couple of weeks ago (above), and meant to post it to show y’all how much more it had grown, but I figured there’s a limit to how much minutia you can throw at people, even on a blog.

Well, there’s been a dramatic new development. I’ve been watering it — actually, watering it a ridiculous amount, but still, it would look thirsty on Mondays.

Here (below) is how it looked when I came this Monday. Actually, this is how it looked Tuesday, after I had given it lots of water to try to revive it.

So… either there is a limit to how much water this stuff can soak up, or somebody dropped a significant amount of Agent Orange in my office over the weekend.

Or maybe somebody put a curse on me — did ya ever think of that?

Still no coffee since 9:37 a.m….
Agentorange

Mike Fitts helped us make up our minds

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
A few days back, I shared unwelcome news with colleagues here at The State. You, our readers, ought to know as well.
    It is with the deepest regret that I hereby announce that Associate Editor Mike Fitts has left theChamber_066_0005
newspaper. His last day on the job was Friday, July 18. This page was likely the last of ours that he saw through the composing room.
    Mike, a graduate of the University of Missouri — the gold standard among J-schools — joined the paper in February 1990 after a brief stint at the Anderson Independent Mail.
    I first had the honor of working with him early the next year, when I was asked to drop what I was doing (a year-long project on fundamental problems in South Carolina government called “Power Failure”) to help out on the national desk during the Gulf War. I was immediately impressed with his quick comprehension of the importance and context of national and international events. Not many journalists his age (or mine) took the kind of interest he did in military affairs. He wasChamber_066_0004 no more a veteran than I was, but you didn’t have to tell him the difference between a rifle and a gun. He was fully ready to explain this war to our readers.
    I soon learned that Mike knew something about everything, from current events to national and world
history to the most esoteric bits of popular culture. You didn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with this guy — at least, not for money. Throw a line from an old movie at him, and he’d answer with embellishment. Make a literary allusion or refer to something that happened in politics before he was born, and he’d tell you something about it you didn’t know.
    (After I helped him with something on his last day, he replied by instant message: “Which it’s a kindness, Captain.” He was channeling a character from Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. I first heard of these wonderful books from Mike, and they are a shared passion.Chamber_066_0003 I will miss such exchanges.)
    Most of all, he not only knew things, he knew which ones were important — and why.
    Mike’s abilities in this regard were recognized when he became the newspaper’s national editor, and have been invaluable to the editorial board since he moved to the third floor in 2000.

    Mike has been our expert on national and international issues from Day One. Closer to home, he has taken on the challenging subjects of the environment, energy policy, economic development and higher education. In recent years, as our staff shrank, Mike put his desk experience to work designing our pages.
    But his greatest contribution has not been obvious to the reading public, or indeed to anyone outside of the editorial board. That is his ability to help the group frame difficult decisions, breaking them down into their component parts and setting them out in a logical sequence that does much to lead us to our eventual conclusions. I’ve made passing reference to this in past columns. Of our discussion of whom toChamber_066_0002 endorse in the GOP presidential primary this year, I mentioned that “As our lead editor on national affairs, Mike framed the discussion, speaking at length about each of the Republicans. As others joined in, it quickly became apparent that each of us had reached very similar conclusions….”
    Later that month, I would write that “As he did before the Republican primary, Associate Editor Mike Fitts framed the discussion of our Democratic endorsement, and did a sufficiently thorough job that the rest of us merely elaborated on his observations….”
    It would be an exaggeration to say we endorsed Sens. McCain and Barack Obama because of Mike — we all had our reasons — but he certainly helped us reach consensus more quick
ly and smoothly. Arriving at an answer quickly — if you remain convinced later it’s the right one — is a particular virtue in our profession.
    It’s called “leadership.” Mike has it, and it’s of that rare sort that works unobtrusively, in a collegial setting. This editorial board has benefited greatly, which is why his name’s been on our masthead the last few years.Chamber_066_0001
    Mike is leaving us to work at a new, business-to-business publication that will soon begin here in the Midlands. As far as we are concerned here in editorial, the only good news in his plans is that he will still be around, and we might get to see him and his family from time to time.
    When I asked whether he wanted to write a farewell column, Mike said he’d let his last one stand for
that purpose. In that vein I invite you go to our Web site and read it. It appeared in the last weeks of the nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, under the headline, “The necessary ingredient for success: hope.”
    I’ll close with an excerpt:

    In 2008, America needs a strong dose of hope from its politics, which have been a source of gloom for years. Cynicism, partisanship and big-bucks lobbying have led to a government that does too little, as big issues go unaddressed. That’s no fun to cover as a journalist, and brings no satisfaction to suffer through as a citizen, either. In this election year, I hope for better.

For the link to Mike’s last column and more, visit my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Mayor Bob defends his apartment security plan

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Coblebobnew

Mayor Bob came by the office this morning to try to sell us on his proposed ordinance to require security measures at apartment complexes. We talked for about 45 minutes. As you know, we have criticized the city in the past for trying to get the federal government to do the city’s job with regard to crime in poor North Columbia neighborhoods. Here’s what we said March 9:

THE STATE
POLICE OBLIGATED TO PROTECT ALL CITY NEIGHBORHOODS
Published on: 03/09/2008
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A22
IT MAKES GOOD sense for the owner of troubled Gable Oaks apartments to beef up security, but that doesn’t relieve Columbia police of their duty to adequately patrol and enforce the law at the omplex.
    City officials seem to believe it’s largely up to the owner of the apartment complex to provide what amounts to basic police protection.
    They say the onus is on Transom Development, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks, to ensure residents’ safety. Some council members want the federal government to require — and help pay for — security at apartment complexes, such as Gable Oaks, that accept federal housing vouchers. Last week, some S.C. House members got into they act by filing legislation that would offer income tax credits in exchange for providing security at low-income, multifamily housing complexes.
    Considering the fact that three people have been killed in or near Gable Oaks since December, it’s understandable that residents and city officials are very concerned. It’s perfectly appropriate for Transom to do all it can to provide extra security for its residents. And it should pay for that higher level of service. Transom plans to do just that; it has agreed to hire security guards and to issue residents parking decals.
    But make no mistake about it, the primary responsibility for protecting residents of Gable Oaks or any other part of the city lies with the city. Gable Oaks is in the city limits, and its tenants are city residents. City residents should be able to expect a certain level and quality of service from the police department.
    We can’t help but believe that if there was a spike in crime in Shandon or Wales Garden — no matter how minor — the city would aggressively patrol the area, get matters under control and pay more attention going forward. Gable Oaks deserves no less.
    But the tone and tack city officials have used when discussing Gable Oaks make it seem as if residents are on their own if the owner doesn’t provide maximum protection. That would be unfair and discriminatory.
    While Gable Oaks is in the spotlight, north Columbia residents have taken this opportunity to express concern that the city neglects their area of town. During a meeting last Monday night, about 50 residents complained of poor police presence, indifferent landlords and a City Council focused more on downtown than north Columbia. There’s no doubt that over the years, the city has paid inadequate attention to certain areas of town, and north Columbia is one of them.
    While city officials say the owner should police Gable Oaks, some acknowledge that tenants from the complex aren’t necessarily the troublemakers. Visitors and people passing through cause some of the problems. That means those people are passing through — or even coming from — other city neighborhoods. And it’s the city’s responsibility to police all its neighborhoods and ensure people’s safety.
    By all means, Gable Oaks’ owner should improve security. But city police shouldn’t take that as a sign they don’t have to be vigilant in policing the area.
    Ultimately, the quality of law enforcement residents in Gable Oaks, or other parts of Columbia, receive will be determined by how committed the city is to help make it safe.

Here are some of the main points that the mayor made to us this morning:

  • The federal government, since it provides subsidies for housing in these complexes, should require security just as it has architectural requirements.
  • The feds have refused twice to ge involved, but suggested the city would be within its rights to require lighting, fencing, private security guards and other measures by ordinance — if the rules applied to ALL apartment complexes in the city.
  • There is some chance the federal position might change with a new administration, but crime-beleaguered residents can’t wait for that.
  • Whatever the philosophical objections (such as our objection that if the crime were in Shandon, the police would deal with it), there is the very real problem of people being exposed to crime. The city has had real-life success stopping crime in Gable Oaks using the approach he is now proposing to apply to ALL apartments in the city, and there is no good reason not to implement something that works.
  • One difference between this and crime involving single-family residences is that an apartment complex is a large business being conducted within the city, and is thereby subject to regulation.
  • Requiring the complexes to provide security is no different from requiring USC to come up with off-duty cops to handle traffic for Williams-Brice Stadium events: If you’re running an enterprise that causes a problem, you deal with the problem.
  • It’s not appropriate for city police to stay in one such business 24 hours a day, at the neglect of nearby areas.
  • Private security guards can enforce rules that city police can’t — such as a complex’s own covenants or lease provisions.

Near as I can recall, those were his main points. Maybe I’ll post video from the interview on Saturday Extra this week. (In fact, I’m sure I will unless something better comes up.)

Oh, and by the way — the mayor shrugged off the friction between him and Kirkman Finlay III (below, from a previous edit board meeting) over the issue. When Warren kidded him that "I thought you were about to rip your tie off," from Adam Beam’s report this a.m. "No," said the mayor, "we were hugging and kissing by the time the day was over."

Finlaykirkman

Mayor Bob on Town, Gown, Sorensen, Pastides

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Making my way back through my public e-mail account, I just got to this one that Mayor Bob sent me Sunday:

    Brad, your editorial today about Dr. Harris Pastides was excellent.  The City of Columbia and the University of South Carolina have one of the best, if not the best, town-gown relationships in the nation.  Dr. Pastides has been an integral part of that success and will continue to strengthen our partnership.  Under Dr. Sorensen’s leadership the University and the local community have achieved more than we could have dreamed.  The research campus in Downtown Columbia was announced in 2003. In April of 2006, USC, the Guignard family and the City unveiled a master plan for the 500 acres in Downtown from Innovista to the waterfront.  The first phase of Innovista with two buildings at the Horizon Center and the Discovery Center are nearly complete, as are the two parking garages financed by the City of Columbia and Richland County, representing an investment of over $140 million.  Innovista will be the driving force in building a strong new economy with more jobs and an increase in our per capita income.
            Another important strategy for transforming our economy is our Fuel Cell Collaborative.  In 2008, we will build on our Fuel Cell District with the construction of one of the first hydrogen fueling stations in the Southeast. Next year, Columbia will host the National Hydrogen Association’s annual convention.  Neither would be possible without the fuel cell expertise at USC.  The University has been critical in developing a decade long regional strategy of increasing the number of our conventions and visitors. The Convention Center and the Colonial Center have both exceeded expectations, and could only have been done with all governments working together.  Mike McGee deserves great credit for the Colonial Center of course.  USC Sports play a tremendous role in our economy.  Carolina football games under Coach Spurrier are regularly broadcast nationally and our new USC Baseball Stadium is coming out of the ground on the Congaree River.
            The University and the community have collaborated on a host of other issues including hosting our friends from New Orleans after the flooding of Hurricane Katrina; together with Benedict College doing our gang assessment; working together on our homelessness effort, Housing First; and collaborating on improving Richland District One schools with Together We Can.  We look forward to continuing that great work with Dr. Pastides.

I told him thanks. As it happened, that was one of the few editorials I actually wrote myself.

‘Nuts:’ The cartoon Robert didn’t put in the newspaper

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Aria080712796s0hsvg1cs48kw4w40kcww

As I’ve mentioned before, for a regular guy who makes his living as a satirist, Robert Ariail can sometimes get all sensitive and even shy. He hates criticism, particularly criticism arising from a misunderstanding of his work (if he meant to offend you, he’s OK with that).

And sometimes he decides that his cartoon ideas are inappropriate. Sometimes he’s onto something, or at least it’s debatable. Other times, he may worry a bit too much. You might say that, on the spectrum of cartoon sensibilities, he’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from this Dutch guy.

Anyway, his sensitivity on that point was one of the reasons why this cartoon didn’t make it into the paper. He was worried about the salacious nature of "nuts" the way Jesse Jackson had used it. But there were other reasons:

  • The simplest, and most obvious, was that he had an oversupply of cartoons, and we ran out of slots for running them in a timely fashion. There will even be on jammed onto our Monday letters page, which is unusual. If we still had a Saturday page, I probably could have argued him into using it there. But since I was out of space, when he said he’d just put it on his Web page, I left it alone. (In case you haven’t figured it out, we have different standards for what we’ll put on the Web, and what we deem paper-worthy. This is driven by factors ranging from the enduring concept of the "family newspaper" and the fact that on the Web, space is unlimited.)
  • He thought people wouldn’t get it, because it got so little coverage in the MSM, outside of Fox — and most of that coverage tiptoed around what he’d actually said. When he first mentioned this, I said that was an advantage if he was worried about salaciousness, since readers who had missed the reference would just take it on the level of saying Jackson and Wright are "nuts." Sure, that’ll offend some, but the offense is more in the realm of the kind Robert doesn’t mind, since that is exactly what he meant.
  • He lost some enthusiasm for the cartoon when he realized he’d misunderstood what Jackson had said. He initially thought he’d said, "Obama’s cutting off his nuts" by "talking down" to black folks. When he mentioned it to me, it caused me to say something like, "He’s cutting off some nuts, all right, and one of them’s Jesse, and he doesn’t like it." That inspired the above cartoon — Robert’s eyebrows shot up the instant I said it — and this blog post by me. But in the course of researching for a link for the blog post, I discovered Jackson had actually said something different — something more hostile, but something that didn’t quite fit as well the play on words upon which the cartoon is based.
  • He had another cartoon regarding what Jackson had said about Obama, and it was actually a better one, and it didn’t rely upon prior knowledge on the readers’ part. As it happens, we put it on the Sunday page, which is the biggest play we can give anything. You’ll see it tomorrow.

Seems like there were a couple of things that ran through my head in the couple of seconds after Robert told me he’d decide to use this on the Web only (and send it to his syndicate), but I’m forgetting them now.

(Trying to reconstruct one of those internal monologues this way is actually one of the fun things about blogging. Dostoevsky did this — far better, of course, but it appeals to me for the same reason. I pretty much fell in love with Crime and Punishment for good at about the point when Andrey Semyenovich Lebezyatnikov goes on and on about what ran through his head in a couple of seconds. I thought that was cool.)

Last of the Cosmic Ha-Has

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Just got a note from Bill Robinson about the post featuring his farewell message:

Your post about me was truly "Cosmic." …. Ha-Ha!

Get it?

Indeed I do. At the going-away gathering for Bill and the other 10 on Thursday, it suddenly occurred to me that he was (by my reckoning, and I stand ready to be corrected) the last of the Cosmic Ha-Has in the newsroom.*

Bill thought for a moment, and realized I was probably right. He was impressed: "That’s sort of like being the last of the ’27 Yankees."

Sort of — if you really stretch the point.

The Ha-Has were a slow-pitch softball team that consisted mostly of guys who worked in The State‘s newsroom in the 1980s. It was a team that, had you seen it play, would have convinced you that here was a team totally focused on the pitcher of beer after the game.

Not that we didn’t have some serious players. I remember this one kid who worked in sports (guys who work in sports, being frustrated spectators, can be some of your most intense players of slow-pitch softball) who hit hard and was a super-fast base runner, something he was not modest about: "I’ll teach ’em to throw behind me," he fumed after the opposing team had tried, late, to throw him out on second, and he zoomed around for an inside-the-park homer.

But most players — while having a love of the game, and preferring winning to losing, so long as it did not involve violating the laws of physics — had a certain ironic detachment about the team and its chances. Hence the name.

I joined in the late 80s, which — if the original Ha-Has were the ’27 Yankees, and I ask you to indulge me for the sake of making a point — would have been more like the late Mickey Mantle era. My best hitting days (when I played for the Knights of Columbus team in Jackson, Tenn., in the 70s, it was a bad night that I didn’t go at least 2 for 4) were behind me. Even in slow-pitch, which is a small step up from T-Ball, I no longer had confidence in my ability to hit line drives wherever I wanted. I was an undistinguished member of the pitching line-up, who was happier playing catcher. The qualifications for pitcher in slow-pitch are to be willing to a) have guys hit the ball back at you really hard from alarmingly close range, and b) suffer the humiliation of streaks in which you cannot get the ball to fall through the strike zone from the approved trajectory, thereby walking several batters in a row.

(I will add that there is nothing more infuriating than pitching in slow pitch and being up against a strategic-thinking team that would just as soon walk in runs as get hits. The entire point of slow pitch is that anybody can hit. You’re supposed to put the ball in play. If you want to walk, you can, because the truth is that it’s a lot harder to loft a ball up in the air and have it drop through a strike zone than it is to throw it overhand. In fact, it’s easier to throw strikes underhand in fast pitch than it is to throw slow-pitch strikes. Having guys stand there and take balls was enough to make me want to bean the batter, but in slow-pitch, who’d notice?)

The greatest humiliation that the Ha-Has suffered during my tenure had nothing to do with my pitching ability, though. One year, we were in a commercial-industrial sort of league. You have not seen lopsided until you’ve seen a bunch of scribes, some of whom were possibly passable athletes in high school (and that’s the best you can say), up against a bunch of hairy mesomorphs who spend their days tossing anvils to each other or something. If you play, say, church-league, you might see one guy in a season hit the ball over the fence, and that guy will be legendary — at least, in the church leagues I’ve played in. Different story in commercial-industrial.

You may think I’m making this up, but it’s true. In one game that year, every single member of the opposing team hit at least one home run, and some more than one, before the game was over. I think the "mercy rule" — if you’re more than a certain number of runs ahead after a certain number of innings, the game is called — was eventually invoked. Either that, or the "mercy rule" was invented because of this game; I forget. Something had to stop it, because we couldn’t, and if things had kept going at that rate, one of those huge specimens would have keeled over from the sheer exhaustion caused by running around the bases.

Some Ha-Has who played with Bill back in the Golden Age:

  • Charlie Pope — Who now works in the Washington bureau of a paper from the Pacific Northwest. Charlie was The State‘s environment reporter back when I was his editor. In those days, Charlie’s favorite movie was "A Flash of Green," in which Ed Harris plays a reporter who writes about environmental issues, and at a climactic moment in the movie stuffs his editor into the trunk of a car. I don’t have a current picture of Charlie, even though he dropped by recently because his son was thinking of going to USC. But to me, Charlie always looked vaguely like Tommy Smothers. You know, the funny Smothers Brother, not the straight man. I don’t think I ever told him that, come to think of it…
  • Dave Moniz — A player with his own personal language. Once, as I ran out to start warming up in the outfield before a game, Dave greeted me with a chipper, "Key lid!" It took me a couple ofMoniz_2 minutes to realize he meant that he liked my hat. Dave is now a civilian PR guy for the United States Air Force, with a civilian rate that is the equivalent of a brigadier general. The picture here shows him from a recent visit to our editorial board, at which he was joined by two guys wearing Air Force "yoonies" which was the way Dave used to say "uniforms." (Teams that had nice uniforms had "key yoonies," and so forth.) Dave was our military reporter before leaving to do the same for USA Today.
  • Jeff Miller — Also went to Washington to work in another paper’s bureau, but now does something else, also out of Washington. Miller Which reminds me — I owe him a call back. Anyway, Jeff’s first job for me was covering the 1988 Republican presidential primary, for which we brought him up from the Newberry County bureau (the journalistic equivalent of AAA ball at the time). He was still covering politics last time I saw him. One of his colleagues took the picture at right, of Jeff and me on a New York street on the last night of the 2004 GOP convention. This picture reminds me, for some reason, of the opening credits of "Saturday Night Live."

And now Bill moves on. But the legend continues.

* Note that I said "in the newsroom." For those of you who are still confused about the difference between news and editorial, I haven’t worked in the newsroom since 1993, so I don’t count.