TweetIt’s probably not fair to pick on this Andres Oppenheimer guy, because he’s just doing what political writers across the country do. But I’m going to anyway. He leads a recent column thusly: Judging from Republican House leaders’ latest objections to an immigration bill that would legalize up to 11 million undocumented immigrants, it looks […]
TweetThe left and the right are both wrong about the Voting Rights Act. I agree with the right, and disagree with the president and other Democrats, that it’s a good thing that the Supreme Court has struck down the provision requiring South Carolina and other pariah states get preclearance of any change in voting procedures. […]
TweetYesterday, Bryan complained that I didn’t put the IRS official taking the Fifth on my Virtual Front Page. I explained that that had been big news the night before, not on Wednesday. Which reminds me… There’s something else that sort of fell between the cracks — the Senate Judiciary Committee’s passage Tuesday night of the […]
Tweet I knew about Warren Buffett, but I hadn’t heard of the “Patriotic Millionaires” group until I got this release today: Patriotic Millionaires Slam Congress on the Sequester Stall “We did our part, now it is time to do yours!” New York, NY –Today, Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength implore Congress to come to an agreement and stop […]
Tweet One reason I like having the new Twitter widget on my blog is that it’s a quick way of sharing with y’all cool stuff that I run across elsewhere — stuff that I probably wouldn’t get around to writing an actual, separate blog post about, but which you might enjoy anyway. Stuff that an […]
TweetThe recent talk about “trust” with regard to the transportation sales tax referendum reminds me of one of my earliest columns for The State‘s editorial page. This ran on Feb. 7, 1995. I had only been on the editorial board a year at the time. Back then, board members rarely wrote columns; I was the […]
TweetThis just came in from Kara Gormley Meador, as a comment on the previous post about her: Good morning folks. I checked with an attorney who is working on the redistricting suit. It sounds as if I am out of 23 for good. The suit underway is based on race. The attorney told me that […]
TweetI’ve never liked one thing that traditionally has been core to the makeup of members of Congress: bringing home the bacon. Yes, I know it’s a particularly honored tradition in South Carolina, from Mendel Rivers through Strom Thurmond and on and on. This state was devastated in The Recent Unpleasantness, and it was sort of […]
Tweet Until this morning, I had not had a chance to look at the congressional districts as passed by the Legislature on Tuesday. All that hoo-hah over the new 7th District distracted the coverage from what I, and others who live in the Midlands, wanted to know: What do the 2nd and the 6th look […]
Tweet This bit of fun comes to you courtesy of our pal Burl Burlingame out in Hawaii. You have to watch it long enough for the music to start before it gets good, but it’s worth the wait. Nothing like a bit of musician humor. And Burl should know from musician humor, being a talented […]
Tweet This morning I had a very pleasant breakfast at the usual place with Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, the U.S. Bureau Chief for Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s largest weekly newsmagazine. I forgot to take a picture of him, but I found the video above from 2008 (I think), in which I think he’s telling the folks back […]
TweetToday after Rotary, Kathryn F. buttonholed me and started egging me to run for office. Hey, it’s easy for her to say — I’m the one who would be making a fool of himself, not to mention having to go to all those chicken dinners. Run for what, you’re thinking? Yeah, I know — it’s […]
TweetJust now, having recently stumbled across Burl Burlingame from my high school class, I wondered to him what happened to the rest of us. There were 600 of us, after all — a whole battalion (being military brats, many of us, we think in those terms). A whole battalion doesn’t just disappear like that. Not […]
Tweet Last week, ex-Rep. Charlie Stenholm came to see me on behalf of Big Oil, pushing new drilling. Since he accepts the Energy Party principle of Doing Everything — increased production AND conservation AND alternative fuels AND anything else that will move us toward energy independence — he found a receptive audience. But that’s not […]
TweetAfter years of Democratic and Republican seats being made safer and safer for their respective parties by way of increasingly sophisticated partisan (and incumbent-protective) gerrymandering, one forgets sometimes that members of underdog parties DO occasionally take a run at a seat in the opposing column — particularly when the seat is open. So it is […]
Tweet Back when Boyd Summers wrote us an op-ed criticizing the Bar exam mess that benefited the daughter of his ex-opponent, another blog speculated this meant he’d be going after Jim Harrison again. Not so. Turns out that Boyd has other stuff on his political plate now. As he wrote via e-mail this week: Hope […]
TweetOnce, early in his tenure in Congress, Jim Clyburn confided to our editorial board that his district really didn’t have to be gerrymandered all that much. He suggested he could give up some black precincts and be re-elected just fine. Now I see that his seat is even safer than I thought. Or at least […]
TweetBy Brad WarthenEditorial Page EditorABANDON hope, all ye who seek common-sense reform from the S.C. General Assembly. You think maybe they’d raise the state’s cigarette tax, the lowest in the nation at 7 cents a pack, especially considering that more than 70 percent of poll respondents say do it? You’re not from around […]