This sad news suddenly took me by surprise. I just got this from Bud Ferillo a few minutes ago:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Former State Representative Harriet Hirschfeld Keyserling of Beaufort has died at the age of 88.
Harriet Keyserling grew up in New York City, graduated with honors from Barnard College, the women’s college ofColumbia University, majoring in Economics and Mathematics.
During World War II, she married Dr. Herbert Keyserling of Beaufort, SC and spent the next thirty years raising four children and engaging in community activities, primarily in the field of the arts and social services, in Beaufort.
She helped organize a Beaufort branch of the League of Women Voters, which led to her running for Beaufort County Council, to which she was elected in 1974, the first woman to serve there. Two years later she was elected to the SC House of Representatives from House District 124, serving for 16 years.
In the legislature she was involved in many issues, including public education, nuclear waste, energy and the environment, the arts and women’s issues. She waged a successful five year campaign to eliminate filibusters from the House of Representatives. Keyserling served on the House Education Committee, Ways and Means Committee, Rules Committee, and chaired the Joint Committee on Cultural Affairs, the Joint Committee on Energy and the Women’s Caucus.
On the national level she served on the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Executive Committee, its Task Force on the Arts, and co-chaired the Women Legislators Network. She also served on an advisory committee on nuclear waste to the U. S Congress Office of Technology, and on a panel of the National Endowment for the Arts .
After her retirement from public office in 1992, Keyserling served on the Southeast Compact for Low-level Nuclear Waste, South Carolina Humanities Council, Spoleto Festival USA, S. C. Nature Conservancy and Penn Center. She was recipient of the SC Arts Commission’s Elizabeth Verner O’Neill Award, Order of the Palmetto, Greenville News Legislator of the Year, and honored by the American Civil Liberties Union, the SC Nature Conservancy, SC libraries, SC Women’s Commission and others.
She wrote a memoir about her experiences in politics, “Against the Tide: One Woman’s Political Struggle,” published by the USC Press.
Keyserling is survived by her four children: Judy, Billy, Beth and Paul Keyserling.
A graveside service will be held on Monday, December 13 at 3:30 p.m. at Beth Israel Synagogue Cemetery in Beaufort. The family will receive friends at the Firehouse, at the corner of Craven and Scott Streets, following the service. Copeland Funeral Home is in charge.
Ms. Keyserling was a great lady who served her state with dedication and distinction. If you’ll recall, I was corresponding with her very recently, as she energetically recruited members for her “Women for Sheheen” movement. I had no idea she wasn’t in the best of health.
Phil Noble’s SC New Democrats are trying to figure out the future of their party (if it has one in SC), so they’ve sent out a survey to the faithful.
Somehow, I got a copy, too:
1,500 SC Democrats have had their say. Have you?
Friends,
Since we emailed you on Friday, over 1,500 people have completed our “What’s Next” survey. That’s 1,500 SC voters ready and eager to change the game and get Democrats back on the road to victory.
We’re certainly thrilled with the response, but we still really want to hear from you.
In less than a month, Nikki Haley will take the oath of office and become this state’s next governor, and for the first time in a long while, no Democrats will hold statewide office, which makes it all the more important that Democrats step up and project a clear vision for our state.
We’ll be taking a look at the results this weekend and will report back with the findings.
We can’t wait to hear from you,
South Carolina New Democrats
I went ahead and filled it out, knowing I’d probably skew the results. For instance, when it asked, “What do you think that Democrats in South Carolina do POORLY?” I answered, “Everything. Which is fine by me, because I don’t like parties. Actually, the Dems’ fecklessness sort of endears them to me. Nothing worse than a well-organized political party.”
And some questions, I just didn’t know how to answer. For instance, when the survey asks:
Which best describes your opinion of the Democratic Party in South Carolina?
… what am I supposed to say? I mean, I don’t WANT the party to do better. I want it, and the Republican Party, to go away. But I chose the second option as the closest to my opinion. I mean, if it really DID get “fundamental change,” it wouldn’t be what it is anymore, would it?
Anyway, y’all should help them out and take the survey. After all, some of you are actually Democrats…
You can have your grainy pictures of Sasquatch -- here is my photographic proof of the existence of Parking Meter Santa!
It was more than three years ago that I first posited the existence of a Parking Meter Santa, going about Columbia cheerfully plugging money into meters and chucking softly to himself, thinking of the joy he would bring to the next person to park there.
I based this on having found a space, in October 2007 (it seemed to me more recently; I was shocked that it was on the old blog) on Assembly Street with an hour and 54 minutes left on it. Ho, ho, ho.
This morning, I found one with 1:09 left — 1:08 by the time I took the picture. Not as generous as the time before, but more than I needed. (Perhaps I haven’t been as good as I was in 2007.)
This leaves me feeling much cheerier about the season.
Last night I watched part of Ben Stein’s documentary in which he seeks to debunk the anti-religious gospel of such famous atheists as Richard Dawkins. Well today, we have a settler for those who don’t believe in Santa… Ha! Take that!…
On the one hand, on the other hand... Lindsey Graham, 2007 file photo. / by Brad Warthen
Seeing the story about Lindsey Graham and immigration in The Stet Peppah today reminded me of this release I got from the senator yesterday:
“Illegal immigration is a nightmare for America. Giving a pathway to citizenship without first securing the border is an inducement to encourage more illegal immigration. This is nothing more than a political game by the Democrats to try and drive a wedge between the Hispanic community and Republicans.
“Today’s cynical vote on the DREAM Act, along with a series of other votes, convinces me that the Democratic leadership in the Senate does not get the message from the last election. They care more about politics than policy in a variety of areas, including illegal immigration.”
Now truth be told, the senator isn’t really being two-faced on this. Only if you believe in the misrepresentation of his critics do you think he’s changed his mind on the overall issue. He ALWAYS wanted to secure the border. To him and John McCain, this was first and foremost a national security issue — you need to know who’s in your country. That’s why you would both secure the borders and regularize the people who have already gotten in. Big Brother (and you know I love Big Brother) doesn’t need folks running around off the grid.
So basically what we have here is a change of emphasis. And that change really started as soon as 2007, when the debate over the previous attempt at serious, comprehensive immigration reform was still going on.
The one thing that Sen. Graham has said lately that really seems a departure for him was when he went out of his way to say that children born here to illegal parents shouldn’t be citizens. If anything indicates that he’s running scared and trying to head off a primary challenge from Mark Sanford or someone four years from now, that would be it. But senators, particularly this one, don’t run that scared that early. There are other explanations. And next time I speak with the senator, I hope to hear it. I doubt I’ll hear it through the MSM between now and then.
My friends at The State were right today to praise the fact that President Obama is working with Republicans on a compromise on taxes and unemployment benefits. But they were equally right to be unenthusiastic about the deal itself.
On the one hand, it’s good that we’re not going to see our economy further crippled by untimely tax increases (even if all they are are restorations to pre-Bush levels). And it’s good that the jobless needing those benefits will have them. (At least, that these things will happen if this deal gets through Congress.) On the other, we’re looking at a deal that embodies some of the worst deficit-ballooning values of both parties: tax cuts for the Republicans, more spending for the Democrats.
It’s tragic, and bodes very ill for our country, that this flawed compromise stirs such anger on both partisan extremes: Some Democrats are beside themselves at this “betrayal” by the president. (Which bemuses me — as y’all know, I have trouble understanding how people get so EMOTIONAL about such a dull, gray topic as taxes, whether it’s the rantings of the Tea Partiers who don’t want to pay them, especially if the dough goes to the “undeserving poor,” or the ravings of the liberal class warriors who don’t want “the undeserving rich” to get any breaks. Why not save that passion for something that really matters?) Meanwhile, people on the right — such as Daniel Henninger in the WSJ today — chide Obama for not going far enough on taxes.
In this particular case, I think the folks on the right have a bit of a point (some of them — I have no patience for DeMint demanding the tax cuts and fighting the spending part), but it doesn’t have to do with taxes — it has to do with the president’s overall approach to leadership, and a flaw I see in it. Henninger complains that these tax cut extensions are unlikely to get businesses to go out and invest and create jobs, since the president threatens to eliminate the cuts a year or two down the line.
That actually makes sense (even if it does occur in a column redolent with offensive right-wing attitudes — he sneers at Ma Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath”), and I see in it echoes of the president’s flawed approach in another important arena — Afghanistan.
Here’s the thing: If keeping these tax cuts is the right thing to do to help our economy, then they should be kept in place indefinitely — or “permanently,” as the Republicans say. Of course, there is nothing permanent in government. The next Congress, or the one after that, can raise taxes through the roof if it chooses.
The problem, in other words, isn’t that the cuts won’t be permanent, because nothing is in politics. The problem is that the president is, on the front end, negating whatever beneficial effect might be gained from extending the cuts by coming out and promising that they won’t last.
One of the big reasons why the economy hasn’t improved faster than it has this year is that businesses, small and large, have not known what to expect from the recent election in terms of future tax policy with these tax cuts expiring. People were waiting to see what would happen on taxes before taking investment risks. (Even if the liberal Democrats were to eliminate the cuts, knowing that would be better than the uncertainty.) And even with the election over, the future has remained murky. The best thing about such a deal between the president and the GOP should be that it wipes away those clouds and provides clarity.
But the president negates that by saying yes, we’ll keep the cuts in place, but only for a short time. You may look forward now to a time when there are unspecified increases. And Henninger has a point when he says:
But if an angry, let-me-be-clear Barack Obama just looked into the cameras and said he’s coming to get you in two years, what rational economic choice would you make? Spend the profit or gains 2011 might produce on new workers, or bury any new income in the backyard until the 2012 presidential clouds clear?
Ditto with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What good is it to say we’re going to stay and fight NOW if at the same time you give a future date when you’re going to leave (or, as the president has said, start leaving)? What are they going to do? They’re going to sit tight and wait for you to leave on schedule. (And yes, pragmatic people may take comfort from the fact that the president has allowed himself lots of wiggle-room to stay there — but the harm has been done by the announcement of the intention to leave). Every effort should be taken to make one’s adversaries believe you’re willing to fight them forever (even if you aren’t), if you ever hope to achieve anything by fighting.
The problem in both cases is trying to have one’s cake and eat it, too — making a deal with the Republicans without one’s base getting too mad at you, or maintain our security commitment without (here comes that base thing again) freaking out the anti-war faction too much. What this ignores is that out in the REAL world, as opposed to the one where the parties play partisan tit-for-tat games, real people react in ways that matter to your policy moves: Business people continue to sit rather than creating jobs; the Taliban waits you out while your allies move away from you because they know they have to live there when you’re gone.
What would be great would be if Barack Obama should commit for the duration to something. He should have committed to a single-payer approach to health care from the beginning. Going in with a compromise meant that we got this mish-mash that health care “reform” turned into. He should commit to a plan on the economy, and not undermine it by saying he’s only going to do it for a little while. And most of all, he should commit to Afghanistan, and not try to mollify his base with dangerous deadlines.
What the president does, and even says, matters. He needs to recognize that, pick a direction, and stick with it long enough to have a salutary effect. Whatever their ideology, that’s what leaders do. And we could use some leadership.
I am saddened by something that just happened in my home county of Lexington — or rather, the way it happened. Doug Ross already alluded to it — approvingly, of course. Therefore it is my duty to demur. Here’s the lowdown:
Amazon is coming into Lexington County — and the county’s blue laws are going out.
Part of the deal that landed Amazon, announced Tuesday, includes a requirement that the county end the blue laws, which generally restrict shopping before 1:30 p.m. on a Sunday.
Amazon’s distribution center is likely to operate at all hours, seven days per week. According to Lexington County Council Chairman Jim Kinard, to ensure there is no problem with its operations, the company asked that the law be changed.
“These guys apparently had never heard of blue laws,” Kinard said.
Amazon’s request for the deal was one part of the big investment that it is making in Lexington County. The company plans to build a $100 million distribution center in the county’s Saxe Gotha Industrial Park alongside Interstate 26. It is expected to employ 1,249 full-time workers and 2,500 part-time staffers during holiday rush seasons….
First, that’s awesome that the community is getting 1,000 jobs.
It’s not so awesome that something that culturally set the community apart from other, more hurried, communities was set aside willy-nilly, without any sort of community conversation.
Yep, I’ve heard all the arguments against blue laws, and I haven’t heard a good one yet. Count me among those who remembers (way, way long ago, like in the 60s) and misses the times when we truly got a day off on Sunday, a day when no one expected us to engage in the hustle-bustle of the other six days because we couldn’t. (And the biggest canard spread by those who advocated modernity on this is the one about how we can CHOOSE not to run around like headless chickens on Sunday. No, we can’t. If you can do something, the world — the expectations of your family, your neighbors, your employer, everyone — will crowd you into participating on some level. Ours is an interconnected universe. Don’t make me quote John Donne, too.)
Again, I’m glad that the community is getting this shot in the arm. And if I had been in the position of those officials needing to act quickly to make it happen, I might have done the same thing. And I certainly understand Amazon’s unwillingness to get caught in a legal bind.
But I just hate that it had to happen this way, so that the community didn’t get to have a conversation about what it was trading away.
Just in case I haven’t provoked my anti-war friends on the blog enough lately…
I saw”Green Zone” over the weekend, and it was a corking good thriller. Just as long as you don’t take the premise seriously.
No, wait — I need to refine that: As long as you don’t take too seriously the one spectacular conceit that does the most to drive the action, which is this… There’s this Iraqi general who is sort of the movie’s Great White Whale, only there’s no one Ahab — EVERY character is frantically pursuing him, with each character having a different motive for doing so. Matt Damon’s character wants him because he thinks he knows where the WMD are, and it’s his (Damon’s) job to find them (he plays a chief warrant officer named Miller). An idealistic one-legged Iraqi (his other leg is in Iran) wants to find him because of what the general and his ilk have done to his country. A CIA officer wants to find him because he believes the Army is the key to preventing the insurgency. A Wall Street Journal reporter wants to find him because he is the mysterious source Magellan that a Pentagon official has told her has provided intel on where the WMD are — reports that she has passed on uncritically in the paper. The Pentagon official, played by Greg Kinnear, want to find him and kill him before he tells everybody the truth.
What truth? This “truth” (SPOILER ALERT!): We eventually learn that before the war, Poundstone (Kinnear’s character) had secretly met the general in Jordan, where the general told him there WERE no WMD. And Poundstone returned to Washington and told everyone that the general had told him the exact opposite, even telling him where to find the weapons. So we invade Iraq, and Miller’s unit risks their lives going to these supposed WMD sites and coming up empty.
This makes Poundstone the Great White Whale of all those antiwar folks who believe “Bush lied” — the perfect representation of the supposed great misrepresentation. He, Poundstone, KNEW the truth and deliberately lied. No mere wishful thinking. No making a mistake (the mistake made by pretty much the whole world — the debate about the invasion wasn’t over whether the WMD existed, but about the best way to get them out of Saddam’s hands). A big, fat, montrous lie.
Which, of course, didn’t happen. If something like that had happened, someone of the millions of people who would love to find out such a thing and tell the world — from the antiwar Democrats who now control our government and have access to all its secrets, to Julian Assange, to the director of this movie — would have let us know by now.
So… the bad news is that people will see Green Zone and think that such a thing happened. And that’s bad even if you are deeply opposed to the war and want to avoid such conflicts in the future, because it keeps you from confronting whatever REALLY happened and realistically assessing how to keep it from happening again. Politically attractive fantasies are just dangerous all around — as the antiwar folks would no doubt say about the delusion that there were WMD.
The good news, though, is that it’s a great action flick. And the other questions the movie raises — including some serious ones that deserve answers — are intelligently, provocatively and even realistically portrayed. Where the movie falls down is wherever it touches upon the Poundstone character. And I mean this in an artistic, esthetic sense as well as political: Kinnear’s character is cartoonish, the portayal more suited to low farce than to serious drama. When he’s on screen, the quality drops. NO ONE would believe this guy; if he told you your mother loved you, you’d say “What’s his angle?” He’s just ridiculous. He might as well be wearing a black cape, stovepipe hat and Snidely Whiplash mustache.
Everybody else is credible; everybody else feels real. While comparisons to the Bourne movies are inevitable (with Damon and the director of the second and third films in that trilogy on board), this film is far more believable, in that there are no superheroes like Bourne in it. (The flaw that it shares with those films is the aforementioned fantasy plotline about a vicious government conspiracy — a great plot device, as long as you don’t start thinking stuff like that really happens.) In fact, the closest thing to Jason Bourne is the Special Forces guy who promptly beats the stuffing out of Damon’s character when he fails to give him what he’s after. And that violence is realistic, not balletic.
Other things that are good, and deserve more explication, are such things as the issue of whether we should have worked with the Iraqi army rather than banishing it into insurgency. If the director wanted a political point, that would have been an excellent one to stick with.
Perhaps the most provocative questions raised surround the frantically earnest one-legged Iraqi, “Freddy.” He tries to approach harried soldiers to give them critical information, and gets knocked around for his trouble. He is forced into suicidally dangerous (for a guy who has to live there) situations in order to help the Americans. In the end, (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT) he raises the film’s most provocative question when he takes matters into his own hands with deadly force. Damon’s character, persuaded by the CIA that the general must be found so we can work with him to prevent the insurgency (I REALLY MEAN IT — MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!), manages to get to him before the Special Forces guys who have been sent to kill him. You think Damon has won the day. Then out of nowhere comes Freddy with a pistol and blows the general away. Freddy then says to Damon — and I don’t have it in front of me, so this might not be verbatim — “YOU don’t get to decide what happens here.”
If you want a good antiwar message, one you can chew over productively, that would be it. But the whole Poundstone thing is offensively ridiculous. You want to talk about a Big Lie, suggesting that anything that clearly duplicitous happened qualifies.
That’s particularly insidious since we are told this story is based in nonfiction. Oh, and if you don’t want to believe me, believe Richard “Monty” Gonzales, upon whom Damon’s character Miller was based, and who acted as technical adviser on the film:
“Green Zone” contains several messages, an unavoidable consequence of making a film of this genre. Critical blunders preceding the invasion, chiefly the bad intelligence that led us to war, made certain that no quick victory would be achieved and certainly undermined U.S. credibility around the world. Later, the U.S. directed a de-Bathification policy which disenfranchised a massive section of the population and helped fuel an insurgency. Consequently, any hope of victory in Iraq was made vastly more complicated and costly — as the last 7 years have proven. I believe this is true.
.
However, “Green Zone” also suggests that we were lied into the war in Iraq; a subtext that is unfortunately being twisted by some in order to give credence to a bumper sticker I deplore, the mantra which has become the left’s version of the war — which is well on its way to becoming the Iraq conflict’s official history — “They lied; people died.” As intriguing as that idea may be, it’s simply not true.
Turns out it was something called A Tale of Two Cities by one Charles Dickens. I’m glad Oprah decided to help the guy out. He deserves a wider audience. I see he’s from London. Maybe I’ll look him up when I’m there at the end of the month, give him a little publicity on the blog.
This reminds me of two things:
I still haven’t read that book. I’ve started a couple of times, but didn’t get into it, which my eldest daughter finds incredible, since it’s one of her faves. Maybe I should try again, after I get done reading Tony Blair’s book. I’m in a sweat to finish Tony’s, you know, in case I run into him over there. What if I I ran into him at Starbucks or something (hey, it’s a small country), and he asked what I thought of his book and I hadn’t read it? What a proper flat I should look. (And yes, I know my British slang needs updating. It’s not even up to Dickens’ era, being stuck in about 1810.)
I read an interesting book review this morning, about a book titled The Other Dickens, a tale of Charles’ wife and how beastly he was to her. Which, of course, also reminded me of how I hadn’t read A Tale of Two Cities.
There is a rather significant moment in 1849 when he insists on chloroform at the birth of Henry Dickens. A tender gesture aimed at sparing his wife pain? Ms. Nayder has other ideas: “a victory of male medical expertise over natural forces,” she decides, in which such “victory” is “compromised by the method through which it is achieved: the dissociation of mind from her body . . . and her consequent objectification.” This is sharply put, but you have a feeling that Dickens’s omitting to send out for anesthetics would have been equally culpable.
The bit about “objectification” gestures at another of Ms. Nayder’s contexts, which is her determination to give Catherine not so much a life of her own as one acceptable to the ukases of 21st-century academe. Nobody in “The Other Dickens”—remember that this is the age of Gladstone and Disraeli—does anything that is merely idiosyncratic: Having been “disempowered,” they perform “transgressive acts” that may or may not leave them in a state of “valorization.”
In other words, the author was somehow ideologically incapable of reaching the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, Dickens was, as an individual person, simply a jerk.
This got me to wondering about something else, after having watched “Frida” last night and being immersed in arguments among Mexican communists back in the 1930s: Which is more given to silly, pompous jargon — feminism or Marxism. Discuss.
Pretty much everyone who follows such things has said Nikki Haley’s first big test would be choosing her Commerce Secretary. And now we see how she has chosen. And it is very… interesting.
For the last couple of hours, since I heard that she had picked Bobby Hitt, I’ve been thinking back over my long association with him and wondering what I can legitimately say that is relevant to the situation.
You see, I know Bobby Hitt. I’ve known him for years. I served with Bobby Hitt. And you, senator, are no…
Wait, wrong tape loop…
Here’s the thing: Bobby Hitt used to be my boss, back when he was managing editor of The State and I was the gummint affairs editor. We worked together in a tumultuous time, as newsroom management was in transition from the old, family-owned regime to a new breed that, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the Knight Ridder editors. Bobby was a leading light of the first category, I was the vanguard of the second (I was the first editor in the newsroom from a KR paper — in fact, I think, the first who had ever been an editor outside South Carolina — after KR bought The State). I didn’t feel like an interloper or a spy — as a native South Carolinian, I just felt like a guy who had come home — but a lot of people regarded me as such. And Bobby was the new generation of the old guard. Some sparks were inevitable.
When I came to work at The State in 1987, Bobby was away doing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, which sorta told me he was no dummy. When he came back in ’88, he was elevated to managing editor of The State (he had headed The Columbia Record before that). In 1990, Gil Thelen replaced my good friend and Bobby’s mentor, Tom McLean, as executive editor. About a year later, Bobby left the paper. What happened in between is a bit of a whirl in my memory, as it was the year of the Lost Trust scandal, the departure of Jim Holderman from USC, and about a dozen other scandals that had my staff running like crazy to stay ahead of them. (A time Cindi Scoppe alluded to in her column about me when I left the paper.)
Working with Bobby was … interesting. Bobby is a character and a half. He’s intense, and has a manner that works well with folks who think, “This guy will flat get some things done,” and very much rubs others the wrong way.
Bobby went to work for Nelson Mullins when he left the paper, and when BMW came into the state and hired that law firm to represent it, Bobby was delegated to help the Germans negotiate the complexities and peculiarities of public and governmental relations. They were so impressed by the job he did that they hired him away from Nelson Mullins, and he’s been up in Greer ever since, playing a key role at the operation that still stands as the big ecodevo success of the last two or three decades.
His intimate knowledge of the workings of such a business and what they’re looking for in a home should stand him in good stead, and no doubt was a huge factor in Nikki Haley picking him for this job. (An anecdote Bobby told me a few years ago about why BMW picked SC… Two reasons: First, our storied tech school system, which they relied upon to train their workers. Second — a BMW exec went on a driving tour of residential neighborhoods in the Greenville-Spartanburg area. He approvingly noted the neat houses and well-kept yards, and decided that people who took care of their property and community like that were people they could work with. The first is an ecodevo asset we understand and are happy to exploit. The second was intriguingly intangible.) The BMW name is political magic, and she’s no doubt hoping some of that magic will rub off on Commerce.
Oh, one other thing of interest: I can’t really tell you for sure what Bobby’s politics might be. News people didn’t speak to each other about such things. But I know he’s Rob Miller’s uncle. Assuming Nikki knew that, kudos to her for not letting that get in the way.
I’m going to be listening with interest the next few days to what business leaders say about this pick. Not what they’re quoted as saying in the paper, but what they say more informally. They’ve mostly been VERY anxious for a new approach to ecodevo in both the governor’s office and Commerce, which is why a lot of them supported Vincent Sheheen against the Sanfordista candidate. Nikki knows that, and knowing it, she has made a rather bold and unconventional pick.
Bobby is a unique individual, from his thick Charleston accent to that slightly mad, conspiratorial, insinuating grin that explodes out of his scruffy red beard at the least provocation. He’s certainly not the standard-issue CEO type that one expects in the Commerce job. No man in the gray flannel suit is he. I feel confident he’ll grab ‘hold of Commerce with both hands, and make something happen or bust a gut in the attempt. His uniqueness will either blow up in Gov.-to-be Haley’s face, or pay off big time. I hope, for South Carolina’s sake, that the latter is the case. I’ll be rooting for Bobby (and Nikki for that matter — she’s the only governor we’ve got), and if I can ever help him get the job done, I’ll be glad to do what I can. We need a win. We need a bunch of ’em.
What was your reaction to this headline when it led the paper the other day — “Haley confronts Obama on health care”?
Yeah, me too. Cringe City. Like, Please don’t tell me she identified herself as being from South Carolina. I mean, think about it: The closest thing to a qualification that Nikki possesses on this issue is a stint as fund-raiser for a hospital, which didn’t work out so well. But now the Leader of the Free World is expected to sit still and be lectured by her on the subject.
OK, so the president invited her to. That doesn’t make me feel much better about her wasting the opportunity by going to bat for a national GOP priority.
Yeah, I know she was elected chiefly by pushing these national-issue hot buttons, and not for anything central to being governor. And that’s my problem with this. That’s what produces the cringe factor. The last thing we needed was another governor who was more interested in playing to a national audience than governing South Carolina, and look what we got.
But hey, that’s what we’ve got, so I wasn’t going to say anything. Y’all have heard all that before.
At least, I wasn’t until I got this e-mail from Karen Floyd over the weekend:
Dear Subscriber
Recently, Governor-elect Nikki made a trip up to Washington DC to speak with President Obama about the highly contentious health care legislation. We are so proud to have our next governor aggressively represent the views of so many Americans.
Below is an article about the event that appeared in the Rock Hill Herald [the same McClatchy piece that was in The State, linked above]. Please take the time to read it and let us know what you think by visiting our Facebook page!
Sincerely,
Karen Floyd
SCGOP Chairman
So proud, huh? I’m beginning to suspect that Karen and I look at things somewhat differently…
Oh, and by the way — I realize that this is just business to people like Nikki and Karen, this constant sniping at the president’s attempt (however flawed) to deal with the health care crisis in this country. They just use it to yank the chains of susceptible people, and get them to vote the way they want them to.
But if this foolishness actually leads to the federal government letting South Carolina opt out of health care reform, as Obama reportedly indicated to Nikki, well then I am going to take this personally. It may be just partisan politics business, but I’m going to take it very personally.
OK, now I’m going to switch directions on you… I hope this doesn’t give you whiplash…
Nikki did something else at that meeting that I’m very proud she did: Confront the president on Yucca Mountain. That actually is a very important issue to South Carolina, and one that the president has taken an indefensible position on, thanks to Harry Reid. Anything Nikki does to get the president’s attention on that short of slapping him upside the head is OK with me. You go, girl.
And to change my tune still further… I was just about to post this when I had a phone conversation with a thoughtful friend who said, you’ve got to read The Greenville News version of the Haley/Obama interaction. The tone was a bit different. In fact, it had this bit:
Haley insisted that she is more interested in a “conversation” with the White House over areas of disagreement than “confrontation.”
That’s nice, but not quite enough to make me do an Emily Litella. I still don’t want my governor posturing on national controversies, and Karen Floyd does. Therein lies the difference.
Sure, he wove a tangled web out there in the cold, but in a way things were more straightforward for le Carré's Alec Leamas.
I really value my Wall Street Journal. Every day, it reminds me what a well-run, thoughtful newspaper that still has some resources to work with can do. And in spite of its staid, conservative reputation, it manages to do some really interesting, creative things.
Graham Greene, creator of Our Man in Havana, would have had just the right touch.
Today, we see what happened when the editors got this idea: With WikiLeaks creating a reality that no novel ever imagined, what would three spy novelists have to say about this strange new world? What does spy fiction look like in a world without secrets?
I devoured it, as I am a fan of spy fiction. And while I am not a reader of any of the three writers they chose (Alex Carr, Joseph Finder and Alex Berenson), they rose well to the occasion of having to write on a newspaper deadline. Sure, they lacked the mastery of the language of John le Carré, and the dry wit of Len Deighton. And none of them have the touch of the late Graham Greene, whose sense of the absurd (think Our Man in Havana, to which le Carré paid tribute in The Tailor of Panama) would fit so well the perversity of Julian Assange et al.
But as I say, they did fine, each taking a different approach. Alex Carr did the best job of portraying the human cost of trashing security, with a U.S. intelligence officer anxiously racing to warn her Afghan source that he has been compromised by WikiLeaks’ callous disregard for his young life.
Those of you who still fail to get, on a gut level, what is wrong with what Wikileaks does should read that one if none of the others.
Yes, it’s fiction, but fiction can communicate truths that journalism cannot. Most of what helps us understand our world, really get it, is in the mortar that lies between the solid fact-bricks that journalism provides. That mortar consists of subjective impressions, emotions, unspoken thoughts — things only an omniscient observer (something that only exists in fiction) can provide.
If you can read those three pieces — I’m never sure what people who don’t subscribe can and can’t read on that site — please do.
A reader this week reminded me of something that I may have known, but had forgotten — that long before he was the funniest deadpan comic actor in America, Leslie Nielsen was … “The Swamp Fox” on TV. She wrote:
I occasionally post on your blog as Abba. Would you consider posting this clip from YouTube showing Leslie Nielsen, who died this week, as South Carolina’s Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, in Disney’s series from the early 1960s – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vvQJ7ZDg1Y. Here’s a longer version – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGN1pDzYAY&feature=related. Leslie Nielsen never looked so good! This clip has the catchy theme song that I remember so well from my childhood. We used to play the Swamp Fox on the playground at school, and many of the boys in my class had tri-cornered hats with fox tails attached. Hear the song once, and you’ll be humming it all day long! A fitting tribute to Leslie Nielsen from our corner of the world, I think.
I loved that show, which ran from October 23, 1959 (right after my 6th birthday) to January 15, 1961 — hardly more than a year.
Like the far, far more successful “Davy Crockett” series and generally forgotten “Gray Ghost,” these shows inspired me and other very young kids to run out and play at being actual figures from history. (Anyone remember that goofy, overly elaborate way Col. Mosby saluted? I thought it was cool, and used to go around imitating it. Wouldn’t you like to see video of that?)
Actually, to take that a bit farther… to this day, whenever I hear the words “Tory” and “Patriot,” I think of first hearing them used on “The Swamp Fox.” So while my understanding of the term was to grow and expand later, I actually had a minimal working knowledge of what a “Tory” was at the age of 6. If I ran into a 6-year-old who used a term like that today, I’d be shocked. But it was common currency among fans of “The Swamp Fox.”
I can also remember a conversation I had with my uncle about “The Gray Ghost.” I was confused about the whole blue-vs.-gray thing (especially since I was watching it in black-and-white), and I asked him during one show, “Are those the good guys or the bad guys?” My uncle, who was only a kid himself (six years older than I) could have given me a simplistic answer, but instead, he said, “Well, they’re both Americans…” and went on to suggest that a case could be made for both being good guys. That sort of rocked my world. There was no such ambiguity on the Westerns I watched. This was my introduction to the concept that in war, in politics, in life, things can be complicated, that there are many shades of gray. Perhaps the track that set mind on has something to do with why I don’t buy into the whole Democrat-vs.-Republican, left-vs.-right dichotomy that drives our politics. After all, they’re all Americans. And in the wider world, they’re all humans. Even the Nazis. (Of course, this doesn’t keep me from understanding that when humans’ actions go beyond the pale — as with Nazis, or terrorists — they must be opposed, with force if necessary.)
Also, while at first I didn’t think I remembered the “Swamp Fox” theme song, as I listened to it repeated over and over on that clip above, I had a dim memory of being struck by the odd syntax of that second line, “no one knows where the Swamp Fox at” — I didn’t know WHY it sounded odd (I was just learning to read, and hadn’t gotten to grammar yet), it just did.
In other words, these shows — which presented very simplistic, often inaccurate glimpses of history — not only helped feed a lifelong interest in history, but helped foster the ability to think.
So… TV doesn’t actually have to be junk, although it’s often hard to remember that these days.
CRBR Publisher Bob Bouyea, Chamber President Otis Rawl, Rep. James Smith, Sen. Joel Lourie, Rep. Nathan Ballentine. In the foreground is former Rep. Elsie Rast Stuart, now chairwoman of the the Richland-Lexington Airport Commission. / grainy phone photo by Brad Warthen
I meant to post about this yesterday, when it happened, but better late than never.
We were there to hear a discussion by a panel featuring Otis Rawl from the state Chamber, Rep. James Smith, Sen. Joel Lourie, Rep. Nathan Ballentine and Rep. Chip Huggins. Joel was a few minutes late, and Chip had to leave just as Joel arrived, but it was still a good discussion.
Here’s Mike’s description of the event, in part (I’d quote the whole thing, but I don’t know how Mike’s cohorts feel about that Fair Use thing):
Lawmakers speaking at the Business Report’s Power Breakfast this morning said they see major difficulties ahead in the new budget year, but they also said there are new opportunities for bipartisanship.
The event, hosted at the Embassy Suites, featured Reps. Nathan Ballentine, R-Chapin, Chip Huggins, R-Columbia, and James Smith, D-Columbia; Sen. Joel Laurie, D-Columbia; and Otis Rawl, president and CEO of the S.C. Chamber of Commerce.
With a new Legislature and new governor coming to Columbia in January, much of the discussion focused on the budget crisis that will greet them.
Ballentine, a member of Gov.-elect Nikki Haley’s fiscal crisis task force, drew a stark picture of the challenges facing lawmakers. Ballentine compared the situation to a lifeboat with a limited number of seats. There won’t be enough dollars to take care of students, the elderly, the disabled and law enforcement, Ballentine said.
“Somebody’s going to get left out, and that’s going to hurt,” he said…
To Mike’s focused report I will add the following random observations:
I don’t know if this would have been the case if Chip Huggins had stayed, but the general consensus, or at least lack of overt conflict, between James, Joel and Nathan on issue after issue was quite noticeable. Nathan alluded to it, saying he was sure that the business people in the room were probably wondering why a pair of Democrats and a close ally of Nikki Haley were agreeing about issue after issue. (And some of the agreements were remarkable, going beyond mere civility, such as when Nathan volunteered his acknowledgement of the problems with Act 388.) Nathan further speculated that the audience might reasonably wonder why, in light of what they were hearing, the General Assembly had so much trouble getting anything done. He explained that the reason was that there were these 167 other people in the Legislature… And he was completely right. If we filled the Assembly with Jameses, Joels and Nathans, South Carolina would see a Golden Age of enlightened governance. These are reasonable young men who, despite their disagreements on some points are reasonable, deal with others in good faith, and truly want what’s best for South Carolina, and want it more than their own advancement or the good or their respective parties. If only their attitude were catching.
I’ll add to that point the observation that if all discourse about issues were on the intellectual level of this one, we’d see a very different, and much better, South Carolina. The conversation was wonderfully devoid of partisan, ideological, bumper-sticker cliches. For instance, I never heard anyone mention “growing government” or “taking back our state.” Observations were relevant, practical, and free of cant. I used to hear discussions like that regularly when I sat on the editorial board, because intelligent politicians did us the courtesy of leaving the meaningless catch-phrases behind. It was good to hear that kind of talk again. (It occurs to me that the fact that over the years I’ve been privileged to hear politicians at their best, trying to sound as smart as possible, may help to explain why I don’t have as jaded a view of officeholders as Doug and others do.) I’d be inclined to say that the discussion was on this level because the lawmakers were paying this assembly the same compliment of respect — but these particular lawmakers pay everyone that sort of respect. Which is why we need more like them.
Otis Rawl, incidentally, was slightly more confrontational — something you don’t usually see in a Chamber leader. He exuded the air at times of being impatient with the air of civil agreement in the room. When Nathan said that he had not realized when he voted for it the harm that Act 388 would cause — Otie challenged him directly, saying he knew good and well that his group had informed lawmakers ahead of time, and there was no excuse for anyone to claim innocence (I think he’s right in the aggregate — the body as a whole knew better, but ignored what they knew it order to scratch a political itch — but if Nathan says he didn’t understand, I believe him; he was a relatively inexperienced lawmaker at the time; and I appreciate greatly that he’s learned from experience). Awhile back, I chided Otie for not being more frank about what he thought on an issue. The Otis Rawl I saw Thursday morning could not be chided for the same thing. I suspect this reflects a growing dissatisfaction with Sanford-era fecklessness in the State House, which helped lead to the Chamber’s endorsement of Vincent over Nikki.
Speaking of Vincent, Nikki, Otie, James, Nathan and Joel … It struck me as interesting, just because language and civility interest me, that everyone speaking of Nikki Haley referred to her carefully as “Governor-Elect Haley.” It was notable partly because it was stilted coming from people who know her quite well as “Nikki,” but also because (and this might have been my imagination) there was a slight change of tone when the speakers said it, a shift to a formality mode. It seemed natural enough that the Democrats present would use that highly formal construction — it’s important to them (particularly since the two Democrats in question are Vincent Sheheen’s two best friends in the General Assembly) to sound scrupulously neutral and respectful in this post-election period. It’s a way of papering over their feelings about her election, and perfectly proper. It was also perfectly appropriate for Nathan to refer to her that way; it just sounded odder coming from him. They were seatmates, and allies in her fights with the leadership. But being a gentleman, he wasn’t going to top it the nob in a public setting by assuming excessive familiarity. Bottom line, just over a month ago ALL of them would have called her “Nikki.” But now they are the very pictures of proper Southern gentleman. Which I like. But then I’d like to see a return of the sort of manners I read about in Patrick O’Brian and Jane Austen. We just don’t see that very often nowadays.
As civil and intelligent as this discussion was (in fact, probably because it was so intelligent), it offered little hope for the General Assembly effectively dealing with any of the important issues facing our state in the foreseeable future. Everyone spoke with (cautious, on the part of the Democrats) optimism about Nikki — excuse me, Gov.-elect Haley — being able to work better with the Legislature than Mark Sanford has (a pitifully low bar). But I heard little hope offered that this, or anything else, would likely lead to the reforms that are needed. The institutional and ideological resistance to, say, comprehensive tax reform is just too powerful. The most hope Joel Lourie would offer is that steady pressure over a long period of time might yield some small progress. He cited as an example his and James’ long (eight-year) battle to get a sadly inadequate cigarette tax increase. The terrible truth, though, is that the cigarette tax was such a no-brainer — it shouldn’t have taken two days, much less eight years — that if IT took that long, much less simple and obvious reform seems unlikely in our lifetimes. But perhaps I’m not being as optimistic as I should be. It’s just that I’ve been fighting these battles, and hearing these same issues discussed, for so very long…
But I ask you: Do you think you and I as citizens had a “right” to know in advance that he was going there? And would a Julian Assange, to your thinking, have had the “right” to tell you about it in advance?
And if you think not, then WHERE would you draw the line? I draw it here: It is up to duly constituted authorities to make such decisions about the security of official information, and not up to self-appointed individuals or organizations such as Assange or WikiLeaks. When they presume to take such decisions upon themselves, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of national and international law.
Would you draw it somewhere else? And if you would, in what way is that consistent with our being a nation of laws and not of men?
I managed to do it. And it wasn’t especially hard. It was a little hard, just not especially. I’ll be happy to let the Congress use my plan, for a consideration of a mere half a percent of the amount by which I reduced it.
The only thing I did that I had real qualms about (and yeah, I know that credible arguments can be mounted against everything I did, but the rules of the game, in real life and here, are that you’ve got to do something) was when I decided to cap Medicare growth starting in 2013. That sounds to me suspiciously like the kind of arbitrary limit that Tom Davis et al. want to enact in South Carolina. But I excused myself in the hope that it would exert downward pressure on costs. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t, though. The only way the federal gummint would really be able to lower costs is if we are ALL in the program — then there wouldn’t be anyone left to raise prices on. Note that I did NOT raise the age of Medicare eligibility. That’s because I think it should be extended to everybody — except that those of us under 65 would pay for it, just the way we do for employer-provided insurance.
I really went back and forth on that one. But if I didn’t do it, I fell short of the goal, and there wasn’t anything else I would consider doing. If I did do it, I exceeded the goal. (As you can see if you check my plan, I have surpluses. Am I good or what?)
And of course, of COURSE, we should raise the age for full Social Security eligibility. Average life expectancy today is 77.9 years. Those born in 1900 only expected to live 50 years. So 70 is like the new, I don’t know, 45.
And yeah, I know states are hurting, but aid to states is just not a core function — and maybe not even a legitimate function at all — of the federal government.
I didn’t touch military spending, particularly not ongoing operations — except for cutting some new weapons programs.
Overall, 33 percent of my deficit reduction came from tax increases, and 67 percent from spending cuts. So take THAT, all of you think I love all tax increases.
Seriously, I charted a middle road on the whole Bush tax cuts issue, because I find both sides of the debate sort of persuasive and sort of not. Democrats’ ranting about Republicans’ “tax cuts for the rich” leave me cold. So does Republicans’ love for tax cuts for the rich. Heh. The issue is what makes sense for both our economy and the proper functions of government. Hence my middle road.
Wanting to share the joy, I sent the link to our friendly neighborhood organic, free-range hog grower, Emile DeFelice. I figured that I might have identified a great new potential market for Caw Caw Creek Farm.
He responded:
What a classic pic! Thanks for sharing that – the great thing about the pig is that every part has a fan club.
That Emile is a crafty marketer, who’s always got his eye on the main chance. He knows on which side his bread is larded…
Earlier this week, Tom Friedman had a column in which he “couldn’t help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker…?”
It was a good column as far as it went, because it highlighted the way self-destructive American partisan gridlock prevents us as a nation from facing the future wisely and pragmatically — unlike the Chinese. So it was that he imagined a leaked Chinese diplomatic message that said in part:
Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.
There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them….
Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.
The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.
But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up…
Very good points — the kinds of smart points that you expect Tom Friedman to make, which is why he’s one of my favorite columnists. But I was still disappointed on a gut level, because I had expected the column to answer the rhetorical question with an even blunter, simpler, more obvious truth.
China’s security solution is to suppress the flow of information, let creativity be damned, and steal from us. (The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman yesterday asked: “What if China had a WikiLeaker?” The three-word answer: They’d execute him.)
Henninger is not usually one of my faves, but this was a pretty decent column about how tough it is, bordering on futility, to prevent such leaks in the Internet age.
And my disappointment aside, Mr. Friedman’s column was excellent as well, because it, too, said things that need to be said over and over.
But it occurred to me that, whether you’re concerned that our nation isn’t pursuing the right priorities for our future competitiveness, or just outraged that the U.S. government hasn’t taken serious action to find, apprehend and lock up that sleazebag Julian Assange for the rest of his life and then some, the roots of the problem are the same.
I’ll put it this simply: The lack of national consensus. Or another way, a perverse refusal to acknowledge that we’re all in this together, and act accordingly.
I try to imagine someone like Julian Assange wandering free anywhere in the world controlled by allies of this country back, say, in the 1940s. And I can’t. There would have been such a powerful sense of a shared national interest, and instantaneous consensus that someone leaking classified military data and confidential diplomatic communications was the enemy of this country that effective action would have been taken to stop him.
Today, a creep like Assange exploits the HUGE division in our country over our role in the world. (We can’t even decide whether we’re fighting one or two wars.) Now before my antiwar friends loudly protest that I’m blaming them for not getting with the program, note that I am NOT. I’m not blaming either doves or hawks. It’s the GAP between us itself that I blame. That’s the No Man’s Land in which Assange walks with impunity. Only after diplomatic communications were compromised this week did we achieve anything like a consensus of outrage between left and right, and thus far even that is too tepid to lead to effective action. (Oh, and by the way, I’m not suggesting we be as ruthless as the Chinese. But somewhere between the harshness of that system and the utterly helpless fecklessness of ours today lies a rational medium, an effective course of action for liberal democracies that hope to survive.)
As for Mr. Friedman’s concerns… go back to that same time — the war years, and just after — and look at the way we formed consensus to do profoundly bold and intelligent things to provide for a better future for our own country and the rest of the world that we suddenly dominated: the GI Bill, the Marshall Plan, the interstate highway system, the policies that boosted homeownership, and on and on.
Today, we find it impossible to come up with a coherent, rational energy policy or keep our infrastructure up to date or deal with the deficit or accomplish anything else requiring bold action because ANY bold action envisioned by the right or the left will be fought, vilified, trashed and frustrated to the utmost of the opposition’s ability (and they’ll do so not because of any merit or lack of merit in the idea, but because the other side came up with it). And again, I’m not blaming either the right or the left, but the GAP, and the insane tit-for-tat game that BOTH sides think is more important than the real needs of the nation.
So whatever you think about the implications of a hypothetical Chinese WikiLeaker, the problem is the same.
It’s a problem that has so integrated itself into our public life that it’s hard even to think of a way out. It’s like a tumor with tentacles slithering to wrap themselves around every fold of the victim’s brain — very tough to remove. I don’t really know how to get to where we need to be. Except, of course, to vote UnParty (if ever given the chance).
Today I was cleaning pictures from the last couple of months off my Blackberry, and ran across this one, which appealed to me — the colors, the looming image of Sen. Graham, the worship attitudes of Steve Benjamin and the other much-smaller dignitaries on the dais at right, some other undefinable qualities that perhaps an art major could better describe. There are certain tensions, or something.
It seemed like a good one for my much-neglected “Write Your Own Caption” category.
Anyway, I shot this at EngenuitySC’s IGNITE! program in the Innovista on the evening of Nov. 17 — which was a great event, by the way. The emphasis was on entrepreneurship, and the keep the energy going, there were 9 speakers, each of whom was kept to six minutes and 40 seconds, so it never got dull. And there was free beer, and there were these tasty sausage things.
To learn more about it, you can check out this Powerpoint presentation that Neil McLean gave at the conference:
This is me (or rather, a reasonable facsimile) making a pitch to an unappreciative client.
You know, I’ve been trying hard to learn to be an ad man. I watch the TV show religiously. I try to dress sharp (even if my sartorial style is a bit more Bert Cooper than Don Draper). I don’t get home until late because I stop at any gathering where free highballs are served. I’ve thought of changing my name to Dick Whitman.
So why is it I have so much trouble pitching my truly awesome ad ideas? Here are some of my recent rejects:
I’m particularly proud of the sensitive way I addressed a delicate public health problem in that last one…
OK, seriously, folks — Kathryn Fenner shared with me this post — “TOP 48 ADS THAT WOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TODAY” — knowing I’d be interested. Some of the examples were pretty cringe-inducing, such as this one. Others… well, others weren’t bad at all. In fact, I don’t think this one below should have been on the list at all: I don’t know about you, but my most memorable Christmas present ever was the Daisy 1894-model air rifle, which I found tucked into my new sleeping bag spread out in front of the tree…
You’d be surprised at how many parents opt their kids out of the yearbook altogether. Like, 25 percent of our student body! Part of it’s because the release form parents sign is a bit sloppy – it lumps yearbook in with online use, and everyone knows that a child’s soul can be stolen if his picture is posted online. But part of it’s definitely a sign of the times. People are sooooooooo paranoid. I was admonished this summer for taking pictures at my oldest son’s birthday party, which was at a pool on post. Snippy mom informed me that her son, who was playing with the birthday partiers, wasn’t “allowed” to be photographed. He must have been in witness protection or something. I told snippy mom that I planned to continue to take pictures of my kids and their friends. Snippy mom left not long after that.
Columbia University, majoring in Economics and Mathematics.
