Fun Post I: Abe Froman tribute

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This promises to be a long and hairy day, with GOP lawmakers in the House poised to knuckle under to a discredited governor’s indefensible vetoes.

So I thought I’d start it with some fun, to give us the strength to bear it all.

I’ll start with this really awesome tribute video I found on YouTube last night. How did I find it? Well, I was posting that item about the death of Jimmy Dean, and I said something about him being the Sausage King of America, which of course was a play on Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago, and I went looking for a link to explain that for those of you who are not well schooled in Ferris Bueller, and I ran across this. (And yes, I linked to it yesterday, but y’all don’t always follow links.)

Enjoy.

Why ETV Matters, by Mark Quinn

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Trying to catch up on my e-mail, I ran across this item which also bears upon the Sanford vetoes:

Why ETV matters

For nearly 3 years, my job in public television has forced me to explore many of the crushing effects America’s Great Recession has had on our state. Now, it appears, the economic tsunami which began to wash over the land in 2008, may wipe away 50 years historic and pioneering television produced by ETV. The Great Recession has arrived on ETV’s doorstep, and I am forced to report on what may be the demise in vitality of a treasured state institution.
I work as the host of a weekly radio and television program entitled, The Big Picture. The premise is fairly simple, and almost ancient in its origins. Barry Lopez, the prolific novelist and essayist, summed up my job thusly: “it means to go out there and look and come back and tell us, and say what it is that you saw.” For millennia, this has been an integral part of the human experience. The earliest cave drawings were nothing more than one person’s reporting of the world that existed over the mountain or across the river. And it has always been so.
And while it’s deeply gratifying to travel our state to find the stories that give expression to the lives we lead today, there’s equal satisfaction in being a conduit to help serve another timeless need that we all have, the need to be heard. There is immense power in the connection with ordinary, everyday people and the dignity they claim when they are allowed to tell their story. The brilliance of ETV hasn’t been its coverage of the powerful or the popular, as essential as that may be. It’s been thousands of collective glimpses into the lives of everyday people doing extraordinary things. Or peeks at places you never knew existed. It’s the story of South Carolina.
For me, public television is taking you somewhere you will never go you’re your local newspaper. Nor will you ever go there with your local television station.
For me ETV is sitting in the Sullivan’s Island living room of best-selling author Dorthea Benton Frank, laughing riotously at the random acts of calamity life will throw at you… knowing if you don’t laugh, you will likely cry.
It’s thumbing through a scrapbook and shedding a tear with Dale and Ann Hampton in their Easley home, remembering their daughter Kimberly who was killed in the war in Iraq. This is where divine grace lives.
It’s being completely captivated by the force of nature known as Darla Moore. Her bank account is impressive, but her resolve, wit and determination are much more so. The first woman to conquer Wall Street still lives in Lake City.
It’s sitting down with 5 former first ladies of South Carolina, and hearing what we all assume; that life inside the Governor’s mansion is for most, a pretty grand affair.
It’s Mrs. Iris Campbell, recounting the thick fog of cigar smoke that surrounded the pool of the Governor’s mansion, as her husband hosted a group of German businessmen and wrote out the plan for BMW’s move to South Carolina on a series of cocktail napkins.
It’s the terrible misfortune of Mike Burgess, staggering as best he can through a life that includes a wife who contracted Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 46. Another day when it’s tough not to cry.
It’s spending a day with the resolute Mayor of Marion, Rodney Berry. The city has been in an economic funk for 20 years. It’s on the rebound now thanks to a fierce pride and stubborn resolve to remake its image in the absence of textiles and tobacco.
It’s hiking to see the rare rocky shoals spider lilies on the Catawba River, knowing the river itself has been named America’s most endangered. I’m not a naturalist, but the lilies are regal and captivating.
It might be a boat ride down the Pee Dee River with a group of unlikely activists. They are hunters and fisherman who opposed the building a coal-fired power plant on the river’s banks. They won.
It’s standing in Arlington National Cemetery on a gray, cold November day with Colonel Charles Murray, recipient of the Medal of Honor. He’s a World War II veteran who calls today’s soldiers America’s Greatest Generation.
It’s a long walk through the Harvest Hope Food bank in Columbia with Denise Holland. She saw the Great Recession first. The number of people they serve is up 250%. Denise Holland is scared, but grateful to tell the story of the down and out, and the dispossessed.
It’s 82 year old Laura Spong, now a best-selling artist. Her paintings fetch as much as $10,000. She took up serious art at the age of 62. Anything is possible.
It’s Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, trembling in anger when he produces a small picture of a teen-age boy, shot dead. Mayor Joe wants better supervision of people on probation and parole. Some of his pleas are now being heeded.
It is the absolute decency of former Governor Richard Riley, and his pleas for civil political discourse as we talk about leadership in the 21st century. This one will take some work.
It’s conversations with Dr. Walter Edgar about the complex history of the south, and why it’s meaningful traditions are an endless source of fascination for people all around the world.
And it’s the passion of Charleston chef Sean Brock. His seed-saving campaign to bring back South Carolina grains and vegetables that are almost extinct, is the biggest revolution in lowcountry cooking in a half century.
Chances are, unless you watch ETV, you probably haven’t heard much about any of these stories. And let me be clear, these stories will not be told, will never see the light of day if our institution is starved of its support.
Think about this: the average story on your local television news station is 75 seconds. Imagine that. I worked in that world for many years and can tell you that most all of these stations are truly committed to their communities. But how effectively can they tell you about our collective condition in 75 seconds?
I represent a very small part of the overall efforts of ETV, and its deep connection to the many thousands of people in South Carolina. And yet, I know that my enthusiasm is matched and even exceeded by many of my co-workers. What we do, everyday, is collect the patchwork pieces of stories that make up the fabric of our life here in this state. Public media is an incredibly important resource in a noisy and sometimes polluted information environment.
Bill Moyers, dean of public broadcasters said, “the most important thing that we do is to treat audience as citizens, not just consumers of information. If you look out and see an audience of consumers, you want to sell them something. If you look out and see an audience of citizens, you want to share something with them, and there is a difference.”
More than 50 year ago, in the advent of a ground-breaking experiment that came to be known as ETV, the mission of public broadcasting was to create an alternative channel that would be free not only of commercials, but free of commercial values, a broadcasting system that would serve the life of the mind, that would encourage the imagination, that would sponsor the performing arts, documentaries, travel. It was to be an alternative to the commercial broadcasting at that time. And guess what, it worked… and it still works today.
Can South Carolina survive without ETV? Absolutely. Will she be as rich? Not a chance.
What will you do to keep the story going? What will you do to help save ETV?
.
Mark Quinn
Host, The Big Picture
www.scetv.org

Virtual Front Page, Monday, June 14, 2010

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Here’s what we have at this hour:

  1. Obama calls for clean energy push (BBC) — That’s the broadest view, the historic view, of what he said from down on the Gulf today. He also promised to press BP to do more to make things right — which the White House says the oil giant has agreed to do. On the less rosy side, two House Democrats investigating the spill blamed “shortcuts” by BP.
  2. Rawl protests Senate primary defeat (P&C) — And remember, while I’m now referring you to an MSM outlet, you read it here first.
  3. Kyrgyzstan Violence Threatens Region (WSJ) — Five days of unrest pose threat to a strategically important staging area in the War on Terror.
  4. Losing candidates make runoff endorsements (various) — We already had Andre Bauer endorsing Gresham Barrett (for all the good that’ll do him). But today, we got Robert Bolchoz endorsing Alan Wilson, Barbara Nielsen (the last Republican state superintendent) backing Mick Zais and James Shadd throwing his support to John Meadors.
  5. Haley enjoys 20-point advantage over Sheheen (Rasmussen) — Which I actually think isn’t so very bad for Vincent at this point, given the enormous advantage she’s had in free media. Did you see the hagiographic profile of her in The New York Times over the weekend headlined — and I am not making this up — “All Her Life, Nikki Haley Was the Different One“? There’s nothing so seductive to the politically correct Eastern Establishment than a viable female minority candidate — it just blows ideology right out the window.
  6. We hardly knew ye, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (WashPost) — This is more than a few hours old, but as a boomer this is still significant in my mind — and not because he was the Sausage King of America (which makes him even bigger than Abe Froman). You know how I heard of the death of this former sidekick of TV’s version of Daniel Boone? From Robert D. Raiford on the John Boy and Billy Big Show (which I had not heard in a long time) this morning. Seems Jimmy and Raiford worked at the same radio station back in the 50s.

Rep. Smith: Democrats WILL vote to override all 107 Sanford vetoes

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Not as a bloc, mind you, because as you know, Democrats don’t do blocs. But according to Rep. James Smith, who called me a few minutes ago to set me straight (thereby saving me a call to him or Minority Leader Harry Ott), it will be the official House Democratic leadership position that ALL of Gov. Sanford’s 107 vetoes should be overridden. And he hopes they will be — but of course that will depend on the Republicans doing their duty by South Carolina — which James suggests the Tea Party has made GOP lawmakers scared to do.

James called me because a lot of y’all were calling him, egged on to do so by this blog (in the absence of really helpful coverage of the

Rep. James Smith

budget vetoes by the MSM). I urge y’all to keep on calling your lawmakers, Democrats and especially Republicans (since there’s more of them) to tell them what you think. And if you’ve forgotten who your lawmakers are, or how to contact them, here are instructions on enabling yourself.

If you’ll recall, House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham told me over the weekend (“Lawmakers will uphold most of Sanford’s vetoes“), the governor is likely to prevail on most of his vetoes of funding for such things as public libraries, the State Museum, technical colleges, SC ETV, the Arts Commission and the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in part because Democrats can’t be relied upon to vote to override. He based this on the lack of support he got from Democrats on some key votes on the budget.

James says that was then, this is now.

Indeed Democrats were divided on some things such as court fees. But that has nothing to do with these budget vetoes. If the Legislature fails to override, says the former Minority Leader, it won’t be because of lack of Democratic votes. And of the governor’s 107 vetoes, “I have yet to find one that we would not override.”

And while Kenny is worried, James still hopes “to be successful in overriding them.”

If the Democrats can indeed stick together tomorrow, that means the fate of these vetoes will lie in the bitter rivalry between regular mainstream Republicans and the Sanford fringe — a fringe that was emboldened by Nikki Haley’s near victory in the primary last Tuesday. All Sanford and Haley and their allies need is to drum up a third of either the House or the Senate for Mark Sanford to have his biggest victory in his eight sorry years in office.

So once again, folks, rather than merely refer you to a link, here are the instructions on how to contact your legislator, as we used to say at the bottoms of editorials:

To find out who your legislators are and how to contact them, go to www.scstatehouse.net and select “Find your legislator” on the left. Or call Project Vote Smart at 1-888-VOTE-SMART.

Tech system funding, by the numbers

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A little more perspective on the governor’s three vetoes of Technical College operational funding, courtesy of Midlands Tech President Sonny White, who spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club this afternoon. (He only mentioned the vetoes in passing; I got the rest from him in an interview afterward.)

When the Technical College system was founded at the behest of Gov. Fritz Hollings (who got the Legislature to go along by buying Sen. Edgar Brown a bottle of bourbon and helping him drink it, which shows that in an altered state of consciousness at least, our lawmakers can be forward looking), the system was paid for thusly:

  • 70 percent of funding came from the state
  • 10 percent came from the counties served by the 16 schools — this went to physical plant and other local operating costs
  • 10 percent came from students — which made sense, since this was about providing a bright future to folks who did not already have good income
  • 10 percent came from auxiliary services such as bookstores and the like

In the 2011 fiscal year, the breakdown will be:

  • 70 percent will come from students — some of it from Pell Grants and lottery-funded scholarships, but it will still be up to the students to find the way to come up with it
  • 10 percent from the state — which is just so many different kinds of pitiful that it defies words
  • 10 percent from counties — Sonny expressed his appreciation that counties have at least kept their part of the bargain over the years.
  • 10 percent from auxiliary services.

Oh, and by the way, the technical system has seen a 20 percent increase in enrollment during this period in which unemployment has hovered around 12 percent.

So now you know.

Some background on Sanford’s tech system vetoes

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You may have seen a piece in The State today by Otie Rawl regarding governor’s vetoes of funding for the S.C. Technical College system. (This may be the only place you’ve seen mention of this in the MSM).

Let me give you some numbers to add to your perspective on this particular outrage of the governor’s.

Basically, the governor was looking for $4 million. What he wanted to do initially was ReadySC. As Sonny White, Midlands Tech president, ‘splained to me this afternoon, ReadySC is the entity at the heart of South Carolina’s ability to tell industrial prospects — the example he gave was Boeing — that yes, we’ll be able to train your workforce for you. To explain to you what the governor apparently doesn’t understand, here’s what ReadySC does:

As an integral part of the SC Technical College System, The Center for Accelerated Technology Training and its readySC™ program work together with the 16 Technical Colleges to prepare South Carolina’s workforce to meet the needs of your company.
Established in 1961, readySC™ is one of the oldest and most experienced workforce training programs in the United States. We are ready to bring this experience and expertise to work for your company.
  • We are ready to quickly and successfully start up your new facility.
  • We are ready to help you seamlessly expand your existing facility.
  • We are ready to discover the skills, knowledge and abilities needed at your facility.
  • We are ready to design new and innovative training solutions customized specifically for your needs.
  • We are ready to respond to your time frames and deadlines no matter how tight.
  • We are ready to deliver world-class training and project management.
The Center’s new moniker — readySC™ — sums up perfectly our message to
companies that are considering a relocation or expansion in South Carolina.
We are ready!

As Sonny explained to me, the problem is that the governor simply doesn’t believe that the technical colleges should be involved in economic development. Let me say that again: Our governor (Nikki Haley’s guiding light) does not believe that the technical college system — which was created under Gov. Fritz Hollings as an economic development tool — should be involved in economic development.

The good news is that Sanford was talked out of this, by ecodevo types like Otie Rawl, according to Dr. White.

But the governor still wanted his $4 million. Fine. So he took it out of administration for the 16 technical colleges. He said that the three biggest colleges — Midlands Tech being one — should provide administrative services for the other 13.

Fine, says Sonny. But there’s no plan to do that, no authorizing legislation, no nothing — except the governor’s airy wish that it come into being.

Shadd endorses Meadors as 5th circuit solicitor

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If I were my former paper, I suppose I’d have an “EXCLUSIVE” tag on this…

John Meadors tells me that at 4 p.m. today, third-place finisher James Shadd will endorse him for the Democratic nomination for 5th Circuit solicitor.

This is a big boost for Meadors, who trailed top vote-getter Dan Johnson badly last Tuesday, 43 percent to 30 percent. I say “trailed badly,” but those numbers still put Meadors within comeback range, especially if Shadd can deliver a significant portion of his 7,692 votes (27 percent).

Complicating this calculation — and making any chunk of voters who can be induced to come out particularly significant — is the expected low turnout for the runoff next Tuesday. Think about it — Republicans still have a governor’s race to settle, not to mention attorney general and Gov Lite and superintendent of education. Whereas Vincent Sheheen’s big win took away most of the motivation for Democrats to turn out again.

So basically, in this race, anything could happen next week.

Bolchoz endorses Wilson for attorney general

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While I was at Rotary at 1 p.m. today, Robert Bolchoz endorsed Alan Wilson for the Republican nomination for state attorney general.

So if you’re Leighton Lord, you’re worried right about now. You would have barely trailed Wilson in the vote last Tuesday, 39 percent to 37. The question becomes, how much of his 24 percent can Bolchoz deliver?

I don’t know. We’ll see. More on this race later. I’m trying to get some face time with the two remaining candidates.

Vic Rawl files protest of Alvin Greene’s win

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Photo of Vic Rawl from his Facebook page. I mean, I THINK it's Vic Rawl. It's HIS Facebook page so it's gotta be him, right?...

Vic Rawl had a press conference down in Charleston today — yeah, like I’ve got time to run down to Charleston — to announce that his erstwhile campaign has filed an official protest of his bizarre defeat by Alvin Greene in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Here’s his statement:

STATEMENT OF JUDGE VIC RAWL
June 14, 2010
Good afternoon, and thank you all for coming.
Earlier today, our campaign filed a protest of last Tuesday’s election results with the South Carolina Democratic Party.
We have filed this protest not for my personal or political gain, but on behalf of the people of South Carolina.
There is a cloud over Tuesday’s election. There is a cloud over South Carolina, that affects all of our people, Democrats and Republicans, white and African-American alike.
At this point, the people of our state do not have the basic confidence that their vote will be counted.
The strange circumstances surrounding Tuesday’s vote require a thorough investigation. For better or worse, this protest process is the only platform currently available for that investigation.
And let me be clear: regardless of the outcome of this protest, a full and unblinking investigation of this election and the overall integrity of South Carolina’s election system must go forward. Whether our protest is upheld or not, I intend to bring my full energies to electoral reform well into the future.
I want to speak briefly about the bases for our protest.
First is ongoing analyses of the election returns themselves, which indicate irregularities.
Second are the many voters and poll workers who continue to contact us with their stories of extremely unusual incidents while trying to vote and administer this election.
These range from voters who repeatedly pressed the screen for me only to have the other candidate’s name appear, to poll workers who had to change program cards multiple times, to at least one voter in the Republican primary who had the Democratic U.S. Senate race appear on her ballot.
For those who experienced problems voting, I urge you to go to our website, www.vicrawl.com and use the form there to report them. You can also call our Election Integrity Hotline at 843-278-0510.
Third is the well-documented unreliability and unverifiability of the voting machines used in South Carolina.
It is worth noting that these machines were purchased surplus from Louisiana after that state outlawed them.
The full details of our protest will be presented on Thursday.
For the people of South Carolina, getting to the bottom of Tuesday’s results will build confidence, either way.
I also hope that a full and frank discussion of our voting system will result in substantial reform.
At the risk of repetition, this protest is not about me, or my personal political fortunes. Indeed, if the protest is upheld and a new election ordered, I have not decided whether to run in it.
But, either way, I am not done with the issue of fixing our elections.
Lastly, let me make something clear. Like all of you, I am aware of the controversies surrounding Mr. Greene. This protest is not about him either.
I would like to speak directly to Mr. Greene and say: “Sir, this is not about you, and it’s not about me. I wish you and your family nothing but the best in the weeks and months ahead.”
I will be happy to take questions.

Yeah, I’ve got a question, which I would ask if I were indeed in Charleston: What’s YOUR explanation for how this happened? You keep saying it’s not about you, but isn’t it, to some extent? Don’t you share some of the blame? I mean, I admit that I share some blame, for not voting in that race. But maybe if you’d been a little more visible, I would have voted for you. Maybe.

Anyway, we’d all like to get to the bottom of this. So protest away, by all means.

Fusco says veto WOULD decimate programs

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I was going to write “Fusco Says Sanford Full of It” as my headline, but it probably would have given ol’ Frank a heart attack. But that’s what this amounts to.

Remember how I wrote that, according to Kenny Bingham, the GOP leadership seemed inclined to take the governor’s word for it that his veto of the entire $29.5 million appropriation for the Budget and Control Board would NOT decimate several state programs, because, according to the gov, the board just had all this money lying around? And I asked Kenny what Frank Fusco, the head of the B&C Board, had to say about that, and Kenny told me he hadn’t talked to Frank yet? Remember?

Well, here’s what Frank has to say:

Veto Would Devastate Board, Key Programs

This week Governor Sanford vetoed the Board’s entire $29.5 million General Fund appropriation plus other line items for the S.C. Enterprise Information System.
In his veto message to the General Assembly, the Governor stated that he was taking this action because the “Board has sufficient carry-forward and other funds to maintain its operations in this fiscal year.”
The Board does not have funds to make up for this cut. If sustained, the impact of this veto would be severe and would result in very significant staff reductions in our agency.
Board programs rely on a variety of funding mechanisms. Some areas, like the Employee Insurance Program and the S.C. Retirement Systems, draw money from dedicated accounts outside the General Fund and are not impacted. But many other areas of the Board are entirely or partially dependent upon general funds.
If our General Fund budget is not restored, these areas of the Board would have to virtually cease operation:
• The State Budget Office
• The SCEIS statewide financial system
• The Board of Economic Advisors
• The Office of Human Resources
• The Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum
In addition, other areas would see very significant staff reductions:
• The State Procurement Office would lose 30 percent or more of its staff. The auditing function would be eliminated and the State Engineer’s Office will be virtually eliminated.
• The Office of Internal Operations would lose about one-third of its staff and would be severely crippled because it has already made so many reductions.
• The Office of Research and Statistics would lose funding for mapping, redistricting of Congressional and legislative seats and the Geodetic Survey. It would lose about 30 employees.
• The General Services Division would lose all funding for operation of the State House and Capitol Complex. Layoffs would be necessary.
• State funding for local water and sewer grants would be eliminated.
We wish it was the case that the Board had ample extra funds that we could simply use to make up for the shortfall. But that is not the case at all.
While some Board programs have funds in trust or other accounts, most of these dollars can be used only for purposes directed by law. For example, funds from the Retirement System could not be moved to General Services. Nor would it be right, for example, to take money we receive to provide Internet service to public schools and libraries and redirect it to a totally unrelated purpose.
And it is exactly because we do not have lots of free cash that we have reduced spending and staffing, including layoffs last year.
The S.C. House of Representatives will take up the vetoes on Tuesday. If two-thirds of the House votes to override the veto, it would then go to the Senate which would also have to override the veto with a two-thirds vote. Please know that I and the Board’s senior leadership team are working diligently to communicate all the facts to the General Assembly as they prepare to consider the vetoes. We will keep you up to date as events warrant.
– Frank Fusco

Thanks to Bob Amundson for bringing that to my attention. There it was, big as life, already up on the Web — although not anyplace I would normally look. Saved me a phone call, which I appreciate…

The blog goes academic

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Just got this request this morning:

Dear Mr. Warthen:
I am teaching Political Sociology next term and I’m putting together readings for my course packet. I follow (and enjoy) your blog and and read with interest your post “Where have all the reporters gone. . . duh.”  I would like to save it as a .pdf and include it as one of the supplemental readings for the section on media, politics and democracy. Please let me know if this is acceptable.
Best regards,
Tracy
Tracy Burkett, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Sociology
College of Charleston

To which I said sure; go for it. I’d offer to come speak to the class, but I don’t get down to Charleston as much as I’d like. I never pass up a chance to further confuse the leaders of tomorrow, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience me…

Lawmakers will uphold most of Sanford’s vetoes

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Governor threatened to veto entire budget again

It took me all afternoon, but I finally balanced my checkbook. Having done that, it is with a great sense of self-sacrifice that I know turn back to the state budget. Oh, my head!

Anyway, you’ll recall that I mentioned the e-mail exchange that a reader had had with House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham, which to me raised questions. That reader later wrote to me again to relate a phone conversation that he’d had subsequently with Kenny. That caused me to send Kenny an e-mail asking him the following:

Kenny, I’ve got a question for my blog… is this correct? Did the governor threaten to veto the whole budget again? And did y’all promise to uphold his vetoes if he didn’t?
If so, why in the world didn’t you just tell him to veto the whole budget if that’s what he wanted to do, and then override him, just as you did before?
I’m just not following this…
— Brad

Kenny responded last night by calling me at home and taking a long time to explain to me what had happened. The two startling things I learned are reflected above in my headline and subhead, to repeat:

  • In all the wrestling back and forth over the budget at the end of the session, at one critical moment the governor threatened again to do the outrageous thing he did in 2006 — veto the entire budget. Rather than call that bluff, the GOP leadership (the group led in the House by Speaker Bobby Harrell, Ways & Means chair Dan Cooper and Kenny) made a deal to uphold most of his line-item vetoes. Why did they not just let him veto the whole budget and override him as they did in 2006? Because between the Democrats, who were voting as a bloc against every move the GOP leaders made, and the Republicans who could be counted on to vote with Sanford, the leaders didn’t think they COULD override a veto of the entire budget. And the leadership didn’t want to see the government shut down.
  • To avoid that, the leadership agreed to sustain most of the governor’s vetoes. I can’t give you numbers, because frankly I’m not sure of them, and Kenny wasn’t giving me precise numbers anyway. We’re talking about roughly $70 million in vetoes that will be sustained. That’s nowhere near the $414 million that the 107 vetoes total up to. But about half of that is a special pot of money created to deal with a special, stimulus-related, higher Medicaid match that Congress hasn’t yet extended, and the governor says they won’t and lawmakers think it will, and even if it doesn’t there’s enough money to last in the program through next February or April, and… well, it gets REALLY complicated. That disputed Medicaid match is isolated in a section of the budget called Part Four. Most of the vetoes lawmakers will be sweating over are in Part One. (Part Two is where you find provisos, and I never even bothered asking about Part Three, if there is a Part Three…)

And yes, the parts they’re likely to sustain include some of the things that folks are most upset about being cut, such as the State Museum. So does that mean the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, for instance, will shut down?

Kenny says no, because the Budget and Control Board has reserves that will keep the museum and other drastically cut programs

Kenny Bingham -- 2006 file photo/Brad Warthen

going. But there he is relying on the governor SAYING those reserves are available to bail out those programs. And the e-mail campaign against these vetoes that I’ve seen says the governor is wrong about that. I asked, how do you know the governor’s right? And he doesn’t know. I asked, what does Frank Fusco (head of the B&C Board) say? Kenny said he hadn’t talked to Frank yet. Presumably he will before the voting on Tuesday.

Bottom line, Kenny doesn’t know exactly what will happen Tuesday on all those vetoes, because there are a number of things that haven’t been worked out yet. And THAT’S what’s different about this situation. In the past, at this point he would have said with confidence that no one should worry; the vetoes would be overridden. That’s what we’ve seen year after year: Sanford makes his symbolic gesture, and the Legislature keeps the government running.

But this is the first time I’ve seen the GOP leadership this flummoxed over the Sanford vetoes. And as Kenny tells it a lot of it arises from the fact that the leaders just don’t think they have the votes. They blame the Democrats (no surprise there, huh?) for voting against them on a number of key budget votes. He said every single Democrat, with the occasional exception of Herb Kirsh, voted against them. Add to that the minority bloc of Republicans that can be relied upon to vote the Sanford way, and the leadership barely had the votes to pass a budget at all, much less come up with the two-thirds to override the governor.

As an example of the things they fought over… the leadership came up with a plan to raise court fees and license fees to help keep the courts running and pay for the next class of state troopers. The Sanford loyalists wouldn’t go for it, and the Democrats said Republicans should raise a general tax rather than paying for the added expenses with new fees.

I need to talk with somebody with the Democratic leadership this week to get their side of it, but Kenny’s account of the Democratic position sounds pretty credible: Basically, they’re saying that the Republicans got themselves into this mess with their tax cuts and such, and the Democrats aren’t inclined to help them out of it.

Anyway, what I got out of all this was this time, we might actually see some of the more headline grabbing consequences of the governor’s vetoes actually happen: shutting down the State Museum and the Arts Commission, for instance. Might not happen, but there’s a bigger probability this time than ever.

And in spite what I’ve been hearing about how the governor has tried to be more reasonable in dealing with lawmakers since his personal troubles began, it appears that he’s up to his old shenanigans, engaging in the same kind of ideological brinksmanship that we saw at the height of his arrogance.

It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens Tuesday. And those who care about the State Museum or ETV or the arts in SC have every reason to be in suspense.

Vic Rawl and the pros from Dover

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I read in the paper this morning that the stunned Vic Rawl did not wish to comment yesterday.

But he was sending out this press release:

Statement by the Vic Rawl for US Senate Campaign

“South Carolinians would rather be 100% right than 90% uncertain.”

As we stated yesterday, our campaign began examining election data on early Wednesday morning. Over the course of the next 24 hours, our staff found several results that seemed unusual to us. We stress that, then and now, we very much hope that Tuesday’s primary was conducted fairly and that nothing untoward happened.

Expert Data Analysis

No one on our staff is a statistics expert or mathematician. As the unusual information began to accumulate, several unconnected people and teams who are far more expert in election forensics than our staff contacted the campaign and volunteered to look at results from Tuesday’s primary.

One of the teams was Dr. Walter Mebane of the University of Michigan and Dr. Michael Miller of Cornell University. Dr. Mebane is a professor of political science and statistics and a recognized expert in detecting election fraud. As of August 2010, Dr. Miller will be professor of political science at the University of Illinois, Springfield, and specializes in the analysis of election data.  Neither is affiliated with the Rawl campaign.

Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford’s law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race.  The test compares the second digit of actual precinct vote totals to a known numeric distribution of data that results from election returns collected under normal conditions.  If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate’s total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane’s test will detect a deviation from this distribution.

Results from Mebane’s test showed that Rawl’s Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence.  In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance.  “The results may reflect corrupted vote counts, but they may also reflect the way turnout in the election covaried with the geographic distribution of the candidates’ support,” Mebane said.

Dr. Miller performed additional tests to determine whether there was a significant difference in the percentage of absentee and Election Day votes that each candidate received.  The result in the Senate election is highly statistically significant: Rawl performs 11 percentage points better among absentee voters than he does among Election Day voters.  “This difference is a clear contrast to the other races.  Statistically speaking, the only other Democratic candidate who performed differently among the two voter groups was Robert Ford, who did better on Election Day than among absentees in the gubernatorial primary,” Miller said.

These findings concern the campaign, and should concern all of South Carolina. We do not know that anything was done by anyone to tamper with Tuesday’s election, or whether there may have been innocuous machine malfunctions, and we are promoting no theories about either possibility.

However, we do feel that further investigation is warranted.

Voting Machine Examination

With that in mind, another expert volunteer traveled today to the SC State Board of Elections in Columbia to conduct an examination of selected voting machines that were employed in Tuesday’s election. When we have the results, if any, of that examination, we will release them immediately.

Gathering of Anecdotal Accounts

While we believe, and urge others to note that “the plural of anecdote is not data,” our campaign is receiving calls and e-mails from people – voters and poll workers – who experienced significant problems with voting for whom they intended. We are looking into these reports and will release any information we find.

Judge Rawl and the campaign stress again that no one knows exactly what happened on Election Day. South Carolinians would rather be 100% right than 90% uncertain.

Well, of course, I said that all along. On the morning after the shocking vote, I was shouting, “Why doesn’t someone do a second-digit Benford’s law test? I mean, come ON!”

Sure I was. You just weren’t listening.

An exchange about the budget vetoes

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A reader writes to me via e-mail to say, with regard to the governor’s budget vetoes:

After receiving an e-mail alert from ETV yesterday and reading about Medicaid cuts, I e-mailed Majority Leader Bingham and asked him to vote to override these two items.  I am attaching his response.  He does not commit to a yes or no answer, and the remainder of his response left me scratching my head.  Why would house Democrats team up with Governor Sanford against House republicans?  Am I misreading this?
I know that there is more going on than I know about, but this just does not make sense to me.
I have asked Majority Leader Bingham for clarification; I have e-mailed Senator Setzler as well.

Here is the response he says he got from Kenny Bingham:

Thank you for your email and for taking the time to write. As you can probably imagine, as a result of Governor Sanford’s budget vetoes, I have been inundated with emails and phone calls from those who are concerned about the negative impact that these vetoes will have on various agencies of state government. In past years, the General Assembly has been able to override many of the catastrophic vetoes that have been handed down from Governor Sanford. Unfortunately, this year will be different. As those who have closely followed the budget process know, we have had a very difficult time putting together a budget that a majority of members would support.
In the House of Representatives, our first try to pass the final budget conference report, failed by a vote of 47 to 69.  After several days of intense negotiations, we were finally able to pass the budget, but only by the slimmest of margins and without any help from the House Democrats. This set the stage for what we now have before us. As a result of not having the support of House Democrats throughout this years budget process, this allowed the Governor and a group of his closest allies, to hold us hostage with this year’s budget. We were faced with the dilemma of either agreeing to accept his line item vetoes, or he was going to veto the entire budget document which would have required that we start the budget process over from scratch. A process that took 5 months to complete the first time, and one that would have been next to impossible to complete prior to government having to shut down on July 1st.
Therefore, when the House Democrats informed us on the last day of session that they would not help us override the Governor’s veto of the entire budget, we were left with no other real option but to agree to sustain the Governor’s line item vetoes. While this is clearly not the kind of news that I hoped to be sending you, it is unfortunately the truth. So barring the Governor having a change of heart, or some other unforeseen circumstance, I anticipate that the Governor’s vetoes will be sustained.
As always, if I can ever be of assistance to you or your family, or answer any questions about state government, please feel free to contact me.
Take care,
Kenny Bingham
I must say, I don’t follow it either. No matter what happened with the Democrats during the budget debate (whine, bitch, moan; it’s always somebody else’s fault, preferably someone of the other party, even the completely hapless Democrats), why can’t lawmakers override the vetoes? I mean, that was then; this is now.
Maybe this will make sense to some of y’all; it doesn’t to me.

“Where Have All the Reporters Gone?” Duh…

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Doug T., back on this thread, kindly brings our attention to a piece by Walter Shapiro on Politics Daily headlined “Nikki Haley and Rand Paul Races: Where Have All the Reporters Gone?” An excerpt:

On the cusp of her historic landslide victory in the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, Nikki Haley swooped into Hartsville last Saturday afternoon. More than 100 Tea Party activists waited in the scorching heat for the Indian-American state legislator, who had fought off two public but totally unproven accusations of adulteryand survived a Republican state senator castigating her as a “raghead.”

It was the perfect political scene to cap the weekend’s campaign coverage less than 72 hours before the state’s most raucous, riveting and, at times, repugnant gubernatorial primary in decades. Hartsville (population: 7,465) may be a small town in the Pee Dee region, but it is just 70 miles northeast of the state capital (and media center) in Columbia. But still there was one thing missing from the picturesque scene — any South Carolina newspaper, wire service, TV or radio reporters.

What we are witnessing in this election cycle is the slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism. I noticed the same pattern (and the same nearly reporter-free campaign trail) in Kentucky last month as I covered libertarian Rand Paul’s decisive defeat of the state Republican establishment in the GOP Senate primary. Aside from an occasional AP reporter, virtually the only print journalists whom I encountered at campaign events were my national press-pack colleagues from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the Atlantic Monthly.

Newspapers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and The State, South Carolina’s largest paper, have dramatically de-emphasized in-depth candidate coverage because they are too short-handed to spare the reporters. A survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) found that newsroom staffs across the country have declined by 25 percent since 2001.

Actually, those numbers underestimate the problem. At the start of the decade I had essentially 8 full-time people in the editorial department (actually 7, but I had a part-timer whom I could work full-time in a pinch without getting into trouble with the bean-counters). There are now two full-timers, folded into the newsroom. As for the newsroom — a separate department on a separate floor reporting separately to the publisher (although that separation exists no longer) — I cannot speak with any accuracy. But it’s easily more than 25 percent.

And near as I can tell, that’s pretty typical of the business. The people left are busting their humps, but can only do so much. So it is when the business model underwriting an industry evaporates.

And we see the effects daily. Our democracy is suffering from a lack of anyone to play the Fourth Estate’s traditional role. Yeah, you can get interesting stuff here and there from enterprising independents who go were the MSM reporters ain’t (which isn’t hard). But you don’t get wall-to-wall coverage, you don’t get “newspaper of record” coverage that lets you in on the totality of what’s going on.

I should add that when Shapiro writes of the “slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism,” it’s actually been much slower, much more gradual, than he describes.

When I was a reporter (oh, jeez, here we go; the old guy’s gonna tell us again how much better it was in the olden days), we actually had something that you could call “statewide campaign journalism.” I cut my teeth on state politics in 1978 in Tennessee covering the gubernatorial contest between Lamar Alexander and Jake Butcher. I was working at The Jackson Sun, a 37,000-circulation p.m. daily. For the last month of that general election, we had somebody with each of those candidates all day every day, traveling with them across the state, riding on the campaign plane and in the cars with them (and reimbursing the campaign on a pro rata basis). We went everywhere with them; we shared their meals. The only breaks they got from us was when they were sleeping, and we probably would have watched them then, too, but we had to write sometime. A typical workday ran about 20 hours. Your metabolism adjusted. Then, of course, we’d call in new ledes for our stories on the run. No cell phones, of course — you’d go to a phone booth, call the city desk and dictate the new lede — based on the latest thing the candidate had said or done — off the tops of our heads. (This, of course, required skills now extinct.)

This was an unusual level of coverage, even then, for a paper that small (how small? Think Florence Morning News). I remember a reporter from the Tennessean once saying — condescendingly, but I think he was trying to be nice —  that the Sun was the “little paper that did things in a big way.” But it was fairly typical for the big paper out of Nashville and Memphis.

By the time I arrived at The State in 1987 the standard of coverage across the country had diminished considerably. But still, we had the horses to cover most of major candidates’ important appearances. We didn’t get them with their hair down as much as we had a decade earlier, but the coverage was still pretty good. And if we ran short of political reporters, we had a deep bench. For instance, in 1988 I pulled Jeff Miller in from the Newberry bureau to be the lead day-to-day reporter for the GOP presidential primary, so that the State House reporters didn’t have to take their eyes off the State House. Today, there is no Newberry bureau — and no Camden, Sumter, Florence, Orangeburg or Beaufort bureaus either. The last of them closed in the early 90s.

Nowadays, reporters will catch a big campaign event if it’s in town, or if it’s big enough run to Greenville or Charleston for a high-stakes debate. But sticking to a candidate one-on-one throughout the campaign? No way. In fact, some of today’s few remaining reporters weren’t even alive back when we did that.

But yeah, the big cuts have happened in the past decade. Things started out bad for the industry in the first six years (killing off Knight Ridder, which used to own The State), then got dramatically worse starting in the summer of 2006, with the bottom falling out of what was left in September 2008.

So no, you shouldn’t be surprised if the South Carolina MSM is missing from a campaign rally in Florence. Or from the Alvin Greene story. Or from comprehensive coverage of the battle over the state budget. This is the way things are now. The army’s largely been disbanded, forcing a lot of us to go guerrilla. You’ll get coverage, and sometimes it will be inspired and even in-depth, but it will be spotty.

Museum and ETV supporters mobilize against Sanford vetoes

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As the word passes around about Sanford’s vetoes, and as the day for lawmakers to consider them approaches, supporters of such state services as the State Museum (which would be wiped out under the governor’s approach) and SC ETV (which would lose most of it’s state funding) are gearing up with e-mail campaigns such as this message passed on by Stan Dubinsky:

Attention State Museum Members!
We need your help!
GOVERNOR SANFORD VETOED $1.69 MILLION IN FUNDING FOR THE STATE MUSEUM
PLEASE CALL YOUR LEGISLATORS!
We need you to call your House member first, and then your Senator and ask them to OVERRIDE VETOES 33 and 106.
Two weeks ago, the General Assembly gave final approval to the state budget which included $2.8 million for State Museum operations. On June 9th, Governor Mark Sanford issued 107 budget vetoes. Included in these vetoes was $1,693,893 in funding for the State Museum’s operating expenses (Vetoes 33 and 106).  The Governor’s cut would leave $1.2 million for Museum operations.  After paying mandatory rent of $1.8 million to the State Budget & Control Board, and paying other fixed expenses, the State Museum faces a devastating $800,000 deficit if the Governor’s vetoes are not overridden!
THIS WILL ENDANGER THE PRESERVATION OF SOUTH CAROLINA HISTORY & HERITAGE, THREATEN ONE OF THE STATE’S UNIQUE EDUCATION EXPERIENCES & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ASSETS, & CRIPPLE ONE OF THE STATE’S TOURISM CROWN JEWELS!
Please go here to find your legislators. Please call their local numbers through Monday evening. On Tuesday, call their statehouse numbers.
If you are available to come to the State House lobby at 11:30 on Tues., June 15, PLEASE DO.  We need CALLS MADE and a MAJOR SHOW OF SUPPORT on Tues. in order to achieve these overrides.
CALLING INSTRUCTIONS:
It is critical that you make the call to your House Member, and then your Senator ASAP! We are expecting the House members to take up the Governor’s vetoes on Tuesday (June 15) at Noon.   The Senate will take them up once the House completes their actions on the vetoes.
CALL YOUR CONSTITUENT HOUSE MEMBERS FIRST!
Also place calls to other House & Senate members with whom you have close relationships.
Please make at least two attempts to call YOUR legislators.
If you do not reach them, be sure to leave several things in your message:
1) Your name
2) where you live and your phone number
3) that you want them to vote to OVERRIDE the Governor’s budget veto numbers  33 and 106.
Thank you for your support!

Meanwhile, I still haven’t seen a good, comprehensive list of the vetoes and their impact from an impartial source (such as the MSM). There’s this story about ETV in The State this morning, but nothing comprehensive. I have the governor’s veto letter, and Wes Wolfe is promising a post this weekend that gives a full list. But the governor paints the vetoes his way, and Wes promises to be in heavy advocacy mode. Here’s what Wes told me:

I’m going to go through the vetoes tonight. May well have to continue tomorrow. When I’m done, I’ll have a post up. It’ll likely be heavy on defending museums, the State Archives, the arts and such. People who back the humanities need every person at the barricade that they can get. They’ve been devalued since the beginning of the Cold War (as in, we need people who know a lot about math and science to beat back the Red Menace). The rise of Japan and Germany in the ’80s didn’t help, nor did the tech explosion of the ’90s. I could go off on this for hours. Anyway, yeah, I’ll have something up in the next 24 hours or so.

Hey, advocacy or not, it’s better than nothing. Thanks for doing all that work Wes!

Also, Rep. Nathan Ballentine writes to me, “go to NathansNews, my most recent post has link to all.” But when I went there it was mainly a reference to the governor’s message. Unless I’m looking at the wrong thing…

Virtual Front Page, Friday, June 11, 2010

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In keeping with my somewhat anachronistic philosophy of what makes a lede story, here is my pseudo-front page for this evening:

  1. GOP rebukes Knotts for Haley slur (The State) — Actually, they did more than that: The asked him to resign. To discuss that, go here. This is not a lede story on a normal day, especially since it happened last night. But there is a paucity of actual news that actually HAPPENED in the last 24 hours. Lots of interesting trend stories, but a lede has to happen, under my rules. I suppose I could lead with the BBC’s lead story — that the World Cup got under way. But a) this is not a sports blog and b) this is not England.
  2. Teen Sailor’s Rescue Raises Safety, Expense Issues (NPR) — Yes, there’s an idiot born every minute. And sometimes, when they grow up, they let their teenage children sail around the world alone — and expect the rest of us to pick up the bill when things inevitably go wrong.
  3. Greene certified as Democratic primary winner (P&C) — OK, so everybody else got certified, too. But the interesting part is that Alvin Greene is now official. And that makes things so wild and crazy that even the Green Party candidate (no, not “Greene Party,” Green Party) thinks he might have a chance.
  4. Mystery in S.C.’s Democratic primary deepens (WashPost) — One of the candidates Clyburn mentioned in his conspiracy theory is linked to a GOP consulting firm.
  5. Bauer throws support to Barrett (thestate.com) — … and Barrett throws it right back. OK, he didn’t. But at least we can dream of headlines we’d LIKE to see… Meanwhile, for a fun contemplation of the Gov Lite…
  6. Kagan 1996 Memo Reveals Views on Religious Freedom (WSJ) — A study of her record may give some cultural conservatives reason to like the Obama nominee.

Anyone see a good rundown of what Sanford vetoed?

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In the last few days, I’ve run links to a story in The State and another in the Post and Courier giving the 30,000-foot view of Gov. Sanford’s budget line-item vetoes, with all the quotes about political philosophy, descriptions of the state of the political relationship between the governor and lawmakers (somewhat better than in past years, you may be surprised to learn), and rehashes of just how much the governor hates the federal stimulus and is looking forward to saying “I told you so” when the money runs out.

What I have not seen is a good rundown of what he was cutting. And boy, am I missing having Cindi Scoppe working for me. Give her a couple of days of communing with the budget document (which might as well be written in Greek for all the good it does me), and she’d tell me everything I needed to know about it. When it comes to writing about the budget, to paraphrase Blanche Dubois,I have always depended on the kindness of… people who know how to read that stuff.

But a number of things have caused me to wonder in the last couple of days.

For instance:

  • The consternation I picked up on over at ETV studios over the massive cut to their budget. ($5.2 million — that detail was in the P&C report)
  • The call I got from someone yesterday whose girlfriend works at the State Museum, and she was worried because the governor had vetoed the museum’s entire appropriation (which would shut it down if not overridden).
  • An e-mail I got saying the same about the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. (I say, is nothin’ sacred?) This appears to be part of the governor’s elimination of the entire appropriation for the Budget and Control Board.

To quote from that last:

Yesterday Governor Sanford vetoed the Board’s entire $25.2 million General Fund appropriation for the Budget and Control Board for next year.  This section of the budget includes the entire General Fund operating budget for the S.C. Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum.  If this veto is not overridden, the museum will have to cease operations.
In his veto message to the General Assembly, the Governor stated that he was taking this action because the “Board has sufficient carry-forward and other funds to maintain its operations in this fiscal year.”  This is not correct.  There are not sufficient funds to make up the $25.2 General Fund cut to the Board, which includes $765,000 for the museum.
This veto represents the greatest threat the museum has faced in our 114 years of existence.  If this veto is not overridden we will no longer be able to preserve South Carolina’s proud military legacy.

Now one can have all sorts of debates as to the relative importance of the museum formerly known simply as the Confederate Relic Room (although I can tell you from having visited that it’s much more now), but what’s bugging me is that, with the vote coming up Tuesday, I just don’t have a clear idea of WHAT all is at stake.

Do any of y’all? And if so, please share.

Let the voters decide the fate of Jake Knotts

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The Lexington County Republican Party has called on Jake Knotts to resign, and has done so, at least on the surface, for noble reasons. Good people everywhere are nodding their heads and thinking, “About time. South Carolina no longer has room for that sort.”

I applaud many (although not all) of the motivations that cause people to say that. And I think it might do our state’s reputation some good in the larger world if he were hounded from office.

But in the end, I think it’s none of the Lexington County Republican Party’s business whether Jake stays in office or not. As he says, he doesn’t serve the Republican Party. He serves the voters of his district. He should answer to them. That’s the way the system is supposed to work. Many of the same people calling for his head within the party are also supporting the candidate who has announced she will run against him in two years. Fine. Let the battle be joined. And let the voters decide whether they prefer Jake, or Katrina Shealy. All of this mess over that inexcusable thing that Jake said should be thoroughly hashed out in that election. And it certainly promises to be an interesting one. (And maybe, if we’re lucky, someone else will step in and run, someone who is NOT tainted by the blood feud between Sanford and Knotts, so that we can have a more straight-up election about values that have nothing to do with power politics between rival factions.)

There are many things that should NOT be settled by public vote. Matters of public policy, for instance. Ours is a representative democracy, and government by plebiscite is in no way to settle complex issues.

But a vote of the people is precisely how we are supposed to settle the important issue of who will be those elected representatives. And we must have the greatest respect for that prerogative of the people, or else, whatever our high-minded standards (and I do find it ironic to hear some of the high-minded pronouncements of principle I’m hearing from some of these Lexington County Republicans, although I welcome it), our system is not grounded in the ultimate source of legitimacy, the people.

That’s what I think about the Jake Knotts affair. Leave it to the voters.

Now, I expect to get hit with all kinds of howls of protest from those who think Jake’s my big buddy, just because, after opposing him strenuously for election after election, we very reluctantly supported him over Ms. Shealy (actually, over Mark Sanford, because that’s what the election was about) in the last election. Such people fail to understand what I think about Jake. I explained it pretty well in a column I wrote at the time, and I urge you to go back and read it. If you’re still not satisfied, well, I’m working on a post that elaborates. I’ll try to get it posted by tomorrow sometime. (I wanted to get it done today before posting this, but it got so long and involved — it involves trying to explain some thoughts I have about the world that I’ve never tried to set in writing before, partly because they take so long to explain — that I just set it aside, and decided to go ahead and post this.)

But in the meantime, consider this: Sen. Knotts is not accused of stealing from the state treasury, or high treason, or physical violence or anything else that would justify short-circuiting the voting relationship between him and his constituents. What he did was say a word — a word that reveals a particularly nasty, grossly unacceptable set of attitudes toward other people based upon the accidents of birth. It was inexcusable, and indicative of much deeper problems, of a great flaw of character.

There are people who believe that merely having such attitudes should be criminalized. I am not among them. For this reason I oppose “hate crime” laws. It’s one of the few things I agree with libertarians (like Jake’s enemy Mark Sanford) about. I believe it is unAmerican to punish a person for his attitudes, however grotesquely objectionable those attitudes are. What we should do is punish the act. And in this case, Jake Knotts didn’t ACT upon his attitude, he just said the word.

Then, let the attitude fend for itself in the public marketplace. This is particularly true of an attitude expressed by a politician. Let the voters decide whether they can live with what it reveals of the candidate’s character. Yes, I know that many people disapprove of the decisions that other voters make. But that’s none of their business. If the poor, black electorate of Washington, D.C., wants to re-elect Marion Barry, that’s up to them — unless he commits a felony or otherwise disqualifies himself. If the redneck white electorate of Georgia wants to elect a Lester Maddox, that is likewise up to them. One of the things these Lexington County Republicans are struggling with is whether they want to be associated with attitudes reminiscent of Gov. Maddox. Good for them. But the final arbiters must be the voters, not a party.

That’s the American way. With all its warts.

More on the subject — probably more than you want — later.

Maybe they thought they were voting for the Rev. Al Green

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That’s my latest theory to explain the victory of Alvin Greene in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.  They thought he was Al Green. (Never mind that this is South Carolina and Al’s from Memphis; just indulge me for a moment — I’m on a roll here.)

And if that’s what those voters were thinking, well then, who can blame them? Certainly not I.

A few days ago, I was listening to Pandora while blogging, and had to stop what I was doing to listen fully to an awesome track by the Rev. Al. It was an unlikely song to be so awesome. It was “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?” Yep, the Bee Gees tune.

Now, I feel about the Bee Gees sort of the way Rob in High Fidelity (my very favorite book of the last 15 years, which I know I mention all the frickin’ time)  felt about Peter Frampton. (In fact, I feel more that way about Peter Frampton than I do about the Bee Gees, because some of their pre-disco stuff was good. But their disco sins are difficult to forgive.) If you haven’t read the book, you may remember the scene in the movie. Rob and Dick and Barry go to hear this new singer in a club, and as Rob enters, he hears the strains of “Baby I Love Your Way,” and grimaces, “Is that Peter F___ing Frampton?” and almost leaves. But he listens, and is so enchanted with what the singer does with the song, that he says to Dick and Barry, “I always hated this song,” and they moan a sympathetic, “Yeahhhh…” and then he confesses, “Now I kind of like it…” and they moan, “Yeahhhh…” (Here’s the scene, by the way.)

OK, so sexual attraction was also involved there. But I know that with Rob’s highly refined pop music sensibilities, he would also have been blown away by Al Green doing that Bee Gees tune. It was amazing.

Where was I? Oh, yes… so if that was why folks voted for Alvin Greene, all is forgiven.