Tag: South Carolina

Jenny Sanford’s Field Guide to Biking the Appalachian Trail

Jenny Sanford, the soon to be ex- wife (divorce filed and pending) and campaign manager of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, has written a book, called   “Staying True.”  

Governor Sanford, who completely disappeared for five days last summer, for a side trip to Argentina to get it on with his mistress, leaving aides with the alibi of “he’s hiking the Appalachian trail”  says that he has not read the book yet.

“I know anything Jenny does, she does well, so I look forward to reading it along with everybody else,” he said, according to The Sun News.

Per Tim Rutten’s review in the LA Times, “Staying True”

is a memoir of a marriage that only can be described as the Contract With America meets Southern gothic.

/snip

In fact, by the time we get to the affair late in the book, it’s a bit of a relief, since this is about the first normative impulse either of the Sanfords seems to have had during their marriage.

/snip

As Sanford informs us elsewhere in the book, “Women were made for sacrifice.”

And boy does she sacrifice . . . over and over and over. What’s never clear from her extended exercise in score-settling is why? The man she describes is driven, self-absorbed, pathologically cheap and 360-degrees weird. She runs his political campaigns, puts up with his habitual absences and bears him four sons.

http://www.latimes.com/feature…

Conservatism is Often Less than Compassionate

Flying somewhat underneath the radar this week has been a controversial remark made by South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer (R).  Last week, the Lt. Governor of the Palmetto State made a particularly toxic and highly offensive remark regarding the nature of assistance programs designed to aid the poor and disabled.  

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

I’ve mentioned this before, I know, but at that instant my mind couldn’t help but flash back to a particular quote made by Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pu**y, loose shoes, and a warm place to s**t.

I think conservatives assume that welfare services and the safety nets provided to those living at or near the poverty line are some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet line whereby some dubiously defined underclass can stuff themselves silly on taxpayer funded giveaways.  The most obvious response to this is, of course, that they are desperately needed, often life-saving, otherwise unavailable options which those with adequate means already have and as such frequently take for granted.  But for some reason this isn’t sufficient enough in and of itself to satisfy the concerns of the average GOP voter or elected official, so perhaps a description of the incredible limitations of welfare agencies needs to be noted once more.  As you will see, one can either decry them as money drains or lament their inefficiency, but certainly not both.

Social service agencies and welfare services are almost always underfunded, meaning that they are also almost always understaffed.  Without enough manpower to answer phones, attend to daily business, and keep things running smoothly, the average applicant must be persistent and also must be his or her own advocate.  Often it is necessary to spend hours on the phone attempting to find someone who either knows to even be connected to a competent worker who has had enough experience with the system to know how to properly process a claim or initiate a service.  Those who lack the patience or the time are often left out altogether.  The working poor don’t have the luxury of being able to devote more than a small fraction of their time to sign up for basic services and have to divide their attention among demanding, often thankless jobs, and the constant time and energy drain that is known as parenthood.  Those with families and dependents often are the ones who need these services the most, but can’t carve out extra time in already busy, over-booked schedules.  Regarding food stamps, which supply one of the most basic of all human needs, what transpires often is that deserving individuals don’t have the time to come into an office or wait for hours, or have great difficulty scheduling a block of time in which to speak on the phone with a worker to complete the process.

Social service agencies and welfare services are dependent on state and local tax revenue, and though the amount of funding varies from city to city, county to county, and state to state, most are barely able to absorb the needs of the less fortunate in good economic times.  In bad economic times, budgets are stretched to the gills, the deficiency in number of workers needed is much more visibly pronounced, and as a result the system quickly grinds to a halt or at least a slow trickle.  In situations like these, with three and four times as many applicants in the pipeline, it takes even longer to obtain even the minimum and it may mean that three and four times as much effort and persistence is needed until one finally receives a place on the rolls.  When budgets are tight, it also means is that coverage for any service can be terminated at any time, for any reason, based on some mysterious internal audit or the flimsiest of justifications, all implemented based on the compulsion to save money and keep from depleting the General Fund.  

Speaking to my own recent experience, just to obtain a referral to a clinic that treats basic physical ailments the way any GP would took two frustrating days on the phone, whereby I called at least seven different numbers and spoke to close to ten people.  Eventually I finally, quite by chance, stumbled across the right person who finally got everything in order.  I was told at the time that the reason for the vast amount of confusion was, in part, a result of the fact that low salaries at certain centers designed to direct patient inquiries meant that there was always quite a bit of turnover.  Since the system itself was complex, it often took a while before any worker properly understood it enough to convey accurate information to anyone.  Though I am thankful for my success, I couldn’t help but think about all the others who found themselves with blood pressure raised high enough for long enough to set aside any subsequent efforts to see a doctor.  It is no wonder that the rates of easily preventable conditions are high among the working poor, since if it takes this degree of effort, I know many will go without rather than undergo what at first seems like a fruitless search.

This leads me to my next point, at which I discuss another barrier to obtaining needed services—senseless complications and poor networking between agencies.  Many times these are products of all the barriers I have stated above, but what this also reflects is our compulsion to micromanage the affairs of the poor.  Not only that, we wish to control their lives because many of us believe that they are clearly up to no good and only a step above either common criminals or lazy ne’er do wells with nothing so much as ambition or drive.  I wouldn’t exactly call this tough love so much as I would call it punitive retribution.  One needs only look at the ACORN matter to see evidence of that.  Conservatives saw exactly what they’ve always wished to see in that case, confirming their own darkest suspicions in the process.  I honestly believe if it were up to them, many would do away with all taxpayer funded programs designed to assist the less fortunate among us, unsympathetically remarking like Herbert Hoover that these services ought to be the domain of churches and faith-based organizations, but certainly not of government.    

Where one sees frustrating evidence that the right hand doesn’t know quite what the left hand is doing in any circumstance, or that everyone’s not quite on the same page, it is tempting to deem it indisputable proof that larger government is both a waste and a headache.  This is what drove the Tea Party protesters to spout off and also motivated those who feared and still fear the enactment of some nebulously defined, super scary government-controlled health care plan, but I counter that assumption by noting that with an adequate amount of funding, an adequate amount of staffing, a moderate amount of reform, and a network of customers of ample economic means, the system would run far more efficiently.  Most people who are used to medicine on demand would simply not stand for the degree of complication and delay as currently exists, and money has a way of smoothing out many of the kinks in any system.  Not all of them, of course, but many.  Money has a way of giving people a reason to stay in a job for more than a short time and encouraging competent management that would attend to the needs of a much more educated, much more affluent demographic that would expect more and not a group of citizens who have unfortunately long come to expect that the few concessions thrown them will be of inferior quality.

Returning to the system the way it is today, the elephant in the room, naturally, is a very pronounced element of racist and classist assumption.  Since discrepancies between wage earnings are still very pronounced between Whites and Blacks, most who qualify for and use safety net programs are poverty-line African-Americans, and more recently a rapidly growing number of Latinos.  Most, but not all, of course.  In my experience, I was the only White person applying for food stamps and the only Caucasian seeking treatment and prescription drug coverage.  As we well know, nothing instigates GOP ire faster than the notion of welfare cheats or avoidable drains on Good Honest American Taxpaying Citizens™, as seen above with Mr. Bauer.  I’m not quite sure what I find more offensive about his remarks, the dehumanizing element reducing poor Americans to feral animals, the element of eugenics which suggests that poverty could be reduced or eliminated by means of forced sterilization or starvation, or the implication that all those in need are simple-minded strays who aren’t concerned with anything much more than just reproducing and creating burdens for humans who have to take the time and effort to keep their numbers in check.  I’ve heard some fairly creative theories for population control and elimination of inferior races, but yours, Mr. Bauer, is not one of them.                  

The real enemy here is not conservatism, or liberalism, or an entitlement mentality, or even an underclass.  The issue is equality, pure and simple, or should I say the lack thereof.  I will be honest here.  I was raised by a Father who placed complete faith in Ronald Reagan and his view of the waste and graft of welfare and with it a simultaneously dismal opinion of the efficiency of any government program, regardless of its stated purpose or function.  Indeed, there was a time where I myself held similar beliefs.  But though I had changed by tune well before then, my eyes were truly opened when it came my time to use these same basic lifelines granted anyone who qualifies.  I recognized quickly that had I not been born into a middle class, highly educated family, I might not have been able to chart my way through a very convoluted system and obtain the services I needed along the way.  Working the system requires a good bit of guesswork and tremendous amount of trying to successfully solve a problem with multiple unknown variables.  

The system is not designed for the undereducated and the impoverished, rather it is a construct of those whose job description clearly must include a love of complicated solutions for simple problems and an insistence upon a variety of completely unrealistic constants, like minimal turn over among workers on the front lines and at the field office.  Again, equality in pay would do much to keep that in check, as would a system that was put together with greater skill and dexterity.  I’m not arguing that throwing money at a problem is any adequate means to fix it, but what I am saying is that if each of the individual pieces of the system were designed with the ability to be revised easily and as the situation demanded, and if those who worked this system took a job as a career, not just a vocation, then many of these problems could be eliminated.  

If these social service agencies and welfare programs were run like a business in the private sector, they would have gone bankrupt years ago, but the fault here is once again that we honestly must not really have much regard for human life, particularly for those “not like us” for whatever reason.  Oh sure, we’ll give money to Haiti and vow to offer our services in any way that we can.  I don’t mean to come across as cynical regarding anyone’s motivation to assist the victims of that battered island nation.  The outpouring of help would soften the heart of even the most bitter person, but many will see Haiti as a one-time, special occasion.  I live in the District of Columbia and in a relatively small area based on surface area both the richest of the rich of the poor living side by side.  The ostentatious wealth of Georgetown is countered by the desolation of Anacostia and recently gentrified areas like Columbia Heights or right near by the Capitol paint an even starker view of the discrepancy.  As I’ve seen the money rolling in to be sent to Haiti, I can’t help but wonder what even a fraction of that outpouring could do for the District’s poor, and especially for those infected with HIV/AIDS since the District itself has an obscenely high number of cases that put it on par with an African nation, not a region within the borders of the United States.

Any system designed to assist those without our fundamental advantages depends upon the cooperation of those farther up the totem pole, and if our checkbooks, if not our hearts are closed to them, then the system will always be insufficient and dysfunctional, poverty will always exist, disparities will always exist between race and class, and so too will the desperate attitudes that lead to drug addiction and crime.  The life we save might be our own someday.  So yes, in this instance we do it to ourselves, and that’s what really hurts the most.  And we do it by not recognizing that it is within our power to treat the cause of the problem, much like medicine would in counteracting a disease.  For example, one can treat strep throat with an aspirin, but that only takes into account the effect.  Treating the cause often requires a shot of penicillin, and once it has made its way through the blood stream, healing begins and pain ends.  Aspirin might be far cheaper than a cost of a doctor’s visit without insurance,  but it will merely mask or temporarily delay the pain of the sore throat.  With time, it wear off, the pain returns, and the need to take more returns.  The disease itself remains and will remain until it is properly treated.          

If conservatives are so indebted to scripture and to their assertion that we ought to be a Christian nation, I wish they’d keep these passages below in mind.


For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’  

“Then the people who have God’s approval will reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or see you thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’  “And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’

On An Ethnic Slur

When it comes to cluelessness, a characteristic demonstrated repeatedly in rightwing politics, the world record always seems to be harder to reach, always seems to be harder to match.  The goal posts just seem to move further and further away. And now we have two South Carolina GOP County Chairman entering the South Carolina division of the clueless sweeps to defend Jim DeMint (R-SC) by invoking an antisemitic stereotype in print, in an guest editorial.

How’s that for stepping up to the competition?  A breathtaking feat.

Writing a guest editorial for the South Carolina Times and Democrat, Edwin O. Merwin Jr., Chairman, Bamberg County Republican Party, and James S. Ulmer Jr., Chairman, Orangeburg County Republican Party, give us these pithy bon mots:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

Nice.  Real nice.  No, they are not saying Jim DeMint is a Jew.  That’s not their point.

And I don’t know who might be taking credit for being the source of this “saying,” or who might have said it when he wasn’t wearing white sheets and a pointed hood and standing before a flaming cross.

But you do have to admit that this writing shows a remarkable degree of cluelessness.  These guys actually wrote this down, and then they had it printed in a newspaper with their names on it.  

Predictably, this flourish of profound cluelessness was lambasted in the editorial of the conservative Palmetto Scoop:

Umm… who in mainstream America thinks it’s a good idea to write something like that in a guest editorial? Especially in light of the racially-motivated attention garnered by South Carolina Republican activists over the past few months.

It’s people like Ulmer and Merwin that make many folks fear for the future of the once Grand Ole Party.

Lest you forgot, the “racially-motivated attention,” referred to, had to do with the remarks of one Rusty Depass that an escaped gorilla was an ancestor of Michele Obama.

That, I thought, had set the previous South Carolina mark for cluelessness.  And I expected that remark to keep the title for decades.  What an error on my part.  Evidently Ulmer and Merwin want to contest the record.

Can we expect the powers that be in the GOP to condemn this remark?  More when I stop laughing.

—————————-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

DeMint violates Logan Act, BETRAYS American interests to a Foreign Power. Will he pay for it?

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    With all the uproar over Republican gloating over American failures, this bit of news has been almost totally overlooked, but it trumps any posturing over the Olympics by a long shot.

    Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has announced that he will be visiting Honduras today to meet with the de facto regime of acting Honduran President Roberto Micheletti in sheer defiance of the position taken by the US government and (the) international community . . .

 Bold added by diarist

thinkprogress.org

      Senator DeMint (R-SC) has been revealed as a member of the C-Street Family, a fundamentalist Christian group that admires Hitler and believes in the Supremacy of a Free Market supporting Jesus, and has just violated the Logan Act, a law that states that ONLY unauthorized citizens are forbidden from negotiating with foreign Governments. As of now, DeMint is acting against American interests.

      And that makes him a traitor.

      More below the fold

A Confeduhracy of Dunces. Symbol of slavery & Joe Wilson worth defending to Rep. King (Clown-IA)

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is proud of Confederate heritage, but confused about geography and American history.

    Meet the Republican plan for the 2010 elections

    Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has been circulating a letter to his House Republican colleagues, asking them to sign onto a petition in defense of Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson (R-SC).

thinkprogress.org

     Save Joe Wilson and his right to lie and call others liars, in the name of the Confeduhracy!

More from thinkprogress.org

    [Wilson] is an officer and a gentleman and everyone who knows him knows that. … Being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.


    I have ancestors who fought for the Union, Mr. King, and they kicked your ancestors ass. Huh? How do ya like that!

    Now, even if Rep. King’s ancestors fought for the Confederacy to defend secession and slavery over almost 150 years ago, I don’t think that is what the people of Iowa circa 2009 really want from their Congressmen today, but then again, judging by the teabaggers and their antics this weekend, maybe I am wrong.

     More of teh stupid below the fold

My Itchy Nose: The Sanford Affair

As I’ve been basking in the drama of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s epic Fail, my curiosity was peaked by some comments on the FDL post, How Stupid Does Erick Erickson Feel Today? As well as posts on TPM, DU, Kos and other sources, all of which make vague connections and toss flimsy innuendo, but none of which actually make the suggested connections overtly.

Having spent a little over 30 years in news/publishing (and having done a bit of investigative journalism in my prime), I found it all just so… fascinating! There are things here that need some firmly supported answers. Disjointed factoids garnered thus far:

Sanford, sans written statement or even notes, appears late to his own press conference, also sans wife (now said to be with kids at beach house) and personal assistant. Sanford began with a rambling extemporaneous exposition on the joys of hiking, as if he intended to defend that story, not realizing that the press corps already knew where he’d been (and who he was with). He didn’t begin apologizing and whimpering until ~4 minutes in. When he asked for that female personal assistant, realized she wasn’t there, knew he was busted.  A pitiful performance.

MSNBC reported that an SC newspaper has been sitting on “the” story (the emails of love) for months. Because The State newspaper is a right-wing rag, it’s not hard to figure why they sat on the info, though it also makes me wonder about who the anonymous person who forwarded them to the newspaper might be. Mrs. Sanford? She managed his campaigns, may have access to his emails. His personal assistant who abandoned him yesterday? These two might also have access to his personal email, at least via forwards he may have sent them and a basic knowledge of his range of rememberable passwords. Someone else in the office?  

Congressional Poverty Scorecard – Anti-Poverty Legislation Blocked

On Monday, the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law released its 2007 Congressional Poverty Scorecard. The President of the Center, John Bouman, noted that in states with the highest poverty rates, their congressional delegations tended to score the worst.

“Poverty is everywhere in America, but it is interesting that in states with the highest concentrations of poverty, the Congressional delegations seem least interested in supporting initiatives that fight poverty,” said John Bouman, president of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, which released the study. “This appears deeper than simply opposing spending. A member could have opposed any of the measures we analyzed that called for new spending and still could have voted to support half of the poverty-fighting measures on our list.”

Former presidential candidate John Edwards was also on the center’s conference call with reporters.

“We can get the national leadership and we can get the congressional leadership we need,” Edwards said. “But first voters need to be educated as to who is doing the work and who is not.”

Hillary …Just Standing By Her Man

For the past week or so, the Clintons have demonstrated what a continuation of dynastic politics would be like in our federal government …a continuation of the divisive politics that has so characterized the past twenty years …Bush senior; Bill; W; and now, God forbid, Hill. America, the world cannot withstand another eight years of this type of politics. Nor can America live the next eight years in a foxhole as the Republicans, especially John McCain, would have us do. It is time for America to lift its sites, return to the time when America was indeed, the shinning light on the hill. America, as represented by our government, has a responsibility to its people and to the people of the world to rise above the fray and lead the world into the future. We cannot be that nation if we lower our sights to defending out of the Republican foxhole or bumbling along with stale ideas, ill-conceived policies, misspeaking and misunderstood presided-over by a two-headed leadership team. This country needs a singular voice to rally-around, who is responsible and capable of leading us into the future, mindful of the past but not constrained by its failures …a leader who is capable of bringing us along in quest of a higher vision for America and who accepts accountability for getting us there. The only acceptable choices are John Edwards and Barack Obama.

Bill Clinton attacks created backlash for Hillary.

Tonight’s victory of Barack Obama was a lot bigger than anyone expected. Most pollsters expected a victory of around 10 points; only one predicted a victory of 20 points. While they correctly predicted the uptick in support for Edwards, they did not predict the huge margin of victory that Obama would take.

The X Factor in this race was the attacks of Bill Clinton on Obama this week. However, it turned out that these attacks created a huge backlash against Hillary and led to Obama’s unexpectedly wide margin. Obama’s victory will undoubtedly give him momentum going into the next race; however, the big question is how much?

The reason that I ask this question is because the next battle will be totally different than the four battles that came before it. In the previous four battles, the winner was the candidate who could do the best at practicing retail politics — this was a turf that clearly favored Obama. With his huge gift for oratory and his ability to draw some of the largest crowds ever for political campaigns, Barack Obama was able to generate the kind of grassroots support that propelled him to convincing wins in Iowa and South Carolina, a narrow loss in New Hampshire, and a tie in Nevada.

But this will be a totally different battle than the one before it, because it will be decided on the airwaves. Stump speeches will be important, but the candidates will have to try to appeal to audiences much bigger than the small audiences that they appealed to before. The battle will be won and lost based on who can create the best commercials that appeal to voters. So, if Obama cannot give people flashes of his oratorical skills in 30 seconds, then he will be in even more hot water than he is already — he trails by double digits in the all-important state of California. And that is on top of the fact that he is still trailing the delegate count to Hillary.

Fall Leaves Across South Carolina

The NYT has 120 plus stories on ‘Clinton’ and ‘gays in the military’ between 92 and 93. If you want to know how the media was able to define Clinton as a divisive figure who alienated people a decade ago, look around. We’re living it. Then, as now, Hillary and Bill are being blamed for the divisions among us.

Campaigning on Race: Who here can deny seeing Obama as a person of color, first; and as an individual, second? Obama has been running on race from day one.

Reverse racism, fears of exclusion, and liberal guilt have been exploited shamelessly by Obama supporters. Policy positions more extreme and right-wing than those of either HRC or Edwards are shuffled to the side in order to present a candidate who voted with the party 97% of the time as an agent of change, rather than simply as more of the same in black.

How often do Obama supporters focus on the superficialities of appearance and ignore the deeply flawed roots of a campaign of cynicism, a campaign that owes so much to bigotry and gay-baiting.

Obama’s Ebenezeer St speech is a milestone in this campaign. Not because Obama spoke out against intolerance, he’s done that before. The Ebeneezer street speech is special because the speech, delivered in a church just a week before the South Carolina primary allowed Obama supporters, many of whom were shocked by the role gay-baiting played in Obama’s campaign, to forget that this campaign of ‘hope’ began by pandering nakedly to bigotry and hatred.

Obama preaches a message of inclusion, but sends anti-gay bigots into the south to drum up dollars and votes. Then he scolds bigots for coughing up the dough. The acolytes see in this astonishing cynicism further evidence of divinity.

Obama devotees place the Ebeneezer Street blindfold over their own eyes and those of others, celebrating themselves, forgetting the message of MLK, forgetting honesty, forgetting, at least until the SC election is over, that there would be no Obama South Carolina victory without bigotry and hate, without Donnie and Mary-Mary.

Gay hatred, bigotry, cynicism and lies will likely carry the day, this weekend, just as they did back in 92-94. When Obama supporters cheer themselves, their morality and their courage, perhaps they can raise a glass to Mariachi Mama, and her son who hung himself last month, and all the gay folks who have taken their own lives rather than endure the kind of hate promulgated from the stage of the candidate for change.

Go to SC w/me to work for John?

I’d filled out the little form online to say I could go to South Carolina and work for the primary on behalf of Edwards, my choice for president, but I didn’t expect they’d need me.

After all…I can’t pay for my accommodations, and can’t do a lot of walking or standing. But today someone from Edward’s campaign staff in SC called, asking me to come to volunteer –asap.

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