SC’s Role

From an AP story:

The amazement was on their faces. Hundreds waited for Barack Obama on that evening in South Carolina, 15 weeks ago, to claim victory — a surprising victory, surprisingly large.

And amazing it was. It made it possible for him to stand today on the verge of being the first black person ever nominated for president by a major party.

One could guess the thoughts of the blacks and whites in that crowd: Can you believe that our state — South Carolina, first to secede and first to open fire in the Civil War — is now catapulting a black man to the front of the presidential contest in a year that bodes well for Democrats?

“Race doesn’t matter,” some began to chant. “Race doesn’t matter!”

Read the whole thing here.

Jeffcoat

One of four remaining undeclared SC Superdelegates, Wilber Lee Jeffcoat, has declared for Obama. He cites Clinton’s recent “hardworking white people” comment as one of the factors in his decision.

Clinton and Obama are now virtually tied in superdelegates, or Obama is ahead, depending on your source. SC Superdelegates Clyburn, Spratt, and Cobb-Hunter remain uncommitted. Those undeclared superdelegates in positions of leadership could end the damage to the party they say they’re so concerned about by announcing now. Clyburn, though, wants this to run its course, as he explains in this interview.

Judgment

I started wondering today what qualifications are needed to be an editorial writer at the state’s largest newspaper. I don’t mean this in any petty, mean-spirited, Brad-Warthen-is-an-idiot sort of way. But I know what qualifications are needed to be a doctor or a lawyer or a brick mason or a fast food worker. I don’t really know what they are for an editorialist.

It can’t just be that you have opinions. We all have those. It’s got to be the quality of the opinion that determines, at least as an initial matter, whether someone is good at that particular job. And after that, the ability to persuade someone else of that quality.

I’ve criticized Warthen and the gang over at the State with some frequency not because I disagree with them on the issues, although I often do, but because, well, either the judgment or the persuasiveness is often so lacking in what they write. And on top of that, the reaction from them when they are disagreed with is telling.

This is what they get paid for.

It’s not the political leanings that bother me, but something else. There are lots of writers I often disagree with but admire: Peggy Noonan, Andrew Sullivan, George Will. The State’s editorialists have never commanded that respect. (Caveat: I do think Cindy Ross Scoppe does good work.) You can read this entry (and the links it contains) to see a few examples of my criticisms.

My most recent criticism involves the decision to publish the cartoon showing a donkey in the process of breaking its two front ankles. Get it? Ha ha. Just like Eight Belles did, right before she was euthanized. Having heard quite a bit about the tastelessness of the cartoon, Warthen published a very, very long blog posting in which he basically says” You critics are wacko animal lovers with misplaced priorities.”

Did I mention that it was very long? If there are that many words, they must support a point, right?

Not really. Go read it yourself. So much for receptiveness to criticism and careful self-reflection.

The editorials they come up with over on Shop Road are sometimes supported more by arrogance than persuasion. Silence Dogood sums up this perfectly in a comment on Brad’s blog:

[W]henever anyone disagrees with your point of view they are portrayed as “not getting it” or being part of some subgroup of fanatics driven by something other than your keen sense of logic.

Bingo.

And then there is this comment about Warthen’s views by Doug Ross:

If you think government is too large, it is because you are selfish. If you think taxes are too high, it is because you are childish. If you think illegal immigration is a big problem, it is because you are a racist.

And if you find a cartoon that makes light of the recent death of a horse offensive, it is because you care more about animals than humans.

Bingo again.

As far as why the cartoon is tasteless and offensive (in a bad way; some offensiveness can be good), it boils down to this: It depicts a tragic moment, a very public death of an animal, to make an unrelated point in a supposedly funny and light-hearted way.

I tried to think of a human equivalent so that Brad would understand it has very little to do with the fact that it’s a tragedy about an animal. Here’s the best I could come up with.

It would be like my drawing a cartoon of Brad Warthen depicting him as Pat Tillman and showing the moment his head gets blown off by friendly fire coming from bloggers in the surrounding hills.

That’s not offensive or provocative because of the underlying point being made (Brad Warthen is being heavily criticized.) It’s offensive because it is using the very moment of death of an individual, it graphically makes a light, supposedly-humorous cartoon out of the critical moment, and the ultimate message of the cartoon has nothing to do with that event. I could easily find another way to convey the message without being so over-the-top and exploitative in the means I chose to illustrate it.

Is a tasteless drawing evoking a horse’s very recent, very public death the biggest issue on the board this week? Nope. Did the way it’s been handled tell us something about the judgment of the professional opinion-makers around here? You betcha.

Ariail

Robert Ariail, the State’s talented editorial cartoonist, should brace himself for another onslaught.

A few weeks ago he drew Senator Obama as a suicide bomber.

Today’s cartoon shows Hillary Clinton riding a donkey in the “Democrat Derby” with the donkey’s front ankles crumbling beneath them.

I’ve often laughed at the people writing letters to the editor complaining about the offensiveness of editorial cartoons. That’s what editorial cartoons are supposed to be. But here’s the thing about tasteless and offensive. If if it’s offensive to the target of your cartoon, then maybe you’ve done your job. If it’s offensive for some peripheral reason - like maybe drawing two breaking ankles after Eight Belles’ widely-viewed death in the Kentucky Derby - you’ve missed the mark.

I told someone after the Derby to brace themselves for the Clinton analogies and tasteless jokes after the only filly in the race finished second, broke her ankles, and had to be put down. Other bloggers and media types went there, not able to resist the easy joke.

Now Ariail has done it too. On top of the fact that it’s incredibly offensive to anyone who cares about animals (not the intended target of the cartoon), the cartoon is easy. He’s better than that.

UPDATE: I went over to Ariail’s site to see what sorts of comments had been left. Apparently he discontinued the comment function after the suicide bomber cartoon. Too bad. Feel free to leave those comments here.

UPDATE 2: Here’s one from an unrelated post on Brad Warthen’s blog, as people apparently look for somewhere to express their disgust at this cartoon:

…[T]oday’s editorial cartoon demonstrates the worst taste of anything I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. A horse’s broken ankles in the Kentucky Derby and euthanization are no laughing matter. Somebody’s head ought to roll. Posted by: penultimo mcfarland | May 8, 2008 9:42:43 AM

UPDATE 3: Arial’s comments are back, including this one: “The most offensive editorial cartoon I have ever seen, bar none.” Will on May 8th, 2008 10:52 am

SC Superdelegates: The Time Is Now (Again)

Jim Clyburn, John Spratt, Gilda Cobb-Hunter, Wilbur Lee Jeffcoat:  It’s time to get on board and declare for Obama.

I’m Just Sayin’

I know it’s fun to talk about superdelegates as if this is a basketball game with momentum swings and stuff, but . . .

The Math

Thankfully, someone in the media is focusing on the actual mechanism by which a Democratic nominee is chosen, as opposed to all that silly momentum-tea-leaf-reading-six-degrees-of-separation stuff that apparently makes for better copy. Anyway, that somebody is Chuck Todd at NBC News. He’s actually done a good job analyzing this race throughout. Here’s what he says:

Despite the fact that another month of contests is still on the docket, nearly half of all remaining delegates will get handed out tomorrow. And the math will be a lot more crystal clear after tomorrow, both in delegates and the popular vote. Following Guam, there are now 404 pledged delegates up grabs, and 187 of them will be decided on Tuesday. Plus, per our count, there are 268 undeclared superdelegates. Here are the basics of what each candidate needs: Assuming he wins half of the delegates tomorrow (93), Obama needs just 38% of ALL remaining delegates to get to the magic number of 2,025. If Clinton wins 94 delegates on Tuesday, she will need 66% of all remaining delegates. In addition, assuming that delegate split tomorrow, then Clinton will need 85% of all remaining PLEDGED delegates to catch Obama for the lead in that category. Moreover, if Clinton simply wanted to cut Obama’s pledged delegate lead to 100, she’d need to win 62% of all remaining delegates after tomorrow. As we’ve noted before, the math is certainly difficult for Clinton.

Can we stop all this punditry about other stuff now?

Getting Interesting

For all my criticism of the juvenile tone of FITSNews, I also give credit where credit is due.

Although “credit” may be the wrong word this time. Whether this is praiseworthy or reckless depends on your perspective.

FITSNews has posted the audio of telephone calls that Republican Dorchester County Senator Randy Scott made from the Dorchester County jail following his DUI arrest. I hadn’t written about or really paid much attention to the arrest previously, because, well another state legislator with personal failings didn’t seem like news to me.

The essential facts are these:

On April 19 Scott was pulled over in Dorchester County around 11:30 pm. He allegedly failed a field sobriety test and was arrested. He was taken to the Dorchester County jail. There he made phone calls to family members. Around 7:00 am the next morning, he was released on a personal recognizance bond.

He has since claimed that the arrest was politically motivated, that the Sheriff of Dorchester County has it in for him, and that his failure of the sobriety test can be attributed to a prosthetic leg.

Somehow the Charleston News and Courier received copies of telephone calls made by Scott shortly after his arrest. His criminal defense attorney obtained a court order that restrained the publication by the paper of the tapes. Judge James Williams’ basis for the ruling on May 2 was that the tapes might affect Scott’s right to a fair trial. He made the ruling “after a conference call with Scott’s attorneys and wife,” as well as the attorney for the paper. (His wife?)

Another hearing will take place tomorrow in Greenwood to address whether the injunction should continue.

Enter FITSNews and SCHotline which both published the audio on Saturday. (I’ll let them duke it out of their “exclusive” and “first” claims. See previous juvenile reference.)

Anyway, this one’s now interesting to me.

There are all sorts of issues bouncing around here for anyone who may want to try to sort them out. Like:

1. Where a blogger knows of a judge’s order that release of tapes would infringe a criminal Defendant’s right to a fair trial, but the blogger is not specifically named in the restraining order and is not a party to the case filed, can he be held in contempt of court for the release? (My guess: Probably not.)

2. Can a blogger in this situation be forced to reveal his sources? (My guess: Probably. There’s no applicable shield law that I’m aware of, and since the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Department was ordered not to disseminate the recordings, there would be a legitimate interest in seeing if the Sheriff’s Department had violated the Order by passing the recordings on after being ordered not to.)

3. Will the bloggers be forced to appear in Greenwood tomorrow? (My guess: I don’t know, but it would make sense, if they can be served in time.)

4. If they do not appear in court tomorrow, will the temporary restraining order be dissolved? (My guess: Yes. It’s out there now.)

5. Was the Judge’s prior restraint ruling against the News and Courier correct? (My opinion: No, not even a close call.)

6. Do the tapes raise the curtain once again on the business-as-usual presumption of favoritism in the courts of this State by those in power? (My opinion: Yep. The content of the recordings is interesting on this point. And this is actually the “newsworthy” part of this story.)

Keep this up, and FITSNews won’t even have to drop celebrity posts into his blog like a teenybopper to keep the hits coming. I, for one, will be tuned in.

UPDATE: Gervais Bridges weighs in here, sneering at the FITSNews claim that it is protecting the Constitution, as opposed to enjoying its protection. Since I have managed to acquire a tone filter for FITSNews in order to make it readable, and since I still have a hard time taking anything they write seriously, I hadn’t really focused on that bit of sanctimony. But Gervais certainly has a point. It’s not what FITSNews has written that’s interesting. It’s what he’s done.

The Choice

How to Write a SC Blog, Part 1

It always makes me a little bit sad when bloggers brag about their hits. It’s the same sadness that came over me that time a woman told me at a party that she was “really, really popular in high school.” I wanted to point out to her that: (a) It was high school; and (b) “Really, really popular” people don’t actually feel the need to tell people that.

But I didn’t because, well, if reliving her golden days as a tenth grade student council representative makes her feel better about her day somehow, who am I to judge? So I just smiled and nodded, and tried to figure out a graceful way to slip away and hang out with the dog on the back deck.

If in this online equivalent of high school, you need to be really, really popular, I’m here to tell you the secrets. A blogger can be really, really popular, even within the very narrow niche of South Carolina politics. There are ways to expand your reach beyond the eleven people who care about such things. And I’m going to provide the public service of telling you what those are so that you too can start a blog and brag about your hits. Thank me later.

OK, there I go again with that long introduction thing. (”Just get to it,” my writing professors used to scribble on the first page of my essays and stories.)

First, there are actual products out there that you can pay for that will tell you how to plant words and pictures in your web site to generate more search hits. Like “Wordtracker”:

People use different words when they search for your products online. Use these ‘keywords’ in your website copy and people will find your site when they search. No matter what business you are in, Wordtracker will tell you the words people use when they search - and how popular each word is. With a Wordtracker subscription, you will be able to: Optimize your website content by using the most popular keywords for your product and services; Generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns; Research online markets, find niche opportunities and exploit them before your competitor. In short, your search engine ranking will soar, you’ll get more visits to your website and more people will buy your products.

Or, if you don’t want to pay the Wordtracker people, you can just use Google Trends. What you’ll find out if you use Google Trends is that the top searches day in and day out are whichever sports or pop culture celebrity happens to be hot.

So let’s say you’re writing about, oh I don’t know, say, who’s leading in some obscure state office primary. South Carolina politics is what your blog is about, so you just write it. But you know not more than eleven people are going to be reading that. And, of course, your sense of self worth hangs in the balance. So what’s a blogger to do?

Here’s what you do:

You throw in entries all around the politics stuff about people like Scarlette Johansson and Halle Berry. Maybe the Roger Clemens and Mindy McCready stuff on the day that story breaks. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Uma Thurman, lots of Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears. And yeah, don’t forget Miley Cyrus. Do you have any idea how many teenyboppers use Google? Me either, but I’m telling you, it’s a lot.

See, you just jam in all these names in blog entries over the course of, I dunno, maybe three or four days. And yeah, maybe the down side is that people will be wondering what any of this has to do with a blog on South Carolina politics, but it’ll be our little secret. The worst they will assume is that it’s weirdly immature for a grown person to be so into celebrities like that. But they won’t ever guess your true motivation.

If somehow somebody figures it out, do not assume the jig is up. Maintain that you just really like Lindsey Lohan. A lot. Start talking about what a shame it was that rehab didn’t take. Or something.

And then keep pointing out all your hits in your blog.

Because, after all, you were really, really popular in high school.

Provance

If you’ve been reading here long, you may remember the entries on Sgt. Sam Provance, the South Carolinian who helped blow the whistle on Abu Ghraib. (Here’s one such entry.)

Sgt. Provance has written a piece responding to a new documentary by filmmaker Errol Morris about the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The documentary is called “Standard Operating Procedure.” It opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. Here’s the New York Times review, which has the same problem with the film that Sgt. Provance does: It doesn’t get to the heart of the central question of who was responsible.

Sgt. Provance writes:

But now I’ve seen the film and I’m disappointed. Morris does little to get to the bottom of what happened. He muddies already opaque waters regarding who was actually responsible for the abuse of prisoners.

My perspective on the Abu Ghraib scandal came from spending from September 2003 to February 2004 at the Iraq prison as a sergeant in Army Intelligence. Working the 8 p.m.-to- 8 a.m. night shift, it was impossible not to notice who was directing the operation. And I shared all this with Morris.

Read Sgt. Provance’s whole piece here.

New Drinking Game

Take a drink every time some simpleton person tosses out the cliche “____ threw _____ under the bus.”

Can we please retire that one? Now??

UPDATE: I see Newsweek’s ahead of me on this one:

What’s most striking about the sudden ubiquity of “thrown under the bus” is that it doesn’t seem to fill any particular need. “It does the same work as ‘thrown off a pier’ or ‘tossed out a window,’ according to Nunberg, the Berkeley linguist, who declined to add yet another theory to origin of the phrase (”Maybe it was rockers. Maybe it was baseball. The fact is these things tend to grow etymologies after the fact,” he says.) Neither Nunberg nor Safire think the phrase harkens back to Rosa Parks or the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955, when African-Americans protested the law that forced them to sit in the “back of the bus.” Good to know. But it’s still a drain to hear the same phrase over and over, channel after channel, column after column. It might be time to throw “under the bus” under the bus.

UPDATE 2: More people are getting on board this movement. Like here. I’m taking full credit for this groundswell. So there. Soon people will just roll their eyes, or gag, maybe, when somebody says something about bus-under-throwing. And you know who you’ll have to thank? Me, that’s who.

Obama Speaks Out on Wright

Go here for the video.

UPDATE: Or here for the transcript.

82 Years Old and Fired Up

The Courts

A couple of news items in the paper today related to how our court system operates.

First, the February bar exam results, which at this point I will call “preliminarily final” pending any behind-the-scenes calls or adjustments, are in. Here are the numbers:

Of 215 total examinees who took the February test, 148, or about 69 percent, passed, according to figures released Friday by the S.C. Supreme Court. That compared with an overall 81 percent passage rate among the 552 people who took the July exam.

For USC’s law school, 22 of 34 test takers, or about 65 percent, passed the February exam, compared with a nearly 92 percent passage rate among the 211 examinees who took the July exam.

At the Charleston School of Law, 23 out of 48 examinees, or about 48 percent, passed the February exam, compared with a nearly 70 percent passage rate among 166 test takers in July.

***

At USC, . . . the passage rate in February was about 91 percent for first-time examinees, compared with about 52 percent for repeat test takers.

Source.

In a related another story, the State Newspaper has brought to our attention the apparent meddling of state lawmakers in the court system. This sort of stuff normally stays under the radar, so it’s always enlightening when somebody screws up and it surfaces. This one involves Senator Brad Hutto, who makes his living defending DUI cases, and Representative Grady Brown.

A state trooper . . . sign[ed] off 10 DUI tickets over the course of three years before defendants went to trial, a violation of court procedure. Each person ticketed allegedly was being defended by state Sen. Brad Hutto, an Orangeburg Democrat and defense attorney.

***

According to [a] Jan. 28 letter, a trooper sent 17 tickets to his supervisor at the S.C. Highway Patrol. Twelve of the tickets were marked “not guilty” by the trooper, so defendants never went to court, according to the letter.

Ten of those 12 were for DUI. The tickets were written over a three-year period, from 2003 to 2006.

***

A 2005 complaint accuses a high-ranking State Transport Police officer of ordering his officers to toss tickets issued to truckers traveling to or near a Lee County landfill, on the basis of an agreement with state Rep. Grady Brown, D-Lee.

Source. Source. (I know the Hutto numbers don’t add up; the State did a confusing job of separating out the data into multiple articles, which I tried to paste together in one place.)

Hutto denies doing anything improper, and Brown calls his meddling “constituent service.” That’s a euphemism for “I did it because I can and nobody’s going to do anything about it.”

This is the thing about state legislators, whether we’re talking about Jim Harrison calling the Supreme Court about his daughter’s bar exam failure or Grady Brown and Brad Hutto here. They’ve done this sort of influence-tossing for so long that they are clueless about the impropriety. Remember the Harrison quotes? He pretty much knew nothing would happen to him for the meddling into the bar exam results last Fall. And Brown’s just doing a bit of constituent service. And Hutto, well, he’s just practicing law.

Meanwhile, the judgeships are largely filled by former state legislators. And the cycle continues.

Ira on Letterman

Just a heads-up:  One of my media heroes, Ira Glass (of “This American Life” fame) will be on Letterman tonight.

Clyburn Admonishes Clinton

Jim Clyburn is making big news for calling the Clintons out on their campaign strategy, including the long-term strategy I mentioned in a comment a few days ago:

“I heard something, the first time yesterday (in South Carolina), and I heard it on the (House) floor today, which is telling me there are African Americans who have reached the decision that the Clintons know that she can’t win this. But they’re hell-bound to make it impossible for Obama to win” in November, Clyburn told Reuters in an interview.Obama holds a sizable lead in delegates won in state-nominating contests which could be hard for her to overcome.

The purported theory is that an Obama defeat in November against Republican presidential candidate John McCain would let Clinton make another presidential bid in four years, Clyburn said.

Clyburn has not yet declared whether he supports Clinton or Obama. But in January, he raised his concerns about the heated exchanges between the two campaigns before the South Carolina primary.

On Thursday, Clyburn took Clinton and surrogates to task, complaining that they want the popular votes in Michigan and Florida counted, even though both states violated party rules for the early scheduling of their nominating contests.

“I think it’s so disingenuous … (adviser James) Carville and Sen. Clinton were all on TV. I’ve seen them two or three times this week, talking about counting Florida and Michigan.”

Obama did not campaign in those states because the Democratic Party said Florida and Michigan wouldn’t be included in the formal tally for the nomination. “Her name was the only one on the ticket in Michigan and still 42, 43 percent of the vote was against her,” Clyburn said.

Still, Clyburn said “I don’t think she ought to drop out.”

But he added, “There’s a difference between dropping out and raising all this extraneous scurrilous stuff about the guy (Obama). Just run your campaign … you don’t have to drop out to be respectful of other people.”

Reuters.  (Thanks to Mattheus Mei in the comments)

Waldo’s Perspective

Waldo Lydecker makes a good point about how Clinton and Obama’s treatments of one particular constituency seems to fall into a pattern. Read it here.

Church Sign Update

The “Obama Osama” letters have been taken down. The sign now reads: “How will you spend eternity, smoking or no smoking?”

The New York Times Blasts Clinton

A few months after its endorsement of Senator Clinton, the NYT says this:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

***

It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.

Hey, uncommitted SC Superdelegates (Clyburn, Spratt, Cobb-Hunter, Jeffcoat), we’re ready. The time is now.