Mother's Day

So it's coming up on Mother's Day. I remember, a hundred years ago, that boys and men wore red carnations if they had "lost" their mothers. That's probably gone the way of so many other things, but was one of those nice gestures we seem to have no time for any more.

So Happy Mother's Day to mothers of all sorts, with approprriate thanks for all they did to birth and raise us. Without them, well, we'd be in a sorry state.

Memento mori

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza last updated his list of the best state political blogs in April, 2009.

Of the six he picked for South Carolina, five are now defunct.

When everyone who showed up equaled 12%, aren't they being kinda fussy?

To take part in the SC GOP/Fox News "debate" you had to stump up  $25K and Roger Ailes could still reject you.

Old habits die hard.

The SC GOP's Fox News-hyped presidential candidate debate last night was an odd business. Five men showed up, but they were, at best, a second-string lot.They all called the President the debate club dweeb who only gets anything right when he follows the playbook of the frat boy class prez he follows. After that, all they did was try to out-Reagan each other.

That didn't work very well, either.

Ronald Reagan was elected president thirty years ago. That's a long time. It's as if people in the 1960s argued the US needed to follow the policies of Calvin Coolidge. No, wait- they did that already. Sorry.

Lobbyists' pay

The consultant/blogger debate over SC's economic development strategy continues apace. Process Story editor Wesley Donehue's cheering Governor Haley's announcement  that Wal-Mart promises to open lots of stores and hire lots of people in the future just after the Wal-Mart-opposed sales tax exemption sought by Amazon.com in return for opening a big distribution center in Cayce was defeated in the legislature: mostly by Republicans. Just the other day, Donehue said the Amazon deal might be alive again.

The governor previously said she wouldn't support or oppose the Amazon deal, but likes the Wal-Mart promise because it involves no incentives from government.

FITS News, which the other day called Donehue an amiable liar, cribbed the same story from The State about how somehow Wal-Mart would save the state's economy.

Wal-Mart promises 4,000 jobs over four years to come. The Amazon fallout has so far cost 2,500 jobs.

So far the debate seems to be between traditionalist Republicans who believe you attract business by way of appeasement (lots of economic incentives) and Teabaggists who argue that we should make the case for SC as a state that makes no offers, no deals.

Both views are wrong.

In the new economy, states with a long-term success are not the ones that prostrate themselves to draw business, either by saying "we'll do anything to get you," or by saying, "We'll do nothing to get you."

Rather, states that succeed are the ones employees want to move to. It's not a matter of big-box factories any more. It's a matter of attracting the people who will work in them. Snart workers can go anywhere in the world, and, so far, South Carolina is not making much of a case for coming and staying here. It's why, whatever side one takes in the Amazon- Wal-Mart debate, both just want the same things: cheap land, low taxes, no unions, and workers who'll be happy to toil for next to nothing.

Dude, consider the lineup-

About those 72 virgins-

Polygamy, again, and bogus as ever.

Newly-minted SC Congressman Trey Gowdy is busy earning his ideological stripes, arguing, in a congressional hearing in which most House members were interested in things like terrorism, with the attorney general about marriage equality.

As President Bush used to say, "Wanted- dead or alive."

In one of the more peculiar responses to the death of bin Laden, a former government official, John Yoo- who helped create the legal dead end that is what we do with terrorists, writes in The Wall Street Journal that the President prefers killing terrorists to interrogating them in Yoo-gitmo.

Post-bin Ladenism, as gracious as ever.

Thirteen hours later, Republicans answered Obama’s plea for bonhomie — with broadsides. “The command-and-control paranoia that we see in this administration is antithetical to everything that we understand about freedom in our country,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) declared on the Senate floor as the chamber began its first legislative day after a two-week vacation. “Individual responsibility and individual freedom and free markets and free enterprise: They’re attacking it on every front.”

It's what they do when nobody's hiring them.

Some of SC's consultant/bloggers are slapping each other senseless with lillies again.

Pay no attention to the man in the loafers.

SC Senator Lindsey Graham is the second-worst political pundit in America.

Bosoms all a'heavin'

A consultant/blogger reports his party is the heroine of a Harlequin novel:

S.C. Republicans are eager for a presidential candidate to come to the Palmetto State and sweep them off their feet.

The TSA Theory of Parenthood

As various pundits argue the man will surprise people in the SCGOP primary, Rick Santorum says adoption is like cattle trying to fly:

SANTORUM: Can you have good stock, solid family with a single parent? Yes you can…if you were getting on an airplane and you had a choice between two of them and one airplane would get you there 95 percent of the time and the other plane would get you there 85 percent of the time. What plane would you take?

Cui bono?

In a most striking comment, a South Carolina consultant/blogger says the lesson of the failed Amazon.com sales tax legislation is that Democrats are job killers.

Which begs the question, why?

Who wakes up in the morning saying, "I want to go to work today and see how many jobs I can kill?"

Where's the political gain for a party to go home at election time and tell voters, "I worked to kill your jobs"?

What makes economic development and job creation a partisan issue?

Don't we all want all South Carolinians to have a place in an expanding economy?

If not, why not? And if the classic model of economic development in the southeast has been rejected, what will take its place?

Teabag leader says terrorism is all about sex

It is a well-known truth that the Teabaggists have no formal leaders.

From time to time, however,  people heading up theoperations of Teabaggist operations emerge to argue about things.

Thus the media covers one Judson Phillips, who argues the President only killed bin Laden to get re-elected, and should have wrapped the terror leader in "pig fat" to underscore to Muslims how intent we are upon denying him his celestial virgins.

72 of them, Phillips salivates.

In other words, Phillips fantasizes, get 'em where they live. In his world view, Muslims are sexually repressed men who only get to have sex in some sort of spiritual afterworld- compared to the West, where people get to have sex in this life but do so knowing that Judson Phillips disapproves of it.

Look north

It's easy to ignore Canada. For that matter, Anericans find it easy to ignore the whole world.

But we ignore Canada at our peril. After all, they're our largest trading partner.

Yesterday the Canadians went to the polls, a tale ignored by American media.

The results were striking.

The Conservative Party- led by the robotic Stephen Harper- finally won a majority after five years of minority rule.

What's more striking is that the Liberal Party- long the governing party of Canada- collapsed, and the New Democrats- winning over 100 seats- became the official opposition.

Canada seems to have gone the way of the US- the left going lefter, the right going righter. The other striking result is the failureof the Bloc Quebecois, long a power broker in Parliament even as they pursued independence for French-speaking Canada. The BQ salvaged only four seats, edging nearer to extinction than the Liberals, whose 35 seats does not include that of their leader, Michael Ignatieff.

What makes this all worth noting is SC's odd, if longstanding, tourism relationship with our neighbors to the north. The US' last ambassador to what Voltaire called "a few acres of snow" was, after all, SC power monger David Wilkins.

It will be interesting to see how far to the right the newTory majority will try going with their new mandate.

Nothing personal

The first GOP presidential debate is set for later in the week in Greenville.

So far nobody's attending. Mitt Romney says he's a no-show but will be in the area in late May.

Meantime, all the rest of the field's drumming their fingers. Odd, that. Prez's got really low numbers. You'd think they'd be piling on.

SC consultant/bloggers must be starving.

Big Love

Of all the striking add-ons to the story of Usama bin Laden's death last night, perhaps the most striking is that when he was up against it, UBL used one of his wives as a human shield.