Brad Warthen's Blog

Praying for some leadership in Columbia

We had various speakers today at Columbia Rotary talking about homelessness in our community, including Amos Disasa from Eastminster Presbyterian, speaking on behalf of the Midlands Interfaith Homelessness Action Council (which he acknowledged that, as organization names go, is a mouthful).

Saving me from taking a heap of notes, Rev. Disasa mentioned the group's Web site, at which you can read the following:

More than $9 million has been raised to build a Homeless Transition Center in downtown Columbia.  Yet this badly-needed facility is facing opposition from near downtown neighborhoods as well as some political leaders.

It is our prayer that the faith community will rally behind the Transition Center.  The starting point is to educate yourself on the need for the Center.  You will find valuable information and perspective in the slide show above.

Then we hope you will sign the petition below and that you will get others to sign it, as well.  We want our city leaders to understand that there are many more of us who support the center than those who oppose it.

When the MIHAC was formed 18 months ago, who could have dreamed that our community could have made so much progress?  But we are not there yet, which is why this petition campaign and your help are so crucial.  Read the petition that follows, please download it, sign it and encourage others to sign it.  With your help we can light the way to end homelessness.

By the way, as I mentioned in a comment a little while ago on my Sunday column post -- after Rotary, Jack Van Loan mentioned that he'd received word that the mayor is mad at him over the subject of my column. Jack said his reaction was to tell the person who told him that to give the mayor his phone number...

My band's playlist

You know that event over the weekend I mentioned attending back here? It was a fund-raiser for Hand Middle School over at Gallery 701. And while a lot of folks did come up and converse with me about newspaper business, our dialogue was somewhat constrained by the fact that it was hard to talk over the sound of the band.

The band was a group of local lawyers who call themselves The Sugardaddys, as in the candy. That, of course, is not nearly as cool a name as what one of the band members told me they thought about calling themselves, which was "Lawyers, Guns and Money." That band member, by the way, was bassist James Smith, also known for his nonmusical work at the S.C. House and in Afghanistan with the National Guard.

The band was pretty good, and in fact their opening number was one I think I'll add to my band's playlist -- The Band's "The Weight." That song would fit right into my band's ouevre, or idiom, or what have you.

Oh, you don't know about my band? Well, it's just in the planning stages, where it's been since about, oh, 1971. The thing is that first I've got to come up with a cool name for it. I mean, you're not going to see me settling on something like "Sugardaddys" just to move things along. No, I'm taking my time; I want to get this right. For awhile there I was sort of enamored of "Wireless Cloud" as a name, but I've moved on. Suggestions are welcome (up to a point). I may end up with the one that a friend suggested many years ago, after inadvertently learning my first name: "Donnie B. and the All-Night Newsboys."

But I did draft a preliminary playlist of cover songs a couple of years back. I meant to post it on the blog, but didn't get around to it or something. I ran across it the other day, and here it is:

• Don't Look Now
• Can't Be Too Long
• Paint It Black
• I've Just Seen a Face
• Simple Kind of Man
• Bring It On Home
• Mustang Sally (but only if I can line up the Commitmentettes)
• Knocking on Heaven's Door
• Hard-Headed Woman
• Soldier of Love
• Lawyers, Guns and Money (hey, it was on the list before James mentioned it)
• The Pretender
• Desperado (Don't know how this got on here)
• One More Cup of Coffee

This list, now that I look back on it, is WAY incomplete and poorly thought-out. For instance, as I say, I don't know how Desperado got on there (watching too much Seinfeld, maybe). If I went with anything Eagles-related, it would have to be Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry." And when it comes to Beatles covers, I'd do "I Should Have Known Better" way before the one listed above -- or "Eight Days a Week."

And this doesn't even get into my original material (perhaps mercifully).

Anyway, once the name is set and the playlist is all worked out, I'll see about trying to line up some actual musicians. Oh, and a manager. Don't be bugging me with gig requests; that's for the manager to deal with. All in good time.

Sunday preview: Ivy Day in the Committee Room (5 Points version)

    Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. When the dome was thinly covered his face lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his crouching shadow ascended the opposite wall and his face slowly re-emerged into light....

        -- from "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," by James Joyce

In the middle of a brilliant, unusually warm February afternoon (Thursday), I was holed up in an Irish-themed pub talking local politics. Jack Van Loan was holding court at his "office" in a booth at Delaney's pub in Five Points. And when I say office, I mean "office," with his files and organizers on the table before him next to his coffee, and his briefcase opened on a bench close at hand. From such locations Jack makes and takes his multiple calls getting ready for the big St. Paddy's Day event (March 14) and talks Five Points politics.

Last year, he was pushing Belinda Gergel for the 3rd district council contest that she eventually won. Today, he was conveying his blessing upon another (potential) candidate -- this one for mayor.

The candidate, or potential candidate, sat in the dark with the bright light coming in the window behind him so that I was talking to a silhouette -- a little like the effect when you talk to Joe Riley in his office down there at the Four Corners of the Law, with that huge cathedral-like array of windows behind him, and the fluid light of the Holy City radiating all about him. This was a little more prosaic than that, but then this wasn't the mayor yet, just a potential candidate.

Who was the candidate? Well, that's him in the very bad phone picture above, with Jack at his right. Shouldn't be hard to figure out. The thing about this candidate was, I needed no introduction. We've endorsed him for statewide office in the past. But my friend Jack wanted to introduce him as his candidate for mayor in next April's election, and I wanted to hear what Jack -- a force in the influential Five Points Association since 1991 -- had to say about him. It wasn't exactly Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and we didn't talk about Parnell, but by Columbia standards it would do.

Anyway, the rest of the story will be in my Sunday column, so tune in.

The war is over -- between Providence and Lexington Medical

Just to briefly mention what I've been up to on this Ash Wednesday, we had a meeting this morning with representatives of Providence Hospital and Lexington Medical Center. They had come to jointly announce a major breakthrough -- they've stopped fighting over whether LexMed should be allowed to do open-heart surgery.

As you know, Lexington has tried everything it could think of in recent years -- regulatory, legal and political -- to get around the fact that DHEC has said (in a shocking, rare instance of DHEC saying "no" to anyone) that they can't do bypasses. Providence and Palmetto Health have been on the opposite side of the table, arguing that a third such program would be duplicative and damage the quality of overall care in the Midlands by reducing the number of procedures they do below the level considered necessary for maintaining proficiency.

We have agreed with Providence and Palmetto Health on this. In fact, we also opposed Palmetto Health expanding its heart program several years back, on the same grounds, but DHEC approved it. We have maintained that yet a third such program would be insupportable.

But now two of these three parties have decided to stop spending millions fighting each other, and after months of negotiations have agreed on the following:

• Providence and Lexington Medical will ask DHEC to "de-certify" one of Providence's four open-heart surgical suites.
• The two will then ask DHEC to certify ONE such unit at Lexington Medical.
• Lexington will drop its challenge to certificates for expansion for Providence Northeast.
• Lexington will pay Providence, in three installments, a total of $15 million to compensate it for the lost revenues from de-certifying a unit.

So what's missing? Well, Palmetto Health. What we have here is a classic 1984 sort of situation: Eastasia and Eurasia have always been at war with Oceania. But now Eurasia and Oceania are friends. Does that mean they are now at war with Eastasia -- I mean, Palmetto Health? Well, no -- at least not at this moment. But Palmetto Health is not a part of the peace agreement, and it's hard to see how the overall battle over this issue is over until it is. We'll see in the coming days.

All of that is not to take away from what a huge breakthrough this is. This has been a very, VERY bitter battle that has distorted local politics as well as spending all that money on lawyers and such. As one who lives right behind Lexington Medical, I can tell you I've caught a lot of heat over this emotional issue, as has the newspaper. It's been tough to get people to look beyond the feelings to the larger issue. (One way I've tried to do that personally has been by pointing out that if I were having a heart attack, I'd have to be transported right past Lexington, only a mile from my house, to Providence -- but that I believe that situation is best for the community overall, in terms of better outcomes for more patients in the Midlands.)

Now, suddenly, it's over? Well, this part of it is. And I find myself torn between on the one hand celebrating the end of a really destructive conflict, and wondering why it's suddenly OK for an experienced open-heart team to be replaced by a startup? Mind you, I'm sure Lexington Medical will do as a good a job as anyone could starting such a program. It's an excellent hospital, and takes tremendous pride in doing everything it does well. Still, all things being equal, would we not be better off with the established team at Providence doing that portion of the region's procedures?

The thing is, politically and financially and in other ways, all things were NOT equal, and continued conflict had its cost. So I can see why Providence has agreed to this even as I have reservations. Lexington Medical is giving ground, too, by the way, aside from giving up money -- it still has objections to the wisdom and advisability of the Providence Northeast expansion. But it's dropping those concerns in the interests of agreement.

By the way, as a brief primer on the importance of money in all these considerations: When Providence started doing open-heart decades ago, it wasn't a money-maker. The Sisters of Charity did it because somebody in South Carolina needed to. Later, open-heart surgery became very lucrative. And while I fully believe that all parties believed they were also doing what was best for their patients, the money has played a big role at each step in these battles. Palmetto Richland, with the largest share of indigent care and an extremely expensive trauma unit, needed to expand into heart surgery to have something that brought in revenues. Lexington didn't want to be left out of that. And Providence, which has struggled financially in recent years after an ill-advised partnership with a for-profit corporation (which the good sisters mortgaged their convent to get out of), could ill afford to give up the revenues.

That's the simplistic, "it's all about money" explanation. There are other factors at work as well. One of them is that the treatment of heart disease is increasingly moving beyond open-heart, often to less invasive therapies. That's one reason why Providence was unwilling to give up part of a pie that was diminishing in overall size. But it also seems to be a reason why it is willing to give it up now -- open-heart isn't the future the way it once was, so Providence sees no point in continuing a wasteful fight over a portion of the diminishing number of such procedures to be done in the future.

Meanwhile, if I heard it right today, Lexington is NOT giving up its objections to a certificate involving the main Providence campus. So all is not sweetness and light, with all conflicts behind us in this community.

But no doubt about it, this is a major step by these two very important local institutions. It's huge. But it's SO huge, and complicated, that much remains to be sorted out.

Capt. Smith sits this one out

Ran into James Smith this morning at breakfast, and expressed my surprise that Vincent Sheheen was running for governor and he was not.

He said he just couldn't afford the time away from his family. As you'll recall, he was separated from the wife and four kids for about a year and a half, most of it fighting those folks President Obama calls the Tolly-bon. He said his wife was supportive, but he couldn't stand to miss the time with his kids. He said a Soapbox Derby event over the weekend (or was in Pinewood Derby? I get those mixed up) underlined that for him; if he were to run for gov, he'd miss such events.

On other matters, I mentioned I had thought of him and the other guys of Team Swamp Fox last night, because I've been watching (via Netflix) the HBO series "Generation Kill," based on the book by the same name by a Rolling Stone correspondent embedded with Force Recon Marines on the tip of the spear in the Iraq invasion in '03. The Marines, who were veterans of Afghanistan, talk about that experience a lot, and are sometimes nostalgic because the way they had fought on that front made more sense to them.

Anyway, I need to get together with Rep. Smith sometime and talk at greater length; I haven't had a chance to do that since he got back.

Midlands leaders band together to take advantage of stimulus

This afternoon we were visited by a rather distinguished and diverse group of business, academic and political leaders who have been putting their heads together to see how our various interlocking existing community ecodevo initiatives -- Innovista, the 3 rivers greenway, hydrogen and fuel cell efforts, and so forth -- can position our community to take advantage of the stimulus funds once they start flowing to achieve some of our existing goals.

As Lee Bussell said when he asked for the meeting:

With the first mention of the stimulus bill we pulled together a working group of about 25 people representing business leaders, USC, the city, counties, Midlands Tech, Central Midlands, The Chamber, Good to Great Foundation, SCRA, Columbia USC Fuel Cell Collaborative and a number of others .
Our purpose was not just to make sure Columbia participated in the creation of jobs through this special program. We identified that for the last 5 years we have been working toward building a sustainable and green community with the creation of an economy based on alternative energy solutions. Sustainability and green jobs have become a central part of our community development strategy.
I am asking on behalf of all of these groups that you consider pulling together a group at the State that we could come meet with next week. We think it’s critical that you understand what we are attempting to accomplish. It could truly enable our regions to find opportunity to not only create jobs, but also to create an everlasting impact on the sustainability of our community and a whole new economic approach.

Lee didn't actually make today's meeting (he's out of the country, I understand) but the following folks did come (starting with left to right in the photo above, from my phone):

• Paul Livingston of Richland County Council
• Neil McLean of EngenuitySC
• John Lumpkin of NAI Avant
• Columbia Mayor Bob Coble
• Tameika Isaac Devine, Cola city council
• USC President Harris Pastides
• John Parks, USC Innovista
• Bill Boyd, Waterfront Steering Committee
• Judith M. Davis of BlueCross BlueShield
• Jim Gambrell, city of Columbia
• Ike McLeese, Cola Chamber of Commerce
• Kyle Michel, Kyle Michel law firm

... and several other folks who I know I must be forgetting as I try to reconstruct who was sitting around the table (or whose names I missed).

Basically these folks represent a lot of different efforts that will be combined and coordinated as the situation warrants to seek funding for things they were going to do anyway, with the goal of long-term economic transformation for the community. As Harris Pastides said, the test of success will be whether, after the construction workers are gone, we still have jobs here that put us on the cutting edge of the nation's move toward a greener economy and greater energy independence.

Toward that end -- and with Congress not yet decided toward the final shape of the stimulus -- Mayor Bob has set up a War Room in his office at City Hall. Pres. Pastides says he'll be doing the same at USC. The watchwords, says Coble, will be nimbleness, persistence and resources as opportunities are seen to match local projects with stimulus funding streams.

The group was very optimistic that the sorts of things they're working on here in the Midlands are a good match, and at a good point in the pipeline, for matching up with priorities they're seeing in the stimulus, and also with longer-term priorities of the Obama administration.

That's what I recall off the top of my head; I haven't gone back through the recording I made. (Sorry, no video; I took out my camera last night for a family birthday party, and forgot to put it back in my briefcase.) I expect some of the news folks who were there will have something in the paper that will flesh this out a little. I just wanted to go ahead and get my contact report filed...

(And no, in case you're wondering, neither the governor nor any representative of his was there. As Coble said, our governor is seen as an obstacle in this process; whether that obstacle will be surmountable or not remains to be seen, but the folks in the room seemed determined to try...)

'Buy American'

Obama has sided with Republicans and biz types in opposing congressional Democrats' "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus bill, much to the chagrin of the Big Labor lobby.

I thought I had made up my mind on this when I read a story in the WSJ that put Obama on one side, and Harry Reid on the other (my instinct in such a choice is to go with Obama, every time). Besides, I'm a free-trader, and one of my beefs with Obama during the election is that he wasn't.

But when I mentioned that this morning, one of my colleagues strongly disagreed. She said (helping you guess who it was) that if taxpayers were putting up the dough, of course it should stay in this country.

Me, I don't want to take the global economy back to a bunch of little protectionist islands. If the economy starts to recover anywhere, I want the growth to flow freely. But I saw my colleague's argument.

Then, former U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins (below) came to see us this afternoon, and he talked about how our good friends in the Great White North -- our biggest trading partners, the people we get the largest amount of oil from, etc. -- are absolutely freaking out about the "Buy American" thing. And with good reason, from their perspective. And they are our good friends and allies. So I value their opinion.

Looking around, I see that Paul "Nobel Prize in Economics" Krugman is no help -- on his blog, he argues it both ways (although I admit, I understand his anti-protectionist argument better than his wonkish one to the contrary).

What do you think?

One Democrat fed up with tax deadbeats

So you think all this stuff about Geithner and Daschle and their taxes is a bunch of Republican spin? Well, maybe it is, but I got an earful about it from one ardent Democrat this morning.

Samuel Tenenbaum, key Energy Party think-tanker, dropped by my breakfast table this morning. This is always an occasion for me to find out what is at the top of his mind -- which can range from his 55-mph speed limit plan to endowed chairs (which were also his idea) to, well, almost anything. Samuel reads a lot, and cares a lot, about a heap of stuff.

But today he was fed up with Obama over the tax deadbeats he's been choosing for his administration. He was going on about how this was not the Change he had believed in when he supported Obama. At first, I thought he was mad because the new POTUS wasn't cutting these people loose once the news broke about their failure to pay. But no, he blamed Obama for not having sufficiently vetted these guys to begin with.

Paying your taxes is basic and fundamental, he maintained, and there's just no excuse for nominating people who haven't done that.

Anyway, Samuel convinced me of one thing for sure -- that I should at the least put up a post to give y'all a chance to sound off on the subject. Yeah, I'm a little late, since Daschle withdrew his name today, but hey, I was out on medical leave yesterday (nothing serious; routine testing).

Joe Riley's crime initiative

One day last week I was pleased to run into Charleston Mayor Joe Riley (one of the finest examples of Joe-ness holding office today) on an elevator downtown. He was in town to lobby the Legislature for his crime bill -- of which I had to admit I had not heard (how's that for an awkward avoidance of a dangling preposition?). He was joined by Attorney General Henry McMaster and SLED Chief Reggie Lloyd in pushing the legislation.

By the time we had arrived at his floor, he had given me a brief outline of it. Fortunately, he also had a staffer send me this release about it , since I wasn't taking notes on the elevator. The group was pushing for legislation that would, among other things:

• Allow law enforcers to search people on probation and parole without warrants.
• Deny bail for repeat offenders.
• Forbid convicted felons to possess handguns or assault weapons.
• Increase the penalty for Assault and Battery With Intent to Kill. (On the elevator, the mayor had said something about S.C. lacking an effective attempted murder statute.)
• Create a separate offense for possessing a firearm while selling, manufacturing, or possessing drugs for distribution.

The mayor seems to be pushing separately (going by the wording on the release), more resources for courts, Solicitor's offices, Probation and Parole, DJJ, and Corrections. Specifically, on that last point, increase funding for drug rehab in prisons.

Here's a story about it in the Charleston paper.

Most of that stuff makes common sense to me, although as with a lot of things that make sense, I wonder where the money will come from with the state cutting back on everything. Anyway, since I ran into the mayor and he shared these proposals with me, I'm sharing them with you.

Employment Security Commission and Sanford

You may have noticed that yesterday I mentioned having met with the S.C. Employment Security Commission. Well, I wrote a column for Sunday based in part upon that, and I thought I'd go ahead and post the video that goes with the column.

We talked about plenty of other stuff, but I had terrible luck with catching the good bits on video. Seems like every time they said something interesting, I'd have switched my camera to still photos, and when I went back to video, it was Dullsville. This clip was about the only entire, coherent bit of any interest that I captured in its entirety.

In the wide-ranging discussion, there were high points and low points, for instance:

• High point -- The ESC members, after having been defiant as recently as the day before, promised they'd get the information the governor had been asking for to him -- or 90-95 percent of it -- by Feb. 9. They said the rest of it is just stuff they don't have because they don't collect that kind of data. Anyway, John O'Connor of our newsroom, who sat in on our meeting, wrote about that in today's paper.
• Low point -- We asked why in the world they have their own TV studio, and the answer wasn't satisfactory -- to me, anyway. But then, how could it be? No, it doesn't add up to a lot of money, and it's a bit of a red herring compared to the actual reason why the unemployment benefits trust fund is out of money: Several years ago the Legislature cut the tax that businesses pay into the fund, and we've been paying our more than we take in since at least 2001. That said, the TV studio does sound ridiculous.

But the subject in the video was the thing that grabbed my attention, because it spoke to the problem of the gross failure to communicate between the Commission and the governor. After all this silly back and forth the last couple of months -- and it IS silly (of COURSE the Commission needs the money the governor is trying to hold back, as anyone who has seen what's happening in our state can attest, and of COURSE the Commission was being absurdly petulant by trying to hold info back from the gov), not to mention just plain wrong -- I had to ask them if they ever sat down to talk to the governor face to face.

I asked that for a couple of reasons. First, people who are sitting down talking to each other don't act the way the governor and the commissioner had been acting. Once you're dealing with someone as an actual person, rather than some faceless opponent out there, you show them more respect than this. Second, I asked because our governor is Mark Sanford. Most governors are interested enough in actually governing that they try to maintain contact and communications with the various parts of government on a regular basis. Not this guy -- for him, it's about the press release, the statement, the op-ed piece, the piglets in the lobby; NOT about sitting down with people and reasoning with them.

The commissioners went on at some length about how the governor had never sat down for a meeting with them in his six years in office, and how he had never accepted an invitation to speak to their big annual luncheon -- unlike every previous governor they had known. (And that latter bit REALLY rang true, as one thing I've noticed about this governor is that he has little affinity for the rubber-chicken circuit -- not that I do myself, but most governors hit all those events they can.)

Anyway, what is NOT on the video is what Joel Sawyer in the governor's office said to Cindi Scoppe the next morning (and I'm copying and pasting some notes Cindi sent me):

We actually found where the gov did indeed meet with them in 2003, and had a letter from ted halley thanking him for meeting with them. he’s also had conversations with all of the commissioners over time.
we looked for more recent requests for meetings, and the only one was I guess a week before they ran out of money. at that point it was just on such short notice that the gov couldn’t attend, but scott english and joe taylor did...

Here's a copy of the 2003 Ted Halley letter Joel mentioned.

So I called Commissioner McKinley Washington to ask about that, and he said the 2003 "meeting" was one of the incidents they talked about on the video: The commissioners were meeting with Eddie Gunn of the governor's staff, and the governor briefly stuck his head in the door and said hi, and that was about it. It was NOT a meeting with the governor, he said.

Mr. Washington also mentions on the video, and repeated to me Friday, that there was a later incident in which the commissioners were meeting with Chief of Staff Henry White, and the governor -- who had apparently changed clothes for a press conference or something, "cracked the door" open long enough to "reach in and grab his denim" so he could change back. And that was it.

So I asked how come ESC executive director Halley sent that note to the governor thanking him for his time back in 2003? "That was just a courtesy statement, but he did not meet with us," said Mr. Washington. "You try to be nice."

Finally, the commissioners said that they tried to meet with the governor at the beginning of the current crisis, but were told he was unavailable, so they met with Scott English (of the governor's staff) and Commerce Secretary Joe Taylor instead (the Sawyer notes above allude to that).

Anyway, more on the subject in my Sunday column...