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Thursday, April 30, 2009
Survey Spotlight: The Pig Flu
Posted by Greg Hambrick on Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 3:24 PM
One offering from our lighthearted news survey and two of the four possible answers:
The swine flu landed in news cycles over the weekend. We don't understand why all of these scary diseases have to involve things that play a role in everyday life (bird flu, mad cow, swine flu, etc.). With that in mind, what’s the next virus America is sure to catch?
A. The Rosey Palm Influenza
B. The Geico Cash Cramps
Go take the full survey, including questions about fighting for summer jobs, local fire coverage, and Lisa Rinna's Playboy shoot.
Photo by flickr user itinerantlondoner
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
DeMint Assaults Big Business … After Taking Their Money
Posted by Greg Hambrick on Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 10:42 AM
Sen. Jim DeMint does not like big business. The picture he paints in today's Washington Times would make you think that the feeling is mutual, but no sir. Nearly $275,000 in first quarter campaign donations from big business political action committees suggest that DeMint has more friends than he's willing to admit.
The column in the Times is in response to the national Chamber of Commerce, which gave DeMint and others low marks for opposing the federal stimulus. DeMint calls the chamber members the "corporate elite" and says that he's not their stooge.
The road back to Republican success is not to reinforce our weakened coalition of corporate interests, but to drop it altogether. Republicans shouldn't be the party of business any more than they should be the party of labor - we're supposed to be the party of freedom.
That's a costly proposition, particularly for DeMint. Tons of big businesses have donated to his reelection campaign, particularly in this first quarter of the year. There were $1,000 contributions from political action committees at AFLAC, Allstate, Bayer, Coke, Chevron, G.E., and McDonald's. Larger contributions included PAC money from Sprint Nextel ($1,500), Campbell Soup ($2,000), R.J. Reynolds ($2,500), and Cisco Systems ($3,000).
DeMint notes in the column that "the Republican Party has been portrayed by liberals (and the media) as a political country club." That same "media" donated some $6,000 to DeMint's reelection campaign in the first quarter, including money from PACs at CBS, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Motion Picture Association, and Time Warner.
And then there's this part of the column:
We should get out of the business of picking winners and losers in the marketplace. We should not care who wins in fair fights between Microsoft and Apple, between CitiGroup and community banks, or between Home Depot and mom-and-pop hardware stores. All we should demand is a fair fight.
Of course DeMint doesn't want to get in the fight between CitiGroup and community banks — he got $1,000 from the Bank of America PAC. And, as for the fight between Home Depot and mom-and-pop hardware stores, well one of those two brawlers put $2,000 in DeMint's campaign coffers and it wasn't mom and pop.
DeMint has always been an interesting study in corporate contribution contradictions. Last year, anti-earmark Demint got more than $200,000 from companies that benefited from Defense Department earmarks in the latest authorization bill. By comparison, fellow anti-earmarker John McCain got $18,000 from the same companies.
While DeMint made more from corporate PACs in the first quarter than liberals like Barbara Boxer, Evan Bayh, and Patrick Leahy, we don't want to make it sound like DeMint gets more money from corporate interests than anyone in the Senate — there are much deeper pockets on both sides of the aisle.
But this urging from DeMint that the GOP shuck the chains of big business rings a little hollow when you look at his balance sheet.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Schools Move Forward With Seismic Upgrades
Posted by Greg Hambrick on Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 4:00 PM
School District staff are expected to move forward this spring with massive rehabilitation plans for the county’s downtown schools most vulnerable to an earthquake. The school board has asked staff to bring forward a proposal next month to address the structural concerns and could move quickly on recommendations.
Charleston sits over a fault line that’s caused a few minor shuffles and shakes over the past few months. The region is also home to the massive, fatal Earthquake of 1886, which looms as a reminder more than a century later that hurricane-force winds aren’t the only natural disaster that pose a threat to the region. Five of the district’s campuses on the peninsula were never designed to withstand the ground shaking under them and would hold little hope of making it through.
The district has been constrained by budget concerns, but discretionary money in the building fund, increased awareness on the school board, and the potential for federal stimulus aid have reignited plans for precautionary improvements.
“The window has opened for us to proceed with speed,” says Bill Lewis, the district’s building director.
The Big Fix 
A strong advocate for earthquake-safe improvements, Lewis has seen the traumatic impacts of earthquakes in California, including lives lost and the looming terror of aftershocks.
“This is not academic for me,” he says.
The campuses downtown, specifically the Rivers building, Buist Academy, Memminger Elementary, Charleston Progressive, and James Simmons Elementary, are highly vulnerable because of the soil conditions and the building structures. The peninsula is on terrible soil, Lewis says, and the schools themselves are not up to today’s seismic standards.
“They have very little sheer strength, and that’s what causes the issue,” he says.
Rivers has already received approval for intense rehabilitation to address seismic concerns. Solutions for the other campuses were included in a district-wide restructuring plan that the board approved earlier this year. It would require relocating students to empty buildings temporarily while the old buildings are extensively modified or demolished and rebuilt.
The district has up to $7 million on hand that it can spend on seismic analysis and designs, Lewis says.
Call For Baby Steps
Board member Arthur Ravenel recalls vivid stories of the 1886 earthquake handed down from his grandmother, who was 22 at the time.
“She said it sounded like all the freight trains in the world came together in a big wreck,” he says.
Ravenel supports incremental seismic upgrades established by the Federal Emergency Management Administration. A 2003 manual notes phased-in improvements could be made along with regularly scheduled maintenance.
“Such an approach, if carefully planned, engineered, and implemented, will ultimately achieve the full damage reduction benefits of a more costly and disruptive single-stage rehabilitation,” the manual reads.
This could work for other district buildings with fewer problems, but Lewis says, "The magnitude of challenges with the first 5 schools may make incremental seismic renovation impractical."
He says staff will be in a better position to advise the board after the engineering analysis.
The district needs to be aggressive in dealing with the seismic concerns, says board Vice Chairman Gregg Meyers, noting that the idea of downtown schools vulnerable to an earthquake “creeps me out.”
Also Read: New study: Charleston overreacting to earthquake threat (May '08)
Monday, April 27, 2009
New Survey: Fire Coverage, Swine Flu, Summer Jobs, Lisa Rinna
Posted by Greg Hambrick on Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:20 PM
Our latest, lighthearted weekly survey is up, with new questions on the swine flu, competing with kids for summer jobs, the long-distance local fire coverage, and Lisa Rinna's latest Playboy photo shoot.
Here's one question and two of the four possible answers:
Though a horrible tragedy we wouldn’t dare seek to minimize, we were a bit surprised at the intense media coverage in Charleston of the horrible, costly suburban fire TWO HOURS away. Now that we have Charleston's biggest tragedy for 2009, what's going to be the lighthearted No. 2?
A. An As Seen On TV product that melds the Snuggee with the Shamwow — created in Wilmington, N.C.
D. Recreated “Grey’s Anatomy” surgery goes horribly awry at community hospital — in Jacksonville, Fla.
Go take the survey.
Round-Up: Secular Humanists, Barrett '10, Sanford Stimulus, Stavrinakis Taxes
Posted by Greg Hambrick on Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:45 AM
Charleston and South Carolina From Off:
• Local secular humanists (whom had a high profile billboard on I-26 a few months ago, lead off a New York Times piece on the movement.
• Gubernatorial candidate Gresham Barrett, regardless of the ribbing he took on Tax Day, won the support of a collection of Greenville Republicans in a recent GOP straw poll.
• Gov. Mark Sanford gets a spotlight in Newsweek over his stimulus stalling. Like the rest of us, they see 2012 aspirations.
• State Rep. Leon Stavrinakis is one of the legislators called out from the state Senate floor last week for errors in his tax returns. He says it wasn't his fault and he's not a tax cheat.
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