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Editorial
So It’s Granny’s Fault?

With its trysting governor and “you lie!” congressman, South Carolina has suffered more than its share of politician-induced embarrassment. Now Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has topped them, cruelly equating government help for the poor to “feeding stray animals.”

Mr. Bauer, who is running for governor, told a conservative political crowd about his grandmother’s warning against feeding strays. “You know why? Because they breed!” boomed the popular Republican. “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.”

He eschewed what he described as political correctness and sternly called for the state to “curtail that type of behavior” by taking away assistance if the parents of children receiving subsidized lunches don’t show up for school conferences. “You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I’ll show you the worst test scores, folks,” said Mr. Bauer.

In casting himself as the candidate of heartless civics, if not nitwit eugenics, Mr. Bauer at least stirred an encouraging furor. Outraged residents point out that South Carolina has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, with unemployment rising to 12.6 percent in a Great Recession the poor hardly caused. Fifty-eight percent of the state’s students receive subsidized lunches.

Now watch Mr. Bauer backpedal. He insists he was a victim of the media, not his own overreach in the politics of class resentment. But his words are out there. With a lieutenant governor like Mr. Bauer in the wings, it’s become clearer why the South Carolina Legislature declined to impeach Gov. Mark Sanford for going AWOL at taxpayers’ expense in pursuit of his mistress. Voters should make Mr. Bauer eat his words.

Since you made it this far, I'm throwing in - for free - one columnist's fairly light-hearted reaction to the State of the Union.

Also from the New York Times...

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Op-Ed Columnist
United We Rant

By GAIL COLLINS

My fellow Americans, the state of the union is angry. Also strong. Presidents usually say the state of the union is strong. But this year you would have to go with strongly angry.

In his speech on Wednesday night, President Obama actually dropped that traditional state-of-the-union-is rhetoric completely in honor of the new irascibility. “We all hated the bank bailout,” he said in one of his first big applause lines.

Yes, the one good thing you can say about our highest elected officials is that they are ticked off at so many people that sooner or later they’ve got to climb up on some common ground. The House hates the Senate. The liberal Democrats hate the moderate Democrats. The normal conservative Republicans hate the hyper Tea Party-types. The Tea Party-ists are having so many internal fights that there’s a definite danger of broken crockery.

And, of course, everybody hates the bankers, except the Republicans who sat on their hands when the president called for taxing them.

Obama does not really do angry. Peeved, yes. He looked pretty peeved when he was being interviewed by Diane Sawyer of ABC News the other night. If he can’t manage mellow with Diane Sawyer, what’s he going to do on Friday when he has scheduled a meeting with the House Republicans? Have you ever seen all the House Republicans in one place? It’s like a herd of rabid otters.

Looking out at the motley crew seated before him for the big speech, the president seemed at times to be pretending that he had never seen these people before in his life. “Washington has been telling us to wait for decades,” he complained at one point, as if he was a visitor from the heartland with a petition that he wanted to deliver if only he could get an appointment with someone on the appropriations committee.

Obama Year One began with euphoria. At the start of Year Two, crankiness rules. The House Democrats jumped up in triumph whenever the president dissed the Senate for holding things up. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid — has Harry Reid had a single sunny moment in the last year? — got caught yawning by the cameras. There were occasionally scattered Republican jeers, although it probably counts as an improvement that nobody shouted a full insult at the president this time around. When Justice Samuel Alito took exception to the president’s assault on the Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance decision, he shook his head and mouthed “not true.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, who hated that decision more than anyone, was absent for the speech. There are rumors that he’s planning to retire. And can you imagine how Congress is going to behave if Obama has to try to name a successor? There isn’t a single jurist in the United States who doesn’t hold some opinion that 41 members of the Senate would find outrageous. Maybe they can locate a nice 50-year-old lawyer who was plunged into a coma on the day he or she passed the bar, and emerged only last week.

On Wednesday, the things that seemed to elicit the most bipartisan reactions were: hope (standing ovation), cutting the capital gains tax for small businesses (ditto) and Obama’s plan for deficit control, which caused a cold breeze to blow from both the Republican and Democratic camps.

Democrats hate the proposed freeze on discretionary spending because they like discretionary spending. Republicans say it’s too little too late, and, besides, it’s their issue. Hands off.

While the reaction certainly suggested this idea is a goner, it’s likely that Obama’s most conservative proposals are still the ones with the best odds of survival. The last few presidents had their best — and often only — luck getting big domestic bills passed when they were the other party’s programs. Bill Clinton got welfare reform. George W. Bush got No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug plan. Both of those were basically Democratic ideas, although Bush added his own personal twist of not paying for them.

But Obama insisted he was going to hang in there and fight the good fight for health care reform and energy and — good for him — getting rid of the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell rule. Plus, he urged Congress to reform itself and regulate lobbyists and campaign donations. (Silence ruled.)

He also threw in a call for earmark reform. Although those porky earmarks are certainly an undesirable thing, ever since John McCain’s presidential campaign I have regarded calls for their reform as a small sign of desperation. On Wednesday, earmark reform got more time than immigration reform.

Obama has been saying that he’d rather be “a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” Being a good one-term president probably sounds great to him right now. Run the Obama Foundation and never have to deal with Joe Lieberman again.