State & Local Politics

The passing of the gun law by the Supreme Court seems strangely anachronistic in 2010. Guns were red-state talismans when the free republic first divided — redivided — into red and blue. Back around the mid-1970s. There were two teams then, and those of us who worked in D.C. fondly recall their anthems displayed on bumper stickers. The one would say: “I’d rather be sailing” and for those in the higher church: “I’d rather be reading Jane Austin.” The other team’s, the gun team’s, would read: “I’d rather be killing commies.” Or the hardcore’s simple yet elegant: “Russia sucks.”

The recession and housing slump have ended booming growth for many cities in the Sun Belt, USA Today reported last week, while some older urban centers and places with diversified economies are enjoying healthy gains, current Census estimates show.

This should be considered in light of Paul Krugman’s essay today in The New York Times, titled "The Third Depression." It is a better name than the “Great Recession,” which doesn’t make any sense, and something better to call it than the “greatest depression since the Great Depression.”

Like Paul Potts singing “Nessun dorma” on “Britain’s Got Talent,” transcendent moments come like a bolt of lightning in the middle of the night. Another came last week when Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.) said to BP America President Lamar McKay during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing: “Well, in the Asian culture we do things differently. During the samurai days, we’d just give you the knife and ask you to commit hara-kiri.”

A great part of America now understands that President Obama’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, writes The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. But his standing shoulder to shoulder with Mexican President Felipe Calderón recently in opposition to a sitting American governor seems unprecedented. Now Burlington, Vt., is the latest city to join Obama’s global coalition against Arizona. But Arizona has options.

The time has come to consider a federal takeover of South Carolina's election apparatus. Well, it would be if we could do that.

Can we? Probably not. The Constitution gets snitty about that kind of thing. But SHOULD we? Definitely.

Citizens there are disenfranchised by the unrelentingly dirty politics that seem to be as much a part of the state's fabric as textile plants. The big difference is the factories have shut down. The rotten campaign tactics certainly have not.

The Bay Area’s KCBS reports that a comment Jerry Brown made is causing a stir in the race for governor. Referring to Meg Whitman's willingness to spend up to $150 million of her own money to win the election, Brown told their reporter, "It's like Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels invented this kind of propaganda. He took control of the whole world. She wants to be president. That's her ambition, the first woman president. That's what this is all about."

Born and raised in New Jersey, I’m hardened to the slights about my native state — what exit do you live at? and put-downs like that. But the home of two terrorists — alleged — in North Bergen, my own hometown, is too much. As if “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore” and “Real Housewives” weren’t enough to seal the distorted reputation, to eclipse the high-class Princeton image — now we have terrorists in North Bergen? As they’d say at the Institute For Advanced Learning, gimme a break.

Partisan politics can be painfully predictable. But the Vedic sages say the world begins again and all will be new when Vishnu is seen riding the white horse. Like that classic photograph by Annie Leibovitz, of Arnold Schwarzenegger on his white steed in earlier days when he was the most stunning man in the world. Arnold as Governator is in part a phenomenon; a psychological being. He came to us out of our suffering. We felt a need for a Big Man in a painful transition to war and conjured him and made him governor of California almost overnight by abandoning the regular process. He brought creativity and new potentials to our most important state, but as it is with all beginnings, the old and entrenched were not ready for the new. Primary victories by Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman suggest they are getting there. But the Governator may have saved the state by pitching and promoting Proposition 14. It will be devastating to the hacks, the entrenched interests, the ideologists, the pundits and the winged monkeys. Maybe the witch is really dead.

Who could have ever imagined this happening in the old puckered-up Dixie, where even the mildest swear word would bring pursed lips and warnings about Judgment Day?

And who in a thousand years — actually, make that 145 years, since the end of the Civil War — who could have imagined that South Carolina, which still holds fond memories of a plantation life, would be on the verge of making the GOP nominee a woman who isn't lily-white?

Rep. Nikki Haley is of Indian descent; in fact, an opponent called her a "raghead.” It used to be, nobody would have even noticed such racist comments. Now they have caused an uproar, and mainly oozed all over the idiot who used the word. Call that progress.

“We already got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion.” — South Carolina Republican Sen. Jake Knotts, Lexington

Since integration, it may have been a little hard to tell the “lint heads” from the “rug heads” and the “octoroons.” Language in the tradition of Old White Men, useful again when a woman like Nikki Haley, who in South Carolina’s legal standing until the 1950s would be considered black, attempts to run for governor there. Meanwhile, liberal New York, which before the rise of the leisure class took 258,000 Southern lives in beating the South out of the old ways, today looks away. As one influential celebrity journalist at The New York Times — a popular avatar of women’s issues — wrote yesterday, it is all mostly what you would expect from those “nullifiers” in South Carolina. This should give advanced anecdotal evidence that Northern attitudes of race and sex fairness are merely strategies of political and regional dominance and airs of cultural piety.