The libertarian congressman articulately defends the idea of legalizing heroin and gets applause in South Carolina.

Free North Carolina reports on an interesting (and unseemly) symbolic aspect of the NAACP’s MLK Day festivities in South Carolina.

Monday, January 17, 2011, 2:17 PM

The annual MLK observance at the state house in Columbia SC had an interesting twist this year. The event is held on the north side steps of the statehouse. Prominent at that location is a large bronze statue of George Washington. This year, the NAACP constructed a “box” to conceal the Father of His Country from view so that participants would not be offended by his presence.

————————————–

The South Carolina NAACP found itself then in an embarassing position when its nasty little gesture attracted media attention, and responded by lying about what it had done and why.

Rock Hill Herald:

The S.C. NAACP said Tuesday it was not trying to hide a Statehouse statue of George Washington at its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally Monday.

The group has draped the founding father’s statue at previous rallies. It did so again this year, and questions quickly arose about whether Washington was being slighted.

Not so, says the NAACP.

A three-sided structure that covered the front and sides of the statue was intended to display a rally graphic and serve as a photo-and-television backdrop for the event’s speakers, said S.C. NAACP executive director Dwight James. However, the graphic was not finished before the rally and could not be put in place. …

King Day organizers have built similar structures around the statue dating back at least to 2007, according to The State newspaper’s archives.

The Provisional Forces of the Confederate States, under the command of Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard, opened fire on Fort Sumter at 4:30 A.M. April 12, 1861.

Before the attack on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln had been in the uncomfortable position of seeking support in order to make war on fellow Americans. Opening fire on Fort Sumter was a disastrously bad idea. Offensive action initiated by the Confederacy placed the federal government in the position of the innocent victim wrongfully attacked and provided a compelling justification for President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops to defend the government.

It would have been far more difficult to obtain support to initiate a war of conquest of fraternal states. The majority of Northerners deplored secession, but initially favored allowing “the erring sisters to go in peace.”

Ironically, the South Carolina firebrands who insisted on asserting that state’s sovereignty over the forts in Charleston harbor inadvertently supplied the moral leverage to their own great adversary that allowed him to begin the process of defeating them.

President Lincoln’s call for troops resulted in the secessions of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, all of which chose to leave the Union rather than supply troops to be used to invade and occupy their fellow states.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford articulates the Republican position on the democrat party Porkulus:

A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt,” Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

“We’re moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy,” Sanford also said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is “what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power.”

“That is quite different than a market-based economy where some rise and some fall but there’s a consequence to making a stupid decision,” Sanford said after pointing to the powers granted to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to help deal with the current economic crisis.

“A lot of people who’ve made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large,” he added.

Instead of bailing out failing companies, Sanford told CNN’s John King that the government should let the economy work through the current challenges without intervention.

“We’re going to go through a process of deleveraging,” Sanford said. “And it will be painful. The question is: Do we apply a bunch of different band aids that lengthen and prolong this pain or do we take the band aid off? I believe very strongly: let’s get this thing over with, let’s not drag it on.”

William Ranney, Battle of Cowpens, 1845, oil, South Carolina State House

Colonel William Washington’s servant, “a waiter, too small to wield a sword,” saved his master’s life by wounding a British officer about to cut him down.

On this day in history, my neighbor, Brigadier-General Daniel Morgan with 800 men gave Colonel Banstre Tarleton’s Legion, 1100 men, what Morgan described in a post-battle letter as “a devil of a licking” at Cowpens, South Carolina, January 17, 1781.

They have a statue of Morgan over in Winchester, whose base bears the motto: “Fought everywhere, defeated nowhere.”

Legendary White Crane-style Kung Fu Master Pei Mei, it is said, killed twelve fully-armed Shaolin monks using only the blade from his broken pencil sharpener.

South Carolina Low Country Island Packet has a story indicating that the Zero Common Sense policies associated with America’s bed-wetting, nincompoop haute bourgeoisie have spread even to within a stone’s throw of the US Marine Corps’s recruit training depot at Parris Island.

A 10-year-old Hilton Head Island boy has been suspended from school for having something most students carry in their supply boxes: a pencil sharpener.

The problem was his sharpener had broken, but he decided to use it anyway.

A teacher at Hilton Head Island International Baccalaureate Elementary School noticed the boy had what appeared to be a small razor blade during class on Tuesday, according to a Beaufort County sheriff’s report.

It was obvious that the blade was the metal insert commonly found in a child’s small, plastic pencil sharpener, the deputy noted.

The boy — a fourth-grader described as a well-behaved and good student — cried during the meeting with his mom, the deputy and the school’s assistant principal.

He had no criminal intent in having the blade at school, the sheriff’s report stated, but was suspended for at least two days and could face further disciplinary action.

District spokesman Randy Wall said school administrators are stuck in the precarious position between the district’s zero tolerance policy against having weapons at school and common sense.

“We’re always going to do something to make sure the child understands the seriousness of having something that could potentially harm another student, but we’re going to be reasonable,” he said.

Pious blithering letter to parents from school dated 9/11.

Police report (!). These idiots actually called the police over this!

Principal McAden “clarified” today, defending the school’s insanity and asserting that the child was “not suspended for having a pencil sharpener. He had an exposed blade which created a dangerous setting for the student and other children. The student was suspended for one day for inappropriate behavior in the classroom.”

Dangerous? Maybe a legendary martial artist could do something effective with a weapon of the sort (especially in the Hong Kong cinema), but an elementary school kid is going to do what with a marginally-edged one inch piece of metal?

They weren’t recorded, registered, taxed, or regulated. Naturally, urban-dwelling environmentalists hated the river shacks of rural South Carolina, and they recently succeeded in persuading the Palmetto State’s greasy pols to impose a permit system incorporating a sunset law completely eliminating these private refuges of individual freedom from South Carolina’s waters in five years. The state’s governor expressed regret at the death of a rural tradition, but he wouldn’t stick his neck out by vetoing the new law.

These days, Huck Finn would not be permitted to raft down the river to get away from Aunt Polly and her civilized regime of rules. Old ladies of both sexes have long since taken care to extend the jurisdiction of the Leviathan state right down every river’s main channel, and up every tributary and every backwater, lest some free American escape from civilization and its discontents, or evade its taxes and its rules.

New York Times:

For who knows how long, people have plopped these river shacks into watery coves and curves along the South Carolina coast. They permanently anchor their shacks miles from the nearest landing and use them to fish, hunt or just get off the grid for a while. Some contraptions are so modest that to call them shacks is too kind, while others are so well appointed that they all but cry out for granite countertops and potpourri.

It all sounds so innocent, so idyllic — so American, in a Huck Finn kind of way. That is, until you consider that the river shack owners are essentially laying claim to public property without paying license fees, taxes or, in some cases, even respect. A few people use the river as their personal toilet; others abandon their shacks, leaving the structures to rot amid the natural splendor.

But environmentalists who see these shacks as an affront to the concept of resource management recently succeeded in lobbying for their extinction. This spring the state passed a law requiring owners to seek permits for the structures — recent surveys counted at least 170 on several rivers and Lake Marion — with the stipulation that in five years all shacks must be removed from the water. …

The issue even posed a dilemma for Gov. Mark Sanford, who ultimately decided to allow the river shack bill to pass into law without his signature. While he supports land preservation, he explained in a letter to legislators, he wonders about increasing gentrification, and “the idea that someone could tie a bunch of 55-gallon drums together and stake out a house on the waterway is representative of what I would consider the magic of ‘old time South Carolina.’ ”

But Patrick Moore, a lawyer working for the Coastal Conservation League, which led the legislative fight against river shacks, sees no dilemma. “The idea that these shacks are some sort of entitlement of our natural heritage is, frankly, an insult to that very heritage,” he says.

slideshow

An overly enthusiatic pair of 21-year-old lovers evidently fell 50 feet (15.24 meters) to their deaths from the roof of an office building in Columbia, South Carolina.

KNBC

slideshow

1:20 video

Failure of school authorities to impose discipline on unruly minority students due to political correctness has led to a legal award of damages to a white female teacher subjected to verbal obscenities in Charleston.

Real Clear Politics:

In a new twist in American race relations, a federal court has ruled that a white teacher in a predominantly African-American school was subjected to a racially hostile workplace.

The case concerned Elizabeth Kandrac, who was routinely verbally abused by black students at Brentwood Middle School in North Charleston. Their slurs make shock jock Don Imus look like a church deacon.

Nevertheless, despite frequent complaints, school officials did nothing to intervene on Kandrac’s behalf, arguing that the racially charged profanity was simply part of the students’ culture. If Kandrac couldn’t handle cursing, school officials told her, she was in the wrong school.

Kandrac finally filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and subsequently brought a lawsuit against the Charleston County School District, the school’s principal and an associate superintendent. Last fall, jurors found that the school was a racially hostile environment to teach in and that the school district retaliated against Kandrac for complaining about it.

The defendants sought a new trial, but U.S. District Judge David C. Norton recently affirmed the verdict. However, he did not support the jury’s findings of $307,500 in damages for lost income and emotional distress.

Although Kandrac clearly suffered — she was suspended from her job shortly after a story about her EEOC complaint appeared in the local newspaper, and her contract was not renewed — her case didn’t meet evidentiary requirements for damages. The judge said a new trial would have to determine damages, but the school district and Kandrac settled for $200,000.

Complete article

The Canadian would-be buyer of a three-bedroom, two-bath house in Jasper County, South Carolina discovered the developers had neglected to inform her of one little detail.

(The local reporter has a few problems with the English language, but one gathers that:)

In 1998, the then-owner of the 1700-acre Delta Plantation, Henry E. Ingram Jr. (a man of decidedly Southern irredentist opinions) when he sold his acreage to Bluffton Home Builders, inserted a few small covenants in the deed.

Mr. Ingram’s covenants stipulated that the property, or subdivisions thereof, could not be sold or leased to:

1. Yankees.

2. Persons bearing the last name Sherman (vide: General William Tecumseh Sherman).

3. Persons bearing last names whose letters could possibly be rearranged to spell Sherman.

Ms. Legare, the would-be buyer (who, being Canadian, would not be personally impacted by Mr. Ingram’s covenants, but who obviously might like to be able resell her house some fine day) and Bluffton Home Builders are now working with Mr. Ingram’s son, Mr. Ashley Ingram, a local attorney (who probably has some personal interest in the matter) to get those covenants removed. But Henry Ingram, now a resident of Corpus Christi, Texas disagrees. The older Mr. Ingram wants his covenants defended and enforced, and is planning to move to Costa Rica, presumably to get further away from those damned Yankees.

———————–

FOLLOW-UP

Alfred L. Brophy tells us he covered the Ingram covenants back in 1998. (Did blogs exist in 1998?)

Mr. Brophy also provides addiional detail: Yankees are defined as people who’ve lived north of the Mason-Dixon line for more than a year or were born north of the Mason-Dixon line. But Ingram also included an exemption: if a Yankee takes a Southern loyalty oath and whistles Dixie as a sign of loyalty, then he is permitted to buy the property.

Paper by Messrs. Brophy & Ghosh on the Unconstitutionality of the Ingram Covenants offers excellent historical background and legal detail; but, alas! the authors do take an unsound view of the desirability of enforcing such covenants.

An alert neighbor snapped a number of photos of a six foot alligator clawing at the front door of Robert & Roslyn Loretta in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He missed the doorbell, but came awfully close.

The Lorettas believed the reptilian visitor was attracted by the smell of barbecuing chicken.

video