By Sunny B. Fry
When my husband was young in California, he rode a motocross bicycle, jumping the hills and valleys around Grenada Hills. One day, jumping a ditch, he saw a glint in the dirt and stopped to pick it up. A gold coin -- which set a precedent for each of his sons, all of whom found treasures in ditches as they grew up (tools, a DVD, a video game, a craft-store bird I got as a Christmas present from my youngest). He thought it was cool and stuck it in his top drawer, and it inspired him to start actually collecting coins, in some haphazard fashion -- wheat pennies and such. But that gold coin remained his Treasure.
Continue reading "Brave Things" »
Nobody is looking at the current state of education and saying to themselves, “This is great. Let’s keep everything just like it is.” For that reason, our Sunday editorial celebrates the innovation going on in our area:
It is perhaps the most important duty of our state to give South Carolina’s children the preparation they need to be successful contributors to our society. Not only for their sake, but for ours.
Our children are our future work force, our future business owners, our future legislators, and even our future governors. The quality we give them now is the quality they will return back to South Carolina, the quality that will define our state long after we’re gone.
– Gov. Nikki Haley in her State of the State address
Continue reading "New School" »
By Cindi Scoppe of The State
Efforts to help voters figure out how their legislators are voting are not, as some Senate Democrats claim, a waste of time. Nor are they a subterfuge, as some tea partiers insist.
The Senate’s new internal rule, like the one adopted by the House last year, requires recorded votes on all but congratulatory resolutions at each step in the process: on second reading, on third reading if any changes are made, when the House or Senate considers changes by the other body, on conference committee reports.
Continue reading "Time for the Scoppe Solution?" »
Friday’s editorials mark two recent state-level actions, both overdue, that could affect us here on the Grand Strand:
We’ve now mentioned the state’s precipitous budget situation so many times that the drumbeat is at risk of becoming hypnotic and eyes begin to glaze over. But even if we cover our eyes, the train continues to rumble down the track toward us.
In the midst of this crisis came a small victory last week, the state Supreme Court’s ruling that hotel booking websites owe sales tax on the service fees they collect. The decision so far only applies to state taxes, but the ruling will act as a strong precedent in similar cases being pursued by Horry County and Myrtle Beach, cases that could result in thousands or millions of dollars coming back to local coffers at a much-needed time.
Continue reading "Every Bit Helps" »
The videos taken last year by animal activists at bear baying events in South Carolina shocked many in the state, who found it hard to believe such an odious practice was still allowed.
The competitions, defended by practitioners as the best way to train dogs to hunt bears, involve securing a bear – often defanged and declawed – and loosing dogs to test their courage and ability to get the bear to bay, or stand up. Dogs are supposed to be pulled away before any contact occurs with the terrified bear, but the videos taken by the Humane Society of the United States showed that bites often occurred. At one event, nearly 300 dogs menaced one bear for four hours.
Continue reading "Time to End Bear Baying" »
Thursday’s editorial offers our take on the voter ID bill that just passed the S.C. House and now heads to the Senate.
This week, the Republicans who have a commanding majority of the S.C. House of Representatives returned to one of their top legislative priorities for the year: voter identification.
Though it ought not be, this has become one of the most explicitly partisan debates in our state. Republicans (led by Myrtle Beach’s own Rep. Alan Clemmons) frame the need for voter identification as a way to prevent fraud at the ballot box; Democrats vigorously oppose it as a form of voter suppression.
Continue reading "Buying Votes" »
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