Thursday’s editorial calls for a bit
more opposition in local elections, for the benefit of everybody:
Surprise! Republican Mark Lazarus is
your new Horry County Council Chairman.
Well, not much of a surprise. In
fact, this was about as far from a surprise as is possible. If surprise were a
city, we’d still be right here and those actually in Surprise would be halfway
across the world, somewhere in Eastern Europe.
If surprise were measured on a scale of 1 to 100, we’re around a -6. That’s how
far from surprised we were with the outcome of Tuesday’s election.
How unexciting and predictable was
this race? Only a paltry 1.23 percent of Horry County
voters bothered to turn out on Tuesday. The unfortunate poll workers at the
Gurley precinct in Loris waited all day and nobody showed up to vote. Hopefully
they had a good book.
Is there any purpose left to Lindsey
Graham’s continued and now-obstructive alarm calls about Benghazi other than energizing his base and
raising his profile ahead of next year’s election? We don’t think so:
Dead horse, meet S.C. Sen. Lindsey
Graham.
Clearly, a number of things went
horribly wrong at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi,
Libya, on Sept.
11, 2012. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were
killed in a pair of terrorist attacks on U.S. compounds.
Friday’s editorial isn’t so
much a stance on an issue as just an observation about how the faces of our
leadership seem to stay the same from year to year:
It’s been quite a year of change for Horry County
leadership. Or has it? What’s striking is how little things might have actually
changed.
To quickly sum up the most notable
moves among our top brass:
Thursday’s editorial applauds the
governor’s intention to appoint more than a pretty face and a seat filler in
DeMint’s place:
Sen. Jim DeMint’s surprise
resignation last week instantly put plenty of pressure on Gov. Nikki Haley, who
will appoint his immediate successor until an election is held in 2014.
Haley has responded well thus far,
particularly with her announcement that she would not be appointing a
placeholder, somebody to simply fill the seat for two years until the election.
Sunday’s editorial offers the
editorial board’s thoughts on the presidential election:
Few things about this presidential
election have lent themselves to unambiguous, clear decisions, despite what the
campaigns and their diehard supporters might like us to believe. Neither of the
major candidates is a miraculous savior or unmitigated fiend. Both stand before
U.S.
voters with significant high and low points, and nobody has managed to leap to
the fore as the obviously better choice.
For proof, you need look no further
than the latest polling data. We give our fellow Americans credit for being
fairly smart and invested in the future of this nation, and as such, if the
decision on picking our next leader were an easy one, we wouldn’t be coming
down to the wire with two candidates that are still neck and neck.
Thursday’s editorial suggests we all
take a deep breath and tone down the fever-pitched rhetoric that’s been flying
ahead of November’s election.
How about a quick game? We looked
back in our archives and the archives of other newspapers. The quotes by voters
below were printed before the presidential elections of 1876, 1896, 1916, 1932,
1980, 1996, 2000 and 2008. Can you match them to the year they came from?
(Answers at the bottom of the editorial)
1. “This is the most important
election of the last 50 years or 50 years to come.”
2. “This is the most important
election in at least half a century.”
So the governor’s rollout of an
ethics reform platform was somewhat bungled. That doesn’t mean her ideas are bad,
as today’s editorial explains:
Yesterday we used this space to
castigate Gov. Nikki Haley for her childish snubbing of a reporter attempting
to do her job during the governor’s statewide tour promoting ethics reform. But
it’s important to note that while we may not agree with all of the governor’s
methods, the specific proposals she offered are worthy of support, and it would
be a shame to let these good ideas be overshadowed by poor choices made in the
process of promoting them.
The Sun News continues its recommendations today in the races on Tuesday’s primary ballot.
Liston Barfield, over Fonzie Lewis
With more than two decades representing the residents of District 58, out near Aynor, Liston Barfield brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table that his opponent simply can’t match. Too many times in our interview with challenger Fonzie Lewis, he said that he wasn’t sure how he’d vote on an issue because he hadn’t studied it and wasn’t familiar with it yet. In this age, when legislative sessions are broadcast live and information is as close as a mouse click, that excuse doesn’t cut it.
The political atom bomb dropped by the state Supreme Court this week has ousted 17 would-be candidates from Horry County ballots and cleared the way for a slate of incumbents to be re-elected. The decision on filing violations has caused chaos throughout the state, led to name calling in the state Senate and will be the subject of House and Senate resolutions on Tuesday to help put those candidates back on the ballot.
Party leaders are scrambling to determine what the fallout will mean in dozens of elections, and many candidates now must decide whether to drop out or run as petition candidates, which could complicate the ballot for voters in November.
Thursday’s editorial takes a swing at the campaign filing dustup that could keep hundreds of would-be politicians off the ballot in June:
The 1962 New York Mets were an abysmal baseball team. The Keystone Kops-like players blundered their way through a season of flubs, gaffes, errors and above all, a lack of coordination. If not for the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, the team would hold the record for the most losses in a single season (120).
Perhaps the most famous catastrophe from that catastrophic season occurred mid-season in the outfield. After suffering through multiple collisions with Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacon, center fielder Richie Ashburn sat down with Chacon and worked out a plan. Because Chacon didn’t speak English, Ashburn would instead yell “Yo la tengo!” (“I’ve got it!”) to let Chacon know when he should back off. Easy enough, right?
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