THE SUMTER ITEM N.G. Osteen 1843-1936 The Watchman and Southron
FRIDAY, APRIL 18, 2014 H.G. Osteen 1870-1955 Founder, The Item
H.D. Osteen 1904-1987 The Item
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Margaret W. Osteen 1908-1996 The Item Hubert D. Osteen Jr. Chairman & Editor-in-Chief Graham Osteen Co-President Kyle Osteen Co-President Jack Osteen Editor and Publisher Larry Miller CEO Braden Bunch Senior News Editor
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Sunday alcohol sales will add more sorrow to our community The approval of alcohol beverages on Sunday is simply about the money. The Bible says, “For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Many know this part of that verse, but few seem to take heed to the rest of the verse: “which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” A vote for Sunday sales is a vote to add more sorrows to our community. Proverbs 23:29-35 should serve as a warning, “Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things. Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast. They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.” According to the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol misuse is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, and it accounts for 89,000 deaths annually (over 240 per day). About.com reports “Ninety-two percent of the domestic abuse assailants reported use of alcohol or other drugs on the day of the assault.” Why would someone with knowledge of these facts support more alcohol use? The love of money. Matthew 6:24 says, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon (money or materialism).” RON DAVIS Pastor Sumter Bible Church Administrator, Sumter Christian School
South Carolina statistics prove that ‘war on women’ is no joke I have long thought that more women should get involved in all things political and otherwise. Wednesday’s letters may be a start in that all letters are from women. I totally agree with the letter from Colleen Yates and Beverly Gagne concerning violence toward women. I hear horror stories from women almost every day. I have said before and I repeat, if a woman lives in a house where a weapon is present, make it disappear. Some people, including some women, think that “the war on women “ is a joke, but South Carolina proves otherwise. I hope that all women vote in the next election with this in mind. Really, everyone should do the same. In all situations, all women should keep personal safety in mind and get out of bad situations. LEE INGLE Sumter
NOTABLE & QUOTABLE In “The New ABCs of Business,” Stanley Bing offers new definitions to common business terms at www. wsj.com. Here are a few: Administrative assistant is the servant and master of senior management. Though all the trappings of everyday work are there — the computer, the phone bank, the piles of incoming and outgoing paper — the real function of the job is to grant or block access. More than any other player in the infrastructure, AAs are both high and low. They feel this status acutely. Treat them as the power brokers they are, and they will sometimes respond in kind. Treat them as functionaries, and you will slowly be expunged from the face of the planet. Cost cutters do a lot of things under various euphemistic names, but what they really do is fire people. Cubicle is a tiny space imposed on powerless workers to take away their individuality and crush them into the role of anonymous cog in a machine run by somebody, somewhere who has access to a door behind which they can take a nap or eat their lunch in peace. Drinks are one of the most venerated institutions in business life, the glue that bonds gray multinational robots to slick sharks in Hawaiian shirts. Eccentricity is any expression of excessive personality. Keep it wrapped pretty tight unless you’re the big boss. Eccentricity is tolerated in organizations that value creativity. Insanity is frowned upon almost everywhere. In “Cold War 2.0, the Videogame,” Daniel Henninger writes, “Obama’s uninterest in Ukraine forgets history.” Read it online at www.wsj.com: Now the battle for Ukraine is ending without much more than a yawn in Washington, London, Paris and most ironic of all, the Berlin that the Cold War divided in two. In 1947, President Harry Truman, a Democrat, began a year-long allied airlift to supply Soviet-occupied and isolated Berlin. The Berlin airlift broke the blockade. Nobody running the West would do that now. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Iron Curtain countries chose to be democracies and turned to the West. Now, 25 years later, Vladimir Putin has demolished de-
mocracy in Russia and is proposing Potemkin-village votes in Ukraine held under the barrel of a gun. Earlier this month, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said, “If there is a thing such as NATO’s border that needs diligence it would be Poland’s eastern border.” He knows that pressure from his neighbor in the east will come after Ukraine. What remains of NATO now is a good question. Mr. Putin gave his answer in Ukraine. The post Cold-War West stands un-led by the American president. Vladimir Putin famously believes the U.S. and Western Europe in 2014 are filled with self-indulgent populations who can barely lift their eyes from an iPhone screen to see a European nation swallowed. Yes, it does look like Cold War 2.0. The videogame. The New York Times reports on the death of F. Reid Buckley of Camden, a novelist and columnist who died Monday at 83. F. Reid Buckley, a novelist, columnist, founder of a school of public speaking and, in family lore, the most literary of Aloise and William F. Buckley Sr.’s 10 children, including former Senator James L. Buckley and the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr., died on Monday in hospice care in Columbia, S.C. He was 83. The cause was cancer, his son William Huntting Buckley said. Mr. Buckley had lived in Camden, S.C., since the early 1970s. He was often mistaken for his brother William, the founder of the conservative magazine National Review. The brothers not only looked alike. They also shared political views; a somewhat aristocratic, stiff-jawed accent; and a love of polysyllabic words. Partly to set himself apart from his siblings, Reid Buckley lived overseas for much of his early life. He wrote articles and columns for National Review and other conservative publications. The Item’s “Notable & Quotable” column is compiled by Graham Osteen. Send comments or ideas to graham@theitem.com.
Full disclosure ruined by the zealots W ASHINGTON — The debate over campaign contributions is neverending for a simple reason: Both sides of the argument have merit. On one hand, of course money is speech. For most citizens, contributing to politicians or causes is the most effective way to augment and amplify speech with which they agree. The most disdainful dismissers of this argument are editorialists and incumbent politicians who — surprise! — already enjoy access to vast audiences and don’t particularly like their monopoly being invaded by the unwashed masses or the self-made plutocrat. On the other hand, of course money is corrupting. The nation’s jails are well stocked with mayors, legislators, judges and the occasional governor who have exchanged favors for cash. However, there are lesser — and legal — forms of influencepeddling short of the outright quid pro quo. Campaign contributions are carefully calibrated to approach that line without crossing it. But money distorts. There is no
denying the unfairness of big contributors buying access unavailable to the everyday citizen. Hence the endless law-writing to restrict political contributions, invariably followed by multiple fixes to correct the inevitable loopholes. The result is a baffling mass of legisCharles Krauthammer lation administered by one cadre of experts and dodged by another. For a long time, a simple finesse offered a rather elegant solution: no limits on giving — but with full disclosure. Open the floodgates, and let the monies, big and small, check and balance each other. And let transparency be the safeguard against corruption. As long as you know who is giving what to whom, you can look for, find and, if necessary, prosecute corrupt connections between donor and receiver. This used to be my position. No longer. I had not foreseen how donor lists would be used
not to ferret out corruption but to pursue and persecute citizens with contrary views. Which corrupts the very idea of full disclosure. It is now an invitation to the creation of enemies lists. Containing, for example, Brendan Eich, forced to resign as Mozilla CEO when it was disclosed that six years earlier he’d given $1,000 to support a referendum banning gay marriage. He was hardly the first. Activists compiled blacklists of donors to Proposition 8 and went after them. Indeed, shortly after the referendum passed, both the artistic director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento and the president of the Los Angeles Film Festival were hounded out of office. Referendums produce the purest example of transparency misused because corrupt favoritism is not an issue. There’s no one to corrupt. Supporting a referendum is a pure expression of one’s beliefs. Full disclosure in that context becomes a cudgel, an invitation to harassment. Sometimes the state itself does the harassing. The IRS scandal left many members of political groups exposed to
abuse, such as the unlawful release of confidential data. In another case, the Obama campaign website in 2012 published the names of eight big Romney donors, alleging them to have “less than reputable records.” A glow-in-thedark target having been painted on his back, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot (reported The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel) suddenly found himself subject to multiple audits, including two by the IRS. In his lone dissent to the disclosure requirement in Citizens United, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that American citizens should not be subject to “to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in core political speech, the primary object of First Amendment protection.” (Internal quote marks omitted.) In fact, wariness of full disclosure goes back to 1958 when the Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP did not have to release its membership list to the state, understanding that such disclosure would surely subject its mem-
bers to persecution. “This court has recognized the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s associations ... particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.” A different era, a different set of dissidents. But the naming of names, the listing of lists, goes on. The enforcers are at it again, this time armed with sortable Internet donor lists. The ultimate victim here is full disclosure itself. If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression. Our collective loss. Coupling unlimited donations and full disclosure was a reasonable way to reconcile the irreconcilables of campaign finance. Like so much else in our politics, however, it has been ruined by zealots. What a pity. Charles Krauthammer’s email address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com. © 2014, The Washington Post Writers Group