A cohort at the S.C. Policy Council recently detailed one the most egregious examples of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do that I’ve seen in a long, long while.

Rick Brundrett highlighted the fact that while South Carolina state law required state agencies to have filed their proposed budgets for the upcoming fiscal year by last Nov. 1, the state’s General Assembly apparently doesn’t feel itself beholden to that statute.

In fact, both the S.C. House and S.C. Senate routinely unveil their proposed budgets months after other state agencies have done so, according to Brundrett’s story in The Nerve.

Jim Merrill, R-Berkeley, a state lawmaker on the House’s budget-writing committee, even acknowledged that the normal budget-hearing process traditionally hasn’t been applied to House or Senate chamber budgets.

What that means is legislative leaders can add in large budget increases for their respective chambers much later, typically at the very end of the legislative session, when the media and public are focused on the budget as a whole, rather than individual aspects.

Brundrett pointed out that the House quietly slipped in a $2.3 million increase for itself for this fiscal year on the last day for regular legislative business last June.

And the year before the Senate gave itself a hike of nearly $5 million, a boost which wasn’t first publicly proposed until more than three months after the General Assembly was in session.

One thing to be said for lawmakers – they’re relatively honest in their duplicity.

Merrill said his subcommittee doesn’t plan on holding any formal hearings on the chambers’ proposed budgets, as is typically done with other state agencies, Brundrett reported.

“It’s probably a little less formal than some of the other agencies,” Merrill said. “Generally, they (the Senate) will give us their budget, and we will give them ours. We generally don’t tamper with each other’s budgets.”

Wouldn’t every state agency like to have this kind of carte blanche? You submit your proposed budget to someone, they submit theirs to you, you both wink and everything’s approved. Nice arrangement.

This lack of accountability is particularly reprehensible given that, despite the state’s budget woes of the past few years, the House and Senate have carried over millions in unspent tax dollars annually in recent years, authorized through little-known state budget provisos passed by lawmakers.

The House, for example, carried over $5.8 million into this fiscal year; the Senate carried over $4 million, Office of State Budget records show.

Those amounts represent more than 30 percent of this fiscal year’s general fund appropriations of approximately $18.7 million for the House and $12.4 million for the Senate.

When those amounts are combined with general and “supplemental” appropriations, the House will have nearly $24.6 million to spend this year, according to Office of State Budget records. The Senate’s available funds total about $16.6 million.

“To put how much tax dollars flow through House and Senate chambers into some perspective, the collective $31 million in general appropriations for the Legislature this fiscal year is larger than the total ratified budgets of at least 50 state agencies or divisions, OSB records show,” Brundrett reported.

Finally, the House and Senate looks like it’s a pretty good gig if you can land a job in either chamber. As of August, 89 staffers in both chambers earned at least $50,000 annually, with the top salaries reaching more than $140,000, according to a state salary database.

They’re not only gathering to scrap away decades of rust and soot in an effort to restore the a handful of the nation’s old steam engines to their former glory, but often pay for the privilege, adopting the locomotives, some of which date back to the 1890s.

“This steam train symbolizes liberty,” Janusz Boratynski, an immunology professor in his 60s, told Agence France-Presse. “When I was little, it transported me from my city of Wroclaw, ruined by the war and teeming with rats, to a holiday spot on the other side of the country.”

Boratynski jumped at the chance to adopt one of the engines in particular: the Tki3, a brooding hulk of red-trimmed black metal built in the early 1900s (see above photo).

In return for his adoption fee, about $500, which covers the cost of a new coat of paint, Boratynski will have his name etched into a plaque on the antique locomotive, once famed for having set a speed record of 110 kilometers per hour, or nearly 70 miles per hour, according to the wire service.

The Jaworzyna Slaska Museum is a former train depot located about 40 miles outside Wroclaw in western Poland. When the depot closed in the 1990s, many of its aging steam locomotives stayed there and risked being stripped for their scrap metal.

The hulking engines were saved thanks to a group of train enthusiasts, former railway workers and local authorities, as well as a private backer, according to Agence France-Presse.

The oldest of the 120 steam engines dates to the 19^th century, and train aficionados are especially fond of the locomotives that were built in Poland between the two world wars.

It takes volunteers about six months of painstaking work to restore the locomotives, and with five new “adoptions” this year, volunteers will have their hands full.

Not all memories associated with steam engines in Poland are good ones, though.

Some still associate Poland’s train tracks with the transport of Jews to the country’s Nazi concentration camps when it was occupied by Germany during World War II, according to the wire service.

“There is no way to know for sure how the museum’s trains were used during wartime, but most trains carrying Jews arrived from other countries,” it added.

The private museum drew 30,000 visitors last year, many of them train enthusiasts from across Europe, said Krzysztof Gryzgot, a museum employee and retired railroad worker who spent most of his career driving steam engines.

One of the museum’s centerpieces is an 80-ton, Polish-made PT31 locomotive. Of 110 such engines produced in 1931, just two survived World War II.

“Even today, she’s still the pride of Polish railways,” Gryzgot says of the one surviving PT31 engine parked at museum.

It would take about $450,000 for a full restoration of the engine. Gryzgot holds out hope that the engine may one day be restored to running order, despite the cost.

“We’ve already found a company that can do it. I’d also like to see it retrace its old route, from Wroclaw to Budapest, all the way to Istanbul,” he enthused.

(Above: A steam engine at the Jaworzyna Slaska Museum. Photo by Agence France-Presse.)

Conventional wisdom holds that the subject of race in the South is an inflexible, immutable issue, separate and distinct as regards blacks and whites. Just as importantly, it always has been, according to popular notion.

A couple of cursory examples:

• Southern blacks today are overwhelmingly seen as being aligned with the Democratic Party, while a solid majority of Southern whites are Republicans; and
• If you visit a so-called “black church” or a “white church” you’ll rarely find many people of the opposite race on hand.

But as selectively segregated as some institutions may appear to be today, there’s no doubt that race relations have thawed considerably in the region over the past 40 years. Obviously, Jim Crow didn’t do a whole lot to bring people of different backgrounds together prior to that, nor was it designed to.

However, one occasionally stumbles across a glimpse of a past that shows that not everything was as neatly delineated between the two races as today’s stereotypical view of yesteryear might have us believe.

If one looks hard enough, there are examples that show the South, like any part of the United States, was and is an infinitely more complex region than today’s television pundits and political opportunists would have us believe.

Case in point: Earlier this month while rambling through the South Carolina Upstate, I came across New Enoree Baptist Church, located in rural Newberry County, about six miles northeast of the town of Newberry.

The church itself was founded in 1868, apparently by ex-slaves who’d attended Enoree Baptist Church, one mile to the south, but who left after the War Between the States.

New Enoree Baptist’s graveyard begins along the south side of the church and runs up the gradually sloping hillside to a tree line some 300 feet away, with tombstones dating back to Reconstruction.

There are hundreds of graves scattered across the incline, but two caught my attention.

The first belonged to Jesse Burnside (see above photo). His stone didn’t list a date of birth, but did state that he died on Sept. 7, 1918, at the age of 78. The interesting part was what etched underneath the above information: “He was a servant of the Confederate soldiers in the war.”

There is considerable controversy today as to what role blacks played in the Confederate military during the Civil War. There are those who wildly inflate the numbers and even insist that some blacks fought alongside their white Confederate counterparts during the 1861-65 conflict.

On the other hand, there are those who insist that very few blacks played any role at all in the service of the Confederacy beyond what was entailed in being a slave.

Incomplete records have made it difficult to determine exactly what role blacks played in the service of the South, though it is indisputable that they were involved to some degree in many different areas.

Among other things, records shows that in 1923 the state of South Carolina paid pensions to 328 blacks for their service in the War Between the States, even if that role was not always clearly defined in the pension documents.

What’s interesting in the case of Burnside is that he, or his family, would choose to have his service in the war memorialized on his gravestone. Remember, by 1918 blacks had been pretty much completely disenfranchised by the state’s whites for nearly a full generation, and were second-class citizens in every sense of the term.

Of course, the possibility exists that someone other than a Burnside family member or Burnside himself paid for the stone, perhaps someone whom he had served during the war.

Tombstone of Wade Hampton Stephens (1877-1921), in New Enoree Baptist Church graveyard, Newberry County, SC.

The other tombstone that caught my attention was one belonging to Wade Hampton Stephens (right).

Stephens was born in August 1877, just about nine months after the pivotal election that brought Gen. Wade Hampton into the South Carolina governor’s office and helped bring Reconstruction in the Palmetto State to a close.

Today, many would be surprised to find that a black child was named after a famed Confederate cavalry commander and Democratic governor who helped “redeem” the state from the clutches of Federal occupation.

However, in the lead-up to the 1876 election, Hampton and his famed Red Shirts had more than a few blacks among their ranks, as many people of both races jumped at the chance to rid the state of what they considered a corrupt Republican administration, even if they often resorted to extra-legal measures, as did their Republican opponents.

Hampton, who became known as the “Savior of South Carolina,” was a beloved figured to many in the state and it’s not hard to see why his name would be a popular choice, particularly around the time of the 1876 election.

It’s feasible that Wade Hampton Stephens’ father himself was a Red Shirt, possibly one of the men of whom Edmund Drago wrote about in his 1999 book Hurrah for Hampton! Black Red Shirts in South Carolina During Reconstruction.

Wade Hampton Stephens outlived Burnside by nearly three years, dying on June 25, 1921. He was 43.

More than a dozen letters penned by French Enlightenment figure Voltaire nearly 300 years ago have been uncovered recently and are now being studied by a British professor.

Oxford academic Nicholas Cronk said the discovery reveals how much the famed Frenchman – whose real name was François-Marie Arouet – profited financially and intellectually from his stay in England in the 1720s.

The missives include a signed acceptance from the 18th century iconoclast for a £200 grant from the Royal Family, according to the BBC.

While in England, the writer and philosopher abandoned the French spelling of his first name instead styling himself “Francis,” which Cronk says is hardly surprising, given that Voltaire was “hugely opportunistic.”

All told, there are 14 newly discovered letters which are being studied by the Oxford-based Voltaire Foundation.

The foundation is carrying out a mammoth work of scholarship in which it will spend, all told, a half century to produce a definitive collected work of all Voltaire’s writing. It is expected to be completed by 2018.

Cronk, the foundation’s director, says the new letters were found in US libraries.

They shed light on the short period spent by Voltaire in England early in his literary career, and demonstrated the rapidity with which he acquired links with the powerful and wealthy, and became influenced by the work of English philosophers and scientists, according to the BBC.

Voltaire took these ideas back to continental Europe, with his books being read in many countries.

Voltaire wound up in England in unusual fashion. While in Paris in 1725 he responded to an insult from a young French nobleman in kind and, as a result, was imprisoned in the Bastille without trial.

Fearing an indefinite prison sentence, Voltaire suggested that he be exiled to England as an alternative punishment, which the French authorities accepted.

During Voltaire’s nearly three years in England he was intrigued by the idea of a constitutional monarchy, in contrast to the French absolute monarchy, and by the country’s greater support of the freedoms of speech and religion.

He was also influenced by several neoclassical writers of the age, and developed an interest in earlier English literature, especially the works of Shakespeare, still relatively unknown in continental Europe.

He would go to become famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, freedom of expression, free trade and separation of church and state.

“Voltaire came to England as a relatively unknown poet with only a recommendation from the British ambassador to Paris, so to make the aristocratic connections that he did shows him to be a brilliant social climber,” Cronk said.

The letters are the only known example of his using an English form of his first name, Francis, instead of Francois in French, according to the BBC.

His use of the Anglicized form of his name followed the receipt of a financial handout from the British court, which boosted his fledgling career.

Voltaire, ever the opportunist, made the canny move of dedicating a poem to the future Queen Caroline – and Cronk said she is likely to have been the instigator of the £200 payment.

“The letter’s significance lies in the fact that this grant probably came to Voltaire at the request of Queen Caroline, a protector of the arts, which reinforces just how closely Voltaire had integrated himself into the English aristocracy in such a short time,” he said.

The writer had already changed his surname. “Voltaire” was an invention, drawn from a Latin anagram of his family surname.

This latest find is unlikely to be the last word on finding more of Voltaire’s letters.

There are more than 20,000 letters from Voltaire known to scholars, but Cronk believes that there could still be thousands that remain unidentified.

(HT: A Blog About History)

Reason No. 375 why newspapers are struggling: The stories just aren’t as captivating as they once were.

Take the following account from the June 18, 1943, Morning Bulletin of Rockhampton, Australia, recounted by the blog buried words and bushwa:

CAIRNS (Australia) – Defying all attempts at removal, a small fish which entered Samuel Attard’s throat, head first, while he was swimming in the Russell River this afternoon, was the cause of a most unusual tragedy.

Attard, who was a maltose cane cutter, aged 34, had been swimming in the river with a mate, who on missing him, searched and found him at the foot of a 30 ft. bank in distress. At first they were unable to find the cause of the trouble, but when the tail of a fish was seen in the back of his throat the ambulance at Babinda, 13 miles away, was sent for. Their efforts to remove the fish failed and artificial respiration was unavailing. So completely had the fish blocked his throat that it was impossible to pass a tube. Later an attempt to provide air by way of an opening in the throat was also tried, but it was unsuccessful.. When a doctor arrived he pronounced life extinct.

Buried words and bushwa didn’t leave it at that, however. The blog followed up the newspaper story by reading about the coroner’s inquest.

It turns out that Attard’s demise came because he employed a method of fishing known as dynamiting, or blast fishing, which consists of tossing explosives into a body of water, then scooping up stunned and dead fish when they float to the surface.

Attard climbed a tree and tossed the explosives into a swimming hole before jumping into the water to retrieve the fish, buried words and bushwa writes.

Apparently his usual practice was to put a fish in his mouth once his hands were full.

“Attard had no top teeth so it was quite easy for the slippery little critter to slide into his throat,” the blog explains.

Buried words and bushwa closes with the following: “It sounds as though bystanders tried a few things to keep Attard breathing, but I am not sure how effective a riverbank tracheotomy would be unless it is performed by an actual doctor… ”

Eighteen months after being discovered on Fiji’s Kadavu Island, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has confirmed the existence of a new flowering plant.

The plant belongs to the scarce Medinilla group and is one of nearly 200 known species, which includes several varieties found only in Fiji, a South Pacific island nation.

“Although the plant was first found in August of 2010, it has taken this long to go through the process and verify it,” Ewa Ewa Magiera, a spokeswoman for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told Agence France-Presse.

The plant was found during a biodiversity assessment of Fiji’s Nakasaleka district carried out as part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Water and Nature Initiative, Magiera said.

There are some 193 known species of Medinilla in Madagascar, Africa, South Asia and the Pacific Islands, according to the conservation body.

Of the 11 that can only be found in Fiji, they include the Tagimoucia flower, the country’s floral emblem.

The Medinilla was named for Don Jose de Medinilla y Pifieda, the Spanish governor of the Marianas from 1812-1822.

Medinillas are evergreen shrubs or lianas. The leaves are opposite or whorled, or alternate in some species. The flowers are white or pink, produced in large panicles.

(Above: Picture of new species of flower belonging to the Medinilla plant group, found in August 2010 in Fiji. Photo by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.)

For a Friday puzzler consider the following two countries and then try to determine which is more prosperous:

Belize and the Cayman Islands are both small former English-speaking British colonies located in the Caribbean with similar climates and roughly the same mixed racial heritage.

Belize has a population about six times greater than that of the Caymans, and has a much larger and more varied land area, with many more natural resources, including gas and oil, and some rich agricultural land that the Caymans lacks.

Both have nice beaches, but Belize boasts the second-largest barrier reef in the world and also has the tourist appeal of Mayan ruins.

So, which is the richer country? If you said Belize, which has been fully independent for more than 30 years, you’d be wrong.

The Caymans may not be fully independent but is self-governing at the local level, with its own currency, laws and regulations. It also has about six times the real per capita income of Belize, according to Richard W. Rahn, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

So how have the Caymans succeeded where Belize has not?

“Perhaps most important is that Cayman had and maintained a competent and honest judicial system, which gave foreign investors’ confidence that their property would be protected,” wrote Rahn, who is also chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.

The Caymans have a very low crime rate, which cannot be said for many parts of Belize.

Many judges in Belize are poorly trained, incompetent and, in some cases, corrupt, all of which makes investors think twice before considering pouring money into Belize.

“It is obvious why Cayman is rich and Belize is poor, and it comes down to one word: governance,” Rahn writes. “If Belize would clean up its courts, fully protect property rights and adopt the best economic practices of its competitors, it could quickly become rich.

“For instance, it takes an average of 44 days to get all of the required permits to open a new business. In some countries, such as Estonia, Singapore and even the Commonwealth of Virginia in the US, the required paperwork to open a business can be done online. Thus, days have been reduced to just a few hours.”

Rahn rightly points out that there is no inherent reason for any country to remain poor over the long haul, citing Singapore, Mauritius, Korea, Chile, Estonia and the Caymans as diverse examples of nations that have become relatively rich over the past few decades.

“Those countries that are still relatively poor are poor because they have not put in place the necessary institutions, political structures and policies,” he said.

Rahn sounded a somber note for the most developed countries of the world when he added that the United States and a number of other wealthy nations are becoming less free and thus, not surprisingly, are growing more slowly.

“Belize could become rich and the US and Cayman could become poor,” he said. “It all depends on whether the political entities elect wise and courageous leaders.”

(HT: Cafe Hayek)

You can’t swing a dead cat in Augusta, Ga., sports circles without hitting a reminder that the great Ty Cobb began his pro career in the Garden City.

The Georgia Peach made his pro debut as an 18-year old with the Augusta Tourists of the South Atlantic League on April 26, 1904, in a game against the Columbia (SC) Skyscrapers.

What’s conveniently forgotten is that Cobb’s first go-round with the Tourists lasted just two days, as the future Major League Hall of Famer was quickly cut.

He then signed with the Anniston (Ala.) Steelers for $50 a game and spent three months in the Tennessee-Alabama League before being recalled to Augusta in July by new owner and manager Harry Wingard.

Cobb’s first season with Augusta was less than auspicious, as he finished with a .237 batting average in 35 games.

The next year was a different story: by mid-summer Cobb was leading the Sally League in hitting and the Tourists sold him to the Detroit Tigers for $750.

In gratitude for his performance, Cobb was given a $50 gold watch as a gift in his final appearance with the Tourists.

He made his debut for the Tigers on Aug. 30, 1905, against the New York Highlanders — known today as the Yankees. He played center field and batted fifth.

Playing against the Highlanders in Detroit, he came up in the bottom half of the first inning against Jack Chesbro, whose 41-12 record the previous season is still a modern record. There was a runner at third and two outs, according to a 2005 ESPN.com story that looked back at Cobb’s first game a century later.

“Jack Chesbro was one of the best pitchers in the game at that time,” said Dan Holmes, who wrote a 2004 book titled Cobb, Baseball’s Greatest Hitter. “He was known for his spitball. Cobb took the first pitch. Then he hit next pitch into the left-center gap.”

Cobb’s run-scoring double was the first of 4,191 hits he would ring up over his 24-year career.

Cobb went on to play in the final 41 games of the 1905 Major League season, batting .240. It would be the only time in his career he hit less than .320. His career average of .367 remains the best ever, several points better than runner-up Rogers Hornsby’s career .358 average.

While Cobb was done with the minors after the Tigers purchased him, he wasn’t done with Augusta. He lived in the Georgia town for nearly 30 years and the Tigers held spring training in the town several times during his big league career, according to the Augusta Chronicle.

(Above: Ty Cobb, middle row, center, with members of the 1906 Augusta Tourists at the Augusta Fairgrounds, the year after he’d joined the Detroit Tigers.)

Nearly 70 years after Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviet Red Army in the waning days of World War II, the circumstances surrounding his ultimate fate still remain unclear but evidence increasingly points to a Soviet cover-up.

A newly found Swedish document shows how the KGB intervened as late as the early1990s to stop an investigation into the circumstances behind Wallenberg’s disappearance, two US-based researchers said earlier this week.

Wallenberg is credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis between July and December 1944. While serving as Sweden’s special envoy in Budapest, he issued protective passports to Jews and sheltered them in buildings designated as Swedish territory.

Wallenberg disappeared after being detained in Budapest by Soviet officials on Jan. 17, 1945.

The Russians have said he was executed on July 17, 1947, but unverified witness accounts and newly uncovered evidence suggest he may have lived beyond that date, according to the Associated Press.

Wallenberg researchers were hoping that key pieces of the puzzle regarding the diplomat’s fate would emerge when an international commission was granted access to Soviet prison records as communist rule was crumbling.

“But a document from the Swedish Foreign Ministry supports claims that the KGB – the former Soviet secret police and intelligence agency – acted to obstruct that effort, said German researcher Susanne Berger who consulted a Swedish-Russian working group that conducted a 10-year investigation until 2001,” according to the wire service.

The Sept. 16, 1991, memorandum from the Swedish Embassy in Moscow cites the former head of the Soviet “Special Archive,” Anatoly Prokopenko, as telling Swedish diplomats that the KGB instructed him to stop a search for documents by researchers working for the first International Wallenberg Commission.

Prokopenko also said the KGB wanted copies of all documents that the researchers had already viewed, according to the memo, which was made available to the Associated Press by Berger. Its authenticity was confirmed by the Foreign Ministry.

The document was significant because it illustrates how since the end of the Cold War researchers have struggled to get access to crucial documents from Soviet archives, Berger said.

“The action in 1991 has, unfortunately, proved symptomatic, rather than an exception to the rule,” Berger told the Associated Press. “Twenty years later, we are still facing this fundamental problem.”

In an interview with the wire service on Monday, Prokopenko said the researchers had been euphoric when they found an archive document on Wallenberg’s transfer from one Soviet prison to another, sharing their discovery with other members of the commission investigating Wallenberg’s fate.

“That was a mistake, the archivist implied, saying the KGB officers on the panel reacted quickly, warning authorities, and Prokopenko was immediately ordered to bar the researchers’ access to the files,” according to the AP.

Prokopenko said he complied because he was working to open the archives to the public, taking advantage of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal reforms, and realized that open disobedience would lead to his immediate ouster.

“I had to make a sacrifice for the sake of uncovering numerous other secrets of the archive,” Prokopenko said.

He added that following a brief period of openness before and after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, authorities have grown increasingly reluctant to allow public access to the archives.

“The situation has grown worse, and even the files that were opened to the public in 1991-1992 were classified again later,” he said.

The Swedish government declassified parts of the memo after Prokopenko mentioned the KGB interference in an 1997 article in a Russian newspaper, but it didn’t become publicly known until Berger obtained it this month.

Wallenberg, who would have turned 100 this year, was arrested the day after the Red Army seized Budapest, along with his Hungarian driver Vilmos Langfelder. The Russians have never explained why they detained the pair.

Russian scholar Vadim Birstein, one of the researchers working for the first Wallenberg commission, told the Associated Press they had just found some previously unknown documents when the archive was closed to them in the spring of 1991.

“We were stopped exactly after I found three documents: two with the name Wallenberg on it and one with the name Langfelder – and (the authorities) said they weren’t hiding anything!”

Birstein and Berger, who are based in the US, said that though they and other researchers have since been granted access to study some Wallenberg files, important archive material has still not been made available.

“At the key junctures, the doors have remained closed,” Berger said, noting that even the first piece of material that was handed over by the Russians in 1991, and was meant to illustrate a new openness on their side, turned out to be censored.

It concerned interrogation material suggesting that Wallenberg had been questioned on July 23, 1947, which would have been six days after his alleged death.

Russia has failed to produce a reliable death certificate or hand over Wallenberg’s remains – circumstances which have prompted researchers to continue efforts to try to tap Russian authorities for more information.

As Sweden’s envoy in Budapest from July 1944, Wallenberg not only saved 20,000 Jews by giving them Swedish travel documents or moving them to safe houses, he also dissuaded German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of the city’s ghetto.

(Above: Budapest plaque honoring Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. The plaque is affixed to the wall of the building where Wallenberg was abducted by Soviet authorities in 1945.)

Like cacophonous cicadas that emerge every four years, presidential hopefuls – this time solely of the Republican variety – are buzzing about South Carolina once again, bawling out their belief in family, faith and freedom.

In fact, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, one might gather from the barrage of television and radio ads being thrown up across the Palmetto State that family, faith and freedom are the essential foundations on which the next president will have to build to ensure the future well-being of our nation.

Alas, it sounds nice, but in reality it’s nothing more than simplistic rhetoric that the media types eat up because it makes for nice short sound clips.

In reality, this type of pabulum won’t go very far in terms of improving the lot of the average American, or, for that matter, do much of anything for most Americans, except those that get elected, along with a few others that latch onto the coattails of the newly elected.

There’s one topic you can be assured will not be discussed by any of the candidates leading up to the SC Republican Primary this Saturday: the inexcusably high dropout rate evident in South Carolina, or any state, for that matter.

Oh, yes, there will be platitudes about the importance of education, about children being the future of America, and other bromides political types like to dust off and trot out around primaries and elections, but nary a one wants to field – never mind substantively answer – hard questions about the shocking number of students who don’t make it through high school.

Too bad, because somebody needs to highlight the fact that South Carolina ranks near the bottom of the nation with a 66 percent graduation rate, according to the most recent data released by the US Department of Education.

Some might argue that this is a state issue, one presidential candidates ought to keep their noses clear of.

Not that candidates – whether Republican or Democrat – have ever let that argument get in the way when there’s voters to be pandered to, but education is as much an economic development issue as anything else.

“In 2010 alone, dropouts cost the nation $4.5 billion in lost earnings and tax revenue,” according to Pat Garofalo of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Garofalo adds that in California alone, college dropouts are losing nearly $15 billion in earnings over their work lives and costing the federal government more than $3 billion in lost income taxes.

“So far, the GOP has had precious little to say about the problem; South Carolina, with the second-worst dropout rate in the nation, should provide the perfect venue for them to change that,” Garofalo adds in a piece that appears on Like the Dew.

Don’t count on it happening. Why? One reason is we here in South Carolina can’t even agree on how many kids aren’t graduating.

In 2009, Neil Mellen of the pro-school choice organization South Carolinians for Responsible Government pointed out in an op-ed in The State newspaper that there were many ways to report figures:

“Officials at the state Department of Education claim that 75 percent of high schools students in South Carolina graduate,” Mellen wrote. “Education Week has reported 66 percent. The US Department of Education is less optimistic. In its most recent detail reporting, it counted 33,439 diplomas issued by South Carolina to a class of students that began with 64,027 freshmen four years earlier. That’s just 52 percent.”

Two points: One, why can’t we come up with a single statistic to measure a state’s graduation rate; and two, no matter how you want to measure it, South Carolina’s not doing a very good job at ensuring the vast majority of its young adults are graduating from high school.

Now, one could argue that the Republican candidates who will be traversing the state this week can’t be expected to have pointed solutions to South Carolina’s dropout problem.

But there’s no reason that these individuals – all of whom are educated and have enjoyed a measure of success in their lives – can’t at least stress why parents and other adults should be talking up the importance of graduating from high school, and how it’s crucial to the future well-being of young adults.

For, if these candidates really do put family, faith and freedom at the forefront of their beliefs, they’ll understand that an educated citizenry is an essential component, perhaps the essential component, in making those beliefs a reality.