Carolina Politics Online

The first shot has been fired in the battle to uphold states’ rights and the Tenth Amendment. Call or email your state legislators and tell them that we want North and South Carolina to follow suit and unite against this encroachment of the Federal government.

RICHMOND — The Virginia General Assembly has given final approval to a bill that would make it illegal for the government to require individuals to purchase health insurance, a measure intended to conflict with Democratic efforts to reform health care in Washington.

Thirty-four other states are weighing similar legislation to block the individual mandate, which is an element of bills that have passed both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. But Virginia is the first state to complete legislative action on such a bill.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell said Wednesday that he intends to sign the legislation.

The Washington Post

Catherine Welborn, the Executive Director of Change the Congress in 2010, is putting together a “Meet the Candidates” forum in Charleston next month.

Change the Congress in 2010, a Federal PAC, is sponsoring this event that is free and open to the public.  Since many people never get to meet the candidates, this is a great opportunity to get ‘up close and personal’ and ask the candidates questions that may be important to you.

Candidates for any race and from any party are welcome to attend and Meet the Public.  Candidates must provide whatever they may need and are expected to take leftover campaign materials with them.  Contact Catherine Welborn at 843.270.1650 or by email at CWelborn@ChangetheCongressin2010.com (email preferred) for further information.

The forum will be held at the Custom House Steps on East Bay Street in Charleston on April 10th from 11am to 2pm.

Like I said last year and the year before they are never going to let this go.  From yesterday’s Post and Courier article, let’s start with the logical fallacies of one Dr. Charles Darby.

“The higher the taxes, the more lives that we can save. It’s time for South Carolina to do what is right for our state,” said Dr. Charles P. Darby Jr., Medical University of South Carolina professor emeritus of pediatrics and executive director of the Children’s Hospital Center for Child Advocacy.

“Those of us who do not smoke pay higher health insurance premiums and taxes to subsidize the habit of smoking,” he said. “It is time the smoker pays for some of the cost.”

The Post and Courier

So according to the good doctor the only way to possibly solve this problem is to hand over more money to the government.  There would seem to me to be a much more logical solution.  Why don’t the insurance companies simply raise their premiums on people who smoke?  What, is that just too easy?  Or is the problem if we go that route our elected officials can’t get their grubby little paws on the money and then redirect it to all of their own little pet projects so they can buy votes at election time?

“Every delay just allows more children to get hooked on cigarettes,” Darby said.

According to what data, Doc?  You think a thirty cent price increase on a pack of cigarettes is going to stop kids from smoking?  It’s a negligible amount.  I am a former smoker myself.  I started smoking in high school back in the early 1990s when Marlboros were a buck a pack.  When I eventually quite smoking in my 20s the price of Marlboros was approaching $5 a pack.  It wasn’t the price that got me to quit.  I just decided to start being more cautious of my health.

Now I am going to shock you.  Unlike in years past, I am not as vehemently opposed to this tax hike this time.  Here is why.

Rep. Chip Limehouse, a Charleston Republican and a ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, made the proposal to get the 30-cent increase in the budget. He said a cigarette tax increase is about the only tax increase he could support and that it’s more important than ever to pass it now. New cash for Medicaid will free up money for schools, law enforcement and other priorities.

If they give so much as a dime of this increase to the schools I am going to be thoroughly pissed.  They don’t need any more money, but other state departments do.  As one example, our jails in particular have been the recipients of excessively painful budget cuts and that effects the safety of every resident in South Carolina.  The state budget has been stripped by more than $2 billion over what it was two years ago, so the efforts have definitely been made to try and reel in spending.

There is also this.

The governor said again in his State of the State address in January that he wants a cigarette tax increase to be used to cut corporate income taxes to make the state more competitive.

“We’re very much of the same mind as we’ve been in years past — that being that we’d definitely be open to an increase in the cigarette tax if it was accompanied by a corresponding tax cut in some other area. In fact, we’ve proposed just such an action in years past,” Ben Fox, communications director for Sanford, said in an e-mail Monday.

The House on Thursday gave key approval to a plan that eliminates the corporate income tax, as a way to make the state more attractive to business, making a cigarette tax increase this year even more likely.

That is a plan I can support.  If the state were to inversely eliminate the corporate income tax in exchange for an increase in the cigarette tax then that is something I can probably roll with.  Unemployment in South Carolina just hit 12.6% and we need a more competitive business environment.  Eliminating the corporate income tax would definitely put us on that path.

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.

That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

ESPN

Of course it was a charade. Obama doesn’t give a damn about what the public thinks about anything. He’s demonstrated that pretty consistently throughout the past year.

So what is the point of this? The states have been managing the use of their waterways with little to no problem for over 200 years. Well, it turns out that this whole unconstitutional power grab is being orchestrated by the radical left environmental movement.

As ESPN previously reported, WWF, Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, Pew Environment Group and others produced a document entitled “Transition Green” shortly after Obama was elected in 2008. What has happened since suggests that the task force has been in lockstep with that position paper.

Then in late summer, just after he created the task force, these groups produced “Recommendations for the Adoption and Implementation of an Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes National Policy.” This document makes repeated references to “overfishing,” but doesn’t once reference recreational angling, its importance, and its benefits, both to participants and the resource.

Additionally, some of these same organizations have revealed their anti-fishing bias by playing fast and loose with “facts,” in attempts to ban tackle containing lead in the United States and Canada.

That same tunnel vision, in which recreational angling and commercial fishing are indiscriminately lumped together as harmful to the resource, has persisted with the task force, despite protests by the angling industry.

As more evidence of collusion, the green groups began clamoring for an Executive Order to implement the task force’s recommendations even before the public comment period ended in February. Fishing advocates had no idea that this was coming.

The commercial and recreational fishing industries have already been taking a big hit in both North and South Carolina and the last thing we need is further encroachment by the Federal government.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has already exhibited plenty of incompetence in the way it enforces U.S. fisheries laws such to the effect that Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC-03) has called for a halt to all prosecutions of fishermen by the NOAA and a complete overhaul of how the laws are enforced.

Morlock fears that “what we’re seeing coming at us is an attempted dismantling of the science-based fish and wildlife model that has served us so well. There’s no basis in science for the agendas of these groups who are trying to push the public out of being able to fish and recreate.

“Conflicts (user) are overstated and problems are manufactured. It’s all just an excuse to put us off the water.”

In the wake of the task force’s framework document, the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF) and its partners in the U.S. Recreational Fishing & Boating Coalition against voiced their concerns to the administration.

“Some of the potential policy implications of this interim framework have the potential to be a real threat to recreational anglers who not only contribute billions of dollars to the economy and millions of dollars in tax revenues to support fisheries conservation, but who are also the backbone of the American fish and wildlife conservation ethic,” said CSF President Jeff Crane.

Morlock, a member of the CSF board, added, “There are over one million jobs in America supported coast to coast by recreational fishing. The task force has not included any accountability requirements in their reports for evaluating or mitigating how the new policies they are drafting will impact the fishing industry or related economies.

“Given that the scope of this process appears to include a new set of policies for all coastal and inland waters of the United States, the omission of economic considerations is inexcusable.”

This is not the only access issue threatening the public’s right to fish, but it definitely is the most serious, according to Chris Horton, national conservation director for BASS.

“With what’s being created, the same principles could apply inland as apply to the oceans,” he said. “Under the guise of ‘marine spatial planning’ entire watersheds could be shut down, even 2,000 miles up a river drainage from the ocean.

“Every angler needs to be aware because if it’s not happening in your backyard today or tomorrow, it will be eventually.

This is what happens when you put an out of touch ideologue beholden to radical special interests in the highest office in the land. The fact that Obama intends to implement this with an Executive Order completely bypassing Congress gives credence to the accusation that he is becoming an elected dictator, much like Hugo Chavez.

This won’t be used to just regulate fishing either. Rest assured that the bureaucratic entities created to manage all of this will also be used to thwart any oil or natural gas exploration off our coastal waters, thus effectively reinstating the Federal drilling ban that just expired less than two years ago.

There is already talk of a ban on bottom fishing all the way down the North and South Carolina coasts to Georgia.  Thousands of jobs in these states can potentially be effected by this at a time when they are experiencing double digit unemployment rates. That aside, there is also the element of this being yet another chipping away at the block of individual freedom and liberty that Americans have enjoyed for over two centuries and that the President and this Congress spit on daily.

If this is put into place it seems like El Presidente will get to decide when and where you go fishing. With the industry being so large I am hoping this will end up in the Supreme Court with a Constitutional challenge if Obama makes good on this move.

Public pressure might be building on Bubba or maybe it’s his shoddy polling numbers, but something is possibly causing Spratt to reevaluate his position on the health care legislation.  According to a few different publications, Spratt is being referred to now as a possible undecided vote on reconciling the health care bill with the Senate version.  Spratt voted in favor of destroying the American health care system late last year.

“We’re telling constituents that he is withholding judgment until he sees the final bill,” says a staff aide.

Christian Science Monitor

Obviously, there are a lot of Democrats who voted “yes” in the fall who have indicated that they want to vote “no” or are considering voting no: Jerry McNerney, Steve Kagan, Henry Cuellar, Kathy Dahlkemper, Dan Lipinski, Marion Berry, Baron Hill, Brad Ellsworth, Dina Titus, Michael Arcuri, Dennis Cardoza, James Oberstar, Bart Stupak, Shelley Berkeley, Dan Maffei, Earl Pomeroy, Nick Rahall, John Spratt and Kurt Schrader.

National Review

I will update the whip count near the end of the day, but Steve Kagen, along with John Spratt, may be undecided now.

Fire Dog Lake

If you live in South Carolina’s Fifth District, call John Spratt’s Congressional office and demand he vote no on the health care bill.  Tell him to stop representing San Francisco and start representing South Carolina.

Washington Office
1401 Longworth Bldg.
Washington, DC 20515
Tel. 202-225-5501
Fax 202-225-0464

Apparently Bubba has set up a call screening system in order to stop the influx of out of state residents from calling into his office about the health care bill.  I guess I can sort of understand.  He doesn’t represent people that live outside of the Fifth District.  Although now that I think about it, he doesn’t represent those of us in the Fifth District either.

A poll conducted last week by Rasmussen of the Republican gubernatorial primary in South Carolina shows Henry McMaster the current favorite.  Out of the four candidates he leads with 21% of the vote.  He also has the highest favorable ratings.  Lt Governor Andre Bauer comes in second with 17% of the vote, yet ironically has the highest unfavorable ratings by a mile with 21% of respondents viewing him very unfavorably and 22% somewhat unfavorably.

1* 2010 South Carolina GOP Primary for Governor

That will be a cold day in Hell.  This man is becoming more incredible by the day.

I can say with the utmost certainty right now that I will not be fingerprinted by the Federal government and treated like a common criminal just so I can have a job and if Lindsey Graham thinks that the people of this state are going to stand for this he is sorely mistaken.

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

“It’s the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. “If you say they can’t get a job when they come here, you’ll stop it.”

The biggest objections to the biometric cards may come from privacy advocates, who fear they would become de facto national ID cards that enable the government to track citizens.

“It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people’s privacy,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We’re also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification.”

The Wall Street Journal

Damn right it will. That’s the same thing that happened with Social Security. Your Social Security number was only supposed to be used within the parameters of that program and it ended up turning into a national identifier for just about every aspect of our lives, credit, employment, loans, etc. This proposal is a back door to the National ID that people have been pushing back against.

We don’t need an Orwellian government tracking program to stop illegal immigration. We just need to enforce the existing laws on the books.

Lindsey Graham needs to be stopped.  He is morphing into an oppressive fascist who no longer has any respect for our Constitution nor the freedom of the American people.

Victor Rawl, a Democratic member of the Charleston County Council and a former circuit court judge, announced his Senate candidacy Monday at events in North Charleston, Columbia, Greenville and Spartanburg.

Rawl, 64, served briefly in the state legislature and retired as a lieutenant colonel in the South Carolina National Guard.

In running against the first-term DeMint, Rawl gives Democrats at least the prospect of a competitive race. Chad McGowan, an attorney who had raised about $250,000, dropped his campaign against the incumbent last month.

Read more: Politico

Are you kidding me?

Few kill. But many rant.

The litany that made accused Pentagon attacker Joseph Patrick Bedell smolder and rant is varied, and still coming to light. His history was one of mental illness, not fringe-group agitation.

In an Internet posting, Bedell had suggested an act like the 2001 terrorist attacks could have been the work of a criminal organization controlling the U.S. government, accepting a “sacrifice of thousands of its citizens … as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control.”

His poisonous view of the government appears well out on the extreme—until you see what some people close to the center of power are saying these days.

“America is teetering towards tyranny,” Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina told the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. He accused the governing Democrats of peddling socialist policies “that have been the enemy of freedom for centuries all over the world.”

Republicans have been branding Democratic policies as some form of socialism for generations, par for the course.

But tyranny? America has real issues with that—it violently overthrew that enemy at the start.

The AP

My God, I don’t even know where to begin on this.  First of all, the Democrats’ policies are a form of Socialism.  That is simply not up for debate particularly since we have a president in the White House who has succeeded in partially socializing the auto industry, the banking industry, and is attempting to take complete control of the health care industry.

Secondly, let’s discuss tyranny.  We have a president and a Congress trying to ram a government take over of health care down the throats of the entire nation that the people have soundly rejected and yet the Congress doesn’t give a damn.  That’s the latest tyrannical actions of the Federal government in a list of hundreds, if not thousands more going back decades.  Redistribution of wealth, compulsory education, radical environmentalism, all of these things and more are actions of a tyrannical government.  The Founders of this country revolted against the British for a hell of a lot less than what we put up with today, but let’s get down to the meat and potatoes of this absurd juxtoposition.

Senator DeMint said, “America is teetering towards tyranny.”  That’s it.  And according to the dynamic douche bag duo Calvin Woodward and Eileen Sullivan of the Associated Press, those words drove Joseph Bedell to open fire at the Pentagon subway station.  They glossed right over an inconvenient truth for them, however, that Bedell was a registered Democrat.  Bedell also despised George W Bush and was a 9-11 truther.  He was also diagnosed bi-polar and manic depressive.  Does this sound like a loony right wing militia wanna be clinging to God and his guns to you?  This fits the bill of an anarchist and they don’t like government regardless of who is controlling it.  He was also clinically nuts.

You would think that two experienced “journalists” would have been able to find these facts that dozens of other folks in the alternative media were able to track down in a matter of hours following the incident,  but it’s clear that Woodward and Sullivan were more concerned with pushing a biased political agenda than being honest couriers of  the news.

Country western singer Brad Paisley fell face first during a performance in Charleston Saturday night.  Fittingly, the tumble took place during his song “Alcohol.”  Perhaps it was really a painful public service announcement masquerading as an accident.

Republican candidate for governor Henry McMaster said at a campaign stop that he opposes using the state’s economic development incentives program for retail projects.

McMaster, the state attorney general, told a gathering Saturday at Sun City Hilton Head that such tax incentives would give an unfair advantage to some retailers.

The State

It’s nice to know that somebody in the alleged party of small government is opposed to doling out our tax dollars to more corporate interests.  Although, I would be curious to know which side McMaster would have come down on regarding the Boeing deal last year.  His statement comes on the heals of a shopping mall being planned in Beaufort.

S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster, a Republican candidate for governor, said during a campaign stop in Sun City Hilton Head Saturday that he is “not convinced the law should be changed” to give tax incentives to retail developers such as the Sembler Co.

Sembler plans to build Okatie Crossings, a 280-acre shopping center and luxury outlet mall in Beaufort and Jasper counties. Sembler has said the incentives are critical to its plan.

Saturday’s statement, which came in response to a question from a Sun City resident, was the first time McMaster has spoken publicly on the bill for which Sembler is lobbying.

That bill could come to the Senate floor as soon as Tuesday.

“I’m not sure we should be in the business of judging one retail establishment against another,” McMaster said of choosing which retailers should get tax incentives.

The Island Packet

If Okatie Crossings can’t be profitable without taxpayers shelling out corporate welfare to Sembler Co., then why are they building the mall in the first place?  If you need a government subsidy to be in the black then it sounds like a bad investment to me.  Builders typically aren’t in the habit of making bad investments so this leads me to speculate that Sembler Co. can indeed be profitable without the incentives, they just want to see how much of their obligation they can pawn off on the taxpayers.

Let’s see how the Republican controlled state legislature, the party that has railed against the Obama stimulus program, votes when this bill comes up this week.

For some in attendance at an executive council meeting for the Columbia Housing Authority held Monday, Feb. 22, it was a surprise when they learned that a man running for governor had been seated among them as he rose to deliver a speech.

If any of them had ever seen Morgan Bruce Reeves on TV before, it wasn’t in a campaign ad. And it was a long time ago, perhaps when he played pro football for the Colts when they hailed from Baltimore, not Indianapolis.

A former player for the National Football League who is running a grassroots write-in campaign for governor of South Carolina, Reeves told the community gathering that he had amassed the necessary 10,000 signatures needed to land him on the ballot in 2010.

The Irmo businessman spoke to a crowd of about 50 at the Cecil A. Tellis Center off Harden Street near the Drew Wellness Center. His speech, peppered with hallelujahs from the majority black audience members, offered a brief biography of his life and his reasons for running for governor.

“I’m not running as a Democrat and I’m not running as a Republican,” Reeves said. “I’m running as a strong-bid third party candidate. And I think that a third party candidate would be refreshing for South Carolina.”

Columbia Free Times

I can’t disagree with that.  A third party candidate anywhere would be refreshing and Reeves is the kind of third party candidate who can actually mount a competitive challenge.  The reason for this is that he has a name that will already be known to some, has a past that will spark interest in those that don’t know him, and if he actually is able to get Magic Johnson to campaign with him that will really raise his profile.  If you’re going to run for office as an independent or third party candidate you have to have either some existing name recognition or a lot of money like Ross Perot.  Reeves already has the 10,000 signatures needed to qualify so he is already over the biggest hurdle that third party candidates face before they even begin, ballot access.

He’s at it again.

Reporting from Washington – Despite steep odds, the White House has discussed prospects for reviving a major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, a commitment that President Obama has postponed once already.

Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections.

In the session, Obama and members of his Domestic Policy Council outlined ways to resuscitate the effort in a White House meeting with two senators — Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who have spent months trying to craft a bill.

According to a person familiar with the meeting, the White House may ask Schumer and Graham to at least produce a blueprint that could be turned into legislative language.

The basis of a bill would include a path toward citizenship for the 10.8 million people living in the U.S. illegally. Citizenship would not be granted lightly, the White House said. Undocumented workers would need to register, pay taxes and pay a penalty for violating the law. Failure to comply might result in deportation.

Los Angeles Times

This sounds like the same stupid idea Bush trotted out a few years back.  Who is going to register and pay all of these penalties when they can just stay here under the radar and milk the system?  Notice that there is no definitive punishment for not complying.  It says who do not may get deported, not will.

With 16.8% unemployment nation wide and South Carolina’s unemployment rate over 12%, why in the hell is Lindsey Graham trying to legalize another 10 million people and bring them into the mainstream work force?  American citizens can’t even find a job right now.

Additionally, with all the problems the Obama administration has had with health care, Cap and Trade, spending, and everything else they’ve tried to do, why would Obama even want to go anywhere near this political hot potato?  Does he not remember the backlash that occurred around this country when Bush brought up his amnesty bill?  People are already seriously pissed off at this administration and the overall government in general.  The Democrats are already plenty damaged over the health care bill.  Can you imagine what is going to happen once they start pushing forward with amnesty again?  Sometimes I am convinced this man wants his party to get obliterated in November.  Is he really this obtuse?

Talk radio host Jason Lewis of Minneapolis will be headlining a fund raiser for South Carolina Fifth District Congressional candidate Mick Mulvaney in Charlotte on Friday.  The even will be held at the Greek Isles Restaurant at 200 East Bland St in Charlotte and starts at noon.  Apparently the seating is limited so they are asking people to arrive early to ensure they get a spot.  Attendance is free, but guests are responsible for their own meals.

More information on Facebook

But Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent working with Graham and Kerry, said a detailed outline of a bill could come within days and that it will have to include a ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions that drops in future years.

Last June, the House narrowly passed a climate change bill with cap-and-trade as its centerpiece and a carbon-reduction target of 17 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.

But the initiative has stalled in the Senate, despite Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approval of a similar bill.

But, as a result of work in the past few months, Kerry said he was feeling “more confident” that a climate change bill could be presented to the Senate for passage this year.

“We’re looking at a new way of coming at this that we think can attract greater support,” Kerry said.

Environmentalists have speculated the bill the senators will produce could take a “sectoral approach” by imposing a new carbon-pricing mechanism on utilities, which account for about 40 percent of the emissions blamed for global warming.

Sources also have said there is talk of a transportation tax. Pollution controls on manufacturers could be put off for a few years to give time for more affordable alternative energy sources to come on line, they have said.

Reuters

I would really like to wonder exactly when it was that someone beat Lindsey Graham with the stupid stick because that guy has nothing but shit for brains.  A transportation tax?  It’s not clear as to what exactly that would entail, but one thing is for certain.  The result will not be good for South Carolina.  Any tax on transportation, but whether its an increase in the gas tax, a tax on transportation companies, on the airlines, etc is going to smack everyone in this state in their back pocket.  A tax on truckers transporting goods would be absolutely criminal because it would cause prices to rise in just about every sector, socking the poor and the middle class harder than anyone.

And yet Graham can’t figure out why he keeps getting booed when he speaks around his own state, oblivious to the fact he is alienating his own constituents in the name of junk science.

Nikki will be in Rock Hill this Wednesday, March 3rd speaking at Winthrop University. The event will be held at Barnes Recital Hall, 855 Ebenezer Avenue, Rock Hill, SC 29733. It starts at 8 p.m. and is open to everyone.

I would love to go this event and I’ll even be at Winthrop at that time, but I’ll be in class. If you can make the time, however, I recommend stopping by and listening to Haley speak. She’s got good ideas to take our state forward.

Winthrop University here in Rock Hill released the results of their latest political polling for the state.  The conclusion?  Most people really don’t much about the people running for governor on either side of the aisle.  I guess that’s not overly surprising.  Most people really don’t start paying attention until the last couple weeks before an election.  Over 75% of people polled knew very little about any of the Democrats running.  When it came to favorable ratings among all candidates of both parties, Lt Gov. Andre Bauer squeaked out through the top of the pack.

Regarding other questions that were asked, people in the state like Michelle Obama better than her husband.  Jenny Sanford is held in fairly high regard and Republicans are far more fond of Senator Jim DeMint than they are of Senator Lindsey Graham.

COLUMBIA — Gov. Mark Sanford said Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s decision to abandon a decades-old plan for Nevada’s Yucca Mountain could cost South Carolina $1.2 billion and leave the permanent storage of thousands of tons of nuclear waste in question, and the governor is prepared to sue over it.

Sanford urged Obama to back off his Feb. 1 decision and stick to the 23-year bipartisan compact to use the Nevada facility as a resting ground for the country’s nuclear waste, including 4,000 metric tons temporarily housed at the Savannah River Site and elsewhere in South Carolina.

The two-term Republican governor said Obama was motivated to reverse course as a way to ensure U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s re-election in Nevada.

The president decided to eliminate all funding for the facility and withdraw its license application with the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Post and Courier

The Yucca Mountain nuclear storage containment site is something that I happen to know a bit about.  My father lived back in Las Vegas during the 1990s and worked on this project for a government contractor.  There is absolutely nothing unsafe about this containment facility nor does it pose any threat to the people of Nevada.  The Yucca Mountain is over an hour away from Vegas and in the middle of friggin nowhere.

I agree with Sanford that this all a political ploy by Obama.  He’s willing to cost our state over a billion dollars and throw billions more away to try and save Harry Reid’s political carcass which has already started rotting and sticking up the place.  Of course people in Nevada have protested against it.  Nobody wants to have nuclear waste in their backyard, but that isn’t happening in Nevada nor would it if the Yucca Mountain project were to commence again.  The bulk of the outcry is based on ignorance.

That move by Obama contradicts his claim that he is suddenly supportive of nuclear power.  How can he says he wants to see more nuclear power plants built while simultaneously shutting down one of the major nuclear storage projects in the country?  He can’t have it both ways.