Locally Speaking

Haley’s Picking Romney Shocks Tea Party Disrupting Republicans

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is betting her future on Mitt Romney’s, exhausting the support that Tea Partyers once supplied her.

Haley endorsed Romney in the state’s Jan. 21 Republican presidential primary, a decision that might vault her into national office or stall her career in Columbia, scorned by those who elected her.

“It was like your best friend took up with a really bad boyfriend,” said Karen Martin, 54, an organizer for the Tea Party chapter in Spartanburg County.

Haley, 39, was elected in 2010 as a champion of the movement that pushed states’ rights and fiscal rectitude. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she was an adversary of the Legislature’s good-old-boy network and became the first woman to run the state that ranks 50th in female representation, said Karen Kedrowski, political science chairwoman for Rock Hill’s Winthrop University. –Vision To America

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South Carolina Wants To Force Unemployed To Volunteer For Benefits

In another push to remind people that if you aren’t employed, there must be something fundamentally flawed in you that needs to be fixed, the state of South Carolina is proposing to make it mandatory that those who have been unemployed for more than six months must perform 16 hours a week of volunteer services in order to continue to receive benefits.

Of course, there is the inherent problem that if you force someone to do an activity in order to receive a reward of some sort, that’s not “volunteering,” that’s simply mandatory unpaid labor.  Or, when you think about it as them receiving their benefits in exchange for providing services, it’s just lower pay employment.  But the lawmakers proposing the bill say that it’s not really forced labor if it’s in the unemployed person’s best interest.  “I just think if someone’s busy working, they’ll be more industrious and more likely to get a job,” said [State Senator Paul] Campbell, R-Goose Creek. “Depending on the skill they’ve got, I think we can put that skill to work. I’m not talking about collecting garbage on the side of the highway.”

But there may be an underlying motive that isn’t being discussed.  Campbell says “his intent is to match people’s skills with work that needs done in city or county governments and schools, from electrical work to assisting in classrooms.”

In other words, he wants to use these “volunteer” workers with mandatory hours in a way that would allow the state to cut the hours or lay off workers who are already being paid for doing government-paid work.  The bill isn’t just to “better” the unemployed, it’s to get free labor in order to cut government costs, and would put even more people in the unemployment line.

But I guess that means more free workers for the state government, right? -Care2