This is such typical behavior of someone from your party.....one part mythology, one part klan, 3 parts ignorance and 5 parts ideology. And this asshole wants to run for president? Please do. Make him your presidential candidate and Palin his vice president. Please.
South Carolina Governor Relents on Jobless Funds
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: December 31, 2008
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Just hours before the unemployment benefits fund was to run out in South Carolina, the state with the nation’s third-highest jobless rate, Gov. Mark Sanford relented Wednesday and agreed to apply for a $146 million federal loan to shore it up, after weeks of refusing to do so.
Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina announcing Wednesday that he had applied for the $146 million federal loan that would ensure continued unemployment benefits in the state.
The governor’s position had drawn rebukes even from fellow Republicans in the Legislature, one of whom denounced Mr. Sanford as “heartless,” and from newspaper editorial pages. On Wednesday, The State, the daily newspaper here in Columbia, accused the governor of playing “chicken with the lives of the 77,000” who are unemployed in South Carolina.
For weeks, Mr. Sanford, newly elected as head of the Republican Governors Association and known for being a fierce free-market foe of government spending, stuck to his stand, questioning the probity of the South Carolina Employment Security Commission and demanding a new audit of the agency.
He has said in the past that he did not trust the commission’s calculation of the state’s unemployment rate, though a spokesman at the Bureau of Labor Statistics said it was calculated the same way as in every other state.
Mr. Sanford is now demanding that South Carolina’s Commerce Department, whose director he appoints, be given access to the state unemployment agency’s numbers, including where applicants are from, their ages, genders and occupations.
The back-and-forth dueling between the conservative governor and the unemployment agency has gone on for weeks, and its executive director, Roosevelt T. Halley, warned that he would have to stop issuing benefit checks to the jobless beginning Jan. 1 if Mr. Sanford did not back down and ask the federal government for the loan.
“It’s absolutely unheard of, it’s insane, for a governor of any state not to request those funds,” State Senator Hugh K. Leatherman, a Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said last week. “I can’t believe anybody would be this heartless, and create such a heartless act on these people.”
On Wednesday morning, at nearly the last minute, Mr. Sanford relented and said at a news conference in his office at the State House that he would request the money. South Carolina is one of three high-unemployment states, along with Michigan and Indiana, to ask for a loan from the federal government to ensure the unemployed continue to receive benefits.
“We will not punish the unemployed for this agency’s incompetence,” the governor said in a statement. But Mr. Sanford continued to insist that he would demand another, more stringent audit of the unemployment office, though Mr. Halley noted that the agency was audited every year by an accounting firm and had been given a clean bill of health.
Late Wednesday, Mr. Halley said he was not opposed to a further audit, and indeed the principal sticking point appears to have been whether state legislators — who have the authority, and many of whom have been sharply critical of the governor — would request it.
“We’ve been asking for over a year, could we get information as to where the unemployment is taking place?” Mr. Sanford said at the news conference. “Nothing’s been done.”
He said, however, that the Commerce Department was aware of where layoffs occurred in the state.
Mildly rebuking the news media here, he said that “you can find any number of people, particularly around the holiday season, who have the most unfortunate circumstances, they’ve lost their job, and those are compelling personal stories.”
<b.Mr. Sanford, a wealthy real estate investor, is often mentioned as a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2012, in part because he is seen as an exemplary adherent of the party’s low-government, antispending philosophy. He recently wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal saying he was opposed to a “bailout” for states.
His stand on unemployment benefits was consistent with his contentious six-year tenure as governor and his philosophy, which is described as “basically libertarian” by William V. Moore, a political scientist at the College of Charleston. He has continuously sparred with members of his own party in the Legislature over spending, limiting his record of accomplishment.
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