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It was my great pleasure to be at the Greenville Tea Party last night with 2000 of our closest conservative friends.

Here’s what it looked like.

Seeing as how the SC Legislature is debating a 24 hour waiting period for abortions today, I found the timing of this 12 year old girls plea to ban the practice altogether very timely.  This is worth watching.

David Odgen

Obama has named David Odgen to be Eric Holder’s Deputy.  Apparently the stridently left-wing Holder needed an even farther left-wing attorney to back him up.

So who, you ask, is David Ogden?

John Hawkins and the Family Research Council have the backgrounders, but here are the high lowlights:

• Ogden was quoted as saying women who have abortions are ”more likely to experience feelings of relief and happiness” than women who have or adopt children.
• Ogden also referred to the right of abortion as “fundamental”, while filing an amicus brief against parental notification of abortions for children younger than 14.
• Ogden served as counsel for the stunningly mistitled “People for the American Way”, who sued for the right to have federal funds to perform abortions.
• Ogden wrote an amicus brief on behalf of physician assisted suicide.
• Ogden wrote an amicus brief against the Children’s Internet Protection Act – forcing libraries to allow access to pornography on computers used by children.
• Ogden sued to overturn the law that forced pornographers to verify that their “actors” were of legal age.
• Ogden sued the federal government on behalf of Playboy in an attempt to force the federal government to fund braille translations of Playboy. 
• Ogden wrote an amicus brief in the disastrous Lawrence v. Texas case that overturned Texas sodomy laws, and another in a case suing to allow gays to openly serve in the military.

So… Obama’s next “Hope and Change” moment is to put a guy who represents child pornographers, Hef, Larry Flynt, and the abortion industry as second in command of the Department whose job it is to stop child pornographers?

Unbelievable.  And completely unacceptable.

With thanks to Suitably Flip:

The US Chamber of Commerce recently ranked the fifty states on a series of tort and liability issues in terms of their business friendliness.

The results? South Carolina’s ranking dropped in 2008 from 37th to 43rd, despite the tort reform and workers compensation reforms passed earlier in the decade?

Why are we ranked so low? The data points we took the most grief from included non-economic damages, the competence of our judges, and our treatment of scientific evidence. Class action lawsuits got a particular nod as well.

Here’s where that rubber meets the road – every frivolous lawsuit in South Carolina costs roughly $30K to defend. Since the median wage in the state is now hovering around $29K, this means that every single lawsuit against business costs the state roughly one job. So, the fact that we’re in the bottom ten in business friendly litigation and unemployment (currently 49th at a whopping 9.5%) at the same time makes some sense.

One other note on what’s wrong, before we get to the fix. The other problem that needs fixing relates to bad judges. In the recent Colleton Prep v. Hoover case, the SC Supreme Court, in a ruling handed down by Justice Don Beatty, found that a construction contractor was liable not for the damage that was done, but for the damage that could have been done when a roof partially collapsed. (That’s jurisprudential malfeasance, and it happens when legislators pick judges without regard to their judicial philosophy, but rather on who is scratching whose back, or comes from whose home county. But I digress…)

Into this mess steps Senator Larry Martin (along with 12 Senate co-sponsors and a probable House counterpart to be introduced next week by Speaker Harrell) with a tort reform bill S.350 that can have a solid positive impact on the business-friendly nature of our legal system.

“Martin/Harrell” – S.350 is modeled after the tort reform proposal of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and seeks to put our state on more of a nationally normed footing. That includes improvements to the way our state handles class actions, punitive damages, and admissibility of certain types of evidence. The bill includes a paragraph modeled after SC’s medical malpractice statute, giving businesses the same protective caps on non-economic damages that our doctors currently enjoy. The bill includes language worked out by Attorney General Henry McMaster to provide standards and accountability for the hiring of outside legal counsel. And, yes, the bill reverses the definitions of two bad SC Supreme Court decisions, including the “could have been” Economic Loss Rule provisions from the regrettable Colleton Prep case.

Senator Martin and Speaker Harrell should be applauded for bringing this bill to the Legislature, especially at a time when our economy needs a boost. The best kind of boost we can give is to ease the tort burdens on business that allow them to hire more workers. The House and Senate should work to pass this bill this year. We’ll be watching to make sure they do.

There has been a lot going on in the past couple of months, and it seems to me that with all of the good things we’re trying to do and all of the bad things the liberals are trying to do, there’s one great guy with us in the trenches these last two months – Senator Jim DeMint.

Stopping Hillary Clinton from turning the State Department into her own private social engineering lab?  Didn’t work, but Senator DeMint voted against her confirmation – one of only two Senators to stand up and do the right thing.

Stopping a tax cheat from becoming Secretary of the Treasury (and thus, nominal head of the IRS)?  Didn’t work, but Senator DeMint voted against the confirmation of Timothy Geithner, even as ten of his Republican colleagues buckled.

Stopping the ill-advised TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) that the Bush Administration was shoving down Congress’ throat?  Didn’t work, but Senator DeMint was the only one to consistently stand up against the bailout.

Fighting against the Obama administrations policy to allow federal tax dollars to go for overseas abortions?  Didn’t work, but Senator DeMint was the elected South Carolinian who brought the amendment to the Senate floor to strip the funding. <em>(seriously, how does a country like ours, with a trillion dollar deficit, whose economy is in the toilet, even begin to consider paying for other countries to kill babies?  I just don’t understand this concept – at all.  But I digress.)</em>

Now Senator DeMint is fighting against the $1T debt-funded Obama/Pelosi/Reid “stimulus” package (and twittering about it along the way.)  I don’t expect we’ll win this one either, in the short run, but with Senator DeMint taking the right stands, we can hope it at least gets somewhat stripped down. 

Keep up the good work, Senator.  We may be losing these fights right now, but we absolutely appreciate having you in the trenches fighting for us.  History will show that you continued to do the right things, even as all those around you lost their minds for socialist Big Government programs and bailouts.

Had a fun evening last night. The Lexington Young Republicans (of which I am Treasurer) hosted a party last night in honor of the State of the State – it was a pre- and post- party, though most of the folks came to the pre. Now, Will likes to refer to the YRs as the “land of 1000 virgins.” I hate to break it to him, but a fairly large number of the YRs in Lexington and Richland (and around the state for that matter) are married couples and young professionals. So, you can pop that perception.

We had about 45 people come through last night, including a handful of legislators (the entire Lexington House delegation plus a few others) and our esteemed Attorney General and his lovely wife. It was also great to see County Councilman John Carrigg there with his wife Beth.

We went over for the speech around 6:30. I was somewhat surprised at the number of empty seats and the ease of getting one. By the time the speech started, there were still around 50 empty seats out of the roughly 200 in the House gallery. I suppose there is less interest in a Governor’s 7th State of the State, but I was still surprised.

I thought Governor Sanford did better this time around. Most of the stumbles were gone, Thomas Friedman was nowhere to be found, and he laid out a simple 5-point plan for where he wanted the state to go this year. He invoked the Obama factor with references to “Yes, we can” without naming the new presidency, which was interesting. He thanked my Representative Nikki Haley and Nathan Ballentine for their terrific work (against tremendous opposition) on getting roll call voting through the House (which passed 115-0 yesterday; still wonder who those 9 holdouts were…). As a result, he got more applause this year (well, that and there were two rows of YRs in the stands… heh.)

I did find it a bit different that Governor Sanford recognized his Cabinet, but not the Constitutional officers in the stands. Sitting on the front row (two rows in front of me) were Attorney General McMaster, Comptroller General Eckstrom, Treasurer Chellis, Secretary of State Hammond, and Agriculture Commissioner Weathers. I didn’t see Adjutant General Spears, and I didn’t see Education Super Rex, though he was clearly there for the cameras afterwards. Of course, Lt. Governor Bauer was in front, gavelling the chamber to order in the purple robes of the evening. (Bauer and Speaker Harrell really did look like two guys from the Heavens Gate cult in those robes. Very scary. Now that indigo is the state color, perhaps it’s time to change the robes from purple to blue… But, I digress.)

The post-party was very interesting. The usual crowd of the restaurant/bar we were at had filtered in, mostly USC students, from the look of it. I had the pleasure of meeting Mattheus Mei of Leonardo’s Notebook, and we talked Evangelical/Catholic theology for the better part of an hour. (Matt – it was a pleasure meeting you.) I also had the chance to chat with Wes Wolfe, the one-time freelance writer for the Columbia City Paper and two-time “anonymous blogger” who managed to get his identity outed both times. (In the process, I hopefully have disabused him of some of his more conspiratorial notions involving me.) Wes – it was a pleasure.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how the legislature reacts to the overall tone of the speech itself. The applause line of the night may have been “let bygones be bygones.” Hopefully, in an economic crisis like the one we’re facing now, the Governor and Legislature will be able to put their heads together to figure out how the state can best move forward with the least negativbe impact to the citizenry.

Oh – and thanks to Cam and Jay-dub for noticing that I was shown on TV from the gallery last night. Hopefully I looked attentive…