Don’t call it a turf battle. Maybe. Reps. Jimmy Merrill and Chip Limehouse, both from the Charleston area, are being pretty vocal about opposing the new expansion by the USC School of Medicine. It’s no coincidence that MUSC, which has to compete for talent and resources, is in their backyard, right? But whatever the motivation, Carolina’s plans to get together with the Greenville Hospital System are getting some close scrutiny.

For instance, there’s the system’s finances. It dropped a peg on the credit rating and laid off 50 people during the spring. GHS responds that its credit is still good and it plans on hiring more than 200 people in the near future. Then there’s the involvement of former Carolina president Andrew Sorensen, who works in the School of Medicine, is a consultant for GHS and has been pushing deals with the system since before he resigned the presidency.

Sorensen’s involvement looks a little shady, but understandable. If there’s a guy at USC who would be at the nexus of medicine, institutional management and financing, it would be Sorensen. And this project has his fingerprints all over it. The deal is for GHS to spend between $35 million and $39 million over seven to 10 years. It’s a massive project, similar to Sorensen’s when he was president. The sciences got shit-tons of money and new buildings while other university divisions (coughcoughCollege of Mass Communicationscoughcough) seemingly appeared forgotten.

The fact that there’s all this investment and time when the university has so many needs and budget issues and rising tuition is probably the best reason why the plans should get a second look.

In separate articles, one appearing in The State on Monday and another in the Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association last month, doctors C. Warren Derrick and Charles S. Bryan questioned the timing of the expansion plan and doubted whether it would produce more primary care doctors.

Derrick is a professor emeritus at USC’s School of Medicine, and Bryan is a former chairman of its Department of Medicine.

Derrick said residency slots will need to be increased if the state hopes to increase the number of doctors here since medical students are more likely to stay and practice medicine in the state where they completed their residency. And Bryan wondered whether the current poor economic climate will allow GHS to uphold its commitments.

“Is commitment to indefinite funding of a four-year medical school, and notably of new, academically-credible basic science departments, good business strategy during this time of economic uncertainty for the nation and for health care financing?” Bryan wrote.

We had a lot of fun with climate change deniers this winter about snowmageddon, because we knew this was going to happen — the blazing heat of a Columbia summer. A four or five-block walk, and things might be getting a little swampy, not to mention sitting still in the shade.

Even people used to dealing with the summer heat have been talking about how this season has been different.

Distance runners often train at the crack of dawn in the summer to avoid the heat. That did no good this summer.

“Even when I did just a short run, two or three miles, I literally had sweat dripping off my fingertips,” said Jeanna Moffet, who has been running in Columbia for 25 years. “My running friends and I have talked about how when we run we feel so sluggish, like we’re out of shape.

“I went out the other day (in the morning) and it felt like I could drink the air.”

The dog days of summer have been worse than normal, even for the dogs. Jeff Brandenburg takes his Weimaraners running with him in the mornings. This summer, the usually rugged dogs have given out after about 30 minutes, prompting him to take them back home and finish his training runs on his own.

The funny thing is that it was the temperature when the sun goes down that made the difference in the averages. This year, low temperatures were closer to 80 than 70. So really, the great outdoors was just an oven fluctuating between 80 and 100. Beyond that, there have been some happenings that go beyond our rather rudimentary knowledge of meteorology.

The more complicated question is why the air didn’t cool at night. Mark Malsick at the State Climate Office joked that a doctoral student could write a dissertation on it.

Malsick and Greg Carbone at the USC geography department offered some likely meteorological explanations.

In general, the Bermuda high that so often impacts our summer weather set up this summer and stayed put, steering moist air our way off the Gulf of Mexico.

Moister air and greater nighttime cloud cover keeps warm air from rising at night. In a more typical summer, the warm air rises after dark and is replaced by slightly cooler air at the surface.

Of course, the sick joke is that the heat probably won’t let up until, say, November.

Last week, Seventh District Solicitor Trey Gowdy — also the all-but-elected new congressman from the Fourth District — stepped in to help manage the Freedom of Information Act complaint brought by a local reporter and prosecuted by the state regarding the Holly Springs Volunteer Fire Department commission. He appointed John M. Rollins Jr., who until recently was a Spartanburg County magistrate, to run the state’s case.

Let’s explain how entertaining this has to be. The commissioners in question were suggested by Sen. Lee Bright‘s breakaway legislative delegation. So was Rollins’ replacement, which was also its own tempest in a teapot in late December.

Naturally, it raised some eyebrows in the Upstate when Bright, with Sen. Glenn Reese, brought in campaign supporter Rob Chumley to fill Brian Taylor’s seat. Here’s a twist: remember how Bright and a number of other candidates in ‘08 were a part of a structured grouping of candidates, consultants and third-party groups? Bright’s primary opponent, then-Rep. Scott Talley, was targeted. Rep. Keith Kelly, who won his primary, was targeted, as well. Guess who is running against Kelly for the GOP nomination next year? Chumley’s father, Bill. And Bill Chumley is paying Bright’s consultant, Chris Sullivan. Nothing weird there, right?

Then there was the strange case of David Snow, who became a victim of this patronage experiment. As this fall’s special extended session was wrapping up, at the end of the day, Snow was relieved of his duties as he was closing up his office. From what we’ve been told, that effectively severely limited Snow’s ability to do anything relating to access to the office. Enter James West, who gave a grand to the Bright campaign last year, as well as the Reese effort. West, to the best of our knowledge, has no legal experience.

Then there’s the last one, with John Rollins being forced out in favor of Tina McMillan, wife of Jim McMillan, who is running against Rep. Rita Allison in the District 36 primary. Amid reports that Allison is being targeted by the same groups who were afoot last year, there’s this interesting fact: Sullivan is running Jim McMillan’s campaign, as well. Mind you, the couple gave $1,000 each to the Bright campaign (Tina personally, Jim through his company).

For an area of the state with a fairly significant population, you can’t play “Six Degrees of Separation” with these guys. The game’s over in two moves, at most. No wonder politics up there are so internecine.

Kevin Geddings is pretty much known for three things these days — getting Jim Hodges elected, Blenheim Ginger Ale and going to prison for ethics violations as head of the North Carolina lottery. For the last one, he received a measure of vindication when a federal judge threw out his conviction and ordered him released from prison in late June.

He resigned five weeks later after reports that a lottery company had paid him thousands in the years leading up to his appointment. Prosecutors said Geddings denied the public of “honest services” by failing to disclose his conflict on a state ethics form.

He was convicted in 2006 for failing to disclose $250,000 in consulting payments from lottery vendor Scientific Games. The company was expected to bid – and did – on the state lottery contract.

Geddings entered prison in July 2007, days before Black himself was sentenced on corruption charges and sent to the same prison.

The combination of his making disclosure mistakes and the little-too-wide interpretation of the law by the government absolutely ruined his life. He lost his company, and while he was in prison his wife divorced him and sent their son to boarding school. That’s harsh. And as he’s picking his life back up, Geddings is facing a future in which there are a lot of closed doors.

“To sit around and say I was right doesn’t make me feel any better,” he said. “The reality is, my life has been blown up. I can’t do anything in Democratic politics because I’ve become toxic.

“I work every day to try not to be bitter. I’m very happy to be with my daughter, and I’m very happy to be starting the next chapter of my life. I know that being bitter doesn’t do any good for anyone. I need to figure out a way to make this a positive experience not only for me but for the people who care about me.”

In January of 1999, this man was a rising star, then it only took a few years for everything to go straight to shit. File this one away in the “cautionary tales” file.

When you want to see what is the epitome of a slow news day, just check out a bylined story on, of all things, college students getting arrested for a keg party. Well, a couple kids at USC-Upstate got their names in print today for having a party off campus as students tend to do, especially at the beginning of the semester. We can only imagine what would happen if Richland County deputies decided to take on the same responsibilities as their Spartanburg County counterparts.

The county’s Tobacco and Alcohol Compliance team, working on a tip that a party was under way where underage drinking would occur, responded to 110 Sherborne Drive late Friday. On the scene, officers spoke with 12 underage people who admitted they had been drinking at the party, an incident report states.

A search of the residence revealed two other people hiding in the attic and one hiding under a bed.

Master Deputy Tony Ivey of the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office said Sunday that with the fall semester having begun, or about to begin, at area colleges, the TAC team most likely will step up efforts to “locate, close down and cite or arrest those individuals found to be providing alcohol” to people younger than 21.

We knew that the culture in the Upstate seems to be stuck in the Prohibition Era, but damn. Your local tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen — stopping college freshmen and sophomores from partaking of cheap keg beer. We do give props to the two kids who went into the attic, though. When you can’t run from the house in a flat sprint, an attic certainly beats shuffling under a bed for trying to hide. Also, kids, next time keep down the noise and try to find a place in a more friendly neighborhood.

Up in Boiling Springs, somebody appeared to be really hard-up for a knife. A Ku Klux Klan knive, from a rather massive set. It makes you wonder all sorts of things about who would break into a storage area and only steal that, and the sort of person who would have such a collection.

A 32-year-old Boiling Springs man reported that someone entered a storage area of his Parris Bridge Road home Thursday night and stole a Ku Klux Klan Case knife engraved with “The White Brotherhood,” the three Klan crosses and the number 66.

The knife was part of a set of 100 Klan knives, according to an incident report. Six Zippo lighters — all engraved with either “Daddy” or “RGFII” — also were reported stolen.

Ah, and the Zippos. The burglar must have been getting ready for a big day at the swao meet.

The news of political consultant and newspaper publisher Rod Shealy’s passing Wednesday afternoon was a mix of shock and, yet, the expected. When Shealy revealed that he had a brain tumor, naturally you expect the worst. Then he went through the treatments and got back to work and for those of us on the outside of his universe, it looked like the man would win despite the odds. After all, that’s something he’s been doing for a long time.

As for us, we didn’t know Shealy too well, beyond some discussions during the 2008 election cycle and the occasional soiree. What we did like about him is that he seemed to genuinely care about what he was doing without taking it too seriously. And everything that everyone has said about his campaign style is undeniably true. He could take a candidate with little money and simply outwork the other guys. Also, even though he said he reformed as he got older, Shealy’s lovable rogue streak was impossible to dislike.

After going through a number of remembrances, we particularly liked Earl Capps’ recount of the man.

…Rod was the one who really defined the Shealy clan. He was confident, sometimes cocky, and always brimming with ideas and stories. While his shirts were colorful, his personality was even more so. If you worked with one of his candidates, you never knew what was going to pop out of his head, or when.

The most important things I learned about politics from Rod is that you never went wrong by running a race based upon hard work and listening to the little guy. His low-dollar campaigns that were based on candidates walking and low-cost mailings often beat the expensive top-down campaigns which put more effort into slick production and mass media efforts. Before anything else, Rod made his candidates get out, walk neighborhoods and talk with people.

In this day and age, where we’ve become so disconnected and hide behind mass and electronic media, this approach was refreshing. A lot of professional communicators teach us to speak, but Rod taught us to listen.

Bessemer, Alabama. A place you’re not likely to go to, unless you’re dragged by family to The Bright Star, a locally-famous restaurant. It’s an industrial suburb of an area in which the specific industry it was built to service began to skip town about 30 years ago. How do you make national news running for mayor of this fine city? Do a poor Photoshop job of placing the candidate in a picture with the state’s most recognizable (living) football coach and place it on campaign material.

“Coach Saban has not been contacted for a political endorsement of any kind,” Associate Athletics Director Jeff Purinton wrote in an e-mail response to questions from The Birmingham News.

Davidson, when contacted about the campaign ad and photo on Tuesday afternoon, at first said the image of her and Saban together was real and taken about three weeks ago. However, when presented later with a 2007 photo of Saban and his wife that appears to be the base photo onto which Davidson’s image was added, the candidate acknowledged that her image was digitally added to the 2007 photo.

“They said we could do it this way,” Davidson said.

It doesn’t take Joe Friday to begin to punch holes in the councilwoman’s story. First she says it was real. Then admits it’s not, but they were given permission. Then the campaign manager says his dad is tight with Alabama coach Nick Saban and got the OK on the golf course. After several hours of talks, internal investigation and the final result of ham-handed crisis management, the campaign manager said, yeah, he lied about everything.

The man who has been managing Bessemer Councilwoman Dorothy Davidson’s campaign for mayor this afternoon said he tricked Davidson into believing she had an endorsement from University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban.

Kevin Morris, 35, said he is responsible for the campaign flier that features a digitally altered picture of Davidson and Saban and touts an endorsement by the coach.

Morris said he told Davidson the photo of the coach and his wife, Terry, was actually of Saban and his mother. He said he told Davidson that Saban had OK’d the altering of the photograph.

How this guy thought he could get away with this ruse is simply incredible. Everything, everything Saban does in Alabama is news. Did he think he could pass out a few flyers in Bessemer and it wouldn’t at least make it to Birmingham, when reporters surprised by the coach stepping into politics would start investigating?

Former Holly Springs Volunteer Fire Department chief Lee Jeffcoat, when fired, said he was going to talk to an attorney and discuss possible litigation against the VFD commission. And now he’s done it, putting the board and a few commissioners not only subject to penalties for consistently erring on the side of shutting out the public, but wrongful termination, as well. In as many words, the suit basically accuses the board of straight-up governmental incompetence.

“The crux of this action is the whistleblower action,” said attorney Ryan Langley, who represents Jeffcoat and filed the suit on his behalf just before 5 p.m. Thursday.

“He’s being retaliated against by the commissioners for speaking out about their secret meetings and secrecy in government. If the chief wins, we all win. Transparency wins. Open government wins. That’s what this is about.”

[...]

The suit states the commissioners, individually and acting together, retaliated against Jeffcoat for making statements on matters of public concern; it alleges a conspiracy among them specifically to injure Jeffcoat; it alleges Jeffcoat was never paid all of his wages in his final paycheck; and it alleges the named commissioners prevented him from retrieving his personal items from the fire department after he was fired.

There’s some sort of appropriate action to take by the commissioners — from both governing and political aspects, and it looks like they keep failing on both counts.

The Upstate cannot be a friendly place for journalists. It appears to be a place that doesn’t exactly value unbiased presentations of the facts, asking questions to elected officials and generally not putting on a pedestal those who make a living in the world of letters. But for everything, there’s a comeuppance. People who were appointed to the Holly Springs Volunteer Fire Department board through the influence of state legislators who had illegal meetings of their own are now required to appear in court to address their closed-government practices.

And it came courtesy of a small-town reporter. How does that irony taste, Rep. Joey Millwood?

Three Holly Springs Fire and Rescue District commissioners — and one former commissioner — will appear in court next month to answer a formal complaint that they intentionally violated the state Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

The four — Chairman Ryan Phillips, commissioners Kelly Waters and Roscoe Kyle and ex-commissioner Clarence Gibbs — were served with a courtesy summons this week following a complaint from Hometown News reporter Jay King. A Richland County judge signed the summonses so local magistrates could avoid any perceived conflict of interest.

King said the newspaper group has been considering filing charges for several weeks. The company — which publishes nine weekly newspapers in the Upstate — wanted to see whether the State Law Enforcement Division would issue charges or investigate.

“I was at the commissioners’ meeting on June 16, and they were surprised to see me there,” King said. “They basically tried to throw me out of the meeting, and when I advised them of the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, I was ignored.”

[...]

Phillips said King warned the board he would take legal action against them at the June meeting.

“We knew this was coming,” he said.

Phillips admitted the board did not follow FOIA law during the meeting in question, but said the commissioners were not aware of what the law required at the time. He said the board’s actions in violating FOIA were not intentional, and said the meeting in question was the first ever called by the board, as it was previously something done by Jeffcoat, the former fire chief.

Oh, that’s rich. We’re so sure that the “Sorry, your honor, we didn’t know it was against the law” defense will develop a lot of sympathy among the members of the court in September.