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.

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.

Before former Major League pitcher Roger Clemens’ indictment on federal perjury charges on Thursday, sportswriters and pundits saw his late-career dominance on par with Barry Bonds’ ability to get better as he got well past his supposed prime. We were fully in the Houston media market when Clemens was with the Astros in 2005. Our first week on the job, the Houston Chronicle declared the Astros season officially dead, complete with an illustration of a tombstone. But things took a turn.

Rocket pitched with an amazing ability that it could be called a Hall of Fame season. At his advanced age — the man was 42 going on 43. The earned run average was PlayStation-worthy, a staggering 1.82. Practically all the team had to do to win games with Clemens on the mound was put three runs across the plate. When the bats warmed up, Houston won the National League and made it to the World Series. Heavens — he won the Cy Young Award in 2004. People in their 20th and 21st years of MLB starting pitching do not pull off such feats without chemical assistance. The Feds agree.

Clemens’s allegedly false testimony came in a public hearing in which Clemens and his former trainer Brian McNamee, testifying under oath, directly contradicted each other about whether Clemens had used the banned substances.

“Americans have a right to expect that witnesses who testify under oath before Congress will tell the truth,” United States Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. said in a statement announcing the indictment. “Our government cannot function if witnesses are not held accountable for false statements made before Congress. Today the message is clear: if a witness makes a choice to ignore his or her obligation to testify honestly, there will be consequences.”

Despite all evidence that journalists and fans have on hand, Clemens maintains his innocence. In a tweet, he said:

We’ll see what happens in court, but his HOF status could be in jeopardy, if previous incidents are of any example.

Cheeseburgers. If you get one while dining out, chances are pretty good that it’s been fried, that the cheese is processed and the buns aren’t exactly whole grain. Eat enough, and they tend to be a contributing factor to clogging one’s arteries, among other physical ailments. They’re not particularly good for automobiles, either.

This week, a Rock hill woman, according to The Herald discovered her car was running “rugged” and took it into the shop. Surely, the mechanic must have been stymied until he tracked the problem back to the gas tank. That’s when he found it. A cheeseburger. And a pickle.

The lunch caused about $1,000 in damages to the car. It is not known how the sandwich got inside the vehicle’s tank.

Eh, maybe the car was just hungry.

When you have a campaign that can ill-afford to have any bad news — like, say, a Democratic gubernatorial campaign in South Carolina — there’s little room for mistakes. And if you’re a staffer on that campaign, the leash is going to be very short. On June 16, Democratic nominee Vince Sheheen‘s new media director Laurin Manning was taken in by the Darlington County authorities for DUI. But it took until today for it to make news that she’s been sent packing.

According to a story by the Associated Press, Manning’s “contract has been terminated,” per Sheheen campaign manager Trav Robertson. We doubt this will make any impact in the long run, but as we said, it goes to show that you’ve got to be careful out there, boys and girls. Just ask Mr. Larry. Also, it said that she’s not responding to the AP’s request for comment about the incident. Come on. The second you get pulled for DUI while working on a campaign, it might be a good idea to have an apology and talking points at the ready.

Former LSU quarterback JaMarcus Russell‘s descent from highly-touted player to total flameout hit that spot when it was revealed on Monday that he was arrested in Mobile for sipping on the drank. Purple drank. Barr. Whatever you call it, it’s the cough syrup with codeine — illegal without a prescription — which is known for catching fire in south Houston a while back and being quite popular in the hip-hop community that spawned Academy Award winners Three 6 Mafia. The group’s 2000 single provoked even NPR to do a story on the trend, though apparently ESPN only discovered it recently (way to keep up, Bristol!).

Maybe the Mothership knew something we didn’t, though, since Russell’s arrest will allow it to refer to its own report pretty regularly for the next few days.

Former Oakland Raiders quarterback JaMarcus Russell was arrested today and accused of possession of a controlled substance, according to the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office.

The substance was codeine syrup, spokeswoman Lori Myles said.

Myles said Russell was arrested at his home early this afternoon during an undercover investigation. He was booked into Mobile Metro Jail at 4:22 p.m. Russell was released minutes later after making $2,500 bail, according to online records.

Needless to say, his roll has been slowed.

The Columbia Police Department has been having problems for a while. That’s not to say there aren’t some great cops in town — we’ve been privileged to have met a few, but the CPD has some serious problems. That’s what Tandy Carter was hired to fix, coming from the small North Carolina town of Shelby. Needless to say, his failure to adequately handle mayor-elect Steve Benjamin’s epic car accident pointed to him being totally unable to do the job.

Hence, it was no surprise today that City Manager Steve Gantt put the kibosh on Carter’s job today. In a morning presser, Cater said some ridiculous shit, among them being that he wouldn’t be a, “puppet police chief.” Yeah. All the while, since the election, that looks exactly like what he was doing. It looked like that he wasn’t going to rock the boat of a prominent city Democrat and his prominent Republican consultants.

The whole reason that the CPD needed to be reformed is that it regularly botched investigations, arrests and transparency. We remember when we went to get the report for lobbyist/consultant Larry Marchant’s DUI, the book of police reports was months out-of-date.

What’s heinously fucked up about that is that when we covered the sheriff’s office and a police department in rural central Florida, it was never a problem to get current reports. Then again, while in grad school at Alabama, the Tuscaloosa News was, at the time, in a lawsuit with the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff’s Office over same said reports, which were by law available to not only journalists, but to the public in general.

This is some basic shit. If the CPD can’t get it right, how could anyone expect it to get the rest of its operations right? And Carter knew exactly what he was getting into. Yet, he acted petulant, entitled and, frankly, wrong under the circumstances.

Now he’s gone. The State reporter Adam Beam put up the letter that gave Carter the boot.

Maybe this time the Columbia city government will select a guy or gal who will get the job done and really create some true reforms in city public safety that won’t be able to be pilloried in the press and on blogs like this one. But we aren’t holding our breath.

Add one more into the “That’s Fucking Creepy and Bizarre” file. Some yay-hoo who used to live in South Carolina sent a message to Sen. Darrell Jackson, threatening to kill him with a bomb. On Friday, newly-minted U.S. Attorney Bill Nettles released a statement saying that the gentleman in question, Dalton Lee MacKenzee (consult the three-name rule for this one) was arrested in Texas and charged with going after the lawmaker.

Nettles says MacKenzee made a phone call in March threatening to use a bomb to kill state Sen. Darrell Jackson of Hopkins.

U.S. attorney’s office spokesman Kevin McDonald said he had no further information about whether any steps were taken to carry out the threat. A phone message left for Jackson was not immediately returned Friday.

We can’t wait for the trial of this guy. He’s got to be all sorts of crazy.

We don’t know if the Free Times know more than they’re letting on, but this quote says so much, “For the past few weeks, political observers have been wondering about a time bomb that might be ticking somewhere down the ballot in the statewide Republican primaries on June 8. One must look no further for the trigger on this particular detonator than the campaign for state treasurer, which could challenge even the governor’s race in the fireworks department.”

We’ve found out that Curtis Loftis, who has been palling around with former S.C. Republican Party treasurer John Cattano and consultant Jeffrey Sewell, was arrested on Feb. 2, 1990 on two counts of assault. According to the police report, he approached his wife (from whom he’d been separated from for months) and a friend of her’s as they left the Capital City Club. The report says he pushed his soon-to-be ex’s friend to the ground and punched him “several times,” then he pushed his ex to the ground before leaving. The report states that his soon-to-be ex, Barbara Diane Goff, exhibited a skinned knee and bruised finger. It mentioned nothing about the physical condition of her friend, Stanley Kuhn.

There’s a lot of talk going on around town about Loftis’ anger issues. His ex, in a legal statement, said that when they were married they had an argument. During that argument, he turned over a table on her and broke a window. She also said through her attorney, regarding the incident on Feb. 2, “On the evening on February 2, 1990 Mr. Loftis approached her as she was leaving the Capital City Club, Columbia, South Carolina, forced his way into her automobile, harassed and intimidated her with threats of litigation and pushed her to the ground.”

In another statement, she said, “I do specifically recall that [Loftis friend] Mr. [Michael H.] Montgomery stated to me that Mr. Loftis had a bad temper and that I should realize that part of my husband’s problem arose from his embarrassment being a ‘bug man’ from West Columbia.”

From what we’ve found out, he beat the charges in court. That’s shocking, considering how damning the police report looks.

Funny thing, this is only the beginning of the bombs we’re aware of in this race. The rest will be coming in due time as we figure them out. But it’s an amazing thing that a guy is running for public office with something like this, and other time bombs, just chilling in the closet like so many skeletons.