Cindi Scoppe
Scoppe: Why the SC budget hasn’t recovered, even as most have
Overall, state budgets have recovered from the recession. But South Carolina, of course, is an outlier. It’ll be years before we collect as much as we did in 2007.
Cindi Scoppe
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: Medicaid madness
I KEEP GETTING these offers in the mail: Let us send you this cookbook for free, and then we’ll send you another one every year, which you have to pay for, unless you cancel. I throw them in the trash because so far I haven’t been offered any cookbooks that I want, and it’s ...
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: The extraordinary case of Hampton v. Haley
What makes the Supreme Court’s unanimous rejection of Gov. Nikki Haley’s power grab so extraordinary is the same thing that made the case extraordinary at its inception: the fact that our governor, our treasurer and our comptroller general would commit grand larceny, in broad daylight...
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: Senate ethics plan might solve enforcement problem
Maybe turning enforcement of legislative ethics over to an independent panel isn’t essential to serious reform after all.
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: Reforms must be precondition for highway funding
THE PROBLEM with all of the proposals to tackle South Carolina’s huge and growing highway maintenance backlog isn’t that they’re a mere drop in the bucket — although they are. The problem is that they’re a hole in the dike.
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: The ‘choice’ charade continues
WHEN SENATE budget-writers took time away from more pressing matters (such as writing the state budget) to begin a review last month of legislation to pay parents to abandon the public schools, Sen. Larry Grooms complained that he had been pushing the plan for a decade...
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: House ethics plan is improved, but still falls short
THE ETHICS legislation the House is set to take up today is much improved from the disaster that House leaders had hoped to pass last week. But it’s far from ideal.
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: Ethics bill ‘surprise’ shouldn’t have surprised anyone
THE ONLY thing that wasn’t predictable about the discovery that the House Judiciary Committee passed an ethics “reform” bill last week that decriminalized ethics violations was the specific discovery.
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: The good guys won one
ON MONDAY, the Senate Republican Caucus tweeted out the news that “Gov. Haley signs bill banning sweepstakes cafes,” and I assumed she had another one of those ceremonial bill signings that she loves so much that the Legislature barred her from wasting ...
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: The story behind the Michael Letts columns
NEWSPAPERS are strange operations. We provide a prominent forum for people to criticize us. In fact, when there’s a choice between publishing a letter to editor or guest column that praises us and one that criticizes us, we pick the one that criticizes us.
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CINDI SCOPPE
Scoppe: A kinder, gentler governor?
LET’S STIPULATE at the outset that politicians talk differently to editorial writers than they talk to other politicians, and to the public. They’re more measured, less apt to throw out red meat, more … reasonable. Even so, it was striking last week...



