What's going on in SC is this: The governor wants the flag to come down, the mayor of Columbia wants it to come down, the House of Representatives wants it down, the business community, and two-thirds of the population all want it down. The only governmental group that wants it up is the state Senate, which is controlled by the a group of idiot SC republicans, and they, as they have said, will not back down under any circumstances. This is not necessarily true of all Republicans, I know, but in SC they could not win elections without the so-called Christian Right and the stereotype dumb-as-a-shovel rednecks, of which we have many in real life. The traditional business type conservatives are in a bind; they don't want all the craziness of the other two large constituency groups but they can't win elections without them. They make a lot of noise so that's what the media portrays as the mass opinion of the people of this state, but it is not. We will all be happy as pigs in shit when they finally remove it from our capitol. This Southern Initiative thing is mild compared to some of what we've had here. The Senate and the KKK sneaked David Duke and other actual Klansmen onto a podium at a public gathering in front of the state house (capitol) that was meant for something else, and you wouldn't believe some of the things that were said. I think the NAACP should continue their boycott of SC until hell freezes over and let's just see what happens.

We have always been a colorful state, Chet