SCHotline

[Update] Gervais Street Bridge has now reopened [1030 AM]

This does not look like a jumper by the looks of the special emergency vehicles at the scene; well update this story as we learn more… Update: Sources have confirmed and tell SCHotline it is a suspicious package. [915AM]

Mike Green will be LIVE blogging in ETV Studios Tonight…Make your vote known and please tell us why you voted the way you did and why!

We are about 1 minute out and I am here with Roxanne Walker and Brad Warthen.

Now Andy is talking with our favorite GOP Chairman from Spartanburg. This guy never ceases to amaze me if he can find a camera he will jump in front of it.

Here we go with our first report.

I am predicting it will be a McCain evening followed closely by Mike Huckabee, Thompson then Romney. If this happens McCain will get a big boost in Florida and I believe go on to be our nominee. I do not think anyone can stop him at this time. Rudy’s strategy of waiting until Florida is proving to be a fatal flaw.

On our first cut away Roxanne went right for the party is in disarry card. Just watch the next cutaway and I will get a good zing in on the Dems.

To all the Ron Paul supporters out there why don’t you put your energy to good use and take out some Rhino’s in the statehouse.

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer is now speaking and he makes one good point that we need to have both primaries on the same day. I agree wholeheartedly this was crazy having the primaries on different days. I disagree with him that the state ran the election well. The whole point of letting the state take over the primary is that no polling places would be closed or consolidated. Then they come out about two weeks before the election and consolidate precincts. Not to mention all the problems in Myrtle Beach. Who are the election officials down there? They need to be held accountable for this mistake.

It looks like it is going to be a long night. Things are just to close to call. I get to go first on our next segment.

We just found out that Brad Warthen went to Memphis state University.

It appears that Mitt Romney is not going to get a bronze tonight but a ribbon for participation.

I am getting word the Upstate is half in and Huckabee is only leading there by 11% of the vote. This will not be enough for him to win here in South Carolina. CNN website is showing what counties are in and how much they are in. Here is the link. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/county/#val=SCREP1

Let’s change the subject now and talk about the whole election process here. I believe South Carolina has lost some prominence in the national spotlight. This compressed election cycle hurt South Carolina and the decision of Mitt Romney to not participate here hurt us as well. Also the election was not as negative as it was in 2000. I credit the rise of the internet and blogs as to stopping this. We along with other blogs were able to expose it and put a spin on it before the main stream media reported it.

Now for some analysis of the race. It appears that Fred Thompson was the spoiler of the race for Mike Huckabee. If you look at it he cut into his leads in the Upstate region and Huckabee was never able to make it up. One could only guess what would happen if Thompson had not been in the race. We could be looking at a Huckabee victory tonight.

The question now is when will Mitt and Thompson drop out. Mitt has put so much time and effort in the state and if it continues and he finishes forth it will not be good for Mitt going into the Flordia primary. It seems the voters of South Carolina knew who Mitt was and rejected him for some reason. It might have been the over scripting of the candidate or maybe it was his lack of connection with the voters. Who knows but it will make an interesting study for some political science student.

Let me say thank you to SCETV for allowing me to give some insight into the Presidential race and thank you for listening to it. I will have some more comments tomorrow on SCHotline.com

SKIING on the beach tomorrow?”

“Late-night ski lift looking for a snow bunny.”

“Where are the cool Brooklyn ski bums? I’ve got tons to share.”

“Take a ride on the snow train.”

The come-ons in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist last week — or any week — are as plentiful as they are obvious (and cheesy). Using a variety of euphemisms that have been around since Jay McInerney wrote about Bolivian Marching Powder, posters invite others to join them for a line or a lost weekend fueled by cocaine.

The cheeky openness of these ads is hardly anomalous. While cocaine and drug abuse seem to have faded from the headlines, with coverage limited to the not-so-veiled references surrounding the exploits of waifish celebrities, it is still very much a part of the social scene, especially in New York.

Evidence of that is popping up in music, television and even theater. Indeed, for a generation that has not had its John Belushi to drive home the dangers of drug abuse, references and even use are open, casual, even blatant.

“You do see it,” said Noel Ashman, an owner of the Plumm, a hotspot near the meatpacking district. “We’re pretty tight at the club with drug use, whenever we see it we kick it right out. But it has popped up more than it did five years ago.”

And like the red flash of a Louboutin pump, it is easy to spot.

“It’s definitely prevalent in clubs, bars, parties — everywhere, basically,” said Cristiano Andrade, 26, a Brooklynite who manages a wine shop and goes out in the city once or twice a week.

Drug-abuse experts say the blasé attitude toward cocaine use is a result of “generational amnesia.”

“There seems to be less of a stigma about” cocaine, said Dr. Herbert Kleber, director of the division of substance abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan. As part of his oversight of research into cocaine addiction and treatment, and in his private clinical practice, Dr. Kleber hears stories about the drug’s use. “People don’t feel nearly as much the need to hide it,” he said. “They feel that they can use it in a more open fashion.”

The visibility of cultural markers — and the absence of cautionary tales — leads to the assumption that coke is not as harmful, say, as heroin (which was associated with the high-profile overdoses of River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain in the 90s), or methamphetamine, whose recent popularity in the gay community has led to a targeted campaign against it, said Perry N. Halkitis, a professor of applied psychology at New York University who studies behavior, the AIDS epidemic and drug abuse.

“If you’re a 19-year-old and you go out and party and you’re offered meth, you say no because you’ve heard these bad things,” he said. “But you’re offered coke, you say yes because you assume it’s safe.” And, he added, as the authorities crack down on meth, “people are going to tend to go to cocaine, which has similar, if not identical properties” as a stimulant.

NOT to mention that the supply and the price of cocaine, about $25 to $30 on the street for a half-gram bag, have remained stable for several years, said John Galea, director of the street studies unit of the New York State Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services. (In rare cases, a large bust can affect prices. Chief James P. O’Neill, the commanding officer of the New York Police Department Narcotics Division, said the authorities seized a record 20 tons of cocaine off the coast of Panama in March, and wholesale prices rose in the last few weeks.)

A prevalence among young people is not entirely borne out by national statistics. According to an annual survey by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, lifetime cocaine use remained stable between 2002 and 2005 among 18- to 25-year-olds. (Data before 2002 are noncomparable.) But the study — which estimates national rates based on a poll of 67,500 people — recorded a 20 percent increase in past-month use among that age group in 2005 from 2004, the last period for which data were available, said Joe Gfroerer, the group’s director of the division of population surveys. (There was no change in usage rates among people over 26.)

The Police Department has not recorded an increase in drug-related arrests at clubs recently, Chief O’Neill said. But, he added, “It doesn’t mean if you’re doing drugs in a club you won’t get caught.”

But in interviews over the last five months with people in the night-life, entertainment, media and finance industries, all said that cocaine is a prominent part of a night out. Teron Beal, 34, a songwriter and aspiring actor, said he encountered cocaine regularly and does it occasionally — and not only in clubs and bars. “When you’re in meetings and you’re in the studio, it’s offered like coffee,” he said. “If you say yeah, they’re cool with it and if you say no, they’re like O.K., and they just go and do it in front of you.”

“Coke is the new weed,” he continued. “Everybody says that.”

Tom Sykes, a former night-life reporter for The New York Post who chronicled his alcohol- and drug-fueled life in the memoir “What Did I Do Last Night?” said that cocaine is more socially acceptable than smoking. “You could go into a swanky party in New York and do a line and nobody would notice,” said Mr. Sykes, who is now sober. “Pull out a cigarette and people would think you’d pulled out a gun.”

And cocaine is not only popular in New York. “When I go to travel somewhere else, people think I do it and they’re so eager to shove it up my nose,” said Roxy Summers, a party promoter and D.J. who goes by the name Oxy Cottontail.

Mr. Beal, who is old enough to remember the drug wars of the 80s, said the perception of the drug has changed. “When I was growing up, it was like a VH-1 ‘Behind the Music’ moment whenever anyone talked about their cocaine habit,” he said. “It was like rock bottom, coke is crazy.” Now, he said, it is merely flashy fun.

Dominic Streatfeild, the author of “Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography,” who is based in London, where according to recent government studies, use among young people has tripled since the late 90s, had another theory. “In a culture obsessed with celebrity,” he said, “the fact that cocaine makes you feel rich and beautiful — it’s the perfect drug for our times.”

With Wall Street surging and a 24-hour global economy, young professionals have the money and the incentive to stay constantly wired.

“I do it every day,” said Kristoff, a European transplant to New York who works in finance and would not give his last name. He said he pays $150 for two grams of cocaine. “If I have to work at 6 in the morning and I have to be on top of the game, I’ll do it. I’ll take a gram of coke and make half a million dollars.”

That cavalier attitude carries over to pop culture, where references to cocaine are as prevalent as the 80s fashions that accompanied its previous heyday. Cocaine rap is a recognized genre in hip-hop, as Sasha Frere-Jones noted in a December 2006 article in the New Yorker; the platinum-selling rapper Young Jeezy made his name rhyming about his days as a dealer and adopted a menacing-looking snowman as his logo. In the last few years, the drug has been the subject of multiple anthologies, some of them flattering.

Recently the comic Todd Barry, a staple of the downtown comedy circuit, used a conversation he heard at a bar — when one man called a friend to remedy his “nose problem” — as the basis for a new joke in his act. And on a recent episode of NBC’s “30 Rock” when two go-getter writers attribute their success to cocaine, it was a laugh line, not a rebuke.

Even Broadway is not exempt: In “Talk Radio” and “Jack Goes Boating” (starring Liev Schreiber and Philip Seymour Hoffman, respectively), the characters do lines and carry on.

When Gridskipper, a travel blog, ran a post in March about the top bars in which to find cocaine in New York, the response was so overwhelming — the list of places named was like a taxonomy of “it” joints on the Lower East Side, the meatpacking district and Williamsburg — and the comment section so lively that the editors pursued the subject for several more days.

“Drug use tends to be cyclic,” Dr. Kleber said. “If you have a really dangerous drug, the generational remembering will come back quickly. If it takes time for the casualties to add up, the epidemic will last longer.” Referring to the drug’s last heyday, he added, “As some of my colleagues said, John Belushi had to die before people believed that these drugs were really dangerous.”

Besides its addictive potential, cocaine can cause elevated blood pressure, seizures, stroke, cardiac arrest or other heart problems, particularly in people with a pre-disposition. Combining it with alcohol, as many do, increases its toxicity, particularly in the liver, said Dr. Thomas Kosten, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the division of addictions at Baylor College of Medicine.

But these negative effects are overshadowed by the drug’s glamorous image, which is perhaps best personified by Kate Moss. After a brief furor when photographs of Ms. Moss apparently snorting cocaine appeared on the cover of a British tabloid in 2005, she entered rehab for a short time and emerged more successful than ever, with bigger advertising contracts and her own line of clothing at Topshop, the British retailer.

“You never hear about the addiction, you just hear about exclusive photos of wild parties with cocaine, ” Mr. Streatfeild said. “The dangers of cocaine are without a doubt very real, but it’s never dispelled that Champagne image.”

IT took the death last February of the skateboard star and downtown bon vivant Harold Hunter, who died at 31 of a heart attack and whose wake was attended by friends like Rosario Dawson, for Ms. Summers, the D.J. and promoter, to rethink her own behavior.

“Harold’s death really affected me; I know the ways in which he treated night life,” she said, adding that she “never touched” cocaine again. Likewise, she said, people in her community of downtown skateboarders, musicians, artists, and D.J.s went into hiding with their drug habits. “But,” she added, “that only lasted six months, if that.”

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by Andrew Citizen

Inspired by the FITSNews story; ‘Being Stupid Is Expensive’; we bought this awesome Nikon camera yesterday. The camera takes about twenty-gazillion frames per second in burst mode so basically anyone including A. Citizen may portend to be a photo-journalist er… evil traffic paparazzi. Long story short we opted for the latter and on our drive to work today (Which takes all of 3 minutes) we SAFELY, captured photos of three really dumb people in close proximity to the S.C. Statehouse, coincidence?

This dumb fellow runs a clearly red-light at Main & Laurel while towing a trailer, nice huh?

This really dumb person runs a red-light right in front of a Columbia police squad car (Was not pulled over) , no not kidding it happened at Gervais & Assembly where there are a lot of really smart people just trying to cross the street and earn a buck.

Shot a picture of this fellow just because we could, how he could even get into his vehicle that was so full junk is mind freaking numbing (Sorry you cannot see the bananas on the dash on top of the other trash).

Not quite sure where this dumb person thing will take us , but we are certain it will keep us in close proximity to the Statehouse.

Get your ‘I See Dumb People’ bumper sticker here