Just call them “Peaches and Herb,” because S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom (a.k.a. “Comptroller Creepy“) and his on-again, off-again lover Kelly Payne are “reunited … and it feels so good.”

In fact these irrepressible lovebirds are … wait for it … engaged. According to a photo album Payne’s Facebook page, Eckstrom proposed to her on December 19, two months after their most recent spat.

Here’s the ring …

(Click to enlarge)

Payne and Eckstrom’s wedding is set for April 2 … assuming the two make it that long without breaking up (or one of them killing the other).

Palmetto politicos have followed this toxic relationship with a mixture of bemusement and revulsion in recent years as the drama it has produced has spilled over onto the state’s political blogs (and occasionally its mainstream media outlets, too).

For example Eckstrom’s creepy texts and emails to Payne have become the stuff of S.C. political legend – and not in a good way. In one of those texts, Eckstrom – who was taken to the cleaners by his estranged wife last fall – referred to himself as a “fine specimen.” In another, he offered himself up to be Payne’s sexual “guinea pig.”

After a high-profile split during the 2010 GOP primary season, Payne and Eckstrom got back together prior to the general election. Of course within weeks of reuniting they became embroiled in yet another public soap opera – this one ending with Payne filing a police report against Eckstrom.

Eckstrom’s combative relationship with Payne was the subject of a Democratic TV ad during the 2010 campaign … as was a 1997 sexual harassment case that the Comptroller settled with $57,000 of your tax dollars (here are a pair of pictures of the woman that Eckstrom allegedly harassed, in case you’re interested).

In addition to his affair with Payne, multiple sources tell FITS that the 64-year-old politician has bragged about having affairs with a statewide elected official in Oklahoma as  one of his subordinates in the Comptroller General’s office.

Despite all of this, Eckstrom was not only reelected Comptroller in November 2010 – but was placed in command of the South Carolina State Guard last spring.

So … will Payne and Eckstrom’s marriage last?

Vote in our poll and post your thoughts in our comments section below …

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Gas prices in South Carolina are continuing to climb … ticking up 16 cents per gallon from the last time we checked earlier this year.

According to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report, a gallon of regular unleaded gas in the Palmetto State now costs $3.38 – up from $3.22 on January 9. Nationally gas prices climbed twelve cents (from $3.37 to $3.49 over the same period).

The numbers aren’t surprising, as gas prices are expected to climb as high as $4 per gallon this summer. In some parts of the country, drivers could be forced to shell out more than $5 per gallon.

How are state lawmakers responding to these price hikes?

Well, “Republican” legislative leaders at the S.C. State House have toyed with the idea raising the state’s gas tax – while one Democratic lawmaker (S.C. Rep. Bakari Sellers) wants to pass a modest gas tax cut.

Yes, you read that correctly … Republicans in South Carolina want to increase the gas tax, while a Democrat is trying to cut it.

Crazy, huh?

How much did a gallon of gas cost the last time you filled up your tank? Let us know by posting in our comments section below …

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GOVERNORS HOLD PRIVATE MEETING ON PORT ISSUES

S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley – who campaigned on a platform of open government – met behind closed doors with Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal for nearly two hours on Friday. In addition to barring media access to their confab, both Haley and Deal refused to speak to reporters after the meeting had concluded.

Talk about transparency, right?

According to the Associated Press, Haley and Deal met to discuss “stalled efforts to build a $5 billion cargo port on the Savannah River shared by both states.”

Um … “stalled?” The last time we checked those efforts weren’t so much “stalled” as they were “obliterated” – with Haley providing the dynamite.

Last November, Haley’s appointees to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) reversed the agency’s previous decision and granted a controversial environmental permit to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for its Savannah Harbor Expansion Project (SHEP). That decision will enable the port of Savannah to handle larger container ships, thus enhancing its competitive advantage at the expense of the Port of Charleston while effectively eliminating any chance that a deep water port will ever be constructed in Jasper County, S.C.

Haley’s “Savannah River Sellout” – which was precipitated by a personal request from Deal – also guarantees that U.S. taxpayers will be on the hook for Savannah’s expansion rather than private capital going to fund a Jasper County facility.

Haley has been roundly rebuked for this decision by Republicans, Democrats and RINOs alike – not only for the vast economic and environmental damage it would do to our state – but also because she’s alleged to have received financial and political favors from moneyed interests in Georgia in exchange for her appeasement.

How roundly? Both the S.C. House and the State Senate have voted unanimously to overturn the decision of Haley’s SCDHEC appointees.

While it’s unclear what Haley and Deal discussed on Friday, South Carolina’s top free market conservative wasted little time in making it clear what the expectations were as far as the Palmetto State’s economic and environmental best interests are concerned.

“Anything short of a specific, date certain commitment from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regarding the release of the spoil easement is unacceptable,” S.C. Sen. Tom Davis said.

Davis said that if the Corps lifts the easement – as it has promised to do (and as Congress has instructed it to do) – then private investment would immediately begin flowing to the Jasper County port site. As it stands now, though, Haley’s deal with Georgia will result in toxic sludge being dumped on the port site for the next half-century – something S.C. Senate President Glenn McConnell has referred to as the “Rape of the River.”

Davis said South Carolina could have won this concession in exchange for the water quality permit that Haley’s SCDHEC appointees gave up for nothing.

“Releasing this easement was the precise thing that we should have demanded – and probably would have received – back when Georgia was coming to us looking for a water quality permit for their expansion project,” Davis said. “It’s my hope and expectation that Gov. Haley and Gov. Deal will now work with the Corps and get that done.”

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S.C. Governor Nikki Haley will appear at a fundraiser in Winston-Salem, N.C. later this month on behalf of Pat McCrory, the frontrunner for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the Tar Heel State.

North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue – a Democrat who was swept into office four years ago on Barack Obama’s coattails – announced recently that she would not seek a second term.

Ummm … really? Has she taken a look at the GOP presidential contenders lately?

Anyway McCrory – who was mayor of Charlotte, N.C. from 1996-2009 – was narrowly defeated by Perdue in 2008. He’s an establishment Republican in the truest sense of the word – in fact he’s been working at the law/ lobbying firm of Moore Van Allen ever since he stepped down as mayor of Charlotte.

***

U.S. President Barack Obama will not attempt to impose a controversial new health care mandate that attempted to make religious organizations to pay for contraceptives, abortion inducing drugs and sterilization treatment.

“Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services, no matter where they work – that core principle remains,” Obama said Friday.

But he quickly added that “religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services, and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly.”

The proposed rule sparked a furor – especially among Catholics, who generally oppose most methods of birth control. And the bad blood may not be over – even as Obama offered his “accommodation” (he specifically refused to call it a “compromise”).

As usual, we’re proceeding straight through the social conservative kerfuffle and addressing the fiscal/ libertarian issues.

Well we’re not … smarter people whose hatred of Obamacare is much more rationally grounded than ours are …

“Critics are missing the larger point,” John Cochrane of The Cato Institute wrote in an op-ed article published in The Wall Street Journal. “Why should the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decree that any of us must pay for ‘insurance’ that covers contraceptives?”

Ah … now we’re talking.

“Sure, churches should be exempt,” Cochrane continues. “We should all be exempt.”

He’s right. Given Obamacare’s infringements on individual liberty, its costly tax hikes and its deficit-busting new entitlements … this contraceptive flap is the least of our worries about the new law.

Pic: via Daylife

***

We’ll probably wind up at the bottom of a ditch in Red Bank, S.C. for doing this, but such is fleeting nature of life … we just hope that our website has provided people with a few smiles over the years.

Anyway, in an apparent effort to preempt the “smoking gun” that S.C. Sen. Jake Knotts (RINO-Lexington) is said to have on their candidate, supporters of former Lexington County GOP official Katrina Shealy are leaking pictures that they say corroborates their assertion that Knotts roughed up a prostitute over a decade ago.

Take a look …

(Click to enlarge)

Hmmmm … obviously there’s nothing in these pictures that even remotely corroborates the allegations against Knotts, although if Shealy’s supporters wanted to accuse the rotund RINO of mixing Crown Royal and Mountain Dew in his mouth, they would appear to have a compelling case.

As we noted in our original report regarding these allegations, we have absolutely no trouble believing that Knotts “knocked around a woman of negotiable virtue in a motor home a dozen years ago.”

His nickname is “Ol’ Knocky,” for crying out loud.

Shealy’s people are going to have to do better than this if they want to prove it, though.

While the Knotts-Shealy feud rages on, it’s still unclear whether former local television anchor Kara Gormley Meador will be able to run for this seat – as she indicated she wanted to do earlier this week. Election Commission officials have confirmed that Gormley currently lives in Knotts’ district – but is about to be drawn out as a result of the state’s decennial redistricting.

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A decade ago, Mark Sanford made bales of political hay by campaigning against long wait times and bureaucratic mismanagement at the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles (SCDMV). And to his credit, Sanford actually made good on his campaign rhetoric after he was elected governor … ushering in a series of reforms that brought this troubled agency into the 21st Century.

Two of Sanford’s biggest reforms? Opening SCDMV offices on Saturdays and equipping the agency’s website to handle routine transactions online – which helped reduce average wait times from over an hour to less than fifteen minutes.

“It’s extremely pleasant,” one South Carolinian told WIS TV 10 (NBC – Columbia, S.C.) shortly after the new reforms were put in place. “The best it’s ever been. I’ve been here for hours before, trying to renew a license and I was in and out in less than 15 minutes today.”

In fact Sanford did such a good job reforming the agency that he used it as a case study of the need for expanded executive accountability in state government.

Unfortunately, under the leadership of Nikki Haley it appears as though the agency is slipping back into its old ways. FITS has heard numerous complaints from residents around the state lately regarding lengthening wait times at the SCDMV.

“I was at the Sumter DMV a couple days ago,” one of our Twitter followers recently noted. “It was awful. People had been waiting there for 2+ hours and it was still packed.”

“Same issues at the DMV locations in Greenville over the past few weeks,” another tweeted in response.

Hmmmm …

It wouldn’t surprise us in the least to discover that service at the SCDMV – which improved so dramatically under Sanford – has been slipping. After all this agency has lost its focus under Haley, choosing to play political games (here and here) rather than do the job that we pay it $84.5 million a year to do.

But before we go off the deep end criticizing this agency, we wanted to put the question to our readers …

Oh, and by all means please share your experiences in our comments section below …

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A South Carolina Senate panel unanimously approved the nomination of Catherine Templeton to be the new commissioner of the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) on Thursday – a victory for the scandal-scarred administration of Gov. Nikki Haley.

The panel voted 13-0 in favor of Templeton’s nomination – with a trio of Democratic lawmakers abstaining.

Templeton’s confirmation was never really in doubt, although the hearing could have been a very damaging event for Haley’s administration – which is still reeling from a major scandal involving this agency and the governor’s appointees to its governing board.

Last November, Haley’s SCDHEC appointees reversed the agency’s prior decision and granted a controversial environmental permit to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for its Savannah Harbor Expansion Project (SHEP). That decision will enable the port of Savannah to handle larger container ships, thus enhancing its competitive advantage at the expense of the Port of Charleston.

More importantly, the decision effectively eliminates any chance that a deep water port will ever be constructed in Jasper County, S.C. Also, it guarantees that U.S. taxpayers will be on the hook for Savannah’s expansion – rather than private capital going to fund a Jasper County facility that would create thousands of South Carolina jobs and cause much less damage to the environment.

Haley has been roundly rebuked for her “Savannah River Sellout” by Republicans, Democrats and RINOs alike, not only for the vast economic and environmental damage her decision will do to our state – but also because she’s alleged to have received financial and political favors from moneyed interests in Georgia in exchange for her appeasement.

In fact both the S.C. House and the State Senate have voted unanimously to overturn the decision of Haley’s SCDHEC appointees.

As it turned out, Templeton was able to plead the fifth on the “Savannah River Sellout.”

Haley was giddy at Templeton’s confirmation.

“We would like to congratulate one of our rockstar cabinet directors, Catherine Templeton, for getting screened out of committee to be the next director of the Dept. Of Health and Environmental Control,” Haley wrote on her Facebook page. “Our cabinet’s loss will be a huge gain for the state of South Carolina!”

That remains to be seen …

We don’t think Templeton is remotely qualified for this position, and obviously there are serious questions pertaining to the integrity of the commissioners who nominated her. Having said that, we believe it the executive’s right to administer the executive branch of government – which is why we recommended that Senators confirm Templeton.

Having cleared the Senate’s medical affairs committee, Templeton’s confirmation will be voted on next week by the full State Senate.

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We were forwarded some information a few weeks ago about a proposed casino resort in the South Carolina Lowcountry but for whatever reason we never got around to writing about it. As we’ve made plain on numerous occasions, though, we have no objection whatsoever to expanded gambling in South Carolina – whether it be casino, sports or parimutuel betting.

Why not?

Well, for starters gambling is an industry that creates jobs … like the estimated 2,250 direct positions (and 1,600 spinoff jobs) that would be created by this planned Hardeeville, S.C. casino resort, which will include a hotel, golf course and convention center. Also … unlike a lot of other industries that locate in South Carolina, this particular project isn’t asking state or local governments to shell out a single dime in taxpayer-funded incentives.

More to the ideological point, though … why should state government enjoy a monopoly on gambling in the Palmetto State?

Seriously … it strikes us as highly hypocritical that our leaders would seek to shut down a proposed casino resort on moral grounds seeing as South Carolina has been running its own multibillion-dollar gambling operation (a.k.a. the state’s “Education” Lottery) for the past decade.

Anyway, while Tea Partiers understand where we’re coming from ideologically … students at the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) don’t particularly care about the philosophical arguments associated with this project: They just want the jobs.

In fact a group of students calling themselves “Let Us Work” recently produced a video promoting the project …

“This project is so beneficial, I don’t why anybody is opposing it.” Ryan Baggott, one of the student founders of ‘Let Us Work,’ told FITS. “Hardeeville and Jasper County need help, and our government shouldn’t be standing in the way of something like this that will help them.”

“It makes me wonder if we really do live in a free market,” Baggott added. “We should allow people to come in and create jobs if they want to.”

Naturally certain segments of South Carolina’s GOP electorate will always oppose gambling, but most Palmetto State Republicans (and most Tea Partiers) don’t have a problem with it.

“This influx of prosperity would be a huge boost to the state economy,” says Bryan Cox, head of the S.C. Free Market Society, another group which is supporting the project.

For our Holy rolling friends in the South Carolina Upstate, an estimated 70 percent of this “influx of prosperity” will come courtesy of out-of-state tourists traveling up and down Interstate 95 – i.e. people who would otherwise spend their money at similar destinations in North Carolina or Florida.

Also, for those of you who care about “home rule,” both the City of Hardeeville and Jasper County have passed unanimous resolutions in support of the project.

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We promise not to spend the entire week focused on the S.C. District 23 Senate race, but at the moment it’s the gift that keeps on giving …

Two weeks ago, we reported on some saucy allegations made against S.C. Sen. Jake Knotts by supporters of Katrina Shealy, the Lexington County GOP official (and friend of Gov. Nikki Haley) who is running against the incumbent “Republican in Name Only.”

This week, we’ve been informed by sources close to Knotts that he is allegedly holding onto a piece of information that will “finish” Shealy’s campaign – while also ending the career of a “prominent South Carolina GOP lawmaker.” According to our sources, Knotts’ plan was to drop the damning information on Shealy toward the end of their primary campaign – while using it as leverage over the elected official in the weeks leading up to the vote.

Ah, South Carolina politics …

Anyway, prior calculations by both Knotts and Shealy are likely being revisited this week in light of former local television reporter/ anchor Kara Gormley’s surprise decision to jump into the race.

One thing’s for certain, though, this has suddenly become the legislative race to watch in South Carolina …

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