Last month it was What The Folks? - a website that claims to have the inside scoop on our founding editor’s untold millions.

This month, it’s Who The Folks? – a mirror website that promises to expose the affairs of our favorite “moral degenerate,” including “the orgies, the threesomes, the one night stands, the lovers before and after his sham of a marriage.”

Yeah … apparently in addition to being rich and famous, Sic Willie is also laying pipe 24-7.  Can all the ladies in the house say yeah (yeah!) …

Please.  This is utter and complete nonsense.  Sic Willie had no game before he got married and we’re guessing he has even less now that his testicles have been turned in.

Plus, there is absolutely no way in hell our founding editor is this important … right?

Right?

In the meantime, for all you haters out there …

Frankly, we’ve had an “elegant sufficiency” of ourselves around here … and we’ve certainly had a “superfluity” of our attention-starved founding editor, Sic Willie.

Of course as FITS has taken a more prominent role in framing the political debate in South Carolina, the scrutiny surrounding our “brain child” has escalated – which is certainly understandable.

None of us take that personally – least of all Sic, who has been clinically diagnosed with a rare (and incurable) case of “Look-at-me syndrome.”

Seriously, people.  We get what’s going on here.

We carry a big stick, and we’ve never given “two bits” who we piss off in wielding it.

That makes some very powerful people very angry, and this is them fighting back.

Anyway, the latest attempt to check our influence is a website called “What The Folks?,” which purports to “expose” a rather lengthy list of entities and individuals who are allegedly paying our founding editor.

In fact, the website claims that $80,000 of Sic Willie’s “dirty money” has already been exposed, although its anonymous authors doesn’t reveal how they arrived at that figure – or identify who paid it.

Nor do they explain why we haven’t received any of it.

Of course we were alerted last week that What The Folks? is merely a precursor to a much more sinister website, which we have now learned is to be entitled Who The Folks? …

Just as What The Folks? purports to expose Sic Willie professionally, Who The Folks? purports to expose his personal life, specifically Sic’s “multiple lovers, ’sextortion’ plots and the orgies and threesomes he conceals from his battered wife,” according to a recent email we received from an anonymous address.

We’re also told that whoever is behind Who The Folks? has obtained public records on Sic Willie (and members of his family) dating back to the early 1990’s.

Wow … this is gonna be fun!

U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett has hired a Karl Rove protege who was at the center of the Bush Administration’s Justice Department scandal to dig up dirt on his political opponents, documents filed with the S.C. State Ethics Commission reveal.

Tim Griffin, a nationally-renowned “opposition research” specialist who is currently running for Congress in Arkansas, has been paid more than $36,000 by the Barrett campaign since July of this year.

In addition to his involvement in the Justice Department scandal, Griffin has also been accused of voter suppression tactics in Florida – allegations he has vehemently denied.  Of course, in 2007 the Bush administration agreed to remove his name from consideration for a U.S. Attorney’s position as a result of those charges.

Griffin would up continuing to serve as an “interim” U.S. Attorney, however, prompting accusations that Bush – like Obama with the “czars” – was circumventing the Senate confirmation process.

Needless to say, Barrett isn’t the only candidate in the 2010 race with a dirt-digging capability.  In fact, it’s become pretty obvious to us that all of the candidates currently running for governor have that functionality.

“Too small to be a Republic, too big to be an insane asylum …”

That’s an approximation of a quote often attributed to the not-so-great state of South Carolina, a mercurial, topsy-turvy little inverted triangle of a state that’s currently undergoing what could be the most sweltering political summer in its storied – albeit unsophisticated – history.

If South Carolina wasn’t already a “banana republic” – as Gov. Mark Sanford frequently referred to it before sticking his banana somewhere he shouldn’t – it has certainly become one in the wake of the utter and complete implosion of political order that has followed his “Argentine delight.”  And if the Palmetto State is indeed an “insane asylum,” then right now its political class is clearly the patient wearing the straight-jacket in a padded room, enjoying its broth through a straw.

Just as our governor became thoroughly un-spooled early on in this crisis, “Argentine Fever” has now swept through the state capital and beyond, causing more unravelings. Each day it seems fresh revelations are shaking the state’s establishment to its very foundations, rattling cages and redefining a political landscape that’s beginning to resemble the surface of the moon.

No joke, people, there are impact craters left and right … with no end in sight (sky rockets in flight? Argentine delight?) …

Sorry …

Obviously, our (not so “little” anymore) website has broken and/0r covered many of those revelations, prompting more than a few people to express their displeasure with the way we have handled ourselves – or handled certain stories.

Rather than play the game of blaming the MSM or offering excuses and/or explanations for the way we’ve handled certain things, we would like to take this opportunity to say very simply that we will continue to do the “voodoo that we do” … just the way we’ve been doing it.

Anybody who doesn’t it like it?

Well, as Slow Hand once said …

Since FITS’ inception, we’ve generally tried to refrain from breaking news about politicians’ private lives unless there was an abuse of taxpayer funds or some other illegality involved.

No more.

The rules of engagement have changed, people, which means that in addition to altering our editorial policy to better compete with news outlets like La Socialista (a.k.a. The State newspaper), we might also reach back into the vault to publish some of the stuff we took a pass on the first time around.

In other words, it’s open season – and we’re drawing a fresh bead.

If you have proof that a South Carolina elected official is messing around send us an email, or visit our contact page.

S.C. school teacher Kelly Payne – who has transformed her high school current issues class into South Carolina’s most popular political forum – joins FITS founding editor Sic Willie this evening to discuss her star students, celebrity guests and Sic’s unnatural obsession for her.

Kelly’s also bringing some special guests to the second installment of our weekly radio program, “Face-Off with FITS,” which last week welcomed S.C. Rep. Eric Bedingfield.

You can read more about Kelly and her amazing group of students by clicking here.

Tonight’s show starts at 6:30 p.m. and will run for approximately an hour.

To listen, click on our radio page and select the “Listen Live” option.

A proposed cigarette tax hike would cost South Carolina’s economy nearly a quarter billion dollars and over 4,000 jobs – including over 1,300 retail jobs typically held by low-income citizens – a study released today by the S.C. Policy Council reports.

In the latest blow to befall a rapidly-disintegrating pro-tax hike coalition, the Policy Council study is chock full of damaging data about the proposed 50-cent tax hike – which would raise our state’s cigarette tax well above current rates in our neighboring states of Georgia (37 cents) and North Carolina (35 cents), as well as regional peers Virginia (30 cents) and Florida (33.9 cents).

Plus, these increases are on top of the largest-ever increase in the federal cigarette tax – a 62-cent hike that just went into effect last month.

“A cigarette tax increase will affect much more than cigarette sales,” the report states. “Businesses along the entire supply chain for a variety of products will suffer a reduction in sales and profits. In turn, these businesses will be forced to reduce employment and investment expenditures. Tax revenues at the state and local levels will decline as a result.”

In bad news for the bill’s big government backers, like House Speaker Bobby Harrell and Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman, the Policy Council report shows that revenue estimates from tax increases in other states have fallen well short of their anticipated mark – 35% below projections in Georgia and 16% below projections in Virginia.

Ruh-roh. We can literally hear RINOcrats pulling their support.

“Relying on a declining revenue source to fund recurring expenses is a recipe for future tax increases,” the report concluded.

No doubt. In fact, we hit on this theme extensively in two previous stories about the tax hike (here and here).

Of course, since then the original plan to spend this money on “low-income families” has been scrapped, with lawmakers now looking to put the money into a “trust fund.”

Oh and are you ready for this?

According to La Liberdad (a.k.a. The Greenville News), “lawmakers would decide later how the funds would be spent.”

In the benevolent dictatorship of Sic Willie, there would be no “stimulus.”

Government would build roads, bridges, some schools, prisons and pay for people to perform these core, limited functions.

Beyond that?

It would get the hell out of the way.

But since the question confronting the state of South Carolina at the moment isn’t whether there should or shouldn’t be a “stimulus,” which in reality is nothing more than a bureaucratic bailout, we’re going to deal for the moment with life as it is – not as it we wish it was.

Still, the truth we’re confronted with is that, right now, Columbia politicians are growing government at a time when every one else is having to cut their budgets – families, small businesses, big businesses, you name it.

In fact, everybody is having making tough decisions right now except government, which will grow this year with or without the controversial $740 million that Gov. Mark Sanford, state lawmakers and the mainstream media have had their panties in a wad over for several months now.

Seriously, even if you eliminated this pot of money altogether, state government would (will) still be bigger this year than it was last year – which frankly makes ZERO sense in this economic climate.

And it makes even less sense when you consider government grew by more than 40% over the previous four years.

Of course, none of these facts are putting the brakes on a good, government-fueled commie whinefest.

And while S.C. Republicrat lawmakers are bitching and moaning about “cuts to core services,” they’ve also been busy adding a Capital Police Force, paying for a new “vegetable marketing” agency, creating some bogus new taxpayer-funded dental program and bringing back “competitive grants” – all while continuing to pour cash into literally hundreds of totally unnecessary government programs.

Yet while all of this unneeded and wasteful boondoggling is going on, it’s important to note that not a single reform measure to fix our state’s spending addiction, backward government structure, anti-competitive policies and bloated, inefficient agency operations is being seriously debated by lawmakers.

Nothing.

Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

That’s because S.C. politicians (and the bureaucrats feeding them doom and gloom pronouncements) don’t want reform – they just want to get their grubby paws on as much of your money as they can at a time when you desperately need to hang onto as much of it as possible.

And so our state government – which has failed the people of the Palmetto State in every way imaginable for decades – wants to keep on doing what it’s been doing even though it obviously doesn’t work and we obviously can’t afford it anymore.

That’s garbage, quite frankly.

Thankfully, our founding editor – in his benevolence – has thought long and hard about this and come up with a plan.

Ready?

“Give them the money …” Sic says.

Wait, what?

Yup, you heard him right.

“Give them the money, all $740 million of the disputed funds …”

Seriously?

Seriously. Let them spend it, Sic says, on non-recurring expenses, recurring expenses, “education” expenses, “health care” expenses – hell, let them spend it on WHATEVER they want.

Of course, that’s just the first half of the sentence. Here’s the second:

“… provided they agree to three simple, easy reforms.”

Oooh … we knew it!

That Sic Willie always has something up his sleeve, doesn’t he?

So what are the three reforms?

A revenue cap, government restructuring and school choice.

Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom-bang-bing.

Why those three reforms, you may ask?

Because a revenue cap would make sure we spend our money wisely moving forward, restructuring would ensure that we spend it efficiently moving forward and school choice would ensure that we don’t fail yet another generation of children while we’re in the process of (finally) picking our state up off the mat with sensible fiscal and governmental reform.

Seriously, if we’re going to pour billions of “one-time” dollars into a bunch of failed bureaucracies, let’s (duh) insist that these bureaucracies make fundamental changes.

You know, so they don’t keep failing.

What’s wrong with that?

After all, everybody likes change right?

Oh we forgot – not at the S.C. State House.

Because “change” that means government (for once) would have to be accountable to the taxpayers, and God forbid the people who pay for this show actually insist that their money go somewhere other than down the f*cking drain … as usual.

Anyway, that’s Sic Willie’s “stimulus” deal.

Take the money – but agree to real reform.

Of course, we haven’t even gotten to the best part of the “Sic plan.”

Ready?

If government refuses to change its ways, all $740 million of this controversial “stimulus” money would go directly to the taxpayers of South Carolina – a massive “one-time” tax rebate to the people who are ultimately on the hook for all this debt.

Bottom line, we’re never going to get the reform our state desperately needs unless we insist on it.

And if the agencies are unwilling to reform, they don’t get our money – we do.

We promise there’s actually some S.C. political news happening today that doesn’t involve our founding editor, but somebody apparently forgot to tell that to the young guns in the S.C. blogosphere.

Or for that matter, the aging Communications Czar of the Palmetto State’s crumbling status quo.

Seriously, did we miss the memo? Because if all guns are blazing at Sic Willie today, we’ve got some interesting details we can share.

We’ve already written about the fact that South Carolina’s MSM is giving out awards to people for targeting Sic, and there’s also the accusation that our founding editor is hatin’ on gay people after his weekend rant on the uselessness of U.S. Rep. Barney Frank.

Of course, those flanking maneuvers merely presaged the full-frontal assault, delivered by none other than his venerable Viagraness, Bob McAlister.

From McAlister’s cleverly-christened SC Conservative blog:

… in the world of bloggermaniacs, where a single petri dish somehow hosts mutant organisms (Folks) and more rational life forms (Adam Fogle), freak is chic. After all, in a roomful of crazy people, everyone is sane to everyone else in the room. A sane person walks into a room of crazies, and the sane person becomes odd.

And so it is with mutant bloggers like Folks, who trashes Fogle like he trashes most everyone who is successful.

Bobby Harrell, Hugh Leatherman, Glenn McConnell, Warren Tompkins, Richard Quinn and most every other Republican is, to Folks, either crooked or a RINO, or both. Never mind that these guys were working to build the GOP when Folks was in his crib playing with his wee wee, begging to the breastfed.

In fact, they made it possible for an unwashed pothead to occupy a position of power in the governor’s office, if only for a brief period of time.

Now Folks has crowned himself the next media god.

Problem is he’s still playing with his wee wee and begging to be breastfed.

Aside from the fairly transparent effort to legitimize Mr. Fogle’s little website, let’s be clear about a few things here.

Harrell, Leatherman, McConnell, Tompkins and Quinn are RINOs.

They are crooked.

And we are going to continue calling them out, because the so-called “Republican” party that they supposedly built has grown government faster than Democrats ever dared to dream – once during the boom years of the 1990’s and then again by an even higher rate during not-so-boom 2000’s.

But since McAlister has named names, let’s go through his parade of big government backers one-by-one, shall we?

Harrell? He was a key player in a scam to take money away from small businesses so that he could fund new higher ed boondoggles.

Leatherman? He’s the Godfather of Pork, a former Democrat and perhaps the most liberal “GOP” politician ever elected in this state.

McConnell? He’s funneled millions of tax dollars to his beloved Confederate submarine while paying lip service to real reform – the consummate RINO.

Tompkins? He’s a nationally-renowned RINO who’s been selling out to well-heeled special interests for years.

Quinn? His firm isn’t quite as bad, but they do represent McConnell, his little Confederate sub and the TV personal injury lawyers. They’ve also given us the most liberal Republican U.S. Senator in history, and lately have stepped up their attacks against real conservative reformers in South Carolina.

Oh, and in addition to blowing your money at unprecedented levels, all of these guys are linked to the government-funded pyramid scheme that aims to place economic development totally under the thumb of a socialist-style central planning committee.

Here’s our point, though.

It’s not just that Harrell, Leatherman, McConnell, Tompkins and Quinn are such obvious leftists … it’s that they’re pretending to be pro-business, pro-growth, pro-taxpayer conservatives.

At least the Democrats in this state are honest about being a bunch of socialists.

McAlister did get two things right about Sic, though … he loves to play with his wee wee and is always begging to be breastfed.

WEB EXTRAS:

Crazy As A Sprayed Roach (SC Conservative)

Wolfe wins SCPA in-depth reporting award (Wolfe Reports)

Yawn. Sic Willie Still Hates Gays (Waldo Lydecker’s Journal)

Rewind – it’s such a great button.

We always used to hit it on our cassette player as soon as “Beat It” was over, or on the VCR remote as soon as Ophelia (a.k.a. Jamie Lee Curtis) had finished explaining the rent situation to Winthorpe in Trading Places.

Mmmm … looking very, very good, Billy Ray.

Anyway, now it’s your turn to use the << button here at FITS to see what you missed over the weekend

<< BLACKJACK ANYONE?

(South Carolina’s biggest spenders are ballin’ on a $21.16 billion budget, yo …)

<< TRADING PLACES – WASHINGTON STYLE

(Lindsey Graham asked for more earmarks than Majority Whip Jim Clyburn? Yup …)

<< LEATHERMAN & COOPER AT IT AGAIN

(South Carolina’s two top budget writers can’t shoot straight …)

<< A. CITIZEN ON FRANK KNAPP

(Apparently, we’re not the only people sick of this dude’s lies …)

Again, those were just the SC political headlines that appeared here on FITS … to catch up on all the weekend clips you missed you’d have to be a subscriber to the FITS Blast, which pumps out a weekend recap of all the hottest S.C. political stories every Sunday in addition to our daily blasts every weekday morning.

Click here to subscribe …