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Archive for the ‘News Posts’ Category

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Rex tour in Calhoun, Charleston, Berkeley over the weekend

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

Campaign News

(COLUMBIA) State Superintendent of Education and Democratic candidate for Governor Jim Rex announced today that he will bring his statewide “46 Counties in 46 Days” tour to Calhoun and Charleston counties on Saturday and Berkeley County on Sunday. Rex is reprising his successful 2006 tour and spending the final 46 days of the primary campaign visiting every county in South Carolina.

“South Carolinians are hurting in every county of our state, and as Governor, I pledge to be a leader who will work to improve education and bring jobs and economic development to every community in every region of South Carolina,” said Rex. “We cannot have a twenty-first century state with islands of prosperity amid a rising sea of poverty and unemployment.”

The schedule is as follows: *

Saturday, May 15, 2010

3:00 p.m.
Community Fish Fry
Unique Sensations
556 Bridge Street
St. Matthews, SC

7:00 p.m.
Community Fish Fry
Hampton Park
Corner, Cleveland and Rutledge Streets
Charleston, SC

Sunday, May 16, 2010

11:00 a.m.
Morris Brown AME Church
13 Morris Street
Charleston, SC

1:45 p.m.
Gilligan’s
582 Dock Road
Moncks Corner, SC

*Schedule reflects only official campaign events and is not inclusive of all Rex appearances.

Tags: 46 County Tour, Jim Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

Rex tour in Williamsburg County on Friday

Friday, May 14th, 2010

Campaign News

State Superintendent of Education and Democratic candidate for Governor Jim Rex announced today that he will bring his statewide “46 Counties in 46 Days” tour to Williamsburg County on Friday. Rex is reprising his successful 2006 tour and spending the final 46 days of the primary campaign visiting every county in South Carolina.

“South Carolinians are hurting in every county of our state, and as Governor, I pledge to be a leader who will work to improve education and bring jobs and economic development to every community in every region of South Carolina,” said Rex.  “We cannot have a twenty-first century state with islands of prosperity amid a rising sea of poverty and unemployment.”

The schedule is as follows: *

Friday, May 14, 2010

4:30 p.m.
Meet and Greet
145 West Main Street
Kingstree, SC

6:00 p.m.
Community Fish Fry
Hemingway Town Park
McAllister Street, Hemingway

*Schedule reflects only official campaign events and is not inclusive of all Rex appearances.

See Jim’s Progress>>

Tags: 46 County Tour, Jim Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

Rex talks jobs in visit to Georgetown mill

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Originally published in TheSunNews.com
By Aliana Ramos

Jim Rex, state superintendent of education and a Democratic candidate for governor, added a last minute stop to his campaign tour in Georgetown on Wednesday, stopping by the Steelworkers of America Union Hall.

Rex, himself a former steelworker, stopped by to see firsthand one of the state’s biggest issues: a lack of jobs.

The ArcelorMittal steel mill in Georgetown has been shut down since July, and the company and the union are in negotiations to reopen the plant. A deal is close, union and company officials said earlier this week.

Rex said he spent about eight months cutting steel coils at the Champion spark plug plant in Toledo, OH after high school.

With such short notice no current steelworkers showed up to meet Rex Wednesday, however Rex shared his ideas for keeping the mill open with the Steelworker Organization’s Active Retiree President Samuel Wragg and The Sun News.

Rex also was invited to the next Steelworkers Union meeting May 19.

“Here is a concrete example … of a work force that is ready to go in an area that has suffered economically,” Rex said. “We are going to do everything we can to get that steel mill up and running.”

Georgetown County’s jobless rate has shot well into the double digits and had improved to 13.1 percent in March, the most recent data available.”Well, part of it is making sure the company believes that the state is helping it remain competitive,” Rex said.

The port of Georgetown needs about $9 million to dredge its channel to the federally authorized depth of 27 feet. It is about 21 feet, according to the last available reading from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The mill was one of the port’s biggest customers.

Rex is spending the last 46 days of the primary campaign visiting all of the state’s counties.

Rex also visited Waccamaw Intermediate School and Sampit Community Center during his campaign stop in Georgetown.

By Aliana Ramos
aramos@thesunnews.com
Contact ALIANA RAMOS at 443-2434.
TheSunNews.com

Tags: Jim Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

Scoppe: Dr. Rex’s diagnosis and cure for what ails South Carolina

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Opinion Editorial originally published in The State Newspaper.

I BECOME less certain every day which Republican I prefer in the gubernatorial race, but I’ve felt sure from the start that it was an open-and-shut case on the Democratic side: Sen. Vincent Sheheen has impressed me from the first time I met him, with his solid grasp of our state’s problems, his focus on systemic reforms, his good-government instincts and his willingness to work across party lines.

So although I like Education Superintendent Jim Rex, I considered our meeting to discuss his campaign for governor little more than a formality. I quickly changed my mind. I still like Sen. Sheheen and may end up where I started, but Dr. Rex is not someone to be written off.

What makes Dr. Rex an attractive choice for governor is his clear understanding of what ails our state and how a governor ought to go about curing it — and a track record that suggests he actually might be able to deliver on his cure. More on that in a moment.

His argument for why he should be the Democratic nominee is that as the only Democrat in the race who has won statewide office — which he did by scraping past the Republican/Howie Rich/pay parents to abandon the schools juggernaut — he’s his party’s best shot for taking the Governor’s Mansion. If the race is still up for grabs, his ability to make that case might well be a determining factor in the June 8 primary, since he and Sen. Sheheen have very similar values and even priorities. (The third Democrat, Sen. Robert Ford, has built his campaign on the fool’s gold of resurrecting the video poker barons and by currying favor with the Rich/voucher gang.)

On the day we sat down with Dr. Rex, the political buzz was about an effort to boost legislative support for a cigarette tax increase by settling for 30 cents instead of 50. That idea was not a little annoying to a candidate who has been pushing a plan most legislators won’t even touch: to raise the tax to $1 a pack, still about 40 cents below the national average but enough to help keep from laying off another 1,000 or so teachers.

He brought up the cigarette tax debate as “a great case study” of our state’s malady: Whenever anything is proposed that would shake up the status quo, “The most common response is ‘no.’ The next most common response is ‘not now.’ Form a study committee. Kick it down the road — preferably until after the next election. And if ‘no’ and ‘not now’ don’t work, then it’s ‘not that much’ as a fallback. That’s where we are now.”

He’s right about the cigarette tax (even at 50 cents), and he’s right in applying his diagnosis to any number of things our state needs to do: comprehensive tax reform, rewriting outdated education funding formulas, restructuring state agencies, rethinking our overall approach to government — all of which he supports, and all of which are currently being studied or will be studied in the coming year by committees created by the Legislature to avoid taking action.

“That modus operandi has permeated the legislative process,” he said, “and it’s devastated our state.”

His cure: “leaders who are willing to risk re-election” in order to move our state forward.

This is where he likes to remind people that he is a “post-career politician,” who worked a full career in public and higher education without dabbling in politics, retired and then decided to run for office — that is, someone willing to risk re-election.

One of the main things he has determined in three and a half years in office — other than what ails our state — is that “you cannot change South Carolina’s government or South Carolina from Columbia.” If he’s elected, he would put together a plan to overhaul the government to work in an era of reduced budgets (“turn-around CEOs don’t come into a company with a detailed plan; you have to kick the tires”) and adopt or build on whatever tax proposals the Legislature’s tax study commission makes. Then he would spend a year holding town-hall meetings around the state, getting feedback but also building support for his plans.

If that sounds like the way Gov. Mark Sanford kept promising he would get his own plans enacted, there’s one critical difference: Dr. Rex has actually done it. In his first year in office, he held 30 town hall meetings across the state. He credits those meetings with creating the grassroots support that led to unanimous legislative approval of plans to overhaul the state’s school testing system and to free school districts from some of the spending constraints lawmakers have put on them, as well as majority support (though not the two-thirds needed to overcome Mr. Sanford’s veto) for a muscular public school choice program.

Of course, it’s one thing to get the Legislature to overhaul a testing program that practically everyone in the state hated, or even give schools spending flexibility when it’s stripping their funding to record lows; quite another to convince lawmakers to overhaul a tax system that needs overhauling primarily because it’s a glob of special-interest favors, or to make fundamental changes to their notion of what government is.

But in this state, even accomplishing the former is significant — certainly not something to be written off.

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE
Associate Editor
Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

Tags: Cindi Scoppe, Jim Rex
Posted in Letters to the editor, News Posts | No Comments »

Rex tour in Georgetown, Charleston Counties on Wednesday

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Campaign News

(COLUMBIA) State Superintendent of Education and Democratic candidate for Governor Jim Rex announced today that he will bring his statewide “46 Counties in 46 Days” tour to Georgetown and Charleston counties on Wednesday. Rex is reprising his successful 2006 tour and spending the final 46 days of the primary campaign visiting every county in South Carolina.

“South Carolinians are hurting in every county of our state, and as Governor, I pledge to be a leader who will work to improve education and bring jobs and economic development to every community in every region of South Carolina,” said Rex.  “We cannot have a twenty-first century state with islands of prosperity amid a rising sea of poverty and unemployment.”

The schedule is as follows: *

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

3:00 p.m.
Sampit Community Center
92 Singleton Avenue
Georgetown SC

7:00 p.m.
New Democrats Gubernatorial Debate
College of Charleston
Physician’s Memorial Auditorium
3 College Way
Charleston, SC

*Schedule reflects only official campaign events and is not inclusive of all Rex appearances.

Tags: 46 County Tour, Jim Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

Rex tour in Greenville, Spartanburg on Tuesday

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Campaign News

(COLUMBIA) State Superintendent of Education and Democratic candidate for Governor Jim Rex announced today that he will bring his statewide “46 Counties in 46 Days” tour to Greenville and Spartanburg on Tuesday. Rex is reprising his successful 2006 tour and spending the final 46 days of the primary campaign visiting every county in South Carolina.

“South Carolinians are hurting in every county of our state, and as Governor, I pledge to be a leader who will work to improve education and bring jobs and economic development to every community in every region of South Carolina,” said Rex.  “We cannot have a twenty-first century state with islands of prosperity amid a rising sea of poverty and unemployment.”

The schedule is as follows: *

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

8:00 a.m.
Live on Fox Carolina TV
Greenville, SC

12:15 p.m.
Spartanburg Rotary
Piedmont Club
361 East Main Street
Spartanburg, SC

3:30 p.m.
Tour CC Woodson Recreation Center
855 South Liberty Street
Spartanburg, SC

6:00 p.m.
Campaign Fundraiser
Home of Nancy and Erwin Maddrey
201 Crescent Ave.
Greenville, SC

*Schedule reflects only official campaign events and is not inclusive of all Rex appearances.

Tags: 46 County Tour, Jim Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

Sue Rex in McCormick, Lancaster on Monday

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Campaign News

Sue Rex, wife of gubernatorial candidate Jim Rex, announced today that she will bring her statewide “At the Table” tour to McCormick and Lancaster on Monday.  The series, featuring roundtable discussions with South Carolina women regarding issues affecting them and their families, is aimed at providing a place for women, who comprise 51.3 percent of South Carolina’s population, to be heard.

The schedule is as follows:

Monday, May 10, 2010
12:30 p.m.
Fannie Kate’s at McCormick Inn
127 S. Main Street
McCormick, SC

4:30 p.m.
Mariachi’s
217 Lancaster Bypass West
Lancaster, SC

South Carolina ranks fiftieth in the nation in women elected to public office.  And, according to a 2008 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the Palmetto State ranks in the bottom third of states on women’s earnings, educational attainment, and poverty.  African-American women earn little more than half of what white men earn in the state and half as likely to hold a four-year college degree as white women.

Learn more about Sue>>

Tags: At the Table, Jim Rex, Sue Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

Rex brings 46 County Tour to Lancaster on Monday

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Campaign News

(COLUMBIA) State Superintendent of Education and Democratic candidate for Governor Jim Rex announced today that he will bring his statewide “46 Counties in 46 Days” tour to Lancaster on Monday. Rex is reprising his successful 2006 tour and spending the final 46 days of the primary campaign visiting every county in South Carolina.

“South Carolinians are hurting in every county of our state, and as Governor, I pledge to be a leader who will work to improve education and bring jobs and economic development to every community in every region of South Carolina,” said Rex.  “We cannot have a twenty-first century state with islands of prosperity amid a rising sea of poverty and unemployment.”

The schedule is as follows: *

Monday, May 10, 2010
6:00 p.m.
Lancaster County Democratic Party Meeting
USC – Lancaster Campus
Bradley Building
476 Hubbard Dr.
Lancaster SC

*Schedule reflects only official campaign events and is not inclusive of all Rex appearances.

For more information and to see Jim’s progress, click here>>

Tags: 46 County Tour, Jim Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

46-county tour in Florence, Allendale, Hampton over next two days

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Campaign News

(COLUMBIA) – State Superintendent of Education and Democratic candidate for Governor Jim Rex announced today that he will bring his statewide “46 Counties in 46 Days” tour to Florence County on Friday, as well as Allendale and Hampton counties on Saturday. Rex is reprising his successful 2006 tour and spending the final 46 days of the primary campaign visiting every county in South Carolina.

“South Carolinians are hurting in every county of our state, and as Governor, I pledge to be a leader who will work to improve education and bring jobs and economic development to every community in every region of South Carolina,” said Rex.  “We cannot have a twenty-first century state with islands of prosperity amid a rising sea of poverty and unemployment.”

The schedule is as follows: *

Friday, May 7, 2010
6:00 p.m.
Community Fish Fry
The Manna House
450 Jarrott Street
Florence, SC

Saturday, May 8, 2010
11:00 a.m.
Allendale Cooter Festival Parade
Line up begins at 264 Gum Street
Allendale, SC

1:00 p.m.
Town of Estill Community Picnic
Bill Durham Center
33 West Railroad Avenue
Estill, SC

*Schedule reflects only official campaign events and is not inclusive of all Rex appearances.

For more information and to see Jim’s progress, click here>>

Tags: 46 Counties, 46 County Tour, Jim Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

46-county tour in Lexington, Orangeburg on Thursday

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Campaign News

(COLUMBIA) – State Superintendent of Education and Democratic candidate for Governor Jim Rex announced today that he will bring his statewide “46 Counties in 46 Days” tour to Lexington and Orangeburg counties on Thursday. Rex is reprising his successful 2006 tour and spending the final 46 days of the primary campaign visiting every county in South Carolina.

“South Carolinians are hurting in every county of our state, and as Governor, I pledge to be a leader who will work to improve education and bring jobs and economic development to every community in every region of South Carolina,” said Rex. “We cannot have a twenty-first century state with islands of prosperity amid a rising sea of poverty and unemployment.”

The schedule is as follows:*

Thursday, May 6, 2010

7:00 a.m.
City Light National Day of Prayer
Brookland Baptist Church
1066 Sunset Boulevard
West Columbia, SC 29169

7:00 p.m.
Community Fish Fry
Bowman Nature Park
6056 Charleston Highway
Bowman, SC

*Schedule reflects only official campaign events and is not inclusive of all Rex appearances.

Tags: 46 County Tour, Jim Rex
Posted in News Posts | No Comments »

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