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South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford sat in her oceanfront living room Friday, recalling how her husband repeatedly asked permission to visit his lover in the months after she discovered his affair.

“I said absolutely not. It’s one thing to forgive adultery; it’s another thing to condone it,” Jenny Sanford told The Associated Press during a 20-minute interview at the coastal home where she sought refuge with their four sons. They were her first extended comments on the affair.

She said that when her husband, Gov. Mark Sanford, inexplicably disappeared last week, she hoped he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, as his staff told those who inquired about his absence. That he had dared to go to Argentina to see the other woman left her stunned.

“He was told in no uncertain terms not to see her,” she said in a strong, steady voice….

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California’s controller said on Wednesday that he would have to issue IOUs in a week if lawmakers can’t quickly solve a $24 billion budget deficit, and the state’s treasurer plans to tap a reserve fund to meet debt service costs.

The measures came as a budget crisis deepened in the most populous U.S. state and the gridlocked legislature failed to pass a proposed $11 billion in cuts.

“Next Wednesday we start a fiscal year with a massively unbalanced spending plan and a cash shortfall not seen since the Great Depression,” Controller John Chiang said in a statement announcing that he would be forced to use IOUs to pay the state’s bills beginning on July 2.

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The personal impact of the Sanford affair is more gripping than the political. Sanford has done a horrible thing to his wife and family and friends. He seemed to know and feel this more profoundly than other politicians we’ve seen go through this familiar apology exercise before. That doesn’t excuse him. Not that he was asking that anyone excuse him. He seemed to be trying to take all the blame, as he should. Some might think his explanations were excuses. To me they seemed like a man confessing the details of a crime.

The minute Sanford started speaking, the reviews poured in via e-mail and Twitter. He was rambling, confused. He didn’t tear up enough when talking about his wife. He favored his mistress. He answered the questions too thoroughly. All these judgments seemed absurd. A man standing in front of a bank of cameras in the middle of a complete collapse is going to say a lot of things poorly.

The snap judgments failed to acknowledge a grain of the fundamental human carnage we were witnessing. You can laugh at Sanford, as you can laugh at a video of a wrecked Amy Winehouse falling all over her house. But at some point, even though they did it to themselves, you have to feel sorry for them as human beings. You can do that, I think, and not be a fan of adultery or drug use.

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South Carolina, kept in the dark about the whereabouts of its governor in recent days, now knows where he’s been on many different levels. Mr. Sanford’s revelations at his Wednesday press conference were stunning in their content and by the sudden public presentation of his personal lapses. It’s a scandal for sure, but not necessarily crippling to the remainder of his term.

The governor admitted an extramarital affair with a woman in Argentina and having taken a five-day trip there without telling his staff of the destination. Long viewed as a devoted family man, the governor acknowledged being estranged from his wife, who is living with their four sons on Sullivan’s Island.

Mr. Sanford, normally resolute and self-contained, was clearly embarrassed and shaken by his public confession of the long-term relationship. Nevertheless, the governor managed to make a full explanation of his lapses and convey his commitment to make amends.

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In an attempt to conceal this private matter, Mr. Sanford deliberately and willfully deceived the people of South Carolina. He eluded the state’s top law enforcement agency and lied to staff about his whereabouts. And he abandoned his duties and exposed this state in a way no elected chief executive should. By making himself unreachable and refusing to take the simple step of turning his authority temporarily over to the lieutenant governor while he was out of the country, he left more than 4 million South Carolinians unprotected in the event of an emergency that only he had the constitutional authority to respond to, particularly one that would call for the assistance of the National Guard. That is inexcusable.

The governor has decided to resign as head of the Republican Governor’s Association because of the problems, and we believe that is appropriate. There are those in our state who understandably question whether he will be able to continue as our state’s chief executive, and believe he should resign as governor as well. We are not ready to join them at this point.

This story is still unraveling, and we do not know what else might be turned up. Moreover, Mr. Sanford’s own actions in the coming days and weeks will play a huge role in determining whether he is fit to continue as governor.

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The disconnection between public treasuries and local domestic needs drawing upon them does not exist within taxpayers’ pockets or bank accounts. The same taxpayers supply money for all layers of government. Rather, the disconnection is purely administrative and governmental. It is a political artifact with the strength of bureaucratic tradition. That being so, the dumbed-down result should be simple to mend but, if experience in Canada is a guide, it can’t be mended.

–Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 105-106

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford’s whereabouts had been unknown since Thursday, and the mystery surrounding his absence fueled speculation about where he had been and who’s in charge in his absence. His emergence Wednesday ended the mystery.

Sanford, in an exclusive interview with The State, said he decided at the last minute to go to the South American country to recharge after a difficult legislative session in which he battled with lawmakers over how to spend federal stimulus money.

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The whereabouts of Gov. Mark Sanford was unknown for nearly four days, and some state leaders question who was in charge of the executive office.

But Sanford’s office told the lieutenant governor’s office Monday afternoon that Sanford has been reached and he is fine, said Frank Adams, head of Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s office on aging.

Neither the governor’s office nor the State Law Enforcement Division, which provides security for governors, had been able to reach Sanford after he left the mansion Thursday in a black SLED Suburban SUV, said Sen. Jake Knotts and three others familiar with the situation but declined to be identified.

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In Hawaii, state employees are bracing for furloughs of three days a month over the next two years, the equivalent of a 14 percent pay cut. In Idaho, lawmakers reduced aid to public schools for the first time in recent memory, forcing pay cuts for teachers.

And in California, where a $24 billion deficit for the coming fiscal year is the nation’s worst, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed releasing thousands of prisoners early and closing more than 200 state parks.

Meanwhile, Maine is adding taxes on candy and ski tickets, Wisconsin on oil companies, and Kentucky on alcohol and cellphone ring tones.

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[Mark] Sanford thinks much could be accomplished on economic development when lawmakers return in January for Sanford’s final General Assembly session.

Lawmakers agreed the stimulus debate did little to further damage the relationship, but noted years of conflicts often fueled by gubernatorial press conferences had left little rapport between Republican Sanford and the Republican-controlled Legislature.

But lawmakers said that if anything can bring the two sides together, it is the state’s growing jobless rate ”” now 12.1 percent.

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The state of California is in crisis and time has almost run out. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor, has spent this week haggling with state legislators to agree cuts to basic services in one of the world’s largest economies.

The state’s top finance officials warned that unless an emergency austerity plan is agreed by Monday ”” and there is little chance that it will be ”” they will not be able to borrow the billions of dollars needed to keep the current government functioning. If California was a company, it would have gone bust months ago.

The breadth and depth of Mr Schwarzenegger’s cuts are unprecedented and no one in the state, not even its dozens of billionaires, will be unaffected….

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The carnage in state budgets is getting worse, a report said Thursday, with places like Arizona being hurt by falling revenue on multiple fronts, like personal income and sales taxes. Other states are having mixed experiences, with some tax categories stable, or even rising, even as others fall off the map.

The report, by the National Conference of State Legislatures, also provided a scorecard for how well drafters of state budgets read the recession’s economic tea-leaves ”” and the short answer is, not very well.

Thirty-one states said estimates about personal income taxes had been overly optimistic, and 25 said that all three major tax categories ”” sales taxes, personal income taxes and corporate taxes ”” were not keeping up with projections.

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The California Supreme Court upheld a ban on same-sex marriage today, ratifying a decision made by voters last year at a time when several state governments have moved in an opposite direction.

The decision, however, preserves the 18,000 marriages performed between the court’s decision last May that same-sex marriage was lawful and the passage by voters in November of Proposition 8, which banned it. Supporters of the proposition argued that the marriages should no longer be recognized.

Today’s opinion, written by Chief Justice Ronald M. George for a 6-to-1 majority, said that same-sex couples still have the right to civil unions, which gives them the ability to “choose one’s life partner and enter with that person into a committed, officially recognized, and protected family relationship that enjoys all of the constitutionally based incidents of marriage.” But the justices said that the voters had clearly expressed their will to limit the formality of marriage to opposite-sex couples.

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it wasn’t voters who decided to increase the number of state government and public school jobs paid for by taxpayers from 719,000 in 1997 to 895,000 in 2007 ”“ an additional 176,000 employees. That translates into 48 added jobs a day every day for 10 years.

It wasn’t voters who changed laws to allow public employees to retire with extravagant pensions equal to 90 percent of their final pay ”“ without resolving how to pay the eventual tab.

It wasn’t voters who approved a 37 percent pay hike for prison guards and bizarre, unprecedented concessions to the guards that gave them a management say in Corrections Department decisions ”“ helping make California prisons more than twice as expensive per-inmate than Florida’s.

It wasn’t voters who refused to look at ways to relieve costly overcrowding at prisons, even as states such as New York enjoyed great success with reform measures.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers scrambled Wednesday to avert a financial meltdown, and public officials across California braced for annihilating cuts on the day after voters trounced their leaders’ rescue plan for the state.

Within two hours of returning from Washington, D.C., the governor huddled behind closed doors with Democratic and Republican legislative leaders to grapple with a projected $21.3-billion budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year and stop state government from running out of money by July.

What a mess. Read it all.

The California state treasurer called Wednesday on U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to extend debt guarantees through the Troubled Asset Relief Program to financially strapped states and local governments facing declining revenues.

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The mayor of Providence wants to slap a $150-per-semester tax on the 25,000 full-time students at Brown University and three other private colleges in the city, saying they use resources and should help ease the burden on struggling taxpayers.

Mayor David Cicilline (sis-ah-LEEN-ee) said the fee would raise between $6 million and $8 million a year for the city, which is facing a $17 million deficit.

If enacted, it would apparently be the first time a U.S. city has directly taxed students just for being enrolled.

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As millions of people seek government aid, many for the first time, they are finding it dispensed American style: through a jumble of disconnected programs that reach some and reject others, often for reasons of geography or chance rather than differences in need.

Health care, housing, food stamps and cash ”” each forms a separate bureaucratic world, and their dictates often collide. State differences make the patchwork more pronounced, and random foibles can intervene, like a computer debacle in Colorado that made it harder to get food stamps and Medicaid.

The result is a hit-or-miss system of relief, never designed to grapple with the pain of a recession so sudden and deep. Aid seekers often find the rules opaque and arbitrary. And officials often struggle to make policy through a system so complex and Balkanized.

Across the country, hard luck is colliding with fine print.

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California’s budget deficit has grown so severe that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said he may be forced to release 40,000 prisoners or lay off 51,000 teachers if voters next week reject three budget balancing measures.

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Eleven weeks after Congress settled on a stimulus package that provided $135 billion to limit layoffs in state governments, many states are finding that the funds are not enough and are moving to lay off thousands of public employees.

The state of Washington settled on a budget two weeks ago that will mean 1,000 layoffs at public colleges and several times that many in elementary and high schools.

The governor of Massachusetts, who cut 1,000 positions late last year, just announced 250 layoffs, with more likely to come soon.

Arizona has already laid off 800 social service workers this year and is facing the likelihood of deeper cuts over the next two. The state no longer investigates all complaints of child or elder abuse.

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“I don’t care what the politicians think,” Mr. [Floyd] Flake, a former Democratic congressman and one of the city’s most influential religious leaders, thundered last week during a Sunday service at the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in Queens. “Ain’t nothing perfect about laying down and signing a license with somebody who got the same body parts you got.”

Mr. Flake went on for about two minutes, much to the delight of many in the pews, who cheered and applauded as the church organist punctuated the reverend’s words with notes from “I’ve Got a Woman,” by Ray Charles.

The sentiment, shared in many churches, would normally warrant little notice. Mr. Flake is the pastor of a predominantly black congregation in a community with a socially conservative tilt ”” hardly an unlikely spokesman for those opposed to same-sex marriage.

But Mr. Flake is also a mentor to the Senate majority leader, Malcolm A. Smith, who is among a handful of political leaders in Albany who will be responsible for the fate of same-sex marriage in New York.

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Fed up with the budget crises and partisan battles that have paralyzed California for years, some influential voices believe it’s time to tear open the state constitution and start anew.

Once dismissed as a hokey gimmick, support for a proposed constitutional convention has been building in the nation’s most populous state. Even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has indicated he would back an effort to retool the document to make state government function more smoothly.

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Rather than continue to play political games with $700 million in federal stimulus funding for schools, Gov. Mark Sanford should have simply agreed to use the money as intended. The drama grows wearisome, and public schools and colleges need the assistance.

On Friday, the governor’s office insisted that it had met the deadline for stimulus funding by filing paperwork with the White House. Maybe so, but Mr. Sanford continues to maintain that the money won’t go to schools, as Congress intended. State Education Superintendent Jim Rex rightly questions whether the governor’s latest gambit will pass White House review.

“The White House has made it clear, on two separate occasions, that federal stabilization funds can’t be used to retire state debt,” Dr. Rex said. “These funds are aimed at creating jobs and saving jobs. For the governor to get his way, the General Assembly would be forced to create some sort of bookkeeping sleight-of-hand that, believe me, the federal government isn’t going to permit because the law approved by Congress doesn’t permit it.”

Nevertheless, Gov. Sanford continues to insist that restoring school budgets with stimulus funds would be a dangerous precedent for the state. In a column on our Commentary page, he essentially declares that the budget problem doesn’t exist.

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Rod R. Blagojevich, this state’s ousted governor, was charged on Thursday with 16 felony counts, among them racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud and extortion conspiracy in a wide-ranging scheme to deprive residents of “honest government,” prosecutors said, including trying to leverage his authority to pick someone to fill President Obama’s former Senate seat.

Five of his closest advisers, including his brother, Robert, a top fundraiser, and two former chiefs of staff, were also charged in the 19-count indictment.

Prosecutors said Mr. Blagojevich used numerous elements of his state work ”” including appointing people to state boards, investing state money and signing legislation ”” as a way to seek money, campaign contributions and jobs for himself and others.

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Six Democratic legislators have introduced a bill to stop Boeing from threatening to move out of Washington. That’s right: threatening to move…. No more threats from Boeing! The state’s biggest manufacturer might leave, but it could never threaten to leave. Then again, if Boeing were really planning an exit, wouldn’t lawmakers want to know?

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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said a make-shift tent city for the homeless that sprang up in the capital city of Sacramento will be shut down and its residents allowed to stay at the state fairgrounds.

Schwarzenegger said he ordered the state facility known as Cal-Expo to be used for three months to serve the 125 tent city residents, some of them displaced by the economic recession. The encampment may be shut down within a month, said Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. The move comes after the Sacramento City Council last night agreed to spend $880,000 to expand homeless programs.

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But asked twice whether he would accept a budget that did not include provisions for additional tax cuts for the middle class, or that did not launch a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Mr. Obama demurred. Instead, he called for “a serious energy policy that frees ourselves from dependence on foreign oil and makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy” — implicitly suggesting that cap-and-trade, though he supports it, might have to wait. As for the middle-class tax cut that Mr. Obama would pay for with revenue from a cap-and-trade program, the president said, “we already had that” in the stimulus package. “We know that that’s going to be in place for at least the next two years. We had identified a specific way to pay for it. If Congress has better ideas in terms of how to pay for it, then we’re happy to listen.”

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The statewide property tax reforms of 2006, which exempted homeowners from most school taxes, were supposed to be paid for with a penny increase in the statewide sales tax. The result: A shortfall of more than $143 million over the past two years, which made the state’s budget problems worse.

Locally, the optional sales taxes that voters approved by referendum in two-thirds of South Carolina counties are used to offset town, city and county taxes.

The difficulty for local governments comes in projecting sales tax revenues up to a year ahead of time, and crediting those amounts to property tax bills. If they guess wrong, they come up short.

“That was our problem,” said Keith Bustraan, Charleston County deputy administrator and chief financial officer. “We set our revenue estimate and then began the long slide.”

Read it all from the local paper.

America’s states are laboratories of democracy. They are both affected by, and relevant to, the larger national debate. What we’ve found in our own corner of the country is that carrying a substantial debt load limits our options when it comes to running government.

A recent report by the American Legislative Exchange Council ranked us 47th worst in the nation for annual debt service as a percentage of tax revenue. Our state dedicates nearly 11% of its annual tax revenue to paying debt. On top of that, South Carolina has another $20 billion in unfunded, long-term political promises for pensions and other liabilities. The state budget has already been cut four times in recent months as the national economic downturn has impacted South Carolina and driven down tax revenue.

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