Alvin Greene Has His Day in Court

South Carolina Democratic Senate nominee Alvin Greene is due to appear in court tomorrow on an obsenities charge.  He allegedly showed pornography to a University of South Carolina co-ed.  The girl's mother, Susan McCoy, says she sought restitution for the $1500 expense of moving her daughter to a more expensive dorm.  She said “We were told by the solicitor’s office that he was destitute, that he had said he had zero income and zero assets.” Yet, he came up with the $10,440 filing fee. He also qualified for a public defender, although he is now represented by a private attorney.  An investigation by the State Law Enforcement Division concluded that there was:

"'no evidence of wrongdoing, criminal intent or deception to the court when Greene applied for a public defender last year' It also determined that he paid for the filing fee with his own savings from the Army, as he has said all along. (The base pay for an E-4 in 2009 with at least six years of service was $2,219 per month.)"



In an interview with the New York Times, he seemed most concerned about what he feels was his improper discharge from the Army, although he won't discuss details or release his military records. 

He has a website up and running.  You may find it a bit, um, thin. Compared to Nevada GOP nominee Sharron Angle's old website, though, it first-rate and rational.

SC Dems Keep Greene

The South Carolina Democratic Party Executive Committee voted down a proposal from Victor Rawl to hold another Senate primary.  That means, for now, unemployed veteran-with-a-pending-vice-charge Alvin Greene remains the Democratic nominee who will face Jim DeMint in November.  Realistically, what else were they going to do?  Greene got 60% of the vote, although there have been allegations of voter fraud.  How did Greene do it?  Listen to one Carolina girl who has apparently lost her sense of shame:



h/t, LC NY Bureau Chief Doug

Breaking: DeMint Leading Greene

The first polling is out in the hotly contested South Carolina Senate race and incumbant gay bashing religious fanatic Republican Jim DeMint has a narrow lead over regular guy Alvin Greene.  If you call 37 points narrow.  But that still means 21% of voters plan to vote for Greene over DeMint, and that's from a Rasmussen poll and everybody knows they skew Republican, right?  I'll bet Alvin's really only 33 or 34 points behind.  You can totally do it Alvin!  That is, unless that July 12 court date for a felony obscenity charge doesn't go well.  That could be a real game changer. 

The whole Alvin Greene saga is beyond bizarre, even by Palmetto State standards.  He is an unemployed veteran who lives with his dad outside Manning.  He's represented by the public defender after being charged with disseminating obscene materials, which implies that he is indigent.  Yet, he waltzed into the SC Democratic Party headquarters, handed them a check for $10,400.00 and got himself on the ballot for the United States Senate primary.  And he won.  He won big.  His opponent, Victor Rawl, is a former judge, State Representative, and Charleston County Council member with incredible academic credentials (OK, my academic credentials) and Greene beat him with 60% of the vote.  That means that 60% of SC Democrats had no idea who either candidate was and just voted for the first guy.  Or maybe they thought he was Al Green.  Hey, do you have a better theory? 

If you've seen any of the Alvin Greene interviews, he doesn't seem like the sharpest guy.  In fact, I'd go out on a limb and call him slow.  I'm not the only one who thinks so.  Gawker's Adrian Chen found an old Army colleague of Greene's who described him as "not all there mentally." 

"During the first couple of weeks of working with him, myself and most everyone else noticed that he wasn't all there mentally. Whenever he was given a simple task such as filling a temporary hand receipt it would never get done, mainly because he didn't know how to fill one out. And this is the most fundamental part of the job."

He goes on to opine that it's quite possible that the $10,400.00 filing fee was Greene's own money.  He lived simply while in the military and could have saved that much cash.  Maybe.  That still leaves unanswered the question why would he spend all that money to run for the Senate?