Property of Nikki Haley?
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) wants the jobless pass a drug test before they can receive benefits, but she seems to have an exaggerated sense of drug use among the unemployed.
"I so want drug testing. I so want it," Haley said during a Thursday question-and-answer session at the Lexington Rotary Club.
Who can blame her? I mean, all the cool kids are doing it. And she's got a really powerful anecdote to make her case:
Haley said scads of job applicants flunked a drug test at the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation along the Savannah River.
"Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them -- this was back before the campaign -- when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test, and of the half that was left, of that 50 percent, the other half couldn't read and write properly," Haley said.
"That's what we have in South Carolina," she continued. "We don't have an unemployment problem. We have an education and poverty problem."
Yes! It's not unemployment that's the problem. It's all the damn idiots in her state. That's why there's 10.9 percent unemployment. Except:
Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the River Site, told HuffPost he had no idea what Haley was talking about with regard to applicants flunking a drug test.
"Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test," Giusti said. "At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive."
The River Site doesn't even test applicants. "We only test them when they have been accepted," Giusti said.
So maybe the problem is actually that Nikki Haley is on crack.
