Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2008 > June
June 2008
Wes Clark’s “insult” to John McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Oh brother.
Wesley Clark, a retired four-star Army general and Obama supporter, is being attacked for statements made on “Face the Nation” Sunday regarding Sen. John McCain. (See the video here.)
“I certainly honor (McCain’s) service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war,” Clark said in his opening remarks.
Clark then went to dispute McCain’s claim of extensive experience with strategic issues, noting that in his political and military careers McCain had never handled major executive responsibility and had little experience in decision-making roles.
“Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down,” host Bob Schieffer said.
“I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” Clark responded.
Ohmigod, can you believe he said such a thing!!!
As an objective statement of fact, Clark is of course correct. As proof, consider the case of the late James Stockdale.
Stockdale, like McCain, was a Navy aviator shot down over Vietnam and imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton. Like McCain, he was a brave man — in Stockdale’s case a Medal of Honor winner — who later rose to admiral. He served his nation with great courage and distinction.
In 1992, however, Stockdale was named by Ross Perot as his running mate on the Reform Party ticket. And on the campaign trail, the brave and honorable admiral quickly proved himself to be in way over his head as a candidate for national office, as he himself later acknowledged.
Riding in a fighter jet and getting shot down did not qualify Stockdale to be president.
Back in 1999, by the way, Stockdale wrote a piece for the New York Times to address rumors then being spread by some in the Republican presidential primary that McCain’s time in the Hanoi Hilton had somehow warped his personality.
“I am not surprised by reports that Senator John McCain’s political enemies have been spreading rumors that his famous temper is a sign of a broader “instability” caused by his imprisonment in Vietnam,” Stockdale wrote. “In fact, a few weeks ago I received a call from an old friend who is also close to the George W. Bush campaign soliciting comments on Mr. McCain’s ‘weaknesses.’ As I told that caller, I think John McCain is solid as a rock.”
I should also note that many of the Republicans claiming to be so shocked and appalled were probably giggling with glee when GOP delegates to the 2004 convention wore fake Purple Hearts to make fun of John Kerry’s war wounds.
Meanwhile, what are we going to do to salvage the situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan? What do we do next in Iraq? How can we address our longterm economic challenges? How can we adjust faster to $4 gasoline?
Permalink | Comments (127) | Post your comment |
McCain up 10 in Georgia?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rasmussen Reports has posted results of its most recent Georgia poll, showing McCain up by 10 points over Obama, 53-43 percent. That’s a stark contrast with the recent Insider Advantage poll showing the two roughly equal in Georgia.
In other state polls, Rasmussen tends to report higher numbers for McCain than other pollsters produce. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong — in Georgia’s case, their numbers feel about right — but it’s a difference worth noting.
They also polled the Ga. Senate race, giving Chambliss a safe lead. Among Democrats, Jim Martin does best against Chambliss. Perhaps the most noteworthy result among the Democratic candidates is that Vernon Jones has a combined 60 percent unfavorable rating (somewhat unfavorable plus very unfavorable) and only a 27 percent combined favorable rating.
Part of that is surely due to the fact that he’s the only black candidate in the race. That does still matter in Georgia. But part of it’s also because he’s the only Vernon Jones in the race.
Permalink | Comments (30) | Post your comment |
“Soon it’s gonna rain …” — NOT!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The most frustrating thing about a drought like this one is the waiting.
You know it has to end … someday. You know the rain will come back … someday. You just don’t know when someday is going to come.
So you wait, because there’s not much you can do to hurry a drought along.
Lawsuits can be like that too. The states of Florida, Georgia and Alabama, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, are embroiled in a tangle of lawsuits over the water resources shared among the states. Someday, a final resolution of those suits could clear the way for sane management of Lake Lanier and the Chattahoochee River and wipe away uncertainties concerning Atlanta’s future water supplies.
Someday, but not today or tomorrow, of course. Because once judges and lawyers get involved, there’s not much to be done to hurry things along. You just have to …
Wait.
But in this case, we do have other options. Our dispute with our neighboring states is a human problem, not a meteorological phenomenon. And as a human problem, it has a human solution. We just have to find it.
But so far, I don’t see that happening. Negotiations have failed, mediation has failed, and leaders in Congress and at the state level appear to have resigned themselves to muddling through this mess, leaving our situation unsettled for who knows how long.
Nobody seems to have a vision of where we want to be in another three years, along with a clear plan for getting there. The only proposal on the table at the moment is that loopy idea of the Georgia Legislature to slice us off a piece of water-rich Tennessee. At a time when Georgia is trying to cast itself as a voice of reason and compromise in the water wars, that’s more than a little off message.
In Florida, however, Democrats U.S. Rep. Allen Boyd and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson at least have the germ of an idea. They have introduced legislation in Congress calling for a $1.2 million study of the Appalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river system by the National Research Council. Florida officials apparently believe such a study would validate their claims that the water consumption of metro Atlanta is doing serious damage to downstream users.
However, at least some metro Atlanta officials also like the idea of an NRC study, because they believe it would validate their own claim that Florida’s problems are being caused by the drought, not by growth in metro Atlanta or excessive water consumption.
“We have always asserted that there is ample water available to meet the needs of all of the basin users if we base decisions on facts rather than political posturing,” says Chick Krautler, director of the Atlanta Regional Commission. “… A balanced inquiry that develops a comprehensive, shared fact base amongst all stakeholders is the first step toward decisions we all can live with.”
This all sounds intriguing: We have two parties that are very far apart in their understandings of the issues dividing them, with each side so confident in the virtue of its position that it is eager to have an outside body of experts come along to validate its opinion.
Sounds like we have a deal. As Krautler says, that may indeed be a “first step toward decisions we all can live with.”
In their legislation, Nelson and Boyd ask the National Research Council to “conduct a comprehensive study of the water management, needs and conservation” of the ACF basin, requesting that it report its findings within two years.
Georgia’s congressional delegation ought to sign onto that bill as co-sponsors and get it passed into law as quickly as possible. In two years — we hope — the current drought will have ended, easing some of the heightened passions now blocking honest discussion. By then, an objective, conclusive scientific report could also give politicians in Georgia, Alabama and Florida the cover they might think they need to make compromises.
Let’s stop waiting and do something.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment |
“Too far” isn’t as far as it used to be
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As AJC reporter Ariel Hart documents, MARTA train ridership is up 15 percent from a year ago. Toll traffic on Ga. 400 is down 5 percent from a year ago. Ridership on express bus systems is up 67 percent from a year ago. Nationwide, we drove 11 billion miles fewer in March than a year earlier.
And as The New York Times notes, $4 gasoline may be sending teen-age cruising the way of the hula hoop or phone-booth packing.
But the real transformation will come as a result to changes in our sense of geography, more specifically our sense of how far is “too far”. How far is too far to commute to work everyday? How far is too far to drive to go shopping or to the movie? That’s changing very quickly. It’s pretty astonishing, in fact.
That’s how energy-saving starts to become embedded in our economy. As our definition of “too far” changes, the way we arrange ourselves on the landscape will change with it. Commercial and residential development will cluster at rail and transit stations, not at highway exits. Metropolitan areas will become more compact and dense — real estate in outer suburbs is already falling in value much more quickly than in areas closer to the core. As we balk at driving long distances for goods and services, businesses will respond with smaller, more numerous stores.
A lot of those changes have been advocated by city planners and architects for years, to little or no effect. Oil at $140 a barrel has proved for more convincing.
Permalink | Comments (24) | Post your comment |
Be the change you wish to see
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I see that Senate Republicans have re-introduced the federal Marriage Protection Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that seeks to defend marriage by limiting it to a pact between a man and a woman.
I also see that Sen. David Vitter, a married man and patron of prostitutes in Louisiana and Washington, and Sen. Larry Craig, the married lavatorial tap-dancer (good acoustics with all that tile, you know) are listed as two of its prime sponsors.
The capacity of some people for self-embarrassment is astonishing. (h/t The Carpetbagger Report).
Permalink | Comments (18) | Post your comment |
Situation dire for North Pole residents
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — Urged on by millions of anxious children around the world, military cargo ships were steaming toward the North Pole Friday in an attempt to evacuate Santa Claus, his estimated 300 elves and several dozen reindeer before they sink into the ocean.
The operation was launched after scientists announced that Arctic sea ice was melting so quickly this year that for the first time in recorded history, the North Pole could be ice free by September, destroying Santa’s longtime home and busy workshops
The weather and ocean conditions in the next couple of weeks will determine how much of the remaining sea ice will melt, and early signs are not good, said Mark Serreze. He’s a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colo.
The chances for a total meltdown at the pole are higher than ever because the layer of ice coating the sea is thinner than ever due to global warming, he said.
“A large area at the North Pole and surrounding the North Pole is first-year ice,” Serreze said. “That’s the stuff that tends to melt out in the summer because it’s thin.”
However, the Santa rescue operation has being criticized by skeptics, who claimed there was no consensus that the ice was actually melting.
“Global warming doesn’t exist, and someone should tell Santa that,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). “The water lapping up next to this guy’s workshop is just an hoax invented by scientists and environmentalists.”
Reached at his North Pole home, Santa was less than convinced.
“Tell that guy I’m about to drown because of this ‘hoax,’” Santa said. “I hate these people who think they can make something true if they just believe it hard enough. What kind of fantasyland do these fools live in?”
Permalink | Comments (32) | Post your comment |
Kaboom goes kaboom
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Damn. My favorite milblog — Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal — has been ordered off the Internets by the U.S. Army, in its infinite wisdom. No further postings from the wise and witty Lt. G….
You can still go back and read previous postings, which I urge you to do. Those of us safe and stateside have an obligation to understand as best we can what we are asking these kids to do for us, and Kaboom offered a stylish, candid window into the soldier’s experience.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment |
The deal with North Korea
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Samuel Johnson made the now politically incorrect observation that “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
I guess that’s how I feel about President Bush’s use of diplomacy to perhaps bring an end to North Korea’s nuclear program. He may not have done it with much style or grace, but the surprise is that he did it at all.
In the early years, Bush had rejected any suggestion of negotiating a deal with the North Koreans, as if talking to our enemies was an act of cowardice. Talk tough, that was the ticket. Make those Korean commies tremble in fear.
That bluster pretty much ended when North Korea exploded a semi-successful nuclear weapon, making it clear that they were less than impressed with macho posturing. After a whole lot of cajoling and convincing within the administration, the president agreed to a less confrontational, more conversational approach that is now bearing fruit.
There is no guarantee this approach will work. What the president announced yesterday was considerable progress toward an important goal, not achievement of the goal itself. But considerable progress is better than no progress or even backsliding, which is what the previous strategy had produced.
Dick Cheney has made it pretty clear he disagrees with this approach. He and others liked the tough-guy strategy because it felt right in their gut, because it confirmed their sense of themselves as moral, uncompromising warriors. OK, fine. Now — explain in a logical sequence how being tough will result in North Korea surrendering its nuclear program.
Silence. Followed by another protestation that “we have to be tough!”
Being tough is not a goal in itself. Being tough is a tactic that under the right circumstances can help you achieve your goal, but under other circumstances can be harmful. President Bush belatedly understands that now.
The agreement with North Korea is an accomplishment for the president, a hard-earned step toward making the world a safer place. But it is also a symbol of what might have been in other areas, including domestic politics, had he been willing to negotiate and compromise instead of try to steamroll.
Permalink | Comments (49) | Post your comment |
A second thought on Second Amendment
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“I consider this the opening salvo in a step-by-step process of providing relief for law-abiding Americans everywhere that have been deprived of this freedom.” — NRA President Wayne LaPierre
You know, this victory could eventually backfire politically on LaPierre and his buddies.
Over the past few years, the American voting public had demonstrated pretty clearly that they weren’t eager for a lot more gun regulation. As a result, the gun debate had turned to the advantage of the GOP.
But this changes the debate. Somehow, I also don’t think the public is eager to start rolling back a whole range of gun laws, laws they had come to accept and support as necessary for public safety. It’s possible that with this ruling, an issue that has worked to the political benefit of conservatives could instead become a problem for them.
Because the NRA has never demonstrated a finely honed sense of how far is too far….
Permalink | Comments (279) | Post your comment |
The Supreme Court and guns
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The National Rifle Association and other groups are celebrating the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling on the Second Amendment, which confirmed for the first time the NRA’s reading that the amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. To that degree, their glee at the ruling is justified.
From a practical point of view, though, it’s hard to predict the ruling’s impact. Justice Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, made it clear that a lot of government regulations concerning firearms are constitutional. However, government crosses the line when it bans certain firearms altogether, as Washington D.C. did in banning handguns.
That does leave a lot of room for regulation, because very few gun laws proposed or passed go as far as the D.C. law did. But it also poses some interesting questions that the court will be forced to address pretty quickly.
For example, if banning handguns is unconstitutional, is it also unconstitutional to ban machine guns and other fully automatic weapons, as current law does? How would you craft a legal opinion based in the Constitution that allows one form of weapon to be banned while protecting another? The only way to do that would be to “legislate from the bench” by basing the decision on the relative risk posed by various classes of arms. But that kind of argument has no basis in the Constitution.
It was also ironic to see the court’s more liberal minority complain about the majority’s “newly discovered right” in a document more than 200 years old (even Scalia acknowledges they did so). “Newly discovered rights” is a term usually flung at the court by conservatives. The minority also argued that such decisions should be left to legislatures and other elective bodies and not be decided by courts.
In other words, the Scalia majority has revealed itself as a bunch of activist unelected judges eager to impose their own beliefs on the rest of us. At least I think that’s how the rhetoric goes … conservatives, did I get that lingo right?
Permalink | Comments (76) | Post your comment |
Why not nationalize oil?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve gotten several emails from readers wondering at my statement that any “new oil” pumped from our continental shelf or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be sold to Americans — or to foreigners — at the world price for oil. There would be no “hometown discount” to Americans for oil produced from American soil. Today, for example, we pay the same amount for a barrel of crude from the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana as we do for a barrel of similar quality from the Persian Gulf.
The question some readers have is why. Here’s the answer:
Under our current system, we Americans don’t own the oil pumped out of our territory. It’s owned by the private companies — Exxon, Chevron, etc. — who find it, drill it and pump it. And once they get it out of the ground, they sell it to the highest bidder. That’s how the industry works.
To get a “hometown discount,” we would have to nationalize our oil industry as countries such as Mexico, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia have done. Then any oil pumped out of the ground would belong to the government, and the government could sell it to American consumers and businesses at less than the world market price. That’s how consumers in Mexico, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia can pay much less than the world rate for gasoline and oil.
Sounds great, right? No, not really. If we’re selling American oil to Americans at $60 a barrel, while the world price is $140 a barrel, some bad things happen. We’d all want to avoid that $140 oil and buy a lot of that $60 oil, putting great pressure on our domestic reserves and draining them much more quickly. It would be short-term gain and long-term pain, and we’ve had too much of that already.
We’d also be creating a false foundation for the economy. In effect, we’d be subsidizing petroleum use; the artificially low price would encourage more consumption at a time when conservation is necessary. In economic terms, it would send a false price signal. You simply can’t run the world’s biggest economy on heavily subsidized energy. Not for long, anyway.
Permalink | Comments (158) | Post your comment |
Thought for the day
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It is perpetually fascinating — no, strike that — it is way too boring to see so many commenters come to this blog and profess to be outraged and offended by the liberal viewpoints they find here.
Folks, this is an opinion blog by an opinion writer who happens to be (ohmigod!) liberal. At least by Georgia standards, anyway — I have friends in other parts of the country who snicker when told I’m considered liberal.
Anyway, coming here and acting offended by the liberalism expressed here is like going to McDonald’s and acting offended to find hamburgers. You’re at McDonalds — that’s what they serve there. Get over it.
Permalink | Comments (34) | Post your comment |
I’ve been trying to tell y’all…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Allowing oil drilling in U.S. offshore waters that are now closed to energy exploration would do little to lower gasoline prices paid by consumers, the government’s top energy forecaster said on Wednesday.
…. Guy Caruso, who heads the federal Energy Information Administration, said consumers would see little savings at the pump.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Post your comment |
At Justice Department, no respect for the law
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
UPDATED, EXPANDED VERSION:
The U.S. Justice Department is easily the most powerful law-enforcement agency in the country. If used for the wrong purposes, its ability to commit the vast resources of the federal government against an individual or group can do great damage to lives and careers.
For that reason, laws and rules have been adopted to prevent the hijacking of the Justice Department to advance a partisan or ideological cause. Those laws exist to protect the principle that the law must be applied equally to all Americans, regardless of party, and that government should never be used as a weapon againt those who dare to oppose the party in power.
But that’s exactly what the Bush administration has done.
“It’s a tragedy because, for many years, the only agency that really had a standing as the untouchable agency from partisan politics was the Justice Department,” says David Inglesias, a former U.S. attorney and stalwart Republican fired because he refused to use his authority for partisan purposes. “And unfortunately, what’s happened over the past couple of years has tarred it with a very, very ugly brush … It’s a serious problem. The American people have the right to believe that ‘prosecutive’ decisions are made on the basis of evidence alone. And right now, that’s called into question.”
The campaign to turn the Justice Department into an enforcement arm of the Republican Party extended even to its hiring of legal interns. By federal law and by longtime tradition, legal internships at the Justice Department had been awarded strictly on the basis of merit. But in the Bush administration, the program was illegally hijacked.
Well-qualified students deemed to have some sort of hidden liberal bent were systematically rejected; less-qualified students with poorer academic records but a record of conservative activism were hired instead. It was affirmative action for the dumb but partisan.
The right-wing response to such charges will be that everyone does it. No, everyone does not do it. Before the Bush administration, nobody did it. Before the Bush administration, politicians of both parties had too much respect for the law and the power of the agency to stoop to such intellectual corruption. Administrations would come and go, both Republican and Democratic, and none of them attempted anything like what the Bush administration tried to do at the Justice Department. According to a new report by the Justice Department’s inspector general — a Republican, by the way — the Bush approach “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”
In other words, those appointed to enforce the law instead knowingly violated it to advance partisan interests.
The internship program is a relatively minor scandal, but it says a lot about the mindset inside the Bush Justice Department. Other investigations are under way into far more serious allegations made by Iglesias and others.
For example, did Bush officials use the department’s immense prosecutorial power to attack their enemies? Did they try to influence elections through selective or timely prosecutions? Were U.S. attorneys — good Republicans all — removed because they clung to the notion that the law and those who enforce it should be nonpartisan?
Yes, they probably were.
“It’s reprehensible. It’s unethical. It’s unlawful. It very well may be criminal.” Iglesias said in a PBS interview. “I know it’s a marked departure from prior administrations, both Republican and Democrat, who understood that U.S. attorneys, as chief federal law enforcement officials, have to stay out of politics.”
The days of the Bush administration grow few in number, and as they do, tongues will start flapping a little more freely. I expect we’ll start hearing stories of even more atrocious abuses of power by the Bush administration. But what we already know is enough to label it the worst administration in our nation’s history.
Permalink | Comments (118) | Post your comment |
Can you predict the electoral college?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to the latest polls, Barack Obama and John McCain are tied in Indiana, a deep-red state that George Bush won by more than 60 percent in 2004. In fact, Obama is doing quite well in a lot of the latest state polls — up by 9 in Michigan, up in Pennsylvania, up or tied in Ohio, up in some polls in Florida, down in others.
My point isn’t to highlight good news for Obama — well, it isn’t my ONLY point. I also want to announce that we’re putting together a contest for this election season, a political version of the NCAA’s March Madness, that will probably be run through this blog.
We’ll give you a map and ask you to predict which candidate will carry each of the 50 states, and we’ll probably use the final national popular vote to break any ties. (However, we could also use the final voting percentage in Georgia — we’re still working out the details).
Will McCain carry New Mexico but lose Colorado? Is Obama strong enough to carry the upper Midwest? Which way will Florida swing?
For all of you political experts out there, it’ll be a chance to strut your stuff.
Permalink | Comments (31) | Post your comment |
John McCain and terrorism
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I have to confess, I just don’t get this one. Charlie Black, a top adviser to John McCain, has been forced to apologize for telling Fortune magazine that he thought McCain’s campaign would benefit if we were attacked again by terrorists.
An Obama spokesman had condemned Black’s remarks as “a complete disgrace,” but again, I don’t get it. Black wasn’t rooting for another attack. He was offering an analysis of what political effect such an attack might produce.
I think Black is probably wrong — McCain has argued that the Bush approach has worked, and another attack would prove that claim wrong. But the faux outrage generated by Black’s candor just makes it more difficult to talk about things honestly in this country, and to talk about things that do actually matter.
For example, the more interesting part of that Fortune article comes when McCain is asked to name the biggest single threat to the American economy.
“Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence,” McCain said. “Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences.”
That’s loony stuff. Radical Islamic extremism cannot possibly “prevail” and does not “affect … our very existence.” Nor is it the biggest threat to our nation’s economy — $140-a-barrel oil and a massive, longterm trade deficit are far bigger problems.
Terrorism is a security threat that must be taken seriously, but McCain is trying to elevate it into a threat as big or bigger than Nazi Germany and imperial Japan combined. That kind of talk actually helps Osama bin Laden, because it blows him up into something far bigger than he and his ragtag bunch could ever hope to be.
Similarly, McCain claimed earlier in the campaign that Iran poses as big a threat to the United States as the old Soviet Union. Again, that’s just absurd. That’s the kind of statement — and poor judgment — that ought to become an issue.
Permalink | Comments (187) | Post your comment |
Atlanta’s getting lapped in the race to the future
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta has built its reputation and economy on being a “first-mover,” on taking risks and making investments before other communities see the opportunity.
But looking around the country, it is startling to see just how far and how quickly we’ve fallen behind other metro regions regarding transportation.
Atlanta has gone from first-mover to last-mover. We’re so far behind, we’re in danger of being lapped.
Just last week, the Houston City Council voted 13-2 to build five new light-rail lines. That’s Houston, the capital city of Big Oil.
“I’ll say it loud and clear: No longer is the city of Houston waffling on rail,” Councilman Peter Brown said. “With gas headed to $8 a gallon and oil to $200 a barrel, we have to rethink Houston as the happy motoring paradise.”
They’re rethinking the future in Phoenix as well. In December, a new 20-mile segment of light rail linking that city with neighboring Tempe and Mesa will begin service. That effort began back in 2000, when Phoenix voters approved a 20-year transit sales tax by an overwhelming 2-to-1 margin.
Four years later, voters in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, overwhelmingly endorsed an additional 30-year transportation sales tax to expand highways and add another 37 miles to the light rail system.
And they’re not done yet. A coalition of business groups and others, led by Arizona’s governor, is working to put a statewide initiative on the fall ballot that would raise $42 billion for transportation over the next 30 years. If approved, it would finance projects from roads to commuter rail.
That kind of progress requires leadership at both the state and metro levels. Atlanta has neither, in part because of problems with our political structure, and in part because we have elected risk-averse leadership.
The structural problem plays out most clearly at the regional level. Arizona’s Maricopa County has a population of 3.8 million, 400,000 more than Fulton, Cobb, Gwinnett, DeKalb and Clayton counties combined. A region with a single county government can move much more quickly than a region with power fragmented among more than a dozen counties and scores of cities.
Without a regional mechanism to exert power, metro Atlanta has no choice but to look to the state for leadership. So far, it has looked in vain. While other states mark the opening of new rail systems long in the making, in Georgia it’s major news when the governor concedes that a commuter rail line might be a good idea someday.
The consequences of metro Atlanta’s failure to build a transportation system for the future have been apparent for years in declining quality of life and attractiveness to business. But with the era of cheap gasoline coming to an end, the problem becomes even more critical.
Our infrastructure, economy and way of life have been built on an expectation that long commutes would always be possible and that no alternatives were necessary. Now the world is changing, and we aren’t close to being ready.
In fact, the head start of places such as Phoenix is now more important than ever. Its new light-rail line has attracted an estimated $6 billion in new condos, office buildings and mixed-use retail projects along its path, the beginnings of new orientation to rail. Those projects were in the pipeline well before the runup in gasoline prices, but they look like an even better investment with oil at $140 a barrel.
Atlanta does have MARTA, a system conceived back in the early ’70s. It has become a favorite target of those who dismiss transit as an option, but if you look closely, its handicaps reflect the handicaps of the metro region it tries to serve.
Because of fragmentation, MARTA is financed by only two counties in a metro region of 12 or more counties. And because of a state government lacking in vision and courage, it is the only major rail-transit system in the country that receives no financial support from state government.
Until we address those issues, MARTA won’t work and Atlanta won’t work.
Permalink | Comments (63) | Post your comment |
George Carlin will never rest in peace
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
George Carlin offended a lot of people. That was OK by him, because the entire human species offended George Carlin. He had no respect for anybody — you, me, anybody.
Every time I watched Carlin do his act, I’d get to wondering: “What’s it like to live and think like that, to be stuck inside that brain forever?” He never forgave the world for not living up to his expectations.
Especially in his later years, there was nothing the slightest bit generous or forgiving in his material. You’d think that some of it had to be schtick , but he would never stoop to giving the audience a wink, never signaling that his disgust at the human race was less than geniune.
And to think of that madman playing the kindly Mr. Conductor with Thomas the Tank Engine — that itself is a very funny, very sick kind of joke.
Even in the anger and bitterness, he was of course profoundly funny. Humor was the only bit of sweetness and light he would acknowledge in this world. Comedy Central ranked him as the second greatest comic ever, behind Richard Pryor, and I think that’s about right. They both told us the truth as they saw it, even though it wasn’t very pretty.
That honesty came at a price. But in their minds the cost of dishonesty was even higher.
Blame it all on the greenies …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Environmentalists are the designated bad guy in the Republican energy narrative. Whatever the problem, environmentalists caused it.
If nuclear power plants aren’t being built, it’s not because they are hugely expensive and a big risk for investors, it’s the fault of environmentalists. If we have to import a lot of oil from overseas, it’s because environmentalists have barred us from drilling in ANWR, even though drilling in ANWR would do little to move us toward energy independence and nothing to alter the price of gasoline.
The same argument is applied to refining. If no new refineries have been built in this country since the 1970s, it’s once again because of the environmentalists.
Except that once again, it isn’t. It’s supply and demand - pure economics, a process that conservatives profess to worship. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the government’s technical energy analysts, new refineries haven’t been built because there simply isn’t much money in it, and investors can get a bigger return elsewhere.
Look at the most recent profit statements from Chevron, the nation’s second biggest oil company. In the first quarter it reported profits of more than $5 billion worldwide. Its profit from U.S. refineries? A paltry $4 million.
People in the oil business know that, which is why you rarely hear that argument coming from industry types. They’d be too embarrassed to utter such nonsense. But they’re more than willing to sit back and let irresponsible politicians blame it all on environmentalists.
Permalink | Comments (30) | Post your comment |
Obama up big; Democrats up even more
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A new Newsweek poll puts Obama up by 15 points over McCain, 51-36. That number is going to fluctuate a lot, and the election is still four months away. But here’s the number that really should have Republicans worried, because it fluctuates a lot less, has implications for every race on the ballot and can affect campaigns for years to come:
“Obama’s current lead also reflects the large party-identification advantage the Democrats now enjoy — 55 percent of all voters call themselves Democrats or say they lean toward the party while just 36 percent call themselves Republicans or lean that way. Even as McCain seeks to gain voters by distancing himself from the unpopular Bush and emphasizing his maverick image, he is suffering from the GOP’s poor reputation among many voters.”
That’s almost a 20-point advantage in party ID. The poll didn’t break that number out by age, but I would guess the Democrats’ advantage is particularly large among younger voters. And once young people identify with a party, they tend to maintain that identification throughout their lives.
It may be a generation before the Republican Party returns to power nationally.
Permalink | Comments (120) | Post your comment |
Obama-McCain tied in Ga?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s conceivable that Barack Obama could make Georgia at least competitive. But I’m not buying the results of the latest poll from Insider Advantage, which reports that McCain holds a statistically insignificant lead of 1 percentage point in Georgia.
Insider Advantage has a mixed record at best in its polling. Right before the North Carolina primary, they had Obama up by just 3, when other pollsters had the margin in double figures. He won by 14.
Here in the Georgia primary, they had Obama up by 15; he won by 35.
So until other pollsters come up with numbers suggesting a tight general-election race here in Georgia — most of them report a McCain lead of around 10 points — this one should be treated as an anomaly.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment |
Scattered vs. isolated
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve always wondered about this, so I did some googling and found this explanation posted by a Weather Service employee:
“National Weather Service forecasters will forecast ‘isolated’ thunderstorms when we are pretty certain that storms are going to form, but we only expect them to affect about 10% of the area. In other words, 90% of the area won’t get wet.
Just so you know, when our forecast says…
“Widely scattered thunderstorms”, it means 20% of the area will be affected. “Scattered thunderstorms” means 30-50% of the area will be affected. “Thunderstorms likely” means 60-70% of the area will be affected. and if we just say “Thunderstorms”, we expect that 80-100% of the area will see rain.
Problems arise, however, when that isolated thunderstorm happens to develop over the most populated city in the area. When that happens, most of the people get wet, even though only a small area received rain. So to many people, forecasters are “wrong” even when we are “right”!
So now I know, and you do too. Of course, given the lack of rain in these parts, that knowledge is only of theoretical importance.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment |
We’re racist, doncha know?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From a commenter about our endorsement of Jim Martin over Vernon Jones as the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate:
“Why does the AJC repeatedly insult the intelligence of African-Americans? Folks don’t be blind to this blatant racism portrayed by the AJC and it’s writers such as Mr. Bookman. Vernon Jones is a threat to the “good ole boys” so rather than talk about the accomplishments he achieved for DeKalb County, you’d rather make personal attacks.
What is Jim Martin really known for? Besides losing the Lt. Governor’s seat—boy that’s one strong candidate. Perhaps Mr. Jones voted for Bush because he was tired of the poor choices (ie losers) the Democratic Party continued to pick to represent us. Jim Martin doesn’t bring any more credit to our party or our state than Dale Cardwell did by climbing a tower—idiot. His only credibility is the fact that he’s White and the so called “stronger” pick of the White candidates. I guess if Martin hadn’t stepped into the race, you would have endorsed the software salesman. It’s a sad day in Georgia when people still have this ignorant mentality in the year 2008. An African-American can represent our state (and our country) just as well as a White person. What are you afraid of? Free your minds people! Vernon Jones for U.S. Senate!”
The funny thing is, it was sent from a DeKalb County government computer….
Permalink | Comments (25) | Post your comment |
We are led by war criminals, says general
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Army Maj. Gen. Anthony Taguba led the military’s investigation into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, and he did so honestly and forthrightly. As reward for doing his job well, he was forced to retire from the service he loved.
The two-star general has now written a forward to a report on widespread, systematic, officially sanctioned torture by U.S. soldiers and civilians. His conclusion is stunning:
“This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individuals’ lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors….
After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
The truth will emerge, and when it does this nation’s reputation will be seriously damaged in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of its own people. Our shame will be compounded by the fact that for so long we dumped blame for Abu Ghraib and other atrocities on the very lowest soldiers in the chain of command, those powerless to protect themselves, while allowing those at the top of that chain of command to claim clean hands.
Permalink | Comments (146) | Post your comment |
The oil-drilling solution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We’ve gone over this before, but since it seems to be taking on new political importance, let’s review:
Would opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other coastal areas to oil drilling have any effect on gasoline prices, as many politicians claim?
No, it would not. For one thing, oil companies already hold a backlog of leases on offshore areas that they haven’t begun to tap, in part because of a global shortage of drilling equipment. They face no shortage of domestic areas waiting to be exploited.
On the other hand, it’s true that drilling technology has improved, and that environmental risks of offshore drilling are much lower than a generation ago. So we probably could begin to assess on a case-by-case basis whether to someday open areas now off-limits to drilling.
However, that would not lower gas prices and it would not alter our basic strategic energy situation. Here’s why:
Take ANWR as an example. Many Americans would be surprised to learn that oil produced from ANWR would be sold to Americans at whatever the global price for oil happened to be. There’s no “hometown discount” - U.S. consumers would pay 100 percent of the global price for ANWR oil, just as we do today for oil produced from Alaska, Texas or the Gulf of Mexico.
That’s because all oil produced in this country goes into the world oil market. All oil sold in this country is bought off the world oil market. The only way to change that would be to nationalize our oil industry.
So there’s only one way that opening ANWR and other areas could lower the price of gasoline here in the United States: It would have to put enough “new oil” on the global market to drive down the price of oil worldwide.
A newly released study by the federal Energy Information Administration says that simply would not happen. According to the EIA, if drilling began in ANWR this year, oil production from that region would peak around 2027-2030. At peak production, ANWR would produce enough oil to lower the world price of oil by about 1 percent.
So if gasoline is selling at $5 a gallon in 2030, that would amount to 5 cents a gallon.
That EIA prediction has actually been confirmed recently in the oil markets. Saudi Arabia has announced it would increase production by 500,000 barrels a day. It sounds like a lot, but it isn’t. Not when you consider total world consumption of about 85 million barrels a day. So it’s no surprise that the Saudi announcement has had no discernible impact on world oil prices.
Furthermore, the EIA predicts that as ANWR oil came on the world market, OPEC would simply cut back its own production, thus keeping the global oil supply - and the global price - unchanged, So in the end, drilling in the wildlife refuge and offshore areas would have little or no impact on oil prices. It is a false hope.
Permalink | Comments (76) | Post your comment |
Martin best pick to face Chambliss
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from today’s editorial….
Five candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate and the right to challenge Saxby Chambliss, the Republican incumbent, in the fall. But only one - former state Rep. Jim Martin — has the experience, the character and the intellect demanded for the role.
Rand Knight, an environmental engineer and software salesman, has the intellect and character but has never held or sought public office. A seat in the U.S. Senate would be too big a step, too soon. Dale Cardwell, a former TV reporter, touts himself as an alternative to “business as usual” but has done nothing to establish himself as more than a protest candidate. Camping out on a tower in the dead of winter may draw publicity, but it is not the act of a potential U.S. senator. Josh Lanier, a retired businessman and consultant, is not running an aggressive campaign.
The remaining candidate, DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones, is a special case. He is a man of large talents and large flaws, but those flaws of temperament, character and judgment are so large as to disqualify him from consideration for higher office.
During his controversial tenure as county executive, Jones has twice been accused of physical confrontations with women, with one case ending only after Jones wrote two apologies to a fellow county official “for the language I used and/or for my conduct toward you, which I now realize was inappropriate and which I now acknowledge has no place in the conduct of our personal and professional affairs.”
In a third case, Jones was accused of rape. His defense — that sexual acts between himself and two women had been consensual, not forced — does not engender confidence in a senatorial candidate. (The charge was later dropped at the request of the alleged victim, who continued to stick by her version of events.)
Voters in a Democratic primary might also question the wisdom of nominating a man who has acknowledged voting for President Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. Having Jones at the top of the Democratic ticket statewide would not just harm the hopes of candidates for lesser office, it would taint the Georgia campaign of presidential nominee Barack Obama as well.
Fortunately, Martin offers an attractive alternative. A Vietnam veteran, he has earned deep bipartisan respect through his service in the state Legislature and as commissioner of the state Department of Human Resources under Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, and Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican.
Martin also stresses the importance of being an independent voice for Georgia in the Senate regardless of who is elected president, drawing a contrast to the blind allegiance he claims Chambliss has given to Bush. His nomination would bring credit both to his party and to his state.
Permalink | Comments (19) | Post your comment |
‘And now for something completely different….’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s the Thursday column…
We got there early, or so I thought. But no.
Some 4,000 people had gotten there ahead us, forcing us to take seats in the far upper reaches of the cavernous, historic Fox Theater in downtown Atlanta. We had all been drawn out of our air-conditioned homes on a warm summer evening, pulled away from our TVs and computers and video games, by the chance to watch a black-and-white movie churned out by the studio system more than 60 years ago, long before most of us in the audience had even been born.
We came to watch Humphrey Bogart lament that “of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.”
We came to giggle at Claude Rains claiming to be“shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.”
And we came to hear Bogie tell Ingrid Bergman one more time that “it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
The enduring appeal of “Casablanca” would probably startle those who made the movie, because it’s such a product of a unique moment in our history. While actors were saying those now-famous lines on a Hollywood sound stage, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers were being shipped overseas in the opening months of World War II. It wasn’t melodrama to say that the fate of the world hung in the balance, giving the screenplay a power that is sometimes lost on modern audiences.
Early in the movie, for example, Rick pinpoints the exact moment in time in which the events take place.
“Sam, if it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?”
“Uh, my watch stopped,” Sam replies.
“I’ll bet they’re sleeping in New York. I bet they’re sleeping all over America.”
The original audience knew quite well what Rick did not, that on Dec. 7, 1941, a wakeup call was coming in the form of Pearl Harbor.
Casablanca is many things — a date movie, a chick flick, a war movie, a spy thriller. But it is also a profoundly political movie about the importance of surrendering individual desires for the greater common good, particularly when great things are at stake. We can’t all be Victor Laslo, the charismatic, virtuous hero, but as Rick finally learns, each of us must sacrifice to do our part. That too had a particular resonance for a WWII audience.
So why does the movie still fascinate us even now, in a very different time and place? The movie supplies its own answer: Because it’s still the same old story, the fight for love and glory. The fundamental things still apply.
There is also an undeniable magic to the familiar, like the old family stories that get retold every year at the holidays even though everybody already knows every line and detail. When Rick and Ilsa are first reunited, you anticipate the bitter sting of that line you know is coming: “I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.” And when it comes, it never disappoints.
At the end, after Rick walked off into the fog with Louie proclaiming “the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” the audience cheered and applauded. But later, as we made our way to the car, the youngest family member remarked that she hadn’t realized how silly the movie was.
Silly? One of the greatest movies of all time, silly?
Yes, she said. Silly because at the end, they made Ilsa out to be so stupid and helpless.
Oh, that. Yes, there is that.
“I ran away from you once,” Ilsa says, her head lolling on Rick’s shoulder. “I can’t do it again. Oh, I don’t know what’s right anymore. You’ll have to think for both of us, for all of us.”
Those are not the words of the noble, strong Ilsa we’ve come to know. They are the words of a screenwriter trying to wrap things up. If you look too closely, the plot creaks and groans in a lot of places, particularly in its reliance on magical “letters of transit” allowing anyone to flee the purgatory of Casablanca for the heaven of America.
But I guess you learn to overlook the imperfections of old friends as you get older — you know, as time goes by.
Permalink | Comments (23) | Post your comment |
Abortion as a campaign issue
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Barack Obama believes that the decision to have an abortion is profoundly difficult for women and families, and that these decisions are personal, between a woman, her family, her God, and her doctor, and that politicians should stay out of it. As president, Obama will oppose any constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade, and he will work to reduce unintended pregnancies through prevention and education by expanding access to birth control and sex education.”
“John McCain is pro-life and on the issue of abortion, he opposes a woman’s right to choose. McCain says that quote ‘abortion is a human tragedy,’ and he believes that we must end abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade. As president, he will nominate Supreme Court judges who will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and return the issue to the states to decide.”
Are those straightforward, accurate and value-free assessments of the positions of McCain and Obama on abortion? It seems to me that they are, but you can draw your own conclusions.
If those are indeed neutral statements not intended to sway a person one way or the other, then the results of a new poll — commissioned by the National Abortion Rights Action League — become pretty interesting. The poll found that after “key blocs of women voters—specifically pro-choice Republican and independent women” heard those descriptions, Obama’s overall poll numbers in battleground states improve from “a net 2 points (47 - 45 percent) to a net 13 points (53 - 40 percent).” That’s among voters overall, not just women.
A candidate’s position on abortion is important to the bases in both parties. This poll — again, commissioned by someone with a dog in the fight — suggests that it also has the power to move those in the middle. And with the the next president likely to name at least one or two Supreme Court justices, the outcome of the November race will be critically important in how this issue plays out.
Purely as a matter of politics, I think a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade would be a political bonus for Democrats, bringing a lot more voters and passion into the debate from the pro-choice side. As the 2006 referendum in conservative South Dakota demonstrated (voters overturned an abortion ban in a 55-45 vote), the public as a whole does not want to ban abortion.
Obama and the ‘Black House?’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia’s national reputation took a hit with all of those stories about the T-shirts likening Barack Obama to a banana-eating “Curious George.” But never fear, Texas has our back, as The Dallas Morning News reports.
Further reporting here.
Strange how nobody actually attending the convention thought it noteworthy, yet party officials now claim to be properly offended.
UPDATE: Let’s try a little thought experiment. Imagine that, say, Colin Powell or Condi Rice had been nominated as the Republican candidate. Could you then imagine that such a button would be sold at Democratic state conventions? No, you could not. And therein lies the difference.
Permalink | Comments (40) | Post your comment |
Bob Barr’s marriage of convenience
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
All I gotta say is, if Bob Barr is the answer, it must have been a helluva odd question.
A friend recommended this piece in The New Republic describing the Libertarian Party convention that ended up nominating Barr for president. It’s pretty funny, and pretty sad too.
As the piece demonstrates, “Libertarian Party” is almost a contradiction in terms, because having a party means having some rules and organization. But Libertarians aren’t much into the rules thing, and they see organization as a fascist concept.
Hilarity ensues…
Permalink | Comments (27) | Post your comment |
“Can Georgia Be Obama’s Ohio?”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
That’s the headline of a new piece in Time magazine.
“In briefings last week with former Hillary Clinton supporters, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, said he is focusing on Georgia and Virginia as potential swing states and, depending on the outcomes of voter registration drives, he’s also keeping an eye on Mississippi and Louisiana. In Georgia, the Obama campaign has wasted no time, launching massive voter registration drives before the primaries had even ended….. Obama has 15 full-time paid staffers who have been in Georgia for over a month.”
The crux of the Obama strategy is to make Georgia competitive by significantly increasing black turnout. If he succeeds, that would also make the Democrats competitive in other races here, such as the U.S. Senate.
Permalink | Comments (28) | Post your comment |
First-class passengers, but not first-class citizens
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The company that wants to put fast-paced, paid security lanes at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is teaming with Delta Air Lines in a move that could bring the so-called Clear lanes to Atlanta by late summer.
Delta had initially opposed the paid express lanes, primarily aimed at business travelers willing to fork over $128 a year for a faster trip through security checkpoints. The airline feared they might interfere with Delta’s own lines for premium passengers.
But the Atlanta-based carrier Monday said that after further study it will partner with Clear Inc. to operate its fast lanes in Delta terminals at New York’s JFK International and LaGuardia airports and Los Angeles International Airport beginning this summer. Hartsfield-Jackson could begin testing the paid lanes as early as August.
Clear promises a five-minute trip through security.”
I’m sure I’m in the minority on this, but the whole idea here bothers me. Yes, going through airport security is a real pain. But it is also a government-imposed requirement. And I just don’t think that more affluent Americans should be able to purchase a way around a government-imposed requirement that is not available to those of lesser means.
I can hear it already: “It’s socialism!! Communism!!” Wrong, it’s Americanism.
If you have the means and desire to buy a seat in first-class, fine. Having more money allows you to buy more things, including better service. That’s what makes the world go around and a capitalist economy hum. That’s all great. It gives those in the back of the plane something to strive for. I understand all that.
But before government, we are all supposed to be equal under the law, one citizen no better than another. That’s a bedrock American principle. Or at least it used to be.
Permalink | Comments (109) | Post your comment |
Obama the Anti-Christ
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Boy, this Obama fellow has really gotten the loony contingent all worked up. He’s a sleeper agent for Islam!! He’s the anti-Christ described in Revelations!!!! Excerpts from my recent email offer a frightening peek into our ugly national id.
E-MAIL #1:
According to The Book of Revelations, the anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal…. the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything ….
Is it OBAMA?? I STRONGLY URGE each one of you to repost this as many times as you can! Each opportunity that you have to send it to a friend or media outlet…do it!
E-MAIL #2:
How long did it take Islam and their oil money to find a candidate for President of the United States? As long as it took them to place a Senator from Illinois and Minnesota?…..
Find a candidate who can get away with lying about their father being a ‘freedom fighter’ when he was actually part of the most corrupt and violent government in Kenya’s history. Find a candidate with close ties to The Nation of Islam and the violent Muslim overthrow in Africa, a candidate who is educated among white infidel Americans but hides his bitterness and anger behind a superficial toothy smile. Find a candidate who changes his American name of Barry to the Muslim name of Barak Hussein Obama, and dares anyone to question his true ties under the banner of ‘racism’. Nurture this candidate in an atmosphere of anti-white American teaching and surround him with Islamic teachers. Provide him with a bitter, racist, anti-white, anti-American wife, and supply him with Muslim Middle East connections and Islamic monies. Allow him to be clever enough to get away with his anti-white rhetoric and proclaim he will give $834 billion taxpayer dollars to the Muslim-controlled United Nations for use in Africa….
Lies and deception behind a master plan — the ingredients for ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ or the placement of an anti-American president in our nation’s White House? Is it mere coincidence that an anti-capitalist runs for president at the same time Islamic sharia finance and law is trying to make advancing strides into the United States? Is it mere coincidence this same candidate wants to disarm our nuclear capability at a time when terrorist Muslim nations are expanding their nuclear weapons capability? Is it mere coincidence this candidate wants to reduce our military at a time of global jihad from Muslim nations?
“People hate people”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Commenter “Moccasin City” made a profound point in the discussion below, so I thought I’d give it top billing here to see what it provokes.
“People won’t ride the train to Lovejoy because people can’t hang out with each other any more. We simply can’t. Something has happened in the zeitgeist that makes public exposure too stressful. People hate crowds. People hate people. We’re an internet cafe society now, and all our contact with humanity occurs in bibagytes and pegamixels. (that’s pig latin for cyber chip speed and memory measuring thingies).”
Hard to argue with that. We do seem to fear each other more than ever; we do seem to have less patience with each other than ever. There’s even a website out there, www.whyihatepeople.com, that encourages you to vent about all those other … PEOPLE!
Permalink | Comments (82) | Post your comment |
Workin’ on the railroad…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday’s column:
In science, they call it a “phase transition,” the process in which something is suddenly and dramatically altered. At 32 degrees, for example, ice remains ice. But at 33 degrees, ice is transformed from a stable solid to a free-flowing liquid. That’s a phase transition.
Apparently, $4 gasoline is a lot like that; it too is the critical point at which attitudes long frozen in place finally begin to melt and flow freely. Americans start driving less, Detroit starts making smaller cars and — wonder of wonders — Gov. Sonny Perdue calls a press conference to publicly embrace mass transit, saying that he “fully supports” a proposed commuter rail line linking Atlanta with Lovejoy on through to Griffin, with other lines coming on later.
The goal, Perdue said, is “providing Georgia commuters with real alternatives.” I know — it’s hard to believe. But I was there in the crowd when the governor uttered those words.
He went on to call for “innovative and progressive decision-makers,” and even admitted that Georgia will need “additional resources” to solve its transportation crisis (“t-a-x” being a four-letter word, at least in Perdue’s dictionary).
However, you could tell that the governor wasn’t entirely comfortable with his new persona. While he adopted position after position that he had long rejected, he did so by recasting them in GOP-friendly terminology. The state of Georgia won’t be “spending” more money to meet its critical transportation needs, it will be “investing” that money “to bring dividends for a long time.” And instead of drafting a new, more progressive transportation policy for Georgia, Transportation Commissioner Gena Abraham and other state officials will “develop a business case” for transportation.
All that’s fine. If calling it a “business case” and “investment” allows the governor to back a plan that reduces congestion, cleans the air, gets commerce moving and offers commuters an alternative to the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, he can call it Ralph for all I care.
Gas at four bucks a gallon has also done something else magical: In Perdue’s mind, at least, it has driven a phase transition at the state Department of Transportation, transforming it from a crippled agency to a bureaucracy ready to build “a world-class transportation system.”
Just a couple of months ago, you might recall, the state DOT was in such disarray that Perdue cited the agency as his chief reason for opposing a plan to boost transportation spending — oops, investment — in the metro region. The department just wasn’t ready to handle it, he explained.
Yet by last week Perdue had changed his tune. In his almost two decades in state government, he said, “I believe that this is the best state transportation board I have had the privilege to work with.”
Again, the board didn’t suddenly improve. The governor’s sudden switch of position has been forced by pressure from voters, business groups, legislators and local officials outraged by the stubborn refusal of state leadership to take the transportation problems of metro Atlanta seriously. What we saw last week was proof that the message had begun to get through.
Little of what the governor endorsed was new; federal money for the Lovejoy line has been available since early in the administration of Gov. Roy Barnes, for example, but the project has gone nowhere, in large part because of skepticism from Perdue.
Over the years, the governor repeatedly opposed kicking in state matching funds for the project on grounds that rail operations would be subsidized by taxpayers. Last week, he again mentioned that fare-box revenues would not be enough to cover operations for the Atlanta-Griffin line and public subsidies would be required. “But we also know that roads are subsidized too, that they don’t pay their full fare,” the governor said.
Like I said, I might not believe it if I hadn’t heard it myself. Now, we’ll see if hopeful words become action and then progress.
Permalink | Comments (19) | Post your comment |
Learning the hard way….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OCEANSIDE, Calif. — On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.
Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.
A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax — a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.
“They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized,” said guidance counselor Lori Tauber, who helped organize the shocking exercise and got dozens of students to participate. “That’s how they get the message.”
You know, I think I finally understand now why the Supreme Court decided as it did back in 2000. They wanted to remind the American people that it matters who we elect as president; they wanted to dramatize the consequences of incompetence and “gut thinking” in the most powerful office in the world.
If so, mission accomplished.
Permalink | Comments (33) | Post your comment |
Special rules for special people
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
AJC reporter Bill Rankin has a nice breakdown on the issues surrounding House Speaker Glenn Richarson’s secret divorce filings.
Randy Kessler, an Atlanta divorce lawyer, said he has received requests from clients for “the Glenn Richardson divorce,” meaning getting the case sealed right after it is filed. “But then we have to explain to them that we just can’t do it,” he said….
“I don’t have a beef with him trying to keep his private life private,” (Atlanta attorney Shiel) Edlin said of the speaker. “The problem is that he seemed to do it in an unprecedented manner. I will be extremely interested to see if the courts grant him the power to seal it.”
It seems to me that the judge in the case — a buddy and former law partner of Richardson — has been doing some of that there “judicial activism,” making the law say what he wants it to say. But hey, what do I know? (Don’t answer that — although I know you guys won’t be able to resist.)
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment |
Perdue guarded rainy-day fund … and now it’s raining
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We’re clearly in the rainy season, economically if not meteorologically (now, there’s a word that’s easier to type than pronounce).
According to the latest figures, state sales tax revenue fell by more than 8 percent in May, indicating a significant slowdown in the Georgia economy and making it almost certain that the state will have to dip into its so-called “rainy day fund” to make ends meet in the months to come.
If this downturn is deep enough and long enough, as seems possible, even the state’s $1.5 billion budgetary cushion may not be enough to avoid a special session or cutbacks in state spending.
However, it’s important to remember that in the recently concluded 2008 General Assembly, leaders in both the House and Senate had advocated raiding the state’s reserve fund to pay for election-year tax breaks.
That’s what the fund is there for, argued House Speaker Glenn Richardson and Speaker Pro Tem Mark Burkhalter. House Minority Leader DuBose Porter echoed that argument, and in the Senate, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle also advocated tax cuts even as economists were warning about falling revenues.
The strongest voice for preserving the state’s rainy day fund was Gov. Sonny Perdue, and luckily for the people of Georgia, he carried the day.
On issues from transportation to education, Perdue has been far from a dynamic governor. And while he opposed the largest, most irresponsible tax cuts, he did back more than $150 million in special business-oriented tax cuts this year, money that could have saved lives if spent on the state’s underfunded mental health system or trauma network.
Overall, however, Perdue has been a cautious steward of the state budget, insisting that Georgia leaders act responsibly in carrying out their fiscal duties. Had Richardson and others succeeded in the more harebrained tax-cut schemes they were promoting, the tough days to come would been much tougher still.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment |
Will wonders never cease?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just got back from a press conference at the governor’s office and saw and heard Sonny Perdue stress the importance of getting commuter rail operational between Atlanta and Griffin and announce $13 million in new funding for commuter buses operated by GRTA.
He also acknowledged that rail service would have to be subsidized. “But we know that roads are subsidized too, that they don’t pay their full fare.”
I know you won’t believe me. But I was there. I saw it in person.
Permalink | Comments (44) | Post your comment |
Mahmoud and Nouri, sitting in a tree…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Earlier this week, neocon cheerleaders Fred and Kimberly Kagan published a piece in the Wall Street Journal in which the opening sentence stated: “America is very close to succeeding in Iraq.” The piece lauded the leadership of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.
That sparked the following response, sent to me by a senior U.S. military officer with service in Iraq who has served as a source in the past. He seems much less enthralled with Maliki, particularly given his embrace of Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Don’t look now, but the Kagans are taking a victory lap.
Yes, that adorable, bloodthirsty (other folks’ blood, mind you) husband-wife duo did their end-zone dance this week on the editorial pages of (you guessed it) the Wall Street Journal.
Fred and Kim Kagan, you’ll remember, were masters of the obvious last year as they pushed their plan to “surge” (so-named because we quickly discovered we couldn’t “sustain”) additional US forces into the explosive cauldron of Iraq.
Just send more manpower, they explained and good things will flow.
Getting ahead of the president, Gen. Petraeus and every other military leader with sense enough not to whistle past the graveyard, the Kagans announced Tuesday that “success is in sight.” Presumably, they were not referring to the sloppy wet kisses Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and Iranian President Ahmadinajahd were seen bestowing on one another that same day.
I’ve never figured out why “The Liberator” Bush has to sneak into Iraq like a thief in the night, while the presumed Axis of Evil top dog, Iran’s “I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket,” is feted as a state guest every time he pops in to see bosom buddy Maliki. Gee, The Liberator has videoconferences with Maliki every week. Suuuuurely that counts for something?
You bet it does. As the Kagans reminded us this week, “America is very close to succeeding in Iraq.” In fact, “the political process builds momentum.” Ah, that explains the Shi’a smooches between the region’s two (former) most bitter enemies.
Any more “momentum” and Maliki and Ahmadinejahd will have to get a room.
But wait, the Kagans warn: Just because “we are winning today,” “these tremendous gains could be lost to skillful enemy action.”
Presumably, these “skillful enemies” are not the same ones the Kagans alternately describe as those who “cling desperately,” yet are certain to “conduct spectacular attacks” in the months ahead.
You see, the “enemy” is weak now….. except when they’re strong.
“No one could have imagined how far we would have come in 18 months,” the boastful duo crows. Right they are. But if we could have imagined we would lose 1,154 brave men and women over these last 18 months, oh how we would have praised the Kagans for their wisdom, right?
By the way, for those keeping score, this 18-month “success story” would translate to 76,933 more American caskets under the McCain 100-year Plan. McCain calls that “victory.”
Turning logic on its head, “defeat” is how McCain describes an Obama plan that removes Americans from the killing fields before the “enemy” can rack up such an eye-popping tally.
And there you have it. Given how pleased Sen. McCain seems to be with the “success” of the “surge,” I think we have a couple of prime nominees for his cabinet.
Madame and Messieur Kagan, thanks for the hard work.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment |
‘Champagne Bill’ Campbell and FoxNews: Sleazy to their DNA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sometimes prison can change people. There is no sign whatsoever it has changed Bill Campbell. The story of the former mayor’s attempt to shorten his prison term by getting treatment for an alcohol problem he did not have is classic Campbell: He tries to scam the system; he gets people to lie for him; when he gets caught, he “became angry and tried to derail the questions by recounting his opinion about the unfairness of the justice system and his prosecution,” like the little crybaby he always was.
Campbell had an addiction problem all right: He became addicted to power and drunk on easy money, but there are no rehabilitation programs for that kind of thing. Well, except for prison, and that clearly isn’t taking.
Meanwhile, our friends over at FoxNews run a news crawl that states: “Outraged liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama.” The “baby mama” in question is Michelle Obama, the married mother of two daughters with degrees from Princeton and Harvard and very possibly our next first lady. (Read updated story from Associated Press on Friday)
Vile to the core…. Fox, like Campbell, once again showing their true colors. Like the scorpion, it is in their natures.
Permalink | Comments (146) | Post your comment |
On war, deception and now denial
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s the column for Thursday:
Did President Bush and his administration lead us into the Iraq war under false pretenses?
Absolutely, they did. The documented evidence is overwhelming. Nonetheless, some of those who initially backed Bush’s decision to invade Iraq continue to claim otherwise, arguing that the president — and they themselves — were upfront with the American people in laying out the invasion case.
For example, in a recent column, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt described the “Bush lied, people died” thesis as a fiction, citing a new report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Sen. John Rockefeller (D-West Virginia).
To Rockefeller, the report documents “the absolute cynical manipulation — deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion,” and says he too had been fooled into supporting the war. But to Hiatt, the Rockefeller report actually absolves Bush of the charge of deception. As he points out, the report confirms that pre-war statements concerning Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs were “generally substantiated by intelligence information.”
Unfortunately, that information just turned out to be “tragically, catastrophically wrong,” Hiatt writes.
In other words, how were the Bush administration and other war advocates — including Hiatt himself— supposed to have known that before the war?
Hiatt is trying to fight this battle on ground that he can defend. The intelligence community did indeed believe that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, and it was honestly surprised to learn otherwise after the war, as was I.
However, the case for war was based on two additional assertions: First, that Saddam had close ties with al Qaida and other international terrorist groups, and that because of those ties, he might give those groups access to WMD to be used against the United States.
Neither claim had a foundation in reality or intelligence, and in fact were contradicted by reports from the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The Rockefeller report is quite explicit in its conclusions:
“Statements by the president and vice president indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by intelligence information,” it stated.
It further concludes:
“Statements and implications by the president and secretary of state suggesting that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al Qaida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence. Intelligence assessments, including multiple CIA reports and the November 2002 NIE [National Intelligence Estimate], dismissed the claim that Iraq and al Qaida were cooperating partners.”
However, there had also been a larger, more important lie behind the invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration did not seriously believe that Iraq posed a danger to the American people. It sought war for another reason entirely, because it believed that the invasion of Iraq and the assertion of U.S. military might could be the first step in transforming the Arab Middle East into a pro-American region and turning Iran into a docile puppy dog. Others in Washington, including some Democrats and members of the national media, shared that simplistic assessment.
However, they also understood that the American people would not agree to fight a war in pursuit of such grandiose goals. To agree to war, we had to be frightened into believing that our own safety was at risk, that without an invasion, mushroom clouds might soon rise over American cities.
So the Bush administration constructed a scenario that would accomplish that feat, and many in the Washington-based media — “complicit enablers,” as former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan described them — put that scenario on their loudspeakers without questioning its veracity.
That’s the awkward truth.
Permalink | Comments (24) | Post your comment |
Iraqis reject McCain’s ‘100-year’ plan
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the very beginning, one of the biggest prizes of our invasion of Iraq was the chance to build permanent bases in the country, just as we did in Japan and Germany after WWII and in Korea. John McCain, among others, has said it would be OK by him if our troops stayed in Iraq for 100 years.
Such bases would give us considerable military leverage in the region, particularly over neighboring Iran. However, the Iraqis don’t seem quite so enthralled with the idea. Their vision for the future seems closer to that of Barack Obama than to McCain.
BAGHDAD, June 10 — High-level negotiations over the future role of the U.S. military in Iraq have turned into an increasingly acrimonious public debate, with Iraqi politicians denouncing what they say are U.S. demands to maintain nearly 60 bases in their country indefinitely.
Top Iraqi officials are calling for a radical reduction of the U.S. military’s role here after the U.N. mandate authorizing its presence expires at the end of this year. Encouraged by recent Iraqi military successes, government officials have said that the United States should agree to confine American troops to military bases unless the Iraqis ask for their assistance, with some saying Iraq might be better off without them.
“The Americans are making demands that would lead to the colonization of Iraq,” said Sami al-Askari, a senior Shiite politician on parliament’s foreign relations committee who is close to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “If we can’t reach a fair agreement, many people think we should say, ‘Goodbye, U.S. troops. We don’t need you here anymore.’ “
Permalink | Comments (71) | Post your comment |
‘Cause the times, they are a changin’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At first, the evidence was purely anecdotal: Daily commuters reporting that traffic seemed lighter than it should be this time of year; my local MARTA parking lot full of more pickup trucks and SUVs than usual; friends from other parts of the country reporting that the highways were less packed than usual.
Then the statistical evidence began to trickle in, backing up eyewitness accounts. The Federal Highway Administration reported that Americans drove 11 billion miles less in March than the previous March, a 4.3 percent decline. Drilling a little deeper into that data, the decline of vehicular travel was even more dramatic here in Georgia, falling 5.8 percent in March.
Looking a little deeper still, travel on rural roads in Georgia fell by 6.5 percent over the previous March, confirming the analysis that rural parts of the state — where distances are longer, alternatives fewer and paychecks slimmer — are being hit hardest by the gasoline crunch.
And now, the state Dep’t of Revenue reports Monday that Georgians bought 175 million fewer gallons of gas this fiscal year than they did last year, a number that will surely rise significantly in the new fiscal year. I bet that’s the first time in modern history that has happened.
These are the short-term effects. The longer term effects on how and where we live, work, play and do business will be significant and at this point unpredictable. If shoppers start to constrict the distance that they’re willing to travel, for example, it could lead to the return of smaller, community-based retailers and the relative decline of big-box stores.
Anybody else have predictions or possibilities on the type of cultural and societal-level changes something like this could produce?
Permalink | Comments (58) | Post your comment |
First the corn, now the tomatoes?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It has always been one of the highlights of summer, the piles of fresh corn on the cob at the grocery store. When corn was at its cheapest, you knew it was at its best, because it meant that the local crop was coming in and flooding the market.
Fresh corn on the cob, dripping with butter, salt and pepper… yes, ma’am, nothing better. Back in an earlier time, when I had enough property to grow it myself, corn picked right off the stalk was a revelation.
But in the summer of ‘08, things are different. For a variety of reasons, the bounties of fresh corn are gone, and the corn that has made it to market so far has fallen well short of the perfection of earlier years. It’s as if something fundamental had gone awry in the universe.
And now they’re pulling tomatoes off the market too. An American summer without corn and tomatoes? What next, a baseball strike?
A few weeks from now, corn from the Midwest’s corn belt would ordinarily start coming into the market. But apparently this year’s crop is likely to be stunted by too much rain, and a poor harvest is predicted. And unfortunately, what the American consumer experiences as an inconvenience may mean starvation in other parts of the world, where life is closer to the edge and paying for food is difficult.
It’s all adds to the sense that the world has gotten a bit out of plumb, economically as well as ecologically. Somehow, I suspect it’s George Bush’s fault.
(That’s a joke, people. Actually, I blame Dick Cheney).
Uh oh, bad news from the guv’s office
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From Gov. Perdue’s press office…
ATLANTA - Governor Sonny Perdue announced today that net revenue collections for the month of May 2008 (FY08) totaled $1,473,892,000 compared to $2,140,232,000 for May 2007 (FY07), a decrease of $666,340,000 or 31.1 percent.
The percentage decrease year-to-date for FY08 compared to FY07 is 0.1 percent.
“These figures are not surprising given April’s sharp rise in collections due to processing improvements made by the Department of Revenue,” said Governor Perdue. “We will continue to monitor revenue collections and responsibly manage the state’s fiscal affairs.”
This is bad news, folks. The governor is correct that the stark decline in income tax collections over May 2007 — 41.8 percent for individuals, 32.8 percent for corporations — is largely a consequence of more of that money being collected and tallied in the April tax season.
However, the 8.3 percent decline in sales and use tax revenues compared to May ‘07 cannot be explained that way and might endanger the state budget.
More importantly, it tells us that the state economy is hurting worse than most of us thought.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment |
Drawing the line at Saxby Chambliss
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from The Augusta Chronicle and Morris News Service:
ATLANTA — The chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee says Sen. Saxby Chambliss will be a key part of the firewall the party wants to build against stronger Democratic control of Congress.
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., set a floor on the number of Senate seats the party must control: 41.
“The number that we get to is really, really important in the U.S. Senate,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons Saxby absolutely must hold his seat.”
… By holding at least 41 Senate seats, the GOP would prevent the Democrats from having the 60 votes required to end filibusters, which prevent votes on bills.
Wow. That’s a pretty low floor, considering that the GOP now holds 49 seats in the Senate. So they’re hoping not to lose more than eight seats, with Chambliss as their firewall?
I’m guessing that plans for that “permanent Republican majority” have been shelved for the time being.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment |
Perdue: Popularity vs. effectiveness
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When historians sit down to write a paragraph or two about the accomplishments of Sonny Perdue’s eight-year period as governor, what will they have to talk about?
I’m afraid the account will look something like this:
He canceled school to save fuel for farmers….
He gave himself a $100,000 tax break….
The main initiative of his second term was “Go Fish Georgia.”
He prayed for rain and it rained…. a little.
Well into his second and last term, that’s about everything of note that you’ll find on his “Sonny Did” list.
Of course, as Perdue’s supporters would no doubt point out, the governor has remained personally popular with the voters of Georgia. In poll after poll, he continues to enjoy approval ratings of more than 60 percent.
Still, Perdue’s time as governor isn’t up yet, and he will still preside over two more sessions of the General Assembly. But there’s no sign that he’s going to be hit by a sudden burst of ambition. Read full column
Permalink | Comments (64) | Post your comment |
“Black guy asks nation for change”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CHICAGO—According to witnesses, a loud black man approached a crowd of some 4,000 strangers in downtown Chicago Tuesday and made repeated demands for change.
“The time for change is now,” said the black guy, yelling at everyone within earshot for 20 straight minutes, practically begging America for change. “The need for change is stronger and more urgent than ever before. And only you—the people standing here today, and indeed all the people of this great nation—only you can deliver this change.”
It is estimated that, to date, the black man has asked every single person in the United States for change.
“I’ve already seen this guy four times today,” Chicago-area ad salesman Blake Gordon said. “Every time, it’s the same exact spiel. ‘I need change.’ ‘I want change.’ Why’s he so eager for all this change? What’s he going to do with it, anyway?”
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment |
The Mystery of the Witchified Wife
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I touched on this in an earlier posting, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since: Why do conservatives seem to identify the wives of Democratic nominees as legitimate Targets of Group Hate?
The venom directed at Hillary Clinton over the years was way over the top, and oddly, it seemed to decline in intensity once she began to build a political reputation and career of her own. In her presidential run, some on the conservative side even began to admit to a grudging admiration of her. And the original example of the Witchified Wife, of course, was Eleanor Roosevelt.
More recently, Teresa Heinz, wife of John Kerry, got a good dose of hate and ridicule, and these days the Right seems positively eager to make a target of Michelle Obama and cast her as the new Hillary, even to the point of fabricating excuses to attack her.
Just as they did with Hillary — you know, the lesbian who murdered Vince Foster ….
Keep it civil.
Permalink | Comments (70) | Post your comment |
Well, this ought to be interesting…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hillary Clinton is about to make her long-delayed concession speech, which will supposedly include an enthusiastic endorsement of Barack Obama. We shall see….
UPDATE I: There’s the endorsement of Obama, accompanied by some rather healthy boos from the crowd and a grim expression from Clinton. She’s saying the words, but I think it’s safe to say her heart isn’t it.
UPDATE II: She’s absolutely right about the historic impact of her campaign. She has dispelled any notion that women aren’t strong and tenacious enough to serve as president and commander in chief. Whoever our first female president might be — and it might still be Hillary — this primary season helped pave the way for that person.
UPDATE III: “A workmanlike job,” I guess you’d say. She did what she had to do, what she never wanted to do but in the end had no choice. It has to be difficult to admit that it has ended, that everything you put into the race and everything that others did on your behalf were simply not enough.
On to November — may the best man win.
Permalink | Comments (43) | Post your comment |
Sorry guys, no video
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For a couple of weeks now, the right-wing blogosphere has been giddily anticipating release of a secret videotape said to feature Michelle Obama that would blow the Democrat’s campaign out of the water. It allegedly features Mrs. Obama ranting and raving in anger at “whitey,” and the story was that top Republicans were holding the tape back until after Obama had secured the nomination, when it would do the most damage.
It all sounded like nonsense, but it fed into the deep, heart-felt desire of some on the right to turn Michelle Obama into evil incarnate, an object of hate, just as they did with Hillary Clinton and to a lesser degree to Teresa Heinz, wife of John Kerry. It also reflected their desperate hope that something, anything, might save them from the disaster that seems to loom come November.
One poster on the freerepublic.com site got so carried away he even rewrote the lyrics of the Beatles’ song “Michelle,” coming up with this gem:
“Michelle bombshell She says words that won’t go over well That Michelle
Michelle, bombshell Once again the wife, she drops the bomb She drops the bomb,”
It gets worse from there.
Again, the story never made sense, and now Jim Geraghty of the National Review tries to kill the rumor by noting that in its narrative, the rumor rather closely matches the plot of a 2006 political thriller by Stephen Frey.
“Now. Either author Stephen Frey is clairvoyant, writing this book in 2006. Or this is one of the all time amazing coincidences. Or whoever started this rumor got the idea from a novel,” Geraghty writes, concluding that “those who prefer a president besides Obama should not go through the summer and fall convinced that a magic-bullet devastating tape is going to appear as an October surprise to save the day.”
Permalink | Comments (21) | Post your comment |
License-plate religion…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“While I do, in fact, ‘believe’ - it is my personal view that the largest proclamation of one’s faith ought to be in how one lives one’s life … If God is working in one’s life, (that) will say what no license plate will ever say.”
- South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, explaining why he refused to sign a bill creating a Christian-themed license plate that says “I believe.”
Unfortunately, the bill became law anyway, because Sanford refused to use his veto power to prevent it. He took the Pontius Pilate approach, you might say. As a result, South Carolina Christians can now boldly proclaim their faith on government-issued license plates. Thomas Jefferson would cringe at the thought.
And if I recall correctly from my Bible-reading days, so might Jesus himself. He didn’t think much of ostantatious displays of fervor.
“When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men,” ” he said in the Sermon on the Mount.
Permalink | Comments (50) | Post your comment |
In praise of “Smoltzie”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Even after 18 years in Atlanta, I wouldn’t call myself a Braves fan. Baseball loyalties that are built early in life and run deep can’t be changed easily. At least not in my case.
I am, however, a John Smoltz fan. When I came to town, Smoltz was the young flamethrower on a bad Braves team, overshadowed by Tom Glavine and later by Greg Maddux. During his 20 years with Atlanta, we’ve had the chance to watch his whole career arc through to revered baseball elder, an opportunity that is rare in modern-day baseball. And throughout that time, through injuries and personal setbacks, he has been a thorough professional, always seeking excellence within a team concept.
I suspect our politics are very different — the only time I’ve ever written about Smoltz was to criticize something he had said about gay marriage, and I never felt right about dragging him into that debate. But political differences are only one aspect of life, and their importance is too often exaggerated. Out of my handful of best friends, several are very conservative, and for a while there, they gave me unending grief about the virtues of the Bush administration. These days, not so much, but that’s another story….
If this shoulder injury is a career-ender for Smoltz, he should be a first-ballot Hall of Famer five years from now. He already is in my book.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment |
They terrorized their own people…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A long-delayed committee report — promised but never delivered when Republicans ran the Senate — has documented the deception, exaggerations and outright lies employed by the Bush administation to terrorize this country into backing the invasion of Iraq.
“WASHINGTON — A new Senate report gives a fresh shot of adrenaline to the election-year debate over the Iraq war. President Bush and his top officials deliberately misrepresented secret intelligence to make the case to invade Iraq, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The panel put a new spin on old charges, comparing claims made in five speeches by top Bush administration officials with intelligence reports. The committee says officials wrongly linked Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks and al-Qaida; claimed Iraq would give terrorist groups chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and said Iraq was developing drone aircraft to spread chemical or biological agents over the United States.
None was borne out by intelligence.”
Of course, administration officials then compounded that deception with gross incompetence in actually running the war they forced upon us. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice — the history books will not be kind to them.
Permalink | Comments (55) | Post your comment |
NC gets railroaded, Ga. gets stuck in traffic
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the Raleigh (NC) News and Observer…
“A third passenger train between Raleigh and Charlotte will be added to the current service to help meet growing demand, Gov. Mike Easley’s office announced Wednesday.
The new train service will run at midday, with departures from both cities, a news release from the Governor’s Office said.
From October 2007 to April 2008, ridership was up more than 22 percent, with 197,126 travelers riding either the Piedmont or Carolinian trains, according to the release. On the Piedmont, ridership was up almost 26 percent from 28,309 to 35,681 passengers; the Carolinian was up 18 percent from 136,358 to 161,445….
Each train makes a morning and evening run between Raleigh and Charlotte, which takes 3 hours and 9 minutes, including stops at Cary, Durham, Burlington, Greensboro, High Point, Salisbury and Kannapolis. The Carolinian also makes stops in Selma, Wilson and Rocky Mount, in the eastern part of the state. Fares for the round trip between Raleigh and Charlotte start at $50.
The estimated cost to operate the additional route is $3 million a year, the release said. The money will come from the federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program.”
Permalink | Comments (25) | Post your comment |
Nothing more dire than this….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We face a lot of challenges as a country, from the situation overseas to the national economy. But none of them is more important than this one.
Georgia has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the country, according to a national study released Wednesday.
About 58 percent of Georgia students graduated on time, compared to the national average of about 71 percent, according to the report. The data comes from the 2004-05 school year, the most recent year for which national comparison data was available. Only four states and the District of Columbia performed worse.
A high school graduation rate of just 58 percent? Even the national number of 71 percent is stunningly low.
Think about those numbers, and what they mean about the future. Forty-two percent enter adulthood without even a high school diploma? The lives wasted, the opportunities lost, the future costs to taxpayers in terms of prison budgets and law enforcement and health care…
Blaming public schools is easy, but it’s not the answer. The answer lies in changing cultural norms so that dropping out carries a serious social stigma among young people. And while it may sound crazy, a concerted, longterm marketing campaign should probably be a key part of our approach, because if anybody knows how to change mass behavior, marketing people do.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Post your comment |
No horse’s head for Hillary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
UPDATED:
For a while there, I worried what it would take to get the message through to Hillary Clinton — maybe something like that scene out of “The Godfather,” when the movie director wakes up with a horse’s head in his bed?
Certainly, more subtle forms of communication didn’t seem to be getting through. On Tuesday night, the last night of the primary process and with the race settled, she yet again passed up the opportunity to acknowledge the reality of Barack Obama’s victory.
With that decision, the prospect of another 1980 loomed. That year, after Jimmy Carter defeated Ted Kennedy for the nomination, Kennedy ducked and dodged Carter on the stage of the convention, refusing on national TV to perform the healing ritual of a handshake. To this day, Carter attributes his subsequent defeat to Kennedy’s pettiness.
This time, however, party leaders intervened, insisting on Clinton’s withdrawal and clearing the way for the next step in the process, the selection of a vice presidential candidate. And even though Clinton has reportedly expressed interest in the post, she has given Obama every reason to be leery.
A vice presidential candidate has to be comfortable in the role of second banana, willing to set aside her own political identity and pledge enthusiastic loyalty to the policies and person of the presidential nominee. And little in Clinton’s handling of this race suggests she would be comfortable in that role.
However, if her interest is genuine, the best way she can prove it is to submit herself to the traditional selection process, just like any other potential candidate. Some might argue that she has earned the right to forego what amounts to an audition, but the position of vice president is that of the understudy, not the star. If the position is not beneath her, the process should not be beneath her either.
For Democrats, the continuing drama at the top of their ticket has no doubt been frustrating, because there’s the aroma of real opportunity in the air.
In a recent poll of 45 Republican-held congressional districts around the country — GOP districts that George Bush carried by an average of 12 points in 2004 — voters favored Democrats over the Republican incumbents by an average margin of 50 percent to 43 percent. That suggests the Democrats may be poised to pick up a lot of seats in Congress this year.
“The Republican brand is deeply hurt, and Republican incumbents face a serious challenge to hold onto their seats in an election driven by change,” the Democracy Corps pollsters concluded.
That finding should be taken with a grain of salt, since Democracy Corps is led by longtime Democrats James Carville and Stanley Greenberg. But Republicans are reaching similar conclusions on their own.
In an unsigned editorial, editors of the conservative National Review label Obama “arguably the most left-wing major party presidential nominee ever.” However, they also acknowledge the Republican Party’s unpopularity and Obama’s “formidable personal talents.”
“If he wins with the kind of larger Democratic majorities he is likely to see in the House and Senate, he will be in the strongest position of any Democratic president since LBJ in 1964,” the editorial notes. “ … Obama will be in a position to deal conservatism some of its worst setbacks in 40 years.”
I disagree with that last point. History will note that the worst setbacks to modern conservatism have been dealt from within the movement, most prominently by George W. Bush and Karl Rove. The way things are setting up, Rove will likely be remembered as the architect of a permanent Democratic majority, a delicious irony he will not appreciate.
Rove’s fate demonstrates an old truism: In politics, the worst damage to your cause is always self-inflicted, and your enemies can do you less harm than your friends. In the next few weeks, we’ll see whether the Democrats have taken that lesson to heart.
Permalink | Comments (139) | Post your comment |
‘Buy this house, get one free’ sale
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Times may seem tough in the ATL housing market, with prices falling and thousands of vacant lots where developers had hoped to be raising houses. But if misery loves company, get a load of this story out of Southern California:
In a sign of how difficult it is to sell new homes in Southern California right now, a San Diego developer is offering a “buy one, get one free” deal, pairing million-dollar homes with less expensive homes.
“We thought, ‘Why does it just have to be on Pop Tarts and restaurants? Why not buy one home, get one free,’” Dawn Berry of Michael Crews Development told 10 News in San Diego.
Operators are standing by!!!
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment |
Are those my only options?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from The Corner, the right-wing National Review’s group blog:
Question:
Would you rather:
a) watch last night’s McCain speech? Or
b) be waterboarded?
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment |
Maybe a veep scenario like this….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On further reflection, here’s how this MAY play out:
Obama will not be hasty in picking his veep. And if he does select Hillary, he would have to do so from a position of strength in which their relative positions were clear — he’s the boss, she does what she’s told — to everybody, including Bill and Hillary.
His campaign could achieve that through a process like that followed by previous nominees of both parties: Drawing up a list of potential candidates, invite them to come to Obama for an interview, be vetted, etc., just as McCain is doing.
Hillary would have to go through the process, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that Obama is the nominee and that she accepts both her loss and his position as head of the party. If she agrees to go through that process like several other candidates — Edwards, Richardson, Sebelius, etc., — Obama would have a hard time rejecting her and picking somebody else.
On the other hand, if she decides that she does not want the second spot or is too stubbornly proud to go through the process — a likely scenario given last night’s performance — she should appear alongside Obama, endorse him but graciously bow out of consideration.
If she takes any other course, she seriously damages Obama, the Democratic Party and her future. She would take a lot of the blame, and deservedly so, for an Obama defeat, and that in turn would probably dash any hopes that the party would turn to her for national office in the future.
Again, that MAY be how things play out in the weeks to come. It ought to be fascinating….
Permalink | Comments (37) | Post your comment |
“That’s not change we can believe in?”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’m watching McCain’s speech, and have two reactions:
One, I have never seen or conceived of a major-party candidate divorcing himself so publicly from an incumbent of the same party. He’s running against Bush, it sounds like.
Two: This may be the worst-delivered major speech I think I have ever heard. Seriously.
UPDATE: Hillary’s speech:
Great message, well-delivered, and an enthusiastic audience even though they know this is the end. Obama could learn a lot from her ability to express both the pride that working people feel and the worries that nag them about the future.
She’s making no decisions tonight, or at least announcing none. That’s fine. And the stress she places on the importance of universal health insurance may be a signal to Obama, as the price of her acquiescence.
But in the end, she also does not acknowledge the reality of her situation. The decision has been made for her.
“There’s nothing we can’t do if we start acting like Americans again.”
Amen. But she can’t admit it’s over, and it is … over.
UPDATE II:
Obama’s turn. Accepting what he has earned, the nomination of the Democratic Party. Magnanimous toward Clinton in a way she was not, and she comes off worse by the comparison. It didn’t have to be that way, but it was her choice.
He honors McCain’s military service, as is right and proper. I was on the floor of the GOP convention in 2004 in NYC, when Republicans mocked the service of John Kerry in Vietnam with fake bandages and Purple Hearts. It was shameful.
He is shading back a bit on Iraq, talking about pulling out with a lot more care than we went in. He does need work on his appeal to working Americans, and needs to get more personal about it. Cerebral, not heartfelt.
But as he wraps it up, he calls on what is best about this country, about the ideals it has preached but not always reached. The comparison with McCain’s speech is … well, stark.
Permalink | Comments (46) | Post your comment |
So, Hillary as veep?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s now pretty clear that it’s over, and that Hillary Clinton will, in some form or fashion, acknowledge that reality tonight. A series of prominent Clinton backers have come out to pass that message along to her in public, just in case she was having second thoughts about stringing it out any longer.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, for example, said on CNN today that “a decision has to be made about whether keeping this nomination wide open is in the best interest of winning in November. I do not believe that it is, and I’m a very strong supporter of Hillary being placed on ticket as a vice presidential candidate.”
AP is also reporting that in a private conference call today among supporters, Clinton said she would be open to running as vice president if it would help the party’s prospects in November.
So that’s the next question. I have a lot of respect for Clinton’s intelligence and tenacity, and believe she would have been a very good candidate for president and a very good president as well. And certainly, putting her on the ticket would go a long way toward healing some wounds within the Democratic Party.
But if I’m Barack Obama, I want a vice president who is the second banana and knows it. If there are headlines to be made, I want to be the one making them. I want a veep who is content to serve quietly in my administration unless and until something tragic happens to force her to step forward.
It would take a lot of convincing to make me think Hillary Clinton could be and wants to be that person.
Permalink | Comments (111) | Post your comment |
Uh, Neal. Let me explain this simply:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve been getting a lot of emails today about yesterday’s FairTax column, almost all of them raising the identical question. Here’s one, just as an example:
“Jay, in the FairTax plan, companies don’t pay taxes so how and why would ‘Well-paid lobbyists beg Congress for special tax breaks on behalf of their clients and demand an exemption etc.’ when they don’t pay taxes?
Now, whenever my email is full of messages that make the very same point, I know what has happened. A radio host somewhere has handed out a talking point, and people are biting on it. As it turns out, that’s exactly what happened in this case. Neal Boortz — some of you may have heard of him — tried to refute my claim that under the FairTax, Washington lobbyists would still be demanding tax breaks from Congress, just as they do today. Here’s what Boortz wrote on his blog:
“The FairTax would completely eliminate the federal tax burden for businesses in this country. So Bookman wants us to believe that a business that pays no federal taxes is going to pay big bucks to a lobbyist to work some congressman to lower their federal tax burden? On what possible level does this make sense?”
On the level of reality, Neal.
Let’s say I’m Ford Motor Co., and I’m pushing new cars that under the FairTax are sold at $30,000. However, if I hire some lobbyists, make some campaign contributions and get new cars exempted from the FairTax, I can now sell those same new cars tax-free for $21,000.
I haven’t changed my manufacturing. I haven’t improved my efficiency. Through nothing more than politics, I have succeeded in cutting the cost of my product by almost a third. And at that much cheaper price, basic economics says I’m gonna sell a lot more cars and make a lot more money.
And of course, dairy farmers will want an exemption too — “Don’t you want children in your district to be able to afford milk, Congressman?” So will lawyers — “It’s wrong and unconstitutional to put a tax on a citizen’s right to counsel, don’t you agree Senator.” And on and on it goes.
That’s the answer, Neal. Pretty simple huh? (And yes, this is technically writing about the FairTax again. But consider it just a bit of tidying up…)
Permalink | Comments (61) | Post your comment |
Is $4 gas just temporary?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If so, it’s probably because $5 gasoline is coming next.
When you watch a baseball game and a ball is hit to the outfield, it’s hard to tell from the stands whether it’s going to be a home run or not. So you watch the outfielder, because he’s in a better position to judge it. His behavior tells you what’s gonna happen.
Now apply that same lesson to gasoline prices. Watch the people who have to invest billions of dollars on whether this runup in price is temporary or permanent. For example, what is General Motors, with all of its high-paid analysts, telling the rest of us with this announcement:
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — General Motors is closing four truck and SUV plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, affecting 10,000 workers, as surging fuel prices hasten a dramatic shift to smaller vehicles.
CEO Rick Wagoner said Tuesday before the automaker’s annual meeting in Delaware the plants to be idled are in Oshawa, Ontario; Moraine, Ohio; Janesville, Wis.; and Toluca, Mexico. He also said the iconic Hummer brand will be reviewed and potentially sold or revamped.
Wagoner said the GM board has approved production of a new small Chevrolet car at a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in mid-2010 and production of the Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle in Detroit.
Wagoner announced the moves in response to slumping sales of pickups and SUVs brought on by high oil prices. He said a market shift to smaller vehicles is permanent.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing the passing of an era.
Permalink | Comments (25) | Post your comment |
Because the truth has a liberal bias….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
… the Bush administration won’t let the truth be heard
“Washington (AP) — NASA’s press office “marginalized or mischaracterized” studies on global warming between 2004 and 2006, the agency’s own internal watchdog has concluded.
In a report released Monday, NASA’s inspector general office called it “inappropriate political interference” by political appointees in the press office. It said the agency’s top management wasn’t part of the censorship, nor were career officials….
NASA public affairs officials criticized by the report called it wrong, saying they were always open and truthful.
Not so, according to the report. The report did not directly accuse them of lying, but used more nuanced terms such as “mendacity” and “dissembling.”
As “Big Daddy” Burl Ives said, “There ain’t nuthin’ more powerful than the smell of mendacity!”
Permalink | Comments (47) | Post your comment |
Well, maybe my nagging feeling was wrong…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A number of signs compiled by the LA Times now suggest that Hillary may pull the plug tomorrow night:
“First, Hillary Clinton announced this morning that she’ll spend Tuesday evening in New York, the city that never sleeps and that she represents in the U.S. Senate. Not in Montana or South Dakota, where people are voting, but New York City. Second, Bill Clinton told folks in South Dakota this morning that “this may be the last day I’m ever involved in a campaign of this kind. I thought I was out of politics, till Hillary decided to run. But it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to go around and campaign for her for president.” Third, the folks at Politico report that Mo Elleithee, a Clinton spokesman, tells them that “we just haven’t figured out our schedule past Tuesday,” so many members of the advance team are being sent home. (UPDATE: A fourth factoid, Tom Edsall reports over on Huffington Post that Clinton has taken the “unusual move” of summoning “top donors and backers to attend her speech.”)”
Permalink | Comments (50) | Post your comment |
This is hilarious… and sad … and true….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The media respond — in animated cartoon form — to Scott McClellan’s charge that they were ‘too deferential’ to President Bush.” Can you identify the voices?
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment |
With the votes almost all cast….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
….. what are the odds that Hillary takes this fight to the convention? It would make no sense, but I have this nagging thought that she may just be stubborn enough to do it anyway.
Clinton campaign not backing down
“The Clinton campaign signaled it is pushing on despite being dealt a setback by a Democratic Party rules committee Saturday weighing whether to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations.
Campaign chairman Terence McAuliffe would not say whether the campaign would fight the decision by a Democratic Party panel to seat Florida and Michigan delegates at the summer convention but only count their votes as half. “
Services »
