Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2008 > December > 15
Monday, December 15, 2008
Caroline Kennedy wants to be a senator
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“ALBANY — Caroline Kennedy, the deeply private daughter of America’s most storied political dynasty, will seek the United States Senate seat in New York being vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Ms. Kennedy ended weeks of silence with a series of rapid-fire phone calls to the state’s leading political figures, including Gov. David A. Paterson, in which she emphatically and enthusiastically declared herself interested in the seat, according to several people who received the calls.
The governor, who has sole authority to fill the Senate vacancy, insisted that he had not yet chosen a successor to Mrs. Clinton and said that Monday’s conversation with Ms. Kennedy was the first he had had with her since an initial discussion almost two weeks ago.
But several people who have counseled the governor on the pending vacancy said that Ms. Kennedy has emerged as a clear front-runner, if she proves able to withstand the intense scrutiny and criticism that her decision to seek the seat is likely to provoke.
Still, some have questioned whether Ms. Kennedy is qualified for the job.”
Permalink | Comments (37) | Post your comment |
Brian Nichols and the death penalty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fulton County DA Paul Howard knew years ago that insisting on the death penalty in the Brian Nichols case would be risky given the historic reluctance of Fulton jurors to impose death. He chose to go ahead anyway, investing millions of taxpaying dollars in effort to put Nichols on Death Row.
Now that the gamble has failed, with three of 12 jurors refusing to vote for death, Howard is complaining that he didn’t get a fair trial. That’s baloney. As an officer of the court, Howard has a duty to accept and respect the jury’s verdict, even if he disagrees with it. He knew, or should have known, that the odds were against him to begin with.
The Nichols sentence is also inspiring some in the state Legislature to try to lower the death standard from a unanimous jury vote to a 10-2 vote. That’s a very bad idea. According to the Innocence Project, more than 200 people have been exonerated after their conviction by DNA evidence in the last 20 years; 17 of those freed had served time on Death Row.
How many more innocent people are still on Death Row today who, because of the nature of the case against them, can’t be freed by DNA? Statistically speaking, they are almost certain to exist. And it is just as certain that innocent people have been wrongly executed.
Nichols’ guilt was never in question. But lowering the threshhold to execution from unanimous vote to super-majority vote raises the odds that society will kill innocent people. Is the greater risk of taking innocent life justified by a greater chance that killers such as Nichols will die?
I don’t see how you can make that rational argument.
Permalink | Comments (85) | Post your comment |
Shoe-tosser hailed as Arab hero
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
BAGHDAD — Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets Monday to demand the release of a reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush, as Arabs across many parts of the Middle East hailed the journalist as a hero and praised his insult as a proper send-off to the unpopular U.S. president….
Journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi, who was kidnapped by militants last year, was being held by Iraqi security Monday and interrogated about whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at Bush during a press conference the previous day in Baghdad, said an Iraqi official.
He was also being tested for alcohol and drugs, and his shoes were being held as evidence, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
“Al-Zeidi is the man,” said 42-year-old Jordanian businessman Samer Tabalat. “He did what Arab leaders failed to do.”
Hoping to capitalize on this sentiment, al-Zeidi’s TV station, Al-Baghdadia, repeatedly aired pleas to release the reporter Monday, while showing footage of explosions and playing background music that denounced the U.S. in Iraq.
Al-Jazeera television interviewed Saddam’s former chief lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi, who offered to defend al-Zeidi, calling him a “hero.”
In Baghdad’s Shiite slum of Sadr City, thousands of supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr burned American flags to protest against Bush and called for the release of al-Zeidi.
“Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head,” the protesters chanted in unison.
In Najaf, a Shiite holy city, some protesters threw their shoes at an American patrol as it passed by. Witnesses said the American troops did not respond and continued on their patrol.
Permalink | Comments (189) | Post your comment |
Transportation debate not just about Detroit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As part of the price for a bailout of Detroit, Barack Obama has insisted that automakers commit to producing fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel vehicles.
Such change has long been resisted by U.S. automakers, but it is an absolute necessity. It would not only make the automakers more competitive in the long run, it would in time make our nation less vulnerable to foreign oil suppliers, reduce the wealth we ship overseas to buy oil and also cut emissions of greenhouse gases.
But such changes by Detroit, important as they are, would be marginal compared to the transformation that government itself is now in a position to inspire.
As part of his economic recovery plan, Obama has promised a massive re-investment in our nation’s basic infrastructure. The goal is twofold: to put people back to work in the short term; and in the long-term build a foundation for a new prosperity once the economy rebounds, as it will.
In a speech earlier this month, Obama called his plan “the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s.”
“We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule —- use it or lose it,” he said. “If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges … they’ll lose the money.”
Note the model cited by Obama: the massive investment in the interstate highway system back in the Eisenhower era. In ways that could not have been imagined at the time, that decision helped to mold the way the country grew and Americans lived. It even influenced the product line of the U.S. auto industry, as Detroit designed its cars for an era of limitless asphalt and limitless gasoline.
That arrangement served the nation well for almost two generations, but with asphalt and gasoline now at a premium, that era, that America, is now passing. And for some, that change has been hard to accept.
Detroit, for example, could not bring itself to acknowledge that changing demographics, energy prices and lifestyles had changed the auto market. And because of that refusal to adapt, its market share began to decline. As recently as 2000, General Motors still sold 30 percent of vehicles sold in the United States; this year, that number fell to 22 percent and is certain to decline further.
The lure of the open highway also drove housing patterns, encouraging the spread of suburbs far from the jobs that sustained them and increasing our addiction to oil. But that too is now changing.
Metro Atlanta offers a great example. In the current housing crisis, the impact here is felt most severely in the low-income areas where people were already living close to the edge, and in the exurban areas that require long, congested commutes.
Today, land in many outer suburbs sits empty, stripped of trees and waiting for subdivisions that may not be built for decades, if ever. A lot of that property is being reclaimed by banks as collateral for failed development loans, but in time it may be reclaimed by nature as well.
Housing has been to metro Atlanta what automaking has been to Detroit, the prime industry driving the regional economy. And like Detroit, the product we’ve been putting out for the past two or three decades may no longer be responsive to market demand. A 5,000-square-foot home on a two-acre lot has become the lumber-and-stucco version of an SUV, popular with some but a niche product.
The Obama transition team has not put a dollar figure on its proposed infrastructure package, but estimates suggest it could be as high as $1 trillion. The infrastructure built with that enormous sum of money will set development and lifestyle patterns for two generations, just as the interstates did.
Inevitably, roads and bridges must be part of that investment.
But if Obama and Congress are serious about reducing our dependence on foreign oil and making this country more fuel efficient, a significant portion of that investment must also be put into projects such as transit and rail lines.
Otherwise, any reform they squeeze out of Detroit will be almost meaningless.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
No sweet-tea drinkers in Obama Cabinet
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Politico takes note of the fact that the diverse Cabinet that Barack Obama is putting together has no representative from the land where sweet magnolias blossom around everybody’s door. (LINK HAS BEEN FIXED)
And note who they turn to as quotable expert:
“Barack Obama is 15 picks into his Cabinet — he announced New Yorker Shaun Donovan as his Housing and Urban Development head on Saturday—but has yet to name one who hails from the South….”
Others acknowledge, however, that the paucity of Democrats in Obama’s cabinet reflects the declining political power of the red-leaning Southern states and the weakening bench of the blue team there.
“Who comes to mind immediately?” asked Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia. “No one, really.”
“The leading politicians in the South at least for the last generation have been active as Republicans,” Bullock added. “You just don’t have Democrats that come to mind as the go-to person or the expert. It highlights the thinness of the Democratic bench in the South… The skill set is so depleted.”
COMMENTING CLOSED ON THIS ITEM
