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July 2006
They hate you, Wal-Mart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wal-Mart, they hate you. Go away. Get out of town. Die. Shocking but true. The left’s war on Wal-Mart is unrelenting. It’s the favorite whipping boy of unionists and their minions who despise the company because it declines to roll over for union organizers. And liberals despise it, in particular, because it builds “big-box” stores that they identify with, ugh, suburbia and SUVs and cul-de-sacs and “sprawl” and all the social ills — white flight, gas-guzzling commutes and cleared land — that freeways wrought. Joining them in sympathetic chorus is the business class of small-town America, a group that sees the retail giant as the hearse coming to bury them.
While Americans love success in football, baseball and other sports, many hate or begrudge it in business, especially in successful corporations and tough competitors that decline to be coerced, shaken down or otherwise rolled. Target: Wal-Mart.
First, Democratic legislators in Maryland passed a law, struck down by a federal judge in July, forcing Wal-Mart to pay 8 percent of payroll in medical benefits — or else pay a one-company tax to the state. Then last Wednesday, Chicago passed a city ordinance requiring retailers with more than $1 billion in sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet to pay employees a “living wage” of $10 an hour by mid-2010. The company says it pays an average of almost $11 per hour at its Chicago area stores, and the least it will pay at the first in-town store to open there in September will be $7.25 per hour. Company officials are deciding how to respond.
American cities, the big ones anyway, often seem less about filling potholes than about pursuing agendas. San Francisco, Washington, Sante Fe and Albuquerque have also implemented “living wage” ordinances. (Of course, in Congress Democrats who see the minimum wage as the issue that will help them reclaim the House in November are in a quandry because the GOP brought forth and the House passed on Saturday legislation to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 over three years. The bill also reduces the death tax, which is now set to expire in 2010, before jumping back to 55 percent in 2011 unless Congress acts.)
At some point soon, courts, Congress and State Legislatures need to step in, as a federal district judge did in striking down the Maryland law, to stop local goverments from imposing social agendas on private companies. If city officials believe workers are entitled to a “living wage” of a sum it specifies, either it should pay the compensation from tax revenues, or grant the company tax credits sufficient to cover added costs. However it’s done, cities, counties and states should pay companies for the cost of complying with mandates that create local exceptions.
When govenrment acts without justification to single out law-abiding businesses with punitive laws, ordinances and regulations, all of us should take pause. A government that can turn on Wal-Mart can turn on us, too.
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Perdue will remake government
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My conservative credentials are in danger of being revoked after I declared publicly last week before the Rotary Club of Marietta that, by one definition, the three greatest governors of my lifetime are Ellis Arnall, Jimmy Carter and Roy Barnes.
In this narrow sense: All exhausted their political capital to bring about bold change in government as they found it —rendering themselves unelectable.
Arnall, governor from 1943-47, is easily the best of the lot. As his biographer, Harold P. Henderson, wrote in his chapter of “Georgia Governors in an Age of Change,” Arnall was an ambitious reformer. Those reforms included a new state constitution, a constitutional Board of Regents, state Board of Education and state Board of Pardons and Paroles. He abolished the poll tax, lowered the voting age to 18, created the Georgia Ports Authority, instituted a state merit system and liquidated state debt without raising taxes.
Carter’s accomplishments are less sweeping, but his reorganization of state government in an effort to make it more coherent and efficient was a high-risk, high-cost effort that consumed all of his political capital. Though governors then were limited to one term, it was just as well. He could not have been re-elected.
Barnes, on regional transportation, education and water, thought big — not on most in ways that would appeal to conservatives. But the standard for me for any mayor, county commission chairman, governor or key legislator is this:
What did the leader do to use the power and money available to fix the problems he inherited?
For Arnall, it was creating modern government. For Carter, it was tackling the special-interest protected fiefdoms. For Barnes, it was configuring government regionally.
Comes now Sonny Perdue.
In ways that have the dramatic potential of Georgia’s most ambitious governors, Perdue’s New Georgia Commission promises to revolutionize state government.
What Arnall and Carter did was to look at the Rube Goldberg contraption that state government had become, recognize its inherent unsuitability for the demands to come and retool it. That is Perdue’s New Georgia Commission.
The commission, headed by Joe W. Rogers Jr., the Waffle House CEO, and Robert Hatcher, the Georgia chairman of BB&T bank, is a group of business folks who meet periodically to look at how state government does business. Their recommendations are handed over to veteran department head Lonice Barrett for research and implementation.
It’s not uncommon for governors to appoint commissions to look at government redundancies and inefficiencies, have them write reports and then shelve them. They are typically launched in a down economy and discarded when the good times roll again.
Not so with this one. A couple of examples:
The state’s construction manual, which informs engineers, builders, architects and others how to proceed, hasn’t been updated since 1954. During that time, various contracting agencies wrote their own rules. “Literally, every state agency was running their construction projects a little bit differently,” says Gena Abraham, director of the Georgia Building Authority.
The state builds to the tune of about $1.1 billion a year. She estimates that standardization of procedures will save taxpayers 1-2 percent per year.
Another example, from her domain, is identifying and managing state property. Just as the state had no idea how many cars it owned, it had no precise inventory of its buildings and property or of its leases. State officials thought we owned 12,000 facilities. As of Thursday, 16,000 had been identified. Abraham’s guess is that we’ll end up with 17,000 — all of them compiled and listed for public inspection on a state database (www.realpropropertiesgeorgia.org) .
Now it’s tracking down, county by county, every piece of property the state owns.
Leases have been consolidated, too. On Friday, Perdue dedicated a “one-stop shop” of consolidated offices in Douglasville, the first of others to come that take separate leases and combine them into one.
This particular office, combining child support recovery, probation and paroles in one facility, is expected to save $150,000 per year in rental and maintenance fees. Consolidating them statewide is estimated to save up to $875 million over 10 years.
Arnall modernized the structure. Carter modernized the boxes. Perdue is modernizing management.
Dull, yes. But absolutely essential for the future.
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Redistricting, immigration, football bowl
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• The front-page headline writer confirms in three words what conservatives have long recognized: “McKinney’s grip weakens.”
• With the 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision affecting Georgia and 15 other states, the idea of an independent commission to take the politics out of redistricting is, or should be, down the tube. Here’s the deal: Democratic districts are protected. The GOPs are available for nonpartisan redistricting. Sure. Some Republicans are dumb. But they’re not that dumb.
• Lottery sales increased from $2.92 billion to $3.17 billion in the fiscal year ending June 30. With bread costing $1.69 per loaf, that translates into 187 million loaves that poor folks and others didn’t eat last year.
• The Atlanta school board votes to revoke the charter of charter school Achieve Academy, which has about 170 students in grades 5-7. The board sided with a deputy superintendent’s opinion that the school lacked a sound curriculum, facility and financial plan. When my band of conservatives takes over, traditional public schools that fail to produce desired outcomes will suffer the same fate.
• Georgia ended the fiscal year by collecting $580 million too much. Of that, $400 million will be added to reserves. Good. The problem with running a surplus is that the temptation’s to spend it — on, say, a new social program, as Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor proposes.
• Oprah’s coming to Cobb County? Oh, opera. Dang.
• Toll roads are fine. With one condition: That the public’s gas-tax money not go to fund projects that can’t be justified on an honest cost-benefit basis. The temptation is to let the private sector relieve congestion while the public sector boondoggles.
• Cherokee Commission Chairman Mike Byrd expresses surprise that 62 percent of those who voted rejected tax allocation districts, like the one used to fund the Beltline in Atlanta. Exit polls showed voter concern about eminent domain and higher taxes. “Most of those [who voted no] didn’t know what they were doing,” said Byrd. Maybe they did. TADs should be used rarely and the ramifications to other property owners explained fully.
• Izzy was the ATL of its day.
• We don’t need Saddam Hussein. We have Howard Dean. Writes the former: “I see that officials of your administration are still lying to you and they still do not give you a true explanation for the reasons that motivated them to rush on the road of aggression against Iraq.” Give Saddam TV and he’ll see. There’s nothing he can say that’s not already being said here.
• I don’t get it. Somebody with a car lives in densely packed high- rise developments. Somebody with a car lives on a quarter-acre somewhere else. The former is supposedly a smarter choice for dealing with traffic congestion. Yet all those folks pour out and head in every direction — not in one, to downtown Atlanta, as they did eons ago, when buses and trains were a solution. Denser development equals more congestion.
• A question for liberals wrestling with whether there’s any threat, short of actual invasion, that would prompt them to take up arms: Do you believe the world is at war? If so, where are you? Neutral until after 2008?
• Surely the Republican majority in the U.S. House and Senate that stalled over immigration can now agree to a proposal that would create a temporary worker program and a path to citizenship — after President Bush certifies that borders are secure. That’s essentially the argument advanced unsuccessfully by U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) during Senate debate. As we all know by now, anything that smacks of amnesty won’t fly in the House.
• A new college football bowl may be in the offing. It would pit the eighth bowl-eligible team in the ACC against some other also-ran in the Big Ten. This is a joke, right? Where’s the punch line?
• Endorsement headline: “Crooks the better candidate for Cobb schools.” Shouldn’t “candidate” be plural? And isn’t the phrase “for Cobb schools” too limiting? One suspects he may have heard these name-play routines before.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Your war, not mine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Throughout the war on terrorism and the most recent phase of Israel’s fight for survival, I’ve been struck by how difficult it is to develop national consensus — or even understanding — of what threats are so grave, or actions so reprehensible, that liberals would consider taking up arms.
It’s evident that liberals and conservatives don’t talk the same language. We see the same events differently. To conservatives, 9/11 was an act of war. To liberals, 9/11 was a criminal offense. We see Guantanamo detainees as terrorists who should be treated humanely but held until they no longer pose us danger. Liberals see them as suspects awaiting trial for ill-defined offenses that may be criminal. So it goes.
My sense of why liberals see the whole war on terrorism differently is that 1) it diverts resources and attention from the domestic issues they think more important, like global warming and auto gas mileage standards and universal health care and 2) it seems to be near impossible for liberals to frame any threat or circumstance, short of an invading army at the Port of Savannah, that would induce them to take up arms. They simply can’t.
In yesterday’s discussion, a few made half-hearted attempts to define that line-in-the-sand. One, rarringt, took a productive stab: peacekeeping actions for humanitarian reasons, defensive actions if an ally were threatened, offensive action if the U.S. came under direct assault or was threatened “by clear and convincing action.”
The majority of Americans have lived with peace so long, or unlike the Israelis have been able to sit out conflicts that didn’t fit with their lifestyles or value-judgments, that different languages and cultures have evolved, nurturing complacency, relativism and a remoteness that renders us incapable ot assessing threats. It’s no wonder that port security and container inspections, for example, are judged by some to be equally important and less threatening than, say, monitoring domestic calls from overseas terrorists.
For me, though, the quest goes on. It’s an important starting point in closing the gap between liberals and conservatives on the use of national power: What, precisely and clearly, other than a invasion of this country — all agree we’d fight back — would cause a liberal to take up arms? It’s not a test of patriotism. It’s not a trick question or one framed to provoke. And the answer, to be useful, can’t be historical. Give this nation something we can apply in the future.
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Save America? Let’s negotiate.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Recent discussions here — those related to the war on terrorism and to Israel’s fight for survival, among them — convince me that in fundamental ways, the divide in this country is so pronounced that we are two nations occupying the same land.
Rereading the July 10 blog on the draft and our obligations to national service, in the context of the nation’s debate over pursuing the war on terrorism and Israel’s survival fight, I am struck by how differently liberals and conservatives see this nation and their obligation to it. In particular, I have in mind two quotes from the July 10 postings, the first from WFC. He wrote, in part, “As a history teacher I’ve studied war for forty years and have reached this conclusion: I would voluntarily have risked my life (or my son’s life) in only two of our wars: the Revolutionary War and World War II …”
The other quote, from B, is that “no one owes their country any more than the country needs from them.” True enough. But since 9/11 I’ve listened to liberals on the street-corner and in Congress define the threat or the circumstance that would take them to arms and this nation to war. I don’t hear it. I don’t see it. Presumably, if the U.S. finds itself in the situation Israel is in, they would. But that’s negotiable. Unless they know in advance the unknowable — that history will judge the conflict to have been as necessary as World War II or the Revolution — my sense is that it doesn’t rise to the liberal test.
Lastly, I look to what liberals are doing to three-term U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), the 2000 vice presidential candidate, and find it chilling that this is a party that could determine terms of war and peace. To his credit, former President Bill Clinton rode to Lieberman’s defense this week. Al Gore, the candidate for whom Lieberman practically gave up his soul, hasn’t. And in the latest poll, Lieberman’s trailing 51-47 to a silver-spoon anti-war liberal, Ned Lamont, who is making his first run for public office.
So the liberal America I see is one that will fight — conditionally, after serious individual negotiation, on the assurance that history will judge the war to have been essential to save the nation or mankind. But if you try to make the case, as Lieberman did, that it’s possible to support the nation at war with some lesser certainty about the stakes, liberals turn to a cable TV mogul from nowhere, as they’re likely to do in the Aug. 8 Democratic primary. Yep, that’s a party I’m willing to turn the country over to.
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Israel’s status must weather new challenge
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Israel should leave southern Lebanon.
Just as soon as Hezbollah is rendered militarily inert. Destroying the entire organization is not required. The existence of its political wing, with 14 of 128 seats in the Lebanese Parliament, is an internal matter of no international concern — until it gives rise to terrorism or to military aggression.
When the job’s done, a cease-fire should be arranged. Not before.
The real war here is between Iran and the United States. The provocation, aided and abetted by Syria and delivered through its Hezbollah proxy, targeted Israel. The timing was clearly intended to divert world attention from Iran’s nuclear ambitions, to rattle nerves in the West and to weaken its will.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad learned saber-rattling from the National Basketball Association. Mouth. Game. Beat ‘em before tipoff. The difference is, however, that Ahmadinejad is a seriously dangerous leader whose nuclear ambitions give the world, and especially his neighbors in the region, a narrow time frame for dealing with him — certainly less than five years.
Pressing a premature cease-fire on Israel, as United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anan has urged, solves nothing. It leaves a terrorist organization in place. When Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashir Assad again decide that there’s some strategic, propaganda or diversionary value in provoking Israel, the world will be here again.
Newt Gingrich is right that World War III is upon us. The conflict in southern Lebanon is a part of it.
It’s not inevitable, by any means, that the war will spread now beyond Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon to Syria and Iran. While the United Nations is likely to be of little value — 2,000 U.N. peacekeepers were stationed in southern Lebanon even as Hezbollah fortified the region for its rocket attacks — the possibility does exist that an international coalition, not involving U.S. ground troops, can police the military resurgence of Hezbollah after Israel completes its mission.
The larger problem, one without a solution until Syria and Iran are pushed out, is the creation of a Lebanese government capable of standing up to and disarming Hezbollah. That’s simply not possible so long as Syria and Iran continue to provide arms and training. Syria’s military may be gone from Lebanon, but its agents aren’t.
For the United States, the course couldn’t be clearer. It is to support Israel, to protect its flanks in the United Nations and with the international community, until it is satisfied that the mission in Lebanon has been accomplished.
Ultimately, this is not about Israel, though Israel’s destruction would be a satisfying outcome to fanatical Islamists. It is a war against the West, and the United States in particular.
While that amounts to World War III, it need not be a series of military confrontations. Israel’s neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, prove that peaceful coexistence is possible. While street sentiment in those countries may still wish for Israel’s destruction, self-interest and the educating potential of television offer promise.
The promise is that the free world, and more peaceful Arab neighbors such as Saudi Arabia, can communicate with the masses in Syria and Iran to convince them that their personal fortunes are served by coexisting peacefully.
Admittedly, given polls in Iran that strongly support the notion that Israel should be pushed into the sea, education and enlightenment are not ready prospects. The point is that alternatives exist.
The fact is, however, that Iran cannot under any circumstances be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. If the world doesn’t take out Iran’s nuclear weapons potential, Israel has to.
For that reason, the United States cannot allow Israel to come out of its military excursion in southern Lebanon weakened in any way whatsoever.
It can’t be seen as unable, either because of world opinion or U.S. pressure, to punish its enemies so thoroughly that Hezbollah knows, and Hamas sees, that retaliation will be swift, certain and decisive.
The world, and this country’s left, which has been dangerously flirtatious with the idea of neutrality in the Middle East, needs to see that the United States is not neutral — and won’t be. The United States absolutely cannot be a party to seeing Israel come out of southern Lebanon diminished militarily or in the eyes of its enemies.
World War III is not all combat. But if Israel is undercut now, and if its enemies are emboldened, it could be.
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How much, doc?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The best battles are those where deep-pocketed competitors vie for the love and affection of the huddled masses. So it is that an insurer with 3,300 employees that pays the medical bills for 40 percent of Georgia’s privately insured patients is locked in public tit-for-tat negotiations with a healthcare conglomerate that employs 5,000 and generates net patient revenues of $737 million. The parties: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia on the one side, Piedmont Healthcare of Atlanta, on the other.
Do we have a dog in this fight? You bet. Blue Cross contends Piedmont’s charges are unreasonably high for the market. Piedmont says that it’s merely asking Blue Cross to pay fees comparable to those charged other carriers.
Not enough about the proposed reimbursements in dispute has been revealed publicly to pick the bad guy — but in principle, this corner’s with Blue Cross, even if it means long-term patients are put in positions where they opt for financial reasons to go elsewhere.
At some point, all of us have to become aware of, and concerned about, what medical services cost. I recently underwent a sleep apnea study that cost about $1,500. Had I been paying the bill, I probably wouldn’t. The physician appeared slightly discombobulated when I asked the cost. He guessed, and assured me that the fee had been negotiated and that I needn’t worry.
But I did. The third-party payment system that keeps us unmindful and unconcerned about what things cost is a major contributor to health care inflation. As with government money, it’s “free.” Until that changes, the nation has no hope of containing, much less curing, inflation.
I do believe the solution is to change the system. A combination of health care savings accounts combined with catastrophic care insurance would give individuals a reason to care what services cost. I believe, too, that every recipient of taxpayer-provided medical care should be charged a co-pay and given financial incentive to avoid over-utilization.
Meantime, though, some payer with clout — Blue Cross, in this case — should be hanging tough, questioning charges and dropping the bomb when they believe them unreasonable, even if it means patients have to go elsewhere. Costs matter. Nothing’s free. Even if we don’t pay on the spot, we pay more in taxes and get less in salaries because of it.
Expanding government’s reach OK if it adds education options
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The only thing tolerable about the growth of domestic spending during the Bush presidency is that, in some instances, there’s a devilish brilliance to it.
He noted one of those instances in Thursday’s remarks to the NAACP. “Let me tell you the strategy behind the act,” he said of No Child Left Behind, which is up for renewal next year.
The strategy, he explained, is to measure how well children are learning. And then to give informed parents, who know what’s best for their children, options. “When we find schools that are not teaching and will not change, our parents should have different options,” Bush said. Wealth can move from a bad school. Poverty can’t. Charter schools, where they exist, are an option. Choice is another, or public school choice, as Bush put it.
And now another option. Two days before Bush spoke, his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, joined the education secretary who served his father’s administration, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), in announcing a $100 million scholarship program for low-income students in non-performing public schools. The program, if approved by Congress next year, would grant scholarships of up to $4,000 per year and tutoring assistance worth up to $3,000 to poor kids in bad schools.
“This offers a way out for students whose families don’t have the money for tuition or the luxury of moving,” Alexander said.
For conservatives, the idea of an expanded role in k-12 education has been difficult to swallow. More money is always popular, so even those who want the feds kept out relish the newfound dollars that NCLB brings.
The testing requirement is an example to conservatives of how to bring about reform — and get better outcomes. Whether children are compared across state lines is immaterial. That’s relatively meaningless.
But if the curriculum is standardized and children are tested on it, as Georgia is doing with its Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests in grades 1-8 , what it reveals about how schools and children compare is important. It identifies where the problems are — and draws attention to them.
Over time, incidentally, as Georgia upgrades the curriculum and pulls up the laggards, children here will perform to national standards on tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the SAT. It’s a matter, I believe, of standardizing curriculum and testing it, constantly raising standards for what’s considered passing. Georgia’s on the right course.
Once parents get information about their child and their child’s school, they need to be able to act on it. The brilliance of NCLB is that it begins to promise parents the same thing that HOPE scholarships promise parents. The promise is that there’s a reward for effort.
HOPE says to eighth-graders that regardless of family income or circumstance, effort will be rewarded and the doors of college will be opened.
NCLB says to parents that if they care enough about their child’s education to get involved, they don’t have to eat their frustration simply because they can’t afford to move and are powerless to force change on their child’s school.
The law now says outside tutoring is available and their child can change schools. That promise actually makes public schools better by forcing officials to target assistance to nonperfomers, lest parents who are financially able take their children and run.
The next level is the scholarships Bush is proposing. “I believe in opportunity scholarships to be able to enable parents to move their child out of a school that’s not teaching, for the benefit of the United States of America,” he told NAACP members.
For the poor, the first key is to provide access to better education. The second, as he spelled out to delegates, is to own something. A home. And for some, a business. “Ownership is vital to making sure this country extends its hope to every neighborhood,” Bush said.
It starts with families, a mother and father in the home. Then education. Then ownership. Then self-sufficiency and independency. Then less government.
If an expanded federal role in the traditional purview of state and local government does indeed bring about reform, and competition — by giving parents information and incentive and means to act on it — it will have been a completely worthwhile expansion.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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New cities, suburban sophistication
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• All the old folks were right. Imagine stealing a Bible — “captured,” in the Yankee soldier’s words, from a home in Decatur during the 1864 Battle of Atlanta. Yes, the old folks were right. The heathen invaders needed the Good Book. It’s now returned.
• Oh, the hand-wringing. That mean old No Child Left Behind law punishes those schools that nobly cultivate “real-world diversity” by penalizing them for failing to educate all of the “diverse” populations. We can do three things. One is educate every student. The other is to change the law, as the educrats want. Or we could group-test and let the kiddies share answers.
• All that high-profile agonizing about whether a tougher new law on panhandling in Atlanta would be too draconian and now we know. It’s pretty much worthless. That is the story of get-tough -on-crime legislation in the liberal city. It’s for show.
• Headline: “4 openly gay people in primary.” Wonder how many transplants from Pennsylvania are in the race? Or Tifton? Or what they have in common that provides some clue as to how they will act in public office?
• An Indian tribe’s suit against Ralph Reed and Valerie Plame’s suit against Vice President Dick Cheney and others have one thing in common: They’re both attempts to use the court for political theater.
• It’s near criminal that the most-congested state route or arterial road in metro Atlanta — Medlock Bridge Road/Peachtree Parkway between Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and Ga. 120 — is not due to get another dime to relieve traffic congestion over the next 25 years.
• Welcome to Georgia’s newest cities — two more north Fulton communities — Johns Creek and Milton. And now Tucker is pondering incorporation. If the result is that people get better service, know whom to call and believe they have brought government to a more manageable scale, the more new towns the better.
• Straw polls are ballot clutter.
• Shirley Franklin on Billy Payne’s endorsement of a civil rights museum here: “Billy Payne shatters the stereotype that the South is resistant to Dr. King’s legacy.” Huh? What stereotype? If one exists, it’s in the liberal mind.
• “Urban sophistication,” or a variant of it, is a phrase commonly used to describe something about intown — most recently, loft apartment living. The phrase “suburban sophistication,” or a variant of it, has appeared only once in more than 20 years in this newspaper — and then by a national columnist describing the people who buy drugs in the inner city.
• The United States should pressure Israel for a cease-fire. Five minutes after Hezbollah’s capacity to rain missiles on Israel is destroyed.
• Universities, researchers and pharmaceutical companies are free to conduct embryonic stem cell research, using any source they wish, and taking it in most any direction they think promising — just not with federal money. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will soon be endowed with $60 billion. Others are generously endowed as well. Until there’s a way off the slippery slope that would obligate those with moral, ethical and religious objections from funding the creation of life for the purpose of destroying it, designating another batch for use with their tax dollars is just incrementalism.
• We don’t need to see any more audits of government spending during Katrina chaos to know: Shovel money out the door without spending guidelines or controls, and it’s wasted, stolen and generally spent like, well, it’s free government money. The solution? Plan and write rules before disasters hit.
• Cynthia Tucker put her ideas out there and the free market rejected them. Decisively, overwhelmingly and expeditiously, just as I suspected they would. Poor Cynthia. Poor, poor Cynthia. The one here? Oh, no. The one who ran against state Rep. Karla Drenner in DeKalb County. And, before reacting angrily and demanding apologies, as the lieutenant governor did last week when I hinted at the youthfulness of the potential first lady, I’m just joshing. I’ve never met the real Cynthia McKi, uh, I mean Tucker. Or heard her speak.
• And, by the way, I did apologize to the lieutenant governor. Herewith: I am sorry this misunderstanding happened at all and I regret its escalation and I apologize. It sounded sincere when I heard it.
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Bush and the NAACP
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President Bush makes his first appearance today before the NAACP’s national convention, something he has avoided. That’s in large part because the organization is the Democratic Party’s proxy. Speaking to them is about like speaking to the Democratic National Convention. The President’s likely to get no regard, much credit, nor any converts. His appearance, meanwhile, will give critics there a platform to talk about what sorry shape the nation’s in under a George Bush presidency. I’ve never quite understood why a Republican President so despised by the likes of NAACP board chairman Julian Bond should validate the aging organization’s contemporary importance with his presence.
Certainly, this Republican and all to follow should make every effort to reach out to African-Americans and attempt to persuade them that conservativism is an appealing alternative. But it’s not necessary, nor is it very productive, to do that by speaking through a hostile filter, through an organization whose members would rejoice at his defeat. Far better, instead, to choose forums — an organization active in faith-based partnerships, for example, or one like 100 Black Men or the Urban League — that are more neutral and, better still, engaged in work that builds stronger communties.
There’s a lesson here. There’s simply no gain in delivering messages through hostile filters — a lawyers group working against tort reform or a seniors group opposed to Social Security reform are other examples. Unless, of course, the address is to explain to members how their leaders are not serving their best interests or the nation’s. All Bush will have done, otherwise, is confirm their importance, further elevating the significance of, and audience for, their criticism.
Bush certainly is president for all Americans, including those who belong to groups that despise him. But being their president does not mean being their punching bag. He has nothing to gain or fear in venturing there. The message this speech sends, however, the wrong message, is that in talking to black America, it’s necessary to speak through an organization that wishes him no good.
Bye Ralph and Cynthia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Maybe it should have come as no surprise, since first time candidates rarely fare well, but yesterday most likely derailed any presidential prospects a decade or so hence for former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed. Bad news, too, for U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney.
McKinney’s been pinned twice now by more mainstream candidates — first Denise Majette and yesterday by DeKalb Commissioner Hank Johnson, who’s forced her into a runoff. The McKinney magic’s gone, a sign that the era of housing-project vote-the-slate candidates is passing.
With the black middle class flocking to South DeKalb, and Rockdale, the 4th District is easily the most heavily black congressional district in Georgia. It’s 58.6 percent black, 33.5 percent white in registration, with Asians, Hispanics and others accounting for the rest. It was 51.6 percent black when McKinney lost to Majette in 2002 and since many of the white Jewish voters McKinney alienated have been moved into the 5th District, her fate is clearly with DeKalb’s large black middle class. Mortgage-holders tend not to be bomb-throwers — or to vote for those who are. A prediction: If Johnson doesn’t defeat her now, a candidate like DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones will two years from now, assuming he can stay out of controversy himself.
It was evident early that Reed would be unsuccessful. He ran strong most everywhere, but not strong enough anywhere. Combine those who have antipathy to the Religious Right with Republicans who feared Reed would energize Democrats in November and add in the cross-over voters. The result is a Casey Cagle victory. Smart guy, Casey. He spent lavishly early, well before qualifying, to send the message to other Republicans that he had money to burn. That kept others out and made him beneficiary of all the anti-Reed vote.
Mark Taylor, while no surprise, demonstrated a quality that State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver (D-Decatur) had observed after running against him for lieutenant governor: Opponents think him a weaker candidate — and yet he wins. Cathy Cox will come back, but her defeat does leave the Democrats without heavy hitters on the bench.
The national election in Georgia is over. Ralph Reed, the budding superstar, is defeated. Cynthia McKinney has lost her magic — and in a district with an oversupply of ambitious politicians, that is very bad news for her. Pretty momentous for a primary.
Speech police should always be off duty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OK, in the final days the campaign commercials did get a little outrageous. Who should have stepped in to sort out the truth? Nobody.
Or, more specifically, nobody presuming to act as supreme authority determining which statements are over the top and which aren’t. I haven’t seen a campaign commercial this season where one candidate fully and accurately described another. But nobody — no committee, no news organization, no interest group and no “nonpartisan” organization — has a mandate to police campaign speech.
Any individual, group or news organization is free to voice opinion about whether campaign speech — purchased or free — is misleading, as a self-appointed group of legal-industry speech police calling itself the Georgia Committee for Ethical Judicial Campaigns intends.
The problem is not that they voice opinion. It crosses the line, however, when the opinion is framed as authoritative, based on some expertise or standing, and it has free-speech consequence for the disfavored.
If I declare that one candidate’s telling the truth and another’s not, the reader is invited to any number of conclusions. One is that what I say is true. Another is that, based on my conservative point of view, I believe it to be true, but I am partially blinded by my ideology. Another is that there are personal relationships, unknown to the reader, and therefore a bias that colors my perspective.
Another possibility is that, in addition to ideology and friendship, I have an undeclared agenda. In the case of the judicial speech police, I believe that to be hostility to the idea of judicial campaigns.
Another possibility is that while my intentions are good, and I believe — as most news organizations do — that my analysis of campaign speech is a public service, the great risk is that I am unaware of my own bias, so therefore can’t declare it, or that I’m inexplicably selective.
An example from elections past is a Democratic Party mailer sent to 300,000 black voters in the 2000 election. The message was this: “Georgia Republicans endorsed a candidate for state office named Tom Mills. Mills makes a living as the owner of a racist Web site that links to white supremacists spewing hate and the ‘n’ word. The site sells pictures of individuals like the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The subject of the mailing was a seventh grade history teacher who worshipped at an integrated church. He was a Civil War buff, an interest that grew largely from genealogy, from efforts to trace his family’s roots and his discovery that some 30 ancestors had served on both sides. He was an artist who drew, and offered for sale, prints of Confederate generals, one of them being Nathan Bedford Forrest, a brilliant cavalry officer.
Mills lost the state Senate race by 656 votes.
To my knowledge, nobody, nor any organization, claiming the voice of authority rushed to denounce the mailing as misleading or to defend Mills. I can’t say why. But one possible explanation is that he and his interests were politically incorrect, and therefore unworthy of intervention.
The point here is that we all have prejudices or blindnesses that make us ill-equipped to intervene as speech police.
One campaign ad misrepresented to this day is the 2002 Saxby Chambliss commercial commonly reported as questioning then-Sen. Max Cleland’s patriotism. At issue were Cleland’s votes on creating the Department of Homeland Security.
The ad had a factual basis — Cleland’s votes favoring organized labor in opposition to the president’s desire to waive collective bargaining rules to hire, fire and assign workers in the proposed new department. Yet it’s commonly reported, and always by partisans, as an attack on his patriotism. It never was.
A truth squad, you say, might have set the record straight. Maybe. But if the myth continues to be repeated — mostly outside the state, admittedly — what confidence is there that an objective truth could have been found in the midst of a fray involving a sympathetic figure who was also an incumbent U.S. senator?
Every commercial I’ve heard in this campaign, regardless of office or party, I believe to be misleading. But it’s up to public opinion in the free market of political comment to determine the instances, the degree and what the assertion reveals about both candidates.
Voters have been turned off by this season’s commercials, and a backlash is possible. But it is public opinion, and not speech police, that should decide when candidates have gone too far.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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‘Peace’ is Israel Dead
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In some cultures, the appearace of weakness — of conceding territory for “peace” — invites aggression. Israel tried. Who could forget the courage and discipline of Israelis ceding control of the Gaza Strip 11 months ago? Even this proud democracy, the USA, older and more confident of its place and power, could not have sacrificed land for peace, in the face of constant provocation, as Israel did. And what did it get from Hamas? Rockets. And from Hezbollah? Kidnappings and rockets.
To my standard, they’ve paid the price. Israel did everything the world could ask. Except die. The fact is that it lives in a Neville Chamberlain world that would trade the Jewish state’s very existence for an illusion of peace, just as the British Prime Minister did in 1938 in surrendering Czechoslovakia to Adolph Hitler. Thank God for George W. Bush that he will not be a party to appeasement.
Until the Arab and Muslim world, and extremists like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Hezbollah puppet-master, recognize Israel’s right to exist, it’s justified in striking at its enemies. Ahmadinejad is sworn to see Israel eradicated — a view shockingly supported by overwhelming numbers of his countrymen in a Reader’s Digest-Zogby International poll. Asked whether Israel is illegitimate and should not exist, 67 percent said yes. Only 9 percent said no.
The timing’s not ideal. The U.S. has its hands full in Iraq and elsewhere. Every effort should be made to keep the conflict from expanding beyond southern Lebanon.
But one day, just as the world, or absent the world, the U.S., has to deal with the threat that North Korea poses, we have to deal with Syria too. And sooner rather than later in the case of Syria. First preference is to change their minds. Second their regimes. Third their form of government. For the moment, though, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and North Korea are the world’s problems to solve.
The U.S. has three friends whose survival would take us to war. Great Britain. Australia. And Israel. Obviously, any threat to our neighbors on the North American continent would drive us there, too. And certainly we have interests and obligations elsewhere, to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan for example. But there can’t be any lack of clarity here. If this country has an ounce of moral fiber left, it will not abandon Israel to its enemies — or to “peace” on an eradicator’s terms.
Republicans’ pandering unbecoming
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last week’s pandering by congressional Republicans illustrates why the party is unlikely to attract black voters — and why preference now shifts to Democrats in November’s U.S. House elections, according to a new poll.
Last week’s deal with Democrats to extend expiring, and discriminatory, provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for another 25 years was an example of election-year pandering. Pure hypocrisy.
The extension is relatively meaningless in terms of protecting anybody’s right to vote in Georgia or elsewhere. What it does is polarize the two parties racially by giving voice and standing to third-rate microphone-grabbers, assuring that every possible dispute, like voter ID, is reframed as one of race.
That advantages politicians in both parties. The more Jesse Jackson and elected officials who appeal at the margins are given stage, the better it is for the Republican Party. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) should be on retainer. She is a gift that keeps on giving. She’s guaranteed a safe district, and Republicans wouldn’t have it any other way.
In practical terms, preclearance of proposed changes in districts and election law by the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division is inconvenient, costly and polarizing, but largely empty of meaning for ordinary voters. Those who committed the sin for which Georgia is being punished are either dead or out of power. So are their schemes. Public opinion, courts and actual voters are perfectly capable of policing politicians who might be tempted.
The hypocrisy of national Republicans played out in the extension of Voting Rights provisions affecting all or parts of 16 states and based on elections of four decades ago. While the majority would cheerfully extend the discrimination another quarter century, something U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) attributed to “lingering prejudice toward Southerners,” they weren’t willing to apply those same provisions to themselves.
“The House failed to prove that the 16 states subjected to federal ‘preclearance’ of electoral laws are substantively different than the states not covered by the Voting Rights Act,” he said. “Proponents of the bill kept citing problems in Ohio and Florida,” but Ohio is not covered and neither is most of Florida.” Nor will they be, no matter how current their imagined sins.
Before another decade of Voting Rights politics is passed, Georgia will lock into two parties based on race. Or it will have political parties going the way of some mainstream religious denominations, splitting into factions. The Libertarian Party certainly has growth potential here, though it’s not yet a realistic alternative to pandering, big-spending Republicans or pandering, big-government Democrats. For now, it’s a vote cast to the wind.
A national Associated Press-Ipso poll of 1,000 adults contains numbers that should cause Republicans some consternation. When the 789 participants who are registered voters were asked whether they preferred a Republican or Democrat in their U.S. House district, the Dems were favored by 51 to 40 percent. Almost a quarter of conservatives, 24 percent, said they would vote for a Democrat.
I’m not convinced they would. For a conservative, the party of big government is not an acceptable alternative when spending is the cause of one’s discomfort with the party in power. It’s that problem again, always fatal for Democratic prospects. Republicans make themselves unappealing — until Howard Dean opens his mouth and the cut-and-run, anti-military wing takes to the microphones.
You have to believe that the GOP would be far more appealing to whites and blacks alike if it stood solidly on principle, as President Bush does on Iraq and the war on terrorism.
If you’re a black guy and you open your door in an election year, there’s a Republican waiting to pander, just as now. The black Democrats and the white Republicans have done a deal that benefits those in power, and it’s supposed to be evidence that both are looking out for the little guy, the little black guy in particular.
The little black guy and the little white guy would be far better off, and so would the GOP, if the party of limited government, fiscal discipline, strong defense and personal responsibility embraced policies based on core values. Black conservatives and white conservatives alike would be far more inclined to stick around if it came toting principle — four years out of four, not one.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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Political ads, voter turnout, days of aging
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Anybody who’d steal Coke secrets and try to sell them to Pepsi probably lacks mental capacity to form criminal intent.
• Of course political ads are over the top. And yes, they insult our intelligence. But they work. And no officeholder has succeeded or failed because of a campaign commercial. Commercials shouldn’t polarize racially, but otherwise I’d let ‘em run.
• You know you’re old when a headline writer, a young whippersnapper no doubt, pens this line to run over a story about the president’s birthday: “President turns 60 years young.” In the next phase, they start saying: “Hey, young fellow.” Then it’s “senior citizen” time. After that, you’re just a crank. Me, I’m somewhere between ” . . . years young” and “hey, young fellow.”
• Oh, no. Government has discovered that my generation is aging. Those on the payroll describe the coming “tsunami” of aging in ways that smell an awful lot like a new taxpayer-subsidized housing program. That, or inappropriate-to-the-area housing density for seniors. Government, back off. The private sector can anticipate and provide the kind of housing the ” . . . years young” generation demands.
• Republicans should make a greater effort to attract black voters. Intervening to get a drug-toter pardoned by a foreign government, as U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) did for Atlanta music producer Dallas Austin, is not what the Republican base had in mind, though.
• President Bush wants to rally world leaders to confront North Korea over its missile provocation. Some problems are the world’s. Some, involving the same regimes at different times, are America’s. We should use the United Nations and other organizations and coalitions. But in the war on terrorism, when our national interests are at stake, we have to be prepared to go it alone.
• The Griffin-Spalding County public school system reported the highest rate of disciplinary incidents in metro Atlanta, 122.7 per 100 students. Thanks for being honest. The metro average, as reported, is 59.2. Atlanta reported 50.9.
• Headline: “Leftist looks to courts in Mexico vote.” Same here. Florida, 2000. An activist Florida Supreme Court did this nation a great disservice in prolonging the uncertainty. If Mexico’s lucky, the Florida court’s not vacationing there.
• Time was Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev might have been called a freedom fighter. But in a world of Osama bin Laden, where hospitals and schools can be targets, there’s no such thing. His death, accidental or otherwise, invites celebration.
• Well, if Thinking Right can’t have the marketing agent for Atlantic Station and Ikea, can I at least have the one for Starbucks?
• On education, the responses of Mark Taylor and Cathy Cox to AJC questions could have been posted in 1950 or at any time since. And on the HOPE stipend, sacred-cow fanaticism in defending it from phantom assault leads politicians to make bad decisions — asserting, as both do, that tuition has to be held in check because increases threaten HOPE benefits. Unless expenses are held in check, the result of a tuition ceiling is more taxpayer subsidy.
• Projections are that Tuesday’s primary-day turnout will be 25 percent. Some complain that’s too few. Not me. Probably half those who do vote are informed. Why would anybody wish to drive more uninformed voters to the polls?
• Once again, the number of failing schools or failing students is not meaningful, except as it identifies problems. As standards are raised, unless we catch up last year’s failures and sweep up those who were on the brink, the failure numbers will grow. We should start asking questions when they don’t.
• Voter ID. Opponents are down to their last political weapons: microphones and judges. OK, so it takes a little longer. Persevere.
• Even going to jail, conservatives are classier. Linda Schrenko takes it straight-up. Bill Campbell whines.
• If he is elected governor, Mark Taylor will most assuredly continue the high school prom nights started by Gov. Sonny Perdue. It will give the first lady someone her own age to talk to.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Money’s not the answer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today may prove significant in the national school reform movement. A group of parents in Newark, N.J., is filing a class action lawsuit asking that 60,000 childen locked in failing schools be permitted to leave, taking a pro rata share of the public money spent on them. With that money, parents would be free to buy the education services their children need in other public or private schools.
Similar suits have been filed around the country, including here in Georgia, but with a different appeal. They’re filed not primarily on behalf of parents, but at the behest of administrators seeking more money. More money. Always more, excuses and money.
In Newark, as related by Clint Bolick, president of the Phoenix-based Alliance for School Choice, spending amounts to $16,351 per student and teachers are paid an average of $76,213. And yet half the students lack basic math and language arts proficiency. Courts have gotten involved and have increased spending but without the results that parents want.
Wednesday’s Thinking Right blog started out discussing the futility of raising the minimum wage, since the real minimum wage is zero. It turned, however, to this important subject, as framed by Southern Democrat: OK, so mandated increases are not the best solution. “This issue, however, seems to be a flashpoint for a conflict between the two keystones of the American democratic experiment: opportunity for all (without a landed gentry or aristocracy) and a market economy.” The market economy values skills. “How do we continue to let the market work while providing for more opportunity for those without access and/or parents supporting them?”
There is an answer. It’s contained in the New Jersey suit — though, honestly, I’m not any more desirous of conservative judicial activism than I am of liberal judicial activism. The legislature should do what the suit asks: Give parents a portion of the money set aside to educate their children to be spent as parents choose to purchse the education services their children need. It’s a three-step process: Give parents information about school performance. Give them a stipend or tax credit based on the child’s needs. And, finally, encourage the free market to create new schools to serve like-needs children. Support public schools, but create a new model — one not built for an agrarian economy with stable, supportive two-parent families.
You can’t dump society’s problems at the schoolhouse door, blending classes that include the gifted, slow-learners, the daddy-deprived, discipline problems, the disabled, and those who barely speak English, while expecting success. It’s unrealistic. Give parents choice and the grants to make choice real.
(Today’s topic — education — is in tribute to Jeff, an active, intelligent and well-informed contributor during Thinking Right’s first month. Jeff, a math teacher, takes his idealism into the public school classroom in a rural Southwest Georgia county where lots of children struggle with poverty — and his subject, as did I. This is his first day on the job. Win ‘em over, Jeff. And rejoin us when you can. We’ll keep a post open for you.)
Minimum wage is zero
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia’s choice not to schedule legislative sessions close to voting is a wise one. The North Carolina Legislature, now in session, has just passed a politically-popular $1-per-hour increase in the minimum wage. The Democratic governor is certain to sign it. In the South, only Florida and Arkansas have mimimun wages above the national $5.15 per hour.
I don’t know why we shouldn’t raise the minimum wage even higher. There’s as much logic to that as there is to raising it to $6.15, as North Carolina just did. It’s just symbolism. The real mimimum wage is zero. If your skills don’t earn your employer $5.15, or another dollar an hour in added value, or $25 if that’s the minimum wage, he has three choices. He can raise prices, unless the market balks. He can stiff suppliers, forcing them to lay off workers. Or he can fire you. To the liberal mind, of course, there’s a fourth option. it’s the fantasy that corporations can take it out of the jillions of dollars in “excess profits.”
In an election year, and certainly close to the time voters go to the polls, raising the minimum wage is popular. Pennsylvania just did it, to $7.15 per hours. And in Ohio, a union-sponsored petition drive is now underway to get 322,899 signatures by Aug. 9 to put an issue on the November ballot to raise the minimum wage to $6.85 an hour. Some 21 states have set higher minimum wages, though surrounding states — Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina — have no state minimum wage laws.
The current plight of the American automobile industry ought to be instructive. When the cost of labor renders the product or service uncompetitive in the marketplace, jobs disappear. We just saw 30,000 of those vanish from General Motors as it adjusts to market pressures by closing nine North American powertrain, stamping and assembly plants, including one in Atlanta, by 2008.
A higher minimum wage is like mandated health benefits. Governments can pass mandates into law. But they can’t make anybody provide the jobs. Except where politicians build higher wage and benefit costs into public contracts, the free market sets both. If your skills aren’t worth the mandated wage, you’re zero.
Activism can’t take credit in gay marriage ruling
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Is Fulton Superior Court Judge Constance Russell, whose decision to trash a constitutional amendment approved by 76 percent of Georgia voters was itself unanimously ash-canned by the state Supreme Court last week, an “activist judge”?
Maybe. Maybe not. Partisans and commentators on the right go so far as to declare her a “rogue activist” link on the marriage issue. While there can be no doubt that judicial activism in Massachusetts fired the cauldron nationally, conservatives do ourselves no favors by falling into the trap set by ideological adversaries. That trap is to declare unpopular decisions evidence of activism.
Judicial activism is real. It’s a serious problem. Decisions on voter ID dance there. The clue on that issue is when judges start to substitute their legislative agenda for those of elected representatives by declaring, for example, as U.S. District Court Judge Harold Murphy of Rome did, that the greater problem for legislators was absentee voting fraud. That’s an arguable point. But legislators are free to choose which of the state’s multitude of problems to address when and how. Object to their priorities, as judges and editorialists often do, and the simple remedy is either to pay the qualifying fee and run, or to put alternatives out there and let public opinion choose.
Judicial activism grew out of the impatience with legislative process — whether the definition of marriage should be expanded, for example. It grew, too, from the arrogance that afflicts the unchallenged. It is awfully tempting to fashion whole remedies, to imagine those who serve the other two branches of government to be prisoners of timidity or politics. Believing that, it’s not a far leap to push them all out of the way and to start divining solutions that spend public money.
Judges are not entirely at fault here. In some instances legislatures or mayors or governors intentionally avoid dealing with the dirty issues, such as prison overcrowding, because it’s far easier to fill ‘em than it is to raise the taxes to build ‘em. Much easier to explain to voters, too, that the devil made us do it.
In general, though, groups that are incapable of selling their agendas to elected officials have found ways to go around them, and the courts are key. But another special interest ploy, too, is to marshal resources at the federal level — the traditional route for organized labor and other activists. By law or regulation, a win there imposes agendas on the 50 states.
Organized labor, in its current jihad against Wal-Mart, had to go to the 50 states individually because it currently lacks the clout in Congress to impose a mandate that large employers spend a minimum of 8 percent of payroll on employee medical benefits. It succeeded in one. Maryland. In Georgia, the bill never got out of committee.
The marriage amendment decision by Fulton’s Judge Russell was not activist in the least. One could argue that whether a judge perceived the ballot phrasing to be one issue or two does offer some clue as to her leanings. The traditionalist’s certainty that marriage is one man/one woman and who believe that the definition should not be fudged, expanded or altered in any way saw the ballot question as indisputably one issue. If, however, marriage is a lifestyle choice enjoying entitlements denied other equally valid lifestyle choices, the ballot measure was two subjects, as Russell ruled.
If I were judge-shopping a challenge based on other grounds, I’d look her up.
In this instance, though, it’s wrong to call her an activist, and there was certainly nothing rogue about her decision. That two levels of judges could look at the same law and the same set of facts, and come to decidedly different conclusions is one reason to know more about who we’re putting on the bench — more certainly than résumés.
The case to watch out for in Fulton, though, for evidence of judicial activism is the one filed against the state by the administrators of some local school systems who are failing to educate children. They blame their failure on money and want more. Money’s one possible explanation. Dozens of others exist, too.
There’s no “solution” — or at least not one this nation has discovered, nor any appropriate sum to spend. It’s a give-and-take that should occur in a political environment where education spending is competing with other priorities. This suit and others like it around the nation are end runs around legislators.
Judicial activism is real. It’s not, however, issuing opinions conservatives don’t like.
Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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Bring back the draft
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Throughout the Iraqi phase of the War on Terrorism, especially when attention is momentarily focused on some other potential world troublespot — last week it was the seconds-long Taepodong-2 missile launch by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il —a distant hum arises from the campgrounds of the Left.
Harken! Listen closely. The hum grows louder. Draaaaft. Draaaaft. Draaft. Draft. Ah, yes, the draft. March the 18-year-olds, boys and girls alike, down to the induction station for physicals. The Bush doctrine, which allows for preemptive strikes against regimes that threaten us, surely cannot now survive another day without the military draft. That’s the message behind the hum you hear from the Left.
It’s all so tiresome. Sad thing, really, that this nation can’t have an honest debate on the draft. We can’t. The Left injects it not for an honest, good-faith discussion, but because it’s seen as a way to mobilize another group against the war. That group is, of course, those affected, those the Left would have this administration round up and march off to boot camp. That group and their mammas. The Cindy Sheehan Nation.
Frankly, I’d welcome a return of an all-male draft. Every citizen has an obligation to public service. And all service is not equal. No higher national-service calling exists than the military. The highest and best benefits and respect for public service should always go to young men and women who choose the military, as opposed to, say, teaching, working in hospitals, serving in the Peace Corps or some other alternative. All are admirable. But all aren’t equal.
Our democracy would be healthier and stronger if reporters, politicians, professors and other opinion leaders experienced the real “diversity” of America in a foxhole on the front line of the war on terrorism. Sad to say, though, that’s a debate this nation can’t conduct in good faith.
Plea to censor legal races just a worn-out gag
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The legal establishment speech police are pitching hissy fits over the prospect that political speech might intrude into, well, politics — an eventuality that they’d find mighty displeasing.
Dire consequences, warns the president of the State Bar of Georgia. Mighty dire. Dire for American democracy. Or so writes Athens lawyer Jay Cook, chief defender of a world that existed before the U.S. Supreme Court opined less ominously that states with constitutions requiring judicial elections, like Georgia’s, should allow candidates to declare their views on disputed legal and political issues.
Not to take or declare “advance stances on how they would rule in particular legal matters” — something nobody is advocating — as posited by Tifton lawyer Rob Reinhardt. He is co-chairman of the self-selected Georgia Committee for Ethical Judicial Campaigns. His group is pushing judicial candidates to pledge that they will not “make false or misleading statements.”
A pledge that invites a rump group of unelected committee-ites, whose politics, agendas and biases are completely unexamined, to divine and then declare a candidate’s statements “misleading” is a pledge I wouldn’t sign for my grandmother.
“Misleading” is not an objective standard. It is presumptuous for a private group to arrogate unto itself the authority to police speech by candidates engaged in a public, constitutional function.
The long, hot summer opens with the stark reality that judicial races will appear on the ballot in November. Not many. At the Superior Court level, only seven of 57 incumbents statewide have competition. Another seven vacancies are contested.
Vacancies are rare — or were before the parties switched positions under the Gold Dome. The system, traditionally, had been to ignore the Constitution and, by informal agreement among judges, the legal establishment and governors, to substitute the resign-and-appoint method. Just before a term ends, the judge resigns and the governor appoints. Very buddy-buddy.
That’s a system that got us some splendid judges — and some bums. It worked conveniently for the buddies until two unfortunate interventions transpired. One was the election of a Republican governor who’s not some of the incumbents’ buddy. The other was that the U.S. Supreme Court unmuzzled judicial candidates.
In addition to local races, one of eight judges up for election or re-election at the appellate level drew opposition. Supreme Court Justice Carol W. Hunstein is being challenged by J. Michael Wiggins, a former U.S. Justice Department official and a top-ranking lawyer in Homeland Security. This will be a big-league race.
Despite the constitutional requirement to elect judges, Georgia is in its infancy with contested judicial elections. Heretofore, rules and customs have been so heavily stacked against challengers that only the occasional idealist, adventurer or oddball rose to opposition. The way we dishonored the Constitution to serve the ends of the powerful is one of the blights on this state’s system of justice.
Serious heavyweight contenders, like Wiggins, and like former Cobb Superior Court Judge Grant Brantley, who challenged Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears two years ago, are starting to emerge at the appellate level, which is where it matters most.
When John Roberts was being confirmed as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court last year, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) produced a letter from a dozen legal scholars who had examined the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on judicial speech that has the Georgia bar president so unhinged.
Their opinion, drafted primarily by Stephen Gillers of the New York University School of Law, was that so long as candidates don’t make “pledges, promises or commitments that are inconsistent with the impartial performance of the adjudicative duties of the office” on “cases, controversies, or issues that are likely to come before the court,” they are free to express their views.
In fact, they continue, it’s hardly possible for a nominee to reach top levels without having formed opinions on “significant constitutional issues and cases of the day.” Having those opinions and expressing them “will not undermine impartiality or the appearance of impartiality such that he or she would be disqualified when those issues come before the court,” they argued.
Voters do have a right to be informed. And turf-protecting lawyers have an obligation to let the clock turn. The buddy-buddy world they defend is gone. The U.S. Supreme Court ushered it out.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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Old buildings and old bureaucrats on the brink
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Until a week ago, I never knew that a person called Star Jones Reynolds was alive on the face of the earth. And in all that I’ve read and heard in the week since, I still can’t figure out why it should have been otherwise.
• Character counts. Good deeds do, too. And since builder John Wieland is long on both, you’d have a hard time convincing me that his company had engaged in a pattern of discrimination against blacks in hiring, pay and other personnel practices — a claim filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by a white former employee. So many phony charges of harassment and discrimination are filed that I no longer assume it’s anything more than a disgruntled or passed-over employee with an attitude.
• Atlanta’s bulldozing the modernist buildings erected between the ’50s and the ’70s to feed a condo craze. Next to go is 615 Peachtree Street, the Fox Theatre neighbor. Some are definitely worth saving, and I’d welcome a panel of architectural experts declaring what’s truly significant and what’s not. I look on many of them the same as I look at mill village houses: Some certainly should be preserved, even in clusters, but on the whole there’s better stock to come.
• A Libertarian running for school superintendent, David Chastain, wants to make the office appointive. A Republican running for labor commissioner, Chuck Scheid, wants the office abolished. Both offices, along with those of the agriculture and insurance chiefs, should be converted into appointive positions. But that’ll never happen. Voters want control, and affected industries prefer their own independently elected voice.
• Georgia truckers now are required to take an hour of training in how to spot potential terrorist activity before getting or renewing a commercial driver’s license. I’d prefer to give that hour over to manners training. They’re more likely to cause terror than to spot terrorists. Georgia needs truck-only toll lanes — and trucks need to be restricted to one no-pay lane.
• Headline: “NEA to lobby for reform of ‘No Child.’ ” The NEA is the National Education Association, the parent of the Georgia Association of Educators. Reform is unionspeak for evisceration. Send money, junk accountability.
• The Georgia Supreme Court got the marriage amendment right. Unanimously. And in the process avoided a political bloodletting in November. Time to move on.
• Over the next decade, about 60 percent of the federal government’s 1.6 million employees will become eligible to retire. This is a recruiting opportunity for young conservatives. It’s not enough to win elections. Bureaucracies interpret law and block or execute it. Any reform — school choice, for example — can occur in half the time if the implementing bureaucrats want it.
• Qualifying for judicial races ended Friday. Only 7 of 64 Superior Court incumbents statewide drew opposition and only 1 of 8 appellate court judges. Another seven Superior Court races without incumbents are contested. Good or bad, the legal establishment protects incumbents — and does its dead-level best to make elections meaningless. They hate ‘em.
• North Korea has a missile, Taepodong 2, that allegedly could reach Alaska and possibly some Western states. Allegedly. A test over the Sea of Japan failed or was aborted after 42 seconds. One of these days we’ll have to shoot it down. But for now it’s not North Korea and its possible nukes that should worry us. It’s Iran.
• Iraq wants a role in the investigation of a former soldier charged in this country with raping and killing a woman in Iraq and also killing her mother, father and sister. I’m with Iraq. American soldiers in a war zone should never be subject to international courts, but when military officials conclude a non-military crime has occurred there, the host country should have a chance to apply its law.
• Headline: “Foreign leaders in Bush’s circle fall out of favor.” Yes. Some. But so, too, have foreign leaders outside his circle, including Gerhard Schroeder, who’s no longer German chancellor, and French President Jacques Chirac, who’s at an all-time low in the polls and is not expected to seek a third term. Never mind.
• If bright young college graduates can take a five-week training course before being unleashed into the classroom, as Teach for America volunteers are, why can’t we open instruction to any willing, subject-competent person? Measure outcomes. And if the kids are getting it, we shouldn’t concern ourselves all that much with the shape, size and location of the classroom or who’s teaching.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Mortgage fraud: Where’s honesty gone?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Three states in the Southeast — Georgia, Florida and North Carolina — are among the top 5 in the nation in mortgage fraud. Georgia, until recently, was number one. Bob Young, the regional director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Atlanta, calls it “one of the fastest growing crimes in America” with the number of pending cases nearly doubling in the past three years.
The most common mortgage fraud scheme, Young says, is to sell a home at a hugely inflated price, relying on phony appraisals. Another is to use bogus pay stubs or other documents to misrepresent a buyer’s ability to qualify for a mortgage. “These crimes take the collusion of several parties to pull off,” Young continues. “That’s why when you see cases of mortgage fraud, you’ll usually find some combination of real estate brokers/agents, appraisers, mortgage brokers and attorneys involved.” New anti-flipping rules involving FHA mortgages take effect Friday. Flipping is buying a property and quickly reselling it at an inflated price.
Much as my conservative heart loves the mortgage — home ownership, like marriage, is the beginning of healthy communities — I’m appalled that white-collar professionals in several respected fields are so ethically bankrupt that they’d casually rip off the rest of us. You expect when the government’s handing out free $2.000 debit cards to Katrina victims with little or no accountability that the crooks will surface. But if elements of the middle class are so lacking moral bearing, what does that say about the kind of communities we’re building? Whenever gas prices spike, liberals and cynics trash Big Oil or Big Business as corrupt. Frankly, I’m less worried about that than I am about corruption next door.
We see it, too, in resume’ inflation. People just flat lie, claiming degrees they don’t have or awards they didn’t earn. I attribute some of it to the cynical proposition that employers discriminate in hiring, and if you can just get your foot in the door, you can prove your ability. We think “the system” is corrupt, so we corrupt ourselves.
Why Georgia with mortgage fraud? I’m not one of those who believes that a politician who takes a free meal is destined to become corrupt, but in small ways — resume inflation — little corruptions do foreshadow big ones. Mortgage fraud is an example. How can we expect virtue in Katrina opportunists, or how can we expect immigrants to honor the rule of law and take the legal route, when important elements of the middle class, society’s keeper of values, rationalizes away its own corruption?
Gender and race in politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Politicians were on parade all over the state on July 4th. The primary’s now less than two weeks away.
One of the early surprises to me has been the inability so far of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cathy Cox to project her instinctive ability to connect with speech audiences to the broader campaign. She’s trailing Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor in polls at the moment.
It’s an interesting race. She has very feminine leadership style, I think, while Taylor is — or was — typically masculine. Attempting to preside over a Senate controlled by Republicans may have brought out his feminine non-confrontational side, but if so, I’ve seen little of it.
Women are not necessarily feminine in management or leadership style nor are males necessarily masculine. Some female politicians — Margaret Thatcher was a famous example — have very masculine goverming styles. Some males — Jimmy Carter comes to mind — have more feminine. Some governing situations need one, some another. Clearly, for example, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s consensus-building feminine style was a disaster in the Katrina emergency. But for Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, it’s been just what Atlanta needed following a bully mayor, Bill Campbell. For what it’s worth, I associate a feminine governing style with Democrats — often called the “mommy party” — and a masculine style with Republicans — the “daddy party.” The mommy party expands government; the daddy party applies discipline — or so it once went, anyway. Spendthrift Republicans have confused the equation.
Party distinctions aren’t useful guides, though. Among Democrats, take the Clintons for example. On the day leading up to war, I’d choose Bill. Once the bombs drop, I’d choose Hillary. She’s the warrior. He’s a consensus building pleaser.
Does gender matter anywhere anymore — or is governing style more important? I was once inclined to vote for women, reasoning that they were outsiders and less likely to be part of the good ol’ boys club. Now I see no difference. Conventional political wisdom a few months ago was that Cox had the advantage because she would appeal to women. Now I’ m not so sure that advantage exists. Are we past the point where gender — and race for that matter — are considerations that tempt us to favor one candidate or another?
A POW’s ordeal, a newborn’s debt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Woodrow Eugene Wooten, with cousin Lois Wooten Brown of Kennesaw at a 2001 family reunion, told the story of his war experience — the kind of memories likely to be held in the hearts of many family members.
Had the preacher not sermonized for 27 minutes into Uncle Dink’s funeral service before mentioning the corpse by name, the cousins might not have turned reflective, counting mourners and absences and resolving, when all the slow-walking and low-talking was done, that we really needed to get together more often.
So it was that for more than a decade now an ever-expanding circle of kin has gathered every October just to keep up with each other’s lives, to talk of new babies and brides. We visit dirt and churn ice cream, and speak of ghosts as though they’re there while walking amid the headstone reminders that six generations were.
But for that preacher, I may never have known Woodrow Eugene Wooten of Tampa, Fla., a first cousin, once removed, an optimistic and cheerful man with a quick wit and mischievous blue eyes. And had I not gently inquired as the reunion years drew by, he may never have gone back. Or taken me to a darkness of his youth.
Last year at his wife Carmen’s behest, he opened up, detailing experiences that before had been just hints among cousins as to the ordeals he had suffered. Time, the six decades since the end of World War II, has added a protective shield. Dates, places, details, indelibly imprinted and meticulously recorded, flow in matter-of-fact recitation. And that is revealing, too. A healing God regenerates and closes doors too painful to leave open until we’ve gained the grace and the wisdom, and therefore the strength, to confront our tormenting demons.
Eugene, the right waist gunner on a B-24J based in England, was shot down on March 6, 1944, while flying at 22,000 feet over Hanover, Germany, as part of a 2,000-plane bombing run over Berlin. His parachute landed at Meppen, Holland. He, suffering a shrapnel wound in his leg, and another crew member were immediately taken prisoner.
While being interrogated, he was forced to sit naked from the waist down on a block of ice. “This was very painful … but I did not give them the benefit of even a grunt.” When he declined to answer, one of the guards “hit me so hard under the chin that it lifted me completely off the ice, and I landed across the room.”
Later, while being transferred from one prison camp to another, he was forced to stand packed with other prisoners without food, water or bathroom access for 38 hours. Upon arriving, he and others were forced to run about three miles through lines of German civilians throwing bricks, rocks and other debris. Those who fell were clubbed by guards or attacked by dogs.
Food amounted to about 700 calories per day, about one-third the average man’s needs. At one camp, Stalag Luft IV, Eugene lost 100 pounds. “I was skin and bones then,” Eugene remembers. “We were hungry. In fact we were very hungry all the time. Our stomachs could not have been as big as a closed fist on the average man. Most of our conversations were about food. We suffered hunger pains. We were always hungry.”
By early 1945, the Germans were desperate. Stalag Luft IV was emptied on Feb. 6, 1945, in the midst of a bitterly cold winter. Prisoners weakened by months of near-starvation began the cross-Germany march.
For 80 days covering as much as 800 miles — a walk from here to Dallas, Texas — frail and weakened men marched. “None of us had any clothing except what we were wearing, so from the time we left Stalag Luft IV until repatriation we wore the same dirty, filthy, lice-infested clothing. This caused all kinds of sores and rashes. … Most of the time … we slept beside the road in temperatures as low as 15 degrees without any bedding or covering whether it was snowing, sleeting or what. Most of us suffered pneumonia, frostbite, freezing, dysentery, etc. A lot of prisoners died on the march,” he says.
His accounts of that ordeal, of surviving on the march by eating dried sugar beets and oats intended for livestock, inspire awe at the resiliency of individuals to endure suffering.
The ordeal ended on the morning of April 26. About 100 of the prisoners had been herded into a barn near the Elb River the night before. They awoke to find the Germans had stacked their weapons and offered surrender. Adolf Hitler committed suicide five days later. For Eugene, who weighed 90 pounds, liberation had come because American soldiers had reached the river.
So it was that six decades ago, a man — whose bravery and personal endurance and sacrifice helped to guarantee the liberties and the freedoms we take for granted — himself became a free man.
Families are made strong by their successes, sure. But in the hardships we all inevitably face in life, we are strengthened by the knowledge that we come — and all of us in America do — from the stock of Woodrow Eugene Wooten. They exist in every family, and each with a story children should hear and a lesson they should know.
It is July 4th. Independence Day. A day to tell America’s story.
I tell you America’s story. It is that every generation inherits a trust, a sacred trust, to preserve the next generation’s freedoms. Our obligations are not abstractions. They are as real as the life and service of Woodrow Eugene Wooten. As individuals, we don’t choose wars. We choose honor — and accept the duty that follows.
At 7:55 a.m. on the 61st day of a POW’s Black Hunger Death March, a baby boy was born free in the hospital near the farm that Eugene left behind.
To the cousin, now 84, that the baby boy might never have known but for a preacher’s ramble, July 4th is an appropriate occasion to say what is in my heart: You saved us, buddy. For the chance to be born free, a grateful family and nation offer thanks.
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Holidays, taxes and traffic congestion
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A holiday weekend — especially one that marks the 50th anniversary of the July 1, 1956 launch of the now-completed Interstate Highway System — is a good time to ask the question: Why in the world is the federal government still collecting 18.3 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes?
It’s an example both of a tax that remains after a project is completed and of the metamorphosing role of government programs. In the Surface Transporation Act of 1982, Congress raised the interstate-construction tax, which had grown from 3 cents in 1956 and 4 cents in 1959, to a 9 cents per gallon. It allocated a penny of it to mass transit. Now of the 18.3 cents collected, 2.86 goes to mass transit.
In addition to the federal tax, the state collects a base of 7.5 cents per gallon, plus the four percent statewide sales tax, making the state tax about 19.5 cents per gallon at the current price of about $3 per gallon.
My view is that the feds should get out of the gasoline taxing business, and out of the business of choosing which highway and transporation projects should be funded, and give that tax over to the states to use as state officials deem appropriate. We’re about to launch a white elephant — a commuter rail project extending 26 miles from Atlanta to Lovejoy — and primarily because federal money is available. What nonsense.
Give the money to a government closer to the people and allow them to decide how they want to spend it — and if they’re smart, they’ll spend it to buy highway congestion relief. If you travel this weekend, or most any day, south of Atlanta on I-75 in the vicinity of Eagles Landing Parkway, you realize the folly of spending on boondoggle rail projects when motorists are stuck in gridlock.
Give the taxing capacity back to the states and let the states address transportation needs on a cost-benefit basis. Spend the money where it buys the most congestion relief. Who could possibly disagree?
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