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October 2006
Rice urges teamwork on North Korea
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Former President Jimmy Carter had it pegged right. The call’s not coming.
“I don’t think we really need outsiders” who volunteer to negotiate with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to end its nuclear weapons program, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview Monday. “We talk to people who talk to the North Koreans all the time from the outside, and those are valuable voices. But look at where we are.
“The North Koreans have tested,” Rice said, “but we have a coalition of states that has been working on this problem now for a couple of years so that you have China, probably the most influential country with North Korea, signed on to the [U.N. enforcement] sanctions against North Korea that I think give some prospects that the North Koreans may feel enough pressure that they come back in seriousness to the six-party talks.”
During a panel discussion at the Carter Center this month, the former president suggested his availability to again negotiate with the North Koreans, as he did in 1994. During those discussions, undertaken at the invitation of Kim Il-sung, the North Korean leader agreed to freeze plutonium-producing reactor efforts in return for an easing of sanctions, fuel oil and a light-water nuclear reactor for domestic energy use — an agreement he promptly began to violate.
After his son, the current leader, withdrew from six-party talks and tested a nuclear weapon three weeks ago, the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions that prohibit delivery of luxury goods, war materiel, spare parts for weapons systems and anything that could enhance North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Carter and others argue the United States should agree to North Korea’s insistence on direct talks. “I think as far as North Korea is concerned, they would be willing [to negotiate],” Carter said, “But I don’t think there is a chance in the world that the U.S. government would approve I, or someone else, to go negotiate with North Korea.”
Said Rice Monday: “The reason we don’t have bilateral negotiations is that we have been down that road. The ‘94 agreement, which was worth a try at the time I think, was then violated by the North Koreans. And they had no penalty to pay, vis-a-vis anybody except the United States because nobody else was party to that agreement. So this time, if we actually get an agreement … the parties to it will be China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the United States. That is a very much more powerful position.”
She continued: “But I really would like to debunk one myth: the idea that we don’t talk to the North Koreans, even bilaterally, within the context of six-party negotiations.
“Back in 2005, the Chinese said to us that the North Koreans wanted to talk to Chris Hill [assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs]. Would we do this in Beijing in order to get the six-party talks restarted? And Chris Hill had that dinner in Beijing, he and his North Korean counterpart. And then about six weeks later, the six-party talks began again.
“So it’s not that we have not talked to the North Koreans,” Rice continued. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we talked to them very often,” as the United States does one-on-one with the four other nations participating in the talks to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. “What we don’t want to do is get ourselves into a negotiation with the North Koreans where it is the United States and North Korea agreeing to something that the other states who have real leverage have no stake in. That’s different than saying ‘Should we talk to the North Koreans?’ We do and we should.”
Rice, for the record, did not introduce Carter’s name. The question was whether there was “a chance in the world” that Carter or some other outsider would be asked to perform any role in talking or negotiating with the North Koreans.
Clearly, as Rice asserted, the most promising approach to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is six-party talks based on U.N. sanctions. No country in the region, including China, wants North Korea to have nuclear weapons.
China is the key. The combination of a neighbor, friendly but unpredictable, with nuclear weapons destabilizes the region, a distraction for a nation intent on becoming a world economic powerhouse.
North Korea’s nuclear program is not solely an American problem. It’s the world’s — and it’s up to the world to solve it.
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Keep families out of politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Family matters don’t belong in political campaigns. Period. Sunday night’s gubernatorial debate, which I did not see, turned personal, according to the morning AJC headline. Gov. Sonny Perdue “attacked challenger Mark Taylor’s past drug use and drinking,” the AJC reported, after Taylor renewed his accusations that Perdue had used his office for personal gain in a land transaction. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use this,” the governor said in a discussion about the methamphetamine problem. “But it’s really about good parenting. It’s about being a good model for your children and not using drugs in front of them. Not driving when your young infant son is in the car.”
In 1992 court papers, Taylor ackowledged that he and a former wife had used marijuana and cocaine but said they stopped when she became pregnant with son Fletcher, who was born in 1983. The lieutenant governor’s behavior almost a quarter century ago, drawn from informtion revealed in a custody battle, is not germane to any issue that arises in a political campaign. Families are, or should be, off limits. None of us outside the Taylor family has any way of judging either parent’s fitness or of knowing whether any parental action or intervention might have changed the course of a child’s life in any general way or specific circumstance.
Taylor may make a marvelous governor or he may be thorougly incompetent — but these charges tell us absolutely nothing relevant about how he would function in that office.
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Hunstein’s attack ad opens Pandora’s box
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Never again let it be said that judicial races are tainted by politics. The standard doesn’t get any lower than that introduced by incumbent Supreme Court Justice Carol Hunstein.
Never again should any segment of the legal community or the media raise a peep about the unseemliness of judicial campaigns. A key member of the group most fearful of full-scale political campaigning in judicial elections has just set the bar. One ad lays bare the sanctimoniousness of sitting judges and the establishment bar that it is inappropriate even to respond to questions about U.S. Supreme Court decisions, lest they contribute to “politicizing” judicial campaigns.
When a campaigning judge wades into the family circle to trash an adversary, as Hunstein does in lashing out at opponent Mike Wiggins in a commercial that started last week, judicial races in Georgia are in the Willie Horton sphere. The Hunstein ad attacks Wiggins on the basis of litigation arising from a family dispute dating back 20 years.
The commercial quotes in part from litigation and an affidavit by his sister, who alleged that he threatened to kill her, an allegation he denied. The ad was based, Wiggins said, on a guardianship motion filed to prevent removal of life support for their elderly mother, who was in a coma.
“It was my duty as her son to preserve her life and her life savings, which she needed to pay for her intensive medical care,” he said. Wiggins was declared her guardian, the sister consented to repay $12,500 to the estate, and he and his sister agreed, and were directed, to initiate no direct contact “in perpetuity.”
Family disputes, as any 62-year-old adult knows full well, are dangerous territory for outsiders. By Hunstein’s age, most adults have lived through and experienced the stress on families, on children and among siblings, that arises from the deaths of grandparents and parents. I have seen close-knit families, who never uttered unkind words about one another, come unglued by the stress of a parent’s declining health and finances.
Children, all convinced that they have a parent’s best interests at heart, reach different conclusions about what’s best. Having just witnessed the six-year mental and physical decline that preceded a mother-in-law’s death, and having witnessed other families trying to reach good-faith end-of-life decisions about what’s best for a mother or father, I am beyond passing judgment on how others handle their personal and family lives, court documents or not.
Most people in public life, like the rest of us who grew up in a era of family and social change where, for example, divorce was common, have angry ex-spouses, children who harmed themselves or others, siblings who felt slighted or mentally abused by one or both parents, or any other family circumstance or dynamic. But decency and propriety should put that area of our lives off-limits, even for public figures. It’s stunningly bad judgment to wander in and gossip it out.
I don’t know Mike Wiggins’ family history or circumstance. I don’t need or want to know it. That Hunstein has put it out on the street in a political campaign is intrusive and should be embarrassing to all who touched this work product, especially in a campaign that she most likely had won. It is truly bizarre.
It’s not that I object to hard-hitting campaign ads in judicial races. The state constitution gives Georgians the right to elect their judges. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that judges and candidates have the right to talk about legal issues and to criticize previous court decisions, so long as they don’t make promises or pledges. They are entirely free to express opinions about an opponent, as Hunstein did in questioning whether Wiggins would “uphold Georgia values.”
My brief, then, is not with the missile she fired, but with her judgment in her choice of material.
As the Wiggins campaign pointed out, before serving in high-level positions in the U.S. Department of Justice and in the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, he “has been through at least three detailed FBI background checks” and “held some of the highest security clearances in the federal government,” said spokesman Brad Alexander. “Those background checks concluded there was absolutely zero reason to question Mike’s personal integrity.”
Take this Hunstein commercial and send it to the archives. It is the one that forever changes judicial races in Georgia.
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Mediocrity, trial lawyers, campaigns
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Though a fair representative of the culture of the modern world, Sweden’s culture minister steps down after just 10 days in office. The minister, Cecilia Stego Chilo, was revealed to have evaded taxes by paying a nanny under the table and for failing to pay a mandatory TV license fee of about $200 per year for 16 years. Calls to mind the 1970 Senate speech by U.S. Sen. Roman Hruska, responding to criticism that Supreme Court nominee Harold Carswell had been a mediocre judge:
“So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” The ethically challenged are entitled to a little representation, too. Oops. They already have it.
• Tag — you’re sued! School officials at Willett Elementary in Attleboro, Mass., and a handful of other schools around the country, ban tag, touch football and all chase games during recess. Why? Fear of trial lawyers.
The Manhattan Institute think tank has done an in-depth examination of the “litigation industry” in Illinois. Among its findings: “Viewed as a corporation, Trial Lawyers Inc. has enjoyed annual domestic revenues that exceed those of every single publicly held company headquartered in Illinois: it grosses more than $49 billion —more than the U.S. operations of Walgreens, Boeing or Allstate, over twice as much as Archer Daniels Midland, over three times as much as Motorola, and fully seven times as much as McDonald’s.” Read it at www.ManhattanInstitute. org. Trial lawyer money goes to Democrats; in Illinois in 2004, the Dems got 78 percent.
• Surprise! Two Democratic constituent groups — the NAACP and the Coalition for the People’s Agenda — want three Republicans on the State Elections Board to resign. Why? Voter ID — which, incidentally, the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to block for this election in Arizona.
• Election, please come soon. The campaigns to frighten the base to the polls exaggerate and distort, making small matters large. Here’s a voter guide: If it’s our fault, vote Democratic. If not, vote Republican. What’s “it”? Anything that threatens our security.
• College costs are up 6.3 percent this year, 35 percent over the last five years. One of these days, colleges will invite upon themselves the same market forces that finally rebelled at health care inflation. Former Emory President William Chace worries, and rightly so, that universities will become the gated communities of the well-to-do. The rich can pay; the poor will get financial aid; the working class could find themselves looking in.
• Fat kids? Here’s the solution for those on Medicaid or PeachCare: Give health care providers a 10-year contract to manage the health of say, 10,000 children, at a fixed fee. Providers should be free to offer incentives and to scale co-payments from beneficiaries based on factors such as whether kids lose weight, keep appointments and generally contribute to their own well-being. A few pilot after-school tutorings/exercise/health management programs should also be launched in public schools with high-need populations.
• Single-sex schools? Go for it. All like-needs kids should be assembled in any configuration — time of day, school year, weekend, all-male instruction, ability or any other — that competent educators deem necessary. Atlanta’s Carson Honors Preparatory School has been given permission to open as two schools, one male, one female.
• Another reason to hope for education reform: The Ohio Supreme Court affirms that publicly funded, privately operated charter schools are constitutional. Choice is coming.
• Overstated headline concerning Georgia General Assembly: “Legislative power shift unlikely.” The level truth: “Legislative power won’t shift.”
• I’m now for cloning. Clone Roswell Police Chief Edwin Williams, who for the last decade has notified federal immigration authorities of illegals held in his jail. Of about 3,800 reported in the last 33 months, the feds have picked up 12. A good cop is one doing his job when nobody’s paying attention. The illegal immigration crisis evolved because nobody at the federal level was.
• Jesse Jackson showed up unannounced at a Mark Taylor fund-raiser. That helps Taylor where he doesn’t need it and hurts him where he does: mainstream Georgia conservatives, which includes many Democrats.
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Money and endorsements in politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As the final week of campaigning approaches, the AJC and other newspapers along with unions, interest groups, and associations, wind up the process of endorsing candidates. Endorsements cut both ways. Republicans and conservative Democrats in most jurisdictions in Georgia want the endorsement of the National Rifle Association. Democrats and some Republicans put great stock in the endorsement of the Sierra Club or the local affiliate of the National Eduation Association union.
I suspect we all are swayed pro or con by some endorsements from some groups in some races where the candidates aren’t well-known or well-financed. But in the high-profile state and national races, where most everybody has sufficient information, endorsements are likely to sway few. That’s one reason, incidentally, that I don’t support publicly-financed elections or limits on campaign spending. Campaign spending is a form of free speech. Certainly, quick and proper disclosure of who gives and who gets is vital in campaigns, but I’m not one who thinks big sums indicate big corruption. There are many ways to “sell out” and contributions are but one. A group that can deliver a thousand voters can be more influential than one that contributes a chunk of money used to buy costly campaign commercials that happen to deliver half that many. Besides, billionaires like George Soros have unlimited ways of influencing election outcomes, and candidates who are largely self-financing, like New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine who spent $60 million of his own money six years ago to get elected to the U.S. Senate, don’t need contributions.
With the end of the campaign season nearing, endorsements and campaign commercials rolling, two questions arise: Do endorsements matter pro or con, and if so, which ones? And what’s wrong, if anything, with properly disclosed money in campaigns?
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More troops for Iraq?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The top commander of American forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, said Tuesday that he may call for more troops to quell violence in the Baghdad area. He expressed, too, a belief that Iraqi forces would be ready to take over security responsibilities by late next year or early in 2008.
While it is clearly disheartening that Iraqi security forces have not been up to the task in Baghdad, changing a military culture, like changing the culture of any population or institution, occurs slowly. Securing Baghdad is essential and if more troops are required to give the Iraqis more time to professionalize their army, troops most assuredly should be provided. On troop levels, I believe it to be true that the U.S. had sufficient forces to win the war and agree too that in planning for the war, the defense strategy of not thinking in terms of manning an occupation army was the correct one. The message, always, should have been: defeat Saddam, stabilize the country and give an elected government the opportunity to function, and then come home. Don’t plan to stay for the long haul. Having said that, though, overwhelming force is required for specific battles and Casey should have access to troops when they’re required for a short-duration situation. That may involving moving troops within country, holding troops over, or getting reinforcements from elsewhere.
It makes sense, too, to remind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that while the U.S. will not abandon Iraq or his government, our stay is not entirely open-ended. No timetables for withdrawal, but the clock is running and it is imperative for Iraqi leaders to resolve their differences so that they can professionalize their security forces to police the militias.
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Pigeonholing voters unfair and unwise
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Women.
Get ‘em all together, sit ‘em down and ask: What do y’all want?
No. Don’t all talk at once. Choose a representative and she will inform the world what women want.
Absurd? Of course. Even in Grandma’s day.
But every political season — during election campaigns and legislative sessions — the notion that “women” are a like commodity that can be weighed, graded and marketed surfaces anew. It’s no wonder that stereotypes fade so slowly and that politicians “fix” yesterday’s problems today.
In the governor’s race, Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor is said to have a problem with Georgia women because substantial numbers of them intend to vote for Gov. Sonny Perdue. No doubt Taylor does have a problem with women who were passionate about the candidacy of Secretary of State Cathy Cox, whom he defeated. Many of those, it seems likely at this late date, will cast a protest vote with the Libertarian in hopes of visiting a pox on both their houses — Taylor and Perdue.
But attributing to all women the politics of “progressive” Democrats miscasts the majority. As the Mason-Dixon poll done for this newspaper in late September revealed, white women support Perdue at about the same level as white men, 66 percent to 21 percent.
The overall difference is when black women are added. About 90-96 percent of black women vote for Democrats, regardless of who’s running or where. In the Mason-Dixon poll, Perdue led among women 49-38, with the remainder undecided or choosing the Libertarian. Blacks represent 27 percent of registered voters. Of those, 16.2 percent are women, 10.9 percent men.
The overwhelming support of black women for the generic Democrat means that those who are hanging back are activist Democratic women who congregate around the issues, often gender-related, such as abortion, that attract activist Democratic women.
Taylor does appear to have lost them, but they’d never vote Republican. You’d find them now among the undecideds or the Libertarians. They’ll wind up either with Taylor, who is running about 15 percentage points below the Democratic base, or with the Libertarian, who’s running about 5 percentage points above base.
The confusion about the voting tendencies of women is because the Democratic Party’s activists tend to be articulate, passionate and media-savvy, much like the reporters who write about them. One would never find Christian conservative Sadie Fields, for example, or state Sen. Nancy Schaefer (R-Turnerville) or Rep. Sue Burmeister (R-Augusta) or Rep. Barbara Massey Reece (D-Menlo), quoted as the voice of women.
With the exception of Fields, who became media-savvy under fire as head of the organization formerly known here as the Christian Coalition, the others tend not to promote themselves in the media. Besides, none would be accepted as the authority to summon women to action — the media simply assume that Republicans or conservative women don’t speak for ‘women.”
That’s because a small but influential segment of women in the Democratic Party do. It’s the practical reflection of quota politics. It’s difficult and messy to sort out the differences in conservative and liberal women, or Cuban and Mexican Hispanics, or rich and poor blacks, so they are grouped by race, gender and national origin and spokespersons are recognized, even when they have little in common.
When three legislators of Hispanic origin reached the Georgia General Assembly three years ago, they were expected to, and did, form a “Hispanic caucus.” Journal-Constitution reporter Carlos Campos captured the moment: “They are men and they speak Spanish. But the similarities among Georgia’s first Hispanic state legislators pretty much end there.” The reality was that the three had no more in common than any other three randomly picked legislators.
Campos quoted the president of the Georgia Hispanic Chamber, Sara Gonzalez, who said something that should guide every soul inclined to think that people who share some identifiable characteristics or heritage should be able to speak for one another. “What unifies us is the language,” said Gonzalez. “Other than that, we have very different cultures and we tend to have our own opinions and that’s the way it is.”
That is, indeed, the way it is — and should be.
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Let’s tax you for me
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Kia, the auto manufacturer, broke ground last Friday on a $1.2 billion plant, its first in America. To lure the company, Georgia taxpayers provide incentives worth about $400 million, or about $160,000 per job.
Business incentives that pit one state against another are losers for all. My preference would be to end them, and to end the state’s corporate income tax as well. One company shouldn’t pay to provide incentives to a potential competitor.
Two related questions: Do you object to your tax dollars going to lure companies to Georgia? And, if you could eliminate one tax as an incentive to promote some desirable behavior or activity, what would it be? One proposal in this election season has been to eliminate state taxes on retirement income in an effort to attract them to Georgia.
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State’s high court shouldn’t be a mystery
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A measure of how successful judges and lawyers have been in seizing the judiciary from Georgia voters is reflected in a poll released Friday that asked 500 likely voters their impressions of the state’s most powerful court.
Buckle up. This civics class is in for a rough ride.
“A stunning 71 percent said they didn’t know or had no answer,” said Shelley West, project director at The Polling Company in Washington, which conducted the survey Oct. 11-13 for the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal organization.
When asked to volunteer any impression about the high court or any decision it has rendered, 2 percent mentioned voter ID and 1 percent each mentioned abortion, gay marriage, immigration, sex offenders and eminent domain — most of which are pure guesses.
Only 17 percent of Georgians know how many justices (seven) sit on the Georgia Supreme Court. Twenty-seven percent guessed fewer, with five the most popular response and 25 percent guessed more than seven, with nine the most popular guess. The U.S. Supreme Court does have nine. Twenty-nine percent refused even to guess at a number.
The “stunning” lack of familiarity with the most powerful court in the state is the consequence of decades of deceit. While the Georgia Constitution provides for election of judges, voters almost never have first choice. That’s because traditionally, judges resign as they approach the end of their terms, enabling the governor to choose their successor. If they resign within six months of an election, the new appointees are not required to stand for election until the next election cycle, more than two years away.
The gentlemen’s agreement among lawyers — a gentlemen’s agreement based on hard-knocks practicality— is that nobody opposes an incumbent. When they do, the establishment bar rallies ‘round. And who can blame lawyers? It’s their livelihood.
That system, a corruption of the plain requirement of the state constitution, is so pervasive that most Georgians have forgotten, or never knew, that the right to pick judges belongs to them. In the poll released Friday, 42 percent guessed that governors appoint justices to the Supreme Court. Another 12 percent had no idea. Only 41 percent knew that voters elect them.
There exists this year a serious challenge to a sitting judge. Mike Wiggins of Atlanta, who served in the Bush administration as deputy associate attorney general, is challenging incumbent Justice Carol Hunstein of Decatur, a 14-year veteran. It’s the choice voters should have routinely.
Wiggins, who graduated first in his class at the University of Georgia School of Law, has all the credentials needed to serve on the Georgia Supreme Court. While serving in the U.S. Department of Justice, he oversaw the civil division and the civil rights division. He served, too, as principal deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, the No. 2 legal officer in a department of 1,400 lawyers.
By every measure it’s a top-of-the-line choice for voters in a race that would rank, with the attorney general’s race, as second in importance to the governor’s race. And yet, a legitimate contest is regarded as the arrival of the Visigoths.
Both sides here are well financed. In addition, a national business coalition concerned about what the Manhattan Institute think tank calls the “litigation industry,” is airing television commercials, independent of Wiggins, that raise the race’s profile.
The fact that an actual judicial race involving two candidates with bases of support alarms those who are unaccustomed to actual campaigns has drawn the hand-wringers, including Bill Bozarth, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, who advocates public funding for statewide elections. Others express alarm that business would take an interest in judicial elections, as though its interest in the leanings of courts with the power to bankrupt it is illegitimate.
Clearly, Georgia needs higher-profile judicial campaigns to educate voters about the high court and their right to elect judges. In the absence of full and fair judicial contests, judges should be nominated by the two political parties. Public financing, as Bozarth suggests, is another guarantee that the incumbent wins.
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Celebs who adopt, Reid, traffic relief
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Good question posed by Pam Wilson of the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society in South Africa on the news that Madonna and husband Guy Ritchie have adopted a 1-year-old Malawian child: “Are celebrities doing it for the right reasons and not to make a statement?” A child rights group in Malawi asks Madonna to help fund programs that allow children to stay in their own communities. Methinks celebrities are making statements.
• Adults can spend their discretionary income on high school booster clubs. Or sports cars or lottery tickets. To excess, there’s danger in all. Otherwise, it’s just another way to connect parents to schools.
• Ten brides in 12 months, including two within four hours. In a world of marriage fraud and mortgage fraud, Democrats are appalled that anybody would suggest that vote fraud is real and that a photo ID is necessary. They don’t kid themselves. Us, they do.
• In metro Atlanta, 4.5 percent of commuters say working from home is a better congestion-relief solution than the 3.7 percent who think public transit is the answer. Makes sense. It’s not a “choice” or “alternative” if transit service doesn’t come where we are, go when and where we want and free up space on the freeway. An option that serves only 3.7 percent of commuters fails the test.
• When Fulton Superior Court Judge Craig Schwall says “now it is my time to speak,” watch out. With repeat-offender child molester Michael J. Pearson, he got right to the point: “Your perverted and morally repugnant conduct is most repulsive and despicable and cuts to the core of evil. Clearly you have no conscience. What you are and do and what you are all about is offensive to the souls and the conscience of a civilized society.” He gave Pearson life without parole. “I am vehemently, adamantly, without equivocation of any kind or type whatsoever, opposed to parole for this defendant ever.” Put him on the high court.
• One good reason not to name buildings, roads and bridges for living politicians: Former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland praises Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as “one of the most ethical men I know” in an op-ed that ran just as the news broke that Reid had used campaign contributions for Christmas gifts for the hired help at his upscale Washington condo. Earlier, the Associated Press revealed that Reid collected $1.1 million on Nevada property that he hadn’t personally owned for three years. Reid reveals why naming honors should never go to the living. The breathing can embarrass; the dead can’t.
• Come December, when the partisan political operatives are back in their lair for a season’s sleep, we will reflect on the most-hyped stories of the season. Top candidate now is former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley’s e-mail sex talk. It should be evident to all, as a venter observed, that House Speaker Dennis Hastert would have been “drummed out of office because of his homophobia” had he attempted to punish Foley in 2003 for overly friendly e-mails to young men.
• Wall Street money-changers failed to get the word that they’re supposed to favor Republicans. Democrat congressional candidates got $6.1 million from bigwigs at 11 securities firms, while Republicans got $5.1 million, according to Bloomberg Markets. Money has no conscience, loyalty or party affiliation. It goes to power.
• If Powder Springs can convey to an individual the privilege of parking and flying his helicopter in another jurisdiction, Cobb County, without its approval and contrary to its zoning, the General Assembly needs to act. Good to know he’s decided to ground his chopper for the time being.
• A Lovejoy City Council member, allegedly a cantankerous sort, is said to have announced “I’m resigning — right now” before leaving a council meeting. Overjoyed, other city officials took him up on it and called a special election. The councilman, Arlie Aukerman, has been wronged. Hotheaded comments in public debate may be dumb, but unless he formally quits, his enemies are just playing games. The dispute is now in Superior Court. Verdict for Aukerman.
• Verdict for Fulton County Sheriff Myron Freeman, too. Whatever his failings in managing the jail or his department, voters had the chance to inspect the goods prior to delivery. They saw, they considered, they bought. If he’s a lemon, he’s their lemon.
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The stakes in November
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With elections three weeks away, everybody’s jittery. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had to be reassured in a 15-minute phone call with President Bush on Monday that the U.S. won’t leave his govenment hanging. Some Republicans in Congress, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner R-Va., have given signals that they would be receptive to a course change — a timetable, perhaps — and there’s the independent commission that includes former Secretary of State James A. Baker III that’s due to make recommendations, probably in January.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, Ramadan and the run-up to U.S. elections contribute to an escalation in violence, with 70 U.S. servicemen killed this month, second highest since the siege of Falluah nearly two years ago.
It’s still clear to me: the U.S. doesn’t leave Iraqi until its government is reasonably capable of standing on its own and until it’s evident to the world that we haven’t been driven out. A defeat there is a guarantee of another generation of terrorism.
The Iraqi phase of the war on terrrorism increasingly is an issue, like abortion, where it’s doubtful that the left and the right have anything left to say to each other. We are at the point now where a traffic accident on Peachtree Street or a cool breeze in the air is the signal the anti-war left was looking for, the “final straw” bit of evidence, of a need to abandon the cause in Iraq as “unwinnable.”
As I read the daily blog, MSN commentary and listen to the talking heads, it’s pretty clear that we’re now talking past each other to the extent that November’s election needs to provide a clear winner and a clear loser. This election is about one thing: Are we more secure with Republicans or Democrats in control of Congress? If anybody else sees a solution that’s not clear winner/clear loser in November, we’re listening.
The UN, once again a paper tiger
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A defiant North Korea denounces U.N. sanctions as a declaration of war and may very well attempt a second bomb test depite the condemnation of the world community. North Korean officials said they had withstood international pressure before and were unlikely to relent now that it is “a nuclear weapons state.” The sanctions, such as they are, on heavy military equipment and luxury goods were imposed by the U.N. Security Council on Saturday. They’re not likely to be seriously enforced. For various reasons, China and Russia, two members of the U.N. Security Council, are unlikely to squeeze North Korea over its nuclear program and neither is South Korea, which is made more vulnerable by the presence of threatening “nuclear weapons state.”
If there’s a productive outcome to the U.N. sanctions or to any other action the world body may take, it’s not clear at the moment. For the U.S., it’s useful to allow the world to recognize that North Korea stands oblivious to world opinion, or to United Nations action, but as an effective counter to a rogue nation intent on developing nuclear weapons, it’s revealed again to be a paper tiger. Once again, the U.N. gives the illusion of importance, but realistically it’ll not effect world opinion to any productive end.
The U.S. certainly should be a part of the United Nations. For regional conflict that doesn’t threaten to become global and for regimes or factions engagiing in genocide in countries with central governments too weak or corrupt to prevent it, the U.N. is a useful forum. But for serious threats to world peace, or for serious threats to our national security, it’s incidental to the solution. The U.S. shouldn’t withdraw. But it’s not a particularly useful instrument of U.S. foreign policy. It defines and focuses attention on the problem. But it doesn’t bring solutions.
Can’t spell doom for GOP just yet
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Notes on the campaign:
• Republicans may lose control of the U.S. House, as pundits are predicting. If so, I’ll be shocked. In 17 of 20 open GOP seats, President Bush pulled 61 percent. A dozen of those are considered possible Democratic pick-ups. The Dems need 15. Georgia is unusual, but the only two competitive congressional races here are held by Democrats — Jim Marshall in Macon in the 8th and John Barrow of Savannah in the 12th. A win by Republicans in either would be a major upset. Prediction: Democrats gain 8 nationally, within the range predicted by Karl Rove. For most disgruntled Republicans, a House led by California’s Nancy Pelosi is no option.
• In the Georgia State Senate, the current lineup is 34 Republican, 22 Democrats. Republicans need four to pass constitutional amendments. Won’t happen now — or probably ever. The GOP’s about maxed out in the state Senate. Of the 22 Democrats, 18 are from districts won by John Kerry. Of the remaining four — Tim Golden of Valdosta, George Hooks of Americus, J.B. Powell of Blythe and Steve Thompson of Marietta — Hooks will retire at his pleasure; Golden shows the potential of being the Democrat who can survive among Republicans; and Thompson’s district is becoming more Democratic. Within four years he’s at risk from a challenger on his left, not his right. Powell’s district was won by President Bush and U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson in 2004, when Powell won by 405 votes. Prediction: Neither party gains more than one seat.
• In the Georgia state House, the current lineup is 104 Republicans, 74 Democrats, one independent and one vacancy — though it’s effectively 104-76. This will likely be the low-point election for Democrats, who could lose another three to five seats, including the one held by former House Speaker Terry Coleman of Eastman.
President Bush won 123 of the 180 House seats. Of the 57 won by John Kerry, 45 are majority black in registration. The only Republican district Kerry won is Jill Chambers’ in DeKalb County. Blacks will, incidentally, constitute the majority of the minority in the new House.
Prediction: Republicans net four. The DeKalb County seat held by Republican Paul Jennings, who retired, is vulnerable.
• Long-term, while Democrats may lose seats in rural Georgia with redistricting in four years, their prospects are good in metro Atlanta. When black voter registration reaches 30 percent, Democrats gain the edge. In Clayton, which in January will become the first large county to send all-black delegation to the General Assembly, black registration increased from 45.3 percent in 2000 to 66.3 percent this year. Substantial increases have occurred in Cobb, Douglas, Gwinnett, Henry, Newton and Rockdale as well. Newton and Rockdale have topped 30 percent; Henry and Douglas are approaching it. Democrats will find new life in close-in counties that straddle the interstates.
• In Gwinnett, the black voting percentage has increased from 9.3 percent in 2000 to 17.8 percent now. In actual numbers white registration has increased by 6,272, and black registration gained by 30,754. Registration by Asians, Hispanics and others grew by 25,528.
The message for Republicans: Cultivate minorities or risk losing existing majorities, probably starting with the state Senate. Not soon, but I’d not count on state Senate control for more than another decade. • A 20-point lead in the last month of the campaign is an almost insurmountable gap for a candidate without money. Mark Taylor’s campaign had three major problems.
One is that money favors the party in power. The other is that Taylor actually needed the primary loser, Secretary of State Cathy Cox, to assure her band of female loyalists that she liked him. Didn’t happen. That hurt Taylor, but also her. A party on the ropes remembers its team players.
And finally, Taylor was hurt by the unwillingness of influential blacks to let him move to the right on crime. He returned to the issue over the weekend, but when he launched a TV ad campaign in September, liberal blacks warned him off.
• It still looks like an incumbent’s year to me. When voters are all over the waterfront, as they were in a late-September poll conducted for this newspaper by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research Inc., citing as top concerns crime, education, keeping a lid on taxes and the availability of health care, my reading is that they’re reciting the headlines. Doesn’t strike me as throw-the-bums-out issues.
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Marriage and taxes: Unsettling trends
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two numbers are disturbing. One is the New York Times report this weekend that married couples are now a minority of households. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2005 finds that 49.7 percent of the nation’s 111.1 million households are marrieds. That’s down from 52 percent five years ago. Another 5 percent are men and women who live together without marrying. That’s one disturbing number.
The other, which represents both good and bad news, comes from the Tax Foundation. The good news is that as a result of tax cuts in 2001 that created a new 10 percent income tax bracket and in 2003 that doubled the child tax credit from $500 to $1,000 per child, the percentage of filers who are removed from the rolls has gone from 22.85 percent to 31.51. For those who earn less than $50,000, it’s increased from 31.67 to 44.53. In Georgia, the under $50,000 filers who pay nothing has risen from 34.09 to almost half, 49.21. Thanks, George. And so much for all that rhetoric about “tax cuts for the rich.” That’s the good news. The flip side of that is that increasing numbers of Americans become oblivious to the cost of government — and, worse, see it as a deep-pocketed daddy. The top 50 percent pay 96.7 percent of the income taxes; the bottom 50, 3.3 percent, according to the Tax Foundation.
The two trends are in many respects disturbing. Marriage, with a mother and father in the home, is a child’s best hope for a happy, healthy and secure transition to adulthood. For children, everything else is make-do. For society, it’s the bedrock institution. The reality that marrieds are a declining percentage of households is of concern, if indeed it represents a changing view that marriage is just another lifestyle option. The concern with taxes is, of course, that those who don’t pay don’t care how big government grows or how much it costs. Of concern, these two trends? I say yes. You say….
Government dealings move into the open
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gov. Sonny Perdue tells a story of going with his father to the country store where farmers gathered to moan, boast or bluff about the season’s crop. One in particular would wait until the others had declared, and then announce triumphantly that he expected his crop to be slightly better than all the rest.
Even in good years, Perdue says, his father declined to declare his crop bountiful. On one occasion, riding back home, the young Perdue asked his father why he’d not spoken up. These folks are farmers, his father replied. They can drive by your fields and know how well you’re doing.
In government, successes are often not so readily evident. And, in fact, efforts that I regard as legacy potential have virtually no campaign visibility at all. It is the work of the New Georgia commission, a Perdue effort to modernize management of the public’s business.
Decades ago, the government of a largely rural, desperately poor state in constant need of paved roads, better education and decent housing had as its first obligation eliminating barriers that kept motivated people and communities from prospering. That purpose is largely accomplished. Motivated Georgians, without regard to place, can achieve a standard of living equal to those anywhere in America.
As the state grew, in fulfilling its obligations, it grew much as the growing family with no option to move. It added rooms in this direction and that. Design didn’t matter, nor did the flow of daily traffic.
There comes a time, though, when the state has the time, resources and need to put the house in order. That is what the formally named Commission for a New Georgia is doing.
One example requires reflection on the Georgia that was — and probably still is. The traditional currency of politics is pork and favoritism.
Sam Caldwell served for 17 years as labor commissioner before going to prison for 21 months in 1984 for conspiring to defraud an insurance company by intentionally sinking a boat and for using state employees to perform personal jobs. While in office, he put together a powerful state political machine. Ironically, he had won the office in 1966 by running against the patronage system that the Labor Department had become. He died in 2001.
When Caldwell’s political machine fell apart, reporters began to take a look at the currency of his political power — and found it in leases for local offices. Relatives of four high-ranking staffers were given no-bid leases at above-market rates on often-inferior quarters that in one 12-month period amounted to $1.24 million. In Dublin, for example, Labor paid $7.07 a square foot for the kind of space that other agencies leased for $3.72 to $6.29. In Gainesville, it paid $7.96 for space; others agencies paid $4.35 to $8.55.
The General Assembly in 1976 had required state agencies to get three bids, but exempted the Labor Department because the bulk of its money comes from the feds.
One of the work efforts of the New Georgia commission has been to assemble leases and do something that represents the greatest and most meaningful reform — to make them transparent. Gena Abraham, the state property officer — a new job-designation that comes with responsibility to find out how much property taxpayers own and lease — has identified 1,600 leases and 19,040 owned buildings.
Many of those leases have been renegotiated at a savings to the state. In Douglasville, for example, consolidating leases by three agencies into one will save taxpayers $8.4 million over the next six years. That’s important, certainly.
But the real reform is transparency. Every one of those leases is available for examination on the Internet (www.realpropropertiesgeorgia.org) and searchable by county, agency, landlord and rental rate. By Wednesday, every one of the buildings is expected to be listed, too.
Why is that so important?
Walk into my family graveyard in South Georgia. I know, but you wouldn’t, that most of the 200 or so people buried there are related in some way. With a genealogical chart, those relationships could be known to all.
Lease and ownership transparency are the keys to the genealogical chart. Post them publicly and somebody will know the relationships. It’s the greatest possible protection against cronyism and sweetheart dealing. Transparency is the beginning of accountability.
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Babs, Darfur, North Korea, runaway bride
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Tolerant, these liberals. Imagine my shock, then, when Babs dropped the f-word on a member of the audience protesting her anti-Bush politicking during the New York stop on her latest farewell tour. Streisand reaches Atlanta on Nov. 2. Tickets are priced at up to $752. A liberal with that kind of money would have to have an inheritance, a government consulting contract or a love relationship with a free-enterprise conservative.
• Another instance where government should rely on faith-based organizations: rehab housing. Atlanta’s grossly mismanaged program spent $5 million in federal taxpayers’ money over five years with little to show for it. Such programs, if they are to exist, need somebody who cares representing the elderly poor — and the poor taxpayer whose money is being frittered away.
• Republicans are thought hypocrites because they preach morality and an occasional Mark Foley fails. Democrats aren’t, presumably because they don’t.
• Marvelous advice from, of all places, a San Francisco-based state appeals court. It upheld California’s ban on same-sex unions and warned judges to avoid the temptation to impose an outcome, leaving the matter to voters and legislators. Maybe the national campaign against judicial activism is beginning to sink in.
• There ought to be a constitutional amendment prohibiting settlements of suits filed against taxpayers until terms are approved by the body charged with levying the taxes any proposed settlement would require. In the case of a lawsuit rolling around the country that would force states to funnel more money to some local systems, that would be the Georgia General Assembly. The lawsuit is an attempt to use the courts to decide an issue that should be left to voters and their legislators. A settlement is hinted.
• Either I’m insensitive or my friends are. Gasper the Georgia Aquarium whale’s health has never come up once in any of our conversations.
• The runaway bride, who filed suit against her former beau for a share of the money paid for their story, is 18 minutes into her 15 minutes of fame.
• Darfur is a reason to have the United Nations. The United States has no strategic interest there. It has its hands full militarily elsewhere. The African Union and the United Nations are the powers to look to for troops and for solutions. We are not the world’s policeman.
• North Korean nukes? See above. One-on-one talks, as Condi Rice noted, have been tried. Didn’t work. The world that’s threatened should lead the search for a solution. Our obligation is to make certain our allies, Japan and South Korea, aren’t left defenseless. But that is a parallel concern.
• The mixed emotions of a conservative: U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob comes uncomfortably close to being the bureaucrat-in-charge of the Fulton County Jail. But the people’s elected agent does appear to be incapable of doing the job himself. There has to be a third way — and the General Assembly should provide it. Either give the job to the County Commission or to a specially created unit of the State Department of Corrections that would manage the facility until the next sheriff’s election.
• When labor unions that support Democrats endorse nonpartisan judicial candidates, as the state AFL-CIO and the National Education Association have done with incumbent Supreme Court Justice Carol Hunstein, you’ve got to conclude that she’s the Democrat and her challenger, Mike Wiggins, is the Republican.
• The Bush administration was accused of failing to plan for the aftermath of victory over Saddam Hussein. Surely nobody will now criticize contingency plans to retain forces in Iraq through 2010. May not be necessary, but enemies size us up on the basis of our history in Vietnam and Somalia. Squeeze us and we’ll run. Throw in domestic political debate over timetables for withdrawal, which can be misinterpreted as evidence that our national will is brittle, and the 2010 planning is a vital, balancing message.
• Three years ahead of schedule, the president’s promise to cut the budget deficit in half is fulfilled. Frightening. Get the books in shape and voters might think it’s safe to return the more proficient big spenders to office.
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Blacks and Hispanics together politically?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Most likely, it’s nothing more than an election-seaon “what if” speech by a nostalgic old guy who longs for the spirit, intensity and power of days gone by. But the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery’s plea at a luncheon celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month for blacks and Latinos to join forces does warrant notice.
What the two have in common is that both are significant minority blocs in this country. Significant numbers of both, too, have not yet joined the middle class. In a crowd of whites, each would most likely be recognizable by skin color. Both could point, too, to discrimination as a shared concern. Other common interests, concerns and characteristic may exist as well.
But by and large, it’s not a natural fit. Take preferences in admissions, hiring and contracting, for example. One minority’s ancestors suffered government-sanctioned or directed discrimination. Lowery’s generation therefore could make a legitimate claim to government preferences as compensation. But no Hispanic has ever been in that position and therefore has no legitimate claim to go to the head of the line. Too, the workforce in many industries, like agriculture, landscaping and construction, is becoming heavily Hispanic. As with the minimum-wage, those who start on the bottom don’t stay on the bottom. They gain skills and move up. They become contractors and then owners. Unless the government presumes to further segment preferences so that some jobs are held aside for different minorities, a willingness to work undesirable jobs to acquire the skills to move up will determine which minority gains advantage.
And there is, furthermore, the reality that blacks are spread over the economic spectrum and there’s no reason to think that the suit-wearers have any more in common politically with the lettuce-pickers than they would if they were all white, all Hispanic or all black. Nope. Interesting suggestion on the surface. But I don’t see it happening.
Is company loyalty gone?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last evening, an annual newspaper ritual was replayed. The company honored employees who had reached a 25-year milestone, as well as those who have worked here longer. The dean of the AJC is sportswriting legend Furman Bisher, who came to work here 56 years ago. He’s followed by a payroll and accounting employee, Frances Seagraves, who was honored last night for reaching the 50-year milestone. I’m a 28-year guy. Nice dinner, nice event.
What was being honored, obviously, is loyalty, a loyalty that goes both ways. Over the course of my work history, that has become rarer. Workers are more inclined now, I think, to job hop, to see work as less central to their lives, and to see the dislocations caused by economic globalization as evidence that gambling a career on one employer is too high-risk. The Atlanta-area plant closings by Ford and General Motors, and similar market pressures on Delta, a Georgia company where employment once signaled status and security, suggest that the employer-employee relationship that was once presumed to be a lifetime contract may be dated. Add to the economic troubles the rampant cynicism that seems to afflict large segments of the population when it comes to corporations and business executives, and loyalty to individual companies is further strained.
Too bad. Corporations, like Delta and Ford and General Motors, did live and reflect cultures that were wholesome and productive. They weren’t just about money, though they were handsomely profitable, and as in Atlanta, they anchored communities and were good corporate citizens. They had values and employees and communities knew what they were. In retrospect, autoworkers and their unions might have been less adversarial in contract negotiations, and management might have been less short-sighted and both might have been smarter in reacting to competition. But at some point they and Delta got a labor-cost structure that their business models couldn’t overcome.
Now the questions: Is employer-employee loyalty a relic? Whether it is or not, control of retirement benefits and health insurance should pass from employer to employee so that workers can move freely, taking their benefits with them. More questions: How do you work now and how do you expect to work in the future? ( I write this from home, were I could stay and work today, but for scheduled candidate interviews at the office.)
A laptop is a school
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Before school officials botched it, Cobb County was onto something with its laptop program.
A laptop is a school without buildings. It convenes any place instructors and students connect, at any time of the day or night, at any level. In time it will open new worlds for parents, just as the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog did for rural families a century ago by freeing them from dependence on merchants within the range of their mules.
Atlanta writer Evelyn Coleman has the Sears catalog of education. Her 15-year-old granddaughter, Taylor Blayne Parker, accesses it every school day. She shops for knowledge without regard to whether she is on the farm or in Chicago, just as farmers with a Sears catalog shopped for store-bought exotica at any time of the day from any place a hundred years ago.
Parker, a 10th-grader, is one of about 30 Atlanta area students enrolled in a virtual school pilot being run by Connections Academy, a for-profit education company started in 2001 by Sylvan Learning.
Connections provides the books, individual lesson plans, state-certified instructors, principals, guidance counselors and other support to parents who don’t choose to educate their children in the traditional school setting.
Connections operates charter public schools in 11 states, though not yet in Georgia. A group of parents in Paulding County, including Erica and Kirk Williams, applied two weeks ago to the Paulding County Board of Education for a virtual school charter. Their application was rejected, 7-1, but with constructive suggestions — such as making sure Georgia history is added to the curriculum — that led them to believe they’ll be successful by the start of next school year.
Paulding is a fast-growing system where school overcrowding is a growing problem. Voters last month rejected a $125 million school bond issue, apparently upset at the way proceeds from a local-option sales tax for education had been managed.
Comaneci Davis Brooken of Atlanta, the Georgia project director for Connections Academy, says the state charter school law did not specifically sanction virtual charter schools until state Sen. Dan Moody (R-Alpharetta) fixed that with a bill that passed the Legislature and was signed into law in April.
Just after that, Coleman’s daughter and Taylor moved back home. Unsatisfying experiences with unhelpful school system officials that ended with, “Well, that’s your only recourse, ma’am” struck a nerve.
Coleman is the author of 20 books, 18 of them for children. Her response to “That’s your only recourse, ma’am” was: “I thought, ‘well, I’m an educated person so it’s not really my only recourse.’ ”
Coleman found Connections Academy on the Internet and liked the curriculum. A dinner with Connections officials and Moody and his wife persuaded them to give it a try.
Shortly after completing her first lessons in April, Coleman says, Taylor came to her. “She said ‘Grandma, you know what? I forgot that I liked to learn.’ I almost cried, really. She was excited. She did the work. She has really enjoyed it.”
Because Coleman shares a family trait toward insomnia, she usually writes late at night. Taylor, too, prefers to do schoolwork at night. “She’s groggy in the morning, so I let her sleep late. The assignments show up every day. She’s very disciplined. She’s able to work at her own pace.
“She’s very acclimated to the Internet. She says it’s easier for her. The teacher calls her every other week, but they e-mail back and forth every day. She has a homeroom teacher and different subject teachers. She has really done well.”
She and others say teachers can be more productive and work with larger numbers of students because they have no discipline problems or distractions. Part of the virtual school agreement is that a parent or another adult will act as a learning coach. In some subjects, that’s Coleman. In others, it’s her husband, Talib, an educator who was formerly a research librarian.
The learning coach has a site, as does the student, so that the instructor and coach can see how well the student’s doing and how much time is being devoted to each lesson.
A laptop can be a school where children learn when and where they and their parents choose. The old education model was the crossroads store. Then the catalog came and eventually even Wal-Mart. It’s all about choice and individual needs.
A Monday AJC story asked whether anybody cares about the state school superintendent’s race. It’s low profile. One of these days, though, the debate will be about whether education reform is to be something other than smaller class sizes and higher pay. It’ll be about choice and real alternatives.
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Questions impolitic to ask
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Questions too rude to ask in a politically correct world:1) Are you here legally? 2) Where is the baby’s father and why isn’t he providing support? 3) Do you not buy health insurance because you can’t afford it or because you have other priorities?
The first question is prompted by a weekend demonstration by a crowd estimated at 2,000 near the State Capitol calling for amnesty for illegal immigrants. “We are Latino and we are here,” the crowd chanted in Spanish. One construction worker, in this country just over a year, made a sign: “I never live from welfare because I hard worker. I just build houses for yu.”
To me it matters a great deal whether the protesters are here legally or illegally, though in the case of the sign-maker it's a question unasked. In fact, I've never seen or heard a story about similar demonstrations that informed readers and listeners whether any named participant was an American citizen, a legal guest or an illegal immigrant. It matters. American citizens certainly have a right to petition their government for any cause they advocate. Guests here at the invitation of their hosts are rude to protest the firmness of the host's mattress. Illegals who protest publicly are twice disrespectful -- once by breaking in and again by flaunting it. The weight of their grievances depends on the category to which they belong.
When we don’t know, the assumption is that the information is being withheld purposefullly. The same is true of stories reporting on children in need. It is really quite remarkable how infrequently fathers are mentioned, as though they never mattered or, in crisis, are never expected to contribute to the solution. And it’s true, too, of unexpected health circumstances that confront families without insurance. The explanation always is that they can’t “afford” it, but the reader and listener never get enough information to know whether they can’t, or have chosen other less prudent spending priorities.
You be the political reporter
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today a change of directions. Not a permanent change, but an experiment.
The AJC reports in the Sunday edition that the top concerns of voters across the state in the governor’s race are crime and public safety, cited by 96 percent of those who participated in a Mason-Dixon poll of 625 likely voters conducted Sept. 27-29. Education was mentioned by 94 percent with “keeping taxes down” and health care availability cited by 92 percent. My reading of those concerns is, still, that it’s an incumbent’s year in Georgia.
Certainly the rash of high-profile crimes, like the school shootings, weigh on voters, but the randomness and the insanity of the shootings make it hard for voters to pinpoint a cause and to place blame. Education is a polling stand-by. When put on the spot, the clueless and the contented voter will cite education. It’s a catch-all good-citizen concern that requires no real knowledge.
Today’s mission, though, for Thinking Right contributors, is to play reporter. Over the last couple of days of travelling around Middle Georgia, I’ve seen no evidence that voters are in a foul mood. But you report: In your circles, what concerns to friends, family and associates express? Which races, state, local or federal, attract attention?
Jury duty, Medicaid, green energy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• “If you don’t show up for jury duty [in Fulton County] nothing’s going to happen,” observes attorney Jack Martin. Consequently, 47 percent of those summoned last year didn’t. Americans — and illegal immigrants — obey laws they think are enforced.
• People in power positions — jail guards, police officers, teachers and congressmen — who take sexual advantage of vulnerables, and especially of children, should go to jail, then rehab. Or vice-versa.
• The problem with race preferences is demonstrated in a report from the Washington-based Brookings Institution identifying 40,149 refugees who settled in metro Atlanta between 1983 and 2004, ninth largest influx in the country. Some qualify for preferences, some don’t — though none has any claim to have been a victim of government-sponsored discrimination.
• When government officials have nothing to do, and no problem left to throw money at, they invent Fanplex, the white elephant facility Atlanta now has on the market for $2.5 million — or about a million dollars more than it’s worth. Few things are more dangerous to taxpayers than politicians who are going to “make” something happen in a free market with somebody else’s money.
• Ain’t No Waste, Fraud or Abuse Here Department: When Georgia started requiring proof of income and citizenship to qualify for Medicaid, beginning Jan. 1, rolls dropped by 69,635 in the first four months. About 10,000 may have been Katrina evacuees who’ve gone home, and 1,000 may have been double-counted. But it is a marvel that so many fled upon hearing that somebody cared to stop fraud.
• Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, calls President Bush a failure and a liar. The question arises: Would he prefer to see a “failure” and a “liar” or a success and truth-speaker win in November? That’s what I thought, too.
• Liberals throughout Georgia will surely sign up for Georgia Power Co.’s “green energy” program. That’s power generated from renewable sources, like wind, landfill methane and the hot air emanating from statehouse political debate. The premium is $4.50 per 100 kilowatt hours, atop the $8.58 customers normally pay. Editorialists should demand a professional-courtesy discount.
• The election is looking better for Gov. Sonny Perdue than the 19-point margin would suggest. Even the Sierra Club, an interest group that was described by Casey Cagle’s spokesman, Brad Alexander, as “a fringe element of the Democratic Party,” declines to endorse in the governor’s race.
• Headline: “University study finds pews not as empty as thought.” This is a study? A Sunday morning look-see might have solved the mystery.
• Well, $2.5 million is far too much, and child molestation is an abominable crime, but a guy held in prison for 22 months beyond the expiration of his sentence because of a bureaucratic snafu is owed something. A suit alleges that Fulton Superior Court Clerk Juanita Hicks and a deputy failed to notify corrections officials of his release date. Him I pay. And watch.
• A conflict of interest for those who serve on state boards is not limited to money. Any person who is active in an interest group that takes positions on public policy issues has a conflict when those issues come before a state board or agency.
• “Hello, is this the bankruptcy court?” U.S. automakers earn $2,400 per vehicle less than their Japanese rivals because of labor costs, a weak yen and less efficient manufacturing and purchasing processes, according to an industry consulting firm, Harbor-Felax Group. For workers there, this is a cruel, abrupt and unavoidable, halt to the contract excesses of the past. Painful as it is for the industry, it’s the price of managing for short-term results. This is the prime reason I fear government workplace unions. Politicians are car-industry execs of the ’60s.
• Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says with the looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers “reform of our unsustainable entitlement programs,” such as Social Security and Medicare, should be a priority. Spending for those two programs will go from 7 percent of the U.S. economy to 13 percent by 2030. As with the auto industry, politicians have no incentive to worry past the next reporting cycle. Here’s a secret: The baby boomers’ retirement tab is a trick on illegals. Sneak in now. Get the bill later.
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The Foley scandal: Where next?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The assertion by former Rep. Mark Foley’s one-time chief of staff that he told top aides to House Speaker Dennis Hastert three years ago that the disgraced former congressman’s relationships with male pages were too familiar, increase the pressure on Hastert to go. Resigning, as the conservative Washington Times has demanded, would be clean — and a clean admission of guilt. Hastert’s chief of staff flatly denies that they were warned by the one-time Foley aide.
While House leaders do need to lay out as quickly as possible details of what they knew and how they handled the information, Hastert’s resignation gets them nothing — and certainly doesn’t change the political situation for Republicans in the midterm election. The damage is done and Hastert’s resignation would simply give Democrats a new target for the final month of campaigning.
As the Foley matter now stands, Democrats are in real danger of overplaying their hand, as they are wont to do. Foley feeds what was once a gay stereotype, that they were potential sexual predators who could not have unsupervised relationships with boys. The Democratic Party really does not want to build a political campaign on the basis that Foley appeared to be too familiar with young male pages — not in an overtly sexual way, according to the early e-mails, but uncomfortably — and that somebody should have intervened to police him. Clearly in retrospect the familiarity was a warning of predatory intent, but I don’t believe that’s always the case.
It seems obvious now, but had I been the senior member of 435 independent contractors, I don’t know that I would have done more than warn Foley that his actions were making young pages uncomfortable and to stop, with some monitoring to see that he had. But editors at The Miami Herald and The St. Petersburg Times apparently had the same e-mails others did last year and thought them not worth pursuing.
Foley’s conduct was reprehensible and at some point the entire world knew that it had crossed a line. When? And what should be the consequences for Hastert and for Congress and for policing the relationship between pages and members of Congress? Those are questions bipartisan congressional investigators should resolve, though it’s unlikely anything but partisanship can come from this scandal until after the winners and losers are declared in November.
It’s not my fault
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Everybody’s a victim. The murderer of Amish school children, Charles Carl Roberts IV, left notes that described his anguish at the death of premature daughter nine years ago. He cited, too, a childhood as a molester of two female relatives who would have been of preschool age.
Then there is in the news, too, the former Florida congressman, Mark Foley, who first suggested that his inappropriate relationships with male congressionall pages was the fault of alcohol. And then Tuesday, his lawyer said in a West Palm Beach press conference that Foley had been sexually abused when he was 13 and 15 by a clergyman. But, the lawyer said, Foley had not had any sexual contact with underage boys.
Whatever the real answers are for the horror at the Amish schoolhouse or for a congressman’s predatory behavior, the explanations that invite the rest of us to think of perpetrators as victims is doubly angering — once for the actual offense and again for it’s-not-my-fault excuse-making. With Foley, one envisions memoirs and a promotional tour through empathy-TV explaining how he was driven to misconduct.
A friend recently described a cartoon with two characters standing over a mangled body, one commenting to the other: “The person who did this really needs our help.” Except for periodic bouts of public outrage, that’s where this nation has been rooted for the past 40 years or more. It’s where much of the country is on terrorism: What have we done to cause people around the world to hate us and how we can change so that they’ll not be driven to terrorism? Enough.
Those guilty are either victims or when they take responsibility, it’s as Janet Reno did after Waco: it’s empty words without accountability or consequence. A conservative dreams: One day Americans will take personal responsibility for themselves, their families, their financial affairs, their retirement years — and most of all, for their own conduct.
Make the call: Terrorists or criminals?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For more than a decade — but most evidently and dramatically over the past five years — two distinct views have emerged as the defining difference in how we confront the evil that threatens.
It is, and has been since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a law enforcement problem, as then-President Bill Clinton defined it by words and deeds. Or it is, as President George W. Bush defines it with his words and deeds, a war on terrorism. Everything else, including last week’s debate in the U.S. House and Senate over legislation to establish military commissions, the rights of unlawful enemy combatants and the role of U.S. courts in intervening, flows from that key difference.
The difference roughly splits left and right, but on the legal issues raised last week a number of libertarians, who fall in between and who fear the power of Big Government to abuse the rights of its citizens, raised concerns about a failure to grant habeas corpus rights to foreign terrorists facing military tribunals.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) argued unsuccessfully that all persons held in U.S. custody, including noncitizens, should be granted the same rights as common thieves in this country. Three Republicans joined him and one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, crossed over to oppose. The amendment failed, 51-48.
It initially appeared that three Senate Republicans — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Warner of Virginia and John McCain of Arizona — would muck it up. They seemed to provide cover to Democrats who on terrorism often sound like filmmaker Oliver Stone, who insisted at the San Sebastian International Film Festival on Thursday that the United States should fight terrorism “the same ways that the British fought the IRA or the Spanish government fought the Basques here” in Spain. In Stone’s view, and many on the left, “terrorism is a manageable action. It can be lived with.” He went off the deep end from there.
This hatred of Bush tempts most of the Democratic Party’s angry anti-war wing to make absurd statements and bad policy. The fear here was that Graham, Warner and McCain’s opposition on the tribunals, when combined with the understandable libertarian fear of Big Government and core Democratic opposition, would result in legislation that effectively destroyed their usefulness by subjecting everything from food to interrogation to endless litigation in federal courts. That would constitute mucking up the president’s bill and hamstringing this country’s efforts to prosecute terrorists.
In the end, however, Graham’s training as a military reserve legal officer proved valuable in drawing a real distinction between the laws of military conflict and those of domestic civil and criminal activity. As U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) noted afterward, “While this bill provides important rules of law procedures for illegal enemy combatants, it does not give them the same protections which we afford lawful enemy combatants or our own military personnel, and that is a critical distinction. That’s how it ought to be.”
That is a critical distinction and it is how it ought to be.
Without reinterpreting or defining the Geneva Conventions, which apply to nations and to their structured, uniformed military combatants — lawful combatants — the legislation takes a separate tact. It prohibits war crimes for the United States and defines prohibited interrogation techniques, but leaves to the president authority to approve other interrogation techniques that may be productive.
The bill draws a distinction between the rights of lawful combatants, unlawful combatants and U.S. citizens facing trial. The role of federal courts is clarified and limited. The rights of unlawful combatants facing military tribunals are cleared up. Congress, required by the U.S. Supreme Court to sanction the tribunals, has done its job, making clear that these are extensions of the battlefield, not U.S. criminal courts.
It is unfortunate that the nation cannot have an honest debate leading to either consensus or, absent that, a clear winner and loser on this critical question: Is the United States fighting a war on terrorism or an international criminal enterprise that has as its goal the arrest and prosecution in federal court of Osama bin Laden and others who can be found by evidence admissible in federal courts to have been hands-on responsible for specific acts?
We simply see the threats differently. Either the law enforcement view or the terrorism view has ultimately to prevail.
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Women, men and politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gov. Sonny Perdue’s lead over Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor is 19 points, 53 to 34 percent, according to an AJC-commissioned poll by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research. Perdue led in all parts of the state, drawing support of 58 percent of men and 49 percent of women, while Taylor pulls 31 percent of men and 38 percent of women. About 11 percent said they were undecided and 2 percent favored the libertarian, Garrett Hayes.
The surprise to me is that Taylor is not running stronger among women. Black women are cinch Democrats and the fact that even with their loyalty, he still pulls no more than 38 percent of the female vote is telling. I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but Taylor has some version of Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow. Something he projects does not appeal to women. I suspect that it’s his size, which women either find intimidating or see as a lack of discipline. I didn’t see anything in his race against Cathy Cox that would create the impression that he’s a bully — the real danger when a guy his size runs against a woman people like. It may simply be that he’s now beaten two women in statewide campaigns who are popular among Democratic women — State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver of Decatur for lieutenant governor and now Cox — and they hold it against him. Whatever it is, time’s running out.
This is a campaign season where the war on terror, pro and con, has sucked the life out of every other issue. Immigration was hot. Health care had potential. Energy had its moment as a campaign issue. The deficit and pork-barrel spending ignited the fiscal conservatives for months. But nationally it’s the war. And in the state, it’s likeability.
The question, though, is whether beyond a visceral sense of comfort with certain candidates, men and women are drawn to candidates for different reasons. Democratic women talk of the “women’s vote” as though its monolithic, which of course it’s not. By “women’s vote,” they mean issues associated with liberal Democrats, like abortion and expanded social services. (The debate on this blog, incidentally, doesn’t reflect any gender differences on issues that I can pick up.)
Questions: Do men and women see government and politicians differently? Or should that be: do single and married men/women see them differently? And what are the vibes that men and women candidates send out that attract us or turn us off? Do looks matter? Katherine Harris, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Florida, who is attractive, has been criticized for coming across as too flirtatious in some TV interviews. Would we think that of Janet Reno?
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