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Friday, November 3, 2006
Bus terminal, no MegaFest, Kerry apology
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• A Floridian uses “part of a home equity loan” to pay $2,952 for a pair of Barbra Streisand tickets, and then spends $325 more on T-shirts and other merchandise. Can you imagine trying to design a government capable of building safety nets under a population that heaps debt on personal homes to afford a concert? Gotta be a liberal.
• The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority is designing a $93 million bus terminal on I-75, just inside I-285. Two points: With projects like this, nobody in state government can be accused of failing to boldly consider “alternatives” to more road capacity. Some alternatives make dollar sense; some don’t. Commuter rail is in the “don’t make sense” category. And two: Don’t use up all that space above the expressways. At some point soon the private sector needs to double-deck the Downtown Connector.
• Some 360 students at Woodland Elementary Charter School in Sandy Springs voted this week in a mock election. An 8-year-old third-grader voted for Mark Taylor, though she’s not certain what a governor does. “I think the governor is the one who gets all the money from the people and then gives them a paycheck.” And who said the Democratic Party had no farm team?
• Feeling the pressure, former JonBenet suspect John Mark Karr flees. Check the bus to Albuquerque.
• “If the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous,” said British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as his government releases a report on climate changes and appoints former VP Al Gore as its “global warming” adviser. If. Scholars at the American Enterprise Institute declared of the report: “Risk estimates are based not on extrapolation of existing trends, but on computer models that are only as good as the assumptions fed in.”
• Last year, global warming caused a bad hurricane season in the Atlantic. But that was last year. This year’s below normal. If.
• Meanwhile, my worry time goes to a still-mutating strain of bird flu. This is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at its finest. Planning. Researching. Coordinating. Preparing for a possible pandemic.
• “Sometimes our government goes too far, and I think this is one of those cases,” said DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones in vetoing a proposed ban on smoking in bars in unincorporated parts of the county. Ordinances such as this are evidence that politicians have too much time, too few ideas and too many laws already — so they’re reduced to kindergarten busy work, doodling and coloring in the legal code.
• Coke announces a wholesale price increase of as much as 25 percent for its orange juice brands. Whew! Finally a price increase we can avoid. Oil, we’re prisoners. OJ, not.
• Looking to start a new business? Here’s one sorely needed: An apology school. John Kerry’s “Of course I’m sorry about a botched joke. You think I love botched jokes?” hardly qualifies. The second round was not much better. John Kerry, stuck in dumbspeak.
• If Congress listened to fiscal conservatives such as U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) of Sharpsburg in the 3rd Congressional District, and outed earmarks, as U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) of Roswell insisted, we’d not have to worry that the U.S. House may be taken over by Nancy Pelosi Democrats. Good men, both, and good fits for their districts.
• Taxpayers would be well served if every Statehouse committee chair put in the hours and offered the kind of leadership that state Rep. Jill Chambers (R-Atlanta) does in overseeing MARTA’s finances, operations and performance. Republican majorities in both houses have a brief window to challenge the status quo before they own it. She’s in a tough race in DeKalb.
• When liberals say that George W. Bush and Sonny Perdue are not leaders, what they really mean is that the two are not leading in the direction liberals want to go.
• The free market works. Bishop T.D. Jakes cancels MegaFest, one of Atlanta’s biggest religious events, for next year. Attendance had dipped from 500,000 the first year to under 100,000 because of the high cost of four days in Atlanta. The thousands of people dressed in their Sunday best will be missed on the streets here. Next to the Olympic crowds, it’s Atlanta’s most interesting gathering of people from elsewhere.
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