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Friday, November 24, 2006
Obama fans, happy Babs, the good life
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Headline: “Most 2006 hurricane predictions turned out to be nothing but hot air.”
• In the hot-air category: Two adjunct scholars for the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis, Denis Avery and Fred Singer, say in a new book that global warming is part of a 1,500-year cycle of moderate temperature swings and that human activity has little to do with it. The current warming began about 1850 and could continue for another 500 years, they say. The book is “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.”
• Southern employers saw their health care costs increase by 11.8 percent to $7,196 this year. Consumer prices overall are projected to increase by 2.3 percent. Americans have to have a stake in caring what services and procedures cost — and with third-party payers, we don’t.
• Who said conservatives have not grown and matured? Bill Clinton’s neighbor was shot and I don’t suspect him. But where’d you say he was that evening?
• The media are becoming Barack Obama groupies, hanging on every word while rushing him into the White House. For goodness sakes, he’s just in the second year of representing Illinois in the U.S. Senate.
• Iran and Syria are suggesting they can be of “help” in Iraq because they saw the election results — and want to talk and dance through the remaining two years of the Bush administration. As Al Gore once said, “A zebra does not change its spots.”
• Acquiring green space is a mom-and-apple-pie issue. But if it’s worth buying it’s worth everybody paying — and not just those who are buying a home or commercial space, as was the proposal rejected by the state’s voters eight years ago.
The plan was to double the real estate transfer tax from $1 to $2 per thousand. Dedicated taxes, as proposed then, are awful. All the state’s needs should compete and all taxes collected should go into one pot.
• Headline: “Elderly dying from falls more often.” More often than once?
• With Democrats in control of Congress, “my depression is over,” announces Barbra Streisand. Well then, shoot — the conservatives’ sacrifice in surrendering control was worthwhile if it lifted Babs out of her gloom.
• You get the conduct you buy. Ordinances, like Gwinnett County’s prohibiting panhandling and camping or homesteading on public property, and Cherokee County’s proposed ordinance on renting to illegals, are helpful. Both levy a cost on undesirable activity, thus encouraging conduct the community desires — respect for the common greens and for the law.
• Just when you think the culture is in total collapse, Americans rise up and shout down something vile — in this case, the O.J. book and TV interviews.
• More evidence that the problems of the homeless are quite often unrelated to housing: A New Orleans couple left homeless by Hurricane Katrina and given a $75,000 home free by members of the Temple of Deliverance Church of God in Christ in Memphis, sells it for $88,000 without moving in and returns to New Orleans.
• Wal-Mart’s agreement that leads the American Family Association to call off its boycott is actually one that every company should adopt as corporate policy: Wal-Mart agrees it “will not make corporate contributions to support or oppose highly controversial issues unless they directly relate to our ability to serve our customers,” company officials said in a statement.
• Ah, life’s good. Sitting at an IKEA table, sipping two-buck Chuck (which actually costs three bucks), making small talk about Zoo Atlanta’s panda cub or debating whether commuter rail to Athens can best be sold as the “brain train” or the “Dawg track,” and occasionally wondering aloud whether we should be more alarmed that a lawyer we never knew (Tisha R. Tallman) for an interest group most Georgians have never heard of (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) took a job in the private sector or that EatZi’s had closed just before Thanksgiving, forcing some Atlantans who were counting on it for their Thanksgiving meals to go hungry. Assuming, that is, they couldn’t find a Kroger.
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