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Thursday, December 21, 2006
Barr’s move, the best Bush, Grady’s flaws
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• I’ve never met her, but Wesleyan College President Ruth Knox adds to my holiday cheer. In fiscal year 2005, her base salary was $43,945, plus 10 percent for benefits, including retirement. She insisted, when coming to the Methodist-affiliated college in Macon four years ago, that her salary be the lesser of the average full-time faculty or the average of full-time faculty and staff. They don’t make them like this anymore.
• Illegals lose in-state college tuition break. But why, one might ask, would Georgia’s working poor ever have been compelled to subsidize illegals? Messages matter.
• Good pickup for Libertarians. Former GOP U.S. Rep. Bob Barr is a thoughtful and principled guy who will broaden the party’s appeal.
• For $300,000 a month — the fee Grady Memorial Hospital gurus are paying consultants — officials surely can expect a new model. This one’s been broken as long as I’ve been in Atlanta, and always returns to the same tune: more state money. More will never be enough.
• OK, I like George. About his father, I was lukewarm. But his brother Jeb, governor of Florida, is the cream of the crop. Conservatives running for office should say what they will do, and then do it. He did. School reform, including vouchers and tax cuts, for example. But Reuters reported that Jeb told Spanish-language reporters in Miami this week: “No tengo futuro” or “I have no future” in politics after he leaves office in January.
• Get rid of pork-barrel politics and there’s not the slightest chance that the feds will agree to pay half the projected $844 million cost of the Beltline transit project. It’s a loop that doesn’t solve any here-to-there traffic congestion problem — except the one it hopes to create with infrastructure-suffocating density. And of course, if somebody else is paying, higher-cost fixed rail is preferred over bus rapid transit.
• President Bush wants to increase the size of the Army from 482,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 to 507,000 today and soon to 512,000. At the start of the Korean War, the Army was authorized at 610,900, with 593,167 in service. Within a year, authorization had been increased to 1,552,000. The United States is not militarily prepared — as it should be —to meet worldwide obligations and threats. That doesn’t necessarily mean more troops to Iraq — more begets more.
• Oh, that’s different. New Savannah Police Chief Michael Berkow acknowledges a sexual affair with a subordinate while he was deputy chief in Los Angeles. “My on-duty assignment [was chief of staff], but my relationship with her was off-duty,” he explained.
• It’d be petty of me, and in the spirit of Christmas I’m tempted not to mention it. But, yes, I’d remove Cynthia McKinney’s name from a public street and rededicate its prior name, Memorial Drive, to victims of Sept. 11, as state Rep. Len Walker (R-Loganville) suggests. If I were really partisan, I’d change the name to George W. Bush Parkway. She understands pettiness and partisanship.
• Horror of horrors. I never imagined I’d turn out this way. I think I may be acquiring a taste for fruitcake.
• Headline on ajc.com: “Do bugs make you fat?” Not if fried in low-calorie lard.
• Falcons coach Jim Mora did less in joking about wanting to coach at his college alma mater, and has apologized far more profusely and convincingly, than “Seinfeld” co-star Michael Richards and 99 percent of the politicians. Even if it wasn’t a joke that Mora had interest in coaching at the University of Washington, it’s not a big deal. The comment period ends on Christmas Day.
• Atlanta certainly should have a civil rights museum. Tell me, though, that it’s also to “provide a forum for an ongoing discussion of human rights struggles at the local, national and international level ” and I hear a noble idea taking a political-agenda twist.
• Headline: “Clayton teacher ties 5 boys to her belt loop during field trip” to the Atlanta History Center. Verdict here: No crime. Case closed. Next.
• So why does the Gwinnett sheriff have a camouflage-painted armored personnel carrier? In most metro neighborhoods, nothing is more visible than men and machines in camouflage.
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Top 10 blog, my study confirms
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Worst place to live in America? For a flash last summer, that was the tempest of the day, in three Georgia towns anyway, because they were included in a new pseudo-guidebook on worst places to live. There was no research behind the inclusion of Douglasville, College Park and Hinesville, so no defense of the three is or was necessary.
The point here, though, is not to offer commentary on worst this-or-that but on the recurring marketing ploy that dupes us all. Top 10 Endangered Rivers. Cities with the Worst Air. The 50 Best Colleges. On and on it goes. And why? Because it’s a marketing gimmick that works.
Marketers have discovered that our ranking on lists evokes response. Either we want to move up, get off, or act in some way consistent with their marketing aim. Special interest groups are notorious for cobbling together lists, often based on nothing more than hunches, agendas, ancedotes, as with the worst places to live list.
The same is true of the now ubiquitous “studies” that purport to document something — or do, but with an agenda, like this week’s revelation that most all Americans had engaged in sex at some point before marriage. It was an odd study answering questions not asked, or at least not that I’ve heard asked by anyone past junior high. Ah, but there was a reason, an agenda, and it became apparent in the 8th paragraph. “The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs,” said the author, Lawrence Finer, who is research director at the Guttmacher Institute, which opposes the Bush Administration on this issue.
Americans love Top 10 lists,no matter their validity. And we more readily believe assertions backed by “studies” no matter their purpose. We’ve become so inundated with meaningless or misleading agenda-driven studies and lists that none of them means much of anything of value anymore. I’ve spent the morning reviewing America’s blogs and, based on that study, can now assert that Thinking Right is one of America’s top 10. Take it to the bank
