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December 2006
View of GOP as buffoons a fabrication
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine that President Gerald R. Ford ever came to be viewed as a klutz or as a man of modest intelligence.
He was neither. As reporter Bob Dart noted in Ford’s obituary, he was probably the most accomplished athlete ever in the White House. After being named Most Valuable Player on his 1934 University of Michigan football team, he was offered professional contracts by both the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions.
His athletic prowess in football carried over to golf, skiing and swimming. JFK may have effected athleticism for the newsreels, but Ford was the genuine article.
And yet, it’s Ford who, in Dart’s words, “gained a comical reputation for clumsiness while in the White House.” Considerable assistance came from comedian Chevy Chase, who often portrayed Ford stumbling or falling on “Saturday Night Live.” Here’s what Chase said last week about the routine, as reported by Reuters news service:
“He had never been elected, period, so I never felt he deserved to be there to begin with. This was just the way I felt then, as a young man and as a writer and a liberal.”
While Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon for Watergate no doubt contributed significantly to his loss to Jimmy Carter, his depiction by the media and entertainment industry as a nice, well-meaning bumbler of modest intelligence conditioned the country to believe him inferior to the challenge.
But as his speechwriter, James C. Humes, wrote after his death, Ford’s “dean’s list grades at the University of Michigan were enough to earn him a scholarship to Yale Law School. In his rankings there, he topped fellow classmates Cyrus Vance and Sargent Shriver.”
Oft quoted was the LBJ crack that “Jerry Ford is a nice fellow, but he played too much football without a helmet.”
This genial dunce theme recurs in media treatment of Republican leaders, with some exceptions. Nixon was smart but evil. George H.W. Bush was genial, but intellectually inferior to Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan was dumb and George W. Bush is too, while the Democrats they defeated — Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry — were all intellectually superior.
The basis for that misperception about most conservatives and Republicans is that by and large they come from places unfamiliar to the New York-Washington media establishment. And it is that establishment, until the rise of the blogosphere, talk radio and cable television, that owned the business of deciding what’s news. They owned, too, the franchise on determining who in the political arena has substance, who’s serious and who’s not.
Conservatives were always disadvantaged in that milieu, and still are, because their constituents by and large were made up of what Ford affectionately called “the ordinary, the straight, the square [the quality] that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation.” It is, he said, “a quality to be proud of … a quality that many people seem to have neglected.”
That’s not Washington, nor is it the pressure groups demanding more government, nor is it the political industry that defines the nation’s problems in ways that make them the solution. It is therefore alien to everyday experience in the centers of opinion and government so, well, Grand Rapids and comfortable and straight.
It’s a mind-set like that of Chevy Chase that makes those “in the know,” in politics, academia, entertainment and the media, quite comfortable in dismissing Ford, Reagan or Bush as somebody who didn’t “deserve to be there to begin with” because they were the choice of the uniformed, misguided, self-interested, complacent and those lacking in compassion and kindness — in essence, the ordinary people who lived in places like Grand Rapids.
When liberal entertainers speak today of Bush, it’s with that same smug dismissive certainty that devalues his intelligence, his moral authority or his claim to the Oval Office.
Often with conservatives, it’s because the critics can’t comprehend their ideas, values or agendas — and therefore either assume they have none or that the ones they have lack merit. But in Ford’s day, a relative few news, opinion and entertainment figures in New York, Washington and Hollywood could turn an athlete into a national klutz and a Yale Law School graduate into an intellectual dullard.
That world passed, though, before the president did.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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When tyrants tremble…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Robert Lowry, a professor of literature and later chancellor at Bucknell University, was also a Baptist minister who wrote about 500 gospel songs. A revised version of one of those, “How Can I Keep from Singing?,” was popularized on the folk music circuit by singer Pete Seeger in the 60s. His version is done soothingly and beautifully by Irish singer Enya, one of the world’s most popular female artists. The first time I heard her sing it, I stopped in my tracks to listen. The original lyrics are as beautiful as her voice.
It springs to mind today after reading news accounts of the execution of Saddam Hussein. Here are the relevant lyrics, as sung by Seeger and Enya:
“When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
And hear their death-knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?”
I much prefer the Lowry version, written in 1860:
My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?
What though my joys and comforts die?
The Lord my Savior liveth;
What though the darkness gather round!
Songs in the night He giveth:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that refuge clinging;
Since Christ is Lord of Heav’n and earth,
How can I keep from singing?
I lift mine eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smoothes
Since first I learned to love it:
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,
A fountain ever springing:
All things are mine since I am His—
How can I keep from singing?
This is the secular version sung by Seeger and Enya:
My life goes on in endless song
Above earth’s lamentations,
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
That hails a new creation.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear it’s music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?
While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
And though the darkness ‘round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.
No storm can shake my inmost calm,
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?
When tyrants tremble in their fear
And hear their death knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging,
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?
The execution of Saddam was essential, for his victims, for Iraq and as a message to other tyrants. While an execution is not an occasion for glee, the world can rejoice that an evil is past — and for that, how can I keep from singing?
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Online sales, Iraq deaths, no to Biden
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones is right. Picking a new police chief is his prerogative, not the screening committee’s. If he blew it, take it up at the polls.
• Don’t tell the tax-and-spenders that online buying is on track to increase 26 percent over December of last year, while sales overall were expected to grow 5 percent. The tax liberal salivates at the prospect of collecting sales taxes on online purchases.
• My impression, as a Christmas mailer, is that the U.S. Postal Service had a very good year — noticeably improved over the past two Christmas seasons.
• Counting paper ballots to affirm challenges to electronic balloting outcomes is time-consuming, yes. But some of us will be counting hanging chads from Florida for another 100 years. Spending a few days to confirm with paper the integrity of the electronic vote is no time at all.
• What do the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services have in common? After tragedy, second-guessers abound. But listen for a practical, affordable system that guarantees a different outcome next time. Hear one? Me, neither.
• City of Atlanta employees will be subjected to three days of “training” in “nonviolent conflict resolution” by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Police are among the first up. Would employees be forced to sit for “training” by the National Rifle Association? Nope. And they shouldn’t sit for other advocacy groups, either.
Besides, read the daily crime news briefs. The wrong people are getting the lesson on nonviolent conflict resolution. Police are not usually violent unless you shoot at them.
• It’s fair to say that a majority of Georgians would regard themselves as conservationists committed to protecting the state’s natural environment, regardless of whether they choose to belong to dues-collecting organizations.
So why then is it seen as a devilish plot to get rid of “pro-environmental voices” when two of four members of the Georgia Board of Natural Resources — three of them appointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue — are forced to step down because of redistricting?
The non-Perdue appointee was up against former state Sen. Jim Tysinger of DeKalb County, as fine a public servant as Georgia produces. I’d trust him to make any decision about Georgia’s future. Besides, the nonselected member had 13 years on the board.
• Metro Atlanta’s growing reputation as a dining destination is in danger. The Fat Boy restaurant in Smyrna, a local institution, is closing for good on Saturday. Its Greek salad was worth a trip from Athens, Rome, Cairo or Paris.
• Headline: “U.S. losses exceed 9/11 death toll.” And the message is … ? Three days at Gettysburg or three weeks at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea would have been more apt comparisons.
• A butcher, a mass murderer who killed frivolously, declares a final absurdity: “I call on you not to hate because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking,” writes Saddam Hussein while awaiting the executioner. The lesson of Saddam’s life: Butcher ‘em, but don’t hate ‘em.
• How the world turns. Islamist groups that had controlled Mogadishu since June and threatened to overrun all of Somalia have imploded in the face of a weeklong Ethiopian government assault.
This is a bad news/far worse news story. Bad in that warlords take back over. Far worse in that a stable Somalia may well become a sanctuary for terrorists. Some problems are ours, some are the world’s, and sometimes one becomes the other, as in North Korea, Syria and Iran. Right now Somalia is the world’s — and should stay that way.
• OK, I’ll take Hillary as president if I must. But please, please, please don’t torture me with four years, or even one campaign season, of the pompous Joe Biden, incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and possible presidential campaign aspirant. To that ambition, I say “give it up or turnit a loose.”
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Polls were wrong; Ford was right
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The AJC’s morning headline, a partial quote from former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, captured the essence of truth about the life and career of former President Gerald R. Ford. “History will treat him well,” asserted the headline, which was drawn from this quote by Nunn: “Jerry Ford brought closure to our national nightmare, and history will treat him well….He set a gold standard for public service and his wisom, decency and integrity strengthened our nation greatly.”
There’s no question now that President Ford was the leader America needed as the nation divided by war and scandal regained its bearings. Shortly after being sworn in, the new President caused a national uproar, and probably cost himself a full term, by pardoning Richard M. Nixon. But as he pointed out later, knowing full well that it could cost him the White House, he granted the pardon to avoid the prospect of a former President in jail and litigation that could have continued to divide the country for years. “I had to turn the page and let the healing process begin,” he told his former speechwriter, James C. Humes.
History is kind, though, to leaders who discount the polls and pursue the course that best serves the nation’s interest, as Ford did. In 2001, he was awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for putting the nation’s needs above his own political fortunes. It’s a lesson that should guide this President and all those to come.
This is a blessed nation. In times of need or crisis, it either finds great leaders — FDR, for example — or it finds ordinary men who rise to the greatness the moment requires. In announcing his death, Mrs. Ford said of her husband that “his life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.” He was a good man and the country knew it. Nunn and others who have made the assertion are right: “History will treat him well.”
Duke ‘rape’ injustice
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Friday before Christmas, the prosecutor in Durham, N.C., dropped rape charges against three Duke University lacrosse players. Did anybody notice? The nation should.
This has been a really bizarre case. The private lab that prosecutors used failed to disclose to defense lawyers in May that it had found the DNA of unidentified males — but not the three Duke students — in samples taken from the alleged victim’s body and underwear. In fact, it didn’t match the DNA of 43 other members of the lacrosse team or of the alleged victim’s boyfriend, lawyers for the accused three student said. The accuser, a student at North Carolina Central University in Durham, had been hired as a stripper to perform at a lacrosse team party on March 14. She told police that she was raped in the bathroom by three team members who did not use condoms. One of the accused produced cellphone records showing that he left the party early.
U.S. Rep. Walter B. Jones (R.-N.C.) has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the DA, Michael B. Nifong, had committed “prosecutorial misconduct” or had violated the civil rights of the accused players. Among other things, the prosecutor is alleged to have allowed police to conduct a photo lineup using only Duke lacrosse players.
As the case has unfolded, it has grown ever more doubtful that the three young men are guilty and ever more likely that the prosecution is being driven by political correctness — either because of race (the students are white, the alleged victim black) or because of class. Members of the lacrosse team at an exclusive private college exploiting for entertainment purposes the 28-year-old single mother who worked for an escort service while attending college.
Though the rape charges were dropped, the three students still stand charged with kidnapping and sexual offense. The crime here, it now appears, is the continued charges against the three.
100 percent chance hot air will persist
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the effort to rush the 2008 presidential election before this year’s chosen crop even takes the oath of office, the realization dawns that politics and the weather have far more in common than the blowing winds.
Before 2006 is gone, and 13 months before the Iowa caucus, the nation is awash in reporting and speculation about who may or may not run and, if they do, who voters might prefer and why.
In the Southwest, 70 people — a group said to include “blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, environmentalists and ‘significant Democratic activists’ ” — are pushing to “draft” New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Associated Press reports.
A Democratic political activist in Oregon is attempting to “draft” Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in that state and it is news. Obama is, of course, the darling of much of the political press, which is drooling at the prospect of a Hillary-Obama primary contest. This is, now, a senator who is two years into his first term, but to a media whose political reporters are so over George W. Bush and so ready to find a new celebrity, Obama is the anointed. For now, anyway.
John Edwards, who was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, creates a buzz that is widely reported as a major story for appointing a former Michigan congressman adored by Big Labor as an adviser and “likely” campaign manager.
We are all invited — led, actually — to fantasize about what it all means. Thirteen months before it matters in the least — and almost two years before it matters to the country.
And there are, too, Al Gore and Kerry and the endless will he?/won’t he? speculation into which all of America is induced to join. And that’s just with the Democrats.
So what do politics and the weather have in common? The volume of information dumped on an unsuspecting public.
The public and voters specifically pay attention when they perceive a need to know, often within the last month of a campaign. Before that, it’s mind clutter, not wholly worthless or uninteresting, but information consumed by those who aren’t political junkies in snippets as munchies for the mind.
For years now, television stations have inundated us with commentary and reporting about the weather. The weather is like politics in that we all have a need, or a desire, to know whether it’s cold or rainy keyed to events in our lives.
But at some point a couple of decades ago, the technology became available and affordable to dump out vast stores of information. Stations started competing, hiring specialists who proceeded to turn an ordinary weather event into endless globs of imparted information.
There was a time, of course, when that volume of information, properly timed and delivered, would have been enormously beneficial. To farmers in an agricultural economy, or to a state — like that of my youth — where the poor lived in uninsulated wood-frame houses built on rock pillars, with tin roofs nailed to wood strips, accurate weather information was imperative. The weather drove their lives and fortunes.
Not so today. It matters. But we don’t get the most of it because we need it or desire it, but because stations have in-house a skill and equipment that drives decision-making.
Long before most of America needs or desires to know the players in a contest that doesn’t matter for 13 months, and even before this election year is past, political reporting and commentary rivals the attention given major news stories.
As with weather reporting by television stations, it’s largely because a vast network of political operatives exist to spin stories and to promote their favorites. The machinery therefore exists to generate information not when we need to know it, but when it’s useful to market their candidates.
The competition to be the first to recognize the Obama boomlet, for example, or to offer some revealing insight into Hillary’s thinking, connections or weaknesses, does the rest. Thus the nation is guaranteed that before this year’s elected officials take office and perform their first official act, or make a single decision that affects the rest of us, we are drawn out of the present into the future.
On any number of public policy issues — the war in Iraq, health care financing, Social Security solvency, the consequence of unchecked federal spending — the nation would be well served by being drawn out of the present into the future. But not about the process of politics.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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Freedom doesn’t come without fight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Christmas Eve of 1952, Bill Wooten of Cartersville was positioned in front of his company’s lines in Korea, watching and listening for the enemy.
They came. And as they did, they shot him.
But given the possibilities of the night, he was lucky. Very lucky.
Bill and two other soldiers were 200 yards beyond friendly lines, listening in weather that was 10 degrees below zero and watching the ice- and snow-covered terrain for sign of enemy movement.
“During the weeks immediately preceding Christmas, enemy contacts had been confined to brief patrol actions initiated by both sides, and to moderate shelling,” officers wrote in an after-action report. The enemy, during the 67 days that the 179th Infantry Regiment occupied a line near the 38th parallel, rained daily 76 mm artillery fire on its positions, usually in the afternoon. On the day before Christmas Eve, 228 rounds landed, 90 of them on positions occupied by Bill’s company. “Although this fire was persistent, it was not alarming in quantity and the resulting damage was negligible,” according to the after-action report.
Christmas Eve. Only the routine. From the after-action report: “Other than the normal expectations that the enemy might choose this traditional holiday, when sentiment and nostalgia could tend to relax the usual alertness, on which to initiate an action, there were no indications of an extraordinary activity.”
An hour before midnight, Bill and his fellow soldiers saw six North Koreans approaching. The enemy saw them, too. Both sides opened fire. Bill, then a corporal, and his two riflemen felled four of them. The other two withdrew. “Two more came up and I downed one of them,” he said.
Minutes later, Bill and a fellow soldier were hit — Bill in the hip with a 9 mm round. With two of them wounded, the trio made their way back to friendly lines. Wounded, but lucky.
As Bill was being evacuated to a hospital in the rear, a reinforced enemy company of about 250 North Koreans, preceded by an artillery and mortar barrage, began the first of three heavy assaults in the sector defended by his platoon. From the after-action report:
“Napalm cans were instantly set off, as the enemy had reached the forward defensive perimeter, coming in under their own artillery fire. Screams were heard above the din of the barrage as the enemy continued to press on. Several members of the outposts were killed immediately. The remainder of the group began to fight a delaying action … Friendly artillery and mortar fire was called in on the forward part of our positions, where the enemy had penetrated.”
A counterattack pushed the North Koreans back. Twice more they came, repulsed in a fierce struggle that included hand-to-hand combat with fixed bayonets.
By daylight on Christmas morning, 1952, it was all over. Six members of the company were killed and another 20, including Bill, wounded.
Though sedated with morphine in the division hospital on Christmas Day, Bill remembers the sound of Christmas carols being sung in a nearby mess tent by medical staff.
Nearly a year later, he was discharged from the Army, back to pick up a normal life, just as his father, James Richard, had done in World War I and his older brother, James Robert, had done in World War II. In three years, 33,665 Americans died on Korea’s battlefields; almost three times that number were wounded.
On Christmas 1953, Bill and Kathryn, the new wife he left behind, gathered with family to give thanks. Thoughts of her, he said, sustained him through the loneliness on the front lines and through his recovery. Days later, he was back on the job at Lockheed, where he worked until 1985. The following year, using a GI loan, he and Kathryn, his wife now of more than 55 years, bought their first home.
On Christmas Day 2006, they will gather again with family, pausing to reflect on and enjoy the Christmas blessings of a free country and a bountiful life. This cousin will not be there. But he will remember that on this day more than a half-century ago, the defenders of freedom stood, just as they do today in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. Democracy’s nobility is in the men and women who risk their lives, who endure the loneliness of families apart at Christmas, so that others can know America’s birthright.
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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
Raise my taxes at your peril
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) said Tuesday that the state’s tax code is ripe for change and hinted at several options, including a flat-rate income tax system, eliminating the state income tax altogether or replacing property taxes with an increase in sales taxes on goods and expanded to services.
Legislators will study options next year with changes possible in 2008, an election year — meaning, of course, that no unpopular tax proposals would be considered. “I’m convinced that the tax structure that has an income tax, sales tax and property tax is hurting our economy,” Richardson said. “Florida doesn’t have an income tax. Tennessee doesn’t have an income tax on its citizens and it puts us at a little bit of a competitive disadvantage.”
An important consideration, he said, is that whatever comes will be revenue neutral. “We will try not to raise any more money and we will try to make sure we raise no less money,” he said. That’s an important point. Politicians raise our taxes at their peril.
Reforming the state’s tax code, though that’s not exactly what he’s proposing, is the grandest of good-government ideas. But it never goes anywhere. So many legislators are talking about this one that it might. A key question, though, is what precisely legislators are trying to achieve. That pretty much defines the course.
Should property taxes be eliminated? I’m not keen on that. The tax is unpopular, but property is wealth. An argument can be made that encouraging ownership by eliminating taxes on that form of wealth achieves social good by promoting responsible behavior and stable communities. I like one aspect of the property tax. It’s one everybody sees in a lump sum, making us all aware of the cost and size of government.
I hate the idea of a tax on services, which is popular at some left-of-center think tanks because it’s seen as most affecting those who consume services, like lawn care and swimming pool maintenance. While I love consumption taxes, the problem with a tax on services is that it’s an easy, painless way for politicians to raise taxes — first here and then there in ways that consumers either don’t notice or aren’t impacted in large enough numbers to mount effective opposition.
For me, I’d eliminate the corporate income tax — and all incentives given through the tax code that force existing companies to pay bounties to future competitors willing to locate in Georgia. Create a tax-friendly business environment that will attract jobs, without giveaways.
The challenge today is to decide which taxes we want gone and which we’re willing to see increased.
Don’t give holdout juror so much clout
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
During the trial of two brothers accused of brutalizing and killing a puppy, when the judge allowed a puppy stand-in — which was promptly adopted, establishing conclusively its emotional appeal — the handwriting was on the wall.
But events, in the case of a juror reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s D. L. Bennett to have “simply refused to consider whether two brothers were guilty of hogtying a small puppy with duct tape and stuffing it live inside a searing hot gas oven,” rendered the judge’s decision moot.
Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard was fit to be hogtied himself. “When they won’t even deliberate, it’s insane.”
Once in the jury room, the holdout juror, according to others, declared an immediate unwillingness to convict, and thereafter she refused to budge.
Howard’s response — one I support — was to announce an intention to ask the General Assembly to pass a law, similar to one in New York, that will allow trial judges to replace jurors who refuse to deliberate. It’s an idea whose time has come. And I’d change the law, too, to permit less-than- unanimous decisions, 11-1 or 10-2.
The Georgia Constitution and U.S. Constitution and the legal code are living documents to the extent that living people properly change them to address the evolution of the civic compact. That compact once held that the will of the individual was subservient to the common good and that, when called upon to perform a patriotic or civic duty, we willingly put aside self-interest and desire. We became, in that instance, a cog in the machine of democracy, an instrument of its promise of freedom and justice.
That is often not the world we live in anymore. Clearly there are among us individuals who think that it’s not really stealing if you’re taking from a corporation or government; or it’s not really lying if dishonesty gets you into a position to perform a greater good, as the individual narcissistically interprets it. And there are individuals who believe, too, that rudeness and incivility in public places are justified if, as the individual narcissistically views it, the “cause” is just.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz came to Atlanta just over a week ago to speak in his capacity as president of the World Bank on America’s responsibility toward African poverty. His speech at the Ahavath Achim Synagogue on Peachtree Battle was interrupted three times by antiwar protesters who accused him of war crimes for his service to the Bush administration.
There’s a measure of dishonesty in accepting an invitation to hear — or in the case of a juror, to fairly and impartially determine guilt or innocence — and then, once through the door, to pursue a personal agenda.
“I think they get the notion for some reason that it is unfair,” Howard said Monday. “Some people just believe that it is unfair to sentence someone to jail for killing [an animal], and rather than disclose that, they will keep it a secret. And once they get on the jury, they won’t make a decision at all. It’s often based on some past experience in their life and once on the jury, rather than deliberate, they sit in a corner and won’t talk about it at all.
“I really think it has to do with this notion today that it’s all right to be different and not to have to entertain a discussion with anyone else about it,” Howard added. “It’s the idea that my ideas might be extreme or foreign, but that’s OK, and the very fact that the majority may disagree is something that I don’t have to take into account.”
The living nature of government is its capacity, through elected officials, to react to changed cultures — the heart of the upcoming debate on Sunday liquor sales, for example. Laws that existed for one era and for a people who shared certain values are routinely changed when the underlying values change. Sad though it be, people do lie to get on juries, resulting in either lighter sentences, hung juries or acquittals that are not warranted by the facts.
In the case of the brothers, the vote was 11-1 for conviction on most counts. Because of the holdout juror, the county will have it to do again next month, at considerable cost to the county and to others awaiting justice.
Judges now can replace jurors who are ill or incapacitated. To that, “I would add a phrase like ‘refuses to deliberate,’” said Howard.
Face it. The world is changed. People lie their way onto juries, convinced that their view of justice outweighs all others. The solution? Change the law as Howard argues.
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Reparations lose
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The notion surfaces periodically, as it did in a federal appeals court in Chicago last week, that reparations should be paid for slavery. At issue in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was whether 17 of the nation’s largest insurers and banks should be made to pay because their predecessors made loans to slave owners or, in some instances, profited by insuring and transporting slaves. A federal judge threw out the case last summer, declaring that it’s an issue to be decided by the executive or legislative branch.
In a decision handed down last week, a three-judge panel mostly agreed with the district court in rejecting reparations claims. “If you think you’ve been wronged, it shouldn’t take 100 years to investigate the conduct of Aetna, Lehman Brothers and the like, ” said Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner, naming two of the 17 companies, when the appeal was heard in September. “There are a lot of people living today whose parents were wealthy in the 19th Century who have nothing.” Plaintiffs wanted the companies to pay into a court-supervised fund that would benefit black communities.
Posner wrote the decision that was handed down last week. If claims could be filed on behalf of long-dead ancestors, “statutes of limitations would be toothless,” he wrote. “A person whose ancestor had been wronged a thousand yuears ago could sue on the ground that it was a continuing wrong and he is one of the victims.” The “casual chain is too long and has too many weak links for a court to be able to find that the defendants’ conduct harmed the plaintiffs at all, let alone in an amount that could be estimated without the wildest speculation.”
The judge noted, too, that agreeing to the claim could open the door to other historical claims — descendents of a Union solider, for example, who was killed by a gun manufactured elsewhere and sold to the Confederacy. The panel did keep alive one slim opening — that a company could be sued if it lied about past links to slavery to avoid losing customers.
Reparations is a notion whose time has come and gone. No living American owned slaves. No living American was. What exactly is the purpose of reparations — or apologies, for that matter, given by people who had no participation in the wrong to people, including recent immigrants, who did not suffer the injustice?
Special-needs scholarship idea terrific
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The most important education reform bill proposed here in decades, one that would give scholarships to special-needs children, has been introduced by state Sen. Eric Johnson of Savannah, the Senate’s President Pro Tem — a position second in power to the lieutenant governor.
Watch for the defenders of the status quo, the more-money it’s-not-our-fault crowd that resists anything that doesn’t boil down to more revenues and less accountability, to rise up in an effort to smite down this reform-minded heretic and his mold-shattering legislation.
Truth is, in the world of education reform, Johnson’s Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act is not revolutionary. It is, in fact, downright mainstream. Florida does it, and has for six years. The number of students with disabilities whose parents opt for the scholarship that allows them to buy education services from any private school has grown from 970 to 17,300.
As Johnson offers the bill here, it’s a reformers dream — and precisely what conservatives should be doing with the government Republicans now control. If you wait 134 years to come to power, for goodness sakes do something with it that makes a constructive difference.
As it exists in Florida, the John M. McKay scholarship program offers parents of children with a disability who are enrolled in public schools the opportunity to transfer to another public school, or to get scholarship aid to enroll in a private school. The scholarships range from $4,800 to $20,700. Parents love it.
Qualifying students in Georgia, according to the legislation, are those who suffer one or more defined disabilities, who spent the prior year in one of the state’s public schools, and who are required by state and federal law to have had an Individualized Education Program (IEP) written for them. That’s 186,272 students.
As proposed by Johnson, the maximum scholarship would be a sum equal to the state and federal money spent on them in public school. That sum — and not any locally generated revenues — would be granted to parents to buy from the private sector the education services they wanted for their child. The sum could be less, since parents could get no more than an eligible school’s tuition and fees.
Johnson has built in some important principles. The money goes to parents, not private schools. Parents designate where they want the money sent. Another important consideration is that no private school is required to admit anybody. And the program “shall not be construed to expand the regulatory authority of the state, its officers, or any public school system to impose any additional regulation of nonpublic schools beyond those reasonably necessary to enforcement of the requirements of this article.”
The early indication is that opposition will come from the education workplace unions and from the organizations that represent superintendents and school boards, as well as traditional voucher opponents, Johnson said last week. Supporters will be free-market conservatives and parents of special-needs children, who in Florida have overwhelmingly expressed their satisfaction with the McKay scholarships.
Some school officials are likely to object because most of the money being spent on a special-needs child will move with him to the private school. The local system should come out ahead, however, because it’s being freed of the obligation to serve a child with special needs, and class sizes should drop as a result. The systems keep their local money, plus the funds that would be spent to transport the children with disabilities.
Johnson’s hope, and a reasonable expectation, is that with a reliable funding source new schools will be created in the private sector built around serving like-needs children.
Some groups, like the education workplace unions, are just flat-out opposed to anything that smacks of vouchers. But “the dirty little secret is that we already have vouchers,” said Johnson. The HOPE scholarship is a voucher program. So too is the pre-k program, which sends public money to private pre-kindergarten programs.
Johnson said his bill “does not attempt to blame teachers, administrators or parents. It simply says that parents of special-needs children can choose the school that their children will attend. If they believe their needs are being fulfilled in public school, they are free to stay.” But if not they would have the option to go. Who could possibly object to giving parents that choice?
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Let’s drink to FEMA, but not on Sunday
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• For the umpteenth time, this headline: “Audit: Katrina aid squandered.” So who do we blame? Frantic talking heads whose commentary insisted that FEMA and other agencies were uncaring because they weren’t shoveling taxpayer money out fast enough? Compassionate conservatives? Haste and oversight don’t go together.
• Sell booze on Sunday? This is a prime example of one of the General Assembly’s faults, no matter which party is in power. The agenda is set by interest groups — in this case convenience stores and other retailers. Trust State Rep. Mark Burkhalter (R-Alpharetta) on this one: “I have not seen any groundswell of movement for Sunday sales. … ” Everything politicians know large numbers of voters don’t want — higher taxes, higher per diem and Sunday liquor sales, for example — come in months after an election. The thinking is we’ll get over it.
Anyway, people who can’t anticipate on Saturday a desire for booze on Sunday shouldn’t be drinking. They’re at or near alcoholism.
• Legislators now will pocket $173 in hotel and meal money — those who live within 50 miles pay taxes on it; others don’t — but Public Service Commissioner Doug Everett of Albany, who’s required to live in his South Georgia district while his office is in Atlanta, is denied any expense money. T’ain’t right.
• Whatever happened to … the baby panda. Or Seeger’s restaurant, about which Atlanta is said to have “grieved” upon hearing that it might close. It did. But what do you expect when your top-rated PR guy goes to panda promotion?
• Wise of the state Department of Transportation to rethink the decision to remove nearly 500 small communities from its 2007 highway map. Saves me from having to hoard the old ones. Hillsboro, James, Shellman Bluff. I’ve driven out of my way just to pass through many of those small towns.
• Iran hosted 67 Holocaust deniers from around the world this week. And this is the regime the Iraqi Surrender Group thinks can or will help in Iraq.
• Either MARTA’s train ridership is up. Or its ridership is paying. Either is welcomed news. New no-jump electronic gates have been installed at all 38 stations.
• If I’m the appellate court judge, I overturn the conviction, if it comes, of two young men accused of brutalizing and killing a puppy. The trial judge, over defense objections, allowed a live puppy to be used in the courtroom for demonstration purposes. The defense objected, arguing that it would prejudice the jury. Agreed. Props, not puppies. Prejudicial.
• Tough call. Would I rather have US Airways or Donald Trump in Atlanta?
• Amazing how often a piece of ground is assigned human attributes. The humans who occupied Gwinnett 16 years ago rejected MARTA. What does that tell us about the humans who occupy Gwinnett today? Nothing.
• This is the enemy: Teachers in Afghanistan, under Taliban rules, get three strikes. They’re first warned not to teach. If they continue to teach, they are beaten, and then killed, as two were Saturday. In Gaza gunmen, believed to be Hamas, ambushed and murdered the three young sons of a Palestinian security officer. The children were 3, 6 and 9. We show weakness or lack of resolve in this corner of the world at our peril.
• It may be hard for legislators to oppose, but no constitutional amendment is needed to “protect” HOPE scholarships. In fact, the fund shouldn’t build up excess revenues, lest the Board of Regents be tempted to raise tuition to suck it up.
• Scandal-plagued Republicans step down from Congress. Ney, Ohio. DeLay, Texas. Foley, Florida. Democrat U.S. Rep. William Jefferson of New Orleans not only doesn’t, but is re-elected with 58 percent of the vote.
• When my band of right-wingers take over, it’ll be made a crime to write about possible gubernatorial and presidential candidates in the next general election cycle until the results are final from the current one. And reporters and commentators are allowed in that two-year period to mention non-nominated candidates no more than 100 times. Them’s the rules. Write ‘em down.
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Playing games with war dead
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Throughout the entire Iraqi phase of the war on terrorism one thing in particular that Americans who opposed the war do drives me up the wall. An example was reported Wednesday from Santa Barbara, Calif. It’s a project allegedly intended to “honor” U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen killed in Iraq.
The project on an acre of Santa Barbara beach involves placing handmade wooden crosses in regimental columns to “honor” every service member killed in Iraq. The story is that “as the nation approaches the grim milestone of 3,000 war fatalities” organizers are running out of allotted sand. The project, the reporter notes, “started as more protest than commemoration” to capture the attention of the public and the media that appeared to pay too little attention to the war’s toll.
Periodically news organizations and groups opposed to the war employ similar devices — using the names, for example, or running the pictures of those killed — ostensibly to “honor” their sacrifice. When it’s done honestly and without a polititical agena — that is, when the gesture is not premised on the notion that Americans support this war or any other because they are ignorant to its costs in human life — it can in fact be a meaningful tribute. But almost all are akin to the Santa Barbara beachfront project.
Take another emotional issue involving the loss of human life: abortion. Would anybody imagine that a field of homemade crosses erected as a scorecard was anything more than a political statement of opposition? Of course not. And would any news organization run a daily reminder of abortions performed in, say, the 10 largest American cities? Of coure not. The political purpose would be too obvious.
If the use of a soldier’s name and likeness is to report news, that’s fair. If it is to advance a political agenda with which the fallen soldier may not have agreed, his sacrifice is not honored. Quite the contrary.
Merry, uh, holiday.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The 14 Christmas trees removed from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport after a rabbi threatened to sue if a menorah wasn’t displayed as well, are back. The rabbi, who had not asked that the Christmas trees be removed, only that a menorah be added, withdrew his threat to sue this year. “We are not going to be the instrument by which the port holds Christmas hostage,” said the rabbi’s lawyer. Key to the return of the Christmas trees, port officials said, was an agreement that they will “work with the rabbi and other members of the community to develop a plan for next year’s holiday decorations at the airport.”
Is Christmas really threatened, as many traditonalists contend? Well, maybe. After the story appeared, I thumbed through the paper looking for the word “Christmas” in advertising. I did the same with a batch of catalogues that arrived around Thanksgiving. All are quick to promote this as the season where one is expected to purchase gifts. And a couple — Dillard’s and BrandsMart come to mind — readily acknowledge that the gifts are offered for Christmas giving. But my Jos. A. Bank catalogue has a “Holiday Catalogue Sale.” The Honeybaked Ham company president included a warm personal letter to me, their “valued customer,” but didn’t actually use the words Christmas or Thanksgiving — though a later mailing did mention Christmas on the inside of a “Holiday Gifts 2006” catalogue.
It’s hard to blame retailers. We do seem to be a nation of people who go through life looking for opportunities to take offense. I heard a radio account recently of a voter who threatened to file suit to get a polling place removed from a Catholic church social hall because signs there opposed abortion. Now can you imagine a value system so fragile, so ungrounded, that a mere sign would cause it to crumble, thereby possibly influencing one’s vote minutes later? Not long ago, we’d simply have walked on, voted, and acknowledged without offense the Catholic view.
It may simply be inevitable that Christmas is destined to morph into a “holiday” season that gives no offense to any brittle body. Even now, Christmas trees are becoming holiday trees and, as in Seattle, a committee has to be convened to plan “holiday decorations.” Sad. But in a world where bringing down some traditional practice or institution, a la Madalyn Murray O’Hair, represents a meaningful life achievement, Christmas may indeed be a national holiday on borrowed time. Merry, uh, holiday.
Insurers’ use of credit data hardly risky
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There is no better example of the gap between the liberal and the conservative view of government than the debate about whether insurance companies should be allowed to use credit scoring to set auto insurance rates.
In the liberal view, the happenstance that minorities or “women” — the latter a category often used politically to represent a particular segment of women — may be disproportionately clustered in higher-cost auto-insurance categories by virtue of their credit histories is evidence of a need for government intervention. Well, yes, in two circumstances:
One would be evidence that individuals, whatever their race, creed, gender or nationality, are being scored on the basis of inaccurate credit information. If it’s happening randomly and infrequently, it’s a personal problem. If there’s a pattern, or if it’s commonplace, it’s a regulatory problem.
The other situation that could require government intervention is evidence that auto insurance companies are colluding on price.
Otherwise, we all should rejoice — and conservatives do — that the insurance marketplace has led companies to become more sophisticated in rate-setting. Allstate, the third largest automobile insurer in Georgia, has developed 384 categories of pricing based on a potential customer’s credit history, home ownership, driving and claims history, age, ZIP code and type of car.
That tells me that insurers have developed, using whatever elements they are legally entitled to consider, a software program that more accurately prices coverage based on their assessment of risk.
So what if they’re wrong? Unless they’re colluding, some other company will price its risk more accurately, and the disadvantaged group — either the good drivers or the bad — will flock to the cheaper policy.
Ah, but you say, consumers lack the sophistication to make price comparisons. Two points here: One is that companies with a price advantage have incentive to make consumers aware. The other is that, if government must be involved at all it’s state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine’s duty to make information available permitting price comparisons.
The notion that government should designate some of its citizens as too incompetent to make rational choices, making it the business of politicians to save them from themselves, is the foundation for big, intrusive government.
Commissioner Oxendine, who should be defending a marketplace pricing system that keeps good drivers from subsidizing the bad, told reporters he can’t explain why using credit information works for insurers. But the inability to explain the computer model to Oxendine hardly makes it illegitimate. The issue for him, as an insurance regulator, is whether components of the pricing model are illegal — race, for example. If not, his role should be to make sure the companies aren’t colluding and that pricing information is readily available and in plain English.
In this instance, the marketplace has done something conservatives should try to replicate in government. It has stopped — or so it appears — requiring people who behave responsibly, who drive carefully, who don’t abuse credit, from subsidizing the irresponsible behavior of others. That is what conservatives designing new government programs should be doing.
State Rep. Rich Golick (R-Smyrna), who introduced the legislation in 2003 allowing credit scoring, defends it still, to his credit. “Insurance companies are in the business of accurately predicting future loss, and if insurance scores weren’t predictive, companies wouldn’t use the criteria,” he writes. The data is “indisputable” that a “clear correlation” exists between credit scores and future loss, he says.
Furthermore, he said, “I have seen no empirical data to suggest” a link between credit scoring and discrimination by race or income. “At no time in the insurance application process is an individual asked about his or her race or income,” says Golick. “The process is blind.”
Golick, as the story noted, represents Allstate, though he denies that it was an Allstate bill. Allstate bill or not, the concept serves consumers. Before its passage into law, most insurers offered only a “handful” of prices and customers qualified or they didn’t. Now the Progressive Group of Insurance Companies, which piloted the scoring system, has overtaken Allstate as the second-largest auto insurer in Georgia. It has 130 categories.
Customers pay, without subsidies from others, for the risk they represent. The marketplace works.
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Who’s at fault in child’s death?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The lead story in the Sunday paper returned to the tragic life of Nateyonna Banks, the two-year-old handed back to the woman who gave her life — and who now is accused of taking it. The story, by Craig Schneider, is an effort to find out how the child wound up back with the woman who birthed her, despite ample evidence that she was unfit.
As usual, the attention is on focused on the Division of Family and Children Services of the Georgia Department of Human Resources. It’s misdirected. Truth is, no government agency can function as God or the loving mother and father a child deserves. In this instance, and in every instance where harm comes to a child, an investigation is necessary to find what when wrong so that procedures can be improved. But until we change the culture that treats children as objects of adult amusement or has adults with no more interest in each other than the clerk and customer at the dollar store creating life carelessly and recklessly, no amount of social worker ingenuity, compassion or diligence can protect children from the fate of Nateyonna Banks. We’re kidding ourselves in our outrage, pretending that the answer is better pay or smarter, wiser social workers, supervisors and judges.
As with public education, the model has to be reinvented to serve a nation where out-of-wedlock births in some populations now approach 70 percent. It is sad, but telling, that the lengthy story about what went wrong for Nateyonna Banks contained only one passing reference to the male at her conception. “The father is not in the picture.” That’s it. The father is not in the picture. The sky is blue. Sugar is sweet. The father is not in the picture. Not in the picture. Nor, evidentally, does anybody expect it or care, or anticipate that at some point he might have been an option for baby. He’s not in the picture. Truth is, the man should be tracked to the ends of the earth for child support. A government agent should be at his funeral rummaging through the corpse’s pockets to make certain he’s not taking a dime with him that should have gone to fulfill his obligation to the child he caused.
So we have a woman who never should have delivered a single child with three, two allegedly abused sexually and one dead. The key man is not in the picture. And we expect government to protect the children. How silly of us.
OK. Let’s form ourselves as the Georgia Child Protection Study Group. How do we redesign the sytem to protect the children? My answer is that we declare that from the moment of conception until adulthood, government’s first interest in the two adults and child is in protecting the child. When adults are charged with drug abuse or with abusing children, the children are taken and put in orphanages overseen by the state. They aren’t returned to the adults until the woman and man who conceived them offer proof in court that they’re sufficiently rehabilitated to have the children back. Adults who harm a child mentally or physically should be sterilized so they don’t create more lives to be damaged.
To the extent that two-parent families are not being formed to nurture children, government should assume protective authority, with all judgments favoring the interest of the child until he or she reaches 18. A child, once conceived, has a right to life — and a right to grow to adulthood without being harmed by adults in the household.
The Georgia Child Protection Study Group is open for suggestions.
Recapping major events
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jim Wooten was on vacation last week, but still took time to blog on AJC.com about the major news events.
On Iraq: Time will provide the truth of president’s work and goals
The language of the Iraq Study Group report boils down to this: The situation’s bad and could go either way.
The U.S. role should “evolve to one supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over combat operations” and ideally, by the first quarter of 2008, “subject to unexpected developments” all U.S. combat brigades “not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq.”
OK. That’s in line with what Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq said. “We would expect to see the entire country having reached provincial Iraqi control by early fall of next year,” said the general. “We should see the complete transfer of command and control of all Iraqi army divisions by late spring, early summer.”
The plan all along has been to stabilize the country and transfer security to Iraqi forces that are sufficiently trained and professional to maintain order. Nothing the Iraq Study Group observes or reports alters that fact on the ground.
It’s still up to President Bush — and Congress, through the power of the purse. Bush’s term ends in two years. There is no face-saving exit that leaves behind a government and an army without a reasonable chance of succeeding. All of the approaches the Iraq Study Group suggests can be tried, but when Bush’s term expires, history will judge whether he was true to this country’s commitment.
On Jimmy Carter: Give a closer ear to director who quit the Carter Center
The shocking news from the morning paper is a quote deep in the story announcing that an expert on the Middle East who was the first executive director of the Carter Center, Kenneth Stein, had resigned his position at the center. The quote is this:
“President Carter’s book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analysis; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book.”
The book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” has angered supporters of Israel for being one-sided and for many of the other reasons Stein claims, including omissions and factual errors. Other experts on the region have reached conclusions similar to Stein’s. While Carter’s not the first to claim that “apartheid” is an appropriate label — Desmond Tutu did too — his position and status will popularize the label.
The book does have such a provocative title, and its content could materially affect public opinion about Israel and the Middle East. Because of that, the allegations Stein makes in resigning his position as a Carter Center fellow for Middle East Affairs bear fuller examination. Stein in particular should be heard more fully because he was the “third person in the room” and because he is a scholar who would be more reliable in recounting details than an active participant inclined to hear selectively.
On the Kathryn Johnston shooting: NAACP involvement OK, but a racial angle is not
The controversy surrounding the police shooting of an elderly woman who fired at them while they were executing a no-knock warrant has been revealing. What strikes me is how anti-authority much of this country has become.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, you expect. It’s his career. But try as I might, it’s impossible for me to follow the rationalization of those who make decisions for the NAACP in taking on the authorities, who as best I can tell have responded quickly and appropriately to questions raised about the tragedy. So far as I can tell, too, there’s no black-white angle that would suggest a role for the NAACP — unless, of course, the angle is opposition to those in positions of authority, whatever its color.
America is passing through a cynical phase, the legacy perhaps of the ’60s-era protesters, who made protests, demonstrations and opposition to authority the high point of their lives.
- Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column usually appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
Coastal development, marriage and health
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
Metro Atlanta is one of only four population centers in the country where car-pooling increased between 1990 and 2000, up less than 1 percent, according to the National Academies Transportation Research Board. And why here? Hispanics. That’s not good news for “car pooling.” It’s a warning of future highway congestion. When the poolers get a financial toehold, they buy their own rides.
Praise to all involved in the decision that led Paulding County taxpayers to tax themselves to buy a 7,080 acres of green space. There’s more green space in rural Georgia than government can or should buy. But that’s not the case 50 miles out from downtown Atlanta. Taxpayers should buy every plot they can afford.
A black Christmas tree is a one-year novelty. Green is forever. It’s a marketing gimmick. By now everybody’s bought all the decorations they need at after-Christmas sales at 50 and 75 percent off.
Jekyll Island “is a jewel on the Georgia coast that has just sort of been overlooked for the last 30, 40 years,” says developer E. Wade Shealy Jr., a developer with big plans to correct that oversight. It’s not been overlooked. It’s been intentionally under-developed. If Republicans are looking for a way out the statehouse door, to be seen as turning Georgia’s coast into a playground for the rich and for those on expense accounts is a fast way to be shown the exit.
I’ve become less inclined to blame social workers when bad things happen to children, largely because I doubt that any of the rest of us would be any better equipped to make the decisions they’re required to make. But goodness gracious it’s near impossible to imagine why any responsible adult would have allowed children to remain in the household with Shandrell Banks, the woman accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter. Social workers, in this instance, wanted the child taken; supervisors, who’ve resigned, over-ruled. Bring back orphanages. And sterilize women and men who cause children to be born that they then harm, mentally or physically.
It’s ironic that the nation is so health conscious — New York City bans trans fats in restaurant cooking — and yet so little attention is directed to the crisis affecting children casually brought into the world by unmarrieds. Their chances of having a healthy life are far slimmer than those of adults dining out. Our priorities are skewed.
Yes, home foreclosures are high. The debate to be had is whether it is a good thing that lenders are luring borrowers into debt they can’t afford. Saving a 10 percent down-payment is evidence of the financial discipline necessary. But home ownership is an important element of responsible citizenship and therefore should be encouraged. Accepting high risk to own a home is not always bad. My fear is, however, that buyers will take too much risk and in large enough numbers that some politician will deem it necessary to bail them out with public money.
Quote of the week: “It was a fast romance, I guess,” said State Sen. Curt Thompson of the bride he took with a deportation order pending, a fact both the politician and his beautiful young bride denied knowing at the time. But all’s well that ends well. An immigration judge lifted the order.
George W. Bush, without U.N. Ambassador John Bolton and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is a weaker president.
Emory University’s raising parking fees to force employees to car pool, take transit, or use off-campus park-and-ride lots. Surely it will also raise salaries enough to cover the now-higher cost of their work-related expenses.
On leaving Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The language of the Iraqi Study Group report boils down to this: The situation’s bad and could go either way. The U.S. role should “evolve to one supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over combat operations” and ideally, by the first quarter of 2008, “subject to unexpected developments” all U.S. combat brigades “not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq.” OK. That’s in line with what Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq said. “We would expect to see the entire country having reached provincial Iraqi control by early fall of next year,” said the general. “We should see the complete transfer of command and control of all Iraqi army divisions by late spring, early summer.”
The plan all along has been to stabilize the country and transfer security to Iraqi forces that are sufficiently trained and professional to maintain order. Nothing the Iraqi Study Group observes or reports alters that fact on the ground.
It’s still up to President Bush — and Congress, through the power of the purse. “New and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts” are fine, as are efforts to engage Iran and Syria and others in the region, as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has done in inviting Iraq’s neighbors to a regional conference in Iraq on ending his country’s violence.
Bush’s term ends in two years. There is no face-saving exit that leaves behind a government and an army without a reasonable chance of succeeding. All of the approaches the Iraqi Study Group suggests can be tried, but when Bush’s term expires, history will judge whether he was true to this country’s commitment. The world has an interest. We have a commitment.
Apartheid label will stick.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The shocking news from the morning paper is a quote deep in the story announcing that an expert on the Middle East who was the first executive director of the Carter Center, Kenneth Stein, had resigned his position at the center. The quote is this:
“President Carter’s book on the Middle East, a title too inflamatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analysis; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book.”
The book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” has angered supporters of Israel for being one-sided and for many of the other reasons Stein claims, including omissions and factual errors. Other experts on the region have reached conclusions similar to Stein’s. While Carter’s not the first to claim that “apartheid” is an approrpriate label —Desmond Tutu did too — his position and status will popularize the label.
The book does have such a provocative title and its content could materially affect public opinion about Israel and the Middle East. Because of that, the allegations Stein makes in resigning his position as a Carter Center fellow for Middle East Affairs bear fuller examination. Stein in particular should be heard more fully because he was the “third person in the room” and because he is a scholar who would be more reliable in recounting details than an active participant inclined to hear selectively.
Carter said he regretted Stein’s resignation and asserted that the book “is devoted to circumstances and events in Palestine and not in Israel, where democracy prevails and citizens live together and are legally guaranteed equal status.” Be that as it may, what will survive in the public domain is the label identified with Israel.
We hate authority
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The controversy surrounding the police shooting of an elderly woman who fired at them while they were executing a no-knock warrant has been revealing. What strikes me is how anti-authority much of this country has become.
Al Sharpton, you expect. It’s his career. But try as I might, it’s impossible for me to follow the rationalization of those who make decisions for the NAACP in taking on the authorities, who as best I can tell have responded quickly and appropriately to questions raised about the tragedy. So far as I can tell, too, there’s no black-white angle that would suggest a role for the NAACP — unless, of course, the angle is opposition to those in positions of authority, whatever its color.
You’d think majority opinion would be to assume that police acted according to training on the basis of information they believed to be sound. Other than the age of the victim, which invites us all to speculate on whether she knew those who executed the no-knock warrant were police, there’s no reason to assume that officers acted improperly. And yet large numbers of people do. It seems, in fact, to be fairly commonplace, this belief that those in authority are bumblers, dishonest or menancing. It’s not just this shooting, either. It’s others that have occurred in metro Atlanta, and of course anything related to decision-making in the war on terrorism.
America is passing through a cynical phase, the legacy perhaps of the 60s-era protestors, who made protest, demonstrations and oppostion to authority the high point of their lives. In the shooting of Katherine Johnston, there’s no reason to believe that the police chief and the mayor and city council aren’t perfectly competent, and sufficiently compassionate, to address the matter of whether their employees acted properly — and to take the appropriate action if they didn’t.
Racial balancing in schools
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The problem with having “diversity” as the standard for determining school admissions and school attendance boundaries is that it’s eye-of-the-beholder — and, furthermore, it’s applied by people who have no particular expertise who are measuring only by skin color.
An important case on far local school systems can go to achieve skin-color “diversity” by creating attendance rules that effectively exclude some children from their neighborhood school on the basis of the color of their skin is being argued today before the U.S. Supreme Court. Suit was brought by parents in Louisville, Ky., and in Seattle, who objected after their local systems created admissions policies that effectively froze the black and white mix at arbitrary percentages. In Louisville, system policies are designed to keep black enrollment between 15 and 50 percent. In Seattle, the effort is to maintain a 40-60 ratio of whites to non-whites. In 2000-2001 in Seattle, about 10 percent of 3,000 ninth graders were denied admissions based on their race.
This is one of those instances where schools are used to achieve a social end that most people would regard as desirable — a nation where people are exposed to, and have an opportunity to know and to respect, each other’ s differences. But the problem is that it’s always reduced to skin color — and that becomes the basis for picking winners and losers.
It’s smart business to hire a work force that reflects the marketplace. Colleges and universities, certainly, should do everything possible to leave no child behind, reaching out to offer admissions to every qualified student and even to aggressively recruit poor blacks from families that have no prior exposure to big schools, like UGA or Georgia Tech.
The Bush adminstration backs the parents in today’s U.S. Supreme Court arguments, contending that school boards are well-meaning, but are attempting to race-balance without compelling justification. And in that, parents and the administration are correct.
Liberals go nowhere with same old deal
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
About noon on Monday, a school day, about 15 teenagers - none, presumably, old enough to buy liquor — sat around an apartment complex drinking and “thinking about” a 14-year-old shot to death by a pizza delivery driver who was being robbed.
Either scene — the small business from which the pizza was dispatched or the one where the shooting occurred — speaks volumes about the pathologies that afflict communities, pathologies that incubate poverty and destroy neighborhoods.
Reporter Ernie Suggs describes the small business, Super Crown Pizza in southwest Atlanta: “Bars are on all of the windows and doors … cashiers and cooks work behind bulletproof glass. Counterfeit bills are taped to the wall, along with a long list of people not to deliver to, who have obviously cheated Super Crown in the past.”
The 44-year-old delivery man, a Pakistani immigrant working two jobs to support his two daughters, has been robbed and beaten at least twice. Delivering to an apartment complex late at night, he told police he was approached and robbed by a group of “three or four” people. During the confrontation, he shot and killed one of the alleged assailants, the 14-year-old.
Flash back now to an appeal three prominent Democrats made in the days leading up to November’s general election.
“On November 7th,” said U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), “we face the most dangerous situation we ever have. If you think fighting off dogs and water hoses in the ’60s was bad, imagine if we sit idly by and let the right-wing Republicans take control of the Fulton County Commission.”
“The efforts” of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others “will be lost,” warned Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.
“Unless you want them to turn back the clock on equal rights and human rights and economic opportunity for all of us,” elect the Democrat, said former Ambassador Andy Young. Concluded Lewis: “Your very life may depend on it.”
Step back and reconcile the facts on the ground with the rhetoric on the air.
Lewis, whose rhetoric was most incendiary, clung to his contention that “there are radical branches of the Republican Party who want to take us back,” as he wrote in an op-ed just after the election. He continued: “They want to undo the New Deal and Great Society programs … These neoconservatives make no secret of their desires to turn back the clock. And for many voters, especially minorities, that would represent a state of emergency.”
The various slurs can be disregarded, for it is abundantly clear that to some deeply partisan liberals, any conservative or Republican to the right of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is “right-wing.” The question does arise, though, as to how the Republican threat the three prominent Democrats envision relates to the needs of the besieged business and the culture of crime along Campbellton Road.
The problem with liberalism is that its New Deal-Great Society programs are spent. Some have been tried — in a dozen, or a score, or 50 iterations and designs — and none changes the facts on the ground, either in the apartment complex or for the pizza store.
Nobody’s going hungry in that neighborhood because food or help’s not accessible. Nobody’s unsheltered or cold, as poor farmers, tenants and urban slum-dwellers were half a century ago. Nobody’s income status blocks their access to medical care. Schools and textbooks and education options are universally available.
And yet a company like Crider Poultry in Stillmore, the object of considerable press attention because of the large number of illegals it employed, is hiring felons bused in daily from a Macon diversion center 96 miles away. Half the free-world applicants since the illegals left don’t pass drug tests or reference checks, and of those who do, many have poor attendance or quit quickly, said Crider’s president, David Purtle. “Our challenge is — in hiring unskilled people — their ability to understand what’s expected of them,” Purtle said. “Attendance is important. No acting up, no mouthing off. They just haven’t learned.”
New Deal? Great Society? Both addressed worlds that existed generations ago. That Big Government Democrats cling to them, while governing the world that exists at both ends of the pizza delivery man’s journey into the dangerous night, is a measure of how dated their solutions have become.
- Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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