Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > January > 04
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Sharpton, rent-a-cops, CDC study
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Quick quiz: Would Al Sharpton have rented a casket for himself at the James Brown funeral if it would get him one more photo op?
a) Yes, if he could have found a corporate sponsor to foot the bill.
b) No, even he is not that much of a media hound.
c) What’s the per-hour rental fee for caskets?
• The City of Smyrna will allow police officers to use taxpayer-provided vehicles while working for private employers. Neither the law, nor police nor police equipment should be lent, leased or rented to private individuals or businesses. Sure rent-a-cops exist, but respect for the law suffers when they’re offered for rent. Police should not be allowed to have other law-enforcement jobs — and if they do, the public portion (uniforms, badges and vehicles) — should stay at the station house.
• Headline: “Welcome to ‘07, Jim” My thanks to the AJC Sports staff for their warm new year greetings. But don’t ask me what to do with Michael Vick or a trigger-happy owner.
• State Rep. Rich Golick (R-Smyrna) proposes to rename a section of I-285 in Cobb County from the Chattahoochee River to the I-75 interchange that’s now named for former state Rep. James E. “Billy” McKinney. And he should. It was applied by Democrats merely to stick a finger in the eye of Cobb County Republicans.
• Before the ink dried on the “Who’s Who in 2007” list, one of the “34 to watch” may be hard to find. The army of Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, leader of the Somali militant Islamic movement, was defeated by Ethiopian regulars before the first full moon of 2007, and last seen in disarray fleeing toward the border. Make that “33 to watch.”
• CNN needn’t have apologized so profusely for its “Where’s Obama?” headline promoting a story on the search for Osama bin Laden. Viewers weren’t confused. Open a newspaper or turn on a channel and he’s there. Obama, not Osama.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does another of its liberal-arts-college research studies. Binge drinkers in high school do other risky things, it finds. The first three college freshmen we encountered could probably have told us the same thing. Do diseases, please. Let the liberal arts professors have their turf.
• The University of Minnesota did one of those CDC-type studies and discovered that teen girls who read dieting articles are more likely in five years to practice extreme weight-loss measures, like vomiting, than girls who don’t.
• A $210 million exit package for Bob Nardelli is obscene. This may be the only time until Democrats return to the minority in Congress that I find myself agreeing with U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.): “They don’t understand the extent to which they make the American people angry.” Contracts like this incite voters against corporate America.
• Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who came to Emory University in 1986 to head its Institute for Women’s Studies, was the most important Georgian in the women’s movement, a scholar of intellectual honesty, faith and conscience. She died this week, much too young, at 65. The example for the rest of us is not in where she started (an ardent feminist) or wound up (strongly anti-abortion), but in her openness to new evidence and ideas.
• Dear Boss, please excuse Jim from work Wednesday. He was among those said to be “mourning” the loss of Gasper the beluga whale. In the absence of school-supplied grief counselors, he went directly to the Georgia Aquarium to mourn, sign the condolence book and express his sadness to the grieving widow. Signed, Jim’s therapist.
Permalink | Comments (129) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
My prize, your pork
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One difference between Republicans and Democrats should be that small-goverment Republicans represent consitutents who want nothing from government — and therefore are inclined to hold its expansion in check. That is, at least, the theory.
Reality is, however, that with rare exception Republicans in Congress, like those in the Statehouse, believe that “bringing home the bacon” is a key reason they’ve been sent to Washington or Atlanta. They believe their effectiveness is measured by how successful they are in transferring the wealth of others to their constituents. The result is that pork-barrel projects move to the front of the line, or get built when the money could have been better used elsewhere. An example is the proposed 26-mile commuter rail line from downtown Atlanta to Lovejoy in Clayton County. It’s a white elephant project and if it gets built at all, it will only be because money was earmarked in the federal budget that will largely fund start-up, but not operating costs.
Clayton County commissioners unwisely agreed in 2005 to cover the transit line’s operating deficit for 50 years, obligating taxpayers there with an open-ended commitment. The sum was estimated at $4 million per year, but the whole world knows how far off the mark such projections can be. The new commission, just sworn in, has balked and is rescinding the pledge. “We can’t put the taxpayers of this county at undue harm,” said commissioner Wole Ralph. Smart guy.
There’s no question that Congress should abandon the practice of earmarking federal money. Most often, earmarking adds no additional money to the state — it just obligates existing money to projects, like the Lovejoy rail line, that can’t withstand cost-benefit analysis or competition from other transportation projects.
President Bush announced Wendesday that he’ll submit a budget plan for balancing the federal budget by 2012 and urged Congress to sharply curtail earmarks, the pet projects hidden in spending bills. Said Bush on earmarks: “One important message we all should take from the elections is that people want to end the secretive process by which Washington insiders are able to get billions of dollars directed to projects — many of them pork-barrel projects that have never been reviewed or voted on by the Congress.”
The President and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate promise civility and to look for “common ground.” Surely, since both parties are equally at fault in porking up the budget, bipartisan agreement exists for ending the “secretive process” that gets us projects like the Lovejoy rail line and the Alaska Bridge to Nowhere.
