Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > January
January 2007
The politics of education
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This year may produce the state’s boldest education reforms in decades. On the floor of the State Senate today, debate begins on a scholarship program proposed by State Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) that would allow the parents of special needs children to buy the services they want from the private sector or from another public school system.
On Tuesday, the Senate education and youth committee passed legislation being pushed by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle of Gainesville to allow entire school districts to free themselves from an array of regulations, including hiring and firing of teachers, school hours and class size, in return for a commitment to deliver results.
As U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings noted in a speech Tuesday to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Atlanta, the top-performing school in the Atlanta Public Schools system is a charter school, Tech High.
The Cagle proposal (SB 39) would permit up to five systems to become charter districts initially, and each would get a state grant of $125,000 for implementation. “We expect a very high demands for these five slots,” said State Sen. Dan Weber (R-Dunwoody) who introduced the bill for Cagle. The lieutenant governor presides over the Senate, but cannot introduce legislation. The Senate panel also passed a bill to create five career academies, a form of charter school, where students would be taught job skills. Five of those would be eligible for $1 million each, with additional funds available for construction.
After her speech Tuesday, I asked Secretary Spellings about the politics of education reform. In calling for renewal of No Child Left Behind, the President included Promise Scholarships, a form of vouchers, for parents of children in chronically non-performing schools. The scholarships would allow parents to move their children — and the federal money spent for their education — to private schools or to out-of-district public schools.
The unions and many of the Democratic constituencies oppose this provision. As the Wall Street Journal noted editorially Tuesday, the President proposed this initially, “only to throw NCLB’s choice provisions over the side to cut a bipartisan deal with Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative George Miller.” Said the WSJ: “Let’s hope Mr. Bush isn’t merely using ‘choice’ again as a negotiating ploy to be tossed out once talks on Capitol Hill get going.”
Spellings sees the world differently. “The President is very much paying attention to this and understands the policy implications” of the new Democratic majority in Congress, she said. “I also want to give credit where credit is due and that is that Ted Kennedy and George Miller have been stalwarts for the accountability provisions and for the supplemental services, tutoring and so forth, that are the choice aspects of this law. And they have had every opportunity to retreat…and they have not.”
I’m not convinced. NCLB’s choice and accountability were the provisions that made further federal intrusion into a responsibility of state and local government palatable. My fear is that with reauthorization we get more federal money and more of a federal presence without greater accountability or more choice. This has always been the concern about NCLB. We knew at the start that it could become just another empty Big Government spending program or something that could potentially revolutionize public education.
Fight the urge to fund what we don’t need
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the great struggles for fiscal conservatives governing Georgia will be to make a difference before they get co-opted.
The pattern in the past has been to create new spending programs, often with little funding and big promises, and then to watch them grow over the next decade and demand sums far beyond what was ever projected. The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council is an example. This headline from budget hearings held earlier this month tell the story: “Budget shackles indigent defense: Lawmakers to consider funding request” (Metro, Jan. 17.)
The state is at the point with indigent defense funding where we were in the 1970s and ’80s on double-digit health care inflation. That is: Every physician was an unchecked cost generator. To combat it, the federal government, through states, developed the so-called “certificate of need” to regulate medical equipment and construction. And employers began to get serious about managed care. Neither was ideal nor wholly effective, but they were useful interim cost-containment tools.
On indigent defense, judges are the potentially unchecked cost generators that physicians once were. The Brian Nichols murder case in Fulton County is an example. Even before jury selection started, legal fees had topped $500,000. Taxpayers provide four lawyers, one a state employee and three others who are paid fees that judges can set, in this case ranging from $125 to $175 per hour. The Capital Defenders’ Office has a $5 million budget for the Nichols case and about 60 others.
If my client is one of those 60, or if I’m the judge presiding over one, I’m not settling for anything less than the fees and defense services provided in the Nichols case. Otherwise, the finding of guilt and the sentence are immediate grounds for appeal.
The Legislature in 2004 created a system whose costs it can’t control. And in her State of the Judiciary speech delivered last week to the General Assembly, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears hinted at the need for a state program to provide lawyers to “middle- and lower-income citizens” in civil cases. “In any given year nearly 40 percent of our middle- and lower-income citizens has at least one civil legal need,” she said, “but only one in every 10 is able too secure legal representation.
“This means that 90 percent of our most vulnerable citizens have no one to represent them while they are trying to handle some of the most important issues of their lives, such as access to affordable housing and medical benefits.” Federal funds and volunteer lawyers serve the poor now, so the real question is how such a proposal might be framed, contained and managed if and when a proposal is made. A Supreme Court-appointed committee is studying the matter now and any decision to ask for funds is at least a year away.
The message to fiscal conservatives, though, is in response to a report that Gov. Sonny Perdue proposes to “kill” a 12-year-old program, intended as a pilot, to experiment with foreign language offerings in some elementary schools. Perdue would redirect to all of the state’s elementary schools the $1.6 million that now goes to a few. To establish the language program in all 1,284 elementary schools statewide would cost taxpayers about $85 million.
Beneficiaries are reacting badly — understandable since the state proposes to withdraw a program many of them value. As Perdue spokesman Dan McLagan noted, the purpose of a pilot is to see if something works. If it does, and the success can be replicated — not always possible — expansion should be considered.
Fiscal conservatives should always create pilots, examine their effectiveness and the validity of cost projections before advancing. The absolute wrong way to go is to lay out an open-ended promise and partially fund it with the expectation that more money will be available next year or the year after. That’s the way prior legislators have put government spending on autopilot. State a promise, underfund it and then wait for a state or federal judge to translate the promise into tax dollars.
Too, as we see on a small scale with the elementary school language programs, every offering creates a constituency. State Rep. Ben Harbin (R-Evans), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is already talking expansion.
Republicans now in control should experiment a great deal — mostly involving the private sector — and be prepared to cut bait when something’s not working, not working as promised, or is too costly. If, indeed, the experience is that a $1.6 million program in a $20 billion budget is not effective and fiscal conservatives lack the political will to redirect the money elsewhere, there’s not much hope that Georgia’s future will be any different than its past.
Permalink | Comments (57) | Categories: Column
Oh, Jane, hush
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There she was again, Hanoi Jane, another of the anti-war grandmas of the anti-war 60s, refusing to be silent any longer, lest the anti-war party now in control of Congress not be aware of the anti-war views they have carefully preserved lo these many decades. Frankly, the geriatric set should have sat this one out. Her presence in Washington at Saturday’s anti-war demonstration is a reminder that the American left hasn’t changed in 40 years. For them, a good anti-war march is the activist equivalent of a good oldies station reviving the hits of their youth — one last fling on memory lane. Move on.
The march, and the coverage of it, prompts two thoughts. One is that this march had a far higher profile than, say, the Right to Life march a week earlier, which also brought thousands to Washington to assert that “silence is no longer an option,” to borrow a cliche from Ms. Fonda. That march, however, reflected sentiment contrary to the views held by most of those who make news decisions. Admittedly, Saturday’s march was timed to Congressional action on legally meaningless troop surge resolution, while the earlier one was timed to the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
The other thought is that organized marches and demonstrations really have become a monumental bore, whether it’s the Right to Life, the anti-war left, candlelight vigils, fund-raisers, or any other massing of humanity for the purpose of making a statement. They’re meaningless, except to fill air time or newspaper pages. They tell us nothing we don’t know about public opinion and, in fact, tell us nothing accurate about public opinion at all. By now, they all look alike and sound alike. Some band of true-believers carrying placards ginned up by marketing firms for television appeal gathers with instructions to look angry or needy or Republican. None of them should get anything more than the coverage given to Right to Life — and that is a brief notice that a crowd gathered, and that by way of explaining to motorists which streets to avoid.
America really needs a new form of public expression. We’ve worn out marches. We’ve worn out the yellow-ribbon scene. It took hardly any time to wear out the celebrity-angst routine, but that’s become a bore too. Jane wore out her anti-war gig 40 years ago on an anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam. With that baggage, she does today’s anti-war left no favors coming forth with the I-can-no-longer-remain-silent routine. Nobody has doubted those politics for 40 years.
Grand day for students with special needs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s a rare treat to be present when the Earth moves, when change comes to an institution that has clung to yesterday despite the collapse and transformation of the world it served.
That happened last week in a committee room across the street from the Georgia Capitol. The institution of public education, protected always by the turf-defending warriors of the status quo, shifted slightly in a new direction Thursday. The Senate Education and Youth committee approved and sent to the Senate floor a bill authored by President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah). The full Senate is likely to act this week.
There’s nothing radical about the bill, the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act. It would give choice — and the state and federal money being used to educate them — to parents to buy the special education services their child needs. They could spend the money, expected to average about $9,000, in the private sector or in another public school system. If parents are content with the services the public school is providing, they are free to remain. It’s honest-to-goodness choice.
But the scholarships threaten because they are seen as a precursor to a full-scale voucher offering — something I support, but, as Johnson pointed out, key Republicans, including State School Superintendent Kathy Cox, don’t. (Johnson acknowledges that he supports a broader use of vouchers than the bill could be accused of offering.)
If you wanted to see in one afternoon the defining philosophical difference between those who have run Georgia and those who are now in power, it was here, in this committee and in the hall outside. After testifying in support of the bill, Johnson stood outside, facing skeptical reporters and angry or nervous advocates.
This is a scene where former House Speaker Newt Gingrich excelled. Gingrich knew what he believes. He’d thought it through. He understood the ramifications. And he never retreats from his position. That was Johnson Thursday, and it should be the role model for the conservative majority in Georgia. When conservatives employ the buzzwords or phrases — “user fees” is one, local control is another — and apply them to mask the cost and expansion of government, it’s immature or misguided conservatism.
The proper course is the one Johnson sets in this bill. Believe in the free market, believe in choice, believe in giving parents the tools to help them take responsibility for their children, and create government in that image. That is exactly what the Special Needs Scholarship Act does.
Johnson was not shy in defending the bill, even when opponents rushed to inject the v-word — which under the prior regime was the kiss of death.
“There’s nothing dirty about the v-word,” Johnson asserted. “Somebody decided vouchers are bad for public education, but it’s not bad” for the HOPE voucher program, which on Thursday was being celebrated by Gov. Sonny Perdue and former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller for having aided a million Georgians to attend college. Nor is voucher a dirty word when public funds are used to buy pre-k services from public and private providers, he noted. Nor was it when used to send GIs to college after military service. Medicaid is a voucher, he said. And food stamps. And vouchers exist, too, for housing.
It’s acceptable, therefore, to offer vouchers that give people a choice of food, medical care. Pre-k is acceptable, too, and post-high school. But not in between. Only about 5 percent of Georgia’s special needs children are likely to take scholarship — or voucher, depending on what you call the HOPE stipend.
The arguments against the Johnson bill come from the alphabet groups that stalk the legislative halls, often during the former regime terrorizing any legislator who dared to propose real reform: GSSA, GSBA, PAGE, GPTA, GCASE, GAMSP, GAESP, GAE, GAEL, GACIS — the school superintendents, school board members, teachers unions and others. It’s a formidable, often self-interested network that one day will own this legislature, just as it did the old one.
Jamie Self, vice president for public policy of the Georgia Family Council, spoke marvelously, dispelling an argument against such programs — that parents aren’t smart enough to evaluate alternative schools.
“Many parents are well aware of the many arguments made here today by the education establishment — and they are insulted,” said Self. “These parents are experts in their children, in their child’s disabilities, in the laws regulating schools and in the offerings of neighboring school systems or private schools.
“The message from these parents is, ‘give us a little credit.’ “
• Jim Wooten is associate editor of the editorial board. His column appears Sunday, Tuesdays and Fridays.
Permalink | Comments (78) | Categories: Column
Evacuees, Iraq war plan, traffic mess
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Good news is bad news: Gas prices falling. But … drivers may return to driving habits deemed to be socially undesirable.
• Speaking of “buts …” Guess the next word to follow in the first sentence of this good-news story about the deficit: “The deficit picture has improved …” And what’s the next word? You got it. There’s a “bleak reminder” that no good news is.
• Good news, bad news: You’re Time’s Person of the Year. But … it’s your fault that kidnapper Gary Steven Krist went bad again and took to cocaine smuggling. You wouldn’t let him practice medicine. He’s very mad at you.
• One thing I don’t like about programs such as American Idol: It’s cruel to exploit people for amusement, especially those who are desperate.
• A state employee who can get as excited as archivist Gregory Jarrell of Morrow was in discovering the state’s only official copy of the Declaration of Independence not only has found a treasure — but is one.
• An ethics complaint based on “common knowledge” was, and should have been dismissed, against Georgia House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram). The Democrats who ran Georgia for 134 years surely do not want to establish “common knowledge” of “inappropriate personal” relationships as the standard for indicting either the living or the dead.
• The Georgia Lottery has the best public relations machine in the state — better even than the panda. Press releases focusing on how much money it raises “for education” are read or reported almost verbatim by most news organizations. They never say how much Georgians “lost” to state-sanctioned gambling. Of course, I don’t mind gambling when the winners are working people such as David Wayne Sharpton, a Barrow County service technician, who still works after winning almost $4 million with scratch-offs. Everything about his life, including the way he gambled and the way he managed his life after winning, is evidence of somebody who has his head screwed on straight.
• Seventeen months after Hurricane Katrina, a New Orleans evacuee in Atlanta sits in his Midtown Atlanta apartment, insisting that taxpayers, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, owe him $6,000 in rental assistance, and waiting for his old job and a place to live. He has no plans to look for work. “The only requirement I should have is that I’m an evacuee,” he said at a gathering of Katrina evacuees. “Don’t tell me to work on somebody’s job when I’m planning to go back to New Orleans.” Seventeen months. No job. Not looking.
• AJC.com headline: “Man dead at church.” Of starvation? I’ve survived sermons that pushed me to the brink.
• Show us the way. U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), in giving the Democratic response to the State of the Union, said President Bush should take the “right kind of action for the benefit of the American people and for the health of our relations around the world.” Those are not necessarily the same. But Webb continued: “If he does, we will join him. If he does not we will show him the way.” Starting, one supposes, with a Democratic plan to succeed in Iraq. Right now they’re looking for a face-saving way to run.
• Republicans who vote for the Democratic resolution to block an increase in troop strength in Iraq, in whatever form, should be defeated. It is a resolution that speaks directly to the enemy.
• What government touches. … China’s one-child policy to combat global warming, oops, over-population leads to too few marriageable girls. In some areas of China, 130 boys were born in 2005 for every 100 girls. Now China is considering incentives for couples having daughters and punishment for gender-driven abortions. Incentivize desirable behaviors, discriminate against undesirable.
• A Fulton Superior Court judge approves the sale of up to $200 million in tax allocation district bonds for the proposed Beltline rail line in Atlanta. Local governments should check or even halt the expansion of tax allocation districts until their impact on other property-tax payers is fully assessed. All those kids and all that traffic and all the other services have to be paid for — and for decades, mostly by taxpayers outside the district.
• President Bush asks for a 20 percent reduction in gasoline use within a decade. OK. Fix gridlock — so that traffic actually moves, thereby reducing our fuel consumption.
Permalink | Comments (114) | Categories: Column
Beer, caskets and wine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Georgia Chamber of Commerce weighs in Sunday beer sales, siding with a convenience store industry that has been pushing for authority to sell beer and wine seven days a week. A bill sponsored by State Sen. Seth Harp (R-Midland) would allow voters in each city or county to decide. Gov. Sonny Perdue declared last week that the proposal would have a “tough time getting the last vote.”
This is, admittedly, not a hot-button issue with me. Mostly it annoys me that the General Assembly finds its time consumed year after year with agendas brought by business, professional or special interest groups. That’s an essential part of its job, certainly. And I don’t fault industry groups for attempting to use regulation and law to gain an advantage over competitiors. What bothers me most is that legislators should be looking at liquor laws, for example, and deciding which provisions are outdated, anti-competitive or monopolistic.
A California retailer, Trader Joe’s, came to town with a prized marketing attraction, a wine, Charles Shaw, more commonly known as “two-buck Chuck.” Here it has to go through a distributor and be offered to competitors, thus losing its earned advantage. That’s an improper use of government regulation. If Trader Joe’s invested in a product and grew its appeal, it shouldn’t be forced as a condition of doing buisness in Georgia to have a distributorship or to make its product available to competitors. Kroger, to its credit, has found a decent wine competitor in Nathanson Creek, which it sells for $2.97. So does Aldi. Others should, too.
The point here is that legislators should be scouring through the laws and regulations to eliminate those that no longer serve the public interest, if they ever did. One other example in an unrelated industry: State Rep. Chuck Sims (R-Douglas), a mortician, proposes to eliminate a requirement that funeral homes have eight caskets on display in a showroom. It is thoroughly outdated, whatever its original purpose — which most likely was something the industry brought forth to keep out smaller competitors. The reality now is that consumers can find an array of offerings available on the Internet at considerable savings, caskets that can be delivered the next day. We don’t need to see even one casket. Show us the video.
In the spirit of the chamber’s proposal, maybe we should allow every city and county in Georgia to decide which laws and regulations affecting business or the environment should apply locally.
I hate the approach that passes the buck to cities and counties. It’s another subject, but if we wish to go that route, why not pass a constitutional amendment that will allow real public initiative so that voters can write their own laws? I’m for that. Why wait for the General Assembly to put a lid on taxes and spending, which it may never do? Give the people that authority and we could have a spending lid by 2010.
Either they make the routine public policy decisions for the state of Georgia — or we do.
Cowed? Not this President.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You have to admit that this is a President who declines to be cowed. Democrats just took control of Congress. Republican senators up for reelection in two years are starting to take flight on Iraq. And his standing in the polls is below 30 percent approval. So what does he do?
He comes to Congress with an olive branch and and ambitious plan to advance a conservative agenda. On health care and education, he invites free market competition in ways that could fundamentally change both. The current employer-based system is flawed in that corporations can deduct the expense, but individuals who aren’t covered in the workplace can’t. The President’s proposal make the benefit taxable income, but exclude the first $15,000 for families and $7,500 for singles. Everybody, then, would be treated alike, whether working for a corporation that provides the benefit or not. The incentive for individuals would be to shop price, thus inviting competition. Competition would come, too, in marketing insurance coverage to those with gold-plated benefits valued at more than $15,000. It’s revenue neutral, insists presidential spokesman Tony Snow. Federal funds would be directed, too, to states to develop pools for the high-risk and uninsured that would attract private-sector insurers. It is very much a free-market effort to provide coverage without creating a new entitlement or new federal spending.
On education, the President urged renewal of No Child Left Behind and a form of vouchers, called Promise scholarships that would give “children stuck in failing schools the right to choose some place better.” Neither the health care, nor the education proposal was warmly received by the Democratic majority.
He did set a goal of reducing U.S. gas consumption by 20 percent in 10 years and suggested updating Corporate Average Fuel Ecnomy (CAFE) standards for vehicles, while doubling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and getting on with nuclear power production. Acknowledging the new majority, he took note of “global climate change” as a problem that needed attention.
He warmed this fiscal conservative’s heart by calling for a balanced budget, something he said can be achieved, without raising taxes. He had a great line on earmark reform, which he asked to be cut in half within the year. Earmarks number more than 13,000 and cost about $18 billion this year. Yet 90 percent of them were added without floor action. “You didn’t vote them into law and I didn’t sign them into law,” said Bush — and yet they have the force of law.
Far less well received was his appeal on Iraq. The President did a superb job of explaining the stakes in Iraq. “Nothing is more important in our history now than to succeed in the Middle East, to succeed in Iraq and to spare the American people” from failure, the consequence of which “would be grievous and far-reaching,” he said. The second half of his speech, on Iraq, was low-key, but firm and clear-eyed. He answered “what’s the mission?” question that continues to crop up on this blog and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I kept looking for the Congresswoman in the red dress at center aisle positioned for face time on national television as the President entered the chamber. She wasn’t there. The election wasn’t all bad.
Education starts to rise from rut
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
O ye of little faith, would-be reformers who dismay that no entrenched institution or cultural drift can be changed, take note:
The lieutenant governor of Georgia, Casey Cagle, roamed the state last week advancing the idea that not just schools, but entire school districts, can be “largely exempted from state and some federal mandates.” In return, they would agree to meet specified achievement standards.
In the Senate, too, the second-ranking official, President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah), has introduced legislation to give scholarships to special-needs children, something Florida has done for six years. It would allow parents of children with disabilities to buy education services from private schools using the sum of state and federal money spent on them in public schools. In Florida, scholarships range from $4,800 to $20,700.
There is talk, too, that reform-minded legislators might introduce tax credits as well, something akin to an Arizona law passed in 1998. That law has allowed taxpayers to take a tax credit for up to $625 donated to a “school tuition organization,” which is the school the taxpayer’s child attends.
Cagle’s leadership is important because he is a high-profile statewide official talking about a reform that has needed such a champion. As with any reform in education, it has been a long, uphill struggle.
Georgia has about 1,800 public schools, and only 58 of them are charters. Just 1.5 percent of the state’s public school children attend charters. The first charter schools — conversions of existing public schools — were permitted in 1995; a 1998 law allowed start-ups.
Phil Andrews, executive director of the Georgia Charter School Association, says about 10 to 15 new charters are being added every school year. “The schools that are opening continue to be of pretty good quality, so we don’t expect to see a lot of attrition along the way,” he said. Gov. Sonny Perdue and state School Superintendent Kathy Cox are supportive, too, he noted. Cox, in fact, appeared with Cagle to declare that allowing a whole system to become a charter district “would be a great innovation for the state of Georgia.”
The opposition historically has come from local school boards, which see charters as competition and as a threat to their funding and control. As a result, progress has come in very small increments. Funding formulas for operations still disadvantage charter schools by about 10-15 percent, Andrews estimates. They operate at a disadvantage, too, in capital funding, but the state two years ago acknowledged the need and made some provisions for funding, though it’s only about 20 percent or less of need. The story, though, is a good one, even if reform has been slow.
Charter school advocates and others from around the state will gather Thursday and Friday to compare notes at a conference Andrews’ group is sponsoring. About 200 people are expected, including representatives of six to eight school systems. Most of the systems sending representatives are in metro Atlanta.
Cagle’s ability to draw attention to charters, along with Johnson’s special-needs scholarship proposal, and other proposals that empower parents by giving them choice, are examples of the dual approaches conservatives must take. Certainly it’s vital to continue making all efforts to improve public schools as they are now structured — by providing, for example, better pay for teachers and funding for dropout prevention counselors in middle schools, as Perdue proposes in this year’s budget.
Reform, then, is a dual track: Empower parents with choice, so they gradually come to accept their obligation to take responsibility for their children’s education. Give them information on school performance. And then give them the means to act. The money should follow the child. That’s one reform track.
The other is to recognize that some parents are quite content to turn their children over to government with the expectation that the public schools will provide everything in a child’s developmental life that uninvolved parents choose to neglect.
We have an obligation to educate those children as best we can in a traditional public school setting — hoping, though, that through charters, educators will have the freedom and creativity to design schools for like-needs kids.
The existing public schools need champions. But so, too, do the alternatives. Be optimistic. The future has to be better than the recent past.
- Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
Permalink | Comments (86) | Categories: Column
Breakdown of family needs reversing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the usual Martin Luther King Jr. Day recitations of problems afflicting America — the war, education, social services, losing our soul, “rebuilding the infrastructure of America’s decaying cities” and an assortment of other ills — no mention was reported, if, indeed, one was made, of a problem that would seem to be at least as significant as water pipes and Iraq.
The unmentioned reality is that children in alarming numbers are being brought into the world without a mother and father in the home, and among minority children the problem is epidemic. In 2004, 69.3 percent of births of black children were to unmarried women. For Hispanics, it was 46.4 percent. For whites, 24.5.
This week The New York Times reported that for what is likely the first time in history, more American women are living without a husband than with one. About 70 percent of black women are living without a husband, 51 percent of Hispanic women, 45 percent of non-Hispanic whites and about 40 percent of Asian women, according to the Census Bureau. Death, divorce and temporary separations because of job or military account for some — and on the whole, choices women make are of no particular concern, except as those choices affect children.
The numbers of births to those unmarried are so huge that it has become politically incorrect even to talk about it. It is really quite extraordinary that a problem so grave — the intentional infliction of disadvantage on a child — has no prominent face or voice in this state. One may be emerging. Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears has begun to raise the issue, indirectly at least, through a commission on “Children, Marriage and Family Law.” It’s not a family law problem. It’s cultural, with family law impact, something she pointed out in a 2004 speech to the Atlanta Rotary Club. “Marriage, in our culture, has become optional, contingent and conditional,” she lamented.
The silence elsewhere is deafening, while the evidence of harm to children is so overwhelming that it really is quite astounding that politicians, preachers and opinion leaders look away or insist that some new education or spending program be created to salvage the children.
A white paper prepared for the Supreme Court commission quotes the findings of studies on child well-being. This, for example, is the conclusion drawn from a number of them: “The wealth of published data demonstrate that married mothers and fathers increase their children’s physical and mental health, general life happiness, academic and intellectual performance, behavioral success at school, and substantially increase the likelihood of these children graduating from college and successfully entering adulthood. These children are also more likely to build successful family relationships themselves in adulthood.”
They’re also less likely to live in poverty, suffer sexual and physical abuse, less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, become criminals, engage in premature sexual activity and or produce children before marriage.
Do two things here. One is to mentally construct the social services and education network that would provide the safety net, or the levels of safety nets, necessary to replace the presence in a child’s life of a mother and a father. The other is to consider how truly irrelevant most of what politicians and opinion leaders identify as problems — the war in Iraq, infrastructure, class size, voter ID, discrimination, all of the standard rally-the-base commentary — is to a daddy-deprived child. Long before the child encounters an obstacle arising from public policy, the decision not to marry made by the man and woman who conceived him will already have damaged his life’s chances.
The American Cancer Society reported this week that from 2003 to 2004, cancer deaths in this country dropped by 3,014, eight times the number by which deaths declined in 2002-2003 — the first year of decline in total deaths in 70 years.
The study’s author, epidemiologist Ahmedin Jemal, credited the drop to “lifestyle changes such as cessation of smoking, more screening, faster diagnoses and better treatments.” For women, lung cancer death rates continue to rise, one expert said, because they took up smoking in the 1960s and ’70s.
Changing harmful behaviors takes time and persistent effort by government, Hollywood, opinion leaders, family, and the media and entertainment industries. It needs leaders. Now, it has few or none. It’s the subject nobody who matters talks about. In part, that’s because the numbers have gotten so large that to talk about it is to offend. It’s because, too, none of us has led a perfect life — and the fear of having our imperfect lives thrown back at us keeps us silent. Where are the voices children need?
Permalink | Comments (117) | Categories: Column
Emory aid, Durham DA and USS Ford
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• The best book yet to be written is the Duke University rape case. Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, who probably should be disbarred, has turned the case over to the state’s attorney general, who appointed two special prosecutors. The story here is the rush to judgment by Nifong, Duke faculty and others. Who said and did what and when — and why — would make a great tale of hysteria driven by political correctness to the point of ruining lives.
• President Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The headline “Builders push poor out of central Beijing” suggests another possible secret weapon in America’s arsenal. Send the American Civil Liberties Union to China. It won’t survive the litigation.
• Unless it’s a crook, the state Department of Education should be careful not to go overboard in cracking down on the tutoring firms that have sprung up under No Child Left Behind. Ultimately, the state and parents should decide whether the tutoring service is doing their child any good. The focus always should be toward pushing parents to make decisions and accept responsibility — with information gathered and disseminated by the state.
• Colleges and universities would have to keep the visas of foreign students on file, track their immigration status and prohibit students with expired visas from attending class under a bill sponsored in the House by state Rep. Burke Day (R-Tybee Island). And the controversy is? Do it.
• No problem here with Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s decision not to push Voter ID right now. The election didn’t change last year’s vote tally. Clearly, until four Senate Democrats sign on to the required constitutional amendment, the GOP lacks the two-thirds majority needed to pass it.
When we know the outcome in advance, why bother with the speeches?
• Super new program at Emory University will commit to families with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 that their child won’t have to take out more than $15,000 in student loans over four years. The rich can pay and the poor get financial assistance at expensive private colleges; the ones out in the cold are children of the middle class. This throws them a lifeline, too.
• The U.S. Navy will name its next aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R. Ford. It’s right in two respects: Ford loved and served in the Navy during World War II. And the honor comes after his death — which is when names should be attached to public buildings, roads, facilities and vessels.
• Praise be. The U.S. Senate voted this week to require senators to publicly reveal their pork, both the earmarks tucked into federal spending and all nonfederal appropriations. Passage is a tribute to U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who has long championed earmarks reform, and U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who insisted on toughening up legislation passed by the House earlier this month. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) originally opposed DeMint, but capitulated after Coburn pointed out that the Democratic bill would cover only 5 percent of the 13,000 earmarks passed last year. It’ll be a great day for taxpayers when earmarks disclosure becomes law.
• “Paper kills,” says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Not this one … our competitors, maybe. Well, not kill. Mostly bore. All of which is beside the point. The old system of physician hen-scratches is dangerous. A new Internet site, a joint venture of technology and health care companies, enables physicians to prescribe electronically for free. This is one of those dozens of reforms needed in the way we deliver, pay for and consume health care services. Gingrich, its champion, could be a serious contender for president if the nation makes health care costs and outcomes its top priority.
• When there are fewer mourners and drier eyes at your funeral than at Ralph the whale shark’s at the Georgia Aquarium, the moral is not that you were a nobody, but that you’ve left a world that has lost its capacity to recognize the difference between humans and other forms of life. Soon we’ll be holding wakes for mink coats.
Permalink | Comments (354) | Categories: Column
Is productive Iraq debate over?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The war in Iraq is nearing abortion as a topic of conversation that generates heat, but changes no minds. Today’s news storiy, the front-page headline of which is “Senate anti-war resolution lures GOP support” reflects the beginning of the new Congressional majority’s Chinese water torture directed toward the next presidential election. Democrats are willing to see this country defeated if it produces two results: One is to send the Bush legacy, and his doctrine of preemptive strikes, to the ash heap of history. The other is to put a Democrat in the White House without obligating the party to or its candidates to have a workable plan, or any plan, on either Iraq or the larger war.
Today’s story is about a “bipartisan” group of senators, including Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a presidential candidate himself, who join with Democrats supporting a nonbinding resolution drawn up by Joe Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The resolution declares opposition to the troop “surge,” calling instead for diplomacy, international cooperation and a transfer of responsibilities to the Iraqi army. Fat chance on the first two, both of which amount to plans without plans, while the transfer of responsibilities is precisely what Bush is pursuing. Buckle down for two more years of this.
Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, interviewed on Fox Wednesday, compared Bush to President Lincoln. “Most people don’t realize that this war is not just in Iraq, but also in Iran. The commander in chief of the United States, in Lincolnesque fashion, must look at information that the American public does not have and make decisions to protect this nation.” The hounds will nip at his heels because the agenda of the opposition is now something other than success in Iraq. Sometimes, though, a president can be unpopular and right. Lincoln was. Bush is.
Politician, get a real job
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ll never forget the shock years ago when a promising young high school student I was interviewing told me he wanted to be a politician when he grew up. It had never dawned on me that anybody aspired to be a politician. I assumed men and women who had been successful in their lives and who had earned the respect and trust of their neighbors were encouraged to run for public office, often in response to some identified need in the community. So public service came as a reward for being a stand-up citizen who had shown leadership ability. I was surprised, too, to read that Markel Hutchins, an Atlantan who spoke to reporters in the aftermath of the police shooting of Kathryn Johnston, was described as a “civil rights leader.” And in a subsequent interview, Hutchins affirmed that his life’s ambition was to be a “civil rights leader.” In both cases — politics and civil rights — I just assumed the moment made the leader and that nobody started out life with those ambitions.
The notion that politics can be a career aspiration, like medicine, engineering or the law, seems to have taken root. Increasingly, public officials in part-time jobs insist on pay and benefits that are the equivalent of many full-time jobs. Taxpayers provide retirement benefits, including pensions and medical coverage, to part-timers in the legislature and in many part-time city and county offices. These are people who could be expected to get those benefits from their full-time jobs.
The compensation of part-time elected officials is in the news today because the Gwinnett County Commission voted 3-1 on Tuesday to raise their pay from about $14,000 per year to $29,000. In Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton, commissioners are paid between $38,000 and $41,000.
The question of the day is how much taxpayers should pay city councilmen, county commissioners and legislators, all of whom are part-timers and all of whom, desirably, have paying jobs elsewhere. Two related questions, too: Should those part-timers have paid staff or an aide? And should those part-time offices be made full-time? Gwinnett Commissioner Mike Beaudreau, one of those who voted for the higher salaries, said the raises are needed to attract “the most qualified candidates.” That argument, frankly, never appealed to me. I never understood why the lazy, incompetent and unemployable wouldn’t be attracted by higher salaries.
My view is that no part-time politician shold be paid pensions, deferred compensation or future medical benefits. I’d give out-of-towners per diem at the federal rate and pay all of them no more than $25,000 per year. I don’t want children aspiring to be politicians. I want them to prepare for real jobs and be ready, and employed, when the call comes.
Tax changes in the works — but slowly
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If Aghanistan is the graveyard of empires, as it’s sometimes called, genuine tax reform is the graveyard of idealism.
And yet, House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) is determined to go there. He is toying, conceptually at least, with the most ambitious and sweeping overhaul ever of Georgia’s tax structure — essentially moving the state toward greater reliance on consumption taxes.
His supposition, awaiting further research, is that a 5 percent tax on income and sales, to include services and Internet transactions, could bring about the elimination of property taxes and a slight lowering of the income tax. The top rate is 6 percent, and over time income has already become a virtual flat tax — joint filers get there at $10,000 and singles at $7,000.
What Richardson envisions is clearly a big idea and is a concept worth pursuing. But slowly. And that’s what he intends. Introduce the idea this year, act on it next.
It’s something of a fool’s errand, really, but Republican conservatives surely didn’t sit in the wilderness for decades to come to power and be the next generation of politicians splitting differences between ophthalmologists and optometrists, docs and hospitals and factions within the liquor industry.
It’s a fools’s errand because every loophole has a political origin and a protective constituency. And, furthermore, the tax reform offerings continue.
The second-ranking member of the House, Speaker Pro Tem Mark Burkhalter (R-Alpharetta), proposes to eliminate the property tax on motor vehicles, which he calls the “birthday tax” because 93 percent of Georgia households own at least one vehicle and the tax falls due on their birthday.
Gov. Sonny Perdue ran on a pledge to eliminate the state income tax on retirement income for people over 65 — and the General Assembly will approve it. He suggested, too, in last week’s State of the State that “we pass legislation to exempt material and equipment used to build biofuel facilities from state taxes.”
Another group in the Senate, meanwhile, is exploring a cap on state spending tied to increases in population and inflation. A number of other states are considering that; Colorado actually did, but voters sabotaged their own discipline later by approving an amendment that required the state to increase spending for k-12 education by one percentage point above the formula, regardless of revenues.
Richardson, in any event, opposes a constitutional cap on spending.
Proposals are being floated, too, to raise state, local or regional sales taxes — which, if passed, would further compound the difficulty of major tax reform.
This debate, regardless of where it leads, is essential for a party just settling into the business of governing. In theory, the new party comes to power with no obligation to protect the other party’s sacred cows. They’re not invested in what’s broken so, in theory, they can invest in a fix. Give them a few years to settle in and the newcomers will be just as protective of turf and loopholes as those who created them.
Grants of tax exemptions, whether for food, the scores of sales-tax exclusions or retirement income, happen because legislators and governors have always used them to win elections. That’s not to suggest many or most, like the proposed biofuel exemption or the retirement-income exclusion, don’t have merit. But, as Richardson notes and as my working years confirm for me, the young are far more in need of income tax breaks than the elderly, especially during their child-rearing years. “But,” he says, wincing with the observation, “they don’t vote.”
Richardson thinks the Legislature has a two-year window to act. Beyond that, it’s into gubernatorial politics and the momentum’s gone.
Revision on the scale he envisions is an idea to be sold slowly. Georgians are not given to sudden changes or to embarking on new concepts that affect their pocketbooks. Too, while he insists that revision be revenue-neutral, expanding the sales tax to services is an idea long promoted by liberals looking for ways to get the “wealthy” to pay more, so that social services can be expanded. And taxing Internet transactions is, unsurprisingly, a push that originates with states looking for “lost” revenue.
The debate on who should bear the burden of government and what that burden should be is ripe. With every tax and every loophole and every dollar of spending, government encourages or discourages some behavior . Maybe Richardson is on a fool’s errand, but whatever the outcome, it will be a useful one.
Permalink | Comments (133) | Categories: Column
Feminism, Boxer style
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It may just be me, but with the death of the Scoop Jackson Democrats, they’ve lost their touch on when and how to be tough. They’re missiles-to-mud-huts and they’re whatever that performance was that U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer exhibited in questioning Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
That exchange, in which Boxer implied that as a childless single woman Rice lacks standing to involve herself in decisions about war, is a lesson to all of us that we really do need to move out of our circle of like-minded friends and, in the case of politicians, sycophants. If you hear often enough from ideological soul-mates that Bush is dumb, for example, or that the makers of war don’t commit their own children to it and therefore lack the legitimacy to prosecute it, you are led into absurdity, which is where Boxer was Thursday.
With Democrats in control of the Senate, Boxer was clearly feeling her Bidenism , which would roughly translate as blow-hard sanctimoniousness in pursuit of air time on a foreign policy subject . Boxer observed in Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioning that Rice has no children of her own. “Who pays the price?” she demanded. “I’m not going to pay a personal price.My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family.” When Rice started to reply that she talks to their families and knows what they’re going through, though “I could never do anything to replace any of those lost men and women in uniform, or the diplomats, some of whom…” Boxer cut her off. “Madam Secretary, please. I know you feel terrible about it. That’s not the point. I was making the case as to who pays the price for your decisions.”
So we have on the one hand feminists complaining that too much attention is paid to what Nancy Pelosi wears because she’s a woman, though in most instances I’ve seen it’s women writing the stories and making the observations. But when a woman whose life achievement would seem to represent the feminist dream comes to testify on the most important issue of the day, her standing and opinion are devalued because she’s not borne any front-line troops. And yet, does anybody think that most liberals would fairly represent to the children they do have that the military is a desirable career choice?
Boxer’s line of questioning was, as White House spokesman Tony Snow said later, outrageous. It was tacky, well over the line. I question whether liberals of this age know how to fight, in politics or war. Like Boxer, they think if the tone is soothing, they can say the nastiest things, even things personal and nasty, and be thought “tough.” They lob missiles, verbal and otherwise, certain that they’ve demonstrated that they can be as tough as the stay-the-course crowd. That’s not the message anybody but their own cheering section gets.
Carter aside, Israel deserves total support
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At some point, the names matter. And so, too, do their words.
Whenever another person long invested in the passions of Jimmy Carter feels so betrayed by the assertions in his latest book that they divorce themselves from his legacy work, the rest of us should surely take notice.
When they, loyalists such as former Ambassador William B. Schwartz Jr., scholars such as Kenneth Stein and Melvin Konner, public people never given to impetuousness, such as former state Rep. Cathey Steinberg and former DeKalb CEO Liane Levetan, when they — and others whose contributions to the betterment of this state and nation are renown — walk away from the most important figure most of them will ever know, the world should take notice. And ask why.
In their farewell, the language is of a pained, bewildered soul forced to consider that they had misread, misjudged or been betrayed by a beloved and trusted friend. “I love Jimmy Carter and I’ve always loved Jimmy Carter,” said Barbara Babbit Kaufman, one of the 14 who resigned last week as members of the Carter Center’s board of councilors, along with Schwartz, Steinberg, Levetan and others. “But this is not the Jimmy Carter that I’ve always known and loved.” she said.
Konner, the Samuel Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory and the author of “Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews,” wrote as much in a powerful AJC op-ed just before Christmas. “Carter has changed,” wrote Konner. “Something has happened to his judgment. I don’t understand what it is, but I know it is very dangerous.” He wrote too:
“[Carter] has become a spokesman for the enemies of my people. He has become an apologist for terrorists.”
Stein, a Middle East expert and the first executive director of the Carter Center, parted company expressing similar views and distress.
In each case, their actions are minimized or discounted: The 14 are among a 200-member advisory board; the 21-member board of trustees is the important one. But the names and the language chosen by careful and precise scholars and people whose lives reflect soundness, judgment and balance reflect a concern the rest of us should share that Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid” chooses sides with harmful and lasting consequence.
It’s a legitimate worry. This is not a tempest-in-a-teapot, a spat or a quarrel among friends.
The matter of Israel’s survival and this country’s relationship with it is much too consequential to discuss in the normal language of political debate. But I do sense a growing willingness, on the left especially, to regard Israel as the villain and America as the enabler.
As the war in Iraq has grown more unpopular in this country, there’s an eagerness to make peace, or at least the illusion of peace, so that we can get out. If we leave in defeat, the entire world knows we won’t go back, even in defense of Israel, for at least the time it took to recover from Vietnam.
For me this is not a time to be equivocal, either about Iraq, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas or our commitments to friends who believe in our word.
Israel’s right to exist has never been affirmed by its enemies. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vows to see it destroyed. Palestinians chose a terrorist organization, Hamas, in parliamentary elections a year ago. Syria arms Hezbollah, which seeks to destroy Israel, as Syria would directly if it could.
For my part, there can be no “balance” in U.S. policy in the region. Retreating from Gaza in the summer of 2005, Israel did something this country would never have done, sending 25,000 soldiers to haul 8,500 of its citizens from their abodes, sacrificing their homes and land to the prospect of peace. What did they get in return? A rain of missiles.
With that example, with Hezbollah and Hamas, and a frighteningly dangerous leader in Iran who is no more than five years away from nuclear weaponry — sworn enemies all — you’ll not find a word here that undermines support in this country for Israel. That was surely not Carter’s intentions, but I fear it will be a consequence.
We have one permanent friend in the region and that is Israel.
When longtime Carter supporters speak out, as Stein and Konner and board members who resigned last week did, the rest of us should listen.
Permalink | Comments (197) | Categories: Column
Ethanol cost, call girl case, airline bid
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• If you can eat it, you can’t afford to put it in a gas tank — starting with corn, the price of which is beginning to affect pork, beef, chicken — and soft drinks, among other food items. Soft drink prices are expected to rise 4 percent, in part because of corn sugar prices. So with ethanol, we pay at the grocery store — and with our tax dollars.
• “Pay-go,” one of U.S. House Democrats’ first 100-hour agenda items, is another of the cynicism-breeding games that politicians play. It gives them cover not to extend President Bush’s tax cuts, but that’s about it. “The big money, as we know, is in entitlements,” noted U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). “Pay-go completely ignores this.”
• Before global warming, you never heard of bullets that were fired into the sky falling and hitting people, as happened in Mableton, or of an Atlanta woman saved by her bra from harm caused by a .45 fired into the air on New Year’s Eve. You never heard, either, of meteorites crashing through roofs, as one did in Freehold Township, N.J. Coincidence? Hardly. Before mankind came along, we didn’t have these environmental occurrences.
• Fulton County commissioners find themselves with excess collections of $90 million. What to do? “We are going to do a little bit of everything,” said Commissioner Bill Edwards. “I’m happy, man. The money’s there. It’s just a matter of what we spend it on.” And we wonder why Milton County beckons.
• The report that a Gwinnett County call girl operation that charged $10,000 kept good records certainly doesn’t alarm any of the johns I might know. And don’t put me on a jury where I’m asked to convict one whose indictment is based on a name somebody wrote in a book. I think we arrest them because we want to see pictures of men allegedly who would /could pay $10,000.
• A telling and ominous sentence in a tally of Pelosi Democrats’ first 100 hours: “The Democrats advanced the bill without even a bare-bones accounting of the estimated cost, which is likely to be in the billions.” The funding, we’re told, will be addressed later. The bill commits to inspecting all cargo on all U.S.-bound ships and all passenger planes. This country could go broke buying a false sense of security.
• The jaywalking British historian, who sounds perfectly obnoxious, invites attention to the rent-a-cop business. Private security couldn’t have compelled the professor to produce ID, cross the street elsewhere or escalate his apparent obnoxiousness into a crime — without summoning a disinterested party, a police officer. Is the cop here a city agent or a hotel agent? I say hotel. And, by the way, no private security company can compete for jobs with a public official with arrest powers.
• Code Red, high alert: Next the poets descend on Atlanta.
• Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle is a smart guy to hire former state Sen. Terrell Starr of Jonesboro, a Democrat, as senior adviser. Starr, who stepped down last year after 38 years in the Senate, was trusted and respected by colleagues on both sides of the aisle, no matter the rancor of partisan debate.
• Bush message to Syria and Iran: A day of reckoning will come if they continue to feed terrorism in Iraq. They might be tempted to change — if they believed that Bush, and somebody like him, would occupy the White House for the next decade.
• Uh, oh. This latest US Airways bid — up 20 percent — should be of serious concern to the hometown company. Money will talk.
• Allowing an advocacy group to determine how many people it represents — in this case, the National Alliance to End Homelessness — is about like asking the secondhand smoke crowd how many people it’s killed. It’s pick a number. In the first case, the alliance puts the number at 744,000. The advocacy group’s spokesman blamed lack of affordable housing. That, yes, and drugs, mental illness, alcoholism, laziness, poor life choices and a host of other reasons.
• Go Fish Georgia, the governor’s new $19 million initiative to lure fishing enthusiasts and their tournaments, will likely not resonate in parts of metro Atlanta. But then neither did NASCAR, until we heard about the crowds and decided a museum was worth $100 million or so in mostly public money. And then lost to a fatter cat.
Permalink | Comments (202) | Categories: Column
A new strategy in Iraq? No.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The hype surrounding the President’s speech last night on the Iraqi phase of the war on terrorism would tempt us all to think that something new and important had been announced — a “surge” in troop strength accompanied by a “change in strategy” that amounts to a “new course in Iraq.” It strikes me as nothing more than a battlefield adjustment, altering tactics and troop strength in one sector in response to the enemy’s battle plan. For those who were looking for a significant Iraq-related news event to declare their political support, conversion or opposition, the President has provided it. Otherwise, in any and all wars, troops shift where they’re needed, and in the numbers commanders think warranted for the length of time they deem necessary to achieve victory. The battle for Baghdad is not open-ended, but neither is it time-fixed.
Certainly the President’s speech gave politicians the news peg to declare themselves. U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, one of the three Republicans (along with Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani) leading the pack for his party’s nomination to succeed George Bush, declared afterwards that “this can succeed.” It is not, he said, “just an increase in troops; it is a change in strategy.” He noted, too, that unless we succeed, the spread of extremism throughout the region will mean we’ll have far greater challenges than we do in Iraq. As the President said in his speech: “The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” Losing is not an option.
Well, maybe it is. The antiwar Democrats, quick to declare defeat, sent U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, on camera in rebuttal prepared to sign the surrender agreement at the earliest possible opportunity. “We are not winning the war,” he said. “The situation is grave and deteriorating.” Escalation — his characterization of what the President had announced — “is not the change Americans called for in November.” Democrats in Congress may balk at funding, pass legally meaningless resolutions that are little more than messages to terrorists to hold on until 2008, or use their control to hound the Administration and to gain face time on the evening news.
From today on until the 2008 elections, the country will be asked — or forced by the two parties — to retreat into isolation or to continue pursuing those who threaten us, as we are doing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, where eight years after the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania we’re tracking down, cornering and killing the bad guys one, eight or 20 at a time.
On Iraq, polls be damned
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Look, here’s the story. President Bush will likely reveal in a speech tonight that 20,000 additional troops will be sent to Iraq to quell violence in Baghdad. Twenty thousand troops may not be sufficent. A higher number deployed throughout Baghdad may be the needed force. That, though, should be left to the generals.
As could have been anticipated, U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the rabid anti-war Left which has opposed this President from Day One, especially on the war on terrorism, are beside themselves. Increasing the number of troops “would be a policy of desperation built on denial and fantasy,” Kennedy said in a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club. “It would compound the original misguided decision to invade Iraq.”
The sentiments of the Kennedy speech will undoubtedly appear today or Thrusday as editorials in liberal newspapers around the country. What it comes down to is this: On Iraq and the war on terrorism, this President should set his course for the next two years, in consultation with Congress of course, but doing what he thinks is in the nation’s best interest in the conducting the war. Let Kennedy and those who gleefully predict defeat in Iraq as the Bush legacy rant. Congress has the power to cut off funds for the war effort. We are there. If Democrats in Congress, and their editorial voices of doom, wish to retreat in defeat, the option exists: cut off funds.
It’s clear now there’ll be little or no middle ground. Too bad. The Left still believes, I am convinced, that their political fortunes will rise from defeat in Iraq and that any effort to achieve victory is futile because Iraq is already lost. Polls be damned — this President is, after all, not Bill Clinton — Bush should supply the troops necessary to stabilize Baghdad. The Left will hate him. Kennedy and his wing of the Democratic Party will spout and spew, comparing Iraq to Vietnam, and in one speech or piece of commentary after another insist that all is lost. But then, what’s new about that?
GOP can stop looking over its shoulder
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As a committee of state legislators assembled to escort the newly elected speaker pro tem of the Georgia House of Representatives, Mark Burkhalter (R-Alpharetta), into the chamber, House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) explained the ritual.
The escort committee, Richardson explained, was a holdover from a more raucous legislative era when adversaries might be tempted to “stick a knife in the back” of high officials.
“Of course, nobody would do that in 2006,” he said rather oddly. And indeed, nobody did. All Democrats, in fact, crossed the aisle to elect Burkhalter by acclamation, and seven of them joined the 106 Republicans to give Richardson a second term as speaker.
Ritual in any institution and certainly in a democracy, archaic or not, is much underappreciated as a reminder to us that even as the political tides change and revolutions occur at the ballot box, the people’s business continues in their house of government. No matter what happens, the chosen return to ritual and the work of the republic begins. Even in its simplicity — the escort committees — it is elegantly inspiring, civil and reassuring, a fresh and optimistic start.
Watching it from the press gallery, it’s easy to believe that this day is the high point for Republicans under the Gold Dome. Two years ago, when the GOP gained control of the House and Richardson was first elected speaker, Democrats were still hopeful, as congressional Republicans are now, that the victors’ reign would be temporary. After November, those illusions are gone.
Their time will come again. The rituals will be theirs to perform. But not soon.
For Republicans, this is the session when power is consolidated and put to a defining purpose. As Richardson explained it two years ago, new legislation should proceed “slowly and cautiously” and, to gain acceptance, should meet at least one test: Will it reduce the size of government? Will it reduce the tax burden on Georgians? Will it promote personal responsibility? Will it strengthen the family?
In the first two years, as legislators pandered for a political edge in November’s elections, the relationship between bills and the four-way test was often elusive. But the GOP faces no serious challenge to its legislative control for years to come. The speaker’s standard, then, should actually apply.
For Democrats, the chore is to find a way to get noticed that will appeal to mainstream Georgia. Rebuilding a party capable of winning statewide gained some urgency after November. There are no obvious heirs.
The key to that redefinition is, as it has been for some time, black Democrats. Of the 74 seats held by Democrats, 61 are in districts where blacks make up more than 30 percent of registered voters, the usual threshold for determining whether a district votes Democrat or Republican.
Somewhat surprisingly, though, eight of the over-30 districts are held by Republicans — including several they would likely have lost with a more competitive gubernatorial race.
State Rep. Robert Mumford of Conyers, a white Republican, is in a district astride one path of black outmigration from Atlanta. His district was almost 40 percent black at the time of last November’s election; he won with 51.8 percent of the vote. State Rep. Gene Maddox (R-Cairo), a second-termer, represents a 34 percent black district; he won with 53.2 percent of the vote.
Other Republicans who won easily in over-30 black districts are three party-switchers, Reps. Mickey Channell of Greensboro (re-elected with 63.8 percent of the vote, Johnny Floyd of Cordele (66.4) and Richard Royal of Camilla (63.9); plus David Knight of Griffin (59.3) and Willie Talton of Warner Robins (70.1).
Even if Democrats succeed in the future in picking up those seats when entrenched incumbents retire, the numbers are still short of a majority.
For the GOP, consolidated in power, it’s time to do something that matters — if not the big idea, tax reform or school choice, for example, something that begins to turn the ship of state in the direction Richardson articulated.
For Democrats, the need is to reinvent and reintroduce Georgians to the party they grew up with. The key players in that will be black Democrats, who now are the party’s majority in the House. The party can only move as far toward the Georgia voting mainstream as they will let it.
Permalink | Comments (151) | Categories: Column
Lock the liquor cabinet, hide your daughters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lock the liquor cabinet. Keep a watchful eye on your daughters. Add a security code to your checking account. The Georgia General Assembly returns to town today.
According to a poll conducted for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc., 40 percent of voters identify education as the top issue facing the legislature. Maybe. I’m convinced, though, that “education” is the fall-back response of people who are contented or not interested enough to have an opinion. “Education” is the politically correct response of those who wish to tell pollsters that they have a social conscience without, often, having a clue — or at least that’s my take on why “education” crops up as the concern stand-by even when other indicators — letters to the editor, personal conversations, participation in education-related activities and the like — suggest that people are more drawn to questions like Sunday beer sales and renaming the Cynthia McKinney Parkway, neither of which amounts to a speck of rat manure. Clearly some people are deeply interested, concerned and informed, as is one of the contributors here, Mid-South Philosopher. But for every one of him, I suspect that there are 25 mumblers without a clue responding to polls.
Other issues of concern: taxes, state spending and the budget, lumped together as one, came in second with 19 percent identifying it/them as top issue, while immigration followed at 12 percent. Various others, including health care, crime, law enforcement, transportation, voter ID and election fraud, registered in the single digits.
My priorities for the General Assembly would be to avoid new and to continue cutting existing taxes, while passing State Sen. Eric Johnson’s bill to provide scholarships/vouchers for special needs children, amended to include tax credits for the others to buy education services from the provider of choice and home-school supplies for parents who elect that option. I’d like to see, too, elimination of the certificate of need regulation that prevents significant competition in the health care industry.
Today’s question is what, if anything, you’d like to see out of this General Assembly? Republicans really should set as a goal the passage of fewer laws this year than last, and fewer next year than this. For true conservatives it should be the mark of a political life well lived that, as individuals, they propose and pass nothing that expands the reach or size of government.
Best interest of child carries little weight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s a familiar story. A Marietta woman, headed to jail on theft charges, leaves her two daughters, one 3 and the other 6, in the care of her boyfriend. He showed up. And then vanished. When the adult female made bond three days later, the 3-year-old was unfed and unkempt; the 6-year-old was in a diabetic coma.
For three decades or more, the common reaction to the neglect of the two children is that it’s government’s fault. Some social worker should have been wise or prescient enough to anticipate their endangerment, and should have found a loving foster family until some other government agent could nurse, school or rehabilitate the woman into being a mother.
Enough. Stop.
A federal judge last October awarded $11.6 million to lawyers who sued the taxpayers of Georgia to revamp the foster care system — a sum legislators are forced to appropriate in this year’s budget. U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob awarded the activists who brought the suit fees of up to $495 an hour. They had asked for $16 million. The commissioner of the state Department of Human Resources, B. J. Walker, said at the time: “Eleven million dollars could pay the salaries of every caseworker in Fulton County for a year, or it could pay for more than 1,800 children in foster care for a year. Children are the losers.”
That particular case was, for me, the culminating event in the liberal drift of recent decades by judges, tempted by special-interest groups, to arrogate unto themselves “solutions” to social problems — “solutions” at least within the narrow range defined by special-interest pleaders. That same temptation, incidentally, is now before a Fulton County Superior Court judge on education.
So what we get are a few bureaucrats fired or hired, a few lawyers made rich, a few do-gooders made righteous — and more dead babies. Why? Because the culture has changed — 25 percent of white babies, almost half the Hispanic and 70 percent of black — are born to unmarried women, creating a generation of children unlikely to grow up ever knowing commitment, or how “normal” husbands and wives treat each other, or how to form healthy relationships with the opposite sex.
What is really most shocking is the silence of most opinion leaders, politicians, entertainers and others who know how destructive this trend is to schools, to the criminal justice system, to child protection services, but more importantly to the children. A few do speak up. But when the numbers reach 50 percent and 70 percent, that becomes politically incorrect.
So we talk about the failure of ordinary social workers to be omniscient and insist they be fired when they aren’t — and yet on any given day, they are making decisions a mother and father should be making about more than 33,000 Georgia children. It’s insane social policy that allows adults to make babies and then effectively to toss them off tall buildings for government employees to catch.
We have pretended for an awful long time that protection of children is the primary concern of social policy. It really isn’t — and hasn’t been for decades.
The primary concern is to sexually emancipate adults from responsibility for children. Between a welfare system designed to devalue men by marrying women to government — except for the purposes of conception — and a fanatical 30-year abortion war to enshrine the absurd premise that, for some months at least, a woman is free to dispose of human life, no questions asked, the best interest of the child has been the least of policy concerns.
Nobody, neither man nor woman, completely owns the body that is used to create human life. This need not be an abortion debate, but from the moment of conception our interest, through government, is to protect the child from mental and physical neglect, abuse or other forms of mistreatment by adults, even in the womb.
Every child has a right to a mother and father. Every child has a right to know his mother and father, with paternity established at birth by law. Fathers would be held accountable for 18 years financial support. The obligation could be satisfied only by payment or death, with taxpayers devoting all resources necessary to collect in cash or labor.
We should stop using children as toys for adults and as ploys for expanding the government safety net that shields them from responsibility. If we expand government, it should be to give children back a mother and a father.
Permalink | Comments (141) | Categories: Column
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) | 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.
The value of stacking bricks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While vacationing in Brazil, I stopped while bicycling past a small mom-and-pop clay building block factory to watch workmen loading a flatbed truck. The workers, about 10 men who appeared to be no older than their early 30s, were industrious, steady to the task of loading the blocks, which had been moved from inside the factory to the outside, where they were stacked. The truck was pulled alongside and about five of the workers hand-loaded them, four at a time, onto the bed of the delivery truck.
I watched the process with some fascination, owing to the debate leading up to the elections in the U.S., about raising the minimum wage, which in Brazil is now being increased from about $163 per month in U.S. dollars to about $177 per month, starting in April. In the brick-hauling operation, I guessed that a good forklift could have eliminated the jobs of seven of the young men loading the building blocks. It was a time-consuming, highly inefficient process, economical only because their wages, all combined, didn’t raise the price of the bricks to more than the ample competition in the area would allow.
At some point, if wages pressed higher, a smart accountant would have advised the owner to invest the capital in a forklift, to spend a few dollars in training an operator, and to fire the excess workers. The bricks they were making were very low tech. The margins couldn’t have given the owner much wiggle room; his options when faced with higher labor costs, it seemed to me, were to invest capital or close shop.
And what of the 10 workers? Ideally, a country’s education system and economy advance in sync, so that job skills and needs align. But in the case of the brick factory workers, the alignment has occurred at the low end. An act of Congress couldn’t change that.
The new Speaker of the U.S. House, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), intends to make raising the federal minimum wage a first 100-hours priority when the 110th Congress convenes on Thursday. The legislation, which is likely to bypass the House Education and Workforce Committee and go straight to the floor for consideration, would likely raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $7.25 in phases.
Brazil is not the U.S. But the fact remains that some labors are not worth much. Employers may be able to pass it along in higher prices but in many instances, as with the brick-stackers in Brazil, they can’t. And in that case, either the owners find alternatives to unskilled labor — or they close shop.
In addition to raising the minimum wage, the Pelosi Democrats plan to pass half a dozen pieces of legislation in the first 100 hours. Among them are a ban on gifts from lobbyists to members of Congress, an end to Bush administration restrictions on federally-funded stem cell research, full implementation of 9/11 commission recommendations, and federal government price negotiation for prescription drugs.
Passing them through the House and through the Senate are entirely different matters, of course. But the question here is whether the nation will be better or worse off if Pelosi Democrats’ agenda succeeds.
Children too often seen as afterthought
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We are a nation that tosses babies from three-story buildings and expects strangers to catch them.
The inability to construct or position enough nets to actually catch and save the thousands being tossed by irresponsible parents is captured in a headline from a Christmas Eve examination of what went wrong in the life of 2-year-old Nateyonna Banks of Atlanta.
“Five nets not enough to save toddler,” the headline reads, identifying them in a smaller headline as “caseworkers, supervisors, lawyers, judge, parental adviser.”
This is where we are:
More than a third of children are now born to unmarried women. As recorded by the Child Trends Data Bank, the percent has risen dramatically, from 5.3 in 1960 to 32.2 in 1995 to 35.8 percent in 2004.
For some populations, the problem is epidemic. In 2004, 69.3 percent of births of black children were to unmarried women. For Hispanics, it was 46.4 percent. For whites, 24.5 .
With a few notable exceptions —- Hollywood stars, grandparents willing and able to help raise their children’s children —- these babies brought into the world of the unmarrieds have everything going against them.
Studies repeatedly document the misery in the lives of children such as Nateyonna Banks, delivered into this world by Shandrell Banks, who is now accused of killing her. A “not in the picture” male presumably participated at conception.
Nateyonna’s story has been told repeatedly since she died of head injuries on Nov. 9 —- injuries police believe were inflicted by the troubled woman who gave her birth.
The investigation into her death has produced a string of “should’ve dones” and “might have beens,” all legitimate, all driven by a sincere desire to figure out how to design and where to place safety nets to protect children in the future.
To be honest, I am beyond blaming or firing social workers, judges or supervisors. I don’t want to fire anybody else unless there’s clear and convincing evidence of intentional dereliction of duty.
We simply cannot keep allowing adults to treat children as the inconvenient result of a night of strong perfume or too many drinks, while the government attempts to design a fail-safe system to protect them.
Considering the case strictly in retrospect, different decisions by professionals outside the home might have avoided a tragic outcome for Nateyonna.
But, as the AJC’s Craig Schneider reported, between August and November, a Division of Family and Children Services caseworker visited Nateyonna’s home half a dozen times. A private agency worker hired by DFCS to teach Shandrell Banks how to be a better parent was in the home up to three times a week.
No government system, no matter how extensive or well-funded, can be the mother and father that every child needs and deserves.
We should change our thinking and our laws. We should declare that from the moment of conception until a child is grown, government’s first obligation is to protect. Adults can do virtually anything they want with their bodies until they use them to create human life.
From that moment on, protecting the child is government’s first interest, including removing the child from endangering relationships under certain conditions. Weighing toward removal would be the absence of a mother and a father in the home, a drug conviction of either parent or an adult in the household putting the child’s life at risk.
When adults create harmful living conditions, the state should remove the children to orphanages operated by faith-based or other organizations in conditions overseen by the state.
The burden, then, would be on the adults to prove to a court that they are sufficiently rehabilitated to provide the child a safe and healthy home. It shouldn’t be up to social workers or judges to have to guess.
The law would specify, too, that adults who harm a child mentally or physically could be sterilized to prevent them from creating more lives to be damaged.
The father should not be allowed to be “out of the picture.” He should pay child support or be required to perform labor in public or minimum-wage jobs, if necessary, to provide financial support to the child or to compensate taxpayers for the support they provide.
If we say the public’s interest is in protecting the child, then it should be so from the start.
Permalink | Comments (217) | Categories: Column
Found on the blog in 2006
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Happy New Year!
Congratulations to RW (the original). You got in the last word of 2006. If it is permitted to use the first day of the new year to speak of the year past, I’d wish to thank all who participated in Thinking Right’s first calendar year. I have come to admire greatly the intellect and debating skills of many of you. And I admit too that I have developed an affection for some contributors I’ve never met.
I started the blog intrigued by the possibilities of productively addressing issues by assembling people who could speak honestly with virtually no censorship. The result is sometimes a little rough and occasionally over the line. But I’ve been enormously impressed with, and bouyed by, your efforts to set limits and to achieve equilibrium. There are good folks here, fair-minded and forgiving. For that, I thank you.
As jbmlaw has pointed out to newcomers who are a bit put off by the in-your-face turn a blog sometimes takes, on most every day the discussion has two tracks, one serious and substantive and one, often substantative but combative. As he points out, too, some contributors are quite accomplished at — and sometimes entertaining in — aggressively or humorously making their points. To be honest, some of it is tough for me to take sometimes, especially posts that suggest a willingness to see harm come to this nation, our leaders or to the men and women who defend us. Every temptation is to exclude those voices. But if those views are out there, we should know. So tempted as I am, I’ve resisted most urges. Conservataives sometimes think our views are discounted because we failed the test of political correctness or because the media gate-keepers deemed them as expressed to be unworthy of a place in public policy debates. With that in mind, I have intentionally avoided most inclination to exclude opinion, even when it offends me. The truth is, though, that I am human and have limits and have delighted in seeing the tail lights on some departing posters.
I end the year, or start the year, far more optimistic about the possibilities. I find myself, too, invested in the lives of people I don’t know, of people like Jeff, the Southwest Georgia math teacher, who started innocently and optimistically last June on a journey of conscience to make the world a better place by improving the ability of chiildren in one disadvantaged corner or the world to compete. As with most undertakings, it has been much more difficult than imagined, he tells us in December. But for the blog, I would never have known his mind, his heart or his story. I am, thus, the beneficiary of the lives you open.
After more than 40 years around newspapers, this has been a new experience for me — but a good one. Thank you all for letting me be a part of your lives and thoughts in 2006. And now to the new year: What would you like to see here in 2007? Here being the blog. Here being the state, region or the country.
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »