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Friday, February 9, 2007
Speeding fines, FEMA fraud and Wal-Mart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Honest John Edwards acknowledges his proposed $120 billion per year health care proposal will require higher taxes. Former presidential candidate Walter Mondale was honest, too. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” It was a very popular admission in Minnesota and the District of Columbia, but nowhere else.
• Local schools have enough trouble without returning to elected school superintendents, as proposed by state Rep. Clay Cox (R-Lilburn). Having a school board and a superintendent each with an independent base is a formula for friction.
• On portraits in the Capitol and statues on the grounds: Portraits should include governors, 20-year Speakers, 50-year legislators and notable chief justices of the Supreme Court or members of Congress. Statues should include Nobel Prize winners, Georgians who became president, U.S. senators or congressmen who served for 50 years and did something, governors dead for 25 years and deemed by historians to have been historically significant, justices of the U.S. Supreme Court from Georgia, and Georgians who led the armed forces in time of war.
• I’m rebuilding a national Democratic Party to my liking. So far, its leaders are U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and … well, I guess it’s just Joe.
• Still don’t understand the connection between the NAACP’s mission and no-knock searches. Wonder if the AARP has a position.
• President Bush’s plan to “slash” spending for Medicare and Medicaid? Never heard of that. Only in America is a budget increase of 5.6 percent a year considered a “slash.” Get used to the word, though. You will see and hear it often.
• FEMA Can’t Win Department: The Associated Press reports that an “analysis of government data obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act suggests the government might not have been careful enough with its checkbook. …” Duh. More than $1 billion in claims were filed and paid for at least 162,750 homes that didn’t exist, the AP reports.
• I really don’t think we should call a Barrow County woman accused of killing her two children a “mother.” Or an Alpharetta man imprisoned for the sexual abuse of his three daughters a “father.” Mother and father are honorifics that should be used for adults who mother and father the children they cause. Use instead “the woman who bore” and “the man present at conception” or some such.
• Public education continues to advance in Georgia. Headline: “People outsmart plants.” Next up: fish. The outsmarted plants are forced to bloom for this weekend’s Southeastern Flower Show. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Agriculture surely objects.
• Life’s good in Cobb County. The Shih Tzus Gone Wild case closed without bloodshed, lawyers or counselors. And bike riders on Columns Drive agree to ride single-file, without same.
• Nashville adopts an English-only ordinance. Southern English?
• Gov. Sonny Perdue proposes an additional $200 fine for speeding in excess of 75 mph on two-lane roads or 85 mph on others. His estimate is that the fines and traffic-related add-ons could generate up to $30 million a year to help finance a statewide network of trauma centers. These are the kinds of false “user fees” that Republicans often like. A genuine user fee, though, levies on a limited group using a government service — golfers, for example, on state-owned courses. If a statewide trauma network is needed, the state should levy the taxes on all potential beneficiaries and fund it. Add-ons grow government while hiding the cost.
• Students and faculty in Greece clash with police over a plan to allow privately run universities. Here, k-12 vouchers frighten the establishment just as much.
• Shut my mouth. Tip me over with a feather. A school superintendent, J. Alvin Wilbanks of Gwinnett County, opposes competition individually, just as the organization that represents superintendents did collectively.
• A telling sentence in a Washington story about Wal-Mart and the unions that use the courts, the media and politicians in its campaign to unionize the company’s 1.3 million employees. The sentence, referring to Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union: “Stern’s union funds a nonprofit group, Wal-Mart Watch, which leaks damaging documents about the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailing giant and pressures it to change its practices.”
• How many liberals would diaper up and drive 900 miles if they thought Barack Obama was courting the GOP? Most, I’d say.
• Jim Wooten is associated editor of the editorial page. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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