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March 2007
A woodsman with a heart big as Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When Bill Oettmeier invited me to the Okefenokee Swamp more than 20 years ago, I was not certain whether it was to duel, socialize or pick the spot in the swamp for my shallow grave.
Thus began, from his strong disagreement with the views and characterizations expressed in a column on the timber industry, a friendship that extended for more than two decades. The friendship ended this week. I write too late of my affection.
The blessing of a career in the newspaper business is that it has brought me, often because of initial disagreements, into the world of people like Bill Oettmeier of Fargo, Ga., on the western edge of the Okefenokee just north of the Florida line.
Over the years following that first visit to the Superior Pine Products Co. lands in Clinch and Echols counties, our paths crossed, often for friendly debate on policy issues: conservation, public education, rural development, taxation and the like. He was a passionate environmentalist and conservationist, gentlemanly in the Southern tradition, but resolute in the cause of forestry.
Besides charm and a superior intellect, Oettmeier possessed a quality that I find irresistible — an abiding love for the people and the soil of Georgia. Wish the best for them, for Georgia’s people and places, and no mere policy disagreement will ever intrude on friendship.
If ever actions demonstrated a love of place, Oettmeier’s did. Or, actually, it was most always the actions of Oettmeier and his wife, Patricia, the first mayor of Fargo. A logical choice she was, too. At the time of my initial visit to unincorporated Fargo, she had decided the town needed recreation for seniors. So she persuaded the state and a family business to donate two old houses, which were joined. Townspeople, at her urging, contributed $10,000 to buy a ceramics kiln, and every Tuesday seniors gathered for arts, crafts and fellowship.
Bill and Patricia, or Trisha as most knew her, were a team for 44 years, constantly pursuing ways to make life better for people on the edge of the swamp, even setting up the Oettmeier Foundation to continue serving the community.
When the Clinch County school board voted in 1991 to close the tiny school at Fargo because of a state regulation, the Oettmeiers organized an effort that raised $12,500 to take the whole town to Atlanta to appeal to Gov. Zell Miller. The governor opted, instead, to go to Fargo.
The school did close, forcing children to ride 30 miles to Homerville. But nine years later it reopened for the youngest children, thanks to a 1998 charter school law. Gov. Roy Barnes attended the school’s dedication — inspired, no doubt, by the persistence of a man whose concern for public education the governor had recognized in naming him to the state Education Reform Study Commission.
When next I heard from Oettmeier, he was proposing his most far-fetched idea for Fargo — a new state park. The state had not created a new park in 10 years. But Fargo got its park, to emphasize environmental education, prompted by Mayor Patricia Oettmeier’s dream and a gift of 317 acres on the Suwannee River from Superior Pine Products Co., the company Bill and his father served for 81 years. “We wouldn’t have had a park there had it not been for the Oettmeiers,” says state parks director Becky Kelley
My last correspondence from Bill came on Feb. 8, as usual concerning a matter of public policy, and a bill he expected to come before the General Assembly to eliminate the requirement that the state forester be a forester. “My prognosis is very bad but that does not keep me from being concerned about Georgia,” he wrote.
When last we talked outside the state Capitol, he had told me, almost as an afterthought, about the discovery of prostate cancer. Georgia, not cancer, was then on his mind.
The cancer, he now said, had metastasized. Treatment produced minimal results. “I told the oncologist I was not coming back. I feel great, then go to see him and he tells me I am dying. Humph.”
“I came to the conclusion that I had never been able to relive one day in the past, nor live one day in the future and today is great and I am going to enjoy it. … Life is good. Now tell me about you.”
Life, in the example you set, is good, Bill. Today at 1 o’clock, family and friends gather at Fargo United Methodist Church to bid farewell to a good and exemplary life. The Georgia he loved and the critic he befriended mourn his passing.
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Sunday booze, jurors refuse, Harland blues
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Get a Post-it Note for the refrigerator. Buy booze on Saturday. The disproportionate anger of those who want Sunday sales is an example of the “me-centered” universe. We’re angry about any rule or law that won’t let us park four vehicles in the driveway or that doesn’t let us buy booze when we want. Me, me, me.
• Lynn Turner, convicted of killing her husband and then her boyfriend for their insurance, gets the mushy-middle’s version of capital punishment. Life without parole. The jury wants her dead, but they don’t want any role in her execution. So they sentence her to die in prison.
• The shrillness of the PeachCare debate should remind every fiscal conservative that no more government, nor any social program, should be created that they don’t intend to grow. Once created, politicians can never cut back without the Chicken Littles insisting that the sickest, neediest and most vulnerable are being denied essentials, true or not.
• I hate connecting laws that connect fees and fines to a specific program, when it’s not a genuine user fee, such as those golfers pay to maintain public courses. Adding $200 to the fines imposed for driving more than 85 mph anywhere, or 75 mph on two-lane roads, is an example. It’s created to help fund a statewide trauma network. Henceforth, a shooter in Atlanta or a knifer in Savannah should be fined an extra $500. Or do we tax guns, knives, ladders and automobiles?
• The changing world, Part 1: President Bush quotes two Iraqi bloggers who wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on reasons for optimism.
• The changing world, Part 2: “Even Bob and I do online banking,” Margaret Reiser, the sole grandchild of check printer John H. Harland, told AJC columnist Maria Saporta. Bob is her husband. John H. Harland Co., an Atlanta institution and a Wall Street darling, churned out profits for 84 years. It’s being sold to a New York-based company.
• If British sailors weren’t in Iranian waters, as Iran claims, and as Global Positioning System coordinates refute, Iran has committed an act of war. Not that Britain can do anything but wait them out. You can’t be weak in a mean world. And Britain is.
• Call me to testify on anything this Congress is “investigating” and I’m taking the Fifth. And so, too, should officials of the Bush administration. Expect one witch hunt after another for two more years. Phony election-advantage political investigations breed cynicism, and destroy the credibility Congress needs for the real scandals.
• Ho hum. Another spelling bee. Another home-schooled winner. Shoman Kasbekar of Macon.
• Voters who lived 36 years ago in Fulton and DeKalb gave their consent to impose a one-cent transportation tax and to use it to buy bus and train service, as opposed to, say, improving roads or adding capacity. Other counties chose the latter. MARTA now wants to extend the tax from 2032 to 2047. The youngest voter granting permission in 1971 will be 79 years old when the tax expires in 25 years. Of course, without question, voters should be asked whether to extend it 15 years beyond that.
• Here’s a shocker: The National Organization for Women political action committee endorses Hillary Rodham Clinton. Wonder how they knew Condoleezza Rice wouldn’t get into the race. Danged premature, I say.
• A state law aimed at curtailing illegal immigration requires large contracting firms with public contracts to verify that potential employees are here legally. To which the president of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Georgia, Bill Anderson, responds: “Finding quality craft tradespeople has been a challenge for many, many years, and anything that could potentially affect that number causes great concern.” To get this straight: A law that forces contractors to hire only those who are lawfully here “could potentially affect” the pool of quality craft tradespeople?
• Don’t believe I would admit that: Circuit City will cut costs by laying off salespeople who earn above average for their assignments, including 80 in Atlanta, and replacing them with cheaper hires. This is every working American’s fear. Methinks the company has a public relations disaster on its hands.
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Legislature: Less is more
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The AJC today offers a recap of legislation that survived or failed to make it from one chamber to the other by the deadline legislators have imposed on themselves. Among bills that failed to make it across was the governor’s tax exemption for retirees, a return of payday lending in Georgia, Sunday booze sales, apologies, and the full-lobbyist employment legislation that would have revised the way the state regulates hospitals and their competitors.
A number of influential legislators were quick to say that the Legislature’s only real mandate is passing a budget. “The biggest thing we do over here is spend $36 billion worth of state and federal money…” said Senate Majority Leader Tommie Williams (R-Lyons). “But at the end of the day we’re going to get that done, and I think in a very — I hope — appropriate way.” His counterpart in the House, State Rep. Jerry Keen (R-St. Simons Island) said essentially the same thing. “Our focus this year was more on the budget and really less is more.”
I, too, am of the less-is-more school. The General Assembly needed to get control of PeachCare spending and the indigent defense system, which has come up short of cash, in part because of the Brian Nichols case in Fulton County. Legislators took steps to deal with those, with the House tightening future eligibility for PeachCare and limiting defendants in capital punishment cases to two taxpayer-provided lawyers. The Senate passed a proposed constitutional amendment to limit future spending, and it approved school reform — charter school districts and special education vouchers.
The session has another 9 working days to go, but I’d be satisfied just with the budget and the major bills that crossed over. Could anybody want anything more out of this General Assembly?
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The big tent Republicans
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The big tent Republican Party has its Northeastern RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), its Blue State moderates and its finger-to-the-wind crowd repositioning support on Iraq to the next election cycle. And they have U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who joined with Senate Democrats on Tuesday to move their timetable to defeat toward a promised presidential veto.
Hagel and U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) joined with Senate Democrats — minus Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent Democrat — to position the Senate for a final vote today or Thursday on the withdrawal timetable. Georgia’s two senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, voted to remove the nonbinding timetable. Their effort failed, 50-48.
Hagel, who has also suggested that Bush could face impeachment, is — can you believe this? — considering a race for the Republican nomination for president. I don’t have a preferred Republican presidential candidate yet. Among those who have some appeal are Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich. Among those who have zero: Chuck Hagel.
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Public must get a voice on Jekyll’s future
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For 92 cents a day, a sum that has not changed in 57 years and won’t change for 42 more, the People of Georgia rent some of the most desirable real estate within its borders to 623 homeowners on Jekyll Island.
The rate, for parcels that average about a third to a half-acre, was fixed for 99 years — a period now set to expire in 2049. A bill now before the Georgia General Assembly would extend the general oversight and management of Jekyll to the 9-member Jekyll Island Authority for another 50 years beyond that. The authority could then decide whether to extend individual leases for residential or commercial property for up to another 50 years, to 2099.
When the current 99-year leases on individual parcels expire, the authority could decide on its own whether to extend them and at what rates.
The Georgia House of Representatives last week agreed, 130-35, to extend the authority’s control over the island, which correctly markets itself as “Georgia’s Jewel,” for 50 more years. With it comes a license to develop the island and impose lease rates as the authority sees fit. State law, passed in 1971, limits development to “not more than thirty-five percent (35%) of the land area of Jekyll Island which lies above water at mean high tide.” Most of that has been utilized with existing residential, hotel, golf and commercial development.
Jekyll now has 10 hotel leases, said Bill Donohue, executive director of the authority. Of those, eight exist as hotels, six on the beach, one across the street and one in the historic district. The hotels generate about $2 million per year in revenue to the authority. Lease payments are subject to negotiation when properties change hands. The 623 residential properties generate $209,315 per year — a sum that does not escalate when properties are sold and is not adjusted to inflation.
The General Assembly in 1950 decreed that Jekyll should be affordable for “people of average income.” That’s certainly no longer the case with residential properties, most of which were built prior to 1970. A 35-year-old, three-bedroom, two-bath house on Jekyll now sells for $450,000, said Donohue, while the authority collects an average of $28 per month. If residential leases are extended when they expire in 42 years, “the idea would be to get them to pay market-based rates immediately,” Donohue said Monday.
The plain fact of the matter is, however, that questions about how to develop — or not develop — a Georgia treasure over the next 92 years should never be left to an unelected authority, whose members serve four-year terms. Nor should it be decided by a single governor or a General Assembly making decisions on the fly.
There’s no inherent reason to distrust the authority’s board or its stewardship. But if it’s granted a 50-year extension now, there’s nothing stopping five scalawags from calling a meeting on a Sunday afternoon 20 years from now and extending sweetheart leases over a valuable public asset for another half-century. Once it’s done, the public has no recourse. They can’t throw the bums out because the bums aren’t elected.
The fact is that two things should happen. Three really. The first is that the state Senate should defeat this bill to extend the Jekyll Island Authority’s management and oversight another 50 years past 2049. The reason is not because of bad management or because its board hasn’t shown responsible stewardship. It’s simply because decisions made now have consequences for the next five generations, at least.
The second thing that should happen is that a state commission be appointed to take recommendations from the Jekyll Island Authority and pull together a 92-year plan that spells out what percentage of the island is to be developed, what the phrase “affordable for people of average income” means, what density is to be allowed and where, and that makes clear to current residential leaseholders that a public asset will revert to public use in 2049. The property of 9 million Georgians is too valuable to assign to 623 individuals.
The third thing that should happen is that a state constitutional amendment should be drafted to reflect the will of the people of Georgia on how they want the island developed for the next five generations or more. It is far too consequential to be left to a single governor’s appointees or to a 40-day session of the General Assembly where legislators are shoveling words into law.
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Disgusting use of pork
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President Bush, speaking of the shameless Democrats and a few Republicans who sent the Senate a porked-up troop funding bill with a surrender timetable on Iraq:
“They set rigid restrictions that would require an army of lawyers to interpret. They set an arbitrary date for withdrawal with no regard for conditions on the ground. And they tacked on billions in pet projects that have nothing to do with winning the war on terror. This bill has too much pork, too many conditions and an artificial timetable for withdrawal. As I’ve made clear for weeks I will veto it if it comes to my desk.”
The two Georgia House members who would have been defeated in 2008 had they voted with Speaker Nancy Pelosi — Jim Marshall of Macon and John Barrow of Savannah — voted no. U.S. Reps. David Scott of Atlanta and Sanford Bishop of Columbus — voted yes. Both were once thought to be moderates, but Scott has moved to the left, recognizing that he’s most vulnerable to a primary challenge in a safe Democratic district that runs around the west side of Atlanta.
Bishop, likewise, is more vulnerable from the left than the right, even though his Southwest Georgia district is largely rural and it’s conservative on defense and security issues. But it’s one, too, that’s heavily agricultural. Bishop, who refers to himself as “the peanut congressman,” was among those who put $74 million into the Iraq funding bill to cover storage fees for peanut growers. Shameful. Paying farmers to sell out the country at war by consenting to the imposition of a pull-out timetable is a disgusting use of political pork.
U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Atlanta, a bellwether of the party’s anti-war fringe, voted against the bill because he wants the troops out of Iraq yesterday. The left so overplays its hand. With Lewis and Pelosi in the lead, it will again on Iraq.
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Bipartisanship shines in effort on budget cap
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Amid the cynicism that smothers Washington and the gamesmanship that erupts under the Gold Dome, the occasional nugget surfaces, inspiring hope that this adventure in democracy can work.
As it surfaced last week in the Georgia state Senate, the whole process, revolutionary as it was, took barely seven minutes. As is usually the case, however, the more telling story is the one that preceded it.
For the record, the event was Senate passage of a proposed constitutional amendment, the Taxpayer Protection Amendment of 2007, to cap the growth of state spending. When its sponsor, state Sen. Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock), brought it to the floor on Valentine’s Day, it failed. He asked for reconsideration. When he brought it back last week, it passed 44-6, well above the two-thirds a proposed constitutional amendment requires.
Before the tax-and-spenders leap from tall buildings, feeling their lives doomed by limitations imposed on their favorite exercise — using other people’s money to fund their agendas — compassion compels me to coax them from the ledge. The proposed amendment is not that onerous, nor is it inflexible, nor is it the end of the Era of Big Government. It’s simply a device that informs politicians — and taxpayers — that spending is occurring beyond the rate of inflation and population growth.
The real story here is Chip Rogers’ enormous skill in finding compromise without consenting to poison pills or to neutering language or amendments that move him off target. Sometimes, as clever lawyers and legislators know, changing three or four words can gut a bill or turn it into something entirely different.
Rogers not only compromises when necessary to advance an important idea, but he accommodates in good faith, even to the point of strengthening the opponents’ hand — something State Sen. Tim Golden (D-Valdosta) noted in reflecting on the negotiation that led to passage of Senate Resolution 20. As an example, Rogers’ language specified that when the economy turned down, legislators could spend a sum equal to that appropriated in any of the three prior years. The intent is to keep them from getting boxed in by economic cycles.
That concerned Golden and other Democrats. “We talked about the three prior budget years,” says Golden. “He said, ‘let’s just take any prior year,’ which gave us another level of comfort.” Rogers agreed, too, to another concern of the fiscally conservative Democrats, that excess revenues be pumped into reserves until they reached 10 percent of the prior year’s budget, another protection against downturns. On next year’s $20 billion budget, the reserve would be $2 billion. It’s now 4.26 percent, or about $693.5 million, and can go up to 10 percent, something that a number of influential legislators support, including House Ways and Means Chairman Larry O’Neal (R-Warner Robins). For most of its existence, the reserve fund was considered full at 3 percent, though a governor at his discretion could increase that to 5 percent.
Golden, and other Democrats who include Doug Stoner of Smyrna and George Hooks of Americus, argued, too, that the first priority for excess revenues should be to fund student enrollment growth, a sum that this year amounts to about $167 million. Rogers readily agreed — and he agreed, too, to give the General Assembly power to declare a financial emergency and, after reserves were exhausted, to waive the spending cap.
The good-faith negotiation that led to a bipartisan compromise on an important issue is noteworthy. For one, it demonstrates that the two parties can work together in good conscience on serious matters. And it is the beginning, I believe, of something that’s important to having a competitive two-party political system in Georgia.
Democrats have a serious problem in attracting mainstream white Georgians, a problem worsened by the national party’s continued pull to the left by its antiwar fringe. In June, voters in the 10th Congressional District will elect a successor to the late U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood. The district stretches from Augusta to Eatonton to the North Carolina line. No known Democrat has a prayer in the district because the party is incapable of pulling more than about a quarter of the white vote in an 85 percent white district.
The way to be competitive is to move into the mainstream while avoiding having some of its shriller liberal voices dominate — and define — the Democratic Party in Georgia.
The effort by Golden, Stoner and Hooks begins that journey.
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Delta’s CEO; Dem’s political PeachCare ploy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right for this week:
• Amazing how much Delta’s CEO Gerald Grinstein has done right — topping it off with an exit plan from bankruptcy and from the company. No stock, no cash for him and anything he might have gotten will fund hardship and education grants for Delta workers, who get cash and stock for hanging with the company through tough times. Some things are more important than money. Class is one. And Grinstein’s got it.
• Anybody inclined to think Republicans are hard-hearted should have heard state Rep. Larry O’Neal of Warner Robins pitch the House in support of $1.2 million in reparations to Robert Clark, who spent 23 years or “8,393 nights in prison” for a rape he did not commit. The resolution passed, 132-25. O’Neal’s sorrow sounded genuine, as was the admiration he expressed for Clark’s “demeanor and attitude” in the face of a wrong.
• Headline: “High court considers student rights.” That would be going to school, behaving and minding the adults. It would not be unfurling a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner at a school-sanctioned event, in this case an Olympic Torch Relay in Juneau, Alaska. The principal took action; litigation ensued.
• Does anybody think handing over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will satisfy the sharks? Of course not. The Dems’ Washington, D.C., game is to destroy the administration, not to find truth. It’s politics by subpoena. Fire the crooks, stand by the besieged.
• The state House is extending the Jekyll Island Authority’s lease over the island another 50 years, from 2049 to 2099. Any single parcel, residential or commercial, extended beyond 2049 should be extended at market rates. Why would the state wish to give away public property of considerable value — which is what it could be tempted to do in extending individual property leases on Jekyll Island beyond their scheduled 2049 expiration? A 50-year lease on any parcel there has to be golden.
• As pictured in the AJC, the Atlanta Presbyterians for Peace and Justice marching in Washington, D.C., against the war, look old. Maybe to reciprocate appreciatively, the 20-somethings should march to protest food at the nursing home.
• ‘Tis a mystery to me how run-of-the-mill soil and water conservation district supervisors became “erosion watchdogs” at the center of a dispute over whether they should be appointed or elected. Only nine of 174 up for election last year were contested; in 27, nobody qualified. So appoint. Avoid ballot clutter.
• Rep. Mark Hatfield (R-Waycross) is among that wave of solid young conservatives beginning to surface in the state House and Senate. He objected to and voted against a bill that would ban the sale of marijuana-flavored candy to children. Who could oppose that? A good conservative who recognizes that “taste” is not a standard judges can, or should try, to employ in deciding what’s legal.
• Sorry, but payday lending is not a Republican or a conservative issue. Doesn’t reduce the size of government, promote personal responsibility, strengthen the family or reduce taxes.
• Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, whose indecisiveness walloped her state during the Katrina disaster, won’t seek re-election this fall. U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican who represents southeastern Louisiana in Congress, would be a good replacement. Actually, it is selfless of Blanco to step aside and give her party a chance to hold the governor’s mansion.
• The manufacturer who produces 95 different brands of pet food confirms it: Price sells dog food to me.
• The supplemental budget, the source of the spat between the state House and the Senate, should be a supplemental — for adjusting sums in the current budget to reflect student enrollment increases and the like, not for introducing new spending and pork. The GOP needs to remember what they objected to when they were in the minority. And not take ownership.
• Cynical. How else to describe a U.S. House that adds money for veterans and children’s medical care (PeachCare) to a $100 billion funding bill for troops in Iraq, to which they’ve attached a surrender-and-go timetable. Some $20 billion in domestic spending is added to buy votes and to give Democrats political fodder when the president vetoes this bill, as he must. Cynicism reigns in the district.
• Metro Atlanta has 5 million people, up a million in less than six years. No more relocation permits should be issued until the region adds road capacity — especially permits to people who insist on calling Coca-Cola and other soft drinks “sodas.” Learn the language. Or speak Spanish.
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The politics of subpoena
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday authorized subpoenas for presidential adviser Karl Rove and other White House and Justice Department officials in its political “investigation” into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. The subpoena authorization set up a potential constitutional confrontation with President Bush.
The President Bush offered to allow the officials to testify under conditions. Among those is that it would limit the kinds of questions they would answer and responses could not be recorded or transcribed. They would also not respond under oath.
In addition to Karl Rove and Harriett Miers, the House committee wants to interview D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, William K. Kelley, the deputy White House counsel and J. Scott Jennings, a special assistant to the president and deputy director of political affairs. The White House agreed to make Rove, Miers, Kelley and Jennings available for private interviews. Those would be limited to communications between the White House and people outside about requests for the U.S. attorneys resignations. Bush said he would invoke executive privilege to prevent aides from testifying publicly under oath.
Bush has not choice now but to fight. He faces two years of politics by subpoena. Feed the sharks now and they’ll be back tomorrow and the day after. Bush’s poll numbers are low — but when it comes to fighting Democrats in Congress, he’s on equal footing. This is a Congress and a party without an agenda — except to trash Bush and the war in Iraq. Ultimately, the country will reject that strategy and the party that pursues it.
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Lights, camera: Actors to their places!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ah, the good old days of House Speaker Tom Murphy and Lt. Gov. Zell Miller are back — that era when at some crucial time, one or the other would lock down provoking a momentary crisis in the legislative process. Tuesday was the 29th legislative day of the 40-day session, meaning that one day remains for the originating body to pass its legislation over to the other. Presumably, legislation that doesn’t make it over by the 30th day is dead for the session — though in some cases, language from “dead” bills can be attached to other bills.
Tuesday was significant because the House just passed its “supplemental” budget for last year — the budget originally intended to make adjustments to last year’s spending. The main budget has not passed yet.
The House chose to add a dash of pork to the supplemental and to include some of Gov. Sonny Perdue’s new legislative priorities, like his “Go Fish Georgia” initiative. On the day the supplemental passed, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle informed the House that the Senate wants a clean supplemental budget, one that addresses emergencies and adjustments. Thus started the Miller-Murphy moment.
The Senate is right — right in two ways. One is that the supplemental should be for fleshing out last year’s spending and nothing more. The other is that, as presumed fiscal conservatives, Republicans shouldn’t be pouring in the pork — special approporiations for the golf and other halls of fame, for example.
Two or three useful bills did “cross-over” Tuesday. One would take 75 percent of the revenues from red-light cameras, after paying for equipment and maintenance, and divert it to the state for funding a trauma network. That’s next best to banning them altogether. It reduces the incentive for cities and counties to use traffic cameras as a revenue tool. One Cobb County intersection, at Windy Hill Road and Cobb Parkway, generates $1.7 million in revenue to Marietta.
The other bill that passed the House would allow judges to impose the death penalty — or some other — when 10 of 12 jurors agree on capital punishment. Now the decision has to be unanimous. Some jurors deceive prosecutors by hiding their opposition to the death penalty — and then simply refuse to agree, no matter the crime. A unanimous jury would still be required for conviction. The bill now goes to the Senate.
The budget standoff may sound like a crisis. But sit tight. Been there, done that. Miller and Murhphy work it out eventually.
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Stem cell bill covers ethical bases; pass it
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At 41, state Sen. David J. Shafer of Duluth is already talking about how he wishes to be remembered when he is gone from this Earth.
The seriousness with which he approaches, and his diligence in lining up scientists, medical experts and ethicists to weigh in on what is often a controversial topic — stem cell research — is testimony to his belief that Senate Bill 148, the Saving the Cure Act, will shape that legacy.
Shafer’s bill is subtitled Keone’s Law to honor Keone Penn, a young Gwinnett man cured of sickle cell anemia by an experimental treatment involving an umbilical cord stem cell. The bill establishes a Newborn Umbilical Cord Blood Bank, or a network of banks, overseen by a 15-member state commission. Banks could be public or private. All state hospitals would be required by June 30, 2009, to inform pregnant women that they can donate postnatal tissue and fluid to the bank.
Shafer had essentially passed a bill last year, which is widely regarded as good public policy, but it fell victim to last-night logjam and a long, filibuster-like speech by state Sen. Vincent Fort (D-Atlanta), who was arguing an unrelated bill. It is on today’s Senate debate calendar. Impressive about Shafer’s push is the effort he has put into declaring and supporting the need to bank stem cells from “sources other than the human embryo and by processes which do not result in the destruction of human embryonic life.” That has been the controversy, of course, over embryonic stem cell research. Ethicists and others fear that ultimately the search for cures involving embryonic stem cells could involve the creation of human life for the purpose of destroying it. It’s a legitimate concern.
“Stem cell research in general has been hampered by the ethical controversy over embryonic stem cells which are presently derived in a process resulting in the destruction of the human embryo,” Shafer declares as a finding of fact. Yet, he goes on, “nondestructive stem cell research using stem cells from postnatal tissue and fluid has already resulted in treatments for anemia, leukemia, lymphoma and sickle cell disease” and are in clinical trials “for multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and spinal cord injury.”
In a letter to Shafer, the director of the Project on Bioethics and American Democracy in Washington, Yuval Levin, writes that:
“For too long, the stem cell debate has been distorted by those who advocate exclusively for research in which human embryos are destroyed. They insist that any attempt to find ways to advance stem-cell science without harming nascent life — and, thereby, to serve both science and ethics at once — is misguided.”
But as they attempt to make that case, Levin writes, “the ideal role for government in the stem cell field … is to encourage productive avenues of research that avert the ethical dilemmas surrounding stem cell research, rather than exacerbate the disputes that arise around those dilemmas.”
Establishing the bank for amniotic fluid and postnatal tissue advances stem cell science in an ethical way that is “a model of balanced and constructive public policy,” Levin concludes. His project is part of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.
Jennifer C. Lahl, national director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, which has endorsed Shafer’s work, notes that “diseases like sickle cell anemia and many of the blood cancers like leukemia are being treated today using umbilical cord blood stem cells.”
She added: “What wonderful news for these children and their families!”
Physicians and researchers, asked to assess the claims made in the dozen findings of fact offer support. Dr. James Carroll, a professor and chief of the Child Neurology area of the Department of Neurology at the Children’s Medical Center of the Medical College of Georgia, notes that “there is a great need for banking umbilical cord stem cells.” He continued:
“While parents in higher socioeconomic groups can afford to ‘bank’ cells from children in their own families, and, thereby, make it more likely thier children will have a potential match, this option is not financially feasible for most. … The need for such a bank is even greater for minorities, because it is often more difficult to find a match for children in these groups.
“With 100,000 umbilical cords, we could match between 95 and 99 percent of the population,” said Shafer. Creating a bank or banks of that size from voluntary donations would likely take several years.
This really is a no-brainer. “It is unusual to come across an issue that clearly eclipses political party considerations,” said Dr. Carroll. “[Senate] Bill 148 is one of these issues.” Indeed it is.
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Beer, Heritage and subpoenas
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Notes from the weekend:
Item: General Assembly returns today. And how did we get here? The “pressing” issues attracting public attention are Sunday beer and wine sales, whether to apologize for slavery and eugenics, Confederate Heritage and History Month and payday lending, Republicans, who support lots of ideas that would be unpopular among most media critics, like vouchers, really do need to become more media-savvy so they know when to stand and argue unpopular ideas and when to leave them on the back-burner.
Item: State Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) is attempting to pull together something that would put the state on record as apologizing or expressing regret on slavery, as Virginia. These debates really are growing tiresome. And an apology is meaningless without compensation. This is wholly about politics, of course. As House Speaker Glenn Richardson noted, Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature from just after the Civil War until three years ago and the demand never surfaced.
Item: Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani gains, John McCain slips among Republicans. Republicans who say they would consider voting for Giuliani increase from 58 in February to 64 percent, while those who would consider McCain slide from 46 to 42 in a Harris Poll conducted March 1 thorugh 12. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans list Rudy as their first choices, 11 percent McCain.
News is good for Newt Gingrich, not for Mitt Romney. Among Republicans, 29 percent would voting for Gingrich and 8 percent list him as their first choice. Some 23 percent would consider voting for Romney, only 3 percent would choose him first.
The dominant consideration for Republicans, and then for the country, is which potential President can best lead a nation at war. Then which is a small-goverment fiscal conservative. And which will appoint strict-constructionist judges.
Item: Did I miss something? Don’t U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President? They do. Democrats and their media allies are determined to find great scandal in the removal of 8 U.S. attorneys by the administration. The administration was dissatisfied with their performance and they were removed. Political appointees serve at the pleasure of the governors, Presidents and other appointing authorities. But settle in for a two-year performance on the use the subpoena power of Congress for political. theater. It’s not about governing; it’s about winning the White House.
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Special needs voucher plan a win-win for students, schools
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgians, by experience and nature, take slowly to change. Part of it is our rural and small-town heritage. Part, too, is the experience of an impoverished region that found seniority in Congress to be an effective strategy for bringing good military-related jobs to poor, under-trained sharecroppers and mill workers.
We warm to new ideas, ease up slowly, talk around them, declare them not to be precisely what we need, agonize — and then buy.
That’s about where Georgia is on legislation now before a House committee to give education choice to parents of special needs students in the state’s public schools. It’s not a new idea in the least. Florida has run the program on which Georgia’s proposed legislation is modeled since 2001. Arizona passed a nearly identical program to Florida’s in 2006, Utah the year before.
And as the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit, public interest law firm based in Arlington, Va., will report on Monday, the idea of giving students and their parents something that, depending on perspective, is either a scholarship, grant or voucher, is not new at all.
“The state of Georgia offers no less than 11 scholarships, grant or voucher programs related to the care and education of its young people, from kindergarten through post-secondary education,” conclude researchers Dick Carpenter and Sara Peterson.
The HOPE scholarship, created in 1993, is the biggest and most popular of them, this year going to 218,000 Georgians. Besides those getting free tuition at state institutions, HOPE also provides $3,000 in public money for full-time students, half that for part-timers, to buy the education services they want from any private college or university in the state, including those with religious affiliations.
For 35 years, public money has gone to private colleges as tuition equalization grants, specifically to promote private higher education in the state. Students choose where to spend. Last year, $900 grants went to 27,362 students. Over the years, more than half a billion taxpayer dollars have gone to nonpublic colleges, including those with religious affiliations.
In addition to voucher-scholarships for post-graduate study, taxpayers also fund a pre-k program for 76,600 children that involves the state purchasing education services from public, private and religious providers, that’s then provided without cost to parents.
The list goes on. “Georgia has spent almost $6 billion helping nearly 4 million citizens since 1973 through choice-based aid programs,” note the researchers for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian research and litigation organization.
Senate Bill 10 pending in the House Education Committee, where a vote is expected the last week of March, is the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act, authored by state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah). It has drawn opposition from the alphabet-soup organizations that traditionally control the General Assembly debate on education issues. But one key to their clout historically diminishes with time. When virtually every member of the Legislature had a family connection to the public schools, either as a teacher or administrator, the agendas of their organizations effectively set the parameters for the debate.
Still, this is a General Assembly nervous about venturing forth with anything unfamiliar. That includes, especially, school choice even when the Special Needs Scholarship Act neither forces nor encourages any parent satisfied with the services their child receives in public schools to make any other choice.
As former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush pointed out in an op-ed in Friday’s AJC, opponents offer gloom and doom scenarios claiming that choice will destroy public schools and that private schools lack accountability.
“Georgia can rest assured,” Bush wrote, “that these doomsday statements have already been proven false in Florida. Our full scholarship program has been in existence for more than six years, and it is working. Equally as important, our public school system is doing better today than it was six years ago.
“Students with disabilities who remain in our public schools are learning more. In fact, we have an 11-point increase in the percentage of our students with disabilities who are reading on grade level or higher over the last six years.”
The parents who leave are satisfied. Those who remain behind are doing better. Who loses?
It’s time for Georgia to get over its nervousness, to get past its reluctance to embrace anything unfamiliar. Nobody loses.
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Up the river, taxing power, an itchy claim
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Credit Georgia for providing a commuting alternative for motorists stuck in gridlock. The state has acquired land for the start of a 43-mile Chattahoochee River canoe trail from near Helen to Lake Lanier. Applying the Lovejoy commuter rail formula, tens of thousands of cars will be removed from rush-hour traffic.
• The Georgia General Assembly and not individual cities, counties or authorities should determine when and how much to raise taxes on consumers who don’t primarily reside in the jurisdiction being taxed. Clayton County commissioners may raise the sales tax on items sold at a portion of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to 8 percent. Talking about taxation without representation …
• Headlines of Dubious Claims, this from Georgia’s Cities, the newspaper of the Georgia Municipal Association: “Valdosta Nips Mosquitoes in the Bud.” I’d just as soon believe “Cairo Conquers Kudzu.”
• Does the General Assembly have the authority to require that voters be who they say they are? Yes. Case closed. “Does this move us toward making the right to vote easier or does it move to frustrating the right to vote?” asked Justice Robert Benham. Well, it frustrates those who aren’t legitimate voters and, by removing them from the rolls, makes it easier to vote for those who are.
• Just as I’m rushing to the defense of a Roswell homeowner being ticketed for having more than four cars on this property that can be seen from the street, I find one of them is a stretch limo from a business he once owned. City officials, meanwhile, seem to have bent over backward to give him an out. Nope. He wants the ordinance changed to accommodate his situation. Ah, America. Fit the law to me.
• “The language of war is victims.” Children. Women. The elderly. Civilians. Innocents. Such is the terrorist mind, as expressed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. You don’t convert terrorists. You capture or kill them.
• A booklet by DeKalb Commissioner Larry Johnson that translates for parents is needed, said his teenage daughter, “so if something bad happens and we need to talk about it, they’ll know what we’re saying.” Or if a parent asks, as they’re wont to do, “How’s school going?”
• “If there’s one thing that can bankrupt America, it’s health care,” says Comptroller General David Walker. In six months, a dozen private sector groups, including Wal-Mart execs, and various medical groups have advocated some version of universal health coverage. It’s a trap — or rather a trip into bankruptcy.
• Some critics complain that this legislative session is churning out too little legislation. My formula for a successful session: Pass the budget, repeal the anti-competitive “Certificate of Need” that minimizes competition in the health care industry, pass education reform and a constitutional amendment to control spending. Praise somebody obscure by putting their name on a small bridge or building, honor the Watermelon Queen and go home.
• A massive high-density development has been proposed on 45 acres near Town Center mall. Has anybody driven I-75 at rush hour? This is insane. Projects approved should not exceed the carrying capacity of existing roads.
• There is something wholly ironic about the Atlanta School Board having the authority to shut down the School for Integrated Academics and Technologies, a charter school in southwest Atlanta, for failing to achieve adequate yearly progress. When has the board shuttered one of its own for failing to educate?
• Some of the best young conservatives, who’ll be stars of the future, represent areas about 40 or 50 miles out from the Capitol. Among them is state Rep. Jeff May (R-Monroe) who has authored legislation that will put a halt to what’s happening next Tuesday where voters in 31 counties, including Fulton and DeKalb, are being asked to approve a sales tax for schools or local governments. His bill doesn’t outlaw those, of course, but it does require that they be held during primaries or general elections, when a fair cross-section of the electorate is likely to go to the polls. Government shouldn’t intentionally try to hold down turnout.
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“The language of war…”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the most interesting sideshows of the attempt by Democrats to force the administration to accept a withdrawal timetable for Iraq has been their effort to find precisely the right language or phrase that will give nobility to surrender. Usually it centers on some version of “we support the troops, so let’s scram.” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass tested a version of it Wednesday as the Senate moved into full debate on a Democratic withdrawal resolution. “The American people are far ahead of the administration,” said Kennedy. “We have an obligation to stand up for our troops and stand up to our president when he stubbornly refuses to change course in Iraq.”
The sideshow had its performances in the House, too, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) had a closed-door set-to with U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), one of the party’s cut-and-run liberals — as opposed to the safe-face-but-leave liberals, which is where Pelosi is. Waters, incidentally, is not modest about her limited importance. This is how she identifies herself on her website: “Congresswoman Maxine Waters is considered by many to be one of the most powerful women in American politics today. She has gained a reputation as a fearless and outspoken advocate for women, children, people of color and the poor.”
Waters is Pelosi’s Sister Souljah on Iraqi withdrawal. Liberals who represent completely safe Democratic districts risk nothing in demanding withdrawal, cutting off funds, or engaging in any other high-risk route to surrender. But some Democrats, like John Barrow of Savannah and Jim Marshall of Macon, would be toast if liberals actually succeeded in forcing a timetable.
It won’t happen, of course. President Bush has vowed to veto anything that hints of a deadline.
And if the world needed any reminder of the stakes here, the tribunal statement of 9-11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, should provide it. “I’m not happy that 3,000 been killed in America. I feel sorry, even. I don’t like to kill children and the kids.” But, he added, “The language of war is victims.”
When reporters ask, don’t tell
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two prominent Marines are holed up, battling an onslaught of media and interest group criticism over remarks that offended them. One Marine, former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller, declared at a fund-raiser in Macon recently that many of the nation’s problems with the military manpower shortage and Social Security were brought about by abortion. Aborting 45 million babies denied the country the workers, soldiers and Social Security tax payers the country needed, he said.
But the real brouhaha was launched by the chairman of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace, a Marine General. What he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune has been widely reported by now. “I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,”said Pace. “I do not believe that the armed forces of the United States are well served by saying through our policies that it’s OK to be immoral in any way.” He also threw adultery into that category and noted that the military does not tolerate it when, as with homosexuality, it becomes public.
Actually, the Pace story should be over by now. He acknowledged, as did his superiors, that he should have stuck to defense of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and kept his personal opinions largely to himself. But alas, the story is not likely to go away for awhile because these days agenda-groups sit poised ready to use any marketing opportunity to advance their interests, as has been the case with organizations like the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which opposes the nation’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Hold tight, General. Marine Zell is bringing reinforcements.
Vision makes comeback in road debates
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sitting in his den with a legal pad, former Department of Transportation board Chairman David Doss of Rome did something that department officials once did routinely in the days before anti-road activists started messing with their heads: He developed a comprehensive state transportation plan that relieves traffic congestion and reduces the barriers to economic growth.
Two components are of great urgency. One is to devise a plan to get traffic in both directions from I-85 to I-75 north of Atlanta without coming down to I-285. The other is moving traffic through Atlanta. Adding interstate capacity around the city is vital, too. And completing the state’s four-lane highway network before development makes it costly and politically difficult, as happened with the project dubbed the “Northern Arc,” is a must.
Critics will pooh-pooh Doss’s approach, snorting that it did not come out of the “planning” process, as a former chairman of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce’s transportation policy committee, Ben Johnson, did in an interview with the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Fair enough. Fair enough, too, to niggle the details. Cost-benefit analysis will establish whether any particular component of the Big Idea state transportation plan should go forward. If we’re not buying improved mobility for the greatest number of Georgians, we should be spending elsewhere.
Doss, in one bold exercise, has reinvented the Georgia Department of Transportation by reasserting its role as the state’s transportation authority. One day responsibility for all state — and metro Atlanta — transportation planning, management and priorities should be consolidated in the DOT, acting according to guidance established by the Georgia General Assembly. The chain should be that regional transportation plans be funneled through the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority to be incorporated, with revisions as appropriate based on legislatively established priorities, to the state DOT. The Legislature, meanwhile, should establish guidelines for funding, including mobility improvement.
But long before that’s possible, the state needs to acknowledge that failing to give manufacturers a route across North Georgia was a serious mistake. Given the option of giving the carpet, automobile and poultry industries a generous tax break or of offering another enhancement that would preserve or grow their businesses, I’d do what Doss has done. He’s identified a corridor about 20-30 miles wide stretching from Jackson to Gwinnett counties on the east to Bartow and Gordon on the west as the route for a toll road, estimated to cost about $7 billion.
The route passes over Lake Lanier and goes through increasingly expensive real estate in Cherokee and Forsyth or Pickens and Dawson. The urgency in getting on with it is that the land becomes pricier and develops more people problems with every passing week. “That’s the single most needed transportation project in this state from an economic development standpoint,” says Doss, accurately.
The connection should already have been under way, but as with so much of Georgia’s transportation planning it got sucked into a variety of parochial agendas. Downtown Atlanta interests objected then, as they do still, because a connector represents “sprawl” — to their minds, at least. Plus, it’s a highway, which is an evil that allows people to flee their social obligations to the inner city and draws money and effort from transportation “alternatives.” And, of course, neighborhoods along the Northern Arc objected, as they do in every instance where something more dramatic than a bike path or a walking trail is proposed.
If Doss is able to do anything worthwhile with his ambitious proposal, it should be to induce state leaders to think comprehensively, to look at all of Georgia and decide which projects will improve the quality of our lives 25 or 50 years from now. Side agendas, whether it’s to discourage development that is pejoratively referred to as “sprawl,” or whether it’s to appease interest groups, should be resisted. What moves us? What removes barriers to economic development?
A real state transportation plan that makes life better for the next generation. That’s what Georgia needs.
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Don’t bet against Newt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Newt Gingrich created a buzz last week when he acknowledged in an interview with James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, that he had an affair — with the staffer who is now his wife — during the effort to impeach Bill Clinton. Clinton was impeached for lying under oath, of course, not for the affair in the White House with a young staffer.
The interview is widely interpreted as an indicator that Gingrich is, indeed, serious about a presidential campaign. Move the discussion about his personal life forward, so the thinking goes, and its kick will be gone next year.
The question for moderates and conservatives is whether Gingrich is supportable as the Republican presidential nominee. Conventional wisdom is that he’d have a tough time in the General Election because his negatives are high, even among Republicans. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 14 percent of potential Republican voters flatly rule out voting for Gingrich.
I’m undecided still, but I am ready for a Big Ideas conservative — and Gingrich is. On health care, for example, the nation is in a mad dash to taxpayer-financed universal health care — something that has the potential to bankrupt this country. The alternative is marketplace solutions based on informed choice and personal incentives.
It’s a problem that requires a committed conservative who knows where he wants to wind up, and has some sense of how to get there. Doing deals that expand government — a prescription drug entitlement, for example — is the conservative’s route to Hillarycare.
Conservatives need somebody who can think and explain the Big Ideas, who can use the bully pulpit to educate Americans to the choices — or else the opposition and media critics will spend four years labeling every initiative as an attempt to “slash” benefits for the needy, or a hard-hearted attempt to save a few pennies at the expense of somebody’s suffering. We really have to move beyond that in the debate — one of the reasons Gingrich is attractive.
Can Newt do it? Probably. He’s right about one thing, already. A year-long pre-campaign season is an eternity. People will be so sick of the celebrities by Labor Days that they’ll be ready to throw them out of office — before they ever put them there.
Time to raise the blinds
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When he was a nobody under the Gold Dome, State Rep. Austin Scott (R-Tifton) discovered what Republicans as a minority had long experienced: Asking for information — and actually getting it — are entirely different.
Even as an elected official with access to Georgia’s attorney general, Scott found himself an outsider with no more success in getting public information from Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany and Tift Regional Medical Center in Tifton than might a high school student pursuing a class project.
Scott’s experiences are not unique. Legislators’ inability to get information to which they are legally entitled — and which, indeed, is essential to their role as the people’s elected representatives — is a persistent problem, even for those now in key budgeting and oversight positions.
If not for her persistence through the summer of 2005, state Rep. Jill Chambers (R-Atlanta) would have found her MARTA legislative oversight committee rendered largely ceremonial by the unwillingness or inability of MARTA officials to answer her questions about its budget.
Other legislators, too, including committee chairmen, complain bitterly that they are unable to get information to which they are legally entitled about salaries, benefits, accounts, program allocations and other expenditures of public money.
State Rep. Burke Day (R-Tybee Island), who is chairman of the committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, distributed to House members in January a copy of a letter he had received from a department head. It came in response to a request for information on the salaries of rangers in the Department of Natural Resources. Wrote DNR Commissioner Noel Holcomb on Dec. 18:
“I am working closely with Governor’s office regarding pay and recruitment and retention for our law enforcement officers, and have already submitted DNR’s budget to the Board and they have approved it.
“Having just met recently with the Governor regarding DNR’s budget, I feel at this time that I am unable to respond to your request for information on the above subject.”
To which Day responded, just as any citizen denied a public record by an ornery counter clerk, “What!!?”
In his comments on the copy distributed to fellow House members, Day wrote: “House Study Committee [on State Law Enforcement Salaries and Benefits] DENIED access to the truth.” And, he wrote elsewhere on the letter from Holcomb: “This is one reason we need to pass Jill Chambers’ H.B. 91,” a bill that would require state departments and agencies to give the Legislature a yearly statement on revenues and spending, a list of contracts valued at more than $50,000, names of conractors and suppliers paid more than $20,000, a list of payments to employees, board members, consultants and other providers of professional services.
Given those experiences, it’s hard to imagine that the wandering souls who come in from the forest to the Big House would ever intentionally make it difficult for the rest of us to access public records or meetings. You can’t have faced an arbitrary denial of records and information — whether you’re an ordinary citizen, a member of an ignored minority in the Legislature or a legislator entrusted with a position of oversight power and responsibility— and not feel “What!!?”
The lesson should never be lost on this new majority under the Gold Dome. The accountable government that conservatives hope to create must also be a transparent government; openness and access are fundamental.
In a conversation recently with Joseph B. Doyle, who directs the Governor’s Office of Customer Service, we talked about a couple of ambitious efforts to make government more responsive. The conversation covered efforts to improve child support services, to give same-day service to a parent, usually the mother, who comes into a Department of Family and Children’s Services office trying to get the court to enforce child support payments. It’s a process that ordinarily takes four months. By handling it same day, as opposed to scheduling a return visit according to a specific caseworker’s availability, process time for enforcement in pilots is reduced to 30 days. The effort is expected to go statewide next month.
An effort aimed at reducing the time Georgians sit on hold when their calls pass through 27 call centers has achieved an average reduction of 3 minutes per call, saving callers 500,000 hours per year. What’s more, 600,000 more calls are being answered. It’s good news, certainly, but the real question is how to continue gaining efficiency and improving service when this governor goes away or attention is directed elsewhere.
Doyle’s response? Gather and report information on response times, dropped calls and misdirected calls and make that information easily available and therefore transparent. The best way to police government to determine whether efficiencies last is to empower Georgians with information. Otherwise, efficiencies are at risk of being flash-in-the-pan.
The same is true of education reforms that are being proposed, including school choice. It’s true, too, of the effort to help consumers become more responsible users and wiser purchasers of health care. The essence of all is to gather information, organize it and make it available — and then count on Georgians to use information to drive reform.
Republicans should never for a minute allow themselves to become a governing party that imposes or tolerates closed government. Information, and more importantly the access to it, is at the core of most everything conservatives want: Greater accountability, a smaller and more efficient government that enhances and promotes personal responsbility. Government in the sunshine should be a given.
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PeachCare, Iraq pullout, Bobby Brown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Nancy Pelosi Democrats have their surrender plan in place. Language to be added to a funding bill would require U.S. combat troops to skedaddle from Iraq by the fall of 2008 — or just in time to avoid any prospect that a Democratic president might actually have to manage a war.
• Bad news for PeachCare. Bailout funds are in the Iraq surrender bill. President Bush has to veto it. Get used to these games. Those who control Congress are determined to put one of their own in the White House.
• Memo to Lovejoy commuter rail backers: Amtrak’s Chicago-Washington train is on time 11 percent of the time. The late-show problem exists throughout the Amtrak system. The reason? Freight-hauling railroads own most lines and tracks are congested
• Clip-and-save headline from ajc.com: “More bad news for Bobby Brown.” He’s Whitney Houston’s bad news.
• Life without parole is the death penalty for jurors who don’t have the stomach for it. Die fast or die slow. Morally, there’s no difference.
• The state Senate has passed legislation increasing penalties for making, possessing or distributing fake IDs. It remains a misdemeanor for the under-21 crowd using fake IDs for booze, but for others the punishment is up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. Here’s a bleeding-heart contest: How long will it take for the law to be declared “unjust” because some violator was two days past 21 or “didn’t know” the ID was fake? About a month after the bill’s signed, I’d say.
• Take and apply when and where you see fit: “We apologize.”
• First Prize in the contest to deprive terrorists of any weapon that might be used against us goes to … Georgia growers of the popular turfgrass SeaIsle Supreme. UGA proposes to license it to overseas growers. Georgia growers, who paid $25,000 for licenses, object. And for good reason too, as Soperton grower Phillip Jennings explains: “We have put too much money into it to allow countries friendly to terrorists to have this grass.” If those suckers get their hands on the Valencia peanut, we’re toast.
• A Russian journalist, Ivan Safronov, who planned to write about alleged Russian plans to sell weapons to Iran and Syria via Belarus “falls” to his death from a fifth-story window. His apartment is on the third. We live in a dream world, both as journalists and as Americans, largely unaffected by the evil that others elsewhere routinely confront. Our “bravery” is going to jail to protect a source; theirs is pursuing a story that could get them killed.
• President Bush should keep his veto pen handy. The Senate agrees to allow airport screeners to form unions. No union should exist in any agency with national security responsibilities.
• Bicycling’s a marvelous sport. But hand it to Roswell Mayor Jere Wood to demonstrate how to make a bicycle an alternative to a car for commuting purposes. He traveled 21 miles from City Hall to the Capitol Tuesday “with a police escort while someone else transported his suit,” according to the news account. Metro Atlanta mayors wanted to make a political statement. They did.
• But for the fact that I’m married and Georgia’s Constitution prohibits same-sex unions, the mega-millionaire lottery winner and “gone fishin’ ” truck driver Eddie Nabors would be awfully attractive, in the Anna Nicole Smith-billionaire J. Howard Marshall II sense. We wouldn’t actually have to live together. Or nothing. Just fish and spend.
• Two state House bills that attempt to address the use of red-light cameras to gin up revenue have promise. House Bill 77, as revised, would divert 75 percent of the revenue, after installation and maintenance costs, to a state trauma network and would require a traffic engineering study before they’re installed. Another, HB 590, would lower fines from $70 to $35. Pass both (if legislators are determined not to ban them altogether). No financial incentive should exist.
• Local governments throughout the state did a neighborly day’s work in sending crews and equipment to help tornado victims in Middle Georgia. DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones, for example, sent seven sanitation employees and equipment to help in Americus.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Pulpit politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last weekend the top two celebrities in the Democratic presidential contest, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, ventured south to Selma to pitch their campaigns to voters in black churches. If the visits evoked concern by any liberal commentator anywhere about the separation of church and state, it was not evident on Monday. Or Tuesday. Or… Imagine, however, how many would have found themselves “frightened” and “angry” if a couple of bigwig Republicans had pitched their messages from the pulpit to evangelicals.
It really is time for the media to get to one standard on whether it’s permissible for candidates to take their politics into the pulpit. It can’t be quaint in one instance, excused as “tradition,” and condemned in another.
Without question, people of faith should get involved in politics and ministers should preach on social issues that grow out of their religious beliefs. But that’s considerably different than pitching camp permanently with one party or the other and with using the church as a campaign tent.
A black congregation moved from Atlanta to my Cobb County neighborhood. I attended one Sunday to hear Andrew Young, advertised as the guest preacher. If I remember the sermon correctly, God isn’t happy with Republicans— or at least He doesn’t approve of the way George W. Bush is running the country. A sanctuary ought to be a sanctuary — from politics.
When time comes, pardon Libby
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This is getting the horse way before the cart, but of course Scooter Libby should be pardoned in the event appeals for a retrial are unsuccessful. The political spin on both sides of this episode makes clear that, as with much of the rest of life in partisan America, what you conclude depends on your taste — or distaste — for this Administration.
Certainly the second-guessers abound. If you believe this is an evil Administration, this is a jury’s affirmation of your bias. Perhaps Libby should have testified on his own behalf, but frankly, I’ve always had trouble getting drawn into this story because it’s been from the start a tale of insider politics in Washington, with one band of power players (the anti-war, anti-Bush/Cheney wing) out to get another. Score one for the visiting team. For now, anyway.
At long last, a plan for war on gridlock
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Give it to David Doss of Rome, former chairman of the state Department of Transportation. The 10-year transportation proposal that surfaced last week is imaginative. It’s bold. And it’s the first real indication that congestion relief is driving this train.
A great frustration with transportation planning has been the lack of promised relief from the grueling ordeal of traffic gridlock. We’re pelted with expositions that advocate “alternatives” to roads, like last century’s rail, or elaborate public transportation systems that require costly equipment and operators — to take you where they go when they’re running.
Meanwhile, gridlock is the continuing result for the most flexible and personal means of transportation that provides travel freedom and mobility to all but a handful of Georgians.
This really goes to the concept of government’s role in our lives. Policy-makers should observe how we choose to live and get about — and then use tax revenues to identify and fix the obstacles diminishing the quality of our lives. Each of us, in traveling daily throughout metro Atlanta, can identify the fixes, whether it’s an intersection that doesn’t work, an exit that backs up into the interstate, or too much traffic for design capacity.
All are fixable — but, instead, we have layers of committees drafting 30-year plans that promise more of the same.
At some point, Georgians should expect and demand more. Status-quo gridlock is not an option.
The “big idea” transportation plan Doss is promoting addresses some of the state’s crucial needs, getting across North Georgia, from I-85 to I-75 and on to Alabama, for example. It addresses, too, the dead-stop gridlock on the Downtown Connector.
And it addresses the capacity problem, with a network of toll lanes around metro Atlanta. The goal is to reduce congestion by half in a decade. The proposed projects would be financed with tolls and with a 10-year, 1-cent sales tax statewide, which would generate an estimated $22.2 billion.
No tax plan of this magnitude will come out of the Georgia General Assembly, pending a yearlong examination of the state’s tax structure and competing needs. So, at best, the transportation proposal is just a conversation-starter for now.
But it has potential.
The state does need to have an open debate, with all cards on the table, about the worsening mobility problem — and how to fix it statewide. The proposed tax, substantial as it is, doesn’t scare me. What does is that this generation of leaders will fail to deliver the quality of life the next generation deserves. Wasting time and money on “solutions” that move a handful of people here and there are deadly to any prospect of building a basic system to serve Georgia.
While significant parts of it, like operating subsidies for intracity bus systems, raise red flags, the proposal is visionary — and it would serve the needs of the next generation. Killing the Northern Arc without offering an alternative way to get pass-through traffic from I-85 to I-75 was shortsighted. Killing many of the expressway projects around Atlanta, such as the Stone Mountain Tollway, was shortsighted. Both put neighborhood politics over the next generation’s mobility and, therefore, its well-being.
While I once dismissed as wasteful the efforts of the good ol’ boy legislators to four-lane Georgia, I’ve now come full circle. The neighborhood politics that have furthered gridlock in metro Atlanta convince me that the time to put in infrastructure is before people arrive. Once subdivisions develop, politicians lose their will. Capitulation is easy. Necessary projects get abandoned.
The proposal Doss brings would pump $3.6 billion into completing the 17 existing four-lane corridors, giving Georgia 3,150 miles of four-lane highways, putting 98 percent of the state within 20 miles of a four-lane.
Georgia should indeed leap ahead on transportation planning. It needs a state plan that involves the governor and legislators, one that brings congestion relief to metro Atlanta. It needs a plan with components chosen on a cost-benefit basis so that projects are forced to compete. Publish the list, along with a timetable for completion. No games. No agendas — except to get us moving.
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Who thinks the South a wasteland?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A charming story in the Sunday paper asks and answers the question: “Think the South is a wasteland? You’re ignorant.” It’s a story Southerners over the age of 50 will have read a hundred times by now as, one by one, the rest of the country and the world discovers that the stereotypes they held to be true aren’t.
This is not intended as a criticism of the story by the Washington correspondent for The Economist, Robert Guest, which is flattering to the region. A quarter of a century ago, an international acknowledgment that the South is not inhabited entirely by knuckle-dragging rednecks would have been a conversation topic for days at the coffee shop. It strikes me, though, that most folks in this region are well past the point in our history where we sit around the coffee shop taking stock of what the rest of the country or the world thinks of us. Most of us are sufficiently informed by reading, travel, associations or television, to have a far more balanced view of ourselves — and of the problems with which the rest of the country and the world wrestle, often unsuccessfully. For good or bad, we have become ordinary.
Truth is we don’t much focus anymore whether we live up to or disprove the expectations of folks elsewhere, or whether the ignorance about this region can be cured. In the past three decades, four Presidents have been Southerners, during which time the world’s media has flocked to this region to explain its “Southern-fried” this or that. If ignorance persists and if the South continues to get a “bad press,” the problem is elsewhere, not in the South.
Who deserves a statue at the state Capitol?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Associate editorial page editor Jim Wooten is on vacation. His “Thinking Right” blog is available daily on ajc.com. Here are some excerpts from last week.
Statues at the Gold Dome
Among my modern-day political heroes, or in this case heroines, a special place is reserved for Margaret Thatcher.
The British Parliament last week unveiled a bronze statue of her in the member’s lobby of Parliament’s Palace of Westminster. She stands in the finest of company, facing the late Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and they were Britain’s two most important figures of the last century. Thatcher served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990.
The statue, the Associated Press reports, “shows her in a typical lively and swashbuckling posture, as though she is addressing the House of Commons, with her right arm outstretched.” (Thatcher’s words to George Bush, the father, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 are appropriate today to the son: “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.”)
Great leader, Mrs. Thatcher, who is now 81. If ever a likeness should be unveiled to the living, she’s a deserving honoree.
The honor prompts a question: In Georgia, who living or dead is deserving of a monument on the Capitol grounds? The House has passed a resolution suggesting former Governor and U.S. Sen. Zell Miller. While I’m a great fan of Zell as U.S. senator, I have a problem erecting a monument to a governor who invited Georgians to engage in behavior that could be harmful to them and their families, as gambling is. Every message from government should be to encourage citizens to behave responsibly and to act in their family’s best interest.
So who would warrant space on the Capitol grounds? Martin Luther King Jr., though he never served in public office, should be there. So, too, should U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. I’d put the late U.S. Rep. Carl Vinson , who served in Congress more than 50 years, there too. And I’d probably get rid of some, moving them to the state history museum that I hope will someday exist.
Is Zell deserving of granite or bronze? Is anybody in the last 100 years who’s not already there: Richard Russell, the Talmadges, Jimmy Carter and Ellis Arnall?
Race and the Obama candidacy
During one of last week’s discussions about the presidential candidates, the conversation turned to Barack Obama, the first-term U.S. senator from Illinois, whose candidacy causes most of the camp-with-the-Democrats media to gush with the adoration of “American Idol” groupies. If we don’t very promptly anoint him president, it’s a sign of America’s lingering racism.
On the Right, meanwhile, he’s seen as a definition-lacking celebrity. Commentator Ann Coulter, who can turn a phrase, refers to him as “Jonathan Livingston Obama” and opined that “his speeches are a run-on string of embarrassing, sophomoric Hallmark bromides.”
In the Thinking Right discussion, a contributor who posts as rarringt offered insightful commentary on Obama and race. Here’s the relevant part of rarringt’s post:
“As an African-American, I don’t sense a whole lot of concern in our community about Obama being ‘black enough.’ As you well know, it’s not a function of melanin content. ‘Blackness,’ for lack of a better word, is about being able to relate to various common threads in our culture, having an understanding of our accomplishments and challenges, and exemplifying a willingness to work to leave things better than the way we found them.
“It’s not meant to be some obtuse, mysterious thing. Obama, and the vast majority of other people of color, fit well into that description, thus taking the question (as far as we are concerned) off the table.
“Besides, as a practical matter Obama’s not a stupid man, and won’t fall into that same ‘where do his real priorities lie’ trap WASPs tried to set for a Catholic JFK.
“The real question, of course, is how white America feels about his ethnicity, and to what extent that will affect the choices of moderate America. I think they’ll like what they see. The dems have a very strong field this election, and there’s a sense of, given current affairs, this election is the most critical in the last 3 or 4 presidential cycles.”
Obama has been careful not to make his success or failure a referendum on race in America and in politics. Is it?
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Red-light cameras, overweight dogs and politicians
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
➢Install red-light cameras to ticket motorists, if you wish. But eliminate the incentive for cities and counties to use them as cash cows. Either roll back property taxes by the sum of fines collected or require that they go through the state’s General Fund to support trauma care. Local governments should never have a financial incentive to decide how vigorously laws should be enforced.
➢Vince Dooley was said to be considering a race for the 10th Congressional District in a special election set for June 19. No, he declared. Just as well. The Dooley my conservative band requested, anyway, was Barbara. With all the candiates getting into the race from the Athens side of the district, advantage shifts to State Sen. Jim Whitehead (R-Evans),who represents about 26 percent of the district vote. He’s got a little age on him, though. 64. Once upon a time, the South sent them young and let them age into power. Carl Vinson, who served more than 50 years, was 30. U.S. Sen. Richard Russell was 36. U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn was 34. U.S. Sen. Herman Talmadge was old. He was 43.
➢Oh goodness, expect orchestrated leaks with dire predictions that would frighten children about the safety of the nation’s airports and air service. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a 14,000-member union, is locked in dispute with the Federal Aviation Administration over pay and staffing Been there. In 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization union (PATCO) struck for 17 sky-is-falling months. Ronald Reagan took decisive action. He fired them. Great man, that Reagan.
➢Agreed that TV and print ads for specific drugs do prompt consumers to ask their physicians for them and may cause them to be over-prescribed. But anything that moves consumers from passivity to active management of their health has to be good. Today paying attention to a medicine. Tomorrow paying attention to bills and to quality of care.
➢You know Americaa’s solved the hunger problem that afflicted previous generations. The Food and Drug Administration recently approved Slentrol, a drug to help dogs lose weight. When our dogs are overweight, hunger in humans is cured, except when individuals make bad choices with food stams and grocery money.
➢Headline: “Land’s explosive past vexes homeowners.” One vexed homeowner is “stunned” and “angry” that nobody told her in 27 years that her home that it was located on the former Camp Wheeler military post near Macon. Darn uncommunicative and uncurious, these neighborhoods. “Nobody told me” is an excuse that comes after due diligence. And probably sooner than 27 years.
➢The Brian Nichols trial is delayed until March 27 to allow the Legislature to deposit more money in the checking accounts of his three private lawyers, whose combined $395 per hour bills are being paid by taxpayers. We’ve seen the future: Defense lawyers and judges can repeal the death penalty by making it cost-prohibitive. Cap spending before this becomes another runaway.
➢How times have changed: I read of a “massive nationwide study of the environmental and genetic factors that make children sick” and alarm bells go off. The Congressionally-created program, projected to cost $3.5 billion, is the kind that becomes a magnet for agenda-bearers. Congress launched the study in 2000. President Bush proposed to terminate it in his 2007 budget, one of 91 programs targeted. Congress just ignored that plea and appropriated $69 miillion to keep it going.
The same story informs us that children will be followed “from their conception to their 21st birthday.” I do trust the government agent there at conception will be permitted to advise the couple that marriage is in the best interest of the just-conceived child.
Who do we honor?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Among my modern-day political heroes, or in this case heroines, a special place is reserved for Margaret Thatcher.
The British Parliament last week unveiled a bronze statue of her in the member’s lobby of Parliament’s Palace of Westminister. She stands in the finest of company, facing Winston Churchill, Britain’s two most important figures of the last century. She served as Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. The statue, the Associated Press reports, “shows her in a typical lively and swashbucking posture, as though she is addressing the House of Commons, with her right arm outstretched.” (Thatcher’s words to the father after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 are appropriate today to the son: “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.”)
Great leader, Mrs. Thatcher, who is now 81. If ever a likeness should be unveiled to the living, she’s a deserving honoree.
The honor prompts a question: In Georgia, who living or dead is deserving of a monument on the Capitol grounds? The House has passed a resolution suggesting former Governor and U.S. Senator Zell Miller. While I’m a great fan of Zell as U.S. Senator, I have a problem erecting a monument to a governor who invited Georgians to engage in behavior that could be harmful to them and their families, as gambling is. Every message from government should be to encourage citizens to behave responsibly and to act in their family’s best interest.
So who would warrant space on the Capitol grounds? Martin Luther King Jr., though he never served in public office, should be there. So, too, should U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. I’d put former U.S. Rep. Carl Vinson , who served in Congress more than 50 years, there too. And I’d probably get rid of some, moving them to the state history museum that I hope will someday exist.
Today’s political quiz: Is Zell deserving of granite or bronze? Is anybody in the last 100 years who’s not already there: Richard Russell, the Talmadges, Jimmy Carter and Ellis Arnall?
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