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Thursday, April 12, 2007
Legal vs. illegal gambling; and Don Imus
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• A surcharge on traffic violations has generated $11.9 million since May 2005 to start up a statewide driver’s ed program for 16-year-olds. But only $2.7 million has been spent. Why? No single program has proved to be most effective, said Robert Dallas, vice chairman of the commission designing the start-up program. “All of us involved … would like to today, not tomorrow, roll out a program that the experts and data agree is the perfect program. The reality is that does not exist. All the programs have to be put in the context of their respective costs.” What Democrats know, and Republicans are yet to learn, is that program design is less important than spending all the money.
• The World of Coke closes at Underground, leaving a building that would be a fine place for a State History Museum.
• Warning to gamblers: The state owns that franchise and has illegalized competition. Morally, it might have a hard time prosecuting as a crime the activity it pushes in most every convenience store. One difference, of course, is that the Texas hold-‘em crowd is not giving a portion of the pot to “education.”
• Do apologies matter? Ask Don Imus. Yes, his comment was racist. We live, however, in an era where grievance-bearers are poised for the media moment — the stupid, racist or dumb remarks, and not just about race either — that enables activists to claim the microphone to pursue group or personal agendas. I always have the sense that activists have at-the-ready a thousand marketing plans awaiting the window of public attention.
• More surprising to me is not that three inmate-on-inmate killings occurred in March, but that only five have occurred since 2005. One’s too many, of course. But Georgia holds 52,792 convicts, 8,000 of them with mental illnesses and 60 percent of them considered violent. Thanks, guards, for doing a job I wouldn’t take for any sum of money.
• The General Assembly should rescind its 1993 recognition of the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee. Four separate groups claim that mantle. One will show up one day demanding a casino license. The feds don’t recognize any tribe in Georgia. But if they do, it would be hard for the feds to deny casinos since Georgia has also declared a fondness for gambling.
• It would be hard for federal regulators to punish subprime lenders more than the market already has. The problem, always, in talking about subprime lenders is that subprime lenders, “predatory” lenders and those who “trick” bad credit borrowers are not the same. Subprime is legit. People pay for the risk they represent. “Predatory” is fraud added to subprime. Trickery is a salesman’s pitch; whether it has occurred is subjective. Don’t yet see anything here that Congress can regulate more effectively than the marketplace has. Spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to bail out borrowers, as U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) proposes is a lousy idea. Even those who lied about their income? Or bought houses they knew they couldn’t afford?
• When House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) and state Sen. Nan Orrock (D-Atlanta) join forces on any issue, as they’re being urged to do on a resolution urging the feds to become more involved in “family planning,” we’ll know this: We’ve lost one of them. Gone. Reduced to incoherent mumbling.
• Another clue as to whether congressional Democrats have any interest in legislating or simply politicking for 2008 will come on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The Democratic bill, which President Bush has vetoed once, is a slippery slope to embryo farms. The votes don’t exist to override. Georgia’s Republican U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson authored one the president will sign that allows federal funding only for stem cells taken from deficient “naturally dead” embryos. It has risks, too, but is the best deal that supporters of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research will get out of this president. Isakson does have a knack for finding the middle ground on contentious issues.
• By agreeing to return $142 million in excess collections to taxpayers, House and Senate leaders achieved the best possible outcome to their stand-off over the one-time appropriations we call pork — though, clearly, much of it has merit. The state should not fail, for example, to ante up the $15 million needed to acquire the 7,000-acre Paulding Forest Wildlife Management Area, for which Paulding County residents have already consented to taxing themselves $15 million. The Robert W. Woodruff Foundation will give $7.5 million when the state antes up.
• Life’s good. It’s spring in Atlanta. I have a great job I intend to keep. And for however long it lasts, the Braves are the best team in baseball.
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Duke case should scare us all
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Like most conservatives, my first inclination is to support the cops, the prosecutors and the men and women in the criminal justice system who are constantly under the gun. But as former governor Roy Barnes was fond of saying, “I gotta tell ya” And this “I gotta tell ya” is that the prosecutor’s conduct in the case of the Duke University lacrosse players scares the bejesus out of me.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper announced Wednesday that charges are being dropped against three former Duke lacrosse players who were accused of rape by a stripper who performed at a team party on March 13, 2006. The three faced charges — dropped Wednesday — of sexual assualt and kidnapping. After a thorough review, the AG announced that “these cases are over, and no more criminal proceedings will occur.” And here’s the kicker:
“We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations,” said the AG. “We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house that night.”
The next chapter in this unwarranted prosecution should bring the disbarment of Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong who proceeded to charge the three despite the fact that eyewitness indentification procedures were unreliable, none of the samples of DNA taken from the woman’s underwear matched those charged, her story changed and no witnesses corroborated it. Furthermore, the DA knew and did not share with lawyers for the three that no DNA match was found.
“I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people,” said Atty. Gen. Cooper. Nifong for one. The 88 Duke faculty members who rushed to the conclusion, which they later denied, that the three were guilty, signing a newspaper ad that linked the case to “racism and sexism” on the Duke campus. One by one, they should deliver personal apologies to the three students whose lives were almost ruined by false accusation.
Nifong shows us what one out-of-control prosecutor feeding and feeding off mass hysteria can do to individuals caught up in the frenzy.
