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Friday, May 25, 2007
State parks; gas prices; Iraq funding
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Poor Zoo Atlanta pandas. They’re losing their ga-ga, goo-goo audience to Ya Ya, the Memphis mom-to be. And now their PR firm has obviously been stolen away by the World of Coca-Cola. Fortunately, however, over-exposure is not fatal, as Britney Spears revealed.
• Hush, John, you’re scaring us. John Kerry’s vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, spoke to Georgia Democrats. Recalling the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, he allowed as to how it’s “time for another Democrat from the South.”
• The GOP should fund a missionary to Candler Park. Democrats pull 99 percent of the campaign contributions there. Same for southwest Atlanta.
• The state should set a three-year limit on funding halls of fame and similar attractions. Or better yet, make it a one-time expenditure. Or even better, enlist the honored industry to pony up.
• If you trust Congress and all future presidents to secure the borders and to live up to the promises in the immigration bill now before Congress, you should support it. Much as its proponents argue otherwise, it still does look like amnesty.
• OK, so some under-utilized state parks or historic sites are being closed on Monday and Tuesday — the slow days — to save money. How many Georgians would vote to raise the user fees by a dollar to $4 to keep them open 7 days? Is that a hand I see down in Valdosta? Nope. Don’t see one.
• A Congress that proposes to fund a war two months at a time really should screw up the courage to cut off funding entirely and take the consequences when the American people take note of what they’ve done. But, for the time at least, Democrats have come to their senses. Funds will continue through the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, and no timetable for surrender is in the latest bill.
• Jimmy Carter is beginning to sound like the cranky old uncle who starts ranting about the broccoli during Thanksgiving Dinner.
• Some Clark Atlanta University students and faculty want its president, Walter Broadnax, fired. The school was penniless and in danger of losing accreditation when he came five years ago. He did the kinds of things private equity firms do to save failing businesses, aligning costs and revenues while attempting to find a financially secure place in the education market. As with the auto industry and the airlines, it may not work. Students and faculty have choice. But for what he’s done, he should be commended, not run off.
• Appalling, simply appalling that the board of Grady Memorial Hospital would shut out an elected representative of the government that pays their bills. Fulton County Commissioner Lynne Riley sat for more than four hours while the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority met behind closed doors to hear a consultant’s report on shoring up the hospital’s fiances. Dumb.
• The brouhaha over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the state Senate’s decision not to confirm a DNR board member originally selected by Gov. Roy Barnes and renominated by Gov. Sonny Perdue, followed by the flap generated by hints that Perdue won’t renominate another Barnes appointee, Dee Simms, as state child advocate, prompt the question: Is it better to fire en masse when administrations change, as President Bill Clinton did with U.S. attorneys, or to pick-and-choose, as Perdue did? The latter certainly — unless every subsequent change is treated as the end of civilization. A president or governor should have the people they want carrying out their policies, subject as they are to Senate approval.
• Oh, please. The U.S. House of Representatives, a two-year re-election campaign, takes note of high gas prices by voting to make gas price gouging a federal crime. This is theater. Devote this wasted energy to securing the borders.
• I’m a victim of vehicle profiling. As the longtime owner of a pickup, I’m scratching my head to connect the vehicle to the neighborhood confrontation between a Cobb County jogger and a man who later approached him “driving a pickup truck.” Had the suspect been driving a little hybrid vehicle, he would undoubtedly have been more even-tempered — or, I suppose, unable to overtake a speedy jogger, thus preventing the crime.
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