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Friday, June 22, 2007
From sprawl to Israel to rented rims
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Grab the children, school them at home. When zero tolerance is interpreted so that children are forced to cut the guns off toy plastic soldiers, as was done in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., it’s time to take the children and run — either to form private schools or to school them at home.
• I can never see the “sultan of sprawl” label applied to former Gwinnett County Chairman Wayne Hill without thinking it reflects bias. Truth is, he did a fine job of managing a fast-growing county. Stopping growth was never an option, though mismanaging it was.
• “I had one developer tell me he had just put in $300,000 to $400,000 in landscaping and he was going to do what he had to do,” said one of the water police in Forsyth County. If car-washing outfits can operate during drought, an exception surely should be made for developers putting in new projects.
• OK, smart guys and career second-guessers on Iraq, what should Israel do now that Gaza is a terrorist campground and the West Bank is a land mine of exploding possibilities? Certainly the U.S. should lift the embargo, as it did. And Israel is right to unfreeze millions in Palestinian tax receipts. Both strengthen President Mahmoud Abbas and his Hamas-less government. Israel, however, is now bracketed by Hamas and Hezbollah with Syria and Iran wishing their destruction. Second-guessing is easy. Charting this course is not.
• In a full press release promoting commuter rail between Atlanta and Macon, and a next-day news story about the staged event in Griffin, not one of the seven or so people quoted appears to have any need to use it to commute to either Atlanta or Macon. Said one of the interest-group big shots there: “Building more roads to alleviate congestion is like buying a bigger pair of pants for obesity. It’s just going to make things worse.” Huh? Buy the bigger pants, son. Do it for the rest of us.
• Juvenile Court Judge Tom C. Rawlings of Sandersville, the newly appointed state child advocate, is a first-rate pick. His selection is a reminder that there’s a replacement capable and qualified for every one of us.
• An etiquette question: If one wishes to give a spouse rent-to-own rims for an anniversary, birthday or Christmas, is it sufficient to pay only the first month’s rim-rent?
• And what chance do conservatives have of cultivating a culture of personal responsibility and self-reliance when rent-to-own rims fall into a category described by Larry Sutton, the president of the 60-store Rent-n-Roll chain thusly: “We want to feel good about the way we look: ‘I don’t want to wait for that. I don’t want to save for that. I just want it.’” Man, when the rims are rented, I’m guessing the 401(k) or the Roth IRA is sliding.
• The head of France’s Socialist Party, Francois Hollande, splits with its recent presidential candidate, Segolene Royal, with whom he had four children over three decades. They never married. They would have, she suggested in a recent book, but he allowed his friends to talk him out of it. A couple that can’t commit after four children is most likely not nuclear-trigger material. French voters agreed.
• Looking for the real-deal fiscal conservative? It’d be hard to beat U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a Coweta County Republican who’s certain to take a media bashing — paid and free — for voting against a proposed $100 million federal program to investigate unsolved murders from the civil rights era. He’s one of two members of the House to vote no; presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas was the other. Westmoreland’s the guy who, as minority leader in the Georgia House, opposed the first Republican governor in 134 years for submitting a tax increase in his first year in office in 2003. He was one of the few, too, who voted in Congress against a $62 billion no-accountability check for Hurricane Katrina relief. And what does it mean that his district is described, in the context of voting against this proposal, as “largely rural”? Is that code?
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