Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > August > 02
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Hopelessly unscholarly standards
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s week-ending free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• No greater mistake could the state make with the HOPE stipend than to lower academic standards because about 18,000 fewer students met somewhat higher eligibility standards this year. When dolts get academic “scholarships” while requiring remedial instruction in college, the program’s a joke. Standards, in fact, should be raised so that even fewer students qualify. Nobody’s son misses out because of HOPE’s grading change. They miss out because they don’t study.
• My views on public nudity have changed. If the alternative is the fall fashions being touted for children and teens. … “This season,” writes the AJC’s Nedra Rhone, “anything goes.” Plaids, stripes. No sooner had Southerners saved New Jersey transplants from their mixed patterns, plaids and stripes indiscretions than the abomination is being pushed on children. For shame.
• Headline: “State may intervene on Grady.” Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle sends a letter to Fulton and DeKalb officials warning that if the locals don’t change the hospital’s governance structure, he’ll press the state Legislature to act. Fair warning to state officials: Don’t make Grady’s problems the state’s. You’ll lose and get hammered in the process. Fulton and DeKalb have to fix Grady and present a “solution” to the state that can be applied across Georgia.
• Think Grady’s governing board has a clue? Wrong. It went behind closed doors for three hours this week to discuss the hospital’s predicament, and then hired the Troutman Sanders law firm to analyze the changed-governance proposal. A report is expected in two months. This board shouldn’t spend five minutes behind closed doors. It lives on public money. And the governance proposed is now commonplace across Georgia. The board chair, state Rep. Pam Stephenson, headed the State Health Planning Agency. The board can know all the pros and cons by Saturday morning. Memo No. 2 to state officials: Don’t take ownership of Grady’s problems.
• Of course a billion-dollar project in DeKalb that adds 1.5 million square feet of commercial space will worsen traffic. Duh. Metro Atlanta’s greatest mistake is allowing density beyond the carrying capacity of roads. The city of Sandy Springs is what happens when people come to believe they have no control over the density pushed on them.
• Georgians own a prized piece of coastal real estate that grows more valuable daily. Why, then, would the Jekyll Island Authority offer even a dime in incentives, much less a $10 million rent break, to one of the nation’s largest developers? No public body should offer tax giveaways, in whatever form, to entice developers to build what the free market is on the edge of doing anyway.
• Quote from former Atlanta City Councilwoman Gloria Bromell-Tinubu: “Slavery is the worst thing and homelessness is the second-worst thing that can be witnessed upon anyone.” Except that people who aren’t mentally ill make choices that take them to homelessness, while slavery is inflicted upon them. Simply feeding and housing vagrants solves nothing and invites more. The need is to move them to self-reliance, if that’s what they want. Otherwise, move them off the street.
• A magazine I never knew existed made news with a Top 10 list that means nothing: college mottos. Blame CNN. They started this 24/7 news business. Thereafter all information, important or not, competes. For the record, Clark Atlanta University was ranked No. 9, with “I’ll find a way or make one.”
• Impeach U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales! The headline says it all: “Gonzales admits obfuscating.” A damnable, indictable offense, for sure. But wait. Don’t go there. Delaware’s U.S. Sen. Joe Biden would face capital punishment. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) gets life, plus 20. And soon, nobody’s left to govern.
Permalink | Comments (188) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
Obama’s war
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Forty-three percent of the Democrats surveyed in a weekend Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll prefer Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. She’s up from 39 percent in June. Obama slipped three points, from 25 in June to 22 in July.
The next poll taken should reflect more slippage. Barack on Wednesday revealed that as President he’d send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists. “Let me make this clear,” said Obama, “there are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and [Pakistan’s] President [Gen. Pervez] Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
Barack and other Democrats have managed to appeal to those, especially on the Left, who want to be out of Iraq at any cost by being career second-guessers. Whatever President Bush did wrong, they would have done right. Whatever strategy had failed to achieve desired results, they would have avoided. Like most commentators, they’re brilliant in hindsight.
And then comes that moment, as it has for Obama, where they have to move from being critic to doer. It’s a Holy Cow! moment, the moment where people begin to realize the ramifications of this person or that in the White House. For Obama, that’s foreign policy and national security.
What he posits for the Waziristan tribal region controlled by bandits, terrorists and warlords in that vast mountainous “no-man’s land” between Afghanistan and Pakistan is an option, alright. And indeed it may be Obama’s plan. But if it were that simple and if Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts there could be pinpointed, we could already have taken him out with a drone. But it’s not. Musharraf hasn’t acted aggressively enough and, in fact, has ceded control there to the warlords.
But the additional fact is that he hangs by a thread and is always one security lapse away from assassination. An invasion by American troops would finish him off and our problems in the region would be complicated considerably. Complications there would no doubt hasten the day the U.S. would be forced to abandon Iraq, or at least shift substantial forces. Maybe that’s what Obama had it mind, but if so it’s the thought process of a guy who shouldn’t be in the White House.
Obama had already exposed his youth and inexperience in the YouTube debate by saying he he would be willing to meet without preconditions with the leaders of rogue states like Cuba, North Korea and Iran. Hillary pounced, calling that stance naive and irresponsible. His response was to say you-too on Iraq and to call her “Bush-Cheney lite.”
Advantage Hillary. But pitfalls remain for the entire crew of Democratic contenders. When they stop second-guessing and start spelling out what they’d do differently, the warts appear. No wonder they’re so desperate to have it all over by election day.
