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Thursday, October 18, 2007
Drought; Vick; lottery’s cha-ching
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Clifford Harris Jr., aka T.I., is a reminder of how quickly loose tough-guy talk and false bravado leads to trouble. It does with rednecks and booze and rappers and drugs. Add one nut-job to the mix and somebody’s getting hurt and somebody’s going to prison.
Let the marketplace price water and divide the “profits” equally among all customers. And refresh my memory on ethanol. Cornell ecology professor David Pimentel is quoted in The Wall Street Journal as calculating that when everything’s considered, 1,700 gallons of water are required to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. The manufacturing process alone takes between 3.5 gallons and 5 gallons. And for this taxpayers offer a subsidy.
Jack Alderman murdered his wife in 1974. That’s 33 years ago. Jimmy Carter was an obscure Southern governor. The last U.S. troops were just months out of Vietnam. Richard Nixon resigned. Patty Hearst was kidnapped. The now-common supermarket price code was scanned for the first time. American Idol host Ryan Seacrest was born. Chet Huntley, Jack Benny and Earl Warren died. Almost half the U.S. population wasn’t even born. And Jack Alderman killed his wife. Justice my foot. The sentence should have been carried out decades ago.
Now the Michael Vick case becomes clear, thanks to Louis Farrakhan: “He is young, black and super rich. And all of those white children were wearing his jersey. White people are losing control of their children to black sports and entertainment figures, and they can’t take it.” And that explains fully and completely why “they” chose “to come down on the brother like that.” There are many Americas. It’s frightening to think that one of them believes this stuff.
About 31 percent of the dialysis patients at Grady’s outpatient clinic are “undocumented residents,” aka illegal aliens. Three possible solutions: pay, return to their country of origin for treatment, or agitate for the creation of a pure charity hospital financed by donated money and services.
Faced with party defections, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely has a fallback to a resolution she’s pushing that could cause Turkey to shut down an airbase vital to resupplying U.S. troops in Iraq. Expect one declaring Salman Rushdie to be the Poet Laureate of American Forces in Iraq. Anything to help …
A bill to make permanent the prohibition on state and local taxes on Internet access had 238 House co-sponsors, more than enough to pass. Yet, House leaders limited consideration to a four-year exemption, which passed. The existing ban expires Nov. 1. Any idea why they’d not allow the vote on a permanent ban? The cynic U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) thinks it’s because they “want to leave the door open to taxing the Internet in the future.”
Demonstrating that he can still work his will, the board of the Georgia Department of Transportation picks Gov. Sonny Perdue’s choice, Gena Abraham, to succeed Harold Linnenkohl as commissioner. She’s a doer and is probably the first commissioner without a background in either roads or politics. Strong management and political skills are in the job description.
Bob Jones III, chancellor of the Greenville, S.C., university that bears his grandfather’s name, delivers a dynamite endorsement to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. “As a Christian I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism,” he said. “But I am not voting for a preacher. I’m voting for a president. It boils down to who can best represent conservative American beliefs, not religious beliefs.” And more: “This is all about beating Hillary. And I just believe that this man has the credentials both personally and ideologically in terms of his view about America what American government should be to best represent the rank and file of conservative Americans.” This is a homer for Romney. For some reason Christian conservatives have been holding back. But Jones is right. No other electable candidate is more likely to represent their values, pro-life among them.
Lottery ticket sales are up. Gamblers bet on ponies, the lottery or subprime adjustable-rate mortgages. It’s too early for the Derby and subprime lenders are tanking. But we’ll always have the Georgia Lottery.
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Stop death penalty ploys
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Murderer Jack Alderman, who has escaped his deserved fate for more than three decades, will be executed Friday unless the U.S. Supreme Court further delays the execution. It’s considering whether lethal injections are cruel. The high court did on Wednesday stop a pending execution in Virginia.
As the Brian Nichols case in Atlanta amply demonstrates, capital punishment opponents are determined to eliminate executions as an option. In the Nichols case, the strategy is to raise the costs so high that District Attorney Paul Howard will be forced to abandon his efforts to seek the death penalty against Nichols. Opponents believe if they can demonstrate that a single death penalty case can bankrupt the system, penny-pinching fiscal conservatives will throw in the towel.
Under no circumstances, of course, should Howard concede to a lesser penalty. The bankrupt-the-system strategy in this case cannot be allowed to succeed. Capital punishment critics point to cases where murders deserving of death managed to escape that punishment, either because a DA in one jurisdiction didn’t think he could get it, or because one or two jurors lied about their willingness to consider it, or because the sentence was set aside because of technicalities or for legitimate reasons. Because some deserving of death manage to escape execution, the critics reason, the system is “unfair” and should be abandoned.
It’s almost amusing. They make certain the system doesn’t work — and then offer a “see there” argument to abandon it altogether.
The Alderman execution should take place Friday. And under no circumstances should Howard ever abandon efforts to seek the death penalty for Nichols.
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