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Thursday, October 25, 2007
Global warming, Thrashers, tuition
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Woodstock voters will decide Nov. 6 whether to limit homeowner tax exemptions for the over-62 crowd with homes valued at $250,000 or less. It’s now unlimited. Old does not equal poor. Ban age-pegged tax exemptions.
• Every unusual occurrence in nature, including the wildfires in California, is now blamed on global warming — and whatever the problem, it could have been solved but for the war in Iraq. So sayeth those on the left, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming,” opined the esteemed scientist Reid.
• One of the dumbest of the many dumb laws the Legislature has passed over the years is one requiring the five members of the state’s Public Service Commission to live in districts. PSC Commissioner Bobby Baker is forced to live in Athens, though his wife owns a home in DeKalb County. He’s a homeowner in Athens, pays taxes there, registers vehicles there, votes there, served on a jury there, has an Athens cellphone and is a member of a church there. How utterly silly to question whether he “lives” there or in DeKalb, as a previous primary opponent has done. There’s no reason for utility regulators to live in districts — except that Democrats under the old power regime thought it gave them some edge. Repeal this silly law.
• Headline: “Hispanic leaders disavow organizer of today’s march.” Why is it, when minorities are involved, it’s assumed that they have “leaders” and, therefore, are accorded the authority to anoint others? “Nobody knows where he came from,” said one “leader” of the march organizer. “As far as I know, he’s working on his own,” said another.
• The Thrashers should not have called attention to the team and its dismal record by firing the coach. Before that hardly anybody knew how lousy the team is.
• Tuition and fees at a four-year public college rose 6.6 percent last year to $6,185 per year. At private colleges, they rose 6.3 percent to $23,712. Inflation, as reflected by the consumer price index, rose 2.8 percent. A modest suggestion: Test ‘em going in and test ‘em coming out, and tell parents — and taxpayers — what we’re getting for the money.
• Question of the Day: With a Democrat in the White House, would the hoopla have been the same had the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testimony emphasizing abstinence-only sex education been edited? No credit for the right answer, students. Everybody knows it.
• The touch screens that KFC and other fast-food outlets are experimenting with shows us the future of touch-screen voting: Nobody’ll need to be literate or to know anything about the candidates. They can just touch an icon of a donkey or an elephant. Or a candidate’s photo. Which means Alec Baldwin wins and Abraham Lincoln loses.
• Having stirred a 90-year-old pot of Armenian genocide with Turkey, House Democrats now move on to Hawaii, with a 261-153 vote to restore some self-governing powers native islanders lost more than a century ago when their queen was overthrown. President Bush promises another veto. The bill “raises significant constitutional concerns that arise any time legislation seeks to separate American citizens into race-related classifications rather than according to their own merits and essential qualities,” said the president’s spokesman.
• Yes. Build more reservoirs. And never concede that individuals own or have property rights to water-withdrawal permits issued by the state.
• Free speech on campus? Of a sort. For lefties, anyway. Activists at Emory University refused to allow the scholarly David Horowitz to speak on academic freedom and radical Islam during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. He had to be escorted from the stage by campus police. “This is exactly what the fascists did in Germany in the 1930s,” said Horowitz, who spoke at the invitation of Emory’s College Republicans. Boos and chants of “Heil Hitler,” most from off-campus radicals, greeted his introduction, said chapter president Ben Clark of Norcross. It went downhill from there.
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Disasters, by race and class
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
News organizations are sometimes accused of stirring the pot on race and class, producing divisiveness. Oddly, it had not occurred to me to draw conclusions from race and class differences in people affected by two natural disasters of different types — Hurricane Katrina and the wildfires in Southern California.
And yet, we are informed, some believe the coordinated efforts to fight the fires and the volunteer-heavy efforts to aid victims in the current disaster, compared to the debacle in New Orleans, “has something to do with poverty, politics and race.” As noted in an AJC article:
“California is relatively rich and has proportionately fewer black residents than most other states, while Louisiana is among the poorest and blackest states.”
That observation, whatever it reveals about hurricanes and fires, is supported by charts comparing the difference in home prices in San Diego and in New Orleans, in income, the percentage of families living in poverty, the racial breakdown and — admittedly, this may be useful to know — the percentage of households without a vehicle.
In New Orleans, in addition to the breakdown of state and local leadership — which, incidentally, cost Gov. Kathleen Blanco a second term — meant that buses remained parked that could have been used to shuttle people without vehicles out of the city before the hurricane hit.
Must, God forbid, we forever in America measure response to disasters by race and class? Or will that end when George W. Bush leaves office?
