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Thursday, November 29, 2007
Feigned foreign skills to Grady ills
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Oh my. Which foreign service experience is more valuable: Hillary’s “security bubble in which guests eat fancy lunches and watch native dancers,” or Obama’s four childhood years in Indonesia? Experts — both Hillary and Obama — disagree.
• Wanted: Disabled child to ask Republican presidential candidates about universal health insurance. Wanted: Gay retired military officer with long career to ask planted questions about “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Wanted: Brilliant child of hardworking illegals who couldn’t complete medical school because of some mean-spirited Republican policy. All needed to ask questions at public forum. Contact Hillary’s Employment Agency.
• Pick your crisis: The water police in Las Vegas tool around in a gas-hungry SUV looking for violators. The only sin in Vegas is watering the lawn.
• Conservative pork-barreler Trent Lott resigns from the U.S. Senate. The Senate needs conservatives, not pork-barrelers. So we’re halfway sorry to see him go.
• In the spirit of the Grady board’s demands on the private sector and the state, I’ll not pay my bills or balance my checkbook until my next-door neighbor agrees to mow my lawn. These “demands” read like the work of a committee of eighth-graders.
• Kiss the ground in America. You could have been born in North Korea, where a factory chief was just executed before a stadium crowd of 150,000 for making international phone calls. Or in Sudan, where a British schoolteacher was just convicted of inciting religious hatred for naming a teddy bear Muhammad, a common Muslim name. Or in Saudi Arabia, where a 19-year-old woman raped by seven men was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes for allegedly cheating on her husband.
• If it’s not the Georgia Supreme Court legislating from the bench, it’s the attorney general legislating from the corner office. The high court ruled, properly, that registered sex offenders couldn’t be made to move from homes they own if schools, churches, day care centers or school bus stops subsequently locate within 1,000 feet of them. Forcing that would amount to taking their property. The Airport Rule applies here: You move there, the noise is your problem; they move next to you, it’s theirs. But the AG has expanded the ruling to include renters. Wrong.
• Bishop Earl Paulk is a reminder of why monuments should never be erected, nor roads and buildings named, for living people.
• A suit attempting to halt Tuesday’s runoff in Riverdale because voters might not have known a candidate is transgendered. And the relevance of this information is …? Toss it.
• Wake me so I can express my excitement at Mideast peace prospects when the Arab world acknowledges Israel’s right to exist. Until then, it’s rhetoric and photo ops.
• As the Grady episode reminds, Atlanta suffers an excess of politicians whose stock-in-trade is negativity. The Atlanta Housing Authority, and chief executive Renee Glover in particular, have achieved a national reputation for redeveloping public housing so it’s not a dead-end street generation after generation. Years into the process, Atlanta City Councilmen Ivory Lee Young and Kwanza Hall take notice and insist that everything come to a halt until a task force can study the impact on tenants and especially on “our seniors.”
• Next up: A demand that moose stop belching until a task force can study their impact on global warming. (Norwegian researchers find that a grown moose belches the methane equivalent of 4,630 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, more than twice the amount emitted during a round-trip flight from Oslo to Santiago, Chile.)
• Headline on Spelman College campus politics: “Should I vote for Obama because of my race? Or vote for Clinton because of my gender?” Or this unstated possibility: “… the most competent candidate?” Or “…the one who’s best for America?” Nah. Wrong prism.
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Team’s ready: Bring on Hillary.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Before Wednesday night’s CNN-YouTube performance, which at times took on aspects of a real debate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was apprehensive. “I think the presidency ought to be held to a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman,” he said.
He needn’t have worried. While there are undoubtedly gimmicky aspects to home-made video, CNN for the most part resisted any temptation to turn the forum over to snowmen, cartoon characters and adult questions planted in the mouths of small children. For that the adults who selected the questions from among 5,000 YouTube submissions deserve credit. It still had some cheesy aspects to it. One, for example, was the invitation to the retired Army Reserve officer from California brought in make the case that the military should jettison its “don’t ask-don’t tell” policy.
On the whole, though, it worked. The initial exchange over illegal immigration prompted real give-and-take. Romney accused former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani with running a sanctuary city for illegals. Giuliani, in turn, claimed that as governor Romney had run a “sanctuary mansion” with hired illegals — landscapers used by a contractor at his Belmont, Mass., home. Romney actually handled it very well, insisting that it would “not be American” to insist that a contractor’s employees produce immigration papers just because they had a “funny accent.”
Clearly among Republicans, illegal immigration is a hot issue — and it likely is among Independents and Democrats as well, one reason Democrats who now support driver’s licenses for illegals will find the issue troublesome in the General Election. While Hillary has hedged, Obama is unequivocal in his support for them.
Mike Huckabee continues to impress — and while he has no chance of getting the presidential nod, he is beginning to appeal as a vice presidential nominee on either the Romney or the Giuliani ticket.
At this point in the debate cycle, the conservative tunes in not so much to see who best succeeds at the game of “gotcha,” or to hear positions reaffirmed. It’s to see who could best go toe-to-toe with Hillary or Obama and who can take the off-the-wall and agenda questions (the military guy, for example) and defend his values and positions.
Wednesday night’s candidate performance demonstrated that the front-runners are perfectly capable of holding their own on any topic — questions germane, off-the-wall, loaded or not — before any audience, utilizing any format. Let’s vote.
