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Thursday, December 6, 2007
These issues will keep you talking
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Quarterback Michael Vick agrees to escrow $928,073 to care for the care and upkeep of 54 pit bulls. When my band of right-wingers take over, the same respect will be applied to children of unmarried adults. The rich — actor Goran Visnjic (Dr. Luka Kovac on ER), for example — will escrow. He’s married and has an adopted son, but has also acknowledged an 8-month-old child. No child should have to wait until entertainers are dead to identify their daddies. Unclaimed or unsupported children of the non-rich will be entitled to DNA samples from any male suspected of causing their creation — and an equal-share claim to their earnings and estates, however small.
• School choice advocate Glenn Delk, an Atlanta lawyer, urges the state to settle a school financing lawsuit brought by 51 local districts. They’d get the option of eliminating property taxes for schools altogether. In return, they’d agree to competition, with the state per-pupil grant following the child. My view is, though, that the state should never agree to settle any lawsuit that attempts to use the courts to make legislative decisions — especially those that urge judges to set executive and legislative branch spending priorities.
• Be all you can be: Join the Army. Or be anybody you want to be: Go to San Francisco. Starting next year, it’ll issue municipal identification cards to all residents, legally here or not. Residents also won’t be required to declare a gender.
• Wow! “Immigrants and their U.S.-born children account for 71 percent of the increase in the uninsured since 1989” and “virtually all of the national increase in public school enrollment over the last two decades,” reports the Center for Immigration Studies, an independent research group in Washington. Of the 953,000 immigrants in Georgia, 53 percent are illegals, the center estimates. We should quit using the uninsured as a measure of slippage in economic conditions.
• Quote of the Week: “We need a way to make [our ideas] public-proof,” says East Point Mayor Joseph Macon, responding to an assertion by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin that local politicians concerned about re-election are reluctant to propose “solutions” that voters won’t like. Two options here: Don’t propose dumb solutions. Or do, but keep voters in the dark.
• My mental health? Superb. As balanced as the Southern diet of beans, greens and cornbread. My colleagues? Hmmm. Let me check. Data from four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls finds that 58 percent of Republicans report their mental health as excellent, compared to 43 percent of independents and 38 percent of Democrats. Conservatism rooted in optimism is healthy.
• In the language of the judicial brotherhood and sisterhood, the Georgia Supreme Court’s rebuke of Judge Hilton Fuller — he’s the presiding judge in the Brian Nichols case — was deft but piercing. His courtroom responsibility, wrote Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, is “to maintain control of the proceedings and to ensure that neither side, whether by design or otherwise, is able to disrupt the prompt and orderly administration of justice.” Translation: Don’t let the defense run up the public’s tab in an effort to force the prosecution to abandon capital punishment. “Far more difficult and complex cases have been tried … without generating the … delay that has plagued this one.”
• Uh, yes, clarification would be beneficial. Such is an appeal from Attorney General Thurbert Baker to the Georgia Supreme Court on its decision preventing the state from taking the property of registered sex offenders by forcing them to move from homes they’ve bought. The AG interprets that to include renters. The ruling appeared to opine otherwise. Give it to us straight up.
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Stationing troops in Africa
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In recent weeks, the U.S. Defense Department created a new unified military command for Africa — presumably in recognition of the strategic importance of the continent and its natural resources. It previously was split among three, none of which had it as top priority.
The first mission was launched in early November when the USS Fort Henry arrived in Senegal’s capital of Dakar to begin a six-month training exercise for African naval forces around the Gulf of Guinea.
Still unresolved, though, is where the military command, called Africom, will be located. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and a top source of American oil, announced on Nov. 19 that it won’t host Africom, which is intended to protect America’s strategic interests and assist African nations with military training and conflict prevention. Some, however, are skeptical and express concern that positioning U.S. forces there could draw the continent deeper into the war against Islamo-fascism.
Given Africa’s history with exploitive colonial powers, the U.S. should be wary of deeper involvement there. Our interests are minimal. If nations there are harboring terrorists who threaten us, we should have the intelligence capacity to know and a regional military presence with surgical-strike capabilities. Otherwise, we should have no sizeable military presence on the continent.
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