Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2008 > January > 24
Thursday, January 24, 2008
King grandchild; tax rebate checks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• To the week’s celebrity news excesses and banalities, I add this insightful observation: Had Heath Ledger lived, he’d be 28 now.
• Before Martin Luther King III, the last time I heard of somebody keeping a marriage secret for an extended period of time — not approaching two years — it was so the lovely couple could finish high school. One more reason life is worth living. The surprises and the mysteries never cease.
• Impeach Casey Cagle? Absurd. One should not arm those Georgians who already think the State Capitol is a nut house, as state Rep. Ron Forster’s suggestion does. Some thoughts pop into our heads that need not pop out of our mouths. Somewhere, for example, there’s probably some school employee thinking it’d be neat to post racy photos of the assistant principal on his school computer. But then he pauses and reminds himself: Nobody is that stupid.
• You know you’re yesterday when the previously worshipful start tossing little bomblets — as Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin did in insisting that it’s “reality, not fantasy or fairy tales” that Barack Obama could be elected president. The fairy tales line was a poke at America’s first black president, Bill Clinton, who was seated in the audience. Ouch. He’d said that Obama’s assertion that he’d opposed the war in Iraq from the start was a fairy tale.
• A foundation will pay 40 students from Creekside High and from Bear Creek Middle schools in Fulton County $8 an hour to submit to tutoring. And if the tutoring takes, they’ll get bonuses. It’s a worthwhile experiment. Desirable or not, we get the behaviors we reward. That’s not to say they actually learn, but it’s not public money, coming as it does through a Charles Loudermilk foundation.
• Former Georgia Tech student Syed Haris Ahmed , who took “casing videos” of Washington buildings, including the U.S. Capitol, who met with extremists and went to Pakistan for jihadist military training, is fortunate that his target was the USA. Otherwise he’d not be arguing now that his admissions should be dismissed because he’d been tricked by the FBI. He’d be arguing for the promised virgins.
• Kudos to state Rep. Mike Jacobs (R-Atlanta) for legislation to crack down on a practice in which purchasing agents authorized six $49,000 payments to a technology consultant, thereby skirting the requirement that expenditures of $50,000 be bid competitively. His legislation would criminalize that practice. “I was shocked to find that bid-rigging like that is not a crime,” said Jacobs. Me, too. Should be.
• Gov. Sonny Perdue wants to spend $26.5 million next year to turn the old World of Coke building near Underground into a state history museum. Another — me, too. Georgia is, as amateur historian state Sen. George Hooks (D-Americus) pointed out, one of the few states without a history museum. “It’s a great move for the state,” said Hooks. “We’ve got priceless treasures of this state warehoused because we don’t have anywhere to display them.”
• Politicians cannot be stopped from rolling the printing presses during economic panic. It’s good politics to cut and distribute checks for a few hundred dollars but it’s hard to see what that approach solves, other than growing the deficit. The subprime debacle and housing will settle out when the marketplace reprices the real estate inflated by speculators and high-risk loans to unworthy borrowers. A check for $300 is “don’t blame us” insurance.
• At the South Carolina debate, Hillary Clinton said President Bush has done “too little, too late” to stimulate the economy. And what was she proposing when? Liberals are always brilliant after-the-fact. They won the war in Iraq that way, too.
Permalink | Comments (125) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
Some Beach, Somewhere
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s looking bad down South for Rudy Giuliani. The latest Florida poll put him in third place, well behind John McCain and Mitt Romney.
The poll, conducted Sunday-Tuesday for the St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald/Bay News 9, has a margin of error for Republicans of 5.1 percent. Both John McCain at 25 percent and Mitt Romney at 23 are within the margin of error. Giuliani’s not. He’s tied with Mike Huckabee at 15 — and Huckabee, running out of money, has essentially conceded Florida, showing up primarily for airport news conferences.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama 42-23, with John Edwards at the drop-out level, 12 percent. Edwards registers a distant third in South Carolina, too. Obama’s up there by about 15 percentage points. That race should be over early Saturday and with a third-place finish, it’s hard to see Edwards going on. No great loss, though. Of the three, he’s the Democrat I’d least like to see in the White House. I can’t bear four years of a President who uses the bully pulpit to demonize some sector of corporate America he wakes up despising.
In some ways, Giuliani’s campaign strategy was the most interesting. Jimmy Carter’s Iowa strategy gave that state visibility and him momentum in 1976. Giuliani intended to use Florida as the springboard to burst onto the scene, win, get the Big Mo and sail through delegate-rich Super Tuesday. It was always high-risk. His problem now is that nobody’s much paying attention to him and all of his some beach, somewhere efforts appear likely to produce meager results. Florida’s winner-take-all.
Florida is huge. It answers two questions. One is whether McCain can win a closed primary. The other is whether Giuliani’s major-league gamble worked. If, by chance, he surges in the next week and wins, he will have rewritten the play-book. If McCain can win among Republicans, he’d have to be considered the front-runner. He’s making a major play for conservatives in Florida by trotting out a commercial featuring supply-sider Jack Kemp, deficit hawk Phil Gramm, the former Texas senator and Tom Coburn, who led the fight against the Bridge to Nowhere.
It could take me a few days to warm up to McCain, but with visions of most of the Democratic alternatives, I could get there.
Services »
