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Thursday, February 14, 2008
Booze, divorce, designer handbags
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Yep, just what we need: Georgia Republicans acting like national Democrats. State Rep. Ron Stephens of Garden City near Savannah is sponsoring a bill to raise the cigarette tax by $1 per pack. On some days it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether it’s Democrats or Republicans running Georgia. This is one.
• Let’s see. Georgia could either spend its millions extracted from smokers via its tobacco company tax collectors on quit-smoking messages — or on sick people. Georgia essentially chooses the sick. It’s the right choice. Besides, can there be anybody left who doesn’t know the consequences of smoking or the causes of AIDS? Government can’t protect people from their own poor judgment, no matter how much it spends.
• “It is a unilateral disarmament, and it is astounding that at a time when Hezbollah is threatening war against Israel … our intelligence community won’t have the tools to protect us,” says U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Roswell). Astounding indeed that Democrats left town Thursday without acting on renewal of the Protect America Act, which expires at midnight. Play political chicken, yes. But not with our national security.
• Is there any possible way House Speaker Glenn Richardson’s divorce filing could have been more badly handled? A judge who never should have touched it. A clerk of court who refused to show a reporter a public document. A file questionably sealed. This is a bad scene guaranteed to get worse.
• If I knew who to fire at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I would. Whenever the agency comes into the news, it sounds like a rat’s nest of bureaucratic backbiters pursuing incomprehensible side agendas. I loved them when they were on the E. coli beat.
• Grand Prize Winner in the Subtle Lobbying Contest goes to — drumroll, please — Georgia’s judges, a hundred of whom showed up at the General Assembly to listen attentively to Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears’ State of the Judiciary address, which ended with a plea for higher judicial salaries. Funny, I don’t remember seeing them there before.
• Now, here’s a tax reform that should appeal to fiscal conservatives: Advanced by State Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ranger) and others in the House, and by State Sen. Chip Rogers in the Senate, the proposed constitutional amendment, HR 1216, requires that excess revenue collections go to one of three purposes. Those are: increases in public school enrollment; building reserves of up to 8 percent of the prior year’s spending; and increasing the personal income tax exemption, now $2,700. The latter rewards work, a desirable endeavor, and is family-friendly.
• Woe is me. The Legislature still does not permit Sunday beer sales — and likely won’t this year. The mass uprising last year for Sunday beer is a reminder that a political groundswell is often just an interest group with sound trucks and noisemakers.
• A former Georgia Tech employee, Donna Gamble, is accused of making more than $316,000 in purchases for personal use on a state-issued credit card over a five-year period ending last year. This is a prime example of why Gov. Sonny Perdue’s emphasis on getting a reliable management and accountability system in state government matters. If the Tech software geeks can write spam-filter software, surely they can write software that raises red flags about unusual purchases such as, for example, designer handbags.
• State Sen. David J. Shafer (R-Duluth) makes a convincing case that the Tennessee River flows through Georgia. A mapmaker’s error in 1818 put 1.1 miles of Georgia into Tennessee, says he. Shafer wants a commission to precisely establish the location of the 35th parallel, the line between the two states. The Florida Gator license plate is for sport. The Tennessee River dispute is for real.
• The surge is working, and, one victory at a time, the war is being won. Latest good news is that Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, a key figure in the 1983 bombings at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and at the barracks of French and U.S. peacekeepers, was killed by a car bomb in Syria. Maybe it was Israel. Maybe not. But to whoever is responsible, thanks.
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Conservatives splitting?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain beats Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama beats him. That’s the findings of a new nationwide Zogby Interactive poll conducted Feb. 8-11.
The surprising number, though, remains Hillary’s problem with men and McCain’s with his own party. Against either Obama or McCain, she wins less than 80 percent of Democrats — though that’s better than McCain does among Republicans. Against Hillary, he pulls 72 percent of Republicans. Ouch. Though they’d be foolish to do it, some conservatives are beginning to talk of aligning themselves with the Constitution Party, which is on 16 ballots and expects to be on 40. It nominates a presidential candidate in April.
Looking to the general election, it is hard to imagine McCain winning if, indeed, any number of conservatives split off or sit it out. McCain draws independents, and would draw more than Hillary, but he loses them to Obama, 46-33, according to Zogby.
For the sport, let’s run the generic Democratic race against McCain, regardless of whether the nominee is Hillary or Obama. Bill Clinton says that with Hillary, it would be exceedingly civil. Perhaps. But from cartoonists, liberal commentators and the moveon.org crowd, we can certainly expect:
Repeated reminders that he’s old, really old, older than any first-term President in American history. One instance where he refers to Shirley Franklin as Shirley Chisholm, the now deceased congresswoman who ran for President in 1972, or makes some similar mistake and for the rest of the campaign he’s treated as approaching senility.
He’s a crank. Well, maybe he is. But his outbursts and ill-temper will become the basis for the charge that he’s too unstable to be President.
Iraq. To the moveon.org Democrats, he’s a dangerous militarist determined to occupy the world for the next 50 to 100 years. War, war, war.
No question McCain and conservatives need to make peace. He may not win with them, but he certainly can’t win without them.
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