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June 2008
Feisty band of fighters takes on the TAD juggernaut
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Internet that makes it possible for presidential campaigns to raise millions quickly may, a small band of Gwinnett County taxpayers hopes, make it possible for those without deep pockets to stand up against well-financed advocacy campaigns.
At issue now is a proposal on the July 15 primary ballot in Gwinnett that asks a question so arcane that only insiders can have a real clue as to what they’re being asked to approve. The question is this:
“Shall the Act be approved which authorizes Gwinnett County to exercise redevelopment powers under the ‘Redevelopment Powers Law’ as it may be amended from time to time for the purpose of improving economic and social conditions in depressed areas within the county?”
That proposed law would work in tandem with a proposed constitutional amendment on the statewide ballot in November. That question:
“Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to authorize community redevelopment and authorize counties, municipalities, and local boards of education to use tax funds for redevelopment purposes and programs?”
Suppose the Gwinnett question was asked this way:
“Should county commissioners be authorized to redirect increased tax revenues from up to 10 percent of the county’s total tax digest from the county general funds into the pockets of developers and financiers?”
That’s a version of Patrick T. Malone’s summation of the ballot question. Who’s he? He’s a partner in PAR Group, a national training and consulting company with strong opinions about tax allocation districts (TADs) and how they’ve been used elsewhere. But most importantly, he’s a taxpayer in Gwinnett who’s found other taxpayers who are determined to see if an Internet-based network can compete against a well-funded public relations sell.
He and others hope to get an e-mail chain from one taxpayer’s mailing list to another to piece together a campaign to defeat the July 15 referendum. The idea has been rejected before, said Malone. “I thought it went away,” he said, “but unfortunately, it resurfaced. It goes back to the idea that we are not smart enough to understand that ‘this is good for you, so we are just going to keep putting it on the ballot until you get smart enough to pass it.’ ”
Jimmy Orr of Bethlehem is another of those on the e-mail list working to build opposition. “We are just a bunch of loose-knit individuals, taxpayers, voters,” he said. “To be honest with you, we simply don’t have the funds to really mount an effective media campaign against the development industry.”
The problem they both have is that they see TADs as — in Malone’s words — “a kind of insidious form of corporate welfare” that has the potential to steamroll unchecked.
TADs can be abused. Malone’s not opposed to a limited number of them, like, for example, a proposed redevelopment of the old Lucent complex off I-85. He thinks Atlantic Station was an appropriate use. In short, if approved, they should be used on a limited basis in areas where redevelopment would not occur otherwise. Examples are truly blighted areas and those with other problems, like pollution.
The fact is, however, that unless the definition of blight is drawn so tightly that they aren’t used routinely to redevelop just ahead of naturally occurring growth, they do amount to little more than taxpayer giveaways.
When TADs are set up, the value of the property for tax purposes is fixed. The growth in value is diverted to the developer for a period of, say, 25 or 30 years. Therefore if a parcel is currently valued at $100,000 and with redevelopment increases to $1 million, taxes on the $100,000 will go to the city or county and taxes on $900,000 will go to pay off the money borrowed for redevelopment.
The Georgia Supreme Court has ruled that property taxes to support schools can’t be diverted to developers. The General Assembly overruled that decision with a proposed constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot in November. If approved by voters who fail to comprehend what it is they’re being asked to do, the state Supreme Court’s decision will be negated.
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The U.S. is powerless…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The brutality of Zimbawbe’s Robert Mugabe is shocking. He stays in power because defeat in a reasonably fair election means that the army leaders who have carried out his atrocities would be at risk of arrest for crimes against humanity. So instead he threatens civil war and intimidates the opposition so that no genuine election is possible. The world tolerates it.
As horrendous as Mugabe’s conduct is, this is an instance where the United States can do nothing, even if it did not have its hands full in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Great Britain, as the former colonial power, can do nothing either, nor can the rest of Europe. Too much bad history. The United Nations, likewise, is limited. It’s peace-keeping role is essentially to stand between warring factions willing to pretend they intend to stop the slaughter. That’s not the case with Mugabge.
U.S. intervention is not a prospect. Participation in any kind of military force, even if that were an option, is off the table. The U.S. military is stretched much too thin already.
But with a presidential election looming here, Zimbawbe does present an example of what should be American security policy. The Bush policy of premption is a sound one. No nation that threatens us and no nation that harbors the terrorists who plot our destruction should ever sleep a wink with the certainty that the U.S. won’t strike.
There should be a delineation, however, between specific threats targeting the United States and other threats. Iran’s development of nuclear weapons threatens the world in general, and the destruction of Israel in particular. The world should act, but probably won’t. Israel, however, cannot allow it to happen. There’s some speculation that Israel could act before President Bush leaves office if Barack Obama is elected and signals a foreign policy that might tempt aggressors to test him.
The world, through the United Nations, has a moral obligation to intervene to protect human rights. The first responsiblity, however, is with regional players.
With Mugabe, that’s regional players in Africa. An opportunity will come this week at the African Union summit. There’s no hope or desire to attempt military intervention. But they could be bolder in denouncing his regime and in attempting to persuade him that it’s time to find peace in exile. In the custom of dictators who’ve stayed too long, Africa — and the world’s financial powers, including Saudi Arabia, Japan and now China — could buy him into luxurious exile. There’s not much of an alternative.
For the U.S., first concern is our national security. Second is threats to world peace, in partnership with other powers and possibly the United Nations. For Zimbawbe, the solution rests with those who are actually in a position of influence — and that’s other heads of state in Africa.
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Count to ‘10, and a fun race for governor
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My standard advice to Republicans under the Gold Dome is this: Get it together.
Don’t stop fighting — at least not when disagreement is about substantive policy choices. When it’s ambition and ego, quit. The alternative to public fights is not to go behind closed doors, cut a deal and then rubber-stamp it through the General Assembly.
Essential, too, is to create a good system of oversight and accountability so that as the state turns to the private sector to provide toll roads and essential services, all transactions are transparent, at arm’s length and fairly priced — uninfluenced by political contributions and connections. Build openness, ethics and accountability into the system — and then farm out government to the absolute max.
Why raise these matters now?
Georgia’s 2010 gubernatorial race will get a lot more interesting, and perhaps competitive too, in coming days. The just-retired adjutant general of the Georgia National Guard, Lt. Gen. David Poythress, is expected to announce in July that he’ll enter the 2010 race for governor as a Democrat. House Minority Leader DuBose Porter of Dublin and others may, as well. Poythress and Porter are the kinds of Democrats Georgians have traditionally chosen. That is, they’re not from the party’s fringe.
That’s crucial. Ours is not a sudden-jolt electorate. We ease into change. Center-right candidates win; center-left doesn’t, unless they’re successful in masking their leanings.
While some delusional Democrats believe Barack Obama will put the state in play this November, the odds are long that a candidate with his politics carries Georgia, even with a record black turnout.
A Democrat who intends to win statewide needs overwhelming black support and at least 30 percent of whites. As of January, blacks were 27.2 percent of registered voters, up from 24.5 percent eight years earlier. White registration over the period declined from 73.6 percent of the electorate to 66.3. Blacks were 39.6 percent of new registrants; whites, 33.4; and Hispanics and others, 27.
In statewide elections, metro Atlanta is pretty much a wash for the two parties. It’s the rest of Georgia that picks the winners. The trick for Democrats is to find a candidate attractive to Reagan Democrats outside metro Atlanta. Even that’s not a guarantee. George W. Bush carried this state with 58 percent of the vote in 2004.
Poythress has won statewide. He was elected Labor Commissioner in 1992 to fill the unexpired term of Joe Tanner, who had been appointed commissioner of the state Department of Natural Resources. He won a full term in 1994, before leaving in 1998 to run for governor. In that race, he finished third to Roy Barnes, who then appointed him adjutant general. Gov. Sonny Perdue reappointed him.
His reputation is for exceptional competence. In 1979, Gov. George Busbee appointed him secretary of state, to fill a vacancy created by the death of the legendary Ben Fortson. Before that, he’d served as an assistant in the attorney general’s office, as deputy revenue commissioner and as commissioner of the Department of Medical Assistance.
In 1982, he was defeated in the Democratic primary by Max Cleland. Cleland, later a U.S. senator, was magic with crowds, just as Barack Obama is today. Had Cleland not opted to vote with national Democrats in the U.S. Senate, he’d be there today. But in 1982, Poythress’ superior competence as an administrator was no match for Cleland’s patriotic appeal and his ability to inspire audiences.
Just before he retired last November, I heard Poythress speak. He is close now to being what Max Cleland was then.
Republicans have no clear front-runner yet. One or more members of Congress may opt to give it a shot. Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine says he’s in. Secretary of State Karen Handel may be, too, and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle aims there, as well. The debacle of the past two legislative sessions is real baggage for Cagle and could damage the appeal of all Republicans running for governor.
Perdue’s successor most likely will be a Republican, especially if Obama is elected and pursues the agenda he’s laid out. But a seasoned center-right Democrat who can run strong in the “other Georgia” can win.
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Arms, cityhood, a fine man of letters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Imagine that. The Second Amendment is real. We can keep and bear arms. Now let’s agree that when a gun is used to commit a crime, the problem is with the shooter and not with the weapon.
Before Barack Obama tries his skills of persuasion on a bad guy who threatens us —- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, no preconditions —- he should test them on a seriously bad guy who doesn’t —- Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Today’s runoff election there is an international joke. Fearing for his life, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has withdrawn. The U.S. can sputter in outrage, but our obligation is to deal with the bad guys whose existence threatens us.
The city of Buckhead? Won’t happen. Without Buckhead, Atlanta sinks. It’s 45 percent of the city’s $72.4 billion in property. There’s a lesson here, though. Fulton County drove Sandy Springs to cityhood. Just as bad private-sector managers create unions, bad public-sector managers create cities.
Two state senators of substance, one D, one R, opt out of the Gold Dome Games. Michael S. Meyer von Bremen (D-Albany) —- a former minority leader and one of two Democrats whom Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle allowed to chair committees —- qualified this week to run for a vacancy on the Georgia Court of Appeals. Joe Carter (R-Tifton), one of Gov. Sonny Perdue’s floor leaders, dropped out of a Senate race he had won (no opposition) to qualify for an unexpected Superior Court opening. A special GOP primary will be held Aug. 5 to choose a replacement. Neither Carter nor Meyer von Bremenever struck me as suited to the intense partisan warfare at the Capitol.
Headline: “Former president willing to help Obama campaign.” The former president is Bill Clinton. Help? Make Hillary the food taster.
Jim Durrett, executive director of the Liveable Communities Coalition, writing in support of the Beltline rail project, reflects the ancient view that those of us who live beyond I-285 are all trying to get to Atlanta’s downtown. Writes he: “We’ve spent the past 40 years building suburbs that are beginning to look unsustainable at $4 a gallon.” We of the “suburbs” are neighbors, not dependents, and when the state devises a transportation plan that moves us where we need to go, instead of just to Atlanta’s downtown, or in a circle around it, we’ll sustain ourselves just fine. Boss, we ain’t your young’uns.
The federal government should have had a bidder at Sunday’s auction of condos near downtown Atlanta. The lowest-bid condo was priced at $183,900 and went for $132,000. The highest-bid was priced at $379,900 and went for $263,000. What does that tell us? That housing’s still overpriced here, downtown condos by about 25 percent to 30 percent. This Congress surely will intervene to prevent the free market from working. Its latest effort is a $300 billion bailout for lenders and borrowers.
The Justice Department’s inspector general says recruiters improperly used “political or ideological” considerations to find and hire conservative interns. Ideology can be considered in recruiting political appointees, but not otherwise. Justice officials should get more sophisticated in screening to hire conservatives. Anybody doubt that colleges and employers look for the codes in applications and essays to achieve diversity? Ideological diversity is important, too.
Letter writers become friends, and their passing evokes sadness. Dr. Harrison L. Rogers Jr., a distinguished general surgeon and former president of the American Medical Association, died this week. He was among the well-read regulars whose intelligent and civil commentary enriched public discourse.
Stop presses! Study finds that elementary school teachers are poorly prepared by college schools of education to teach math. An exception is my alma mater, the University of Georgia. It requires teacher candidates to take math courses not designed for teachers.
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Right to bear arms, yes. Child rapist, no.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Yes! In a 5-4 decision, this time with Justice Anthony Kennedy on the right side, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that we have a right to keep and bear arms that is irrespective of service in a state militia. Got one right.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision Wednesday overturning a Louisiana law that provided capital punishment for adults who rape a child — in this specific case, a man who brutally raped his 8-year-old stepdaughter — has a kind of Catch-22 reasoning.
Wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion:
” The evidence of a national consensus with respect to the death penalty for child rapists, as with respect to juveniles, mentally retarded offenders, and vicarious felony murderers, shows divided opinion but, on balance, an opinion against it. Thirty-seven jurisdictions—36 States plus the Federal Government—have the death penalty. As mentioned above, only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for rape of a child. Though our review of national consensus is not confined to tallying the number of States with applicable death penalty legislation, it is of significance that, in 45 jurisdictions, petitioner could not be executed for child rape of any kind…
“We conclude on the basis of this review that there is no clear indication that state legislatures have misinterpreted [an earlier decision, Coker v. Georgia, that banned capital punishment for raping adults] to hold that the death penalty for child rape is unconstitutional. The small number of States that have enacted this penalty, then, is relevant to determining whether there is a consensus against capital punishment for this crime…
“After reviewing the authorities informed by contemporary norms, including the history of the death penalty for this and other nonhomicide crimes, current state statutes and new enactments, and the number of executions since 1964, we conclude there is a national consensus against capital punishment for the crime of child rape.”
An argument commonly used by death penalty opponents in state legislative debates is that,under Coker, laws applying to the rape of children would be unconstitutional. That argument carried the day in most legislatures. So now?
Five members of the court find national consensus in the failure of legislatures to extend capital punishment to those who rape children. Wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the dissenters:
“The Court provides two reasons for this sweeping conclusion: First, the Court claims to have identified ‘a national consensus’ that the death penalty is never acceptable for the rape of a child; second, the Court concludes, based on its ‘independent judgment,’ that imposing the death penalty for child rape is inconsistent with ‘the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.’ …neither of these justifications is sound…
“In assessing current norms, the Court relies primarily on the fact that only 6 of the 50 States now have statutes that permit the death penalty for this offense. But this statistic is a highly unreliable indicator of the views of state lawmakers and their constituents.”
The lesson here? In the absence of consensus among experts, legislators should never be swayed by arguments made by those who insist that a proposed law will be ruled unconstitutional. That’s an argument frequently applied in a whole range of circumstances by minorities attempting to carry the day, or by bureaucrats who attempt to influence public policy.
In this instance, the failure of states to act is taken as evidence that an emerging national consensus has developed on this issue.
Concluded Alito for the dissenters:
“The Court is willing to block the potential emergence of a national consensus in favor of permitting the death penalty for child rape because, in the end, what matters is the Court’s ‘own judgment’ regarding ‘the acceptability of the death penalty.’ Although the Court has much to say on this issue, most of the Court’s discussion is not pertinent to the Eighth Amendment question at hand. And once all of the Court’s irrelevant arguments are put aside, it is apparent that the Court has provided no coherent explanation for today’s decision.”
The five members who prevailed had a conclusion in mind — and found a “national consensus” route to get there.
Now ask again: What are the stakes in this presidential election? Two or three of those who joined Kennedy are expected to retire over the next eight years.
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Tidbits: Mr. Varsity, church and oil
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tidbits from the morning paper:
First up, an Atlanta institution. Most everybody in Metro Atlanta and every student who has attended Georgia Tech in the last 50 years had to have met Erby Walker. He was the most famous “What’ll ya have? What’ll you have?” counterman at the Varsity, the North Avenue insitution that’s only slightly less famous than the institution of higher learning across the street. He died Monday at the age of 70.
I found him intimidating — friendly and likeable, but intimidating. I felt a bit like a customer awaiting service from Jerry Seinfield’s Soup Nazi. The Varsity counterman speaks a code; all the regulars know it and order their food accordingly: chocolate milk in a cup without ice is NIPC. No Ice, Plain Chocolate.
Anyway, the question is whether the Varsity and Erby Walker in particular are a part of your personal history.
Another item from the AJC’s Wednesday edition is an effort being made by lawyers for the Southern Center for Human Rights to strike down a state law taking effect July 1 that prohibits registered sex offenders from volunteer work in churches.
Opponents of the law say it will prohibit even those who were convicted after engaging in “consenual sex as teenagers” from volunteering, even though they pose no danger to children. Furthermore, they contend, the prohibition would keep adults from singing in the adult choir.
There is, of course, nothing in the law that keeps registered sex offenders from attending church, as State Sen. President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) noted Tuesday. “They just can’t be Sunday School teachers or volunteer for vacation Bible school. It prevents them, as it should from being around children.”
He thinks, and I do too, that “somebody’s trying to use religion to accomplish their own agenda.” It’s a repeat of the strategy that seeks to raise doubt, find inconsistencies, work openings and eventually do away with capital punishment. Convince the public that the offenders are actually the victims of “unjust” laws.
In the news today, too, is a story headlined “Offshore drilling stirs fresh debate in Florida.” Yes it does. But one might conclude from the three pictures that first show “sugar-white” beaches, the second showing oil rigs in the Gulf and the third showing “the fears” of Floridians — an oil-soaked beach in San Francisco last November — that there’s a direct connection.
First, to see the proposed oil rigs that would come from opening more of the outer-continental exploration, you’d have to take a boat or a plane. Rigs that are 50 or 150 miles off shore are not visible from the sugar-white beaches. And while accidents do occur, the spills — as in San Franscisco — are far more likely to come from tankers transporting oil, whether that oil originates in Nigeria or from the outer-continental shelf, where 97 percent of federal lands are currently off-limits to drilling.
The votes apparently exist in Congress to lift the ban on off-shore drilling. Four-dollar gas, and no relief in sight, has convinced the nation that safe, responsible exploration is an integral part of an effort to provide some protection against the whims of a world oil cartel. But Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid Democrats won’t bring it up — at least until later in the summer.
Delay, pretend, stick your head in the sand. Maybe $4 gas will go away. Maybe the Social Security crisis will go away too. Maybe tyrants just don’t understand the real us. Maybe fantasy is good public policy.
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Rhetorical gimmicks no substitute for oil exploration
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tough call.
Do we go with Indigo Girl Amy Ray on nuclear energy? Or do we go with the thoughtful, wise and deliberate Johnny Isakson? Close call. Really tough. A lot of good policy truth comes out of the entertainment industry.
Her view is that “nuclear power is not the answer to our energy dilemmas.” His is that “Democrats must be willing to embrace nuclear energy for electricity and responsible exploration of our oil and gas resources in Alaska, Colorado, Montana and North Dakota, as well as in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic coast.” Republicans, in return, “must be willing to embrace conservation initiatives as well as alternatives such as solar and wind energy.”
Hmmm. I’ll take Sen. Isakson’s position. Besides, neither he nor anybody else in a responsible position has suggested that nuclear power is “the answer” to our energy insufficiency. On virtually nothing is one approach “the” solution to a problem, or the cause of it.
To Barack Obama, there are at least two causes of $4 gas. One is Big Oil’s profits, which he’d tax away. The other is speculation in oil markets, which he’d regulate more heavily. In the Obama world, more taxes and more regulation are the combination of solutions to most every problem that can’t be solved by more spending.
U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, at a Senate hearing last week, noted that in futures contracts for the benchmark West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil, the evidence does not confirm that speculation has been a major contributor to the run-up in prices. “The data shows that while there may have been an increase in market participation overall,” Chambliss said of oil futures in domestic trading, “the proportion of positions held by commercial participants … and noncommercial … has not changed over the past two years. Speculation … seems to have held steady at about 20 percent.”
Commercial participants are those like MARTA that attempt to lock in future gasoline costs and fully intend to take delivery. Noncommercial represents speculation.
The precise role of speculation worldwide is not yet known, but there is a danger here that politicians, like Obama, can make matters considerably worse. “There is speculation in all commodity markets, just as there is in the stock market,” said Chambliss. Any exchange in any country can list oil contracts for trading without any approval from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It may be physically delivered here, but it can be traded anywhere.
A knee-jerk reaction on the part of politicians can’t stop worldwide speculation, if indeed it’s a problem, but it can drive trading markets overseas, as has been done with the so-called IPOs, or initial public offerings of companies. Most of those are now going to England and elsewhere, he said.
The rhetorical gimmicks —- taxing Big Oil, closing what Obama calls the “Enron loophole” that exempts some electronic trading from U.S. regulation, or nationalizing the oil companies —- are campaign fodder. They’re distractions, not substitutes for exploration, for adding refinery capacity and for nuclear. Even John McCain’s proposal to give a $300 million taxpayer-funded “prize,” amounting to $1 for every man, woman and child in the country, to the inventor of an auto battery that will deliver power at 30 percent of the current cost is a desperation gimmick from a politician who wants to be seen as offering a solution.
McCain, like Obama, opposes drilling on a small portion of the 19 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. McCain has come to recognize the essential importance of exploration on the outer continental shelf; Obama is in la-la lockdown, still dreaming. Some 97 percent of the 2 billion acres of the OCS, which contains an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil, is currently off-limits to exploration. The U.S consumes about 7.5 billion barrels of oil per year.
U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Grantville, a Republican, has gathered the signatures of 174 of his colleagues on a pledge. It reads: “I will vote to increase U.S. oil production to lower gas prices for Americans.” That’s it. Simple. But it gets to the heart of the problem. “Supplying our energy needs requires ‘all of the above’,” said Westmoreland. That includes “conservation, alternative energy development and increased supply of oil,” he said.
There’s not one solution. But there’s no solution without more exploration. Open ANWR and the outer continental shelf.
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Would you vote for Bob Barr?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Republicans are worried that in 2008 Bob Barr may be Ralph Nader, the guy Democrats blame for sending Al Gore home in 2000.
He won’t get more than 4 percent of the vote nationally, predicted Georgia’s U.S. Rep. John Linder, “but in some states that may be enough.” Most all of Barr’s vote is expected to come from those who would otherwise vote for John McCain.
That would twice-please Democrats. Barr was the first member of Congress to call for Bill Clinton’s resignation after Monica Lewinsky and was one of the House managers who made the case for impeachment to the U.S. Senate.
Barr drew 6 percent in a recent poll in Georgia, which could be enough to put the state in play.
I’ve already declared that I’ll not vote for Barr — or any other third party candidate. Ross Perot’s 19 percent got us Bill Clinton in 1992. Barr is a spoiler, but disenchanted Republicans are out there, especially among fiscal conservatives, that McCain has not yet captured. And maybe he won’t.
Question of the day to Democrats and Republicans: What would make you vote for Bob Barr?
I have no intentions of doing it, but if I came to believe that there was no difference on national security, on taxes and on judicial appointments, I could essentially sit this one out and vote for Barr, a guy I like and respect.
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No-drilling energy policy no way to get out of oil crisis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Conservatives have to be good listeners.
When mired in traffic congestion, sucking up $4 gas because politicians add density but not highway capacity, those who see roads as escape tunnels to tree-killing “sprawl” employ a coded language. When you hear them say “we can’t build our way out of traffic congestion” and therefore “alternatives” should be funded, grab your wallet, your anti-anxiety pills and leave home early. What they’re saying is: No roads, no way.
In the U.S. Senate last week, Majority Leader Harry Reid uttered the energy version of the same message to motorists who are, in the words of U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, “mad as hell” about $4 gas. “Despite what President Bush, John McCain and their friends in the oil industry claim, we cannot drill our way out of this problem,” said Reid, reading from the same script as his House counterpart, Nancy Pelosi.
Such is the tenor of intellectual engagement in Congress, an institution that’s grown more dysfunctional than the dregs of life on a Jerry Springer stage. Nobody, of course, has ever insisted that the United States can drill its way out of the $4-per-gallon gas problem, but just as more highway capacity is an obvious solution to traffic congestion, more efforts to find oil — and to refine it into gasoline — are essential elements of a national energy policy.
Chambliss, in a conversation this week, insists that it’s time to ratchet down the rhetoric, “to take some of the politics out of this thing, because we are at loggerheads. I will tell you that the immigration issue was intense, but everybody is affected by the gas-price situation, and they are upset … they are mad as hell.”
He hopes this week to strike a compromise. It would involve Republican capitulation on drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, with recoverable reserves estimated at 10.3 billion barrels, while Democrats would agree to open offshore areas, with reserves estimated at 18 billion barrels, and oil shale stores in the West. In Utah, Colorado and Wyoming those represent reserves of 800 billion barrels, President Bush said this week.
Democrats shut down on drilling altogether, and even McCain foolishly opposes opening ANWR, a part of Alaska that’s equivalent to an area half the size of Lake Lanier in an area half the size of the state of Georgia.
Pelosi said oil companies already have leases on 68 million acres that they’re not tapping. “There are some areas where they haven’t drilled,” Chambliss said, “but their contention that there are 68 million acres is simply wrong. There are areas under lease, but the geologists will tell you that there’s no oil where they had the lease. That’s a pretty bogus argument.”
Alfred W. “Bill” Jones III, chairman and CEO of coastal Georgia’s Sea Island Co., was among those once adamantly opposed to offshore drilling. He’s reconsidered. “We did have very strong objections, but it is hard to have that same sense of the fact that it shouldn’t be done given the price of oil and our current economic conditions,” Jones said Friday. “While we may still be opposed to offshore drilling and don’t necessarily think it is the answer, we have a hard time arguing against it today.”
As part of a national energy plan that included “broad conservation policies, more refining capacity, alternative energy sources” and appropriate safeguards and distances from shore, “it is getting hard to argue against it.” He’d prefer 50 miles offshore; Chambliss says 25 or 50, but in neither case would rigs be visible from shore.
Jones and Chambliss both note that during the devastating hurricanes that swept through the Gulf of Mexico, “there wasn’t one drop spilled in the gulf with Katrina and Rita blowing through.”
More exploration now won’t have immediate impact, sure. But had former President Bill Clinton not vetoed legislation passed in 1995 to open a tiny part of ANWR, that oil would be flowing now. “No Never” is not intelligent energy policy.
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The smoker, felon voters, frozen food
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Oh, yeah, Shirley, sure. Cut the check. Atlanta taxpayers and utility customers are at the limit of their tolerance on taxes, and therefore the feds should cut a check. People want to know, she told a U.S. Senate committee, “why didn’t the federal government help us more?” The Atlanta mayor also thinks Georgia should raise the gas tax to help. Don’t tax me; tax thee to help me. Spend.
Ordinarily I’d agree that doctors know best. But if U.S. District Court Judge Tom Thrash’s decison stands ordering the state to issue a blank check in Medicaid cases, it’s an invitation to waste, fraud and abuse. A physician prescribed 94 hours a week of private nursing care for a developmentally disabled 13-year-old. The state approved 84. The judge said the state has no discretion. An appeal is in order.
Oh, goodness. Barack Obama’s in trouble with the lefties. He smokes. Cigarettes. He can’t be president. Hillary declared the White House a smoke-free zone in 1993.
When the government’s bailing us out, we never learn. We’re not out of one mortgage crisis before we invite another. Freddie Mac, a government-chartered private company, touts a mortgage program that allows buyers to put no money down and to get 105 percent of the purchase price. But not to worry. The mortgages will be packaged up with some sound ones and sold to investors. But wait. That’s how this bad movie started.
Wall Street Journal reporters generally know what they’re hearing when conducting interviews about taxes, business and the economy. The outlook Barack Obama offers “appears like a return to an older-style big-government Democratic platform skeptical of market forces,” news reporters write. Change. To yesterday. But then those who have listened to him already know that.
Raul Castro, in what is being called his “boldest break yet from socialism,” directs state companies to develop a salary structure that pays hard workers more than slackards. Pay for performance. What a novel idea. One day even the teachers unions in this country will take the bold break from socialism. The view of the National Education Association is that merit pay “undermines the collegial relationship among teachers.” It will in Cuba, too, when the loafers discover that the performers have bigger paychecks. They’ll either work harder or organize.
Hmmm. Would we prefer to have the third term of George W. Bush, as Obama refers to the McCain candidacy, or the second term of Jimmy Carter, as McCain describes an Obama presidency? Easy call.
But it’s true. The effort by Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia to restore voting rights to felons is an effort to kick up the Democratic vote. Except for former state school Superintendent Linda Schrenko and former state Rep. Robin Williams, both Augusta-area Republicans, all the people in jail are Democrats, wrongly convicted, too. I’m sure of it.
The story of the illegal immigrant from Guatemala —- hired as a day laborer and then shot and killed by an off-duty DeKalb County deputy who said Marcial Cax-Puluc killed his wife in an attempted robbery —- is most bizarre. The most thorough investigation possible is warranted.
Food manufacturers in Mexico promise to “freeze” prices on 150 food items, including canned tuna and tomatoes, fruit juice, oil, flour and coffee, until Dec. 31. One of three things will happen: 1) said items will disappear; 2) taxpayers will pay the difference in the form of subsidies; 3) manufacturers will squeeze producers and raise other prices to cover those that are frozen. There is a fourth option, I suppose. Mexico can export its excess demand to the U.S., as it’s done for years.
Pike Family Nurseries has to be kid-friendly. Its former CEO is one.
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Puzzle: What change is Obama?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The headline in the morning AJC over a story about Barack Obama meeting with his newly assembled national security advisory group is this: “Obama turns to Clinton advisers.”
For those who feared that Obama represented the second term of Jimmy Carter, it was reassuring. There she was, semi-well preserved, former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, along with Warren Christopher and former Defense Secretary William Perry, all from Team Clinton, the administration that declined to take custody of Osama bin Laden in 1996. Not enough evidence to indict, they thought.
Former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn was there, too,of course, along with former U.S. Sen. David Boren and former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton.
On national security, it’s reassuring that the change Obama represents is no more radical than that wrought by old school Democrats. Obama could be in a position where his decisions could plague this nation, and the world, for generations to come. It’s reassuring, therefore, to see that the “change” he promises is yesterday’s.
It does bring up a question, though. Has anybody heard a policy statement from Obama that represents anything other than yesterday’s approaches to anything? Taxes, no. Social spending, no. Bi-partisanship, no. Energy, no. Obama’s a new soundbox affixed to an old agenda The problem is that much of the country seems to be unaware of the 60s and 70s, while many of those who are still cling to the era. The old-timers of the flower-children generation want one last Woodstock on the White House grounds before they go.
But the question, really, is to identify something in Obama’s promise of “change” that represents actual change.
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Obama needs Nunn; we need oil
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s a long-shot that former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia would be Barack Obama’s choice as vice president. But polls make clear that if it’s not Nunn, it’ll have to be somebody like him — a seasoned politician who projects sound judgment and a wealth of experience in dealing with foreign policy and national security issues.
In spite of everything working against John McCain, he’s hanging in there against the rock star. The latest ABC News-Washington Post poll puts Obama up by only six percentage points, 48 to 42, against McCain. Significantly, though, almost half — 46 percent of those polled — don’t think he’s experienced enough to be President. In a world at peace, that might not be a major obstacle. In one where bad guys fly planes into landmark buildings, and where evil regimes could produce nuclear weapons during the next President’s term, being thought too inexperienced for the job is a big-league problem for Obama.
Nunn, while solid, has lost his star-power in the 12 years he’s been out of the U.S. Senate. But that may not matter. Obama needs a vice president like him, if not him.
McCain, meanwhile, has joined to ranks of those who recognize that while this nation may never achieve energy independence, it’s essential to take steps that move us in that direction. He called this week for lifting the federal ban on offshore drilling, with states that approve it collecting a portion of the royalties. Obama opposes that, saying that allowing exploration now won’t affect gasoline prices for at least five years.
President Bush is resuming his push for drilling on a tiny part of the Artic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. While, as Obama would argue, that will take even longer to have impact on domestic supplies, probably a decade, the nation does have to get started. That oil would be flowing now had environmentalists not persuaded former President Bill Clinton to veto authorization when Congress approved it in 1995. Ten years is a long time. But we can project that the day of $4 gas — or $8 gas — will come again. Act now.
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U.S. Senate primary could be Vernon Jones’ to lose
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This week’s question posed of all candidates for the U.S. Senate, without regard to whether they have primary opposition, is straightforward enough.
“What should the United States do to end the war in Iraq?”
Only U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss got it right. We win.
DeKalb County Chief Executive Officer Vernon Jones came close. Except for the usual Democratic-candidate habit of misquoting John McCain on how long U.S. forces will be in a shooting war in Iraq, the position Jones advocates is awfully close to existing policy. Former State Rep. Jim Martin of Atlanta may be close, too, but his expressed position essentially allows the reader to conclude anything. That’s probably smart. Georgians may tire of the war but will never opt for defeat, however couched.
With less than a month to go before the July 15 primary, which pits Jones and Martin against three other Democrats, it does appear to be Jones’ race to lose. Here’s why:
Despite the Barack Obama surge in Georgia’s presidential primary —- 97,310 more Democrats than Republicans voted —- he’s not on the primary ballot next month. The driver of turnout, therefore, is local races and about 35 contested legislative races.
In Democratic districts, the contested races are heavily in the metro Atlanta area and predominantly in majority-black districts. About 25 House and nine Senate members have challengers. Senate races are in metro Atlanta, Savannah, Albany, Augusta and Columbus. The only white incumbent Democrat with opposition in the state Senate is Nan Orrock of Atlanta.
The point is that legislative races in the Democratic primary are in areas that likely favor Vernon Jones.
The other local race that can be expected to drive turnout is sheriff.
The advantage there likely goes to Jones as well. Democrats have contested primaries in 65 counties, including Bibb (Macon), Clayton, DeKalb, Dougherty (Albany) and Lowndes (Valdosta). The overlap of sheriff and legislative races creates voter-interest hot spots that, when combined with the racial-pride enthusiasm generated by Obama’s success, make Jones hard to beat in the primary.
Martin is relying on Jones’ words to sink him. Jones has said he voted twice for George W. Bush, causing state party chairman Jane Kidd to question his allegiance to the Democratic Party. Jones thinks Martin is “too liberal for Georgia” and has chastised the party for recruiting “losers.” Against Chambliss, Martin would be the stronger candidate, but I’m not yet convinced that he can get the nomination —- or that Jones can’t win without a runoff.
While the Senate campaign is not yet on the radar, Jones has a presence, with billboards or signs at least, in towns and cities with large black populations. They’re noticeable, and they were early, giving him exclusive claim to voter attention. See it half a dozen times and the name sticks. That’s important, because blacks represent almost half of the Democratic base, and since 2004, 160,000 blacks have been added to voting rolls, compared with 150,000 whites.
While he has his critics in metro Atlanta, Jones is a personable candidate with great potential to charm voters. His name is out there, and if he’s able to tap into the Obama groundswell, he’ll be hard for the Democratic establishment to beat.
By targeting his base in DeKalb and Clayton, the 34 House and Senate districts with primary challenges, and the 65 sheriff races in counties with large black populations —- something that’s manageable —- Jones could pull it off next month. No runoff. Could he win in November? Probably not.
Could Martin? I’d not bet against him, though he’d be a long shot. He’s likable, and that comes across in his television commercials. He’s a Vietnam veteran and a guy who probably can make the case that he’d be a centrist on most issues. He’d support ending some of the Bush tax cuts, but not all; capital gains, for example.
The Obama surge, the Gold Dome debacle that this past session represented and the low opinion voters have of Congress don’t bode well for Chambliss. He’s not a shoo-in —- though the race is his to lose.
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Obama and race preferences
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama’s political success — he’ll be Democratic nominee for President of the United States — prompts the Wall Street Journal to pose this question on its news pages:
“Does America still need affirmative action, given that an African-American has made it to the top of American politics.”
That issue, The Journal’s Jonathan Kaufman speculates, “is likely to dog Sen. Obama on the campaign trail as he seeks to win over white blue-collar voters in battle-ground states like Michigan.”
In addition, Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska voters may be asked this November whether race and gender preferences should be banned in admissions to state universities, state-funded jobs and state contracts. Whites and blacks, as you might image, divide sharply on the question.
Obama, according to his spokesman, believes “affirmative action in universities today is appropriate only if race is one of many factors.” John McCain opposes “affirmative action plans and quotas that give weight to one group of Americans at the expense of another,” said his spokesman. “Plans that result in quotas, where such plans have not been judicially created to remedy a specific, proven act of discrimination, only result in more discrimination and violate the concept of equality of opportunity.”
Obama himself is an example of the problem of applying preferences on the basis of skin color. With immigration, it’s increasingly difficult to justify giving preferences to those, like Obama, with no history of having been victimized by government-imposed or sanctioned discrimination in America. His African father was never a U.S. citizen and his mother was white.
It is hard to explain to a working class white from the hills of West Virginia who has suffered generational poverty why Kodak “diversity” is such an imperative that he should be willing to accept discrimination that favors a newcomer, perhaps even a newcomer who came here illegally. Racial preferences should, as McCain asserts, should be granted “to remedy a specific, proven act of discrimination.”
Otherwise they never go away.
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Commuter ‘pilot project’ to Lovejoy off the rails
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Eons ago, before “the Bridge to Nowhere” aroused the nation to the outlandish waste represented by congressonal earmarks — those unexamined pork barrel projects that individual politicians dump onto taxpayers — commuter rail to Lovejoy was born.
It came about not because anybody had examined the transportation or congestion-relief value of a slow train that would traverse the 26 miles from Atlanta to Lovejoy. It came about because somebody prevailed on former U.S. Rep. Mac Collins, who represented the area, to earmark $87 million of the transportation money otherwise coming to Georgia, to create the Lovejoy line.
More than a decade later, Gov. Sonny Perdue drank the Kool-Aid. Reasoning that the money’s just setting there, and gas is $4 a gallon, he made a decision that is most uncharacteristic of a governor whose legacy will be a determined effort to make Georgia the best-managed state in the nation. Last week he announced support for a Lovejoy line extended to Griffin. It will be, he says, a pilot project.
Perdue thus takes the position that was being forced on him by former Secretary of State Cathy Cox when she was mounting her own gubernatorial campaign two years ago. Reacting to language inserted in a state budget “at the 11th hour that threatens the Lovejoy commuter rail project,” she criticized “Gov. Sonny Perdue and state lawmakers” for a decision that “potentially” left “millions in federal transportation funding on the table. …” Her Democratic colleagues lamented, too, that failure to spend the money would “make it more difficult to secure federal funding” in the future.
Bottom line: Money exists. Spend it. That’s not Sonny.
Besides, state auditors who were examining the advocacy-group-driven efforts to sell commuter rail noted that $21.1 million had been spent on studies of 14 proposed lines in the 10 years ending in 2006 and none had been built. While they were not specificially asked to comment on the Atlanta-Lovejoy line, they noted the risks anyway. Wrote the auditors:
“We found the project may cost more than the estimated $108 million; the state may be liable for a portion of the federal investment in the project (about $87 million) if the line is terminated prior to being in operation for 20 years; and the state may be liable for covering any operating shortfall.”
Of the $108 million, almost half would be spend on upgrades to track taxpayers don’t own, with most of the remainder going to rail stations.
Ridership projections from 2004 were for 1,800 riders a day, with annual operating costs of $7 million. The 26-mile trip from Lovejoy to Atlanta would take 46 minutes and cost $5.60.
Taking commuter rail on to Macon — the ultimate goal of rail supporters — was projected in 2002 to cost somewhere between $290 million and $2.3 billion, with annual operating costs of $22.6 million.
Perdue vowed four years ago that all proposed transportation remedies, commuter rail included, would be subjected to cost-benefit analyis and compared on cost effectiveness to other options for lifting metro Atlanta out of gridlock. “What we’ve begun to do is make transportation policy based on facts. Congestion can be measured. What we’re doing is measuring where the greatest needs are, taking the resources that we have, and looking for the best solutions to those needs.”
He did not then rule out commuter rail but insisted that “we’ve got to be sure that it moves people in a way that they will adopt and ride — and that means it generally has to be quicker, more pleasant and go where people want to go. …”
Two points: Fiscal conservatives don’t spend money just because an earmark put it there. And money spent on the wrong solution worsens congestion.
Commuter rail south is a money-sucking white elephant. That it will remain, unless the state takes other steps, such as moving state agencies and departments out of Atlanta to points south, as the Department of Corrections is doing in relocating to Forsyth. Moving employees from Atlanta will help cure traffic congestion here — and help spread jobs to the south.
There has to be more than a plan for commuter rail. There has to be a plan for commuter rail to attract riders.
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Brittle loss, bogus lives, Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
When my 95-year-old mother-in-law died two years ago, I knew Sophie Mae peanut brittle would suffer a financial blow. But dang. Rich’s. Davison’s. The C&S bank. Southern institutions gone. And Sophie Mae’s on a flatbed headed north. Old Atlanta may have gone, but the corporatists can never take away our world-famous heat and humidity.
The contest is over. A winner is declared. It’s State Sen. Vincent Fort of Atlanta, who wins the coveted prize of unlimited airtime on all local TV networks in the New Motto for Grady contest. Fort’s entry, inspired by the news that the state has given the hospital $12.7 million for its trauma center, the lion’s share of available money, offered this unforgettable new motto: It’s Still Not Enough.
What gives? MARTA presumably is the beneficiary of high gas prices —- and yet it’s projecting a deficit of $43 million for the coming year after reporting back-to-back surpluses.
MARTA’s setting the example for other governments in one respect, though. Rather than add employees for the brief spell needed to instruct riders on the new Breeze card payment system, it hired contract workers. When the job’s done, they go. Not surprisingly, though, some object, insisting that taking the contract job meant they’d become MARTA employees. Huh? One contract employee is said to be “angry.” Your anger is not my mandate.
Evidence from Massachusetts is a reminder that the proper term for the “uninsured” is “self-insured” when people who can afford to buy health insurance choose not to because they prefer to spend the premiums on something that gives them pleasure. In Massachusetts, 5 percent of taxpayers failed to buy health insurance —- and almost half were fined $219 because they could afford it but still didn’t buy. Strip mandates and allow purchasers to buy health insurance anywhere in the country and combine it with health savings accounts and catastrophic coverage. Penalize people for not having coverage. The self-insured will buy.
The most difficult job in Georgia is being a caseworker for the Division of Family & Children Services. You’ve got to be the momma, the daddy, the psychiatrist and the omniscient protector —- and in the instance you’re not, you get fired. The best approach to the problems of children at risk is to do everything we can to make certain they come into the world with a mother and a father in the home.
Holy cow! Breaking news from the Free Enterprise front. Stop presses. A “reinvigorated focus on price” enables Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, to beat out the competition in a tough economic environment. Briefly, for the Obama economists who peruse these reports, it means that when prices (or taxes) are lowered, business (or government) wins. Wal-Mart’s stock is close to a 52-week high. Time for a windfall profits tax on successful retailers. And take away any tax incentive to build new stores or maintain the ones they have.
I’m beginning to believe half the newcomers to metro Atlanta are running from the law, lies, lives or ex-wives. Investors with newcomer Kirk Wright got bogus statements. The wife of fake physician Eric Perteet, another newcomer, got from him bogus transcripts and degrees.
Headline: “Rivals take their shots at absent Chambliss.” Uh, the absent Chambliss has no primary opponent and hence no reason to appear onstage with five Democrats and a Libertarian. It would be noble of him to consent to be their punching bag, but why?
Must we go the entire summer with the partisans distorting John McCain’s position on the Iraqi phase of the war? They jumped with glee when McCain said on the “Today” show, in response to a question about whether he had a timetable for troops to be out (Barack Obama’s is 16 months), “No, but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq.” The Left insists that the two options are to bail out in 16 months or to stay in a shooting war for 100 years. Dishonest.
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High gas, rage
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In France, largely because of taxes, gasoline costs the equivalent of $10 per gallon. In Britain, same reason, it’s $9.50 and in Spain it’s $7.73. All Europe is in a rage.
Here, Congress dawdles, dreaming up ways to blame the oil companies and levy a windfall profits tax, while the Energy Department offers projections that prices will peak at $4.15 per gallon this year, but stay above $4 per gallon through most of next year.
John McCain, who on some days can sound awfully much like the entrenched political cartel that controls Washington, regardless of the party in power, said on NBC’s “Today Show” that “absolutely” the oil companies should return some of their profits to consumers.
It’s here that it starts to get tricky. In Political Washington, that thought often translates into an intervention by Congress to determine how the oil companies should return profits to consumers. “They should be embarking on research and development that will pay off in reducing our dependence on foreign oil,” said McCain.
Fair enough. Let them drill off shore. Let them tap the known reserves in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge. Encourage the construction of more refineries and more nuclear facilities. And, of course, encourage research in alternatives.
“The point is, oil companies have got to be more participatory in alternate energy, in sharing their profits in a variety of ways,” said McCain. “There is very strong and justifiable emotion about their profits.”
In Washington-talk phrases such as “sharing their profits in a variety of ways” and “justifiable emotion about their profits” should prompt concern. It sounds like the voice of the moderate, reach-across-the-aisle Republicans who achieve bipartisanship by giving Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid Democrats half of what they want without really getting anything much in return.
McCain said he doesn’t expect gas prices to drop before November’s election. “I don’t think it’s going much lower and it could go higher…you’ve got a finite supply, basically, and a cartel controlling it.”
We may know today in Georgia, but one other concern about the high gas prices is that it could tempt state officials to see white elephant solutions — like, for example, commuter rail from Atlanta south to Lovejoy — as an “alternative” to the automobile and high gas prices. It is and will remain a white elephant that would be funded because advocacy groups are pushing it, not because it’s a transportation solution.
It’s not just governments, the oil companies and producers that profit from high gas prices. Four-dollar gas may be bad for you and me, but for some advocacy groups it’s the opening they need.
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‘Can I afford the payments’ on Obama ride?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Is it “demonizing” Barack Obama to point out that he’s “the most liberal senator” in Congress? Mike Huckabee, auditioning for the vice presidential nomination on the Republican ticket, says “I think we will make a huge mistake if we try to demonize Barack Obama.” Is identifying him as a liberal demonizing him?
If so, the first big mistake goes to the lone Democrat in Oklahoma’s congressional delegation, Dan Boren, who is the son of former U.S. Senator David Boren. “I think this is an important time for our country,” Boren said in an interview with the Associated Press. “We’re facing a terrible economic downturn. We have high gasoline prices. We have problems in our foreign policy.”
While Obama talks about reaching across the aisle and fashioning a new Washington, “unfortunately his record does not reflect working in a bipartisan fashion.” Boren speaks the truth, of course. Obama is a factory-issue leftist who is as partisan as they come in Washington. There’s a real disconnect between the talk and the walk.
Boren represents a mostly rural district that gave two-thirds of its primary vote to Hillary Clinton. “We’re much more conservative,” he said. “I’ve got to reflect my district. No one means more to me than the people who elected me. I have to listen them… Our nominee is not my first choice.”
Huckabee, who made the comment about Republican activists demonizing Obama while campaigning for a state senator in New Hampshire, does have good political insticts, even though I far prefer a host of others to him as the vice presidential nominee.
“I’m grateful for Barack Obama and his magnificent climb and the journey he has made” as the first black positioned to win his party’s nomination.“As an American, I can obviously salute the extraordinary barriers that have been broken already in this election cycle. But…he has gone far enough this year because, ultimately, this election is not going to be about something symbolic, it [will] be about something substantive.” said Huckabee.
He compared the Obama surge to the new-car shopping experience. “When you got to the showroom, the car is really appealing; it’s got that new car smell and all the bells and whistles. But then you’ve got to decide, can I afford the payments? I think when people start looking at what Obama is saying, the very last thing they need in this tough economy is more tax burden on their families and their future.”
Question of the day: Will the new-car smell wear off before or after Democrats sign the contract and drive it out of the showroom? I’m betting that Boren is the first in a line of blue dog Democrats who know the full tab to be paid for picking the hybrid version of a shiny new McGovern-mobile. Promises 40 miles per gallon, delivers 12. And when the costs of buying off all the constituencies who assembled the Obama ride are factored in, working Americans will suffer an extreme case of sticker shock..
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Tech High works
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On the last week for Cobb County schools, I am sitting in Pebblebrook High School’s Center for Excellence in the Performing Arts in Mableton watching a dozen talented male dancers, all of whom principal Regina Montgomery believes will have professional dance careers.
It is a fabulous, state-of-the-art facility, better than the performing arts facilities at most small colleges.
On the last day for Atlanta public schools, I am walking the halls of Tech High, a 4-year-old charter school built as an elementary school in 1922 that is in constant need of repair. In addition to rent of $36,000 per year, maintenance is another $250,000. “When you look at these pipes, they burst,” said Kelly McCutcheon, executive vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a think tank that conceived of Tech High and supports it financially. “We plan on breaking even next year,” said McCutcheon, though the foundation has to raise almost $500,000 this year to support it, down from $1.326 million in the 2005-2006 school year. The Atlanta system will spend about $8,500 per student for the 250 who attend Tech High, but includes no money for maintenance, transportation, nutrition or administrative functions.
McCutcheon estimates that charter schools, like Tech High, get about 60 percent of the funding provided other public schools. It could become self-supporting with 500 students.
The temptation is to compare Pebblebrook and Tech High, to suggest, as Georgians have for generations, that the superior education is possible only with superior facilities and equipment. Facilities do matter. But Tech High is among those that convince me a superior school is shared desire to excel and a connection between teachers and students, facilities notwithstanding.
In a setting that should be a distraction, students at Tech High outperform their APS peers on the Georgia high school graduation test, with 98.1 percent passing, compared with 93.7 for the system as a whole. Its first graduating class of 44 students this year has an average 1,397 SAT score, second-highest in the APS system. The school takes all applicants from the city.
All but three of its graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges or two-year technical schools. One of those three chose to join the Army before pursuing college. Three will enroll at Georgia Tech.
Walking the halls with Barbara Christmas, former head of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE), who serves as Tech High’s CEO, is like walking into a family reunion. We’re not meeting just the best and the brightest; students selected to put the best possible face on the school.
She stops them as they walk by and relates a shared experience —- the students from inner-city Atlanta who traveled by bus to Collins, in rural Tattnall County, to spend time in her home. For one student, it was his first time to see live chickens and pecan trees in a grove.
Kalina Harrison, a rising senior, waiting for a ride home, is asked about the school. “Tech High is a good school, and we have a great science teacher,” she says, flowing into a testimonial, as many other students do, to praise a particular teacher.
The 18 faculty members are special. While they are intentionally paid slightly more than other APS teachers, they were subjected to extensive interviews to make certain that they shared the school’s purpose. “If your child comes to this school,” says Christmas, “your child’s chance of having a great teacher is 100 percent.”
Most impressive in the student body is that they look you in the eye and chat comfortably. They exude self-confidence, the kind that comes from knowing stuff, not from being taught self-esteem. It’s a disciplined, focused school, with a strict dress code. “Here we know them and love them and want them to be successful,” said Christmas. About 75 percent to 80 percent are on free or reduced-price lunch; about that many take MARTA to the school on Boulevard, and “we pay for the MARTA ticket,” she said.
In a 1922 elementary school, there is the connection and a shared determination to succeed. Tech High works. Walk the halls and you feel it. Talk to students and you know it.