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Thursday, July 3, 2008
Finest flour, honest judge, skeeters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Independence Day has a new meaning. Celebrate America, home of the Green. Denver’s Democratic mayor, John Hickenlooper, is determined that this year’s convention will be the “greenest in the history of the planet,” with 85 percent of all waste generated there reused, recycled or composted. “It’s the new patriotism,” said Hickenlooper. With some ease, it is possible to assert that much of the verbal waste generated there will be fully recycled on America.
• J.M. Smucker, the latest owner of the most Southern of flours, White Lily, moves its milling operations from Knoxville, where it’s been produced for 125 years, to Ohio. Cookbook author Nathalie Dupree declares quite rationally that “I will slit my wrists if it changes.” She’s assured it won’t. The only people who wouldn’t consider tampering with White Lily a criminal offense are those who can’t cook or don’t eat Southern.
• The paper’s filled with stories about the impact of rising food and energy prices on businesses, especially restaurants. The lamentable reality here is that prices go up, justifiably, but I’ve never seen prices on a menu fall, except maybe in the highly competitive fast-food business. If the price is not increased, the packages shrink, as Kellogg is doing in shrinking the box sizes of Froot Loops, Cocoa Krispies and Apple Jacks by 2.4 percent. Other cereal makers are also raising prices. Dang ethanol. About 30 percent to 35 percent of the current corn crop will be diverted to ethanol. Dang a Congress that’s not serious about moving toward energy independence. Conserve. Drill. Build refineries. And never put food in the gas tank.
• Headline: “Experts share best and worst ways to fight mosquitoes.” Best way: Kill them. Worst way: Talk to them without preconditions, supposing that they can be talked out of wanting to bite. No charge for this expert advice.
• The Independent Republic of Atlanta wishes it to be known that the law of its neighboring state, Georgia, does not apply at its airport. No Second Amendment here, except as defined by local order.
• Not surprisingly, the Fulton Superior Court judge who ruled that “global warming” is reason to invalidate a state permit for a proposed coal plant in southwest Georgia, Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore, presides in the Independent Republic of Atlanta.
• Whenever you see a dollar figure notably attached to anything, whether it is the death penalty, England’s royals or the war in Iraq, you can pretty well know that some group is opposed and wants you to think it’s too much. They never report the costs of undertakings they favor, unless it’s deemed “paltry.” So we know when it’s reported that “maintaining Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family” comes with “an annual price tag of $80 million” that somebody objects. Sure enough, the source is “a prominent anti-monarchist group.”
• Imagine the national notoriety that Mississippi lawyer Richard “Dickie” Scruggs would have gotten had he represented Big Oil, Insurance or Tobacco. Instead, he made hundreds of millions suing tobacco, asbestos and insurance companies, and used a portion of those proceeds to try to bribe a county circuit court judge. “Perhaps this was not the first time you did this because you did it so easily,” said a judge, sentencing Scruggs to five years in prison. “There is evidence before the court that you have done it before.” Referring to Circuit Court Judge Henry Lackey, the sentencing judge told Scruggs: “You picked the wrong man to try to bribe.” Celebrate America’s birth — and a judicial system that Judge Henry Lackey represents. Give me one honest judge and I can endure 10 corrupt politicians without becoming a cynic.
• Shocking but true: The Clayton County Chamber of Commerce, which represents about 625 businesses, concludes that school board candidates with a business background are better suited for the school board. I’m taking my cue from the Clayton County Honesty & Competence Commission.
• Happy Fourth.
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Paid volunteerism. More Obama.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Leave it up to a liberal Democrat to turn the call for service to America into another Big Government spending program. Get used to it. It’s all Barack Obama and his wing of the party know.
Speaking Wednesday in Colorado Springs, Colo. — a “bastion of the religious right,” the Associated Press calls it — the call for service was part of the the campaign’s “flag week” effort to reposition himself as a God, country and flag-loving patriot. It’s to show America that while he spent most of his life hanging out with anti-American lefties, he’s a true-blue America-first patriot. Besides, it worked for JFK, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, though none of them had Obama’s baggage.
He did this time, in speaking at the University of Colorado, think to include the military as a possible opportunity to fulfill a national service obligation. “I hope that you take a moment to think about what you can do to shape a country we love, shape its future,” he told students. “Loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the 4th of July.” (Has it ever meant that to anybody outside the Obama circle? )
Obama sees a service-to-America gap arising because we’ve not been asked aggressively enough and we’ve not been given sufficient incentive. It’s true that we haven’t been asked aggressively enough. That is, if you don’t read local newspapers or pay attention to the military services’ on-going appeals for recruits.
His solution is to expand national service programs to the tune of $3.5 billion a year, to be funded from the surrender-dividend, the money freed up by fleeing Iraq and by going to the magic money tree for liberal Democrats: rich corporations. (That’s their idea of national service: Harvesting the bountiful fruit of the Corporate Money Tree.)
A new addition he announced Wednesday is the “Green Vet Initiative.” Green vets would be offered “counseling, job placement and mediation” for jobs in the “renewable energy” field. (We don’t make this stuff up. We’re not that imaginative. Government has already expanded in all of the ways our band of right-wingers could have dreamed up.)
Paid volunteerism. More of Yesterday Tomorrow. That’s Barack Obama.
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