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Friday, December 26, 2008
Football shootings and housing musings
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
A 79-year-old man in Clayton County is charged with shooting his neighbor after taking a comment the wrong way as they watched the Atlanta Falcons-Minnesota Vikings game on television. I’m guessing the wounded man opined that the Falcons wouldn’t make the playoffs in the elderly gentleman’s lifetime, which the 79-year-old took to be a threat.
KB Home, one of the nation’s biggest home builders, will pull out of Atlanta. The market, and a 12-month supply of homes for sale, dictates that decision. Had Congress been supplying the money — big developers are asking — there would have been no need to react to market conditions. Their instructions would have come from politicians: Stay and continue building “affordable” homes. That’s the future of “public-private partnerships/bailouts.”
None of President-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet selections is from the South. Big deal. The Cabinet is not quota-based.
A West Bank father offers his daughter and a dowry to the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at President Bush. Half the lefties in America would match that offer.
Christmas cheers to the Gwinnett County School Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks and members of the school board for having the courage to be among the pioneers. They’re signing a contract with the State Department of Education to be measured by the results they produce in return for more freedom from state mandates. It’s always easier to blame something (too little money) or somebody else (state and federal mandates) for failure, as some superintendents around the state are doing. Putting it on the line requires a willingness to take risks. Signing the contract is evidence of confidence in themselves and their abilities to run the system.
More reason for holiday cheer headed into the new year: Another Atlanta law firm, Chorey, Taylor & Fell, announces that it will hold hourly rates to this year’s levels in 2009 as “an appropriate recognition of economic conditions,” said founding shareholder Tom Chorey. “Our rates are well below the big firms in Atlanta and we still think we need to freeze them,” said Tom McLain, another of the firm’s lawyers.
Confidence in the fairness of the nation’s tax system has long been weak. Word from the IRS that it sent out more than $1 billion claimed on returns known or suspected to be fraudulent last year because of “limited resources” further erodes faith in the system. Chances of being audited are about 1 percent for those who report incomes of less than $200,000, about 3 percent for those who report more.
The federal loan to Chrysler and GM will, I fear, turn them into Morris Brown College — never really competitive, never really subject to the marketplace.
This downturn is serious. Toyota lost money. First time in 70 years.
Uh, oh. The company whose executives think 2009 will be hunky-dory is an Atlanta-based rent-to-own furniture chain, Aaron Rents. If you can’t afford to buy furniture, you can rent it. But you may not be able to rent the rims for your automobile so readily. The company is re-evaluating its wheels and rims rental business in light of the current economy. When times are bad, something’s gotta go. Could be the spinning rims.
Great piece by John O’Sullivan in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Conservative Snobs Are Wrong about Palin.” A flavor: Sarah Palin “has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones.” And to those who say, she’s “no Margaret Thatcher,” Sullivan replies: “As it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common.” Love it.
Memo to Evander Holyfield: Don’t fight guys, like the 7-foot Russian Nikolai Valuev, where you have to stand on a step-ladder and punch up to hit them in the chin. Especially at the age of 46.
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