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Thursday, February 12, 2009
On school vouchers, chief’s comp time
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Horror of horrors, a Clayton County parent has been placed on five years’ probation, fined $1,000 and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service for moving into her sister’s home in Henry County so her son could attend classes there. The woman, Tanja Revette Hale of Rex, has also been ordered to pay $1,200 in tuition costs to the Henry school system. When we make criminals of parents trying to do what they think best for their children’s education, it is, indeed, time for vouchers. State Sen. Eric Johnson’s bill will allow parents to buy services from any school or system willing to take them. No games required.
Didn’t know that people at the top got “comp time.” But, yes, DeKalb Police Chief Terrell Bolton does — 37 days of it in 2007 and 24 days over the first 10 months or so of last year. I always thought the top dog was there when needed, off when required, and that nobody ran a punch-the-clock tab.
Believe passionately enough in anything and the evidence you see will confirm it. Some 305 species of birds are wintering over about 35 miles farther north than they did 40 years ago, according to an Audubon Society study, thus confirming global warming. Forty years is a speck in time.
More evidence that the embittered left cannot let it go: U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants a “truth commission” to investigate claimed abuses of suspected terrorists and other decisions made during the Bush Administration. The haters won’t go away until they see George W. Bush in leg irons or in the grave, with their historians writing the textbooks on his performance in office.
If the problem’s simply that business has fallen off temporarily, it’s smart management to do as executives and board members at Mueller Water Products company of Atlanta have done. The company is temporarily furloughing about 5,900 workers at 26 plants nationwide and bigwigs are taking a 20 percent pay cut. Decisions on which plants to close and for how long will be made by those closer to the factory floor. If it works, it means that when business does pick back up, a loyal, trained work force is available to ramp back up quickly. Smart, good-sense management.
Jurors do play so many games nowadays that it’s just as well that Georgia legislators give prosecutors a straight life-without-parole alternative to the death penalty. It’s a slow and costly alternative, but it’s the death penalty still, a meal at a time, spread out over decades.
Clip this phrase — “a little noticed provision of” for future use in revealing how radical and dishonest the alleged “economic stimulus” bill is. Only three Republicans in the entire Congress voted for the bill — the three who will always be there for the Obama administration. That’d be Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
Quote of the week, from Clayton County Commissioner Wole Ralph: “This [development around the Atlanta airport] will allow citizens to get more services by shifting the tax burden to businesses.” Spoken like a true liberal — and the formula for driving business offshore, unless, of course, you give them a monopoly and allow them to charge enough to cover all their political obligations.
Will somebody in the state’s leadership — the governor, or at least the lieutenant governor or the Speaker — tell the Georgia Lottery board that it is not to permit video lottery in Underground Atlanta? In about two minutes, this PR campaign to gamblize-up (it’s a newly coined word) Underground that has the various politicians and interest groups lining up for a piece of the pie, can be put to a screeching halt. Lead. Be leaders. Act. The way to get something unpopular approved, whether it’s a tax increase or more opportunity to feed a bad habit, is to promise all the gimme-crowd a slice of the pie.
Here I draw the line: I refuse to join former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in declaring that public officials who are drunkards, adulterers and double-dippers who don’t know how to do their jobs should be barred from office. A quorum is required for all public bodies.
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Congratulations, Sen. Isakson
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Among those less attuned to workings of Georgia voter’s mind, this pronouncement may seem premature. It’s not. U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson won his 2010 reelection campaign on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2009, the day the House and Senate struck a deal on a $789 billion “economic stimulus” bill .
He surely must have been tempted to join three renegade Republicans from Maine and Pennsylvania in supporting a larger bill that passed the U.S. Senate Tuesday. In some respects, it would have been a “free” vote — free in the sense that his vote would not have been the one the Democrats needed to put it over the top. The Mainers, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter, who’s up for reelection in 2010, did that dirty deed.
Specter, who’s regarded higher by Pennsylvania Democrats than by Republicans, will be 80 when he runs again. Even if the seat goes Democratic, there’s no real reason to keep Specter around. He’ll always be there when Harry Reid needs him.
Isakson had to be tempted because he’d succeeded in getting a $15,000 tax credit for those who buy a primary residence, something he thinks essential to jump-start the housing sector. Had he agreed to support the pent-up demands of Democrats who’d had their spending ambitions partially checked for eight years, his tax credit language would undoubtedly have stayed in the final bill. He, too, could have stood with Reid and received the showering of blessings as a Great American Patriot that Reid bestowed on Collins, Specter and Snowe.
That photo op would, of course, have been political suicide back in Georgia since, in about two years, the details of this spending bill — which are largely unknown to members of Congress and to the media — would have filtered out. The more we know, the more likely it is that the nation will come to understand how little this had to do with economic stimulus and how much it had to do with enacting a social agenda that includes national single-payer health insurance.
So congratulate Isakson. He made the right choice for the country and for his political future in Georgia.
