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Thursday, March 5, 2009
Weekend free-for-all
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Pick a topic:
• “Stand by for news!”
• The one argument I don’t believe I’d make for another State Court judge for Clayton County is one made by Chief State Court Judge Harold Benefield. Argues he: The judge and support staff would cost $697,908, but he’d generate $764,994 in fines, producing $67,086 in revenue for Clayton. It should be a misdemeanor for any public official ever to connect any justice or law enforcement decision to revenue generation. In fact, when my band of right-wingers takes over, we’ll issue that as an executive order. No legislation needed.
• Scratch my head and try, but I simply cannot remember the veteran Democrat Keith W. Mason being distraught that ideology had reared its ugly head under the Gold Dome when Democrats were running things. Which tells me he either didn’t recognize it or did, but didn’t think it was a problem. He’s calling on a “new generation of business leaders — regardless of party affiliation” to whip this new crowd into shape. If the business crowd has any energy, clout or money, it had better use it to stop the assault coming from D.C., including the so-called Employee Free Choice Act.
• Cobb, blessed Cobb. When all the world panicked Monday and shut down the schools because of a dusting of snow, Cobb school officials stepped outside, observed, used good judgment — and kept them open.
• Associated Press writer Philip Elliott is of the opinion that President Barack Obama’s decision to sign a $410 billion spending bill loaded with 8,600 earmarks totaling $7.7 billion is the “Washington equivalent of officials pinching their nose and swallowing a bitter pill.” Pardon me, but isn’t the president’s party in power? And isn’t he something more than a bystander or victim of a Congress that just does bad things?
• Liberals levy taxes; they don’t pay them. Another of Obama’s appointees, caught, agrees to pay $10,000. This time it’s former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, nominated to be U.S. trade representative, at the back-tax window. And, had it been done by a rich Wall Streeter, he’d have been skewered, too, for deducting $17,382 for tickets to Dallas Mavericks basketball games without full business substantiation.
• We have Black History Month, followed by Women’s History Month and who knows what in April. Aren’t these you-don’t-know-me months getting a little long in the tooth?
• Who said this? “This government is here to protect the people, not the … rich.” 1) Nancy Pelosi. 2) Barack Obama. 3) Hugo Chavez. All could’a, but Chavez did.
• Whether Georgia Power is allowed to charge customers while nuclear reactors are under construction — a position I support — is neither liberal nor conservative. It’s a matter of guessing about the future, which explains why members of both parties wound up on different sides. The Senate vote was 38-16; the House vote 107-66. It now goes to Gov. Sonny Perdue for his signature.
• In what’s offered as the legislative quote of the week, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Ben Harbin (R-Evans) is quoted as saying, “One of the things I learned is that in a tough economy, everybody wants to cut government. They just don’t want to cut theirs.” My response: “Too many lobbyists, Ben. The majority, the people who don’t have lobbyists, still want cuts.”
• CH2M Hill-OMI, the private-sector company that runs Johns Creek, Milton and Sandy Springs, has some locals demanding to know its profits. Sandy Springs Mayor Eva Galambos offers precisely the correct answer: “I don’t feel it’s necessary to know what their profits are so long as we get good services and that I can compare and see if we have more or less employees than cities of the same size.” If cities are getting good service at a competitive price, its profits are immaterial. It’s liberals who lie awake nights worrying about whether honest profits are “fair.”
• Any “assisted suicide” that involves arm restraint so that a suffocating victim cannot remove a bag from over his head is assisted murder.
• I love John Rosemond’s parenting advice. “Before the psychological parenting revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s,” the guilt was placed on the misbehaving child. After the revolution, it’s on the parent, he writes. The man exudes good, healthy-adult sense.
• “Good day!”
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Friday, Sunday and Tuesday.
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Pass never-again octuplets law
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The unmarried California woman and her sperm-donor friend who are the parents of octuplets, along with their fertility-clinic physician, have given us a glimpse of the carelessness with which irresponsible adults can create human lives.
That act of child cruelty has drawn the attention of Georgia State Sen. Ralph Hudgins (R-Hull), who has introduced legislation to limit the number of embryos that fertility clinics can implant. The limit would be three for women over 40 and two for younger women. It should be passed into law.
“I think its totally immoral,” said Hudgins. “I think the doctor ought to be prosecuted and the woman should give them up for adoption.” Whether Nadya Suleman and the children’s sperm-donor daddy put them up for adoption is not something that is of legislative concern. Law should be changed, however, so that sperm donors can be held liable for financial support for children born to unmarried women. Every child deserves a mother and a father. When adults carelessly create life, both should be accountable to the child, an accountability that would include a legal obligation to provide financial support and a right to know the father’s name.
Hudgins is right about the physician. His license should be withdrawn and, furthermore, he should be held financially liable for damages done the children by bringing them into the world in a home where they can not get the care, attention and two-parent support that is a newborn’s right.
