Kyle Wingfield

Not with Iran, mind you, but with Republicans in Congress regarding health care.

The basic premise of a bipartisan, televised meeting between President Obama and the GOP to discuss health care is good — a step toward fulfilling the transparency on health-care negotiations, something Obama was for before he was against it. It might amount to nothing more than political theater, but there would be at least the chance of having a substantive discussion.

That can’t be the case, however, if the discussion is to start from the current House and Senate health-care bills.

This idea doesn’t make sense on any basis. It’s become quite clear since the Massachusetts special election that there’s no appetite among Democrats for forging ahead with the current bills. (Not to dance on his grave, but the death yesterday of Rep. John Murtha only makes the House Democrats’ numbers game harder.) The only reasons for trying to get Republicans involved in fixing the current bills are:

a) the false …

Continue reading Whatever happened to negotiating without preconditions? »

I’ll post some thoughts about the Tea Party Convention later on — I’m in between meetings at the Capitol at the moment — but I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer a hearty congratulations to the Boy Scouts of America, which was incorporated 100 years ago Monday.

Scouting was a major part of my life for at least 10 years. I worked at a Scout camp for five summers, attended several national Scouting events and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. But what I remember best are times like burning chicken soup on my first backpacking trip in the Cohutta Wilderness Area, chasing a horse that got loose before a trail ride, learning how to cook biscuits on a makeshift reflector oven in a fire pit (we did get some things right), and recording some of my best memories with my dad, brother and some of my best childhood friends.

It is an organization that teaches responsibility and independence in an era of finger-pointing and dependency. It has helped to shape some of our country’s finest leaders — …

Continue reading One hundred years of service »

This year is, in many ways, a moment of truth for Georgia’s conservatives. Who knew that the fate of 12-year-old sex slaves would be front and center?

Out of the blue, a fight broke out this week among social conservatives over a child prostitution bill sponsored by Sen. Renee Unterman (R-Buford).

The bill would change the law so that children under 16 — the age of consent in Georgia — are not charged with prostitution and instead are considered victims. The FBI lists Atlanta among the cities where child prostitution is most rampant.

“Decriminalization of prostitution,” cried groups such as the Georgia Christian Coalition and Concerned Women for America of Georgia. Some of them said Unterman had “good intentions” but was misguided.

Actually, I think they have that charge backward.

The arguments against the bill tend to conflate adult prostitutes and children.

When holding people responsible for their actions, we presume they choose to act. The notion that kids aged …

Continue reading Change the law to protect sexually exploited children »

I’m sure the next Bernie Madoff is being caught as we speak, given that even the Securities and Exchange Commission has found time to jump on the cause celebre of climate change. From the Washington Post:

The commission, in a 3 to 2 vote, decided to require that companies disclose in their public filings the impact of climate change on their businesses — from new regulations or legislation they may face domestically or abroad to potential changes in economic trends or physical risks to a company.

Chairman Mary L. Schapiro and the two Democrats on the commission supported the new requirements, while the two Republicans vehemently opposed them.

(snip)

Schapiro said companies already must disclose anything that can have a significant effect on their bottom lines. But she said the SEC’s action on Wednesday was intended to provide more guidance on what might be taken into account. “The commission is not making any kind of statement regarding the facts as they relate to the topic of …

Continue reading Because the SEC has nothing better to worry about — right? »

Dick Morris, the Bill Clinton adviser-turned-Hillary Clinton critic, was in Atlanta last night to speak to members and donors of the Alpharetta-based American Seniors Association, a conservative alternative to the AARP that has attracted 200,000 members since its founding five years ago. I had a chance to sit in on the talk, so I thought I’d pass along some of what he had to say.

On health care, he declared the current bills “dead” and, controversially, derided the argument that health-care costs need to fall at all. “What’s wrong with spending 18, 20, 22 percent of GDP on health care?” he asked, citing rapid but expensive advances in care, and predicting that further advances in the near future would help bring down costs of treating cancer and other diseases.

About Sarah Palin’s “death panels,” he said: “She’s wrong — it’s worse than that.” A death panel, he argued, at least looks at an individual and considers factors specific to his or her life. A government-run health …

Continue reading Dick Morris on health care, the economy and the 2010 elections »

Here’s a story that’s far too common in Georgia:

My wife and I bought a house in July. It had been on the market for a while, and foreclosure loomed. Consequently, we got it for 60 percent of what Fulton County says it’s worth.

After improving the house, we had it reappraised. It was still valued at only 80 percent of the county’s estimate.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in line for a 20 percent property tax cut. When we appeal for a lower valuation, we’ll have every expectation the county’s appraisal will remain much higher than the market will bear.

There are tens of thousands of similar tales in metro Atlanta alone, according to an AJC investigation. (Click here to see metro Atlanta home appraisals using ajc.com.) They are the reason Georgians disproportionately hate property taxes.

It’s not that Georgians pay a crushing amount in property taxes. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation ranks our property tax burden in the middle of the …

Continue reading Our property tax process needs repair »

The Climategate saga continues to unfold. The latest chapter involves the apparent cover-up by Phil Jones of the beleaguered Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University and a Chinese-American colleague, Wei-Chyung Wang, about the significant movement of weather stations in China. These are weather stations whose records are a crucial piece of the data demonstrating rapidly rising temperatures — and their movement, perhaps from rural areas to urban centers, could in part undermine the conventional wisdom about why the Earth warmed in the late 20th century.

Ronald Bailey at Reason Magazine has one of the best summaries of this particular episode — which, like much of the Climategate story, has depended on yeoman’s work by British journalists while most of their American colleagues pooh-pooh it. (Example: Search for “Wei-Chyung Wang” on Google News and you get 55 results and just under 300 articles, or less than 10 percent of the hits generated for “Punxsutawney …

Continue reading This week’s sign of the non-apocalypse (Vol. 1, No. 2) »

This graph from economist Keith Hennessey says it all about whether President Obama is serious about fiscal responsibility (h/t: Greg Mankiw):

So, while out of one side of his mouth the president pledges to get serious about the budget, with the other side he’s proposing even more spending in the coming years than he did previously. To which Hennessey adds a very important point:

Remember that fiscal policy is not just about the budget deficit, the difference between spending and taxes. It’s also about the size of government: how much is the government spending, and therefore taking from the private sector?

On that point, let’s also note that the president wants to slash the charitable deduction write-off for families who earn more than $250,000 a year. This change is projected to reduce charitable donations by $100 billion over the next 10 years. That’s a $100 billion increase in dependency on government programs, a $100 billion bet that Washington knows these people’s …

Continue reading Quantifying Obama’s (alleged) conversion to fiscal responsibility »

A third straight year with a $1 trillion-plus budget deficit: That’s what President Obama proposed today in his budget request for fiscal 2011 (the budget year beginning this October).

The White House does project that by 2015 the deficit will fall to half of this year’s level. For some perspective, however, the 2015 deficit would still be almost as large in inflation-adjusted dollars as the combined deficit of any two years between the end of World War II and 2009.

Democrats will have to bear that budget as they try to avoid repeating last month’s shocking loss in Massachusetts on a national scale in November’s mid-term elections. And that’s assuming Congress doesn’t increase the deficit even further. This is essentially a bet against the tea-party movement, even though the tea partiers are more likely to gain strength and momentum this year, as the Instapundit, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, argues here.

But even the still-historic deficit levels projected in 2012-2015 may be too …

Continue reading Obama’s deficits: Quite the rosy scenario »

If you need a reminder of why our view of religion in the public square is so skewed, here’s a good one. As Fox News reports:

An atheist organization is blasting the U.S. Postal Service for its plan to honor Mother Teresa with a commemorative stamp, saying it violates postal regulations against honoring “individuals whose principal achievements are associated with religious undertakings.”

The Freedom from Religion Foundation is urging its supporters to boycott the stamp — and also to engage in a letter-writing campaign to spread the word about what it calls the “darker side” of Mother Teresa.

The stamp — set to be released on Aug. 26, which would have been Mother Teresa’s 100th birthday — will recognize the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her humanitarian work, the Postal Service announced last month.

The idea that the Mother Teresa stamp is chiefly a reflection of her Catholicism, rather than the half-century she spent serving the extremely poor, is preposterous. The …

Continue reading Our separation of church, state and brain »