Archive for May, 2009

At the state Republican convention in Savannah, national party chairman Michael Steele asked the young to stand.

About 50 did. No further invitation is needed, he told them. You are here and now given license to work actively to expand the party.

The gesture was as much for the elders as for the young.

Just as the GOP has to demonstrate seriousness about attracting minorities who share the party’s core beliefs, it’s vital, too, to educate the next generation.

There’s Ronald Reagan. And then … Nobody comes to mind.

Start young.

Generations of young environmental activists started out as first graders who were taught that recycling is a moral imperative. Environmentalism and “Kodak diversity,” both important certainly, have become foundational beliefs primarily because the media and educators gave them moral primacy — just as they once did to love of country and a belief in American exceptionalism.

When environmental indoctrination conditions a nation to …

Continue reading Trust is key for conservatives »

Ordinarily with armed robbers, I’m for locking them up and tossing the key.  They’re a particularly dangerous lot. By the time they pull a weapon and utter a demand, they’ve already decided they’ll kill.  Bad guys.  Truly bad guys.

But there’s one armed robber I’d turn loose.  That’s Richard Paul Boucher, 56, an armed robber serving prison time in Virginia when he slugged a guard and escaped 27 years ago.  His wife, Debbie Lynn Boucher, 53, aided the escape and has been charged with hindering the apprehension of a criminal.  I’d turn her loose, too.  Give them both a pardon.

In the years since, as the AJC’s Jim Tharpe reported Sunday in a fascinating tale of a husband-and-wife on the lam, the couple has lived on odd jobs and enterprise in the North Georgia mountains.  To avoid detection, they never got a driver’s license and never took a job that required a Social Security number. They lived in a trailer park, did odd jobs for their neighbors and for others who …

Continue reading After 27 years on the run, let them go. »

The group might be called “I love my city, but I’m sick of my government.”

Both are true.

Sitting around the breakfast table, Lynn Irvin and other members of a group called Campaign for Atlanta discuss their frustration with a government that doesn’t work.

Like any Atlantan who has phoned City Hall or one of its agencies, they recount a litany of failure and frustration.
The Southwest Atlanta woman offers an account of a garbage truck emptying foul-smelling “Jerry curl juice” in the streets, something she was convinced would never have been allowed in Buckhead.

No, replies the Buckhead woman, the same thoughtless service extends there, too. She offers an account of having to clean up after them on her street.

Both are convinced, as are others from Midtown and Ormwood Park, that, as Irvin says, “by keeping blacks and whites separated, the city gets by with providing no services to anybody.”

It’s not that one side of town’s getting care and attention and the …

Continue reading Citizens ask, can we talk? »

Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:

• A warning to conservatives wishing to avoid being trampled in a stampede: Never stand in the path of a liberal determined to give a Republican governor a big hug for vetoing a tax cut. Won’t give ’em a vote, but will give ’em a big wet kiss.
• Despite Gov. Sonny Perdue’s veto of a capital gains cut and business tax credit for new hires, the Legislature did send an important message that it believes in cutting taxes to stimulate the economy, as opposed to Washington’s print money and spend approach. Kudos to state Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ranger) and state Sen. Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) for ushering the bill through.
• Georgia’s seventh in foreclosures. It’s fourth in mortgage fraud. Connect the dots.
• Please, Republicans, for goodness sakes, don’t do what Associated Press writer Erica Werner warns about. The president’s trying to reshape “the nation’s health care system to bring down costs and extend coverage …

Continue reading Jeans, taxes, good Republicans »

On most occasions when President Barack Obama reverses field, it is a good thing.  He’s never out of the campaign mode, so “candidate” Obama says things that President Obama lives to regret. 

 A good example was “candidate” Obama’s declaration that he’d not oppose the release of dozens of photos from military investigations that are alleged to show abuse of prisoners in Iraq. As the President responsible for serving the interests of the entire country, he came to realize that “candidate” Obama had said a dumb thing.  The release of the photos serve absolutely no good purpose.  They have propaganda value for terrorists abroad and for the leftists in this country who have never veered from their fanatical determination to see the legacy of George W. Bush destroyed.  But that’s it.

As Obama noted in announcing that his administration will try to block release of the photos, as sought by the American Civil Liberties Union, their only value is to “further inflame …

Continue reading Release Iraq ‘abuse’ photos? Getoutahere. »

America’s dirty little secret, cleverly hidden from illegal immigrants,  is that while many of them get a free ride up front, there’s a heck of a bill that’ll be dropped on them before they exit this life.

It’s coming in the form of a federal deficit, projected to be $1.84 trillion this year.  And it’s coming in a whale of a bill for Social Security and Medicare, the government’s two biggest entitlement programs.  Social Security trustees reported Tuesday that Medicare will start paying out more than it collects in taxes this year and go broke by 2017 –  a short nine years away.  that’s two years earlier than projected last year.

The old folks’  retirement entitlement will start paying out more than it collects in taxes in 2016, a  year earlier than projected last year, and be flat broke by 2037, four years earlier than projected last year.  

The decline in the stock market has shaken the confidence of those who have 401(k) and similar retirement investments.  …

Continue reading Social Security is trick on illegals »

At the age of 12, the young Wilcox County farmer Melvin Everson made his first big-league speech at a Future Farmers of America gathering at Atlanta’s Sheraton Biltmore hotel.

By the time he settled in at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) in Tifton, the young Everson had been cured of the desire to take up his father’s occupation of farming the family’s 176 acres between Rochelle and Abbeville. At one time, he was the most likely of the 10 children of Northern and Willa Everson to stay on the farm, though he jokes now that “that second row of cotton I picked made me decide that farming was not the life for me.”

The speeches that he might have made over the hood of a John Deere now have a larger audience — and next year will have a larger audience still.

State Rep. Melvin Everson, now of Snellville, hopes to be the first black Republican to win statewide office in Georgia. He’s running for state labor commissioner, an office Democrat Michael Thurman is …

Continue reading GOP needs diversity, core values »

No question, the long process has begun.  In journalistic short-hand, it’s being cast as this:  Should the Republican Party follow the path of Colin Powell or Rush Limbaugh? 

Former Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in Sunday.  Here’s the transcript of an exchange with Bob Schieffer, host of CBS’s “Face the Nation”: 

SCHIEFFER: Let’s talk quickly about your party, the Republican Party. A lot of controversy. Arlen Specter has left. He said there’s no room for moderates in the party anymore. You said last week the party should not moderate. But what are you going to do? I mean, you can purify the party to the point that it’s too small to ever get elected to anything. How do you broaden the appeal of your party, and yet do you think there’s a place for moderates?

CHENEY: Oh, sure. I think there is room for moderates in the Republican Party. I think partly it’s a semantic problem. I don’t think the party ought to move dramatically to the left, for example, in order to …

Continue reading Which GOP? Powell or Limbaugh? »

The most cherished gift of my college education was $5.

The second was $50 that came as the reward for having completed another school year, a gift from a childless great-aunt.

It was the third gift, though, that paid college tuition and bought textbooks, a quite unexpected gift from the publisher of The Macon Telegraph and News, Peyton T. Anderson Jr. His financial gift was a guarantee that, with a part-time job, I’d never have to drop out of college again.

The $5 that mattered most was my mother’s, an expression with money she hadn’t to spare that, together, we’d make it over the final hurdle.

I protested. I’d be fine, I told her. I had a job and Mr. Anderson’s support. I could make it. She insisted. We were in this together. That had always been the case.

By the age of 16, she had the first of her seven children. Before the last two were school age, she was alone, abandoned by a husband who, except for the infrequent drop-ins I came to hate, simply vanished …

Continue reading Mother’s love still lives on »

Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:

The U.S. Senate wisely rejects a bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to “cram down” mortgage rates. You can bet that the rate on your next mortgage would be higher to cover the risk had it passed. A dozen Democrats joined Republicans to vote it down.

Chicken of the Sea, mindful that Al Gore’s global warming projections will make Vidalia and Lyons seacoast towns, announces that it’ll build a $20 million tuna packing factory employing 200 about 110 miles inland, in Lyons. Until the fishing ships are able to dock in Lyons, the tuna will be shipped in frozen. About 65-70 million years ago, Macon was on the coast. Check with me soon for beach front property in Jacksonville, Ga.

Headline: “French excel at leisure.” Another from Yahoo: “Kirstie Alley tells how she gained 83 pounds.” A reminder: News is what people don’t know.

My colleague, Jay Bookman, offers his extended neighborhood as the place to jail …

Continue reading We’ll miss Kemp; so long Specter »