Archive for December, 2010

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

● Sometime in America’s future, wiser heads will return to the concept of universal military service. Lifting “don’t ask, don’t tell” is an example of the public policy that comes when decision-makers have little or no understanding of the stresses of those on the front. In non-combat units, it’s manageable social engineering. While any love or sexual relationship is a distraction in non-combat units, it has the potential to change behaviors in ways that get people killed in front-line units. It’s no surprise that almost 60 percent of Marines objected to lifting the ban. Recruiting and retention are bound to suffer.

● Sometime in America’s future, too, we’ll come to realize that children aren’t play-pretties for adults who have run out of toys to buy, for celebrities who are making social or political statements or for young unmarried women who can’t come up with any other answer to the question, …

Continue reading Better decisions in America’s future »

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

● If you get a chance, go back and read Sunday’s front-page story on the Atlanta Public School’s cheating scandal. Read it from this perspective: When the perpetrators, the overseers and the opinion leaders — i.e., the business community — all have a vested interest in glorifying the achievements of the school system, who protects the interests of parents and children? Two lessons here. One is that the state should never again delegate the job of policing its responsibility — the integrity of its accountability testing system — to locals. The other is that the free press does have to remain, as Hosea Williams would have said, unbossed and unbought — meaning that local media doesn’t get so wrapped up in a desired-outcome narrative.

● The most remarkable political story of this decade in Georgia is the implosion of the party that controlled it all 10 years ago. This week, State Rep. Mike Cheokas of …

Continue reading ‘Real Deal’ is cutting state’s costs »

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

● The government falls far, far short of exercising the control over children’s lives that’s necessary to keep them from becoming, uh, full-figured. It can take over breakfast, lunch and early dinner and patrol school halls and grounds for unsanctioned calories, but until it takes full custody of the children it’s just tossing money and growing the nanny state.

● All year and not a federal budget. Reflecting back, do you realize how little the issues important to the leaders of this Congress arose in conversations you had or overheard in public places this year? No wonder the disapproval rating of Congress is 83 percent.

● Sad and disappointing to read the quote from the student body president at the University of Georgia, concerning efforts to trim the goodies and, thereby, save the HOPE grants. Said he, sounding for the entire world like the gimme-elders whose resistance to reform brought Social Security to …

Continue reading Health care supporters in retreat »

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

● Here’s an idea for saving HOPE, a concern of Gov.-elect Nathan Deal. Make it a scholarship. A real one with standards sufficiently high to cover the money available. Don’t promise what we don’t have.

● Bless ’em, yet another group of Delta Air Lines workers has rejected the invitation to unionize. I love the diversity of the private sector, where companies like Chick-fil-A can buck the retail crowd and maintain the founder’s values — never open on Sunday — and where employees of a company like Delta in a heavily unionized industry say to unions “thanks, but that’s not our culture.”

● Oooh! The angry hard-core lefties who seethe that individual earners are keeping
too much of what they believe to be the government’s money are in full temper-tantrum. It’s because President Barack Obama has agreed with Republicans to trade off a two-year extension of all of President George W. Bush’s tax …

Continue reading Democrats still feeling election’s toll »

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

● Like Marion Jones, the Olympic champion who surrendered her gold medals after admitting to taking performance-enhancing drugs before the 2000 summer games, Atlanta School Supt. Beverly Hall should return the National Superintendent of the Year award for 2009. There’s “clear-cut, direct, eyewitness evidence that student tests” were doped-up during the 2009 CRCT exams, said Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard. Her watch, her responsibility.

● Yes, do scrap the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — if we have no intention of committing it to the stress of combat. If we do, the nation should listen to Sen. John McCain, Marine Commandant Gen. James F. Amos and his predecessor, Gen. James T. Conway. Amos pointed out that “there’s nothing more intimate than combat” where young men are “laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers.” If …

Continue reading Reservists deserve our thanks »