Archive for February, 2011

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

● Among the more frightening revelations from the effort to keep the HOPE program solvent for future generations is how quickly the intelligent morph into welfare-state grubbers shouting “gimmee.” “HOPE must always fund 100 percent of tuition,” write the presidents of the student bodies at Georgia Tech and UGA in an AJC op-ed. Good students “should not have to go into debt in order to cover tuition.” Most frightening here, assuming that leaders speak for the masses, is that in less than two decades Georgia has turned its best and brightest into demanding dependents of government.

● Coupling HOPE scholarships to the state’s lottery revenues, as opposed to tuition levied, as Gov. Nathan Deal proposes, is a marvelous idea. While both the regents, who are responsible for setting tuition, and the governor and legislators, who are responsible for raising HOPE funds to pay it, have the same employer, it’s …

Continue reading Students, savers win with HOPE fix »

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

● Ah, so this is it. Drinkers who can’t make it through Sunday on the stash of booze they bought Saturday and those who were too discombobulated to remember on Saturday that booze is not sold on Sunday are not, it is revealed by the AJC, the driving force behind all the legislative attention directed to Sunday sales. It is the Georgia Association of Convenience Stores and its president, Jim Tudor. This is one of the reasons Republicans should be wary of getting too close to “business.” Business has the money and the incentive to legislate public policy in Georgia — and what’s good for their bottom line may not be good for others. (Really, this is not a hot-button issue with me. It’s simply that it’s symptomatic of a larger problem: Who decides what’s important for Georgia?)

● To all the recent comers to metro Atlanta, it’s a shame you weren’t here to hear radio personality Ludlow Porch, who died …

Continue reading Media should learn from Ludlow »

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

● Tuesday’s wrong-way-driver crash on I-285 caused an eight-hour shutdown of a section of the interstate that handles 200,000 vehicles per day. The wreck at Dunwoody demonstrates how vulnerable metro Atlanta is to gridlock — and how the terms employed in our transportation policy debate can lead to the wrong remedies. Commuters took to off-interstate roadways, the arterials. Those are, in fact, the “alternatives” that can serve a majority of the region’s drivers. Yet when the term “alternatives” is bandied about in transportation planning, it invariably is code for a costly mass transit network that’s an “alternative” for the few who happen to be near fixed stations. Spend where we get the most congestion relief for the dollar.

● Georgia’s children are more caring than we’ve realized. Last year a high number of students in about 10 percent of the state’s schools changed answers from …

Continue reading Three cheers for a selfless coach »