Archive for April, 2011

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

● Shameful that Atlanta’s King & Spalding law firm has dropped the client in the Defense of Marriage Act — the client being U.S. House Republicans, on behalf of the American people, in the absence of willingness by President Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, to fulfill his obligation to defend a legitimate act of Congress. This may be the darkest day in King & Spalding’s history. Having taken the case, King & Spalding had an obligation to finish it, as asserted by former partner and Attorney General Griffin Bell in a 2009 Mercer law school address. The honorable Paul Clement, President George W. Bush’s U.S. solicitor general, who was handling the case for King & Spalding, quit the firm. One guy, at least, got it right. (And does this mean that all these years lawyers have been joshing us when they draw distinctions between their own political views and the clients they take?)

● President Obama, en route to …

Continue reading DeKalb deal was way too sweet »

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

● Georgia should create a guest-worker program to establish that immigrants available for hire are here legally. A study of the feasibility of such an effort is part of legislation just passed by the General Assembly. Some businesses and farmers, fearful of the consequence of hiring laborers who turn out to be illegal, despite their good-faith verification efforts, opposed legislative efforts to crack down. The solution is for Georgia to certify a pool of eligibles, at least until the feds get serious about perfecting E-Verify.

● The charges hospitals levy and the pennies-on-the-dollar reimbursement they expect and get from government are wildly at odds. As Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter M.B. Pell reveals, markups at some Atlanta-area hospitals exceed 500 percent and on the low side are more than 200 percent. Grady’s is 265 percent. That’s a problem for the self-insured and others who choose not to buy private …

Continue reading Guest-worker program is needed »

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

● President Barack Obama’s speech on deficit reduction calls to mind an expression routinely employed by troops in Vietnam to quickly dismiss the unimportant: “It don’t mean nuthin’.” Indeed, it doesn’t. The Observer in Chief stacks words that have no particular relevance to yesterday or tomorrow. In serious times, he’s an unserious man.

● Time’s run out on tax revision for this legislative session. No harm’s done. Republicans, in fact, should be cheered that House Speaker David Ralston pulled the effort to rush through something consequential that, as with the Obamacare debacle, legislators and the public hadn’t absorbed.

● During the tax code rewrite State House Majority Leader Larry O’Neal, R-Bonaire, the driving force behind tax revision, touched on something that conservatives will encounter time and again as they rock the status quo. O’Neal told the AJC that doubt existed as to whether the numbers data legislators were …

Continue reading No harm done on tax deal’s end »

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

● Every now and then, achievements in science, medicine and technology are breath-taking. Two in the past week come to mind. The first was a stupendous achievement at Emory University Hospital where a team of surgeons led by Dr. Linda Cendales performed a 19-hour surgery to attach a hand to 21-year-old Linda Lu. As a 1-year-old, Lu lost her hand to complications related to Kawasaki disease. It’s a first for Emory, though the surgery was first performed by a team that included Cendales in 1999 in St. Louis. And this week, even without a functioning “black box” flight recorder, searchers operating undersea robots found the wreckage of Air France’s Rio-to-Paris flight resting 2.4 miles below the surface of the Atlantic — and can identify some of the bodies before they are recovered. Even with a daily diet of economic gloom and incomprehensible brutality and murder, some news is worth waking up to.

● I may become a liberal again …

Continue reading State pension secrecy needs light »