Archive for August, 2011

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Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all:

● The recent welfare state riots in Great Britain offer America a glimpse of our future — unless we reverse course, which is, really, the struggle between two distinctly different views of the role of government playing out in the 2012 presidential election. Well beyond the elections, though, conservatives have to rethink how we approach government and turn this nation.

● Prime Minister David Cameron addressed the riots. “We have been unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong. We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said, about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy … Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control. Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged — sometimes even …

Continue reading A road map for conservatives »

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

● What you should learn about government and the culture that grows it is this: Often the desired outcome is dictated well before “the people” are invited to speak. That will be the case with the 1-cent metro Atlanta regional sales tax for transportation. It will pass. Two crucial decisions made by politicians and bureaucrats determine that. One is the 10-county grouping. The other, now being made by the Georgia General Assembly, is to push the sales tax referendum from next year’s party primaries to the November presidential election. The decision by the Republican majority to switch to a date that will attract more Democrats further skews the outcome. Need proof? In the 2008 General Election, with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, Democrats won the 10 counties by a vote of 1,010,941 to 741,596. Two years later, Democrat Roy Barnes defeated Nathan Deal in that 10-county region by 601,323 to 512,862.

● …

Continue reading My nits with the transportation sales tax vote »

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

● The state House minority leader, Rep. Stacey Abrams, D-Atlanta, accuses Republicans under the Gold Dome of trying to reduce her party’s 23 white incumbents to 10 by merging them into districts with blacks. No such conspiracy is necessary. It’s doubtful that Georgia has more than 10 to 12 state House districts (of 180 total) where white liberals are the majority. The solution to redistricting politics is often presented as surrendering line-drawing authority to a nonpartisan commission. That’s a no-go. Democrats would start out with virtually all seats off the table — minority incumbents protected by the Voting Rights Act — leaving the commission to work its nonpartisan magic on GOP districts.

● The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s fact-checkers decree as “false” a claim made by the Georgia Department of Transportation that work on a highway project in Cobb and Cherokee “is expected to create over …

Continue reading A nation of freebies can’t last »

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

● The nation has just been through a couple of weeks of alarmist insanity. Tiny prospective cuts in the growth of bloated federal spending have been greeted with alarm throughout the nation. Those who want nothing more than to convey to our children the quality-of-life opportunities our young parents worked to give us — the tea party movement, for example — are branded in Leftspeak as “extremists” or worse, “terrorists.” Good grief, what an ordeal.

● The president of the United States threatened, emptily and unnecessarily, not to post grandma’s Social Security check. Grandma shut down. So did shoppers. The only reason a president would introduce that angst into individual family budgets would be to gain momentary political advantage. For 60 years at least, politicians have spooked the old folks by introducing imaginary threats to Social Security and tempted them by promising benefits financed by somebody …

Continue reading Self-reliance is not a bad policy »