News opinion 2008-08-07 Andanh.com

Ordinance is needed for solicitors Wed, 6 Aug 2008 11:32:56 -0500
Imagine you’re sitting in your vehicle at a busy street corner and someone comes up to you soliciting money. In Bowling Green you really don’t have to imagine, because it’s happening. Not on a daily basis mind you, but on certain days solicitors can be seen on busy street corners soliciting people waiting in their cars at traffic lights. One intersection popular with solicitors is Broadway Avenue and U.S. 31-W By-Pass. They walk up and down the street, with buckets in their hands, sometimes getting off the sidewalks onto the road and attempting to solicit drivers for money. This is something that has got to stop. It is not only annoying, but dangerous as well. Someone could really get hurt walking between traffic to solicit funds. It has the added negative of slowing traffic flow. We are glad that the Bowling Green City Commission shares these common concerns and discussed the issue last night during a nonvoting work session. The commission could vote in the future to prohibit street-corner solicitation of drivers. A draft ordinance notes that there is currently no clear regulation of people asking for donations at stoplights. The proposed ordinance would prohibit any financial solicitation not only on the asphalt, but on road medians or shoulders. Violators could be punished with a fine of $100 to $500, or 90 days in jail. This should be a no-brainer for the city commission. The commission, along with this newspaper, has received numerous complaints about these solicitors over the years and it is time to stop their unsafe and annoying practices. It should also be noted that some of these people who are attempting to solicit funds aren’t even from our community and provide little information, if any, about what the money they are seeking is going to be used for. We would urge city commission to exempt events near street corners such as cheerleaders raising money for a cause by holding a car wash, Alex’s Lemonade stands and other worthy events where traffic flow and safety are not issues. People in our city want to have safe and peaceful commutes when they are driving to and from work and these solicitors don’t enable them to do that and that is unacceptable.

Barack’s uphill battle Wed, 6 Aug 2008 11:32:48 -0500
Some of my Chicago friends who support Sen. Barack Obama already are speaking as if his victory is a done deal. I hate to burst their bubbles, but a nagging question still haunts Obama euphoria: Why isn’t he further ahead in the polls? After all, they gush, his superbly managed campaign of “hope” and “change” seems to be humming along, as strong as the euro against the dollar. The popularity of his rival Sen. John McCain’s Republican brand is as weak as a subprime mortgage. Yet after running as much as nine points ahead of McCain in major polls, Obama’s lead has mostly evaporated, especially in key Midwestern industrial swing states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Why? I think a big reason is McCain’s refusal to be scary or outrageous enough. Although he has yet to win the hearts and minds of his party’s conservative base, Republicans could hardly have picked a better candidate in this, their hour of woe. He has maintained enough of his maverick image to resist Democratic efforts to re-brand him as Bush’s third term. Sure, his policies have flip-flopped like the political equivalent of Twister. But Obama has sashayed toward the political middle, too. That’s what candidates do in general election campaigns, especially in the dog days of summer. Voters start paying closer attention in the fall. That leaves time for a lot of late-summer dancing. A second big reason we journalists love to cite is advisors. McCain hired Steve Schmidt, a protege of Karl Rove who has introduced Rove’s famous brand of hardball attacks at Obama’s perceived weak points: Suddenly we see Obama’s charisma recast as empty-headed “celebrity.” His freshness is remade into inexperience. His seriousness is recast as hubris and arrogance. His empathy is recast as “elitist.” Sen. Hillary Clinton tried much of this during the primaries. It didn’t put her over the top, but it kept her in the race, especially with white working-class voters over age 50. Boomers and older voters have been less enamored of Obama than the young and college-educated. McCain, too, has gotten back into the race, judging by the polls, just in time to wage a competitive campaign in the fall. How much of an obstacle is Obama’s biracial background? That’s hard to say in a society that long ago rendered “racist” to be as much of a taboo word among whites as the N-word is among blacks. As a result, a lot of us look for any sign of coded racial appeals and our imaginations run wild. Some see racism in the juxtaposition of two blondes - Britney Spears and Paris Hilton - in a McCain ad attacking Obama’s “celebrity. Republican analyst David Gergen sees the “arrogant” charge against Obama as new racial code for the old-South label “uppity.” It does have a familiar ring, doesn’t it? Reporter Amy Chozick in a Wall Street Journal essay stirred up a lot of pundit and blogger buzz by musing that Obama’s skinny physique might be a disadvantage in our notoriously overweight nation. She cited a memo to reporters by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. Explaining McCain’s recent attack ad that tries to paint Obama as an empty-suit celebrity, Davis’ memo mentions, “Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day.” Gee, thanks for giving me a new excuse to skip my workout, Rick. Smelling a rat - or maybe fat - Timothy Noah responded in the Web magazine Slate that skinniness might be a code word for black. “This physical attribute looms large in our nation’s history as a source of prejudice,” he writes. If so, I wonder if might there be new hope in the sex appeal department for us guys who sport Tony Soprano physiques? Somehow I think not. Racist or not, we have learned this much from Obama’s campaign: Any day in which race is the big topic of discussion is not a good day for Obama. His rapid rise benefited ironically from his ability to “transcend race,” we have been told repeatedly. That’s another way of saying that he seemed to offer Americans a way to reduce race to something that would not matter anymore. Americans want to believe that race doesn’t matter and apparently we will only believe it if we hear a black person say it. Race alone does not explain Obama’s polling gap. Had Colin Powell run, with his military background and other experience, he would not have had the same problems persuading undecided voters that Obama has faced. Obama’s best remedy may come from his choice of a running mate. I don’t know whom he will pick, but I have a feeling that no skinny, black Harvard grads need apply. I’m sure they will understand why.

Solzhenitsyn and Rodman were great men Wed, 6 Aug 2008 11:32:49 -0500
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. Peter Rodman is dead. And memory is dying with them. Over the weekend, Solzhenitsyn, the 89-year-old literary titan, and Rodman, the American foreign policy intellectual, passed away. I knew Rodman and liked him very much. We were partners in a debate at Oxford University last year. He provided the gravitas. A former protege of Henry Kissinger and high-ranking official in two Republican administrations, Rodman was one of the wisest of the wise men of the conservative foreign policy establishment. Calm, elegant, dryly funny, brilliant, but most of all gentlemanly. He died too young, at 64, of leukemia. Solzhenitsyn was, of course, a landmark of the 20th century, one of the few authors capable of elevating literature to the stuff of world affairs. What I admired most in both men was their memory. They remembered important things, specifically the evil of communism. And, perhaps nearly as important, they remembered who recognized that evil and who did not. Rodman, for example, was an architect of the Reagan Doctrine in places such as Angola and Afghanistan. One of his books, “More Precious Than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World,” was the quintessential defense of thwarting the Soviets in ugly spots of the globe where Americans were understandably reluctant to spend blood or treasure. In Berlin on July 24, Barack Obama’s history of the Cold War sounded cheerier. There was a lot of unity and “standing as one,” and we dropped some candy on Berlin, and now we need to be unified like we were then. But unity was hardly the defining feature of the Cold War. There were supposed allies reluctant to help and official enemies who were eager to do their share. There were Russians - like Solzhenitsyn - who bravely told the world about Soviet barbarity. Here at home, there were a great many Americans, including intellectual heirs to the “useful idiots” Lenin relied on, who rolled their eyes at self-styled “cold warriors” such as Rodman. And from Vietnam through the SANE/Freeze movement, liberal resolve and unity were aimed most passionately against America’s policies - not the Soviet Union’s. Having recently published a book on fascism, I think I understand why so many people refused to see the evil in communism. It was well-intentioned. The Soviets were our allies in World War II. Communists spoke of socialism and liberation, and their agents, friends and apologists in the U.S. were comrades in arms with Americans battling racism. But it’s worth remembering how evil Communist governments really were. Stalin murdered more people than Hitler. The hammer-and-sickle’s stack of bones towers high above the swastika’s. “The Black Book of Communism,” a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low. If, after the moral cataclysm that was the Holocaust, you wish to say that the Nazis were more evil than the Soviets, fine. But don’t roll your eyes at serious people who consider anti-communism no less honorable and righteous than anti-Nazism. Look to the Holomodor in Ukraine, where 4 million to 6 million people were murdered and a culture largely erased. Terror, purges, massacres, assassinations and the forced starvation of millions - these are all horrors that we rightly associate with Nazism but somehow fail to correlate with communism. In 1974, when the New Yorker reviewed Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” George Steiner wrote: “To infer that the Soviet Terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral indecency.” When Ronald Reagan denounced the “evil empire” - because it was evil and it was an empire - he too was accused of absurd oversimplification. The real brutal oversimplification is the treacle we hear from Obama, that victory in the Cold War was some Hallmark-movie lesson in global hand-holding. The reality is that it was a long slog, and throughout, the champions of “unity” wanted to capitulate to this evil, and the champions of freedom were rewarded with ridicule. “This is the moment,” Obama proclaimed, “when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday.” Rodman and Solzhenitsyn understood that such talk was dangerously naive. People free from the “shadows of yesterday” forget things they swore never to forget. Solzhenitsyn and Rodman are gone now, and a generation that learned such hard lessons is leaving us too quickly. The amnesia bites a little deeper.

Readers' views Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:55 EDT

LexTran should get new ideas, not new taxes

Say it ain't so.

I am a Lexington taxpayer. I applaud the new LexTran general manager, Rocky Burke, for his recent town meeting. Riders wanted more frequent stops, upgraded shelters and better reliability. Burke says consultants will be used to try to integrate everyone's wishes and come forth with new tablets of stone.

However, these meetings are pre-positioning LexTran to move for a new taxpayer burden. I will not go along with new taxes. Our transit model is broken. Hiring consultants that are incapable of thinking outside the box will not produce new solutions.

Mockingbirds serve us all by singing others' songs Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:55 EDT

After my uncle started talking about the mockingbirds at his place, I started listening more intently. And sure enough, I have one of my own outside the cabin window.

At first I enjoyed listening to it singing, singing, always singing. But then I realized he was singing other bird's songs. I began to wonder whether the mockingbird ever had its own song and whether somewhere along the way he had abandoned it in favor of the other birds' songs.

Oh, this mockingbird does a pretty good job of singing other birds' tunes, but I began to think that somehow he may not be singing those songs as well as the birds he is mocking.

I'll bet that if I were one of those other birds, I would be hanging around on the phone wire with all my bird buddies saying things like, .What a hack, just where does he get off singing our song?. And my bird buddies would be saying, .Yeah, I wish that old Mr. Karaoke over there would just get over himself. Did you hear that? He doesn't even know when to throw in that trill thing we do..

Blame subsidies for trade woes Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:50 EDT

This editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News.

Don't be fooled by the recent dip in world oil prices. The factors that caused prices to spike have not disappeared, and global trade patterns underscore the likelihood that a new round of increases could happen at any time.

India and China, two of the biggest oil importers, continue subsidizing fuel for their citizens. Their economies keep booming while their governments absorb the cost of oil. In these countries fuel prices are allowed to rise to market levels, political turmoil could quickly ensue among their billion-plus populations.

Show us the money men Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:55 EDT

The attorney for The Webb Companies caused quite a stir Tuesday when he refused to give any indication of exactly who plans to spend $250 million in cash to build the CentrePointe development.

This hotel-condo-office tower may become the linchpin in a plan to finance long-desired public improvements, along with a parking garage for the project. Using tax-increment financing, the city would go into debt and hope to recoup some costs from future tax revenues CentrePointe would generate.

So, taxpayers must know with whom the city is committing to work. Right now, we don't even know on what continent the investors reside. That's simply bizarre.

The developer has survived the controversy over this project with his proposal intact and his way clear. So this is not the time to start another fight over disclosing the investors. No one gains from that.

Pulling in reins on steroid use Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:55 EDT

The move to ban anabolic steroids in thoroughbred racing got a huge boost last weekend when Breeders' Cup threw its considerable prestige and hefty purses behind the effort.

Breeders' Cup conducts the world championship day of racing each fall, as well as qualifying races throughout the year around the country. All told, Breeders' Cup hands out a lot of very desirable trophies and more than $31 million in purses.

On Friday, Breeders' Cup announced serious penalties for trainers who use steroids in any of its races. Additionally, beginning next year, it will fund purses and hold its races only at tracks in jurisdictions that have adopted Racing Commissioners International model rules on steroids.

This is an important stick added to all the carrots individuals and organizations have held out to racing to do the right thing.

Conventional wisdom Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:47 EDT

Direct Kick: Maybe we can put this whole Favre thing behind us

Chinese Dir