Monday Morning Quarterbacks

Published: November 17, 2008

No stone left unturned

The incoming Obama administration is busy screening top-level job applicants, a process that caught the eye of blogger Ben Wolfson at unfogged.com. Wolfson noted only the smallest details of a person’s past are excluded, such as traffic tickets of less than $50. "Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun,” he wrote. "They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.”

GM’s plight

Cal-Berkeley economics professor J. Bradford DeLong comments at delong.typepad.com on the crisis facing General Motors Corp. While there’s good reason not to let financial firms go bankrupt because it shuts down the credit that fuels the economy, DeLong writes, there’s no good reason not to let nonfinancial businesses — like GM — go into Chapter 11. "I believe the federal government has an obligation to autoworkers and retirees,” he writes. "But this obligation is not well-exercised by keeping GM out of bankruptcy.”

Guilt-ridden

Racism might still be alive and well, but not in the devastating way some might claim. At least that’s the view of nationally syndicated columnist Walter Williams. Many problems in the black community have little to do with discrimination, Williams wrote. Black children born out of wedlock, those raised in one-parent households, the under-education of black students and the high crime rate among blacks aren’t problems that can be pinned on discrimination. Guilt-ridden whites, he wrote, have bought into the discrimination explanation and gone along with lowered academic standards, race-based preferences and lax behavior expectations. "Maybe the election of a black president will help white people over their guilt feelings so they can stop acting like fools in their relationships with black people.”

Countering the prop wash

California’s just-passed traditional marriage initiative, Proposition 8, and ensuing protests from the gay community prompted Michelle Malkin at michellemalkin.com to suggest President-elect Obama should intervene on the Left Coast. She wrote the "bearer of hope and change” should "weigh in and work your healing magic on the anti-Prop. 8 rabble-rousers who continue to wreak havoc on Mormon churches in several cities and states and blacklisting peaceful voters who supported the ballot measure.” Malkin continued, "It is getting very ugly out there and no one in the Democratic leadership has stepped up to condemn the insane rage, to borrow a phrase. Where art thou, Lightworker?”

School choice

Miserable public school or well-regarded private school? Nationally syndicated columnist Cal Thomas said it’s not difficult to guess which the Obamas will choose for their daughters. It would be "intellectual and social child abuse” to put them in public schools in an attempt to pander to teachers unions, Thomas wrote. Lucky for the Obamas they can afford that choice. "Parents who put their children first are to be admired and emulated. Politicians who are parents and who have the power to let others make inferior educational choices, but refuse to do so, are inconsistent at best and hypocrites at worst.” If opponents of school choice continue to win out, Thomas suggests donations to a scholarship fund that helps children attend better schools. "This will offer children trapped in bad schools the brighter future they deserve and the country will get the better educated citizenry it desperately needs.”

Dollars and sense

Forget for a minute all the really complicated ways to trim the federal budget. USA Today has a relatively simple suggestion. Quit printing dollar bills, which wear out and must be replaced less than every two years. Instead, the newspaper’s editorial board is advocating minting more dollar coins. They cost more to produce but last three decades or so. They estimate the savings would be at least $500 million. "Abolishing the dollar bill would make only a tiny dent in the federal deficit, but $500 million to $1 billion isn’t chump change, either,” the newspaper argued. "Failure to go after the easy targets just sends the message that Congress isn’t serious about saving money.”

In his spare time

Scott Ott at scrappleface.com had fun with the president-elect with a satirical post on Barack Obama’s announcement — that Obama resigned his Senate seat on Sunday to begin work on another memoir. "According to a news release from the publisher, the memoir entitled, ‘143 Days That Shaped a Nation: The Senate Career of Barack Obama,’ is the third in a series of biennial Obama memoirs and promises a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the Senate from an outsider’s perspective, along with personal anecdotes about Senate colleagues whom Sen. Obama occasionally met, or heard about,” Ott wrote.

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