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4A SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 2006 Moustox jßmljj OPINION Daniel F. Evans Editor and Publisher Julie B. Evans Vice President Don Moncrief Managing Editor New coaches are valuable A high school diploma is more than a piece of parch ment. It is a ticket to a better paying job and a better way of life. Statistics show that a high school diploma has mon etary value, just as a college degree does. Students who drop out of school before graduation from high school are giving up, most of the time, the opportunity to get a decent paying job. That is why Gov. Sonny Perdue has championed - and is putting into place - a new strategy for helping students continue high school through graduation, rather than dropping out. Students will have coaches, just as athletes do, and these coaches will be there to help keep students in school until they receive their diplomas, which can give them the opportunity to earn more money and the benefits that go with it. Of course, the object of gradu ating from high school should not, necessarily, be a goal in itself. For many students the high school diploma should be their passports into college, where a degree can result in even higher pay ing jobs. It is all about helping students live up to their potential. The coaches - one in every high school - will face a daunting challenge, but they are being prepared to take on this new, unique responsibility. We can only imagine how rewarding it will be for these graduation coaches when they see students who might have dropped out of school walk across the stage and receive diplomas at graduation exercises. In our opinion, it would beat winning a sports champi onship by a mile. Metal thieves are expensive Thieves are finding scrap metal valuable. Stealing it beats buying it. The city of Warner Robins experienced an expen sive loss to thieves recently when SSO worth of scrap metal was taken out of an air conditioner. It cost the city SIO,OOO to repair the damage. Contractors throughout Houston County have com plained for years that copper and other building materi als are being stolen regularly from construction sites. One of the most egregious examples of theft from a construction site occurred in Centerville several months ago when two men drove up in front of a house that was under construction and took off with all the new appli ances in the house during broad daylight. Workers in the area who saw the thieves in action said they were not suspicious because it “looked like” the men taking the appliances belonged there. Building materials are known to disappear during the night from construction sites and there really is no way to know who took the items or where they went unless the thieves were observed in action. Warner Robins is going to make it more difficult to sell scrap metal with regulations pertaining to the disposal of it. However, as Mayor Donald Walker pointed out, a crackdown in Warner Robins will not prevent thieves from disposing of their ill-gotten gains elsewhere. Worth Repeating “This is the Middle East. None of the people who were involved with this will be allowed to live.” Golda Meir, 1898-1978 Prime Minister, Israel (Labor) HOW TO SUBMIT LETTERS We encourage readers to submit letters to the editor. Letters should not exceed 350 words and must include the writer’s name, address and telephone number. All letters printed in The Home Journal will appear with the writer’s name and hometown - we do not publish anonymous letters. The news paper reserves the right to edit or reject letters for reasons of grammar, punctuation, taste and brevity. Letter writers are asked to submit no more than one letter per person per week. We cannot guarantee that a letter will be printed on a specific date. The Home Journal prefers that letters be typed. Letters to the editor are published in the order they are received as space permits. A Journal employee will call to verify the author of each letter. There are three ways to submit a letter to the editor: E-mail it to hhj@evansnewspapers.com, mail it to The Houston Home Journal at P.O. Box 1910, Perry, GA 31069, or drop it off at 1210 Washington St. in Perry - between 8 a m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Foy S. Evans Editor Emeritus Of course, the object of graduating from high school should not, necessarily, be a goal in itself. For many students the high school diploma should be their passports into college, where a degree can , result in even higher paying jobs. It is all about helping students live up to their poten tial. Tim coaches - one in every high school - will face a daunting challenge, but they are being prepared to take on this new, unique responsibility. 'Dogpatclf no mope; city grows up I remember when people in Bibb County referred to Warner Robins as “Dogpatch”. It wasn’t said in a complimentary way, either. The real Dogpatch was a fictional place inhab ited by hillbillies in the popular comic strip “Li’l Abner”. Most readers of this column probably are too young to have ever heard of the comic strip or Li’l Abner. Actually, Warner Robins was not the kind of place that you would not select to live. Families moved here during and after World War II for one reason - to earn a living. When wives saw the scrubby little town they weren’t at all pleased. I knew many women who cried them selves to sleep after moving here from other cities. It was my idea of a town in an old Wild West movie. There were only a few privately owned homes. Alcohol sales were restricted to “Front Street”, where things could get pretty rough. Yet the only indoor movie theater in town was located there. A few stores were scattered along Watson Blvd. from the railroad tracks to Commercial Circle, where there were a few businesses. North Commercial Circle was owned by the federal gov ernment, which rented space to a drug store, hardware store, appliance store and a barbershop. Unpaved South Commercial Circle was half filled with privately owned businesses. There was nothing attractive about any of the storefronts. Watson Blvd. was a narrow strip of paving to the edge of town at Pleasant Hill Road. There was little reason to believe it [ - mE inc fil gS/QnaM The Reuterization of war journalism « What’s the big deal over a little faked smoke?” That seems to be the prevailing attitude among media pooh-bahs irked by bloggers who exposed the crude Photoshoppery of a Reuters photographer over the weekend. The cameraman, prolific Lebanese stringer and chronicler of Hizballah Adnan Hajj, was fired. But the black cloud of truth-distort ing photo fakery, jihadi-sympathizing news staging and sloppy photo cap tioning in the Middle East hangs over American journalism thicker than any thing Hajj could conjure. Charles Johnson of littlegreenfoot balls.com, who was instrumental in debunking the faked National Guard memos that disgraced CBS News and Dan Rather during the 2004 presi dential election, led an Army of Myth Busters who exposed Hajj’s digital cloning of smoke clouds over a Beirut bombing scene. The Jawa Report (mypetjawa.mu.nu), another War on Terror blog, dissected a second Hajj photo of cloned flare smoke in an image of an Israeli F-16 fighter jet over the skies of Lebanon. A Reuters cap tion falsely identified the manipulated flares as “missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh.” My video news site, HotAir.com, continues to track the lat est developments. The Internet graphics expert brigade zeroed in on an obvious Photoshop technique used in the billows of Hajj’s smoke known as the clone stamp tool. It’s also known as the rubber stamp tool, fitting for a news service that seems to have made its mark rubber stamping pro-Hizballah propaganda. Indeed, the day after Reuters ‘fessed OPINION EFFECTIVE fOUTICM. A 0 CAMPAIGNS Columnist loyevansl9@cox.net HRk ever would be more than a bump in the road, surviving off jobs created by Robins Air Force Base. To be honest, it was an ugly town that was supposed to dry up and go away at the end of World War 11. It was saved from extinction by work the base was called on to perform during the Korean War. Only a few stubborn individuals, with nowhere else to go, believed the town would survive. But it did. One of my aunts in Macon asked me on numerous occasions why I was wasting my time in Dogpatch. I had just started a little weekly newspaper - The Warner Robins Sun - and I clung to the hope that I had made a good choice. There were many times when I wasn’t sure. People made their homes here only as a last resort. Most workers on the Base commuted from Macon or several other towns around Middle Georgia. Macon was the hub. Even base com manders identified with Macon and more or less ignored the fact there was a town called Warner Robins. Now, half a century later, look what has happened. Houston County Michelle Columnist matkin@comcast.net 'J7Z. up to the doctored photos, the wire ser vice falsely blamed the Israeli Defense Forces for bombing a funeral proces sion, according to Arutz Sheva. Hajj provided perhaps the lamest excuse in photojournalistic history for his image manipulation since Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” rational ization telling his bosses that he was quote trying to “remove dust marks and that he made mistakes due to the bad lighting conditions he was working under.” Among his many other dubious shots: several Hizballah-embedded images, an artfully burning Koran and an iconic photo of a dead child paraded around Qana by unknown handlers. Watch now for braying, rationaliz ing and messenger-shooting from the journalistic elite. You will hear them complain about the bloodthirsty blog mob. You will see MSM editors rally around Reuters and dismiss this deba cle as a lone event. Adnan Hajj, the new international Jayson Blair/Mike Barnicle/Janet Cooke/Mary Mapes/ Walter Duranty, will end up with a book contract and a job at A 1 Jazeera. Media veterans will hope that their professional apathy will snuff out prob ing questions like baking soda on a pan fire. After all, it’s “old news” already. HOUSTON DAILY JOURNAL has become the place where there is remarkable growth. Bibb County is los ing residents to Houston County. We look on Bibb County today the way they looked on us long ago. It isn’t a place we would want to live. The latest census figures show Bibb County’s population outstrips ours by less than 30,000. Bibb County has less than 20,000 more housing units than Houston. Median income in Houston is $46,242 per household, compared with $35,169 in Bibb. The pendulum has swung this way. And continues everyday. However, Bibb County still is the hub. We are a spoke. No getting around it, no matter who we try to coat the picture. Bibb has major industries and much more commercial development and shopping facilities. Here’s something interesting, though. Houston County schools have almost the identical number of stu dents as Bibb County schools. That’s a statistic that I am having trouble digesting. I haven’t heard anyone call Warner Robins “Dogpatch” in a long time. The image has been replaced with a pro gressive city and a modem, progressive county. Having been here through the trans formation of Macon and Warner Robins I find it fascinating to see people who can afford it turning their eyes toward Houston County, bringing with them high incomes and dreams of a better life. As they used to say. “Who woulda thunk it?” In a sense, they are right. Whether from sloppiness, laziness, incompetence or ideological bias, American journal ists have played dupes or worse to jihadi propagandists for decades. Just a few weeks ago, a New York Times pho tography editor raved over her photog rapher Joao Silva’s image of an al-Sadr army sniper posing in a window firing at U.S. troops. “Incredible courage,” she panted. It’s not clear whether she was talking about the photographer or the terrorist. The Associated Press has failed to respond to my repeated ques tions about one of its Iraqi stringers, Bilal Hussein, who was detained by the U.S. military in April after being captured in a Ramadi building with a cache of weapons, according to my sources. Hussein was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photography team. From the fake “massacre” in Jenin, to the false accusations against Israel in the shooting of Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura, to the dissemina tion of “Pallywood” terrorist video pro ductions, to the false labeling of execut ed Shiite fishermen in a Haditha sports stadium as victims of U.S. Marines, the Reuterization of war journalism goes far beyond Reuters. Reuters can kill a few pictures, but it does not kill persistent doubts about the American media’s ability to cover this war through anything but a dis torted lens. The blogosphere can help clear the bogus smoke. Only the Old Media itself can stamp out the toxic fire. Michelle Malkin is author of the new book “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.” Her e-mail address is malkin@comcast.net