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4A ♦ SATURDAY, AUGUST 26, 2006 Mmx&tem IDailg djnurrcxl OPINION Daniel F. Evans Editor and Publisher Julie B. Evans Vice President Don Moncrief Foy S. Evans Managing Editor Editor Emeritus Yes, Virginia, this will end Residents along South Houston Lake Road aren’t convinced the widening and paving project will ever be completed. It is a Georgia DOT project and, despite the desire of the Houston County Commissioners to help complete it, their hands are tied. It probably will qualify as one of the worst managed projects the Georgia DOT has ever handled. When we were told several years ago that this road would be widened and paved most Houston Countians were thrilled. Now, after years of incon veni e n c e and prom ises, they are baffled, outraged and disgusted. The con tractor start ed the proj ect, then went away for many months with out touching it. When work ers show up it appears to be a token work force. Obviously, no one connected with the Houston Lake Road project feels any urgency to complete it and provide relief for motorists who use the road and for families who live on it. The DOT has promised that the project between Russell Parkway and Cohen Walker Drive will be completed by December. You can’t fault motorists who use this road for asking “which December”, since they have heard so many unkept promises in the past. Root causes for the long, drawn out project go all the way back to the sign ing of the contract by DOT with the road contractor. As in all such contracts, there was a penalty clause for not finishing it by the deadline, but clearly the penalty was not large enough to convince the contractor that he should stay on the job here until completion, rather than tak ing his crew somewhere else. No explanations or excuses will satisfy the thousands of motorists who have endured the inconvenience for such a long time. The best we can expect out of this disaster is that the Georgia DOT learned a lesson, which is that they should make the penalty for failure to complete a job on time so large that no contractor would consider abandoning it. We are looking forward to completion of the road widening project, whenever that is. We hope that it is December of this year, as promised. We will not count on it until we see it. Worth repeating “This reporter approaches the matter with rather fresh memories of friends in Austria, Germany and Italy who either died or went into exile because they refused to admit the right of their government to determine what they should say, read, write or think.... Movies should be judged by what appears on the screen, newspapers by what appears in print and radio by what comes out of the loudspeaker. The personal beliefs of the individu als involved would not seem to be a legitimate field of inquiry. When bankers, or oil or railroad men are hauled before a congressional committee, it is not customary to question them about their beliefs.” Edward R. Murrow, 1908-1965 Journalist Send your Letters to the Editor to: The Houston Home Journal P.O. Box 1910 • Perry, Ga 31069 or Email: hhj@evansnewspapers.com The DOT has promised that the project between Russell Parkway and Cohen Walker Drive will be completed by December. You can't fault motorists who use this road for asking "which December", since they have heard so many nnkept promises in the past. Bodyguards, celebrities shouldn't mix Why are celebrities permitted to hire gun-carrying hoodlums as bodyguards, who do not hesitate to rough up anyone who gets in their way? Cynthia McKinney’s thugs roughed up reporters and photographers follow ing her defeat. Most celebrities have several bodyguards with them. They act as if they have the right to abuse ordinary citizens, and they get away with it. You or I could not (even if we wanted to) surround ourselves with hoodlums with a license to run roughshod over the general public. Law enforcement should not contin ue to turn a blind eye to the tactics of these bodyguards. Celebrities, includ ing an obnoxious member of Congress’, should be forced to abide by the same rules that apply to the average citizen. Celebrity does not deserve a special sta tus at the expense of average people. ■ ■■ John Rocker made a remark that was considered “racist” and they drummed him out of baseball. Andrew Young did the same thing and the very people who attacked Rocker are rushing to excuse Young’s action. Double standard? ■ ■■ Can anyone explain* why every time I drop a coin or small object it winds up under a chair, desk or piece of fur niture? Do you have the same misfor tune? TOPUiAP rlrrc pprcT Fw«Y WROTE ) 1%, WE POUT 1 \ ) wot=l tortue wailGtreet (I wm good iwrauseNCE.' I VCMWOT WONJ Cjj JOURNAL ,T MENTIONED/l THE BRlTc> GEENITO 66ABLE I -'V ( \ (T J f TO FOIL,TERRORIST PLOTS 1 , WUIONAIRE SEOR \M \ Vs * Z S 'jJw'Sff/llmk. AILOWSTHBR l i| f" MMIX? AND uwwl I WKfSKS?"3 mnSuat man Jll&m I WOT &cm J UJ: MfKBE WE SHOULD . J F KnfjJJ Conservative women are consumers, too Dear High Fashion Cosmetics Manufacturers: I want you to know that I am a conservative woman who shares something in common with your mil lions of treasured liberal female con sumers: the need for a quality skin care regimen. Perhaps this comes as a shock to you, but conservative women also suffer chapped lips, rough elbows, undereye circles and ragged cuticles. (I speak with Absolute Authority on this.) The quest for a good moistur izer transcends partisan politics. Our money is green, like everyone else’s. Oh, and we have feelings, too. So when corporate boneheads in your industry (such as the ones at MAC Cosmetics) hire left-wing celeb rities (such as offend-a-holic Sandra Bernhard) to hawk lip-plumping prod ucts by hurling epithets at us (such as “little freaked out, intimidated, fright ened, right-wing Republican thin lipped (expletive)”), we are not just going to roll over like tubes of mascara across a make-up counter. There was a time when you could get away with snubbing us so gratuitously a time before the Internet and the blogosphere and You Tube existed. No more. When the gals at The Cotillion (cotillion.mu.nu), a consortium of conservative women bloggers, orga nized an online protest against MAC’s anti-Republican advertising mockery, the company realized a simple truth: Politicizing beauty potions may be good for a few snickers in the board room - but it’s plain bad business in Middle America. Last Thursday, MAC ended the tem pest in a gloss pot by issuing an apol ogy: “Thank you for taking the time to contact M.A.C. The Plushglass Sandra Bernhard video on the MAC website has gotten enormous reaction. Sandra Foy Evans Columnist foyevansl9@cox.net ■ ■■ How can anyone believe that profes sional baseball and basketball play ers are worth the multi-million dollar salaries they are paid? They don’t even have to perform to a certain level of competency to receive their pay. I like the way professional golfers are paid, which is in direct relation to their performance on the golf course. Play badly, get no pay for the week. Play great, receive a big check. Baseball and basketball pros receive many times the amount earned by pro golfers each year and many of them dog it because they can. ■ ■■ Last year city and county water departments didn’t do very well finan cially because of a year of above aver age rainfall. This year their pockets must be bulg ing as a result of the unusually long hot weather and below normal rain fall. I cringe when I see my water bill, which this year far exceeds anything I have paid in the past. LfcCfc Of INTELLIGENCE Michelle Malkin Columnist malkin@comcast.net is a provocateur and this is why MAC has worked with her. In monitoring these reactions, we realized there was one sentence that was offending some of our customers, which was not what this video was intended to do. We edit ed out the one offending sentence out of respect to some of our customers. The MAC philosophy is about embrac ing and welcoming everyone and cele brating difference - ALL RACES, ALL SEXES, ALL AGES is our credo. We appreciate your interest in M.A.C and hope we have the opportunity to serve you in the near future.” Fine. I won’t toss my must have MAC lip conditioner - unless the Transportation Security Administration forces me to at the airport, that is. But let this be a lesson learned, beauty barons. Your customers are not just “Desperate Housewives” cast members and unhinged friends of Madonna. It’s not nice to bite the manicured hands of conservative women who feed you. Take it from a big-mouthed Fox News Channel contributor who buys lip gloss by the barrel. If you truly “respect” all of your customers, you won’t go out of your way to pay sneering “provo cateurs” to antagonize a substantial portion of them in the first place. The bottom line is that enhancing the bottom line should be your top prior ity, not enhancing your popularity in Hollywood. Note, by the way, how reflexively B * « IHb| Warn HOUSTON DAILY JOURNAL ■ ■■ With officials telling us that water will become a precious commodity in a few years and a form of rationing going on now, how long will it be before all of our manicured, well-watered lawns will become a thing of the past? The day surely will come when we will not be permitted to “waste” water just to make our yards more attractive. ■ ■■ Anyone who doubts that water will be scarce in years to come, and much more expensive, too, should consider that some of the most savvy investors in this country are sinking billions of dollars into projects that will produce water in the future. ■ ■■ When is a gated community not real ly a gated community? When there are no security guards at the gates. ■ ■■ Here’s a statistic that should interest many readers: 35 percent of the people who use personal ads to meet and date are already married. Well, well. ■ ■■ Do you rely on a dictionary to be sure your spelling is correct? A report says that in Webster’s 1998 dictionary 318 entries were spelled incorrectly. Can’t we count on anyone? hypersensitive the corporate world can be to certain politically correct seg ments of their consumer base versus others. Remember when Burger King withdrew a product line of ice-cream desserts based on a single complaint by a British Muslim who claimed he was offended by the swirly cone design on the container lid because he said it resembled the Arabic inscription for Allah? And remember when athletic foot wear company Nike caved in to the Council on American-Islamic Relations over its nutty claim that one of the company’s sneakers had a design on the heel allegedly resembling, yes, the Arabic inscription for Allah? CAIR mau-maued Nike into building three playgrounds for Islamic communities in the U.S. to atone for the claimed insult - in addition to apologizing for any unintentional offense, agreeing to a global recall of all products carrying the design and introducing sensitivity training for Nike designers. Can you imagine how much more militant the offended Muslim response would have been if Burger King and Nike had gone out of their way - as MAC did - to hire someone to deliber ately provoke a significant portion of their customer base? Imagine riots and burning buildings and fatwas. It’s easy if you try. Conservative women, for their part, will deal with their figurative fat lips at the hands of MAC and mouthy Sandra Bernhard without threaten ing boycotts or issuing death threats. No need to withdraw “Plushglass” or build us playgrounds. A free MAC lip pencil should heal the pain just fine. I’ll take mine in Cranberry. Michelle Malkin is author of the new book “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.” Her e-mail address is malkin@comcast. net.