About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 2, 2018)
6A OPINION ®he £ntics gainesvilletimes.com Friday, November 2, 2018 Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com Submit a letter: letters@gainesvilletimes.com The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. LITERS Vote no on the Brunch Bill We live in the Bible Belt. We encourage people to attend church on Sunday mornings. The brunch bill will allow visitors and the citi zens of our great city of Gainesville and county of Hall to drink alcohol between the hours of 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on Sunday mornings. I believe visitors and our citizens alike will respect our current “differentness” in not allow ing drinking during these hours as we encourage people to go to church instead. I voted “no” early on this issue on the upcom ing Nov. 6 ballot on the Special Election section. I hope you will, too. Bill Morrison Gainesville Pre-election talk is just guessing; voters will determine outcome In the current hyperbolic broadcast media envi ronment, with its 24-hour maelstrom of talk about nothing but the coming midterm elections, forcing politics into every tiny crevice of our private lives, I am reminded of the week before the big football game. Analysts on hundreds of channels predict the big game’s outcome. Pundits declare the winner in advance of the game. They think they know exactly how the game will unfold and who the win ners and losers will be. Then the game is actually played and sports fans everywhere realize that the folks who talk about the game are not the players who deter mine the outcome. The midterm elections are very much like that. After standing mute for 24 months and listen ing to the talking heads of broadcast media pre sume that they know how you and I will vote or ought to vote, our moment to speak comes. Every two years we arrive on the national stage at this moment when all becomes clear. Are you and I satisfied with the direction of the new administration in the various areas of public policy, or do we long for the policies of the previ ous administration? On Nov. 6 go to the polls and vote. You and I will bring our country a moment of clarity. Bob Boyd Murrayville To submit letters: Send by email to letters@ gainesvilletimes.com (no attached files) or use the contact form at gainesvilletimes. com. Include name, hometown and phone number; letters never appear anonymously. Letters are limited to one per writer in a month’s time on topics of public interest and may be edited for content and length (limit of 500 words). Letters may be rejected from readers with no ties to Northeast Georgia or that address personal, business or legal disputes. Letters not the work of the author listed or with material not properly attributed will be rejected. Submitted items may be published in print, electronic or other forms. Letters and other commentary express the opinions of the authors and not of The Times. Your government officials U.S. government President Donald Thimp, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20500, 202-456-1111,202-456-1414, fax, 202-456- 2461; www.whitehouse.gov Sen. Johnny Isakson, 131 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510,202-224- 3643, fax, 202-228-0724; One Overton Park, 3625 Cumberland Blvd., Suite 970, Atlanta 30339, 770-661-0999, fax, 770-661-0768; isakson.senate.gov Sen. David Perdue, 383 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510,202-224- 3521, fax 202-228-1031; 3280 Peachtree Road NE Suite 2640, Atlanta 30303, 404-865-0087, fax 404-865-0311; perdue.senate.gov. U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, 1504 Longworth House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, 202- 225-9893; 210 Washington St. NW, Suite 202, Gainesville 30501,770-297-3388; dougcollins. house.gov U.S. Rep Rob Woodall, 1725 Longworth House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, 202- 225-4272, fax 202-225-4696; 75 Langley Drive, Lawrenceville 30045, 770-232-3005, fax 770- 232-2909; woodall.house.gov Georgia state government Gov. Nathan Deal, 203 State Capitol, Atlanta 30334; 404-656-1776; www.gov.georgia.gov Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, 240 State Capitol, Atlanta 30334, 404-656-5030; www.ltgov.ga.gov Secretary of State Brian Kemp, 214 State Capitol, Atlanta 30334, 404-656-2881, fax 404-656-0513; www.sos.state.ga.us; Elections Division, 2 MLK, Jr. Drive SE, Suite 1104, West Tower, Atlanta 30334-1530,404-656-2871, fax, 404-651 -9531 Attorney General Chris Carr, 40 Capitol Square SW, Atlanta 30303; 404-656-3300; law.ga.gov School Superintendent Richard Woods, 205 Jesse Hill Jr. Drive SE, Atlanta 30334; 404-656-2800; www.doe.k12.ga.us; askdoe@gadoe.org Labor Commissioner Mark Butler, 148 Andrew Young International Blvd. NE, Suite 642, Atlanta 30303-1751; 404-656-3045, 877-709-8185; www.dol.state.ga.us Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens, 2 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Suite 704, West Tower, Atlanta 30334; 404-656-2070; oci.georgia.gov; inscomm@mail.oci.state.ga.us Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, 19 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Room 226, Atlanta 30334; 404-656-3600, 800-282-5852; agr.state.ga.us; info@agr.state.ga.us Trump didn’t encourage Pittsburgh shooter, but he’s not helping either The debate over whether or not President Trump encouraged the man who set out to slaughter Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh really isn’t a debate at all. It’s a shouting match. “Yes, he did!” “No, he didn’t!” And it will likely only make things worse, as each side grows increasingly deaf to its own heated rhetoric and ever more furi ous at the other’s. Here’s a better question: Is Trump helping? The answer is obviously no — and that’s bad enough. Let us stipulate that the pro-Israel father of Ivanka Trump, who converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, is not “literally Hitler.” But let’s also stipulate that there’s something about Trump and his MAGA nationalism that’s been, and remains, very attractive to bigots. This doesn’t mean that every one who jumped aboard the Trump train is a bigot. Far from it. But it is simply true that some who did are bigots, and Trump and his team have been dismay ingly unconcerned about this fact. I have some personal experience here. When the alt-right rallied to Trump start ing in 2015,1 was one of their targets. I was besieged with anti-Semitic filth. I ranked sixth on the Anti-Defamation League’s list of targeted Jewish jour nalists. Once, when I mentioned that my brother had died, I was pelted with “jokes” asking if he’d been turned into soap or a lampshade. While the attacks shocked me, I was more dismayed by how little many fellow conservatives seemed to care about the entire phenomenon. This was back when Steve Bannon — later the Trump campaign’s CEO and eventually the presi dent’s senior adviser — still wanted Breitbart.com to be a “platform” for the alt-right. The best defense of Trump at the time was ignorance and, ironically, bigotry — toward Republicans. A lifelong New York Democrat, Trump had no real understanding of what traditional con servatives and Republicans believed. In 2000, when he vied for the Reform Party’s presidential nomination, he said he was trying to keep bigots from taking over the party. “He’s obviously been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler,” Trump said of opponent Patrick Buchanan. Trump’s dream running mate: Oprah. In 2016, after years of cultivating support for his birtherism, Trump still believed many of the liberal stereotypes of the GOP as a hothouse of bigotry. That’s why he struggled to repudiate David Duke and let Putin’s and the alt- right’s racist troll armies fight in his name. Trump thought he needed them. Trump is even more ignorant about how to be presidential. He’s the first president who doesn’t even know how to pretend to be a unifying figure, at least for longer than it takes to read a state ment. Instead, he’s enraptured by the rapture of his base, feeding them red meat, dog whistles and cultural wedge issues — anything to keep all of the attention, negative or positive, on him. He often says it would be “so easy to be presidential” but, as he said at a Pennsyl vania rally in March, “you’d all be out of here right now, you’d be so bored.” Why try to unify the country if the price is a little less applause and attention? This dynamic has had a transforma tive effect on Trump, his base — and his opponents. Trump long resisted calling himself a “nationalist,” fearing it was kooky Bannon stuff. Now he embraces it, heedless of its implications to others not already on his team. The media has gone from being biased (it is), to being “fake” (it’s not), to being the “enemy of the peo ple” and tantamount to a fifth column. Many in the Trumpified right-wing media amplify and reinforce all of this because they, too, are addicted to the same base. Amidst the mail-bomb scare last week Trump tweeted about how unfair it is that CNN can criticize him “yet when I criticize them they go wild and scream, ‘it’s just not Presidential!”’ The false equivalence is lost on him and on his big gest defenders. CNN isn’t the president. It’s in a different lane. And while some of its coverage is worthy of criticism, it isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a warrant for Trump to leave his lane. I don’t think Trump deliberately encouraged the slaughter in Pittsburgh. But every day he fuels a sense of chaos, a feeling that none of the norms or rules apply anymore. And that is bad enough. It certainly isn’t helping. The president is supposed to at least try. Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. JONAH GOLDBERG goldbergcolumn@ gmail.com X&OM® ||-I WsCbrWbsh.fbstVAlter8Gmip Don’t take any wooden nickels. USA BENSON I Washington Post Writers Group If Congress dithers, Americans will pay BY KATIE TUBB The Heritage Foundation Like many Americans, you may not have an opinion on nuclear waste policy. But when you consider what it’s costing taxpayers, that may change. How much? About $7 billion to date (yes, billion with a “b” — 12 zeroes) and years of wasted time, with the near cer tainty of another $27 billion to $50 billion on the line, all courtesy of the forced gen erosity of, well, people like you and your neighbors. Some history is helpful. In the 1970s and ’80s, Congress began the work of determining what to do with radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel — not just from commercial nuclear power reac tors, but from defense activities such as powering the Navy’s nuclear submarines and cleaning up Cold War and World War II nuclear weapons sites. Congress directed the Department of Energy to collect and store waste starting no later than 1998. It chose some fed eral land at Yucca Mountain in Nevada to be the destination, so long as it was deemed safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. With that vision, the department entered into contracts with commercial nuclear power companies, whose custom ers in 35 states paid the DOE roughly $750 million a year to fulfill this service. These are customers of some of the small est nuclear power plants — Dairyland Power’s now closed reactor in rural Wisconsin — to some of the largest in the world, such as Palo Verde in the deserts of Arizona. Those commercial plants, and not the taxpayer, have paid the DOE some $38 billion with interest over the years — as it should be But 1998 came and went with no reposi tory. In entered the federal taxpayer. Nearly 100 lawsuits later, the Treasury Department has been making annual payments to nuclear power companies to recover the costs of storing and secur ing nuclear waste in the interim. The money comes from the Judgment Fund, a “permanent, indefinite appropriation” that is as big as the taxpayers’ pockets can stretch. To date, taxpayers have covered nearly $7 billion in legal damages, routinely making the DOE one of the most expen sive sources of Judgment Fund payouts each year. This also means nuclear power customers are paying twice. It will get worse before it gets bet ter. The DOE projects it will be legally liable for $27 billion more to nuclear power companies. That figure assumes the government will restart the Yucca Mountain repository review process now. Suspecting that won’t happen, the nuclear industry estimates taxpayer liability will be closer to $50 billion. It’s not clear when things will get bet ter for the taxpayer. Former Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made a career out of trying to eliminate the Yucca Mountain project and found a powerful ally in the Obama administration’s DOE and Nuclear Regu latory Commission. Since then, the Trump administra tion has routinely requested the funds necessary to follow the law, starting with completing the scientific review of Yucca Mountain. But Congress remains in the deadlock of the Obama years, unable to agree on funds for Yucca Mountain. Ironically, one of the red herrings some congressmen use to further delay is to argue that the Trump administration’s requested $120 million is “too expensive.” Which is of course to ignore that the funds in question are actually coming from the pot of money collected from nuclear power customers, not to mention the bil lions taxpayers are shelling out in legal fees while Congress dithers. There are other grievances that could be mentioned. For those with a grim sense of humor, Congress and the DOE have offered hundreds of millions in tax- payer-backed tax credits and government loan guarantees for advanced nuclear power plants... which if built will have no place to dispose of their spent fuel given the current state of the situation. Or again, Congress has been using pay ments by nuclear power customers to write off increased federal spending on mandatory programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, rather than seeking to actually reduce spending with real cuts. In other words, Congress has little incentive to do anything at all so long as taxpayers are silent. Maybe it’s time they spoke up. Katie Tubb is a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation. She Stines EDITORIAL BOARD Founded Jan. 26,1947 345 Green St., Gainesville, GA 30501 gainesvilletimes.com General Manager Norman Baggs Editor in Chief Shannon Casas Community member Brent Hoffman
