Newspaper Page Text
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
