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Declare among the nations, and publish, and set up a standard;
publish, and conceal not; Jeremiah 50:2
& EDITORIALS
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2016 winner: Front Page excellence
2017 winner: Best Humor Column - On the Porch
GUEST COLUMN by Barton Swain
PEACH STATE POLITICS by Kyle Wingfield
In praise of the
news on paper
H ere’s an unpopular opinion: There is a future in
newspapers. I don’t mean newspaper com
panies. I mean physical, hard-copy newspa
pers—the kind you buy on the street, the kind
someone tosses onto your driveway early in the morning.
The kind everybody says will be a thing of the past in a
few years.
My conviction on this point stems from a decision I
made about a year ago—to subscribe to, as we used to
say, the paper. I was reluctant to do this, and for the usual
reason: You can read all the newspaper’s content online,
either for free or for a smaller subscription price.
For several years, though, I had trouble with online news
reading, and I thought maybe it was time for a regressive
revolt. I had begun to notice, first, that I remember almost
nothing I read online. I must have read scores of online
articles in 2016, say, but I can hardly remember one. Yet
somehow I can recall things I read in hard-copy newspa
pers and magazines 20 or 30 years ago; in some cases I can
see the words on the page.
I had also begun to feel anxious that, despite all the
news reading I do, I was never able to catch up. When
you get your news by searching online news aggregators
and perusingTwitter, you can spend an hour reading
articles—two hours, three hours—and still you feel you’ve
only read the smallest
slice of relevant news. You
read and read, but unread
stories are still everywhere
and you spend the rest of
your day feeling anxiously
ill-informed.
Newspapers mostly rid
you of that anxiety. When
you read the paper in the
morning, you spend 45
minutes or an hour doing
one thing: reading the news. When you put the paper
down, assuming you’ve made a decent effort to read and
understand a fair sampling of items, you’ve read the news.
At that point you can go about your day happy in the
knowledge that you have some idea of what sort of things
happened in the world yesterday and of what intelligent
people think about them.
The newspaper, and especially the serious metropolitan
daily, allows you to ingest the news on an array of topics—
and be done with it. After spending an hour reading the
paper, you’re as caught up on national and world affairs
as any person can claim to be. You’re not aware of all the
profound and amazing writing “out there,” but you’re suf
ficiently well-informed, and for the remainder of the day
you can apply your mind to other tasks, without anxiety
or guilt.
The newspaper brings a kind of epistemological defini
tion to the everyday work of being literate. You can hold
the day’s knowledge with two ink-stained hands, and
when you’re done with it, you can throw it away. It won’t
update and demand to be read in a few hours, and it won’t
follow you around on your smartphone.
I don’t know what the future of newspapers may be. But
I know there is one—because newspapers are physical and
limited, and so are we.
This column first appeared in the April 16 Wall Street
Journal. Barton Swaim is opinion editor of the Weekly
Standard.
is published every week by The Monroe County Reporter Inc.
Will Davis, President • Robert M. Williams Jr., Vice President
Cheryl S. Williams, Secretary-Treasurer
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Next governor should keep councils
S ome of what doesn’t survive
is not to be regretted; some is.
Rarely do lawmakers stand by
as an effective entity fades into
the sunset. But there was one such
case this year.
The Georgia Council on Criminal
Justice Reform was created in 2013
— by a law that provided for its dis
solution on June 30,2018, unless
legislators voted to keep it running.
They did not. So, after five years of
vetting and proposing ways to make
the state’s criminal justice system
work smarter, the council will close
less than three months from now
The original idea was to let the
council serve through Gov. Nathan
Deal’s final legislative session, then
let his successor decide whether to
bring it back. It might be possible for
Deal to extend the council’s life on
his own, perhaps by re-establishing
it under an existing agency. Either
way, the next governor should seek
to reauthorize it legislatively. There’s
more work to be done on this front,
including the work of demonstrating
how the new policies are performing
and what would improve them.
I’m a process guy — all the person
ality-typing systems out there tell me
it’s in my nature — so I’m drawn to
the process this council established.
Although several of the council’s 15
members are elected officials, they
and the other members are appoint
ed to the council. That affords them
some political insulation in research
ing and forming their proposals —
which, of course, must be approved
by legislators and signed by the
governor to take effect. That insula
tion lets them seek the best ideas for
reform, with political accountability
for those ideas on the back end.
It’s a system that works, and would
continue to work. And not just for
criminal justice reform.
Consider, for ex
ample, how difficult
health-care reform
has been on the state
level. (We’ll set aside the
mess at the federal level
for today.) There are
market-oriented ideas
such as direct primary
care, which allows pa
tients to contract with
doctors for a menu
of services, including
visits to specialists, as a
complement to high-
deductible, catastrophic
insurance plans. That is, it’s “insur
ance” rather than just prepaid health
care, the way insurance works for
automobiles. But neither direct pri
mary care nor many other ideas that
would put decisions in the hands
of patients and doctors, instead of
government or, in some cases, insur
ers, have gotten through the General
Assembly. Maybe working through
the obstacles and objections outside
the hurried, 40-day session would
help?
Another thorny issue that could
use this kind of process is the soar
ing taxpayer cost of teacher pen
sions. Georgia must keep its prom
ises to those teachers already on
staff or retired. But the state needs
a new, effective retirement plan for
teachers hired in the future, since the
current arrangement is becoming
fiscally untenable and
may not be attractive
to tomorrow’s work
force anyway. That is,
however, a debate most
elected officials are
loath to tackle. Perhaps
they’d be more will
ing to take up pension
legislation if the hard
work of crunching the
numbers and narrow
ing the possibilities was
done by one of these
kinds of councils, with
representation from
pension experts and
education professionals alike.
The next governor would be wise
not only to keep the Council on
Criminal Justice Reform in place,
but to use it as a blueprint for other
reforms.
Kyle Wingfields column runs in
newspapers around the state. A for
mer columnist with the Atlanta Jour
nal-Constitution, he is now president
and CEO of the Georgia Public Policy
Foundation: www.georgiapolicy.org.
JUST THE WAY IT IS by Sloan Oliver
What are the U.S. interests in Syria?
L ast week, anyone see the Fake
News about a chemical attack
by Syria against its own people?
Bashar al-Assad is accused of
launching a chemical attack against anti-
government rebels in Douma, Syria that
killed upwards of 40 civilians and in
jured scores more. Here’s a quick review
on Syrias use of chemical weapons:
• August 2012 - Obamas famous (and
stupid) “Red Line” statement when he
warns Syria saying, “that a red line for
us is we start seeing a whole bunch of
chemical weapons moving around or
being utilized.”
• March 2013 - The US, France, and
other countries announce they have
strong evidence that Syria used sarin gas
to kill civilians and rebel fighters. The
“red line” is crossed
• August 2013 - In response to nu
merous chemical attacks, Obama DOES
NOTHING. Oh wait, he condemned
Syria and angrily told Assad that he was
naughty.
• July 2014 - Secretary of State Kerry,
on Face the Nation, reports, “We struck
a deal where we got 100 percent of the
chemical weapons out.” (Libs and Dems
actually believed Kerry.)
• 2015 - The feckless Obama and the
haughty John Kerry assured the world
that all chemical weapons were removed
from Syria. Therefore, any subsequent
report that Syria has used chemical
weapons is Fake News because Obama
talked tough and assured us that Syria
removed them.
• 2017-2018 - Syria didn’t remove
its chemical weapons, and the Assad
regime continues to use them against its
own people.
AS A FORMER member of the
intelligence community, I’m well aware
of our ability to collection information.
Intel agencies collect information from
a variety of sources. The sources are bro
ken down into broad categories known
as SIGINT, IMINT, and HUMINT.
SIGINT is an acronym for signals intelli
gence. SIGINT is the intelligence derived
from collecting signals and emissions
from devices that produce them such as
military radio transmissions, cell phone
calls, radar signals/emissions, and emis
sions from numerous other devices and
weapons. IMINT is short for imagery
intelligence. It is the intelligence derived
from imagery - think satellite photos
and aerial photography (the U-2 and
drones.) HUMINT is human intel
ligence and, like it sounds, is intelligence
from human sources. A prisoner of war
is a human source, as is a CIA agent
who recruits a foreign “source” to gather
information. Another information
source, and often the most informative,
is OPEN SOURCE (OS) information.
OS is information available to everyone
- examples are newspapers, magazines,
and web sites. There are other aspects
to intelligence collection, but the take
away is that intelligence agencies gather
information from a number of sources.
Collected information is just one piece
of the puzzle. Then, it must be analyzed.
THE COLLECTED information
only becomes “intelligence” once it has
been integrated with other sources of
information and has been thoroughly
analyzed to produce an intelligence
summary The intel summaries are
compartmented and briefed to those
who have a “need to
know!’ Need to know
means that the intelligence
is only shared with those
working that specific is
sue or area. For example,
when I was in the Army,
stationed in Europe, I
didn’t have a “need to
know” what some CIA
agent had collected while
on assignment in China.
That Chinese intel was
compartmented and
available only to those
working issues related to
that specific information.
WHAT DOES all this mean? It
means that when our intel agencies brief
the president on an event, information
has been collected from a wide variety
of sources, the information has been
checked for accuracy, it has been com
pared to other information, and it has
been analyzed. However, intel agencies
can, and often do, get things wrong. For
example, intel missed the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor (1941), the Tet offensive
in Vietnam (1968), the Iranian Revolu
tion (1979), the collapse ofthe Soviet
Union (1991), the 9-11 attacks (2001),
and the rise of ISIS (2011). Reason for
these failures, while tens of thousands of
smart people work to produce intelli
gence; our adversaries work equally hard
to deceive us.
DID ASSAD use chemical weapons
on his people? Our intel agencies say
that he did. If he did, it makes little
sense, since President Trump had just
announced that he was planning to
pull US troops out of Syria. Ask who
has the most to gain from a chemical
attack - Assad or rebels fighting against
him? If the rebels could pull off an attack
and blame it on Assad, clearly they have
much to gain. Whether Assad or the
rebels used chemical weapons, the big
ger question is, “Why should the United
States care?” Yes, chemical weapons
are horrible and using them breaks
international law. However, shoot
ing or beheading civilians is horrible
and breaks international law, as well.
Regardless of how they’re killed, 40 or 50
dead is horrible. But what’s our national
interest in Syria? Assad is a bad guy, but
so is Kim in North Korea, and dozens
of others around the world. Should we
start bombing them all? Or only when
they use chemical weapons? Or only
when it’s in our national interest? Speak
ing of which, what are our
national interests? Hard to
argue that it’s Syria.
LOCAL NEWS-
When you think of “low-
incoming housing” (LIH),
what comes to mind? I
think of apartments and
multiple family units
where there is high crime
often associated with high
drug usage. There is an
indisputable link between
low-income housing and
high crime rates. Every
where there is LIH there are higher
crime rates than similar populated areas
that have owner-occupied, single fam
ily housing. I tell you this because the
Monroe County Planning and Zoning
(P&Z) Board will hold a public hearing
to discuss/approve a 72 unit LIH de
velopment on New Forsyth Road very
close to the Bass Pro entrance. Vantage
Development, LLC has applied to build
a 72 unit, multiple family development
on 18+ acres in Bolingbroke. Vantage
specializes in building low-income
housing. Problems that I foresee include
increased crime, increased traffic, and
decreased property values in the sur
rounding neighborhoods. The P&Z
meeting will be April 23,5:30 pm, 3rd
floor of the County Building, 38 West
Main Street, Forsyth.
WEEKLY Quote - “Trust but verify”
Ronald Reagan
Sloan Oliver is a retired Army officer.
He lives in Bolingbroke with his wife San
dra. Email him at sbanoliver@earthlink.
net.