Friday, October 13, 2006

Couple of things

- They get on these runs every once in a while, and this latest editorial by the Athens Banner-Herald continues their new tradition of me disagreeing with their views ... or, in this case, their interpretation.

But if they are, no thanks will be due to Commissioner Elton Dodson, a lawyer, and County Attorney Bill Berryman, who contended at Tuesday's meeting that legislators and the legislature's counsel office might have some problem in crafting those goals into workable laws that will pass constitutional muster. Here's Dodson, as quoted in a Thursday story in this newspaper on the push to get some underage drinking enforcement laws on the books: "I don't want to assume that the lawyers in Atlanta and the legislature will take care of this for us. That's not a safe assumption."

A worthwhile concern, of course, but it makes the rather arrogant presupposition that because a couple of local lawyers can't see a way to get a workable law written, it's unlikely such legislation can be drafted.

That's hardly the attitude that needs to prevail as this community - particularly its government, its bar and club owners and the University of Georgia - works to find reasonable approaches to keeping underage people within the law. Dodson and Berryman would do well to display some forbearance on the issue, reserving comment until they have a piece of proposed legislation in front of them for review and comment. After all, they're not the only lawyers in the country.


I think the problem isn't that Dodson and Berryman don't wish to address the problem in a reasonable manner, but rather that they have concerns that a politically conservative majority in the state legislature will address the issue in a way that a predominantly politically progressive community will truly appreciate and desire ... as well as saying that this is a problem the community should want to tackle and not pass off to the Georgia General Assembly. I didn't see anything inflammatory in Dodson's statements, so it looks as if the Banner-Herald just wanted to pick a fight for no good reason.

- There's another candidates forum at 7 p.m. on Monday at East Friendship Baptist Church.

- Forget Gov. Sonny Perdue and Mark Taylor ... the gloves are off in Michael Adams and Vince Dooley feud. The former Georgia football coach fired off a letter to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution defending his record. Awesome.

- Speaking of the governor's race ... gosh, I sure am glad we're actually debating the important issues of the day (as an aside, there are way too many Disney references going on in this thing).

3 Comments:

Blogger Adrian Pritchett said...

I'm not even following the underage drinking issue, but that editorial was really off the mark. It's like the writer(s) have no idea how government works.

http://www.athensworld.com/article.php/20061013080751615

9:54 AM  
Blogger Jmac said...

I'll get that link up Adrian. Nice work there.

It just seems to be a rather oddly constructed argument to me ... that we're going to criticize a local official for wanting to carefully develop local policy to address a local issue.

All they needed to do was somehow blame the bar owners and they would have turned a hat trick.

10:40 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Elton! Elton! He's our man! If he can't do it, no one can!

5:10 PM  

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