Major milestone in community's history of giving
There's a nice new round number we can put on the greater Chattahoochee Valley area's long tradition of generosity: One hundred million dollars. As in $100,000,000.
That's the mark the Community Foundation of the Chattahoochee Valley passed this week, with the disbursement of more than 100 grants totaling more than $620,000, enabling the foundation to top the $100 million mark.
That's not the bottom line in local philanthropy by any means. What individuals, families, faith communities, civic organizations, various foundations and other donors have given over the years would add up to many times that -- which makes this milestone all the more impressive.
It's impressive largely because the Community Foundation of the Chattahoochee Valley has been in existence only since 1998.
The money the foundation has collected since then is a substantially higher amount -- $187 million, according to Community Foundation President and CEO Betsy Covington. Good management and sound investment of that money has the foundation holding current assets of $109 million after the $100 million in grants. You can't quibble with that kind of philanthropic arithmetic.
Self-Trumped
Politicians of every persuasion have been making foolish public statements ever since there have been politicians.
History does not tell us exactly how often toga-wearing Roman pols rolled their eyes or palmed their faces at the nonsense of some speechifying senator in the not-so-Eternal City. But even the most outlandish bloviation of Buffoonius Maximus was surely eclipsed this week.
In any political landscape of the wrongheaded, the unworkable, the unconstitutional and the just plain bucket-of-rocks stupid, Donald Trump's proposal of a "complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" rightly rises to Everest prominence.
Give Trump this much: He's managed with one especially noxious Trumpian gust to do something nobody has managed in decades -- get Democrats and Republicans to agree on something that matters.
State GOP Chairman Matt Moore of South Carolina, where Trump made his proposal, Tweeted that "as a conservative who truly cares about religious liberty, Donald Trump's bad idea and rhetoric send a shiver down my spine." His counterpart in New Hampshire, where it's rumored a fairly important primary will take place, agreed: The idea, said Jennifer Horn, is "un-Republican. It is unconstitutional. And it is un-American." She's right on all three counts.
Pressed for specifics, Trump responded through a spokeswoman: "Because I am so (wait for it, now ...) politically correct, I would never be the one to say. You figure it out!"
If there's a horse deader than that one, it's mummified in a pyramid somewhere.
This story was originally published December 8, 2015 at 4:51 PM with the headline "Major milestone in community's history of giving."