SaportaReport

When it comes to political muscle in Washington, D.C., Georgia has almost no pull.

The days of the late Sen. Richard B. Russell or the now-retired Sen. Sam Nunn are a distant memory. The days of a President Jimmy Carter and a Georgia mafia running Washington, D.C. is for the history books.

Today, we are the state that didn’t get invited to the national dance. With a Republican governor, a Republican-dominated legislature, two Republican United States senators, we have little pull with a Democratically-controlled White House and a Democratically-controlled Congress.

So we sit back and watch our neighboring states receive hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, from the federal government to finance their grand plans for high-speed rail and an upgraded infrastructure.

Oddly enough, we were in a similar spot back in late 2000 (just

By Eleanor Ringel Cater
Special to SaportaReport

There’s nothing here but lots of nothing, done to a turn by John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (“Match Point”) as his clueless partner/straight man.

That’s meant to be a compliment.

This pleasantly overloaded hokum casts Rhys Meyers as a diplomatic aide in Paris with 007 dreams. They are fulfilled — and then some— when he’s assigned to drive a cue-headed, playful-mode-full-on Travolta (there’s even a hamburger joke meant to evoke his Great Comeback in “Pulp Fiction.”)

The pair race around Paris (or some

The sci-fi masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released way back in 1968, a year when it seemed as if the whole world was coming undone.

I was an 8-year-old science nerd at the time, and my big sister Gail took me to watch director Stanley Kubrick’s G-rated head-trip at the Rialto Theater on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

I didn’t understand most of the movie but couldn’t wait for the day when I could travel across galaxies talking to computers and scooting between the stars with my very own jet pack.

Better still; the movie imagined a distant future that was an escapist balm to the brutal realities of the times.

“Let the Awe and Mystery of a Journey Unlike Any Other Begin” was that movie’s wordy but inspiring tagline. Cool.

In 1984, the movie’s sequel “2010” was released with even trippier special effects, more ambitious interplanetary excursions and an army of chatty computers.

But the Utopian ambitions of the original had been downsized a bit: an alien intelligence convinced the Americans and the Russians that nuking each other into oblivion would be a bad thing. That’s nice, but I was expecting more than just a futuristic version of 80’s-style detente.

Well, the future is here. Unfortunately, although the technology on movie screens and in our lives is advancing apace, we’re not exactly keeping up.

By Guest Columnist MIKE “STINGER” GLENN, former Atlanta Hawks basketball player, broadcaster, book collector and lover of history.

My love of books began with my mother, Annye Wilkes Glenn, my first and best teacher. Mom first taught me literacy by reading countless bedtime and daytime stories and feeding my inquisitive and developing mind with intrigue and fascinations.

Mom, who taught elementary school her entire career, was my teacher in the third, fourth, and fifth grades. Mrs. Glenn, as I was instructed to call her at school, mandated reading periods—even in the summertime for her children- and discussions of lessons learned. She would always ask me, “Michael, what lesson did you learn from the book that you read?”

I loved sports books, but I was not allowed to limit

By Maria Saporta
Friday, February 5, 2010

A groundbreaking bill to support the arts, economic development and quality-of-life initiatives was introduced Feb. 1 in the state House of Representatives.

House Bill 1049, introduced by Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, and Stacey Abrams, D-DeKalb, would transform the local option sales tax by allowing counties to pass a fraction of a penny sales tax.