Tom Baxter

There has recently been a man-bites-dog story about a newspaper, although it has received scant attention in the newspapers, which cover nothing so poorly as they cover themselves.

Last year the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced that it was cutting back to three print editions a week and would focus henceforth on “new and innovative ways” to cover the news online. That was a dog-bites-man story. The idea of cutting back circulation days has been kicked around in newspaper circles for several years, and Detroit and a few smaller papers have already done it. It’s in line with a larger narrative about the demise of newspapers at the hands of the internet.

Last month, however, the Times-Pic announced a change in strategy. This summer it will begin publication of a tabloid edition, to be called TPStreet, which it will sell for 75 cents a copy on the three weekdays — Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays — when it isn’t printing the old paper. Continue reading →

Don’t get me wrong: I like Reese Witherspoon. A few years ago I was asked to suggest names for a list of outstanding young Southerners, and I included the Nashville native, as much for her business smarts  as a movie producer as for her acting ability.

But allow me to vent. After all, I’m a citizen of the City of Atlanta.

As practically everyone must know by now, Witherspoon was a passenger in a car driven by her husband, Jim Toth, when they were pulled over last April 19 by one of Atlanta’s Finest. As she has since acknowledged, the couple had consumed “one too many glasses of wine” at an Atlanta restaurant.

The officer was in the process of arresting Toth after the breathalyzer and coordination-test routine when Witherspoon hung her head out the window of the car and told him she didn’t believe he was a real police officer.
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By the time Howard had gone into a nursing home and his son and daughter-in-law had returned from the West Coast to take care of his affairs, the mail bulged from the mailbox every day, often overflowing in stacks 10 inches thick.

For a man of his limited means, Howard always gave generously to political and religious causes, but in the last year or so before he became unable to care for himself, the amounts of the checks he wrote began to increase. Correspondingly, so did the volume of mail, until his home became the postal equivalent of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The family discovered that in that last year he wrote some 5,000 checks, for a total of about $70,000. His son estimates the total for all his sunset years to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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For modern-day philosophers contemplating the nature of news, last week provided a gruesome laboratory. News, we must posit first, is not events. It is the way that we react to events.

Last week an explosion strong enough to generate a mushroom cloud ripped apart a Texas town, killing at least 14 and injuring 200 more. Authorities intercepted letters containing a deadly poison, intended for the president of the United States and a U.S. senator from Mississippi. A justice of the peace and his wife were arrested in Texas and charged with three murders which had widely been attributed to a violent prison gang.

Of course, it was none of these stories which were the biggest news of the week, but the bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon which killed three people and injured more than 130, and the dramatic manhunt which followed.
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Taxes should be simple and fair. You hear that mantra a lot these days, and it has a special power around this time of year. The more I meditate on it, the more my mind is drawn toward the raging irony that the simplest and fairest tax my household pays, the state income tax, is the very one which some seem hell-bent on getting rid of.

Start with simple. Like thousands of Georgians, I use a computer tax preparation program to file our federal and state taxes every year. The federal taxes are a pain, especially since I pay self-employment tax and have to send Uncle Sam a check for estimated taxes four times a year.

But our state income taxes are literally as simple as pushing a button. It takes less than a minute for the program to compute my state tax after the drudgery of calculating the federal income tax is finished. And it’s a pleasant interlude, because this year, like last year and several years before that, we’ve had to write the federal government a check for more money while we’ve received a refund from the state.
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It’s a fact not much remarked on that the closest thing to a frontrunner we have so far in the squishy-soft field for next year’s U.S. Senate race in Georgia is a Democrat.

There’s good reason no one pays much attention to a couple of polls from February showing former Sen. Max Cleland leading every Republican contender. He’s shown no interest in the race, and even the names being seriously discussed — U.S. Rep. John Barrow and Michelle Nunn — haven’t made any commitments.

And yet there are several reasons why next year’s Senate race may be more important in the long run for the Democrats than the Republicans, win or lose.
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Here’s one way to estimate the chances of getting Tennessee to change its mind and give up a thin strip of its existing territory so Georgia can gain access to the water in the Tennessee River.

Right now, the Tennessee legislature is considering a bill that would end party primaries for U.S. Senate nominees, and give the Republican and Democratic legislative delegations the power to choose their respective nominees.

The idea of giving up some of their existing territory for our convenience has so far met with overwhelming resistance in Tennessee. But you figure, if they’re fools enough to go for the idea of giving up the voters’ right to select their U.S. Senate nominees, we just might be able to talk them out of that land without a fight.
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Jimmy Lewis is a man known for dire predictions.

The CEO of HomeTown Health, which represents more than 50 rural Georgia hospitals, he peppers his regular email messages to his clients with urgent warnings to hoard every penny of cash they can get their hands on, and as a lobbyist his testimony has caused the chair of one committee to complain that he always says the sky is falling.

Ominously, his predictions are starting to come true. Lewis forecast at the beginning of the year that five to six rural hospitals might be forced to close in 2013, and already there have been two. Calhoun Memorial Hospital in Arlington closed in February, and Stewart-Webster Hospital in Richland shut its doors last week.
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