Tom Baxter

Under the rules which award states for recent Republican performance, Michigan, which holds its Republican presidential primary on Feb. 28, will seat 30 delegates when the GOP holds its national convention in Tampa this August, fewer than Alabama or Mississippi. Arizona, which votes the same day, will seat 29.

The following week, Georgia, with 76 delegates, is the biggest prize on the Super Tuesday, when 10 states with a combined 437 delegates make their choices.

Based solely on the numbers, one might think this would put Georgia in the national political spotlight. Instead, Georgia Republicans who’ve seen their kindred in other states whoop and holler through a score of debates, will have nothing more exciting to watch Monday night than Colbert’s return. The next televised debate will be Wednesday in Arizona, and Michigan appears to be getting the lion’s share of Super PAC ads.
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Where do we go from here, in the struggle to keep the lights on and the factories humming, while insuring the earth doesn’t become an oven and the water we drink a luxury? A satisfactory answer to that question is still a long distance away, but Georgia is looking more and more like the “here” referred to in that question.

Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency made available a new database showing the nation’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the top two sites – the Southern Company’s Plant Scherer in Juliette and Plant Bowen near Cartersville – are in Georgia, and within a 65-mile radius of Atlanta.

Along with the nation’s third-largest emitter — Southern’s Plant Miller near Birmingham, Ala. — these sources for the electricity which lights the screen this is being written on account for more carbon emissions than the entire nation of Finland, according to one report.
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Last week’s story of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure cancer charity’s hasty retreat from its new policy excluding Planned Parenthood from funding followed what in the past few months has become a familiar arc.

Like Bank of America’s abandonment of its announced debit card fee, the Netflix retreat from its bivalved pricing system, and the reversal of fortunes for the SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy bills in Congress, that arc was a very short one. An aroused universe of customers/contributors/online users emerged quickly and a blast of media exposure forced the organizations involved to reverse themselves.

Certainly, these examples speak to the already well-understood power of the internet to focus a firestorm of negative attention, sometimes on subjects as passing as a singer’s performance on Saturday Night Live. But they may point to something deeper, a new wrinkle in a culture already molded by the requirements of rapid response.
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The little secret a lot of legislators don’t want you to know isn’t how lavish some of the meals lobbyists feed them are. It’s about how hungry they are by the time they line up at the trough.

You already know about those big-tab dinners lawmakers are fed, and if you don’t, a story by Chris Joyner in Sunday’s AJC about one thrown by a convoy of lobbyists for the House Natural Resources Committee will give you a good idea.

Lobbyists have been wining and dining legislators since time immemorial. But what is seldom remarked is that over time, the net worth of those being fed, compared to that of those who are feeding them, has seriously declined.

The same financial disclosure forms which make it impossible to tell exactly how rich the legislators are, also make it impossible to tell how many of them have gone broke. But the Great Recession has had a deep and sometimes tragic impact on the General Assembly.
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Last week was not the first time Newt Gingrich has gone ballistic over the media’s interest in his private life, but never before has he achieved the sort of afterburn which propelled him into his huge win Saturday in the South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary.

On the day the Republicans, under his leadership, won control of the U.S. House in 1994, Gingrich is said to have been so infuriated by a Mike Lukovich cartoon which referenced his first divorce that he dented the ceiling panel of the car he was sitting in when he saw it. Whether that story is true or not, it’s a fact that Gingrich demanded an apology from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and refused to have any contact with the local paper, until practicality and the indefatigable Jeanne Cummings wore him down, weeks into his term as speaker.
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State-of-the-state messages often come with a heavy load of navigational imagery.

Former Gov. Sonny Perdue, a pilot, portrayed the state as a plucky little plane, weaving between the storm clouds. In his second state-of-the-state message last week, Gov. Nathan Deal exhorted the legislators to think of themselves in a league with Columbus, da Gama, Vespucci and Magellan – brave explorers who set their course by the stars and plunged confidently forward into the unknown. In the advance text, the speech was titled “Charting the course to prosperity.”

It would be nice if one year, the governor would trim his metaphorically sails somewhat and compare himself to a harried Atlanta commuter trying to make it back and forth between home and work. That would not only mirror the experience of many voters, it would better describe the way government really works.
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Oh to have Gertrude Stein back, if only for a day. It was she who said once of Oakland, “There’s no there, there.” What wonders of grammatical compression might she have concocted in an age when the very concept of thereness is under stress?

The Southern Baptist Convention is considering dropping the “Southern.” The St. Petersburg Times has retired one of the most honored mastheads in newspaperdom to become The Tampa Bay Times. Texas A&M and Missouri will kick off next fall in the Southeastern Conference, and Kansas (where I spent a pleasant spell last fall as a fellow at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics) may join the Big East.

These signs of cultural dislocation ought to be of special interest in Atlanta, a city
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