Agriculture secretaries just don’t get the attention they deserve. A recent cover of the magazine caricatured Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Bob Barr shining the president’s shoes. No member of the Trump team has shined those shoes more enthusiastically, however, than the former Georgia governor, nor under tougher circumstances.
When you look at it short range, the failure to pass the disaster relief bill South Georgia farmers have been told was on the way is just another maddening example of Congress’s inability to do anything useful anymore. Looked at from a larger perspective, it is uncomfortably consistent with the direction the country is taking on climate change.
Gee, what a coincidence. In Tennessee, as in Georgia, the state house speaker has been embroiled in scandal this year, with calls for him to step down. Things couldn’t be working out much differently than they are in these neighboring states, however.
The first outlines of the Supreme Court showdown over Roe v. Wade are taking shape, and with them new questions. If the laws pass this year by state legislatures take effect, how exactly will they be enforced?
What do the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Rifle Association have in common? More, it turns out, than these groups’ leaders and supporters would care to admit. In recent months, scandal has threatened the survival of both organizations, and in both, women with deep Atlanta connections have been thrust unexpectedly into key leadership roles.
Stacey Abrams has made it pretty clear she wants a rematch with Gov. Brian Kemp. In a more low-key way, Kemp has signaled that is the race he’s expecting in 2022.
Measles isn’t polio or Ebola, but the often violent resistance to vaccinations has many common threads. Germs thrive where government is in disarray and science is mistrusted.
The fundraising battle has begun in the two North Metro congressional districts which will account for most of the money spent in Georgia House races next year.
“Our country is full,” President Trump said last week, prompting a spirited response from demographers who warn that much of America is instead hollowing out, losing working-age residents at a particularly alarming rate. But from different perspectives, the same place can look full or empty.
As she ponders which of a buffet line of races to jump into next, Abrams has been making the national media circuit, the hottest name on the bill at progressive conferences and a guest on talks shows, morning and night. Events promoting the reissue of her book, “Lead From the Outside,” are sold out around the country. It’d be nice if it could last forever, but sooner or later the current Democratic star has to make up her mind.
It was, in its way, an ambitious session. We can say that before any confetti flies. But it was also one in which events outside the Golden Dome eclipsed what was going on there.
In little more than a year, electric scooters have made a mark on America’s urban landscape. Just as impressive, in its way, is the speed with which this freebooting young industry has taken on the governmental trappings of more established businesses, complete with lobbyists and competing legislation.
Earlier this month Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, in so many words, that his company is moving on from Facebook. Given the outsized importance Facebook and other social media have assumed in our public life, that news has not received as much attention as it deserves.
Crossover Day, the last day for a bill to pass one chamber of the General Assembly in order to be considered for final passage that year, always comes with a dollop of drama. More than in most years, this one seems to have marked a real passage.
When I worked as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal back the mid-‘70s, I would rise before dawn to catch a MARTA bus at the corner of North Decatur Road and Scott Boulevard, along with a crowd of commuters who drove every day from Lilburn and Lawrenceville, parked in the North DeKalb Mall lot and made the second leg of their commute by public transit. I recall those days to make the point that however the referendum turns out March 19, commuters from Gwinnett County have been riding MARTA for a long time, and over the years, forking over a share of the sales taxes that support it at Atlanta lunch counters and stores.
Even when it seems the border wall, the Mueller probe and the Korean summit have overshadowed the healthcare debate, it remains a constant, driving force in American politics. The battle rages on, in venues outside Washington.
The media is seldom so circumspect as when it covers itself. Thus it was that the biggest Atlanta media story in many a year landed Saturday morning in a modest one-column hole on Page A10 of the Journal-Constitution.
U.S. Rep. Rob Woodall’s announcement last week that he won’t run again for the 7th Congressional District seat which he won by a hair in the last election doesn’t guarantee that this former Republican stronghold will swing to the Democrats in 2020. But it does bring to a close an era of Republican history.
We live in an age when people want to play the same old games, but they can’t agree on the same set of rules. It’s a world where blurred boundaries and shifting alliances make it hard to tell at times who’s won or lost, instead producing dual, asymmetrical victors. Pepsi and Coke, Brian and Stacey, Donald and Nancy, Maroon 5 and Big Boi, AOL and Mitch: winners all, depending who you ask.
Over little more than two years, the wrong contestant has been announced as the winner of the Miss Universe Pageant, the Oscar for best picture has been awarded to the wrong movie, and a missed call so egregious it has prompted a lawsuit has played a key role in deciding who’s in Atlanta for the Super Bowl this week. Things like this just didn’t happen back in the good old days, but that isn’t because there haven’t always been foul-ups of similar magnitude.
Planned charging stations for e-scooters, e-bikes could ease tension over their useJune 14, 2019 - 9:03 pm
Gwinnett County firm stiffs workers OT pay in case resolved by federal Labor Dept.June 12, 2019 - 11:50 pm
Fulton County’s new sustainability plan sets climate change mitigation as No. 1 goalJune 10, 2019 - 6:48 pm
