Author Archives: Tom Baxter

When neither party picked a Southerner on their tickets in the 2008 presidential election, a string which went back to 1972 was broken. With Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan, it’s now two elections in a row without a Southerner on a national ticket.

That’s readily understandable. Ideology mattered more than regional considerations this year, and Ryan will be enthusiastically embraced by the Republicans’ conservative base across the South. But it does set one to thinking about who the next Southerner to make it on a national ticket might be.

At this stage it’s impossible to say which individual will have that combination of ability and luck to be either the nominee or the running mate on the ticket in 2016, 2020 or 2024. But chances are the next Southerner on a national ticket will be a lot different than the last, former U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. He or she is much less likely to be a Democrat – or a white Anglo.

Last week, on the same day Metro Atlanta voters were turning down the TSPLOST referendum, the Mississippi Supreme Court denied a motion by Mississippi Power (which like Georgia Power is a Southern Co. subsidiary) to charge its customers interim rates to continue construction on its big coal-gasification plant in Kemper County. These seemingly unrelated stories, the TSPLOST vote and the Kemper coal fight, actually have considerable resonance with each other.

Like the plan for funding new projects which was rejected in nine of Georgia’s 12 transportation districts, the Kemper project has enjoyed the backing of a wide swath of Mississippi’s business and political establishment. Former Gov. Haley Barbour made the plan to mine lignite from a large nearby site, convert it into a gas and burn it a major part of an aggressive state policy to encourage energy-related projects of all kinds. The project, with its new technology, was the beneficiary of some $300 million in federal funds.

Design-wise, the ballot Georgia voters will see when they go to the polls Tuesday is a hot mess. It puts wishful thinking ahead of real choices and doesn’t get to the toughest questions until the end.

The candidates and questions vary by county, but all follow the same ballot order. First come the party primaries for state and local offices. Then come what are labeled Republican or Democratic Party Questions, all of which can be designated as wishful thinking, since votes aren’t actually being cast to enact these measures, but merely to solicit voters’ opinions.

The wishful thinking section is followed – as if to jolt voters out of their fantasies — by the nonpartisan judicial elections. And only then, at the very end, do we come to the issue which has consumed so much energy and money and gas this year: the T-SPLOST question, followed by the local questions, like liquor sales in unincorporated Fulton County and consolidation in Bibb County, which really mean something to the voters.

Another school year will be beginning soon, and Tom Keating will be about the mission which has occupied nearly half his 40-year career as an educator: school toilets.

He has, he says, “been a lot of places, and done a lot of stuff” as a consultant and director of Project CLEAN (Citizens, Learners, and Educators Against Neglect), the organization he launched as the vehicle for his crusade to make school restrooms cleaner, safer and generally more civilized. He and his cause have been the subject of numerous articles, including a front-page Wall Street Journal story. He’s worked in 18 states, and several foreign countries.

Consulting with school systems on how to improve their restrooms has never been a lucrative calling, however, and even more so in these days when music teachers are getting layoff notices and school janitorial services are being outsourced. It’s increasingly harder to get the attention of harried principals and school superintendents, but Keating is nothing if not insistent.

“They can blow me off, but I don’t go away,” he said.

How hot is it? Why, it’s so hot, that last week, a South Carolina Republican who had a 93 rating with the American Conservative Union when he was in Congress announced he’s heading up a campaign to promote conservative solutions to the nation’s “energy and climate challenges.”

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis will head the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a national campaign which will operate out of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. Conservatives, he said, “need to stop retreating in denial and start stepping forward in the competition of ideas” over these challenges.

Both Republicans and Democrats have reasons for dismissing this news.

Republicans will point out that Inglis got trounced in the 2010 GOP primary by Tea Party favorite Trey Gowdy, who said he didn’t believe in global warming and accused Inglis of being soft on the cap-and-trade issue. No wonder, then, that he’d wind up in this job. Democrats will say the Republicans willing even to talk about climate change are few in number, and late to the party.

In many ways, Georgia has sleepwalked through its housing crisis.

It wasn’t a poster child for the real estate bust in the way Arizona, Florida and other Sunbelt states were, back when the collapse in home values dominated the headlines. Yet the bust started earlier here and has lingered much longer, as attested by the recent news that the state’s foreclosure rate is now the highest in the country. Metro Atlanta ranks second in the list of large metro areas, behind only the Riverside-San Bernadino-Ontario metro – the so-called Inland Empire – in California. Douglas County leads the list of the nation’s counties, with one foreclosure for every 122 properties.

Testifying at a U.S. House committee hearing in 2009, Georgia Tech professor Dan Immergluck, an early prophet of the perils of the sub prime lending market and author of the book “Foreclosed: High Risk Lending, Deregulation and the Undermining of America’s Mortgage Market,” said some south Atlanta neighborhoods had experienced boom-bust cycles worse than those more widely noted in Las Vegas or Phoenix.

Atlanta’s foreclosure map has changed, Immergluck said in a recent interview, reflecting new and troubling developments in the economy.

Later, we called him Dr. Margarita.

He was the admitting doctor at the rehab center where they took my brother after his Medicare days ran out at the hospital. Standing bedside on his one room visit in the few days we were there, he cautioned my sister-in-law that no one could tell how long “this” was going to take.

“So you ought to drive down to the beach, get one of those cabanas, order a margarita, and just kick back,” he told her.

We just stood there. My sister-in-law didn’t speak up and say she wasn’t the kind of woman who would leave her husband in the final stages of COPD and go to the beach. She was already battered from weeks of outrages. One exchange back at the hospital had been so bruising that when the doctor left the room, the old black man in the other bed leaned over and said, “If I could get out of this bed, I would have knocked the s**t out of him.” So the depth of Dr. Margarita’s callousness didn’t really sink in at first.

They don’t have a catchy name yet, like soccer moms or NASCAR dads, but Latino voters have grown large enough in number, particular in several of the key swing states in this year’s presidential election, that a cliche can only be just around the corner.

Nothing bespeaks the rear-view nature, from a political perspective, of Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Arizona immigration law than a recent USA Today/Gallup poll of what issues these voters are concerned over.

The biggest issue on their minds is health care, which the court will rule on later in the week. Among Latino-Americans as a whole immigration ranks high, but among those registered to vote it’s fifth on the list behind healthcare, unemployment, economic growth, and the gap between rich and poor.

It was a very L.A. kind of riot. The sky seemed especially gray the evening I drove up from San Diego in 1992 to join a team covering the outbreak of violence after the acquittal of the police officers who’d been filmed beating a black man named Rodney King. But there was a ballroom dance competition proceeding as scheduled at the LAX Hilton when I got there and the lobby was filled with Latin dance division competitors, as vivid as parrots. Often, in the smoldering aftermath of the violence, there were similar splashes of color amid the gloom.

The manner of Rodney King’s passing, in a swimming pool on a Sunday morning, insures his place as one of history’s quintessentially California characters. But as he was himself all too aware, the violence which bore his name was only incidentally about him.

Up in North Carolina, a state once admired for its relative enlightenment, the legislature has been talking about regulating the sea level.

Alarmed by a science advisory panel’s recommendation that the Tarheel State should plan for a sea-level rise of more than three feet over the next century due to global warming, coastal developers and business interests have advanced a bill limiting who can make such predictions and how they make them. Abashed somewhat by comedy-show ridicule of the measure, a committee toned down some of the language last week, but passed a bill which prohibits any ordinance, rule or official policy based on a sea-level estimate other than one made by the Coastal Resources Commission, using models “consistent with historic trends.” The full Senate is expected to vote on it Monday.

The sea-level bill is the latest, and far from the most egregious, product of the long war between developers who want to build as close to the ocean’s edge as they can and environmentalists who’d rather they weren’t there at all. But it’s also part of a more general, growing debate over science and its role in public life.

It has been three years since they took down the water tower with the “Success Lives Here” sign that used to welcome interstate motorists to Gwinnett County, and since then the county has been losing an average of a commissioner a year to corruption charges.

Which is not to say that the pace might not pick up still more. Commissioner Shirley Lasseter, who resigned last week after pleading guilty to a bribery charge, is said to be cooperating with a federal investigation, along with her son John Fanning, a member of the county Zoning Board of Appeals, and her business accomplice, Carl “Skip” Cain.

Compared to more competitive years, the scene at the Capitol on the final day of qualifying to run for state offices last Friday was pretty listless. With a new map drawn by the Republican majority, the number of truly competitive seats continues to dwindle, and the prospects for a tea party uprising in this summer’s Republican primaries fizzled as the qualifying period inched toward the noon deadline.

But this process, which separates with a check those who are serious from those who’re just talking about it, always generates a little drama, and there was some in both parties on Friday.

Commenting on the Republican primary loss earlier this month of his friend, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, former Sen. Sam Nunn bemoaned the lack of political passion which he says is eroding the middle ground of American politics.

“The people who I call the common-sense middle are largely absent in the active role of the political – whether it’s fundraising or get-out-the-vote — and that’s a big part of the problem,” the former senator from Georgia, who worked across the aisle with Lugar to create a program for the elimination of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, told the AJC. “People on the extremes have every right to exercise their voice and pocketbook, but the people in the middle should as well.”

This failure of the middle to rise up can’t be blamed on a lack of money or media attention, as attested last week by the collapse of Americans Elect, the latest in a series of well-funded, high-profile attempts to gin up interest in a third-party, middle-ground presidential candidate.

A few years ago, Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum hosted a fascinating exhibit based on the papyrus legal records of a family which lived in Egypt in the 5th Century BC.

As a testament to the lasting lessons such archaeological treasures can transmit, it came to mind last week when Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to endorse same-sex marriage.

At about the same time the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments in the Justice Department’s challenge to the Arizona immigration law last month, there were a couple of developments which paint a much different vision of the future than might be guessed by Americans on either side of the immigration issue.

A few days before the much-publicized hearing, Audi announced it has selected Mexico as the site for its new SUV manufacturing plant, spurning several U.S. suitors, including Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. This follows recent decisions by Honda, Mazda and Nissan to build or expand on plants in Mexico, which is projected to increase its auto manufacturing by over 40% by 2015.

This news adds context to the second development, a report by the Pew Hispanic Center that net migration from Mexico to the United States, legal and illegal, has slowed to a halt and may even be moving slightly in the other direction.

The most protracted presidential campaign departure I can recall before the present example was Wesley Clark’s in 2004, and that was only because the general got cold feet halfway down an elevator in Memphis heading toward his withdrawal speech after the Tennessee Democratic Primary. As a result he made the press corps take an extra bus ride to Little Rock the next day before he faced the inevitable.

That was nothing compared to Newt, of course. In what he may well consider to be a template for how future unsuccessful candidates should structure their goodbyes, Gingrich let it be known a week in advance that he’d be officially leaving the campaign on Tuesday, and then – you’ve got to love this guy – postponed the announcement until Wednesday.

It serves the purposes of both sides to portray the recent departure from the American Legislative Exchange Council of several of its corporate sponsors as a “War on ALEC,” in which left-wing groups pressured Coca-Cola and other corporations into defecting from the organization. A war, for both the left and the right, makes for great fundraising.

In a sense this story line is accurate. The campaign led by the African American group Color of Change was the catalyst for the corporation’s break with ALEC over its promotion of “stand your ground” gun laws like the one involved in the Trayvon Martin case. Much the same can be said about the Media Matters for America drive against Rush Limbaugh in the wake of his comments about Sandra Fluke earlier this year. If you want to elevate these interest-group scrimmages up to the status of full-scale armed conflict, fine, we can call it a “war.”

But the alacrity with which so many companies followed Coca-Cola’s lead, like the rush away from Rush, makes it seem as if they were just waiting for the chance to close the checkbook on ALEC. Which makes sense, when you consider how much the contemporary corporate mindset is geared to the ruthless elimination of the extraneous.

“Filing feels good! Share your tax triumph with your friends!”

That’s the cheery message, along with that familar FB button, which greets you on TurboTax this year when you’re finished with the annual ordeal. I’ve embraced social media, but posting my “tax triumph” on Facebook is pushing it just a little too far. It’s vaguely un-American to post the news of your tax filing as if you’d just bought a new puppy.

Shame, too, because for once, I have something to share. Quite unexpectedly, our household has been the beneficiary of Sonny’s Gift.

Officially, what has come to be called the Great Recession ended nearly three years ago, although Friday’s paltry jobs report was yet another demonstration of how hard it’s been for the nation to put it in the past tense. Still, there has been time now since the economy hit a bottom and began this all-too-modest recovery to begin thinking about what the Great Recession really was, and what lessons from it we’ll pass on to future generations.

When parents tell their children and grandchildren about it decades from now, they will first have to struggle with the Orwellian nature of the name. English provides a perfectly good word for a really big recession – depression – but for telling reasons, we’ve shirked from this usage.

Late in the last night of this year’s legislative session, in that hour when so much mischief famously has been done, there was a brief but illuminating flash of red which revealed the way things work under the Golden Dome and the potential of social media to disrupt the old order.

You can it watch it, starting at the 3 hour 16 minute mark, on this Georgia Public Broadcasting archive video.