No summer in our lifetimes has been awaited so eagerly as this one. But their expectations for relief this summer don’t hang on much.
Category: Tom Baxter
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Kemp’s numbers lag, even as the coronovirus curve flattens
The curve has begun to flatten, the public responded enthusiastically to his lifting of stay-at-home orders — judging by the crowds who came outside, at least — and everybody digs Sign Language Santa. So far, however, none of that has given Gov. Brian Kemp the big bump other governors have enjoyed during the pandemic.
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What we didn’t know about the economy was bound to hurt us
By Tom Baxter What kind of economy is it, exactly, that we’ll be trying to jumpstart back to life in the coming months? The pandemic has churned up some surprising answers to that question. The Commerce Department reported last month that the nation’s Gross Domestic Product declined by 4.8 percent in the first quarter of […]
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Socially distanced candidates stuggle to control their messages, and their laptops
You could see the very picture of a politician’s frustration in this socially distant campaign season about eight minutes into the Atlanta Press Club’s first-ever Hollywood Squares-style debate, broadcast Sunday morning on Georgia Public Television.
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Mail-in voting combines with Postal Service woes to form a new political divide
In the past, both parties have accused the other of rigging elections, sometimes with good reason. What’s new is the rapid increase in mail-in, absentee and early voting, and the rising Republican mistrust of all of these.
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From the chaos of pandemic policy, regional alliances emerge
Last week marked the first, still sketchy, indications that the COVID-19 pandemic may have begun to recede in the United States. We may also one day look back on last week as a fateful pivot in the way the states of our United States relate to each other.
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2020 Census lurches forward under the cloud of the pandemic
*expand featured image to view full graphic By Tom Baxter Americans had already grown wearily accustomed to the rituals of counting by the time April 1 — Census Day — rolled around last week. Every day since Leap Day, when the first U.S. coronavirus death was announced, has been filled with tallies of deaths, infections […]
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As virus advances, the vestiges of Hill-Burton form a tattered line of defense
Lister Hill was an Alabama Democrat, the son of the first American physician to suture a human heart. Harold Burton, an Ohio Republican, was a former Cleveland mayor who was already serving on the U.S. Supreme Court when the legislation he’d co-sponsored with Hill was signed in 1946. The health care system which today faces its greatest crisis is in large part the creature of the law which bears these senator’s names, the Hill-Burton Act.
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Political calendar coinciding with pandemic’s grim timeline
In hindsight, knowing just what we knew then, we could have predicted by the end of January that the COVID-19 epidemic was going to plow into this election year like a drunk driving a truck into a storefront.
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FDA letter to Kemp a preview of the hard choices that will come with the pandemic
Last Wednesday, Cobb County Manager Rob Hosack met with representatives of the Federal Drug Administration, and the following day FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn sent a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp. That letter is a good example of the hard choices that await the country in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Democracy, interrupted: Election delay complicates local ballot questions
Moving the date of the Georgia Democratic Presidential Primary from March 24 to May 19 may prolong the endgame battle between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, but it isn’t likely to change the final result. That may not be the case with a couple of Metro Atlanta elections which were also scheduled for next week.
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In the span of a weekend, Georgia feels the impact of the coronavirus
There may be no better example of the dizzying speed with which the coronavirus epidemic is affecting politics than this. On Friday, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins went to a good deal of trouble to make it into the entourage accompanying President Trump on his visit to the CDC Friday afternoon. On Monday afternoon, Collins announced he, like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep Paul Gosar, was self-quarantining after coming in contact with someone at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference who later came down with the virus.
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Are we so bad, after all? What lists can tell us and what they can’t
What’s more fun, journalistically, than a list? While we’re waiting for qualifying week to end here in Georgia, and fretting over our supplies of hand sanitizer, let’s take a brief dive into how lists get made, and what they really tell us about ourselves.
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Collins loses no time rejecting Trump’s overture to be national intelligence director
In the end it was just a reality show too far, the idea that U.S. Rep. Doug Collins could be lured away from a confrontation with U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler with the sourest plum in Washington, the job of national intelligence director.
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CDC girds for battle against COVID-19 as the knife looms near its budget
By Tom Baxter Reflecting a complicated history, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the CDC, as everybody in Atlanta knows it — has gone through several names changes and adjustments. Its World War II predecessor was the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas. That’s a clue as to how the CDC came […]
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The caucus that Carter built comes a cropper, leaving Democrats in a muddle
In 1976, when Jimmy Carter changed the way people run for president with his success in the Iowa Democratic Caucus, there wasn’t all this finickiness about what the results actually were.
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Georgia’s jungle primary is already bringing out the beast in some
Last week, a bipartisan group of legislators tried to forge a path out of the jungle, so to speak. They passed a bill out of a House subcommittee which would have abruptly changed the rules for the upcoming special U.S. Senate election, eliminating the jungle primary system in which everybody of all parties runs together runs together this November, followed by a likely runoff in January.
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State economist walks the line between budget cuts and prosperity
Even though it doesn’t always feel that way, more people will get up and go to work today in Georgia than at any time in the state’s history. Which makes the dip in state revenues a little harder to explain.
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Remembering the long, slow days of the Clinton impeachment, on the eve of what looks like a shorter one
On a corner wall of my office there still hang two of the long tally sheets reporters used — maybe they still do — to record votes in the United States Senate. They are a memento of the final day of the 1999 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, the vote count which found the president not guilty on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. It was both a momentous and deeply dispiriting experience.
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A huge windfall that wasn’t complicates the budget picture for this year’s legislature
In a recent letter to his constituents, Senate Majority Leader Jack Hill explained, with refreshing candor, what has caused the biggest headache Republicans face in this election-year session: the windfall from the federal tax cut never came through.
