Category: Tom Baxter

It’s an odd little world, where a Japanese company many of us still associate with the stereo equipment of our youth is brought to its knees because it can’t get concrete poured fast enough in Georgia and South Carolina.

If you think it’s swampy on the Potomac, try your average state capital, where ethics reforms pursue the “low-hanging fruit” and investigations sometimes disappear with an appointment.

The late, great Furman Bisher once referred to the Super Bowl as “the World Series of capitalism,” and that man knew a thing or two about ball games and money. More than any other event, the Super Bowl is about high rolling, from the commercials that cost as much as a feature-length film down to the hustlers on the streets.

Virtually unnoticed amid the pomp of the inauguration and the clamor which followed it, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta issued a ruling Friday which could be as important as anything that was done or said over the weekend.

Our Town, always hungry to put itself on the map, suddenly finds itself hosting the Packers in the NFC Conference championship game and the subject of a Donald Trump tweet war. Henry Grady Nirvana, in a perverse, 21st Century way.

Could it be an omen of sorts, when a bogus snow storm causes the postponement of one of the state’s most time-honored celebrations of pork, in all its manifestations?

State governments are the laboratories of democracy, they say, and last week test tubes were bubbling to overflowing on both coasts, in North Carolina and California.

Faux news is fake news that people want to believe. It isn’t just biased news, such as you see very commonly. Its falsehoods are not the result of reportorial laziness or editorial ham-handedness, but objective assessments of the audience’s gullibility.

Robert Kelley’s “The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century” isn’t an inviting title, exactly, but if you want to understand the shape of the electorate in this year’s election, this book, published in 1979, would be a great place to start.

We seem to have a selective memory when it comes to the Cold War. A sequence of events that would have turned Walter Cronkite ashen-faced has gone largely unreported in the United States.

To understand the country Donald Trump will govern, we should understand how reality television imitates reality while diverging from it in its obsessive rituals of elimination.

If you had told a Democrat before this election that Hillary Clinton would turn Cobb, Gwinnett and Henry counties blue while improving on Barack Obama’s performance across the entire Metro Atlanta region, they would have gone to bed confident they were going to carry the state. Didn’t happen.

We Americans like to think we’re unique, and that our politics is unique, and to a certain extent that’s true. Look who we just elected. But a lot of the contest and reality shows we watch in the States originate in Europe, and so, sometimes, do our politics.

Our voting system isn’t rigged, it’s jerry-rigged. This election year, with its shadowy suggestions of Russian dirty tricks, its last-minute court rulings concerning ballot access in North Carolina, and those malfunctioning voting machines, has outlined what amounts to one of this country’s great infrastructural failures in this century.

There are those who’ll tell you pretty fast that they won’t miss Barack Obama a minute when he’s gone, and others who dread the day he leaves office. Time will tell, in both cases.

You could say that this long and unprecedented presidential campaign has been book-ended by debates handled by Fox News, and that’s fitting. This has been a convulsive period for the country, and more unexpectedly, for Fox News.

We’ll return after Wednesday night’s debate with news of this century, but first, what we’ve discovered this year that tells us it may be a smaller world than we thought.