Category: Tom Baxter

Into the quiet pond of Georgia politics a couple of significant pebbles have dropped, creating ripples we may be writing about for quite a while.

The old America of a half-dozen bowl games that really meant something and favorite sons who had their shining hour on their state’s primary day, then dutifully joined the nominee on stage at the national convention, is rapidly giving way.

It’s not just the presidential election which ends this year at an unusually suspenseful juncture. On a wide range of stories, the final chords of this year’s tune don’t land anywhere near a tonic note.

Healthy, wealthy and wise. The three qualities seem to go together, and not just because they ended up in the same proverb. Let’s take a look at some recent reports and rankings — there may not be progress, but there are always reports and rankings — to see how Georgia is doing on the h-w-w spectrum.

Bracketed by the splatter of terrorist bullets on both sides of the Atlantic, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris hasn’t attracted as much attention as the planners must have hoped for.

On Oct. 23, 1983, suicide bombers detonated truck bombs outside two barracks buildings housing U.S. and French peacekeeping forces in Beirut, killing a total of 307 people, including themselves. It’s important to remember the relative calm with which that was handled, especially after what has been one of the most unseemly episodes of politically induced hysteria in a long time.

An upset in the Louisiana governor’s race and the luck of the draw in Mississippi gave Democrats in the South a rare reason to celebrate last week. The biggest upshot: Louisiana is likely to be the next state to accept the federal Medicaid expansion.

It was a different Donald Trump the night before the terrorist attacks in Paris, and the afternoon the day after. The news brought back in stark focus the issues on which the maverick candidate’s campaign has been based.

In his meteoric rise to the top of the Republican presidential field, Dr. Ben Carson has been playing a strange sort of jazz. Just as early jazz loosened the four-square beats of the old marching bands, he has rattled some of the stuffy conventions of campaign coverage, to the delight of conservative voters.

The protracted battle over the Affordable Care Law has produced some strange reversals. These days, it’s the governor of Alabama saying it’s time to move past a lost cause, and people in Washington still invested in total resistance.

Money talks. But it doesn’t always make sense, and in politics, it doesn’t always get what it wants, as the latest round of campaign finance disclosures illustrates.

If they had really wanted to cut up, the schedulers at Fox News could have run with last week’s developments and quickly scheduled a debate of the Republican contestants for House speaker — directly opposite Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate on CNN.

Alabama has touched off a furor with the closing of drivers license offices, after passing a strict photo voter ID law. This is not only a big voting rights story. It’s another stage in the third-worlding of the rural South.

To appreciate why House Speaker John Boehner sang “Zippity Doo Dah” as he headed for the podium to announce his resignation last week, consider the race that is shaping up to replace him.

It’s a mystery fit to defy the combined talents of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Precious Ramotswe. And a petite Georgia archaeologist raised on caving and climbing is in the middle of it.

In another year, you figure, John McAfee’s screwball campaign for the presidency would be getting more attention than it has so far. But this year, even an ex-millionaire who claims to have had his dog shot before his eyes in a Central American torture chamber has a hard time getting attention.

“Within our military, I will find the General Patton, or I will find General MacArthur, I will find the right guy.” — Donald Trump. But were those the right guys?

There has hardly been a Georgia sacred cow more solidly ensconced in its bovine divinity than Delta Air Lines. As the state’s biggest employer and an ambassador to the world, the corporation has always been right up there with Coke in its influence.
Not this year, though.

“When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.” Remember that one? That platitude, with several variations, was repeated often, back when so much of the world’s economy, not to mention culture, hinged on what happened here. But it is no longer only we who sneeze.