Category: Tom Baxter

There’s nothing in the state Constitution which specifically says the legislature has to adjourn by midnight of its 40th day of business, but it’s a tradition observed “for time eternal,” as a disapproving House Speaker David Ralston said after learning the Senate was prepared to ignore the clock if necessary to have its last vote. Last Friday night, that tradition was ignored.

To the infrequent visitor, there’s a certain Dorian Gray quality to the Golden Dome these days. In the chambers where votes are taken, the senators and representatives seem to be getting progressively younger. Outside in the halls, where deals are made, the lobbyists (to say nothing of the reporters) are growing older and grayer at an alarming rate.

For the time being, ethics is on the back boiler in Georgia. But in Alabama and South Carolina, two powerful house speakers have been indicted.

Just a stone’s throw from the Place de la Republique, center of Sunday’s huge rally in Paris, stands the bust of Frederick Lemaitre, Comedien, 1800-1876. A favorite of the boisterous crowds who frequented the theaters near there in the mid-19th Century, Lemaitre was one of the colorful characters portrayed in the film “Children of Paradise.”

Hopefully proper homage was paid to Lamaitre’s memory by the demonstrators on Sunday, because the belly laugh is as much a French value as freedom of expression, and it was both which were targeted last week.

We’ve come to the end of that season when Hartsfield-Jackson is its most frenetic, as a multitude of travelers head to wherever they call home, for whatever holidays they celebrate. As the New York Times documented in a recent story based on its analysis of census data, the currents of that annual migration have changed.

In the past, going “home for the holidays” has most often meant a trip back South to one’s state of origin, by people who had found jobs in the Northeast, the Midwest or the West.

How do you spell Obamacare sideways? Maybe Insure Tennessee, the name of the new program announced Monday by Gov. Bill Haslam, the third Republican governor to accept the Medicaid expansion since the midterm elections, and one of the most creative in figuring out what to call it.

The first time I saw Mary Landrieu, I was in New Orleans working on a story about then-Gov. Edwin Edwards. The silver-haired daddy-o of Louisiana politics, as I described him then, was leaving a banquet in a Canal Street hotel with a gaggle of aides and reporters in tow when he ran into Landrieu, a New Orleans legislator running for state treasurer.

The moment sticks in my mind because Edwards stopped and kissed Landrieu’s hand, an act of Cajun gallantry that also had the air of a potentate acknowledging the scion of another principality.

It’s been a little more than 40 years since Americans sat in hours-long gas lines and learned, to their chagrin, what the letters OPEC stood for. This country’s modern-day energy policy was forged in the aftershocks of the OPEC oil embargo, conditions very different from those which prevail today.

When the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries last week failed to agree on a plan to prop up oil prices by limiting production, it was interpreted by some as an act of economic warfare on the United States.

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
James Russell Lowell

I’d never read this poem before I heard Andrew Young quote the first line, applied to a passing story of the day years ago, and I wouldn’t be able to recall the complete couplet or its author if it weren’t for Google. Therein lies a new wrinkle in our upward and onward struggle that I’ll bet would have set Lowell’s pen flying.

Reality has hit a rough patch. We’re not speaking here of political or economic reality, where the news is seldom good, but something on which our state and city have made an indelible mark: reality entertainment.

Real people may be cheaper than film stars, but they can come with some nasty surprises, as demonstrated by the catastrophic (for the network, the family and most likely the whole town of McIntyre) collapse of the “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” franchise.