Between buyouts and lockouts, the visionaries who dreamed big about Atlanta’s future have to be a little dismayed right now.
Turner Broadcasting and CNN, like the Atlanta Symphony and chorus, were built on the upstart idea that a media operation based in a provincial city could compete on a global scale. The fates of all these organizations are now in the hands of much larger forces, and what happens to them will have a lot to do with the image Atlanta projects to the world.
First the math.
If we assume a reasonable increase in turnout over the 2.6 million Georgians who voted in the election four years ago, as most observers do, then the 40,000 voter applications (some say the number is as high as 55,000) which the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights says have not been properly processed would amount to between 1 and 2 percent of the total vote in next month’s election.
Among the recent victims of exotic diseases was an Alabama hunting dog named Brennel. The National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa — the animal version of the Centers for Disease Control — confirmed last week that the dog had contracted the rare pseudorabies virus from a feral pig at a wild hog rodeo.
The virus that killed Brennel has never jumped over into a human host, although commercial hog producers inoculate against it to protect their stock. The attention focused by a government lab on Brennel’s ailment is a sign of the vigilance with which we now patrol the frontier of infection.
In more ways than one, Barack Obama has been Nathan Deal’s bestest frenemy this year.
Had his glancing reflection not flickered briefly in the funhouse mirror of American culture, chances are U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller’s punishment for beating his wife in an Atlanta hotel would have been relatively mild.
Fuller spent a couple of nights in jail last month after his wife called police to their room at the downtown Ritz Carlton, and his cases were reassigned to other judges while the matter was being cleared up. But the charges against him were to be dropped in an agreement in which he was to enroll in domestic violence and substance abuse programs. It looked as though he would be returning to his judicial seat in Montgomery, Ala.
But last week the wind changed.
To fully appreciate the irony of last week’s headlines, as stories about the state’s investigation of voter fraud competed with the latest nursing home scandal, you have to understand something about the actual theory and practice of stealing votes.
When asked why he robbed banks, the late Willie Sutton is said to have replied, “Because that’s where the money is,” thus assuring himself more posthumous fame than he earned with his crimes. When it comes to votes, you could say much the same thing about nursing homes, which is why they often come up in speculations about voter fraud.
Yes, we have the U.S. Senate up for grabs and a couple of barn-burners in our state, but there’s a vote next week across the pond that should be of interest to a lot of people in this part of the world, for reasons that go all the way back to Alexander McGillivray and William McIntosh.
Both sons of Scottish traders and Creek mothers, McGillivray and McIntosh were part of an extended, creolized elite which held sway over a vast part of the Southeast before the American Revolution. Equally at home in the Creek towns, the backwoods trading posts and the society halls of Charleston and Savannah, they were important early figures in the history of Georgia and Alabama.
There are some obvious parallels between the case of former DeKalb County Commissioner Elaine Boyer, who resigned her office and pleaded guilty to a kickback scheme last week in federal court, and former Gwinnett County Commissioner Shirley Lasseter, who was sentenced to federal prison along with her son a couple of years ago after pleading guilty to bribery in an FBI sting operation.
Both were respected local leaders whose reputations were based on years of service. Both were Republicans representing affluent neighborhoods. The most striking parallel between these fallen public servants is that from all appearances, both were pretty hard up.
These days some of our most important stories find their way to the top of the news cycle for incidental reasons, and such is the case with the unrest in Ferguson, Mo.
As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar notes in a searing essay in Time, three other unarmed black men were shot by police in the United States within the same month as Michael Brown. The Albuquerque, N.M. police department has been involved in the shooting of 37 people in the past four years, and killed 23. Even cases which sparked widespread protests and rioting, such as Cincinnati in 2001 and Anaheim in 2012, attracted far less national media attention than Ferguson.
As important as the issues it raises may be, what caused the ever-restless eye of the national media to focus on Ferguson was that this young man was shot in August, when Washington and the world’s other power centers are quiet, and his body lay on the ground for four hours, an image broadcast nationally by the end of that news cycle.
Did you hear that Michelle Bachman got high out in Colorado and was stopped for driving under the influence? How about the liberal economist Paul Krugman filing for bankruptcy? And did you know Sarah Palin has taken an on-air job with Al Jazeera?
Stories like these are almost unbelievable, which means they are, just barely, believable. None of these stories are true, but they’ve fooled quite a few people who have passed them along as fact in social media. They’re the product of a satirical website which produces faux news.
As the latest hit on the perennially embattled John Barrow shows, faux has also become a political tactic.
Last week there were a couple of stories from around the region that veered far enough from the conventional story line to bear watching as possible signs of things to come.
For six years, the Mississippi chapter of the Sierra Club has waged a legal battle against Mississippi Power’s plans for a massive coal-gasification plant in Kemper County, which runs along the Alabama state line north of Meridian. As discussed before, it has been a fight which drew the environmentalists into alliance with conservative libertarians who view the plant as a boondoggle.
The Sierra Club announced last week that it had reached a settlement with Mississippi Power and would be dropping its suit in exchange for a number of concessions on the part of the utility.
If you sensed a sanctified aura emanating from the Omni Hotel last week, it’s because a very sacred subject was being discussed inside.
Coal.
“I hope all the citizens of Alabama will be in prayer that the right thing will be done,” Alabama Public Service Commission chair Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh said at a press conference in Birmingham, before heading to Atlanta for an EPA field hearing Tuesday.
“Who has the right to take what God’s given a state?” asked Alabama Public Service Commissioner-elect Chip Beeker.
We’re in the year of the ground game. Campaigns still spend tons of money flailing at each other on television, but it was the ground game that ambushed Eric Cantor in Virginia, and saved the day for Thad Cochran in Mississippi.
And in Georgia, it was the strength of David Perdue’s ground game which gave him the winning edge in the U.S. Senate primary runoff.
With the ground game’s importance in mind, perhaps the biggest story that didn’t get a lot of attention last week was the consolidation of a Democratic ticket which is a first in the nation’s history.
The names of Connie Stokes, Valarie Wilson, Doreen Carter, Liz Johnson and Robbin Shipp haven’t generated as many headlines, combined, as the sixth Democratic woman on the ticket, Michelle Nunn. But these five African-American women candidates could potentially have a big impact on Nunn’s race, as well as Jason Carter’s bid for governor.
Polls are like drops in a bucket. A single poll, like the one last week which showed challenger Jason Carter leading Gov. Nathan Deal by eight percentage points, is only a solitary ker-plunk. It’s what accumulates in the bucket that can reveal where a race is headed.
The Real Clear Politics chart on this race shows 13 publicly released polls so far this year, and Deal has led in 10 of them. Interestingly, the three polls in which Carter has led — an InsiderAdvantage poll in early March, a Rasmussen poll in late May, and the Landmark Communications poll last week — all were conducted by polling firms which are Republican in their leanings.
For a few minutes during Sunday night’s U.S. Senate primary runoff debate between David Perdue and U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, the air got about as thick as it has in this entire, long and nasty contest. This was their only televised face-to-face encounter, but it’s possible that in these last humid July days before the vote, things could get hotter still.
“I would have expected a little bit more of you,” Kingston said after Perdue had declared that stories about a problem donor showed the congressman was “open for business.”
But Kingston then proceeded to give as good as he got, accusing his opponent of a “sweetheart deal” when Perdue’s cousin, the governor, named him to the Georgia Ports Authority board while a trucking company he co-owned did business at the facility.
A few minutes before the June jobs report was released last Thursday morning, the wise guys on “Squawk Box” went around the table predicting what job growth would be. Even the optimist on this panel was far short of the 288,000 new jobs reported by the Labor Department. Later that day, as the nation prepared for Independence Day, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average passed 17,000 for the first time in history.
Also last week, a Quinnipiac University poll showed a plurality of Americans thought Barack Obama was the worst president since World War II.
What is wrong with this picture?
Maria Saporta’s column gives a good sense of what’s at stake for transportation policy in Tuesday night’s Clayton County Commission vote on putting a full-penny MARTA sales tax on the the ballot in November.
The commission’s vote could mean a lot to statewide Democratic candidates on the ballot this fall, as well.
In 2010, when Gov. Nathan Deal was elected, voter turnout in Clayton County totaled 61,339. In the presidential election year of 2012, turnout in the county was 92,748. So that’s about 31,000 votes that spell the difference between voter enthusiasm in Clayton and the lack of it. In a close statewide race that could also spell the difference between victory and defeat.
We have come to a place in American politics where, when a six-term U.S. senator from Mississippi wins his primary, it can be called “stunning,” with at least a small amount of justification.
Fifty years after Fannie Lou Hamer and other members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party fought to be counted at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, black votes spoke loudly Tuesday in Mississippi, although not as Ms. Hamer might have imagined they would speak.
Political lightning can be tricky to judge. You can’t always tell from the following thunder how close it has struck.
Last Tuesday evening there was a bright flash over Virginia, and the thunder that followed it reverberated across the country. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s defeat at the hands of an unheralded college economics professor, David Brat, was quickly pronounced the greatest political upset, ever. By many standards — the difference in money spent, polls, the fact that a majority leader had never been defeated in a primary — there was justification for that claim.
New challenges produce new terminology, and there was plenty of it being thrown around Monday at the first meeting of the Rural Hospital Stabilization Committee, the latest blue-ribbon panel tasked with solving a problem no one else has been able to tackle.
The committee members were briefed on the details of the newly-created Rural Freestanding Emergency Departments — RFEDs. The result of a relaxation of state licensing rules, these are emergency facilities designed for rural counties where full-service hospitals have closed. They’re intended to work with larger facilities within a 35-mile radius, treating patients on site for no more than 24 hours.
