Category: Tom Baxter

John Barge had a doctor’s appointment in Rome on the morning of Snow Jam 14, so he was late getting off on his morning commute to Atlanta. His car was already slipping on the ice by the time he got to Cartersville, so he decided to call the state superintendent’s office in Atlanta and tell them to close up shop.

The state superintendent doesn’t make the call on whether to close schools, but Barge at least had his office staff on the way home before the worst of the traffic havoc began.

So give Barge credit for good timing. He’ll need an awful lot of it if he has any hope of overtaking Gov. Nathan Deal in the short sprint to the May 20 Republican gubernatorial primary.

What happened last week was a watershed event in the transportation history of the Atlanta metro region, and very likely in the careers of a couple of politicians as well. But it’s important to remember how small a thing it was that touched it all off — small enough to make us the laughingstock of the country, sure, but small enough also to make us worry about how we’d deal with something worse.

The snow and ice that touched off the debacle was comparatively mild compared to the 2011 ice storm. It was more comparable to the 1982 Snow Jam, and that hysterical incident commenced much later in the working day with, if memory serves, much worse conditions.

The state of the state, Gov. Nathan Deal said last week, is “excellent.” Depends how you size it up.

Last week, as a teaser to tomorrow night’s State of the Union message, Politico  dusted off an idea originated by H.L. Mencken and Charles Angoff back in 1931, and produced a ranking of the states based on 14 different rankings of things like life expectancy, graduation rates, crime rates and so forth.

The bad news: Georgia ranked 42nd among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The good news: in 1931, we were 46th.

Perhaps we could quibble. We’re only 36th, after all, in per capita wealth, and we have the 30th best crime rate. But a glance up and down the 14 indicators of a state’s real health makes it seem pointless. It might be a little farther up or down the list, but Georgia falls well within the bottom half of all of them.

There was a time when the governor’s annual State of the State speech drew such a crowd to the Capitol, you could hardly get off the elevator on the third floor. This year the House gallery was filled with invited guests, but the group which gathered under the hall monitors to listen to what Gov. Nathan Deal had to say was significantly smaller than the one which collected to watch Sen. Don Balfour’s post-trial remarks the week before.

The sparse crowd had less to do with the importance of the speech than the digitalization of the lobbying trade. There were perhaps more eyes than ever trained on Deal last week, but many of them were watching him on streaming video.

In his first three State of the State speeches, Deal declared that the state of the state was “strong.” This being an election year, our status was upgraded this time to “excellent.”

The dramatic highlight of the Georgia General Assembly’s first day in session Monday was Sen. Don Balfour’s brief speech to the Senate on the occasion of having been cleared of all charges related to the misuse of his legislative expense account in a jury trial last month.

It was the most bipartisan moment under the Golden Dome in years. The former Rules Committee chair wasted no opportunity to insert the phrase “Republican and Democrat” into the list of those he thanked for their support. He noted that a former Republican governor, Sonny Perdue, and a former Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, had testified for him.

In a pointed reference, he thanked his lawyers Ken Hodges and William Hill, even though “at least one person didn’t appreciate my pick of lawyers.” That was an apparent reference to Attorney General Sam Olens, who defeated the Democrat Hodges to win his position.

Every year, harried editors, hungry from the holiday drought, get a gift from the U.S. Census Bureau: the annual report on how and where the nation’s population is growing.The report’s always good for local breakouts on how your state stacks up against the rest. But this year, the big news from the report was how little news it made.

Newspapers in Florida were all teed up to report that state had pulled past New York to become the nation’s third-largest state. Eventually it will, but not this year. It was the same non-story in North Carolina, which was poised to move ahead of Michigan into the ninth-largest position. The Tar Heel State pulled closer, but Michigan grew enough to stay ahead.

For Georgia, there’s even less of a headline.

The upcoming election year is shaping up to begin in a very interesting, not to say painful, way. The question is how interesting what’s going to happen in January will seem in November.

The federal grand jury investigating the commission formerly known as the State Ethics Commission is scheduled to meet Jan. 14 to receive documents related to its investigation of complaints against Gov. Nathan Deal going back to his 2010 race for governor. Deal and his attorney, Randy Evans, have so far taken a “who, me?” position to the news that three current or former ethics commission employees have been subpoenaed by the federal panel, speculating that the grand jury probe must be about the mishandling of documents at the commission, even though the documents are about Deal’s 2010 campaign.

A federal grand jury investigation is not something to pass too lightly over, particularly in an election year when you have primary and general election opponents waiting.

Want to know the biggest issue currently looming over state and local government? It’s a secret. Or to be more precise, it’s secrecy itself.

Secrecy has assumed a higher profile recently because of the important role it played in the deal to move the Braves to Cobb County. But secrecy is also at the root of the biggest story one county over, in Paulding. In a lot of ways, the plan approved by the airport authority a year ago last week to bring commercial airline service to the Paulding Airport is the first cousin to the Braves stadium deal. Except that in Paulding there’s no ball team in the mix and the reaction now that the deal has been disclosed has been considerably less celebratory.

The same set of attitudes that caused the Paulding airport authority to hold an executive session the day before Thanksgiving, then approve a lease agreement that in fact amounted to a major expansion in a brief public meeting, reach up into state government as well, beginning with the vast network of development authorities created by the state, and obliged by state law only to disclose their private dealings essentially to themselves.

Imagine how it would be if we chose the best college football team the same way business rankings size up the states.

Suddenly the Crimson Tide would have a lot of company. One football ranking might give the greatest weight to the team which has scored the most points. Baylor might be No. 1 in that one, despite its loss to Oklahoma State over the weekend. Another might pay more attention to ranking the worst teams than the best ones, with Florida an upset possibility this year.

This alternate reality is worth keeping in mind when sizing up Nathan Deal’s campaign ad  touting the state’s No. 1 rating for its business climate.

“Now, for the first time in history, Georgia is the No. 1 place to do business,” the ad says.
Not to take anything away from the historical significance, but the ranking,  in Site Selection magazine, is designed to reflect the specialized point of view of its readers, those on one side or another of the corporate-state site selection game.

A few weeks ago I offered an idea for what to do with Tom Watson’s statue: move it down to Marietta Street where it could stand in eternal debate with Watson’s old nemesis, Henry Grady. Circumstances having changed, here’s an improvement on that idea.

Let’s move Hank Aaron’s statue from the Ted to Marietta Street as well, and arrange the three of them in a permanent tableau to represent a huge swath of Atlanta’s history. Grady could be following the arc of the home run ball Aaron just hit, while Watson could be gesturing northwesterly toward the new home of the Atlanta Braves, which some city wags have already unkindly dubbed Mary Phagan Stadium.

All three statues have been jilted, in their separate ways. Watson’s been banished from the Capitol steps by the governor, Grady was left in 2010 by the AJC, which made the move from Marietta Street to Dunwoody (with considerably less analysis than has been afforded the Braves’ move in the past week), and now the Braves are leaving the scene of Aaron’s greatest triumph.

When Jason Carter’s grandfather announced he was running for president, the news was such a surprise that it generated that famous “Jimmy Who?” headline. It was a different story last week when the young state senator from DeKalb County announced that he’s running for governor.

Gov. Nathan Deal’s campaign claimed it was only a coincidence, but by the end of the week it had placed its first campaign ad, an upbeat spot touting Georgia’s ranking by Site Selection magazine as the nation’s No. 1 state in which to do business. The speed with which former state senator and DeKalb County commissioner Connie Stokes announced she was changing gears and running for lieutenant governor was a sign Carter’s decision was no surprise on the Democratic side, either.

Often the biggest news stays buried longest. This fall we’ve witnessed another government shutdown, the chaotic roll out of the health care networks and the reemergence of polio, long forgotten, in war-torn Syria. But there’s a good chance that in the future, the announcement of what’s been unearthed in that other Georgia on the other side of the globe will be looked on as this season’s biggest development.

For a long time, the people who study these kinds of things thought of human evolution as a family tree. Over the past few decades, as a wide variety of human-like, or hominin, specimens were discovered, that concept was replaced by the idea of a family bush. Many related species evolved over time, researchers concluded. Each new discovery generated a new species name — homo habilis, homo ergaster, and so forth — making the bush progressively thicker. Only one of these species survived — but which? — and evolved into homo sapiens, which is us.

These assumptions have been challenged in a dramatic way by a study published this month in Science magazine.

“Sometimes history is not pretty.  But at the same time, it is the history.  Good or bad,” Rep. Tommy Benton (R-Jefferson) said last week after Gov. Nathan Deal ordered Tom Watson’s statue removed from the west side of the State Capitol.

Benton is right about history, and it’s very fair-minded for a conservative Republican to protest the removal of the statue of a Georgian who advocated the nationalization of the railroads and embraced the Bolsheviks.

When he was pressed on the matter, Deal said the removal of Watson’s statue from the Capitol grounds was a “safety issue,” which would have brought a hearty laugh from Watson if he were still around. The one thing his contemporaries seem to have agreed on was that Tom Watson was a dangerous man.

Over the past couple of years, three grand-scale computer crashes have made their way into the news: Facebook’s chaotic IPO, the election-day collapse of Orca, the Romney campaign’s “killer app” for turning out Republican voters, and the problem-plagued launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance exchange portal, which prompted the first-ever Rose Garden speech to deal with a computer crash.

The first big lesson that can be derived from these three disasters is that when a lot is on the line, run a beta test. Team Romney failed to do that before the last election and ended up looking like amateurs compared to the smoothly running Democratic technical operation. That makes the launch failure of HealthCare.gov even more embarrassing for a president who was being lauded only days before for his flinty-eyed resolve in the budget crisis.

Want to know how screwed up politics in Georgia has become? A story in a column by my old AJC colleague Jim Galloway kind of says it all.

Gov. Nathan Deal, whose nagging ethics problems have become the stuff of regular headlines, invited Sen. Johnny Isakson, who has tried to be a voice of reason in an increasingly unreasonable Washington, to tailgate with him at the Georgia-Missouri game. There were a lot of protests on Facebook, but they didn’t come from voters criticizing Isakson for associating with an administration which is beginning to attract fruit flies, not to mention the FBI.

Instead, they came from voters livid over Deal inviting Isakson, who had the nerve to say the Republican strategy of holding up the rest over the budget, to stop a program that is separately funded, was a dumb idea. Deal’s invitation was, in fact, an act of some political courage in the current climate, and in the end, Isakson had to cancel because of the ongoing negotiations in Washington.

It was interesting last week, while channel-surfing between clips of one Republican congressman blessing out a park ranger and another admitting he didn’t know what the House GOP could ask for to save face and back away from the budget crisis, to catch some of the recent British Conservative and Labour Party conferences on CSPAN.  A lot about British politics looks very familiar, but there’s much that seems very different, indeed.

A big difference is that these are two parties talking among themselves, and to each other. Their language is often saltier — Prime Minister David Cameron  spoke of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s economic proposals as “Red Ed and his Blue Peter economy” — but at least they’re talking.

Some of the differences between their current politics and ours are only cyclical. Over there the Conservatives are in power, so the party more like the Republicans defends the pace of the economic recovery while the party more like the Democrats attacks it. Some of the similarities are more fundamental.

When I was an intern reporter at the Montgomery Advertiser, there used to be a basement bar downtown that I’d hit with the older guys after our late-night deadlines.

A keyboardist who was a music professor at Alabama State would arrive an hour or so later, and sometimes in the wee hours he’d be joined by other musicians who’d finished their gigs elsewhere. He played a fine, cool version of “Yellow Bird.”

One of my most lasting memories from those days was the night the Alabama legislature finished its session and, to my astonishment, the bar ran completely out of liquor.

Some may been shocked when a reporter covering the U.S. House vote tweeted that members walking off the House floor Saturday night reeked of booze. Having by now covered the finales of many legislative sessions, I wasn’t so surprised. “Yellow Bird” came lilting back into my mind.

Last week’s capitol-steps pep rally for the Green Tea Coalition, a left-right, pro-solar alliance which has its roots in Rep. Jeff Chapman’s unsuccessful attempt to pass a bill limiting profits on cost overruns at the two new nuclear reactors being built by Georgia Power at Plant Vogtle, was one of several related and equally curious developments across the region this year.

Last month, with little advance notice, the Alabama Public Service Commission voted for what was described as the largest reduction in Alabama Power Co.’s allowed rate of return in 25 years.

Since then a lot of questions have been raised, and Alabama Power has basically said that nobody’s rates are going to go down any time soon.  But the mere fact that the Alabama PSC went through the motions of a rate reduction was a reflection of the political heat generated by the lone dissenting vote on the panel, Commissioner Terry Dunn, who had pressed to have testimony taken under oath in the hearings preceding the vote.

For a vivid picture of how Georgia’s fiscal priorities get fixed, let’s compare the state’s refusal to join in the Medicaid expansion with its determination to move ahead with the deepening of the Savannah River channel to the Port of Savannah.

The Medicaid expansion issue, aka the ObamaCare issue, is very controversial, with advocacy groups lining up on both sides to turn up the heat in the lead-up to Oct. 1, when the uninsured can begin signing up for health care exchanges, and Jan. 1, when the expanded Medicaid program begins. As much as they disagree on everything else, neither side would argue that the economic consequences are very high for the state. Tim Sweeney of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, an advocate for accepting the expansion, has estimated the cost for each month of delay to be between $240 million and $300 million.

The harbor dredging project also involves getting money from Washington, but in this case the lack of controversy is almost unsettling. When every important political leader in the state from Kasim Reed to Paul Broun is on board with something, you know it’s either a no-brainer, or nobody’s using any brains.