Category: Tom Baxter

They still remember that brief and glorious moment when everything clicked. The campaign they worked on didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to, but a decade later, they can say they were there at the dawn of a new political era.

Last Friday night, a group of veterans of the 2004 Georgia for Dean campaign gathered at Manuel’s to remember those days and — apropos of the kind of campaign they ran — connect with others during the evening via Skype.

If you look it up, you’ll see that John Kerry and John Edwards split nearly all the vote in the Georgia Democratic presidential primary that year, and Howard Dean, the anti-establishment former Connecticut governor who later became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was a washout. But the numbers don’t tell all the story.

In military terms, the engagements which took place here 149 years ago Monday marked one more indecisive but ultimately fateful turn in the bloody Civil War campaign to capture this city. Atlanta didn’t fall to Union troops until Sept. 2, 1864, although there was no more major fighting. The conflict on July 22, which took the lives of more than 9,000 men, including a general each side, was recorded in history as the Battle of Atlanta.

Politically, few battles have had as immediate, or as lasting an impact as this battle and the larger campaign of which it was the centerpiece.

Fifty years ago this month, Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. became the only elected Southern official to testify for what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision to “go beyond the niceties of racial harmony” and take a firm stand on the issue of segregation had been a “torturous” one, Allen’s son, Inman Allen, told the Atlanta Rotary Club Monday.

It was “a uniquely courageous and dramatic testimony that many have suggested was a pivotal moment in this country’s journey toward a fully integrated society,” Allen said, speaking to a group which his father once headed and of which his grandfather was a founder.

Few big developments have been telegraphed as thoroughly as last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling voiding Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, so it was no surprise the response from all concerned was nimble.

It took almost no time at all after the court’s ruling was published for several of the Southern states which had been held in check by the law to bound forward with plans to implement voter ID laws and maps that had been deemed discriminatory by the courts.  And it took only slightly longer than that for liberal groups to begin mass fundraising appeals based on the impending outrage.

If the three Southern women were fictional characters, they might be the co-habitants of one hell of a summer-read novel. But all of them are real, and in a week when there was plenty of other stuff to make news of, they stepped unexpectedly into the spotlight.

We all know the character of the brassy Southern Magnolia who works her way to the top with energy and pluck, not always helped by her no-count relatives. Very often this character is tightly wound, capable of coming unstrung with frightening speed. So it has been with Paula Deen.

In the week when the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a significant chunk of the Voting Rights Act, racial commentary in our country centered mainly around Deen’s use of the N-word. There’s no little irony in that she got to this very public place by way of a law suit which started out as a sexual harassment case directed primarily at her brother, Bubba Hiers, brought by a white woman employee.

With protesters in the streets across the globe from Istanbul to Sao Paulo, what has been going on every Monday in Raleigh for the past couple of months hasn’t received nearly as much attention, outside North Carolina, as the 2011 demonstrations at Wisconsin’s capitol in Madison. But North Carolina’s Moral Mondays, as they’re called, bear watching.

Politics in North Carolina never was as smooth-edged as it might have appeared during the Mayberry era, and in recent years it has cycled into a particularly bitter period. After voting for Barack Obama and elected a Democratic woman, Bev Perdue, governor in 2008, the state swung dramatically to the right in 2010, putting Republicans in control of the legislature and the redistricting process. The GOP tightened its lock in 2012, electing Pat McCrory, the former mayor of Charlotte, governor and strengthening its hold on the legislature.

Just as meaningful as the change from Democrats to Republicans has been the shift within the Republican Party to a more confrontational brand of conservatism.

Georgia’s a big state with a lot of counties, so don’t feel bad if you can’t locate Chattahoochee and Long counties on a map. On the other hand it might be time to brush up on your geography: Chattahoochee and Long are the third and fifth-fastest growing  counties, respectively, in the United States, according to the latest report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Over the years we’ve grown accustomed to seeing one Metro Atlanta county or another near the top of the Census Bureau’s list of the 100 fastest-growing counties, as the boom spread outwards. But this year the fastest growing metro county was Forsyth, No. 29 in the country with a growth rate of 7.1 percent between 2010 and 2012. Fulton (No. 43 with 6.2 percent growth) and Gwinnett (No. 83 with 4.3 percent growth), were the only other metro counties on the top 100 list.

Chattahoochee  (15.7 percent growth rate) and Long (11.1 percent) counties are on opposite sides of the state from each other, and neither is close to Atlanta.

Later this month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to add to the evolving case law dealing with how states share their increasingly precious water resources.

This time it’s not our water war that the court is concerned with. But how it rules in a long-running dispute between Texas and Oklahoma could affect how ours turns out.

There have been 38 interstate water compacts,  two of which were involved in the water war involving Georgia, Florida and Alabama over how much water Metro Atlanta can draw from Lake Lanier. Both those compacts were allowed to expire, although the issues they sought to address continue. Another is the Red River Compact, agreed to by the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana in 1980 for the “equitable apportionment among them of the waters of the Red River and its tributaries.”

My colleague, Maria Saporta, recently visited Houston with a group of civic leaders and reported on that sprawling megalopolis beside which we often measure ourselves. Today we'll take a less formal look at another Texas city to which we need to pay attention.

If Houston is your uncle who got rich developing shopping centers back in the '80s, Austin is your nephew who just made a fortune on an Internet startup.

Until recently, the Texas capital's explosive growth has been overshadowed by its neighbors, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. But in this year's Forbes listing of the fastest growing cities in the country, it elbowed past its Texas rivals to take the No. 1 spot. And it's quality growth: Austin was the only U.S. city to make a 2010 ranking of the world's most dynamic cities, based on growth in employment and income.

Austin may still cultivate a small-town image, but the metro area passed a fateful milestone over the weekend, when its telephone service was shifted to a 10-digit dialing system.

One of the significant cultural dividing lines these days is that between those who think of Mark Zuckerberg as a bright young guy and those who look upon him as a rich old dude.

This was born out recently by a Pew Research Center study which showed that teenagers are increasingly turning from Facebook toward Twitter and other sites with “fewer adults, fewer parents and just simply less complexity,” according to Amanda Lenhart, one of the authors of the study.

“Facebook just really seems to have more drama,” said Jaime Esquivel, a Virginia teen quoted in an AP story about the survey.

I may not think of “drama” in quite the same way as this high school junior, but I can certainly relate. As a journalist, a lot of people friend me on Facebook just to read me, and I de-friend only in the most extreme circumstances, so I see a wide slice of Facebook life. Believe me, it gets pretty wild out there at times.

Speaking to the Georgia Republicans at their state convention Saturday about the  need to bring minorities into the party, Gov. Nathan Deal cited what he called a “shocking” statistic: 56 percent of students in the state's public schools aren't white.

Actually, you would have to live in a very lily-white enclave to be very shocked.

Considering the dramatic demographic shifts which have taken place in recent years and the fact that whites comprise by far the highest percentage of students attending private schools in the state, it's no surprise non-white students make up the majority in public schools.

But there's another statistic that many in the state might really be shocked by. In the recent U.S. News and World Report of the nation's public high schools, the top three schools in the state, and seven of the top 10, have student bodies in which whites aren't in the majority.

There has recently been a man-bites-dog story about a newspaper, although it has received scant attention in the newspapers, which cover nothing so poorly as they cover themselves.

Last year the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced that it was cutting back to three print editions a week and would focus henceforth on “new and innovative ways” to cover the news online. That was a dog-bites-man story. The idea of cutting back circulation days has been kicked around in newspaper circles for several years, and Detroit and a few smaller papers have already done it. It’s in line with a larger narrative about the demise of newspapers at the hands of the internet.

Last month, however, the Times-Pic announced a change in strategy. This summer it will begin publication of a tabloid edition, to be called TPStreet, which it will sell for 75 cents a copy on the three weekdays — Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays — when it isn’t printing the old paper.

Don’t get me wrong: I like Reese Witherspoon. A few years ago I was asked to suggest names for a list of outstanding young Southerners, and I included the Nashville native, as much for her business smarts  as a movie producer as for her acting ability.

But allow me to vent. After all, I’m a citizen of the City of Atlanta.

As practically everyone must know by now, Witherspoon was a passenger in a car driven by her husband, Jim Toth, when they were pulled over last April 19 by one of Atlanta’s Finest. As she has since acknowledged, the couple had consumed “one too many glasses of wine” at an Atlanta restaurant.

The officer was in the process of arresting Toth after the breathalyzer and coordination-test routine when Witherspoon hung her head out the window of the car and told him she didn’t believe he was a real police officer.

By the time Howard had gone into a nursing home and his son and daughter-in-law had returned from the West Coast to take care of his affairs, the mail bulged from the mailbox every day, often overflowing in stacks 10 inches thick.

For a man of his limited means, Howard always gave generously to political and religious causes, but in the last year or so before he became unable to care for himself, the amounts of the checks he wrote began to increase. Correspondingly, so did the volume of mail, until his home became the postal equivalent of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The family discovered that in that last year he wrote some 5,000 checks, for a total of about $70,000. His son estimates the total for all his sunset years to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For modern-day philosophers contemplating the nature of news, last week provided a gruesome laboratory. News, we must posit first, is not events. It is the way that we react to events.

Last week an explosion strong enough to generate a mushroom cloud ripped apart a Texas town, killing at least 14 and injuring 200 more. Authorities intercepted letters containing a deadly poison, intended for the president of the United States and a U.S. senator from Mississippi. A justice of the peace and his wife were arrested in Texas and charged with three murders which had widely been attributed to a violent prison gang.

Of course, it was none of these stories which were the biggest news of the week, but the bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon which killed three people and injured more than 130, and the dramatic manhunt which followed.

Taxes should be simple and fair. You hear that mantra a lot these days, and it has a special power around this time of year. The more I meditate on it, the more my mind is drawn toward the raging irony that the simplest and fairest tax my household pays, the state income tax, is the very one which some seem hell-bent on getting rid of.

Start with simple. Like thousands of Georgians, I use a computer tax preparation program to file our federal and state taxes every year. The federal taxes are a pain, especially since I pay self-employment tax and have to send Uncle Sam a check for estimated taxes four times a year.

But our state income taxes are literally as simple as pushing a button. It takes less than a minute for the program to compute my state tax after the drudgery of calculating the federal income tax is finished. And it’s a pleasant interlude, because this year, like last year and several years before that, we’ve had to write the federal government a check for more money while we’ve received a refund from the state.

It’s a fact not much remarked on that the closest thing to a frontrunner we have so far in the squishy-soft field for next year’s U.S. Senate race in Georgia is a Democrat.

There’s good reason no one pays much attention to a couple of polls from February showing former Sen. Max Cleland leading every Republican contender. He’s shown no interest in the race, and even the names being seriously discussed — U.S. Rep. John Barrow and Michelle Nunn — haven’t made any commitments.

And yet there are several reasons why next year’s Senate race may be more important in the long run for the Democrats than the Republicans, win or lose.

Here’s one way to estimate the chances of getting Tennessee to change its mind and give up a thin strip of its existing territory so Georgia can gain access to the water in the Tennessee River.

Right now, the Tennessee legislature is considering a bill that would end party primaries for U.S. Senate nominees, and give the Republican and Democratic legislative delegations the power to choose their respective nominees.

The idea of giving up some of their existing territory for our convenience has so far met with overwhelming resistance in Tennessee. But you figure, if they’re fools enough to go for the idea of giving up the voters’ right to select their U.S. Senate nominees, we just might be able to talk them out of that land without a fight.

Jimmy Lewis is a man known for dire predictions.

The CEO of HomeTown Health, which represents more than 50 rural Georgia hospitals, he peppers his regular email messages to his clients with urgent warnings to hoard every penny of cash they can get their hands on, and as a lobbyist his testimony has caused the chair of one committee to complain that he always says the sky is falling.

Ominously, his predictions are starting to come true. Lewis forecast at the beginning of the year that five to six rural hospitals might be forced to close in 2013, and already there have been two. Calhoun Memorial Hospital in Arlington closed in February, and Stewart-Webster Hospital in Richland shut its doors last week.

Nearly every discussion about Georgia’s economic future begins at the top, with high-tech companies like Digirad, the medical imaging firm which recently announced it’s relocating its headquarters to Atlanta, or prime industrial plums like the KIA plant in West Point.

But a provocative report by a new group, the Essential Economy Council, argues that the upper tiers of the state’s economy rest on a cluster of low-end economic sectors, not connected to each other in earlier studies, which face severe challenges in the years ahead.