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Earlier this week, Political Party passed on Randall Vaughn’s concerns about a nasty ankle-breaking corner at Simpson and Marietta streets, near the Georgia Aquarium. Friday, work crews finally came out to fix the problem. In Vaughn’s words (and photo): "Here’s progress in action."
It was easy to see that the toughest part of Hank Johnson’s job in the election season was behind him last September as the candidate, sporting a cream-colored suit and a lopsided grin, trotted onto the stage at the state Democratic Convention to scattered handclaps, and gave an impromptu speech that was heavy on halting phrases.
Johnson whipped firebrand U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-DeKalb, in a run-off election a month earlier. Now he was facing what amounted to a walk around the last lap of the track to claim victory in the general election. In seemingly off-the-cuff remarks, Johnson wasted no time excoriating — in his own, inimitably quiet way, of course — the Bush administration for leading America, at $3 billion a week, into what Johnson called "an unwinnable war" in Iraq.
He assailed the president over Bush’s constant refrain of making his tax cuts permanent. Finding some rhythm after a slow, stuttering start, Johnson called on the administration to instead make Pell Grants permanent, to make access to college tuition permanent, fair wages permanent, universal health care permanent.
It had been a speech waiting to catch fire, and the crowd almost responded to him as the list of woe continued, but McKinney holdouts were in the room, deflating with their silence the gushing reaction the strong words, however calmly delivered, might have generated.
Gov. Sonny Perdue infuriated members of his own party when he first assumed office and tried to raise taxes on spirits and cigarettes. Now he’s part of a Republican tax-cut charge with a proposal that’s probably the least radical of the bunch.
And the most politically viable.
The governor, a political pragmatist by nature, wants the state to freeze the state income tax on seniors. Meanwhile, a brigade of fellow Republicans in the Gold Dome are falling all over each other in an effort to completely overhaul Georgia’s tax structure and give tax cuts — which mostly benefit the rich — to all comers.
Sen. Mitch Seabaugh, R-Sharpsburg, and majority whip, wants to eliminate the personal and corporate income tax and replace it with a higher consumer tax. "People should choose when they pay taxes by the spending decisions they make," he says.
The personal income tax is the largest source of revenue toward Georgia’s budget, $30 billion when you include federal aid. To make up for the loss, the state would have to impose a considerably high sales tax, or significantly cut state programs.
There are also House Speaker Glenn Richardson’s proposals, which are to get rid of the income tax and property tax and replace them with an increased sales tax and a flat tax. The latter taxes all household incomes at the same rate, which means a wealthy taxpayer barely feels the impact, while someone on the lower end of the income spectrum can get hit very hard.
For his part, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle favors doing away with the corporate income tax, by taking "incremental bites at the apple" over a period of time.
Yet another reason to love National Public Radio is its thorough presentation of both sides of the controversy surrounding former President Jimmy Carter’s recent book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter was interviewed on Thursday’s "Morning Edition," while former Carter Center colleague Ken Stein appeared on Friday’s episode.
Check out the link.
Business and fishing go together almost as well as business and golf.
Maybe even better.
That was the message coming out of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and the Environment this week, as lawmakers sized up Gov. Sonny Perdue’s Go Fish Georgia proposal.
John Biagi, the state’s assistant chief in fisheries management, said the purpose of the governor’s $19 million initiative is to promote and improve recreational fishing in Georgia, and that includes improving access to lakes and rivers. Already the state generates $1 billion from freshwater fishing and $550 million from saltwater fishing. But people aren’t coming from out-of-state to fish in Georgia. They’re tearing through here on their way down to Florida.
"Georgia ranks 21st in the country in attracting non-resident anglers," Biagi said.
Surely Georgia can do better.
But fishin’?
"It is big business," Dan Forster, director of the wildlife resources division for the Department of Natural Resources, told the Senate committee. A premium fishing tournament can create a $20 million impact. Your restaurants. Your hotels. A large single-day event can net $1 million. Wal-Mart sponsors a fishing tournament in other states, Forster noted. Georgia could partner with Wal-Mart to do the same here.
The senators liked what they heard.
Didn’t get a chance to come out to our last Political Party? Don’t sweat it, we’ve got you covered.
Here’s the Podcast for you to download and listen [mp3].
More photographs after the jump.
In 1975, Dad took the sis’ and me down to Underground for an evening
of debauchery. It was like a family vacation in a bawdy 1890s railroad
town. Street musicians. Oil lamps. Public drunkenness. All manner of
people sharing cobblestone streets to create the cacophony that makes a
place exciting to a 15-year-old.
The image that sticks is standing outside former Gov. Lester
Maddox’s gift shop. Maddox was a genial segregationist who’d used
pick-ax handles, and a gun, to chase away three African-Americans who’d
tried to desegregate his Northside Drive restaurant.
Now, the recently retired governor was a tourist attraction. I
peered through the window while he signed souvenir pick handles for
tourists. A couple of black kids, just a bit older than me, were
laughing and waving to try to get his attention, and I joined in. The
goober governor waved back, with a plastic smile, as he shifted stiffly
from foot to foot. "Oh, Lester, you’re my hero," one of the kids said,
laughing.
Continue reading "The real Underground" at atlanta.creativeloafing.com È
Some say the wheels have been knocked off the Beltline. Others say
no one has a solid, let’s-get-it-done plan to mount a transportation
engine in the visionary concept of ringing intown Atlanta with a
necklace of transit, parks and development.
What’s clear is that Atlantans hoping to hop a Beltline trolley or
train — well, they’re going to be a whole lot older before they get
that chance.
Terry Montague, the new president of Beltline Inc., insists "transit
is at the heart" of the project and that "preparation for transit is
very much underway." But she concedes "the ‘when’ question is hard to
answer."
Continue reading “Does the train have wheels?” at atlanta.creativeloafing.com È
The Senate Natural Resources Committee convened at the Statehouse Wednesday to discuss Gov. Sonny Perdue’s "Go Fish Georgia" plan. Everyone on the committee seemed pretty gung-ho about Sonny’s vision, but it’s frankly hard to see it as a positive development. Emphasis on "development" intended.
Atlanta: We want to clean up our rivers, preserve them for future generations.
Georgia: But that doesn’t make anybody any money. It’s a loser. You’ve got to tie that idea to a winner, namely a big moneymaker, and when you look at success stories like Buckingham Palace and Mount Rushmore and Vegas you really can’t go wrong with tourism.
Atlanta: Yes, but…
Georgia: Fishing! Fishing is a great tourist attraction. Make Georgia the fishing capital of the world!
Atlanta: But we want to clean up our rivers. Georgia has a big concentration of blackwater rivers along its coast. Blackwater rivers have higher organic content. That means when mercury — from coal-fired power plants, for example — goes into the water, the bottom of the food chain absorbs it quicker and introduces it into the food chain. We need stricter environmental laws to ensure that…
Georgia: Fine, fine. You can do that too. But first you’re going to need access points to the rivers and that means more roads. The more people we can pack in, the bigger the roads. Once you get down to the docks, and incidentally we need more of those too — no big deal at $100,000 a pop, but I know a guy who can do it — you’re going to need a place to stay, preferably luxurious.
Atlanta: Yeah, but what about the rivers?
Georgia: The rivers, sure. You’ll need your hotels down there by the rivers, and your high-class restaurants and your convention centers so you get not just commerce but commerce on a grand scale. Your golf courses, you bet. You make it so nice people start thinking they don’t want to go there part-time anymore, they want to live there year-round, so you start putting in your condominiums and your townhouses and your bigger boat docks, sure, because these people love to fish. That’s the reason they came in the first place.
Although he rose through the ranks of the Atlanta Police Department and retired as a major, the Peace Officers’ Annuity and Benefit Fund didn’t recognize Howard Baugh’s membership and denied him and other black officers their retirement benefits on the basis of their race.
He’s still waiting for the pension he deserves.
When he joined the homicide division in the early 1950s, Baugh had already been around death plenty, having carried the bodies of his fellow GIs off of Mount Suribachi during the battle of Iwo Jima. The first African-American on the department to be promoted to detective sergeant, he worked a security detail for Martin Luther King Jr. when the Civil Rights leader spoke at Wheat Street Baptist Church in 1960. He ended up working a lot of security around King.
"I told myself nothing would ever happen to him in this town," says the retired officer, now 82.
Four years older than "ML," Baugh grew up in Sweet Auburn, and was a neighbor and friend of the King family. His mother and King’s mother used to talk over the hedge bushes every day.
"I’d never known ML to be the kind of guy the rest of us were in the neighborhood," Baugh says. "Daddy King kept his mind occupied with the church."
When the young Baugh looked through the window of the King house once and heard King’s father telling him, "I’m gonna beat your ass until I make something out of you," Baugh said he was laughing so hard he caught the elder King’s attention. "’Send Howard over here,’" the pastor told a third party. ‘"I’ve got something for him, too.’"
Looking out for King later in life was professional for him and it was personal.
Looking out for Baugh and a dwindling population of other retired African-American peace officers is also personal for Civil Rights activist state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, and state Rep. Willie Talton, R-Warner Robins, a retired deputy sheriff. The lawmakers have co-sponsored a resolution that would require the state to pay retirement benefits to officers denied by Georgia’s Jim Crow era, when segregation was the law of the land — in this case specifically between the years of 1931 and 1976.
Backers of the Beltline, a proposed 22-mile loop of transit and trails that would circle intown Atlanta, scored big yesterday when a Fulton County Superior Court judge ruled that the funding mechanism for the project is, in fact, legal.
Barring an appeal from the individuals who brought the challenge, the Beltline is now poised to rake in some serious cash.
Last year, Atlanta City Council, the Fulton County Commission, and the Atlanta school board approved the funding source Ñ a tax-allocation district, or TAD Ñ for the estimated $2.4 billion project. The TAD permits the city to borrow from future tax revenue that will be generated by rising property values. It is expected to raise $1.7 billion toward the cost of the project, with the rest coming from private donations and, the city hopes, federal funding.
Challengers of TAD claim that it has the potential to drain future funds that would pay for basic services, such as schools. Proponents say that those future funds actually would be less bountiful without a project like the Beltline driving up property values.
Washington lawmakers snoozed through the coming train wreck. Now the state is scrambling to minimize the damage of a potential shortfall of federal money for Georgia’s PeachCare program.
State Rep. Kathy Ashe, D-Atlanta, calls it the biggest, most discussed single issue of the session: how to provide health insurance for the 270,000 children of low- and moderate-income Georgians who stand to lose their access to PeachCare. According to the state Department of Community Health, Georgia will run out of federal dollars for PeachCare by the end of February or March of this year. Says Alan Essig, executive director of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, "While DCH would still have approximately $30 million in cash to pay previously incurred bills (through May) the agency reports that funds would not be sufficient to pay for continued coverage of children beyond March 2007." The state needs between $60 million and $80 million to keep the children enrolled in PeachCare, Essig says.
We’re talking about kids here.
"We have 300,000 children in Georgia who are uninsured," Ashe says. "We need to make sure the 270,000 who are insured through PeachCare continue to have access to health insurance."
Since only federal funds can be used toward the program, Georgia lawmakers can’t step in and fund PeachCare without changing state law. On Tuesday morning, Ashe and other members of the House Children and Youth Committee heard testimony at the state Capitol from Voices for Georgia’s Children, an advocacy group. Policy Director Lauren Waits urged state representatives to make the necessary changes to the law and devise a plan B in the event the feds can’t dredge up the money in time.
"There are state-based solutions," Waits said. "There’s no reason why children should lose their health insurance."
For years the GOP’s stern answer to a guy with a health ailment standing on a street corner was, "Get a job."
Now Sen. Judson Hill, R-Marietta, envisions a day when insurance and health care are not tied to a person’s employment. Does this portend a kinder, gentler GOP?
Hardly.
At the center of attention since he dropped a 79-page health-care bill last week, Hill came out of a transportation committee hearing Tuesday alluding to the president’s State of the Union speech just hours away.
"A lot of what’s in the bill you’ll hear the president talk about tonight," he said.
As if that’s supposed to reassure me.
I was barreling headlong through a crowd of lawmakers and lobbyists on my way out the door, but since I’ve already tried to make sense of Bush speak for the past six years with no success, I opted instead to pump Hill for some answers, and he happily obliged.
At least Hill understands the issues and welcomes debate. But he’s definitely on the same Gingrich-Center-for-Health-Transformation frequency as Bush.
Of course, it’s no accident that Gingrich and Hill go way back, and that Newt sees Georgia as the 2001: A Space Odyssey baby for his health-insurance reform plans.
Basically, Hill’s bill boils down to more tax incentives for businesses that enable their employees to invest in high-deductible health savings accounts. The bill would also give state tax breaks to individuals who open such accounts.
A few days ago I chided the AJC for declaring "Global warming, it’s not" when they tried to explain why we were having two weeks of spring weather in the middle of January.
Now comes word that a new report compiled by 600 scientists is going to tell you what Republicans don’t want you to hear: Global warming is upon us, and it’s very real.
Here’s the money quote:
WASHINGTON — Human-caused global warming is here — visible in the air, water and melting ice — and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.
"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence … is compelling."
A few weeks ago, I was browsing the web and came across a series of photos that compared glaciers and mountaintops near the Artic Circle today with photos taken 30 years ago. The difference was startling. Where there once was ice and snow, there is now nothing.
The news report notes that last year was the hottest year on record for the United States, and that the two warmest years on record for the world were 2005 and 1998.
The U.S. has essentially taken the ostrich approach to global warming. Can that attitude possibly be taken seriously any longer?
They outsourced the war. They tried to wreck social security.
They’ve been sued by states that bound together in response to the EPA’s failure to enforce environmental laws.
They continue to talk about "making the tax cuts permanent" even as America runs up a colossal budget deficit.
Now the Republicans want to sell you a health insurance plan.
From President George W. Bush in his radio address on Saturday to lobbyists such as Newt Gingrich to Sen. Judson Hill, R-Marietta, and other GOP state legislators, the right wing would like to break up group health insurance as we know it and supplant it with individual, "consumer-driven" health coverage.
Health insurance is already laid up in a body cast in this country.
These guys want to make it worse.
