Fresh Loaf

Let’s see if I get this. Sunni insurgents in Iraq are often the allies of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. So, what does the Bush crime cartel do? Why, it’s giving arms to those very same militias in order for them to fight al-Qaeda (which, it’s worth remembering, wasn’t in Iraq until GWB invited it via his deceit-propelled war of conquest). What will happen to those arms? Yep, they’ll end up killing Shiite Iraqis — and American soldiers.

The Bushies’ justification, by the way, was that it had had some success with the program in Anbar province. They must have neglected to read the reports that the anti-al-Qaeda alliance in Anbar was crumbling.

If that isn’t sufficient to make you slap your forehead this Monday morning — and I swear I’m not inventing this — it appears the military considered developing a “gay bomb.” No, not the sort of bomb the religious fruitcakes would want — one that would kill gays — but one that would turn enemy soldiers into sex-crazed homosexuals.

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It’s not as though the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has been exactly harsh on Mayor Shirley Franklin. Better terms to describe the relationship would be “limp,” “flaccid” and “pandering.”

It’s the business of the elites protecting and rewarding each other.

Latest example: “Brand Atlanta” is the misbegotten marketing program that came up with the awful ATL logo and promotional program. The outfit this week was rewarded for its bad work by City Council, which cheerily chipped in $4 million in taxpayer dollars, the overwhelming bulk of Brand Atlanta’s alleged “public-private” funding. Put another way, every man, woman and child in the city was robbed of $8 to fund Brand Atlanta. Did you get your money’s worth?

But it gets better.

Brand Atlanta is one of the creations of the Franklin regime. And the AJC editor in charge of metro coverage is Bert Roughton. (With what AJC staffers are calling the “post-journalism AJC” restructuring, Roughton has a new title of managing editor – but he most definitely can decide what and how City Hall is covered.)

Who does Brand Atlanta hire as an executive director with a lavishly overpriced $160,000 salary? Why, none other than Roughton’s wife, Melinda Ennis-Roughton. You can find the tidbit about hubby Bert’s relationship in the AJC story on Ennis-Roughton, but it’s extremely well buried on the jump page.

Not that Franklin & Co. weren’t already safe from tough reporting by the AJC – but the mayor has a lot less to fear now. And you’re paying for it.

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NPR reporter Nell Boyce went on a quest to find the biggest producer of greenhouse gases in the United States. It turns out the government has twisted itself in a pretzel of convoluted rules and laws that make it almost impossible to determine which companies are the big bad boys in the pollution business.

That differs from other industrial nations, such as Canada, that have a registry with the idea of creating new limits for industrial polluters.

However, Boyce did find that the most egregious offender in Canada is a coal-fired power plant in Ontario. And that if the No. 1 culprit in the United States is also a coal-burning generating plant, then we have clues about who wins the prize. An old law requires power plants to report their greenhouse emissions.

Boyce found: “[T]he EPA says that for the past three years, the company at the top of that list has been the Robert W. Scherer Power Plant near Macon, Ga.”

Georgia Power, which runs Plant Scherer, is likely so distressed at the NPR report that it’s probably busy buying a few more congressmen and senators, who will then eradicate the requirement that the company report its pollution.

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It was nice to read that Mayor Shirley Franklin is continuing her dogged efforts to be seen almost anywhere other than crisis-beset Atlanta. Most recently – just last weekend – she was having a merry time in the Big Apple. That followed jaunts to the Far East and Vancouver, British Columbia, in recent weeks.

I’m sure it is mere coincidence that the mayor’s latest vacation — er, I mean, working trip — coincided with investigations heating up over her ex-husband’s business dealings as a concessionaire at the airport. Just like those other trips had absolutely nothing to do with unraveling police scandals, federal investigations and the like.

This jet-setting must cost the taxpayers a little change. But as has become standard operating procedure in the Franklin regime, her factotums have refused to provide CL reports on what the mayor is spending. We made such a request on May 10, and to date there has been no response from the mayor’s office. Georgia’s rather lame open records law requires that officials provide some sort of response within three days of receiving a request.

Previously, we had requested all of the mayor’s communications with police Chief Richard Pennington – only to be told that the mayor’s office is not the custodian of the mayor’s correspondence. Who is? The mayor’s spokeswoman, Beverly Isom, told us she’s not required to make such disclosures. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney could learn something from the Franklin folks.

The mayor, although she didn’t bother to comply with the law, nonetheless expressed amazement at a recent press conference that reporters had had the temerity to ask for her letters, e-mails and the like with Pennington. Franklin contended she never put her communication with the chief in writing. Sure.

But back to Franklin’s New York junket. She appeared on a panel discussion, and the mayor was apparently upset at the changing demographics in the city where she sometimes stops to pick up her dry cleaning before heading off on another fun taxpayer-paid-for out-of-town adventure.

The mayor told the panel: “It’s not spoken about much, but there are concerns that we will lose, as African-Americans, our political base.”

You’ll recall that Franklin was one of the Gang of Three – along with Andy Young and Congressman John Lewis – who produced a famously racist radio ad last fall that told African-American residents “your very life may depend on” voting for a black candidate for the Fulton County Commission chairmanship. Such race-baiting desperation only ignited anger in the city. And it provided fodder to some, such as many Buckhead residents, who want to secede from Atlanta.

Clearly, Franklin is worried. But it’s not because she’s fretting over the lives of blacks in the city. Rather, what’s at stake is the continued dominance of the “machine.” It was created by Maynard Jackson, and bequeathed to Young, Bill Campbell and then Franklin. The power base for the machine is poor and working-class blacks – an irony since the political elite have honed to a fine art the process of catering to Atlanta’s corporate power brokers at the expense of the not-wealthy.

As many Atlantans have come to realize, their lives (in the sense of preserving their homes and neighborhoods) are indeed threatened – but by the city administration far more than by the candidacy of a moderate white Republican for the county commission.

Interestingly, Franklin conceded that very point at the Manhattan panel discussion. “African-Americans are choosing to live outside the city for the same reasons everyone is, which is bigger house, so-called better schools,” she said.

It’s not that suburban schools are, as the mayor sneers, “so-called better.” It’s pretty obvious that the intown schools suck. And for the same reason as many other facets of Atlanta’s public sector. The schools and the city administration are inefficient and bloated with employees. The public schools do a lousy job of education, while the city has failed at its No. 1 task, making the streets safe by having a motivated, well-managed police force.

I’d sure like to see Mayor Franklin visit Atlanta once in a while. Maybe she could discuss how the police department became so corrupted and mismanaged.

Maybe, instead of just slamming the door with a “no comment,” she could talk candidly about her drug-dealing ex-son-in-law and her daughter, now under investigation for possible money laundering. No, mayor, you can’t dodge that one forever.

Maybe, when it comes to questions about her ex-husband, David Franklin, the mayor could be a little more original than her usual rejoinder that they’ve been divorced for 20 years. We know that. It doesn’t answer the questions about his role in city affairs or what’s been going on at the airport concessions he controls.

Maybe Franklin could still find her legacy.

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Metro Spirit, the alternative newspaper in Augusta, pokes fun at the city commission there, which plans to spend $3.2 million and hire two full-time employees to protect the burg’s fire hydrants, an apparent top priority of George Bush’s Fatherland Security. The story is worth reading just to absorb the quote from Gen. Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove.

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Among the personnel changes announced May 22 by Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington was a very curious assignment. While the media focused on the wholesale restaffing of the narcotics squad, the officer appointed by Pennington to oversee what’s commonly called “internal affairs” isn’t winning the hearts and minds of many rank-and-file cops.

And it’s not because they fear Maj. C.J. Davis will become a bulldog at enforcing ethics, conduct codes and the like as the new head of the Office of Professional Standards. Rather, cops see Davis as a prime example of the cronyism in the police department — cronyism that deters integrity.

Davis, for example, was the major whose previous Special Enforcement Section portfolio included the narcotics unit. She was up the food chain from the on-the-street narcs, but if the buck stops somewhere, her desk is a prime candidate. However, Pennington’s style is to protect his inner circle and blame cops on the street.

Pennington didn’t mention Davis’ role in overseeing that badly corrupted narcotics unit — perhaps because it would have been one helluva reason NOT to make Davis the head of internal affairs.

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What do you call an American who supports terrorists and sells sophisticated weapons to the mullahs who run the anti-American regime in Iran?

Why, you call that person a headliner at Sean Hannity’s “Freedom Concert” scheduled for July 10 at the Arena at Gwinnett Center. And the headliner’s name is, of course, Oliver North, who befouled the uniform of a Marine Corps officer by committing treasonous acts that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

Violating a law called the Boland Amendment, North was the point man in constructing the scheme that sold arms to Iran and funneled the money to Ronald Reagan’s pet terrorists, the Nicaraguan Contras. Those fellows, as detailed by investigative author Gary Webb, also raised money by selling cocaine on the streets of Los Angeles. North himself was well aware of the Contras’ – and possibly federal agents’ – drug dealing or complicity in drug dealing. North’s handwritten notes about funding the Contras from July 12, 1985, state: “$14M [million] to finance came from drugs.” Two DEA agents later said that in 1985 North had wanted to take $1.5 million in Medellin Cartel bribe money that was carried by a DEA informant and give it to the Contras. North was convicted on three felony counts – but like many lawbreakers avoided justice because of a convoluted technicality, that he had been immunized in testimony to Congress.

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That mean old Yankee mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, has been sending Union forces armed with lawsuits into Georgia (and other states) trying to catch gun dealers who illegally sell firearms. Many of those guns end up criminals’ hands in New York.

So a few of those fine neo-Confederates in the Georgia Legislature are preparing a legal skirmish line to drive back the Northern aggression. State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-DooDahDooDah, and Sen. President Pro Tempore Eric Johnson, R-LookAwayLookAway, say they’re considering legislation for next year that would make illegal the legal forays by Bloomberg’s Yankee lawyers.

Ehrhart, known primarily for his hatred of Atlanta (other than when he is hating New York), is chairman of the House Rules Committee. He told the New York Sun:

We have indoor plumbing. We have books that don’t have bark on the outside of them. We can handle our own law enforcement. … This is anti-Southern bigotry.

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The Daily of Drastically Decreasing Circulation reported today about convicted drug kingpin Tremayne Graham, also under investigation for a double murder. Graham also, not so incidentally, is the former son-in-law of Mayor Shirley Franklin.

Of course, savvy Atlantans already know the score — they’ve read CL Senior Writer Mara Shalhoup’s award-winning stories on Graham and the Black Mafia Family.

Mayor Franklin remains consistent and determined not to comment on Graham.

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The more people know about Big Media becoming Bigger, Bigger and Humongous Media, the more they dislike the idea, the Pew Research Center Found in 2003. Before information was available on media-consolidation schemes pending before the Federal Communications Commission, 34 percent of respondents thought they were bad ideas. After the information was available, 50 percent were opposed. Only 10 percent supported the moves.

So the solution for some media giants is to keep the public in the dark. Atlanta’s Coxopoly does a darn good job of that. Four years ago, there was nary an article on moves by media giants to muscle approval from the FCC to allow daily newspapers to own, without much restriction, broadcast properties in the same city. Here in Atlanta, where Cox already owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, WSB-TV plus a number of radio stations, the goal was for the company to snap up another television outlet, maybe two.

Only after it was too late for citizens to voice their feelings to the FCC did the AJC run a story — and that never explored Cox’s role in lobbying for the changes. AJC Managing Editor Hank Klibanoff assured me at the time: “There’s no conspiracy.”

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Phil Kent, never at a loss in bashing liberals on his gig on WAGA-TV’s “Georgia Gang,” is eating a little crow today. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann gave him the silver “runner-up” for “Worst Person in the World” on the May 9 edition of “Countdown.”

A little explanation is needed:

The two groups most hated by right-wing blowhards are MoveOn.org and Media Matters.

MoveOn.org organizes at the grass roots. Meanwhile, Media Matters
diligently documents the errors, misstatements, fabrications, falsehoods, mendacities, fibs, lies and canards of the right’s pundits. The pundits, since reality is not an issue to them, concoct more errors, misstatements, fabrications, falsehoods, mendacities, fibs, lies and canards about Media Matters, which Media Matters then documents. It’s fun to watch.

And the most hated man by the right is George Soros, the billionaire investor who puts his money where his mouth is in backing progressive politics. For the right, this is unacceptable, ignoring the fact that conservative corporations, front groups and billionaires (e.g. Richard Mellon Scaife) make Soros look like an amateur in using money to manipulate politics.

So a popular myth among the veracity-challenged right-wingers is that Soros funds Media Matters. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly — despite evidence to the contrary — routinely parrots that untruth. Media Matters has documented that it hasn’t received money from Soros, directly or through other organizations.

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When police rioted at an immigration rally in Los Angeles May 1, that city’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, canceled a trade mission to Mexico to return home, take command, condemn the obvious wrongdoing and vow to get to the bottom of things.

Compare that leadership with Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, who, as I write in my column this week, goes on a junket every time things get hot at home. And, of course, Franklin was almost invisible for a week after the Nov. 21 slaying by corrupt police officers of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles has a real Police Commission that oversees law enforcement — unlike Atlanta, which created one two months ago following the Johnston killing, but has yet to staff it.

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This is a tale about missing newspaper boxes. To sort out the players, Creative Loafing’s readers will recall that Debby Eason founded this newspaper 35 years ago. In 2000, her son, Ben, took over the group. Debby went off and started several community newspapers called the Story. She recently stopped print publication, although the Story still has a Web presence.

Meanwhile, J. Patrick Best was once CL’s ad director. When he left … well, it wasn’t pretty. Best started a publication called the Sunday Paper. It’s either a sorry imitation or a spunky competitor to CL, depending on your point of view (or who signs your paycheck).

Back to Debby Eason. When she quit publication of the Story, she wanted to sell her 850 distribution racks and boxes. Best bargained with Debby to get the boxes for the Sunday Paper, and we also wanted them. Since we’re owned by Debby’s son, we won. Blood is thicker than water, as you’ve heard.

The Story had already plastered its boxes with CL’s logo — just so there wouldn’t be confusion about who owned them. But when our circulation department went to pick up nine of the boxes at Atlantic Station, they weren’t there. Nope, they were missing in action. So we filed a police report.

It turns out the Sunday Paper had the boxes, and, despite our logo on them, had painted them. A big oops on their part. They say the incident was a mistake, that an overenthusiastic independent distributor had erred in kidnapping our boxes, according to a voicemail message Best left with our publisher, Dave Schmall. “I want nothing to do with them,” Best said.

We got the boxes back with no bloodshed, and we’re not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, we’re out inventorying the rest of the Story’s former boxes and racks to see if any others are MIA.

The good news is that you’ll find CL in hundreds of more places when we get the boxes out on the street.

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I wrote last week that an industry source predicted that nationwide newspaper circulation numbers would show a 5 percent decline for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Sunday edition. The source was a little optimistic.

The actual Sunday loss was 6.7 percent, declining to 523,687, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Meanwhile, daily circulation fell 2 percent, to 357,399.

When the AJC reports this, it will be with the explanation that most dailies saw plunging circulation, and that’s true. The smoke screen of explanation by the newspapers is that all of these weird things have conspired to starve them of readers, things like the Internet. What they won’t admit — especially over at the AJC — is that for years they have slashed news staffs and dumbed down their publications. Savvy readers have left.

Don’t expect the AJC to give you historical perspective. Nineteen years ago (the earliest I could dig up complete records), the combined daily circulation of Atlanta’s then two newspapers was 458,700. The Sunday edition was 650,500.

That’s a 22 percent loss for daily, 19.5 percent for Sunday. Meanwhile, from 1990 to 2006, the Atlanta metro area has added more than 2 million people, an increase of more than 67 percent. Thus, the AJC has gone from reaching about 1 in 6 potential subscribers to 1 in 14.

If you’re an advertiser, the AJC likely refers to you as “Hello, sucker.” The more circulation that vaporizes, the higher the advertising rates go (the opposite of what logic would indicate). For the billionaire Cox family owners, lost circulation is a plus. They spend less publishing the newspaper.

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Word is leaking out about more bad news at the Atlanta Daily of Desperately Declining Circulation. The industry monitor — the Audit Bureau of Circulations — will release its latest numbers on Monday.

Editor & Publisher reports: “According to industry sources, overall daily circulation for the six months ending March 2007 is expected to sink approximately 2.5% while Sunday will drop around 3.0%.”

One of those sources tells us that the AJC will beat the pack — and record a 5 percent drop in Sunday circulation. No word yet on what the daily numbers will show.

The newspaper industry has long been in a cycle of decimating news staffs — as the AJC did recently, pushing senior staffers (as in those who know shit from Shinola) out the door. The quality of the papers plunges, and then publishers scratch their heads and wonder why droves of readers are refusing to read the daily rags.

Expect the AJC to acknowledge any circulation losses, but gloss them with sophistry about online readership.

Meanwhile, Media Audits, which measures audiences for print and broadcast outlets, had some good news for CL. More people read us each month than read the front section of the AJC.

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Oh, yeah, he lied about Monica.

And what did the Cheney-Bush regime do? Merely deceive the American people and Congress into supporting a war that has cost probably in excess of 100,000 lives and squandered half a trillion dollars. (Have you gotten your $1,700 worth of war? That’s about what it cost every American for Bush’s adventure.) And wiretapping Americans. And torture. And corruption beyond belief. Either the regime is criminally insane, or just criminal.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich has a solution. He introduced articles of impeachment against Cheney. Why not Bush? Because, if successful and Bush gets booted, we’d end up with the GOP’s Lex Luthor as president. Kucinich’s resolution asserts: “Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Vice President actively and systematically sought to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction…” and then provides 18 pages of details.

A Zogby poll in January found that 52 percent of respondents favor impeaching Bush if he lied about wiretapping Americans. That compares with 36 percent of poll respondents who favored a congressional inquiry into Clinton’s behavior, and only 26 percent who favored impeaching Clinton.

Will the Democrats get the message that now is the time to act?

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One of the favorite laments of the right-wing noise machine is that there’s been an epidemic of teen sex, especially oral sex, because of Bill Clinton trysts with Monica.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, recently proclaimed: “Who popularized oral sex for the nation? And who was defended day in and day out royally for doing so? Bill Clinton. And who defended him? The Democrats.”

When a, ummm, turgid intellect as Limbaugh renders such an erection of opinion, it not only must be true, but we must apply it to other social events…

The massacre at Virginia Tech, for example.

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Let’s face it: Right-wing talk radio acquired the moniker “hate radio” for a reason. It’s full of racism, religious bigotry, paranoia, homophobia and sexism.

One would think the media would be near-unanimous in condemning the use of public — repeat: public — airwaves to broadcast speech more appropriate to a meeting of a Klan Klavern. Over at the Cox-owned Atlanta Journal-Constitution, they did express outrage at recent comments by Don Imus. But AJC editorial writers only went ballistic when hate speech was broadcast on stations that compete with Cox’s own radio and TV outlets. The newspaper had no such criticism aimed at often more virulent racism on Cox stations.

Indeed, part of Imus’ outburst was highlighted by a racist remark about the hairdos of a women’s basketball team, and his reference to the athletes as “ho’s.”

Yet a year ago, Cox’s lead talk-radio host, Neal Boortz, referred to a black congresswoman: “She looks like a ghetto slut. … It looks like an explosion in a Brillo pad factory.” Hairdo and derogatory sexual references are hardly distinguishable from the remarks that got Imus fired.

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In my column this week, I opine that Vernon Jones doesn’t have a chance in semi-announced semi-candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat held by Saxby Chambliss.

A poll released today by the Republican-aligned Strategic Vision, one of the better Georgia political groups, reiterates my point. It shows Chambliss shellacking Jones 57 percent to 29 percent. That’s the sort of lead that falls into the “live boy/dead girl” category — former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards once boasted that the only way he could lose an election was to be found in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.

In other results, the Strategic Vision poll has some surprises for the religious zealots in the Georgia GOP. Those nasty secularists tended to dominate Georgia Republicans’ favorites for the 2008 presidential nomination.

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So DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones is running for the U.S. Senate seat held by the draft-dodging Bush lotion boy, Saxby Chambliss. Jones says he’s a Democrat, but for years the buzz has been that he’s a GOP wannabe — but being a black Republican is not only oxymoronic, it’s simply plain old-fashioned moronic.

True, the GOP really does like people of color — when it comes to needing minimum-wage wait staff for $1,000-a-plate banquets for neo-Confederates. And there are a few sorry souls — Herman Cain comes to mind — who get a bit of fleeting fame, much like the bearded lady at the freak show, by being tokens.

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Atlanta police Chief Richard Pennington held a press conference Tuesday in which he looked dutifully distressed as he proclaimed: “We don’t ever want another person in this city to go through what Miss [Kathryn] Johnston went through.”

Nice words, and a superb acting job by the chief.

Pennington was referring to the police slaying of Johnston, an 88-year-old west Atlanta woman. Narcotics detectives on Nov. 21 smashed into her home with a no-knock search warrant. Johnston, fearful of crime in her neighborhood, had a gun and opened fire. Return fire from officers killed the woman.

An FBI probe has pressured officers involved to confess they had used illegal shortcuts in obtaining the warrant. The cops had claimed a confidential informant had told them about drugs in Johnston’s home. The information was actually provided by a low-level drug dealer.

Police said they found a small quantity of marijuana in Johnston’s home. Officers who were at the scene have told Creative Loafing they believe the marijuana was planted by members of the narcotics squad after they killed Johnston.

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It’s hard to muffle the audience at the annual and generally raucous Buckhead Coalition luncheon, a close encounter of the Atlanta kind that smushes together corporate heavy hitters and media paparazzi in a West Paces Ferry eatery a size too small for the crowd.

But the newly minted chairman of the Fulton County Commission, John Eaves, managed to drop jaws and provoke palpitations at the Jan. 31 shindig. He had a little help from a slippery critter called a Newt, which is generally a small amphibian but at the lunch was clearly a forked-tongue reptile.

Continue reading “A reptilian Newt’s forked tongue” at atlanta.creativeloafing.com.

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There’s a good reason Republicans in the Georgia Assembly are scared to death of a resolution by Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, that would apologize for the state’s participation in a “eugenics” program that sterilized about 3,300 people between 1937 and 1970. Nationally, more than 64,000 people were sterilized, and eugenics advocates had plans to do the same to as many as 10 million “unfit” Americans.

Eugenics was a pseudo-science that blended well with the South’s white-supremacy credo. As University of Georgia professor Ed Larson wrote in his 1995 book, Sex, Race and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South: “So long as southern Whites did not expect African Americans to contribute substantially to the intellectual progress of civilization, the need for eugenic improvement of Blacks lost urgency.”

Applied, this meant that upward of 60 percent of those sterilized were black. And most were women, many accused of lascivious behavior.

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