Fresh Loaf

Holy shit! The new flyer by Mary Norwood is by far the dirtiest, most negative message to come out of this mayor’s race so far. In fact, it prompted me to wonder what the legal boundaries are for Constitutionally protected political speech.

As you can see, the headline reads:

Kasim Reed: Late paying his taxes, but wants to raise yours.

OK, it’s clear that Norwood’s not going to let this tax allegation drop, even though the AJC’s Jim Galloway offered a self-described “fact check on taxes” that thoroughly rebutted Norwood’s claims:

My AJC colleague Cameron McWhirter and other reporters spent weeks vetting the major mayoral candidates this summer.

In the course of that reporting, McWhirter checked Fulton County tax records. Reed met with him and provided detailed documentation about his financial holdings, real estate and tax payments. Reed owed no back taxes at the time of the meeting and owes none now.

The flyer provides a link to a story that WSB-TV ran after getting a tip from the Norwood campaign, but even that two-and-a-half-minute piece shows the unpaid tax claim to be a non-story.

Then there’s the other allegation: that Reed wants to raise taxes. I’ve interviewed Reed several times, sat in on numerous debates and forums and read all his campaign material — and yet I have no idea where this claim is coming from.

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Last night was the couch-sitting public’s first window onto the Atlanta mayor’s race, courtesy of a semi-televised forum by WSB-TV. I say “semi-” because the station inexplicably showed only the first half-hour of a 90-minute event. Apparently, it was deemed more important that viewers be able to see “America’s Funniest Home Videos” than their next mayor.

Anyway, even those who didn’t bother to switch over to radio or the Interwebs to catch the final hour didn’t miss a great deal. No clear winners or losers emerged, but the candidates’ relative strengths and weaknesses do tend to become more visible the longer you see them in action.

Fortunately, last night’s forum was sponsored by the Atlanta Police Foundation, a law-and-order support organization, so the candidates didn’t waste time pandering to special-interest groups, as has been the custom at several previous forums. Instead, they got right down to the first order of business: bashing Chief Richard Pennington.

It usually goes without saying that every new mayor brings in his or her hand-picked police chief, but it didn’t go unsaid last night. Everybody, most conspicuously Council President Lisa Borders, was sticking the boot in Pennington’s ribs, claiming how they would hire a top cop who’s responsive, visible, accountable and doesn’t fancy himself too good to mingle with common beat cops — unlike you-know-who.

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Looks like this sucker’s starting to get a little more competitive:

The race for the Atlanta mayor’s office got a little tighter in the last week, according to a new poll released Friday.

The new WSB-TV Channel 2/InsiderAdvantage poll shows that Mary Norwood still leads the race with 33 percent, but her lead over Lisa Borders slipped to just six percentage points. Last week Norwood led Borders by eight percentage points.

Although she is still second in the race, Borders actually dropped in percentage points, going from 34 percent to 27 percent this week.

The big gainer was Kasim Reed. He remained in third place, but jumped from nine percentage points to 15 percent.

There are still plenty of folks to convince. Twenty-three percent of the poll’s respondents are still undecided.

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It’s the future of journalism, people! 140 characters is all you need!

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Like many locals, I was shocked and, frankly, a little pissed off when I read in the AJC over the weekend that Atlanta police had unexpectedly changed nearly every important detail that had previously been reported about last week’s late-night armed robbery at the Standard and the shooting death of bartender John Henderson.

John Henderson

If Henderson hadn’t been killed “execution-style,” as the initial AJC headline blared, then why say he had been? Was his female co-worker hiding in a cabinet during the shooting, as WSB-TV had reported, or not? Sometimes, in order to trip up or mislead the criminals, the cops don’t tell everything they know about a crime, but it didn’t make sense that the public narrative of the event could have been so far off.

After talking to Lt. Keith Meadows, commander of the Atlanta Police Department homicide unit, I’ve reached the conclusion that the press snafu over the Henderson murder was brought about by a combination of vague, inconclusive information offered by the police and a competitive news environment in which reporters race to make their stories as definitive as possible — often before all the facts are nailed down.

In other words, what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.

Meadows conceded that detectives were initially mistaken about how Henderson was killed. (Readers should be warned that some of what follows is fairly graphic.)

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— It’s Veteran’s Day tomorrow, which is set aside to honor the men and women who have put their lives on the line on our country’s behalf. Call a vet  and thank them for their sacrifices. At the Daly Briefing, our intrepid correspondent is back in the U.S. from Iraq. But he’s stuck in Kansas because of military bureaucracy. And will be stuck there a day longer because … well, federal offices are closed because it’s Veteran’s Day. Patience, patience.

— Strong words from Erick at Peach Pundit, who is tired of hearing Johnny Mac’s folks whine about the shortcomings of Caribou Barbie. After all, they’re the ones who plucked her out of a moose hunt to be the next vice-president, right? Erick is so pissed off that he has a petition to make Republicans who bash Palin official political lepers.

— The Republican Party is obviously in trouble and Newt Gingrich has volunteered to be the savior. DownRight is down with that notion, but not the idea that the party has to become more moderate. They argue that Johnny Mac ran as a moderate and lost, which is evidence the party has to turn even harder right. But, listen, don’t forget Newt has this little issue with, you know, family values.

— Left On Lanier also delves into the Republican Party’s post-election tug-of-war and points out that for the far-right wing, even Fox News has become too liberal.

— Georgia’s U.S. Senate run-off will be under the national spotlight. At Georgia Women Vote, Amy takes note that unmarried women came out strong for J-Mart and Obama. Will they come back for the run-off?

— And, finally, there can’t be a worse feeling in journalism than to pursue a story, miss it, and then see a competitor nail it. Live Apartment Fire follows the tale of the two Atlanta garbage men who chill out in East Point while collecting OT, and how WSB trumped WGCL in the local television news wars. But that doesn’t erase the fact that WGCL still has its ace in the hole: Dagmar Midcap.

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