Why not spend the money MARTA does have?
In the space of a week, it seems as though MARTA has been snatched from the jaws of death only to be right back at death’s door.
The Atlanta Regional Commission voted Wednesday to divert $25 million in federal stimulus funds to help close a MARTA funding gap. It seemed as though this would keep the transit system from drastically cutting service.
Then Thursday, MARTA’s board said it would still need to enact draconian measures to overcome a $110 million hole in funding for the next fiscal year.
While MARTA’s funding drama has played out over the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking about how the transit system should spend the money it has in capital reserves – the money it cannot use for operations. Read more
New green building materials
Yeah, California may be a dysfunctional mess. But it’s still ahead of the Southeast in developing affordable green building materials.
There are a lot of great sustainable products out there. Before the housing downturn, more and more of them — from insulating concrete forms to solar hot water systems — were being produced within 100 miles of Atlanta. And I imagine that the trend will continue even through this recession.
One of the big frustrations for green homebuilding, however, remains the cost of transporting the really heavy stuff that’s only available from some distant innovator on the West Coast. Read more
Poythress hits Republican “secession candidates”
GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE DAVID POYTHRESS: See his anti-secession video after the jump.
Democrat David Poythress may be an underdog in the 2010 governor’s race, but he put a video on YouTube today that does a pretty good job of showing how silly — perhaps even vulnerable — Republicans are sounding as they leap all over each other to appeal to the far right.
The subject: Noises the GOP candidates have been making about seceding from the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Poythress, who flaunts the fact that he’s a retired Army Reserve general, expresses his “outrage” in the video that four of six Republicans in the governor’s race are “embracing secession.” Photos of candidates Ray McBerry, Eric Johnson, John Oxendine and Karen Handel appear on the screen.
Poythress’ claim is only a bit of a stretch. He falsely states that the candidates said they’d “support secession from the United States of America.”
On the other hand, McBerry, whose photographer should appear next to the entry for “fruitcake” in the latest edition of Webster’s, has indeed announced that he’s running as a “States’ Rights”candidate. He also has less of a chance of winning the Republican nomination as Cynthia McKinney would were she running for the Democratic nomination.
OK, so Johnson, Oxendine and Handel — three of the GOP field’s four frontrunners — stopped short of declaring war on Fort Sumter. But they’ve been only a tad less direct than McBerry. Read more
Sunday AJCs do a bit of muckraking
After weeks of catching grief for its redesign, its staff cuts and the dismantling of its editorial board, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has pumped out some pretty strong reporting — particularly in its last two Sunday editions.
Not only has Cameron McWhirter done a hell of a job on two straight Sundays uncovering gubernatorial candidate John Oxendine’s questionable campaign fundraising practices (which inspired my own bloviation on our, uhm, colorful insurance commissioner), but the paper’s done some real digging on powerful business people who help determine that your tax dollars are spent for their benefit. Yesterday’s paper contained two such stories — Ariel Hart and Alan Judd’s expose on a roadbuilder who’s helped to bankroll political careers, and Ty Tagami’s article on the Sembler Co.’s request for a bailout in the form of DeKalb County tax breaks for its new Brookhaven development.
It’s difficult to say this early whether the spate of excellent enterprise stories signifies a lean, mean reporting machine whose focus makes up (at least a bit) for the staff cuts, or if it amounts to a shrinking staff running on fumes before the reporters get too exhausted to do any more than tell you the stuff that the powers-that-be want you to know anyway. Read more
Will campaign donor scandal help Oxendine?
A BIT GEEKY, EH? One of the flattering photos of Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine that are plastered all over the state Department of Insurance website.
Georgia Republicans may be riding higher right now than Republicans are elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean the state party isn’t suffering from the same dysfunction that’s led the national GOP to nosedive.
It’s just that Georgia’s voters seem content to allow Republicans to get away with partisan excesses, fuzzy math and their inability to govern effectively — so long as they manage to sound more conservative and paranoid than the next guy.
Which brings us to the AJC’s revelations about John Oxendine’s campaign finance mess (is “scandal” too harsh a word?). The longtime insurance commissioner, now a leading 2010 Republican candidate for governor, has a reputation for raising big money from executives at the companies he regulates.
Last Sunday, AJC reporter Cameron McWhirter broke the story of 10 loosely connected political action committees — tied to a Rome, Ga., insurance baron — that funneled $120,000 last year to Oxendine’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. The donations appear to be illegal.
In the article, Oxendine pooh-poohed the revelations. And, taking the tact that a lot of Southern politicians have used when caught doing something wrong, his campaign sent out a hilarious e-mail blaming the article on “the left-wing, anti-conservative, anti-American bias of the AJC”:
What they have really done is confirm to conservatives which Republican candidate they are afraid of — which Republican candidate they do not want to win. This is a time honored tradition at the AJC. Attack and smear any real conservative who might actually win. Attack, attack, attack. Talk about anything but the issues.
At Team Oxendine, we wear this hit piece as a badge of honor. Georgia Republicans know perfectly well a candidate is not a serious front-runner until they have been attacked and smeared by the AJC. That day has come and the AJC has sent a message loud and clear — John Oxendine is a conservative the liberals cannot tolerate. We are proud to know the “fair and balanced” crowd at the AJC is not for John Oxendine.
(Kudos to Travis Fain’s Lucid Idiocy blog for publishing the full memo.)
That Monday, the campaign still was calling the article a “hit piece.” But, faced with an ethics investigation, it did announce it would give the money back.
I suppose it’s pretty basic to observe that Oxendine is trying to use the story to engage the Republican base in his victimhood, and that he’s hoping to tap into the anti-media paranoia that’s such a strong motivator for Southern conservatives. That would be nothing new, of course. In the early 20th century, governors Tom Watson and Eugene Talmadge ran against the “liberal” Atlanta newspapers to become the most powerful Georgia politicians of their day. South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond and Alabama’s George Wallace rode similar routes to national prominence in losing presidential campaigns. Read more
Chambliss, Harkin partake in polite food fight
U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.
I needed to put my 3-D glasses on to make out the partisan divide between Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Sen. Tom Harkin at a hearing that ended just a few minutes ago at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Clifton Road in DeKalb.
The point of the Agriculture Committee hearing was hard to argue with: “Benefits of Farm-to-School Projects, Healthy Eating and Physical Activity for School Children.” Real Mom and apple-pie stuff. Or at least, Mom and apple.
Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who chairs the committee, and Chambliss, the Georgia Republican who’s the ranking minority member, came down from D.C. to hear the testimony of two prominent public health experts, a U.S. Department of Agriculture child nutrition expert, and a man who runs a farmers’ coop that sells local produce to school districts.
As is customary for such events, both senators began by praising each other and lauding their great friendship. In other words, they disagree with each other on just about everything.
Early on in hearing, Bill Dietz, director of the CDC’s division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity, noted that childhood obesity has been deemed by public health experts to be an “epidemic” — and that isn’t being addressed effectively. “We’re about where tobacco was in the 1960s,” Dietz said.
You just know that’s the kind of talk that drives a conservative crazy: Read more
Paste, Regator and the start-ups
I first met Scott Lockhart of Regator at the company’s fall launch party at Paste Magazine’s offices in Decatur, where the combination of optimism, fun and just a wee bit of anxiety that pervades Atlanta’s tech start-up community could be tasted along with the cheese and crackers.
Last night, Lockhart — along with his two business partners (his wife and his brother-in-law) and the social-networking/start-up zine Mashable — hosted a larger event at the Trolley Barn in Inman Park, in advance of Regator’s redesign roll-out next month.
One of the first guys I saw as I came in was Tim Dorr, who personifies the tech community’s vibrancy and quiet enthusiasm. Dorr is founder of A Small Orange, a very service-oriented web-hosting company (I use them), and the partner in FeedScrub (a start-up that, well, scrubs feeds), as well as a web development company and about half-a-dozen other startups. The guy runs his company’s conservatively but always seems to have a new gadget, a new idea and plenty of time to share his knowledge with tech neophytes. Read more
The PSC’s latest giveaway to Georgia Power
From former Public Service Commissioner Angela Speir Phelps and the Georgia Online News Service:
The phrase “a chicken in every pot” was a slogan used during Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign in 1928. A year later, the Great Depression began. We are very blessed that we are not suffering as those who came before us did, but it’s tough times these days.
Georgia ranks in the top 10 in the country for foreclosure, bankruptcy, and unemployment. During these trying times, if we are going to have a chicken in every pot, then we need to make sure we don’t have the fox guarding the hen house. This scenario comes to mind when I think of recent decisions made by our elected representatives, such as the five statewide elected public service commissioners who voted this week to commit $6.4 billion dollars of consumer’s money to Georgia Power without implementing the safeguards recommended by their own staff. Read more
New! Improved! Atlanta Unsheltered!
UPDATE: See update halfway down this post!
You’ll notice a format change on Atlanta Unsheltered today.
Er, I mean, you’ll notice the change if you’ve actually been on this blog before. If you hadn’t been on Atlanta Unsheltered until now, well then, I guess you wouldn’t notice anything different — now, would you?
I liked the layout that I was using before. It was on a premium Wordpress theme called Livewire. I was really proud of myself for having installed it myself. But the truth is Livewire’s kind of high maintenance, and the presentation of the latest stories from five or six categories on the homepage is more appropriate for a news publication than for a one-person blog.
I’m not producing the volume of content needed to change out all the categories each day, so it looked stupid to have, say, the same Arts & Events up for two weeks, while the Media/Tech category changed out consistently. Not only that: The fact that the A&E post often didn’t change out sometimes for two or three weeks amounted to an admission about my social life that I’d just as soon sweep under the rug.
(I also was kind of disappointed by WooThemes’ lackadaisical customer service; seems to me that if you spend 70 bucks on a premium theme, the guys ought to put a bit of effort into answering questions — but maybe the problem is that I’m such a neophyte.) Read more
Blue Dogs get bad rap
An opinion piece from Chris Kromm and the Georgia Online News Service:
The Blue Dog Democratic Coalition is one of the favorite punching bags of the progressive blogosphere. From DailyKos to OpenLeft, the Blue Dogs — a group of 51 “moderate and conservative” House Democrats — are routinely held up as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the Democratic Party.
A piece in Firedoglake is typical of the anti-Blue Dog genre, in which they are savaged for being hypocritcal about government spending, opposed to hate crime laws and being the descendants of racist Dixiecrats (although the majority of Blue Dogs aren’t in the South).
Defenders of the Blue Dogs respond by saying that these Democrats come from “hard districts,” and they can’t take progressive stands because they’ll get voted out of office by their conservative constituents.
Put aside for the moment the unpleasant implication that Blue Dog votes are devoid of moral conviction and based purely on political calculation. Even on its own terms, is the idea that Blue Dogs come from uniquely conservative “hard districts” even true?
An analysis by the Swing State Project might give the Blue Dogs some backup. Read more
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