How Tea Party rumors gain traction
Ostensibly, the Tea Party meeting I attended Tuesday night in Peachtree City was about the “cap-and-trade” climate change bill that Congress is now considering.
But a passing reference to an unrelated rumor was more interesting. And it said a lot more about the way the Tea Party rank-and-file gets worked up over things that aren’t even happening.
This week’s baseless rumor apparently is that President Obama is planning to ban protests on the National Mall. “Treason,” one Tea Partier responded when he heard that. Another yelled something about “revolution.”
Here’s the video. Below’s my explanation of why the rumor appears to be totally baseless.
Boulevard crosswalk: the finale (for now)
You may recall I was trying to use the power of citizen activism to make my neighborhood more pedestrian-friendly.
I often walk up Boulevard from Grant Park to Cabbagetown or Oakland Cemetery, crossing over Interstate 20 (I even see people jogging through this area).
Unfortunately, while there are crosswalks as you walk over the on and off ramps for I-20, the ‘walk/don’t walk’ lights were not working great and I thought it would be helpful to walkers if there could be a short interval in which cars were prohibited from entering the crosswalk.
And so I enlisted Councilwoman Carla Smith, who represents my district on City Council, to see if the DOT couldn’t see its way to helping us out (since the crosswalks are part of interstate on/off ramps, they fall under the DOT’s jurisdiction).
You can find my last post about it here. Carla managed to find a sympathetic ear at the DOT, which conducted a study of the crosswalk, but as she told me recently, we can’t get what we want.
The DOT has agreed to refresh the crosswalks, and I’ve noticed the ‘walk/don’t walk’ signs are working better, specifically by giving walkers a longer period of time to cross the street before flashing the orange ‘don’t walk’ symbol.
But it’s really not enough because cars can still enter the crosswalk even if the ‘walk’ light is on, as you can see in the photo above.
If you look at the photo, you’ll see the white, solid ‘walk’ symbol.
And yet there is a car moving through the intersection.
So can I really safely cross the intersection on foot? Uh not really.
Carla said all is not lost — she’s ever the optimist — and thinks we may be able to revisit the issue again with the DOT.
But for now, watch it when you walk up Boulevard. It may be called Boulevard but there are many spots where you are not meant to stroll.
No, really, this train is bound for Charlotte
Charlotte, N.C. — you now the city where that light rail car is headed — is applying for $25 million in federal funds to build a streetcar line.
That would be on top of the light rail system.
The Charlotte Observer reports that city council voted 7-4 on Monday to apply for a grant that would pay for most of the cost of constructing a 1.5-mile line.
The newspaper also noted that three Republicans on the council and one Democrat voted in favor.
You can read the whole story here.
Maybe Oxendine was hunting for water
The John Oxendine shooting accident had nothing to do with this man.
Aha! Now I’ve figured it out. That “not a Dick Cheney” hunting accident involving John Oxendine, his sons and some guy straight out of an episode of Petticoat Junction wasn’t an accident after all.
It was a reconnaissance mission on behalf of the thirsty people of Georgia.
Think about it: Yesterday, Oxendine announced that, if elected governor, he’ll take up with the U.S. Supreme Court a Georgia request that Tennessee let us pipe water from the Tennessee River to metro Atlanta.
Could it be mere coincidence that someone in Oxendine’s hunting party peppered a northwest Georgia man with buckshot just one week earlier?
Hear me out: The incident occurred on Walker County property owned by a man whom the current insurance commissioner is supposed to be regulating Read more
This train is bound for Charlotte
As a freelancer, I pitch story ideas and sometimes editors bite and sometimes they don’t.
Last week, the global conglomerate Siemens came to Atlanta to show off a light rail car that will be part of Charlotte’s transit expansion. I thought it would make a great story, but I was the only one.
Or was I? Maria Saporta was on it, of course, and from her column I learned that the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce actually laid track to properly display the car, which can also be used as a streetcar.
Laid tracks? You have my attention now.
Maria mentions a lot of great things, so please check out her column.
But I would like to mention one thing former Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory said while he was in town.
McCrory, who Maria points out is a Republican, said you need to marry transit with the existing transportation network and expansions need to make economic sense. And he said you can’t build transit without a land-use plan.
“The right is only going to want to build roads. The political left will want to put transit everywhere out of fairness. This is not a fairness issue,” McCrory said. “There needs to be an inter-connected system of sidewalks, bikeways and buses.”
Doors of Inman Park
I did my own personal photo hunt one day in Inman Park, and here’s a glimpse of what I came up with.
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Now this is smart growth
I love to walk up to the Sweet Auburn area near downtown Atlanta and today I had the perfect excuse: the dedication of a new mural about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., at the King Historic site.
What can I possibly say about Dr. King that could do justice to his legacy? He touched everyone, including me, a white Long Islander who stood, rapt, listening to the loudspeaker in my Junior High homeroom when my social studies teacher played Dr. King’s last speech each year on the King holiday (which was not then a holiday, at least not in New York state).
An excerpt from that speech, given April 3, 1968, has pride of place in the mural, as you can see in the photo below.
If you don’t get the chills when he says “I may not get there with you,” well, that’s as good an indication as any that you’re not alive!
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Newt’s pants are on fire! Not surprised, are you?
Here’s a point that shoots right into the split between left and right: 19 of the last 20 “Pants on Fire” ratings on PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter are held by rumors, errors and lies from the right.
In other words, the idea that “both sides do it” is a bit of a myth. There is no moral equivalence between one side lying 19 times as much as the other.
Right wingers will respond as they typically do: They will attempt to work the ref. They will claim that PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize winning project run by the St. Petersburg Times, is “biased.” But that simply doesn’t wash in this case. If anything, PolitiFact has bent over backwards to throw a harsh spotlight on misrepresentations from the left.
Case in point: The sole “Pants of Fire” rating for the left side out of the most recent 20. Read more
Beautiful buildings of Atlanta, entry No. 5
You’d think I would have jotted down the address or the name of this beautiful building. But I didn’t (it’s downtown, possibly on Peachtree a block or so north of Woodruff Park).
I’m quite sure some astute reader will help me out!
I take lots of photos with the idea of posting them to this blog, and then life intervenes.
Maybe I’m wrong, but sometimes it feels as though some people don’t think there’s anything beautiful in Atlanta. I would love to hear readers’ picks for other beautiful buildings around Atlanta.
I’ve had my hands full
OK. Given the choice to spend time with this …
or this …
What would you do? I rest my case.
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