The other day my fourth-grader glanced up from one of her trivia books to announce that a leech – a blood-sucking leech – has 32 brains. In a moment that revealed how low my personal standards have sunk, I replied, “Hmmm … Now I don’t feel so bad.”

She got it immediately, as witnessed by her eye-rolling and reluctance to return my high-five. But I thought I made a valid point: Compare what a leech has accomplished with 32 brains versus what I have done with just one. I feel better about myself already.

It’s a shame that Georgia’s elected legislative body, which has 236 brains, can’t feel better about some of its accomplishments.

Take our still non-existent statewide trauma care network. Year after year, our elected officials, who talk a good game about supporting health care and emergency medicine and saving lives, simply have not put all those brains together to figure out a way to permanently fund a trauma system.

This year was no different. In fact, it turned out worse than last year, when the legislators ponied up almost $59 million to keep a handful of trauma centers open. In the closing week of the 2009 session, they squeaked through the Super Speeder law, which will provide about $23 million for the Georgia Trauma Trust Fund in 2010. Unfortunately, running an organized network of trauma specialists and facilities needs about 100 million bucks a year.

Bottom line: We’re going backward, in more ways than one.

At this rate, Georgia will not have a statewide trauma system. Ever. Put another way, let’s just say that if you live or travel south of Macon or west of Savannah, where trauma centers are few and far between, make sure your affairs are in order. More than 5,000 Georgians die of traumatic injury every year. Advocates of a trauma system claim it would save about 700 lives a year, even with moderate success.

In the meantime, people are dying in the streets. And worse, they are dying in emergency rooms, where Georgians often erroneously believe that all trauma care is equal and you will get the maximum care possible. Not so. A fully equipped and staffed state-designated trauma center – of which Georgia has 15 and needs about 30 – is far more likely to save your life than a general ER, which number 137 at acute care hospitals throughout the state. Fewer than a third of trauma victims are treated at a trauma center in Georgia.

Read the rest of this story at GONSO.

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Disappointment

It’s a word business leaders typically avoid, largely because its use acknowledges that something did not go right.

But in near universal consensus, business leaders across Georgia continue to express bewilderment and, yes, disappointment that state legislators were unable to pass a law that would increase funding for transportation before the legislative session ended April 3.

While transportation was the top priority for business leaders, many also say the legislature failed to act on a host of other pressing issues during this year’s 40-day General Assembly session.

“I guess disappointment seems to be the word that’s used the most and I think it’s the most appropriate one,” said Doug Hertz, president of United Distributors in Smyrna and a key figure in the Get Georgia Moving coalition, which aims to reduce congestion around the state.

Demming Bass, with the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, echoed his statement.

“I don’t know how you can continue to disappoint people,” Bass said of the Assembly’s failure to approve a new funding mechanism for transportation. “It was all politics.”

Business leaders, many of whom took the unusual step of supporting a sales tax to fund improvements to roads, bridges and transit, minced no words when they announced in January that transportation was their No. 1 priority for this year’s legislative session. Many vowed comprehensive transportation reform would not fail again, as it had in 2008 when a bill died on the floor of the Senate a little before midnight on the last day of the legislative session.

Instead, the two houses of the General Assembly were unable to reach a compromise on two competing transportation bills, and now, even 10 days after the session ended, the business community is not mincing words about how they feel about this year’s legislative gridlock. And it’s not all about transportation.

“I think everyone was shocked by what an unproductive session it was,” said Renay Blumenthal, the senior vice president of public policy at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week, John Rice, vice chairman of GE, whose Energy unit is based in Cobb County, expressed frustration that a “well-written, badly needed bill” aimed at reforming school board governance got caught up in “horse-trading politics at its worst. … How long will we let bad politics and self-serving politicians get in the way of good policies?”

What’s driving much of the business community’s rancor is a core belief that economic development is, as Hertz said, the “lifeblood” for increasing state revenue for services, creating jobs and building more dynamic communities.

To ensure continued economic growth, business leaders say the state needs to reduce congestion around Georgia, a move that would require a new source of revenue.

The need to devote more money to solve transportation woes is so acute that leaders from Walton, Barrow and other counties far outside of central Atlanta said they would support more funding for MARTA, the city’s mass transit system, according to Sam Olens, chairman of the Atlanta Regional Commission. After the Legislature declined to provide more funding to MARTA, the ARC offered money to help the transit system close a funding gap created by falling sales tax revenue.

“The single biggest impediment to economic development is transportation,” said Hertz, whose distribution company employs 1,200 people at sites in Atlanta, Savannah, Albany and other cities in Georgia.

Other issues, including a bill to outlaw embryonic stem cell research, also provoked ire in the business community, for much the same reason: prohibiting such work would deter companies from moving to Georgia. Indeed, the bill to limit scientific inquiry in the state, which did not move beyond the Senate, was seen in the business community as an embarrassment coming, as it did, two months before Atlanta will play host to an international biotech conference where state officials hope to recruit companies to Georgia.

“They didn’t have to pass that,” said Bass of the Gwinnett Chamber.

It’s unclear what the business community’s next step will be; most of the issues will have to wait for the next legislative session, which begins in January. Hertz said Get Georgia Moving may have made a mistake by not endorsing one plan over the other, and he thinks that next year the key to winning the bill’s passage may be support for a plan that authorizes regional taxes for regional projects, rather than a statewide tax.

In the meantime, some economic leaders already have plans to engage in some much-needed “damage control.”

“We are going to have to explain it to prospects,” said Blumenthal, with the Metro Atlanta Chamber. “A lot of prospects know we have traffic, and many cities have traffic. The difference is in Atlanta we are perceived as [not] doing anything about it. We don’t even have a plan.”

Jeanne Bonner is the senior business writer at Georgia Online News Service.

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A time trip I like to take about once a year spirits me back to Sept. 19-20, 1863, at a spot along the Tennessee-Georgia border where soldiers did what soldiers do. And that includes dying – 3,969 of them – and being maimed, blinded, shattered and a variety of other almost-but-not-quite-lethal events we describe as wounding – another 24,430.

It was called the Battle of Chickamauga, and if you go to the visitor center at the battlefield, you’ll be captured, as I am on my annual treks, by the photographs of common men in rough blue and gray uniforms. Many of the warriors were mere boys. This is not the fancy dress Civil War portrayed by Hollywood.

Among the larger photos is one of Col. Cyrus Sugg of the Confederate Army’s 50th Tennessee Infantry, who commanded Gregg’s Brigade after Brig. Gen. John Gregg was shot in the neck. One of the plaques scattered around the battlefield even notes where “Sugg took command,” a phrase that appeals to me.

Unfortunately, Col. Sugg rated a calculation in one or both of the numbers above. He was wounded at Chickamauga, and then taken to a field hospital in Marietta, where he expired.

Cyrus Sugg was a relative, and one of many Suggs who fought in the Civil War, so this is personal for me, folks. John H. Sugg, another Tennessean, was a Confederate soldier who ended up as a Yankee prisoner of war. Then there was Joseph Sugg, who kept dodging service in one or the other of the competing armies in Missouri until captured by federal troops who made him join their band. There was even a Rebel steamboat named the Tom Sugg, which was captured by Union soldiers in Arkansas’ Little Red River.

And, there are many African-Americans with the surname Sugg or Suggs, who likely are descended from slaves owned by my ancestors who originally settled in South Carolina. I’ve even attended a family reunion of one branch of the black Sugg family.

So, all things considered, I get this Southern heritage thing. But if I ever in some eternity get to ask Col. Cyrus Sugg a question, it would be: “Suh, jes’ what were y’all thinkin’?”

And if I ever get a chance to ask the Georgia General Assembly, en masse, a question on the subject of history, it would be: “Gentlemen and ladies, if I may use those terms in their loosest application, what the hell were you thinking when you failed to pass urgent transportation funding but did find time to pass a silly law that would have the effect of elevating the fables of Gone With the Wind to sanctified history?”

Which is exactly what a bill that passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses (AKA asylums) of the General Assembly did. The law denoting April as Confederate Heritage and History Month will undoubtedly by signed by Gov. Sonny “Unreconstructed” Perdue.

Let’s consider for a minute exactly what Georgia will be commemorating. A bunch of brigands, in order to preserve their own aristocratic way of life, connived and committed acts of mass terrorism to undermine and overthrow the U.S. government. If there had been a Pentagon in the 1860s, they surely would have bombed it.

They pursued their criminal conspiracy by convincing the most uneducated and unsophisticated citizens that the nation they thought they were part of really wasn’t their nation, but that a mythological fairyland of cavaliers and damsels was their homeland. The treasonous leaders of this conspiracy, especially the military el jefes led by a turncoat named Robert E. Lee, violated their sacred oaths, including those made to God. They claimed to be honorable, but where the hell is honor in betraying one’s country and vows?

The plebeians were largely duped into joining the 19th Century’s version of Al Qaeda, but the law allows little room for those who are determinedly stupid. Just as many uneducated Muslims are conned by “leaders” into committing vile and unforgivable acts of terrorism, so too were the farmboys of the South deceived into believing in a “cause” that never really existed.

That’s not quite the magnolia and Scarlett O’Hara version of Confederate history that the legislators envision. Without regard to the implications, their proposed law calls on all Georgians “to honor, observe, and celebrate the Confederate States of America, its history, those who served in its armed forces and government, and … the cause which they held so dear from its founding on February 4, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, until the Confederate ship CSS Shenandoah sailed into Liverpool Harbor and surrendered to British authorities on November 6, 1865.”

Indeed, it’s worth noting that they did not pass a law endorsing the rich, fruitful “Southern history,” only that part of the South’s past as it relates to a band of usurpers, terrorists and traitors. But, of course, defining it as “Confederate” history means it’s white history. Blacks, as we know from the Holy Gospel of Margaret Mitchell, had only supporting roles, mostly to be whipped or be treated with about the same paternalism as one shows to a good dog.

In part, this Confederate history law is a mean-spirited swipe at the idea of black history months. The legislation would equate the fantasy of a noble “lost cause” with the actual reality of the African-American narrative, a story that has been suppressed, often viciously so, by the South’s Jim Crow mentality. Put another way, to follow the Georgia legislature’s logic, the Aryan myth of Nazi Germany would be just as valid as the true history of the Holocaust.

Since this is Georgia, everything is about race. The Republican (AKA Neo-Confederate) dominated legislature didn’t pass transportation funding or other critical legislation because the rural good ol’ boys were playing racial politics, at least in part. They don’t want to be perceived as doing something that would help all of those blacks, interloping white Yankees, gays and other minorities in Atlanta.

The Confederate history law is more of the same mindset. Indeed, its Senate sponsor, John Bulloch, hails from that part of the state 200 miles south and 200 years in the past from metropolitan Atlanta. It’s a part of the state where more than a few folks have folded sheets and hoods in their attics. I’m sure Bulloch has no intention of teaching about the legacy of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Ku Klux Klan, and the 5,000 or so incidents of terrorist lynchings by fans of Confederate history. That would be simply inconvenient and uncomfortable.

Racism has been a sure road to power for some Republicans. When former state Rep. Sue Burmeister (R-Augusta) introduced a requirement for photo voter registration in 2005, U.S. Justice Department lawyers reported that she said, “If there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud,” and “when black voters … are not paid to vote they do not go to the polls.”

Sadly for the GOP, being beholden to the “Old South” is about as viable a long-term political strategy as Germans who still believe a fellow named Adolf had some great ideas for running the world. Aunt Pittypat bemoaned: “Oh, dear. Yankees in Georgia. How did they ever get in?” Bad news for Pittypat (and Georgia legislators):

A lot of Yankees and a lot of Southerners (like me) who won’t tolerate racial politics and who most definitely don’t believe in honoring terrorists, whether named Osama bin Laden or Jefferson Davis, now live in Georgia.

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-Atlanta) chided his colleagues on the Confederate history month law – but his comments are equally applicable to much of what goes on at the Gold Dome. “These Southern states really still have not come back into the Union,” Brooks told the Los Angeles Times. “That is why it’s been so difficult over the years to get the states to recognize that flying the Confederate emblem on the flag, holding reenactments and pushing these calendar events as a matter of law is a reflection . . . of their Confederate mentality. … The Confederacy lost, and the majority of the American people will not accept these ideas about a renegade group of folks who decided they would overthrow the U.S. government.”

Put another way: Do un-American acts have a shelf-life? If certain acts were un-American less than 50 years ago, weren’t they un-American 150 years ago? If so, who would expect us to honor those acts today? Are these people terrorist sympathizers? Are they un-American?

John F. Sugg is executive editor of the Georgia Online News Service. [full bio]

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State and local lawmakers joined with activist groups Wednesday  in urging Gov. Sonny Perdue to call a special session of the Georgia General Assembly to deal with transportation funding issues.

“Come September, it’s going to be a regional walk to work day,” Benita West, president of Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 732, said  during a press conference at the Five Points Metro Atlanta Regional Transit Authority (MARTA) station.

West was one of many Wednesday to pile blame on state leaders for failing to take necessary action on transportation during the General Assembly session, which ended April 3.

Not only did legislation to create a new transit funding mechanism fail, lawmakers also left MARTA in a financial crisis.

Read more here.

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Just take the fiasco-on-top-of-fiasco that was the Georgia Legislature’s annual session: No solution to the state’s traffic mess. A sweetheart deal to make average residents (but not businesses) pay beforehand for Georgia Power’s new nuclear power plants. A mean-spirited refusal to change MARTA’s funding formula. Cutbacks at schools and colleges.  Shot-in-the-dark tax cuts for any well-connected special interest under the sun.

Transit? Forget about it. Clean energy? If coal’s good enough for Georgia Power, it’s good enough for your lungs. Education? We’ll send our kids to private schools — where they don’t have to learn about no stinkin’ evolution.

In South Carolina, the governor is refusing a federal gift of $700 million in stimulus money for schools just to make a point that the stimulus package — kind of may be working — amounts to “fiscal child abuse.” Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal — secure with his own state’s famously stellar economy — called the stimulus “irresponsible” and is refusing to accept federal aide for his own unemployed residents.

OK. We admit it, Mr. President. We chose these people to lead us, and there’s no sign that we’re going to stop electing people every bit as reasonable and wise as they are. There is only one conclusion to reach from all this: We Southerners just aren’t competent to run our own affairs. Please, save us; please, send the troops.

Install, a governor general. Kick our representatives out of Congress. Let wiser people from nice states like Oregon, Massachusets and Maryland set national policy. It was working the first time around, but the Feds didn’t stay long enough.

Please Mr. President, stop us before we screw things up really badly.

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The 39th day of this year’s legislative session — the one that was the setup for today’s final, frenzied effort — was one of those that the denizens of the Golden Dome will be talking about for months, or maybe years.

For someone who doesn’t work in the sausage factory of government, however, it isn’t obvious what made the day so significant. It was more about the machinery, really, than the sausage.

The dramatic high point of this penultimate legislative day came on a Wednesday afternoon vote on SB 200, the organizational chunk of the giant transportation package making its way through the process like a baby goat passing through the digestive track of a python.

In a break with precedence, if not strictly the rules, House Speaker Glenn Richardson kept the voting machine on at least four minutes while lieutenants worked the floor and flipped five votes which had at first been cast against the measure. Richardson cast the deciding vote for passage, 91-84.

Hallway denizens, young and old, shook their heads in wonder, and asked aloud if anyone could remember such a thing. Which no one could, although Tom Murphy, in his record tenure as speaker, might have done something similar at least once.

To outsiders, it must seem that the real significance of all this legislative drama is that Richardson, Gov. Sonny Perdue and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle are at last coalescing around a compromise state transportation strategy. Immediately after the House vote, the Senate named its conferees for the negotiations over the spending side of the package, and things on the surface at least seemed to be proceeding clickety-clack.

But it might not mean that at all. Wednesday’s vote could be the harbinger of some grand compromise to be delivered up today, or the setup for another train wreck tonight. (That’s if you consider leaving the DOT board as is to be a train wreck. Some don’t.) This could be Richardson getting on board with the governor and lieutenant governor, or he could be as one lobbyist put it, “using the House as a fiddle to play Casey with.”

For the rest of this story click here.

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Advocates of a balanced approach to getting people around metro Atlanta — which is really the only approach that could get things moving again in Atlanta — almost got a solution through the state Legislature last year. But they failed because of a single Senate vote. The measure would have allowed metro voters (and, for the matter, voters in other regions of the state) to decide whether or not to levy an extra penny sales tax on themselves for transportation improvements.

This year, Senate has approved the regional transportation tax option, but the House instead passed a much bigger statewide sale-tax hike. Because the overwhelming bulk of the money in that statewide tax hike would go toward roads, that option is supported by highway contractors, heavy equipment purveyors and other beneficiaries of sprawl.

So the two state chambers are at loggerheads with only two days — today and Friday — remaining in this year’s legislative session. A conference committee is tasked with coming up with a compromise, but it’s hard to imagine how that “compromise” could be written without settling on one approach or the other.

Says the Georgia Online News Service’s Jeanne Bonner:

Many business leaders say publicly they are cautiously optimistic that a compromise between Senate and House transportation bills can be reached by midnight on Friday when the current session of the General Assembly is expected to end.

But underneath a civil exterior, many say they are frustrated that the 11th hour failure to pass transportation legislation last year has not truly served as a cautionary tale for this year’s session. A transportation bill died on the floor of the Senate last year a little before midnight on the last day of the legislative session.

I personally think the statewide tax isn’t worth passing. It would result in a tremendous waste of money on roads, many of which are unneeded vast amounts of pork for rural areas.

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The AJC’s James Salzer does a nice job of covering a powerful lawmaker’s advice that school systems furlough teachers on their planning days to make up for the Georgia Legislature’s failure to meet their funding commitment to school systems.

Rep. Edward Lindsey (R-Atlanta), chairman of the House budget subcommittee on education, said school officials should consider furloughing teachers on “planning” or training days in hopes of saving the state up to $200 million.

That money would then be plowed back into school system budgets to help keep local officials from having to lay off teachers and other staffers.

“If we could give these (school) systems more flexibility, we could avoid some of these layoffs,” Lindsey said Tuesday during state budget hearings. “We would be remiss if we did not consider it.”

Salzer points out that teachers and school officials aren’t particularly excited about the idea. Lost in the discussion, however, is the bigger question: How will this affect students?

Won’t school plans be skimpier and not as well thought out if teachers aren’t paid to prepare them? Won’t good teachers find work elsewhere once they tire of being treated this way?

Meanwhile, legislators are more than happy to use the state’s stimulus money to give tax breaks to homeowners and are busy using poorly defined business tax cuts to hamstring the budget without even knowing the impact.

Lindsey’s balance-the-budget-on-the-backs-of-school-children idea isn’t a law. It’s a suggestion based on the fact that he hatcheted shcool budgets. It’s sort of a tacit admission that, no matter how you look at it, Republicans have pulled the schools’ budget noose so tight that they can only propose unreasonable ideas when asked how school systems are supposed to make these budgets.

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The only part of their proposal remotely designed to help create jobs is described by the AJC as “a $2,400 income tax credit for each unemployed person that businesses hire before July 2010 and keep on the job for at least 24 months.”

Now, I’m trying to imagine the business owner who would make a decision to hire an unemployed person (and to exclude from consideration any employed candidates) so that two years down the road, if that unemployed person stayed in that job, the business would get a $2,400 tax credit.

“It wouldn’t change how many jobs were created, it would only change who gets the jobs,” one economist was quoted as saying.“You are giving taxpayer money to things that would have happened anyway.” And the recession will be over by the time the businesses will get the credits anyway..

The unemployed-hire’s tax credit is actually just cover for the bill’s more substantive measure: A $1 billion giveaway to businesses, starting in 2012, with the phaseout of the state corporate income tax.

That’s unlikely to do anything to ease the recession (which hopefully will be long past by then), but it will make it much more difficult for future lawmakers to balance the budget without cutting big-ticket items like schools, health care and transportation.

Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, R-Canton, and House Majority Jerry Keen, R-St. Simons Island, are all gungho about it, so it seems likely to pass. Ah, well. That’s the way the sausage gets made in Georgia — sort of like the peanut butter.

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