On September 20, 1863, the Confederate Army of the Tennessee under General Braxton Bragg repelled Union forces under General William Rosencrans at the Battle of Chickamauga. After Gettysburg, Chickamauga is generally considered the second-bloodiest battle of the Civil War, with 18,500 Confederate casualties and 16,100 Union dead.
The first classes at Oglethorpe University under it’s current non-denominational charter were held on September 20, 1916. Happy 100th Anniversary to the Stormy Petrels. The university was originally affiliated with the Presbyterian Church and located in Midway, Georgia. In 1870, after a period of closure during the Civil War they relocated to the Atlanta area. Currently, a collection of more than 20,000 pieces of political campaign materials is on display at the Weltner Library on Oglethorpe’s campus.
On September 20, 1976, Playboy magazine released an interview with Jimmy Carter, then a candidate for President.
During the 1976 campaigns, a 13-foot tall smiling peanut sculpture was created by the Indiana Democratic Party for Carter’s presidential campaign.
Since 1976, the Jimmy Carter Smiling Peanut has held its position as the world’s second largest peanut, “the most photographed thing in Plains”, and one of the oddest monuments to a politician worldwide. Unfortunately, in 2000, a reckless driver crashed into the peanut, whose wooden hoops, chicken wire, and aluminum foil weren’t enough to keep it upright. After the accident, the peanut was moved from the Plains train depot to the Davis E-Z Shop in Plains, where it remains today. Although the peanut has been kept in pristine form, the fence surrounding it has become dilapidated as a result of over a decade of tourists posing for photos on it.
Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections
Governor Nathan Deal issued an Executive Order to remind gasoline vendors that state law prohibits price gouging during a state of emergency.
“Due to a leak in a critical fuel pipeline in Alabama, which is currently undergoing repairs, Georgia and other states have experienced interruptions in motor fuel supply,” Deal said. “There have been recent reports that wholesale and retail gas prices have substantially increased in some markets. In order to remedy this, I’ve issued an executive order reiterating the state law prohibiting price gouging. In addition to this, I’ve sought and received a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency as well as lifted operating regulations for commercial truck drivers hauling motor fuel. I urge the public to maintain regular consumption levels and travel schedules in order to reduce further interruption in fuel supply.”
Georgia Code Section 10-1-393.4 reads in part:
(a) It shall be an unlawful, unfair, and deceptive trade practice for any person, firm, or corporation doing business in any area in which a state of emergency, as such term is defined in Code Section 38-3-3, has been declared, for so long as such state of emergency exists, to sell or offer for sale at retail any goods or services identified by the Governor in the declaration of the state of emergency necessary to preserve, protect, or sustain the life, health, or safety of persons or their property at a price higher than the price at which such goods were sold or offered for sale immediately prior to the declaration of a state of emergency; provided, however, that such price may be increased only in an amount which accurately reflects an increase in cost of the goods or services to the person selling the goods or services or an increase in the cost of transporting the goods or services into the area. [Emphasis added.]
Gov. Deal also attended the dedication of Coleman Middle School in Duluth, named in honor of State Rep. Brooks Coleman.
Coleman is named after Brooks Coleman, a former teacher and administrator in GCPS, and in his 12th term as a state representative in the Georgia legislature. It’s Gwinnett County Public Schools’ signature STEAM school, which means it focuses on science, technology, engineering, arts and math. It’s on Main Street and in the same building as the former Duluth Middle School.
During his tenure in the legislature, Coleman has served on numerous committees and has chaired the Education Committee. His ties to the Duluth community run deep, including being the Voice of the Wildcats at Duluth High football games and his work with the Duluth Fall Festival.
Republican John Watson is considering a run for Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, according to the AJC Political Insider.
Watson, a former chief of staff to Gov. Sonny Perdue and adviser to Sen. David Perdue, said he is “taking a serious look at the race” to succeed John Padgett, who will not run for another term next year.
“I have had the opportunity to work alongside extraordinary people to help see Georgia go from blue to red,” said Watson. “And I don’t think that Republicans in the future can simply cross their fingers and hope for continued Republican dominance. That’s why I want to be involved in the future.”
Michael McNeely, who is now the party’s vice-chair, said earlier this month he was running for the top spot. Other possible contenders include former Cobb GOP chair Scott Johnson, state GOP treasurer Mansell McCord, ex-Congressional candidate Martha Zoller, tea party guru Julianne Thompson and DeKalb attorney Alex Johnson.
David Lightman of McClatchy News looks into the crosstabs of a poll by Monmouth University and finds a deeply polarized electorate in Georgia.
–Urban/elsewhere. Clinton’s up 20 in the greater Atlanta area. Trump’s up 18 in the rest of the state.
–Black voters. Clinton 88, Trump 4.
–White Voters. Trump 66, Clinton 20.
–White voters with no college degree. Trump 78, Clinton 10.
–White voters over 50. Trump 68, Clinton 23.
–White voters under 50. Trump 63, Clinton 16, Libertarian Gary Johnson 16.
“There has been some talk of Georgia becoming part of a demographic realignment in presidential politics. However, Clinton is not quite making the needed inroads among young white voters to take the lead here,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, in a news release.
The DeKalb County Board of Education voted to oppose the Opportunity School Board Amendment on the November ballot.
In DeKalb, 26 of the district’s schools are on the state’s list of those considered failing.
Board chairman Melvin Johnson, reading a joint board statement, said local control and community involvement are the best medicine for improving academic achievement.
“We believe it is not only wrong, but risky to give up local control to a new state bureaucracy,” Johnson said, adding the board “strongly believes the answer to improved academic outcomes and achievement is in the classroom and school house.”
Board member Stan Jester, the lone vote against the district statement, said the district should be prepared in case the in-house efforts don’t succeed in addressing years of damage.
“If this does not work for us, what’s the plan?” he asked. “Whether you like OSD or not, what’s the plan if we can’t improve academic achievement?”
The Faith & Freedom Coalition of Georgia has printed 2016 voter guides and is asking for assistance in distributing them. If you’d like to share the FFC guides with your friends and neighbors, contact FFC Georgia Executive Director Dave Baker via email to dbaker [at] ffcoalition [dot] com or via their Facebook page.
Marietta and Cobb County Boards of Education are considering a 5-year Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax projected to raise $750 million.
State Rep. Howard Maxwell presents the four Amendments to the Georgia Constitution that voters will weigh-in on in November.
Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington, Jr. was arrested on allegations of family violence.
Local news media says a police report states Arrington became angry when his wife Kristen Reed Arrington threatened to call a woman in his phone.
His wife told police they wrestled over the phone as he pushed her to the ground, dragged her along the floor and twisted her arm behind her back.
Arrington Jr. was released from the Fulton County Jail on a $2,000 bond. He is the District 5 commissioner of Fulton.
The Fulton County Board of Assessors voted to fire Chief Appraiser David Fitzgibbon after an error in calculating property tax bills by a vendor.
Members of the county board of commissioners have criticized the error and felt Fitzgibbon was at least partly responsible for it. At an August Fulton Board of Commissioners meeting, District 2 Commissioner Bob Ellis expressed concern about Fitzgibbon and asked for more accountability, collaboration and communication from the tax assessors’ office in the future.
“While it appears that the tax assessor’s office has finally provided tax digests to all jurisdictions, this year’s two-month delay is totally unacceptable,” Ellis said. “It has created unnecessary complications and distractions for many local governments. The delay, as well as other issues that have emerged, highlight the need for greater accountability from the Fulton County Tax Assessor’s Office.
Conservation groups are asking to file a friend of the court brief to assess effects on the environments in the Georgia-Florida water litigation.
“The court’s decision here will directly determine the fate of the Apalachicola River watershed and may well establish important precedent for future interstate water disputes that inevitably will arise in the face of growing human populations, a changing climate regime, and myriad federal and state legal mandates to protect ecosystem health,” the organizations stated in a court document filed Thursday.
The City of Warner Robins has hired a firm to study the costs and fees associated with providing water and sewer service.
Cherokee County Commissioners will hold a public hearing tonight on the FY 2017 budget, which will add up to 13 full-time employees while coming in $13 million under the FY 2016 budget.
“The decrease is primarily to the bond refunding that took place earlier this year so we had to transfer those funds to pay those bonds,” county manager Jerry Cooper said at the Sept. 6 work session. “That is the primary factor for the decrease in the budget.”
One of the 13 new jobs proposed for the county is a staff attorney, a move designed to cut legal costs.
“The addition of the staff attorney position will lessen the county’s spending on outside legal services significantly as well as allow even greater oversight into compliance and legal issues while offering a readily available resource to the county manager, agency directors and staff when needed,” Cooper said.
A $75 million solar farm to provide electricity to Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base opened Monday.
The plant, built in partnership with Georgia Power, is supposed to have been completed in December, but the 133,000 solar panels are in place well ahead of schedule, early enough for base commander Capt. James Jenks to wield some of the oversize scissors. Jenks moves on to a new duty assignment in Hawaii at the end of September.
To illustrate the size, Jenks said, it’s big enough for two Disney’s Magic Kingdoms, but with 17,000 acres, Kings Bay has room to spare.
He hinted to Georgia Power officials, “We have some room for expansion.”
The solar plant provides energy security for Kings Bay by providing “redundancy inside our fence line,” he said.
As base commander, one of the bills he approved each month was the $1 million power bill, and Kings Bay is working to reduce that by replacing all lights with more efficient LED lights and replacing the 1980s era heating and air-conditioning systems with more up-to-date technology, he said.
The Georgia Department of Education held a meeting in Columbus to receive citizen input on implementing federal education law.
“We know that our children are very wide and diverse, and our education needs to be wide and diverse,” Georgia Superintendent Richard Woods told the crowd. “We can put not only rigor with it, but also relevance.”
Woods urges stakeholders to take advantage of the flexibility in the new federal law.
“If we create and have the same model,” he said, “then we’ve really wasted a lot of time.”
The Newnan Times-Herald editorial page has become part of my daily reading since Walter Jones took over as Publisher. Their editorial on Constitution Day is worth reading, and if you know a young student, maybe high school or college, would be a great thing to pass along.
Today is the birthday of the Constitution, an amazing political document rightly venerated around the world. But it’s not a “living document.” It’s a contract.
A contract is a binding agreement between two parties, in this case, the government and the people or us. Imagine if your bank simply decided on its own to change the terms of your mortgage or the person you bought your lot from announced you could no longer use your back yard.
The terms of contracts only change by mutual consent. Most, like the Constitution, spell out the ways they can be changed. But it’s not a contract if one side tries to alter things midstream.
So, as we celebrate Constitution Day today, remember why we read the writings of our Founding Fathers, like The Federalist Papers. It’s to be clear on the understanding of those who agreed to the contract on our behalf. What did “domestic tranquility” and “common defense” mean at that time? Especially important is the meaning of the Bill of Rights where most of the controversy resides, like the right to free speech, to bear arms, protection from cruel and unusual punishment, and powers retained by the states.
If a majority of Americans conclude that the reasoning in 1897 is no longer applicable because of changing mores or technology, then we have a duty to propose an update and vote to ratify it. That has been done 27 times, so it’s not impractical, but it is difficult – yet fair.
I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the entirety of it. And you might also pass it along to any elected officias you know.
Uber launches in Columbus today, with Mayor Tomlinson set for the first ride.
In 2015, the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation that to allow Uber to move into Georgia markets through statewide regulation. The company must purchase a local business license in order to operate, but that is the extent of the local control, Goodwin said.
Uber is currently operating in the Atlanta, Athens, Macon and Savannah markets in Georgia. Last month, Uber launched in Auburn, Ala.
The Mercer School of Medicine is working on the next generation of healthcare professionals with a summer program for high school students from rural areas.
“We’re really trying to look for ways to build up our applicant pool from those areas because those are the kids we want,” Sumner said. “We need to develop a farm team.”
“Farm team” takes added meaning when you consider the audience of teenagers comes from 4-H Clubs in southeast Georgia. The project is a first for Mercer and the state 4-H organization – giving rural kids a taste of what it’s like to be in medical school. The 4-Hers took turns simulating doctor-patient conversations and learning how to test a reflex.
Rural Georgia has a doctor problem. A recent study by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute finds two-thirds of the state’s counties don’t have enough doctors and most of those counties are rural.
Laura Harker, a health care policy analyst for the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, appreciated the Mercer-4-H recruitment effort. But Harker said that there are large forces at work in rural areas that make attracting new doctors difficult.
“It’s really important to focus on the current issues with rural hospitals and clinics that they’re facing, with having to care for so many people living in poverty or who are uninsured and not able to pay for care,” she said.
That situation can lead to rural hospitals struggling to balance their budgets. And those shaky hospital financial conditions can make small towns unattractive to prospective doctors.
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