President elect Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, DC on February 23, 1861.
On February 23, 1945, United States Marines raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the Pacific island Iwo Jima.
This first flag-raising was photographed by Marine photographer Sgt. Louis R. Lowery. On Lowery’s way down Mt. Suribachi, he ran into AP photographer Joe Rosenthal and two other Marine photographers, PFC Bob Campbell and PFC Bill Genaust, who was shooting movies, informing them that the flag-raising they were looking for had already occurred, but encouraging them to check out the view from the top of the hill. The three men continued up the volcano.
Once atop Mt. Suribachi, Rosenthal attempted but was unable to find the soldiers involved in the first flag-raising, deciding instead to photograph the second flag-raising, which featured a much bigger and more photogenic Stars and Stripes. Lowery’s film was sent back to military headquarters for processing via ordinary army post–and took a month to arrive. Rosenthal’s film was sent by seaplane to Guam, and sent from there via radio-photo to the United States. The photograph so impressed President Roosevelt that he ordered the men pictured in it to return home for a publicity tour. Rosenthal later won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, but for years was forced to deny erroneous reports that he personally staged the second flag-raising and attempted to pass it off as the original.
Although the famous photograph has long led people to believe that the flag-raising was a turning point in the fight for Iwo Jima, vicious fighting to control the island actually continued for 31 more days.
Today, the first and second flags flown atop Mt. Suribachi are held at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia.
On February 23, 1954, the first children in the U.S. were inoculated against polio using a vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.
Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections
The Columbia County Board of Education has declined so far to ban the book “To Kill a Mockingbird,” after a parent requested it. From WRDW:
At Tuesday’s meeting, Columbia County school officials voted not to take any action on “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
It comes after a mom complains about the book “To Kill a Mockingbird.” She says she wants it banned from schools for its racial themes and language.
In the official appeal, the mom makes it clear she thinks the book has no academic or literary value to students.
The anonymous complaint claims the theme of the book is “To humiliate the African American race and the language. Emmet Till also identify with the theme.”
“There is so much positive that we can teach. When we look at the destructive behaviors of our past. Especially when we have the opportunity to teach our kids to have those conversations,” said Lori Van Lenten, Columbia County mom and educator.
WRDW also looked at the process for addressing parent requests:
An appeal like the one for Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” does not happen often. But when it does, Columbia County has a process in place.
It’s a process that also applies to books in school libraries. School leaders also clarified their gender equity policy. The school board defines gender as the sex assigned at birth, which lines up with Georgia High School Association standards.
“We read the book in its entirety, and we offer the parent an opportunity to come in and present their concerns to us. We ask a teacher to come in and share how it’s taught in the classroom, and then following that, we have some discussion,” said Michele Sherman, associate superintendent, CCSD.
The committee follows an outline, judging if the book in question is relevant, appropriate, of the highest qualities, and free of vulgarity. In this case, it was the book’s relevance that sealed the deal.
“The teacher did an excellent job showing how she used it in her classroom and gave us insight into really the numerous standards that she can teach using this particular novel,” she said.
Sherman encourages parents to talk to teachers about what’s in any book before appealing.
Under the Gold Dome Today –Committee Work Day
8:00 AM HOUSE AGRICULTURE AND CONSUMER AFFAIRS COMMITTEE 406 CLOB HYBRID
8:00 AM HOUSE Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee 341 CAP HYBRID
9:00 AM HOUSE Appropriations Education Subcommittee 606 CLOB HYBRID
9:00 AM HOUSE Appropriations General Government Subcommittee 415 CLOB
9:00 AM HOUSE CANCELED Education Academic Innovation Subcommittee 132 CAP HYBRID
9:00 AM HOUSE Education Academic Support Subcommittee 132 CAP HYBRID
9:00 AM Senate Judiciary Committee 307 CLOB
10:00 AM HOUSE Public Safety & Homeland Security Subcommittee B 406 CLOB HYBRID
10:00 AM EDUCATION COMMITTEE 132 CAP HYBRID
10:00 AM Senate Economic Development and Tourism Committee 450 CAP
10:30 AM HOUSE MOTOR VEHICLES COMMITTEE 403 CAP HYBRID
11:00 AM HOUSE PUBLIC SAFETY & HOMELAND SECURITY COMMITTEE 406 CLOB HYBRID
11:00 AM HOUSE Appropriations Higher Education Subcommittee 606 CLOB HYBRID
11:30 AM HOUSE Judiciary Non-Civil Smith Subcommittee 403 CAP
12:00 PM HOUSE HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES COMMITTEE 506 CLOB HYBRID
1:00 PM HOUSE HIGHER EDUCATION COMMITTEE 606 CLOB HYBRID
1:00 PM HOUSE GAME, FISH, & PARKS COMMITTEE 406 CLOB
1:00 PM HOUSE Appropriations Health Sub Committee 341 CAP HYBRID
1:00 PM Senate Health and Human Services Committee 450 CAP
1:00 PM Senate Natural Resources and Environment Committee – canceled 307 CLOB
1:30 PM HOUSE Ways & Means Ad Valorem Subcommittee 403 CAP HYBRID
2:00 PM HOUSE Ways & Means Income Tax Subcommittee 403 CAP HYBRID
2:00 PM HOUSE GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE 406 CLOB HYBRID
2:00 PM Senate Retirement Committee 310 CLOB
2:00 PM Senate Education and Youth Committee 307 CLOB
2:30 PM HOUSE Ways & Means Tax Revision Subcommittee 403 CAP HYBRID
3:00 PM HOUSE Appropriations Human Resources Subcommittee 406 CLOB HYBRID
3:00 PM HOUSE JUDICIARY NON-CIVIL COMMITTEE 132 CAP HYBRID
3:00 PM HOUSE Appropriations Public Safety Subcommittee 341 CAP HYBRID
3:00 PM HOUSE Special Committee on Access to Quality Health Care 606 CLOB HYBRID
3:00 PM HOUSE Low THC Subcommittee of Regulated Industries 506 CLOB HYBRID
3:00 PM Senate Finance Committee Mezz 1
4:00 PM Senate Transportation Committee 450 CAP
Governor Brian Kemp announced $422 million in sewer and water grants to local governments, according to the AJC.
The awards came three weeks after Kemp announced $408 million in COVID-19 relief funding would go to expand high-speed internet service in the state to over 132,000 homes and businesses that currently lack access.
The money is part of the $4.8 billion the state is expected to receive in federal relief money that congressional Democrats approved a year ago over GOP opposition.
Most of the water and sewer grants would go to areas outside metro Atlanta, although Kemp included awards for Douglas, Forsyth and Gwinnett counties and the city of Smyrna.
“Today we are taking another significant step forward when it comes to Georgia’s infrastructure,” Kemp told a crowd at the Capitol while announcing the grants. “Certain infrastructure that doesn’t always receive a lot of attention but that we rely on every single day.”
Governor Kemp signed Senate Bill 369 making Gwinnett County Board of Education elections nonpartisan, according to the Gwinnett Daily Post.
Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation that moves the county’s school board to nonpartisan elections into law on Tuesday morning. The bill goes into effect immediately, which means school board members will be voted into office in one election — unless there is a runoff, of course.
And, since state law stipulates that county-level nonpartisan races be held in conjunction with the party primaries, the school board elections will be held in May.
The first Gwinnett County school board seats to be elected through nonpartisan elections will be Districts 2 and 4, which are up for election this year. District 4 will be an open race due to board member Everton Blair’s decision to run for state school superintendent rather than seek re-election to his current seat.
District 2 is expected to at least be a contest between board member Steve Knudsen and parent Michael Rudnick.
The vast majority of school boards in Georgia are already elected through nonpartisan elections, but there are several that still hold partisan elections.
Broadband expansion to rural Georgia is coming and results partly from inadvertant bipartisanship, according to the AJC.
The idea of bringing internet service to vast, disconnected swaths of rural Georgia seemed like a laudable — but unreachable — goal.
Who would pay the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost to build internet lines in sparsely populated areas with few customers?
An inadvertently bipartisan effort recently found a big part of the answer. Democrats in Congress provided funding for Georgia Republicans’ plans to wire one-third of the state’s locations that lack online access.
The result is $408 million for Georgia internet construction from coronavirus relief money that will reach 183,600 residential and business locations, distributed through a series of state laws passed during the past four years.
House Bill 500 by State Rep. James Burchett (R-Waycross) called the Georgia Agribusiness and Rural Jobs Act (GARJA), passed the State House according to the Capitol Beat News Service.
The Georgia Agribusiness and Rural Jobs Act (GARJA), which cleared the House 153-11 and now moves to the state Senate, would provide $100 million in tax credits to companies in rural areas of the state with fewer than 250 employees, starting Aug. 1.
“This gives rural agricultural businesses another opportunity to borrow money,” said Rep. James Burchett, R-Waycross, the bill’s chief sponsor.
“In this state, small and mid-size family farmers are having to overcome obstacles that are vastly different from what we grew up with,” added Rep. Winfred Dukes, D-Albany.
The House voted 153-11 for House Bill 500, which would provide a second round of tax-credit funding for the program.
The measure’s sponsor, Rep. James Burchett, R-Waycross, told colleagues recently, “In my district, this has been a wildly successful program,” including keeping open a small bag company that needed investment capital.
But during debate in the House on Tuesday, state Rep. Matthew Wilson, D-Atlanta, said the legislation didn’t include a means to determine whether the program is a cost-effective way of meeting its promise to create and retain rural jobs.
“We don’t have enough incentives for rural Georgia,” said Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, a backer of the bill and one of the most proficient authors of tax break bills in the General Assembly.
House Ways and Means Chairman Shaw Blackmon, a Republican from Bonaire and co-sponsor of the bill, said: “We often incentivize private-sector investment in Georgia to expand and grow our economy. This happens to do so specifically in our rural Georgia counties where growth has been much harder to come by.”
State Senator Chuck Hufstetler (R-Rome) has a proposal to reduce the cost of new nuclear reactors currently being built, according to the Capitol Beat News Service.
Allowing Georgia Power to finance the Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion and other large projects through ratepayer-backed bonds could save customers hundreds of millions of dollars, supporters told a state Senate committee Tuesday.
But an executive with the Atlanta-based utility said such securitized bonds are risky and are typically reserved only for unexpected costs.
Senate Bill 421 would authorize Georgia Power to pursue securitized bond financing to recover some of the costs of the Vogtle project as well as what Georgia Power is spending to retire its fleet of coal-burning power plants and clean up the ash ponds surrounding those plants.
Securitized bonds would reduce interest rates compared to traditional bond financing, yielding utility customers huge savings, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Hufstetler, R-Rome, told members of the Senate Committee on Regulated Industries and Utilities. Twenty-two states have adopted laws allowing securitized bonds, Hufstetler said.
Representatives of both the state’s largest power customers – the Georgia Association of Manufacturers – and residential ratepayers testified in favor of Hufstetler’s bill.
Committee Chairman Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, said he wants to hear from members of the PSC on Hufstetler’s bill before voting on it.
The Georgia State Senate passed Senate Bill 449, creating a “Parents Bill of Rights,” according to the AJC.
The Georgia Senate voted 33-21 Tuesday for legislation that further opens the window into public school classrooms, making it easier for parents to get copies of instructional materials.
Critics call Senate Bill 449 invasive and an unnecessary demand on teachers’ time. But proponents, including Gov. Brian Kemp, say parents have every right to see what their children are being taught in school.
The bill would allow parents to opt their children out of sex education courses, as well as from audio recordings, photographs and videos. It also enforces parents’ authority to review all instructional materials and school records about their child.
The legislation provides a deadline of three to 30 days for schools to abide by parent requests, and an appeals process when schools refuse. Parents could appeal to the local school board and then to the State Board of Education.
From the Capitol Beat News Service via the Augusta Chronicle:
Senate Democrats argued the legislation is unnecessary because parents already can play a role in their children’s education if they choose to. “Parents are invited to back-to-school nights and parent-teacher conferences,” said Sen. Elena Parent, D-Atlanta. “They can attend school board meetings and many do. They can elect school board members.”
The bill would create an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers when they should be working together, Parent said.
“This bill creates a process for investigation and appeals … document production efforts that contribute to an atmosphere of censorship and overburdening of teachers,” she said.
Parent predicted the bill would worsen an already troublesome shortage of teachers in Georgia. Supporters countered that a Parents’ Bill of Rights has become necessary in Georgia because in-home instruction during the coronavirus pandemic has shown parents what their children are learning that, in some cases, conflicts with their values.
From the Associated Press via AccessWDUN.
Conservative ferment over how schools teach about race, sexual orientation and other subjects is increasingly leading to calls for transparency mandates, like the one envisioned in the measure. Other bills pending in Georgia would allow parents to ask for “inappropriate” materials to be removed, ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” on race and prohibit transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.
“I believe that parents have a fundamental right in deciding what your children are taught in the classroom,” said Sen. Clint Dixon, a Buford Republican and Kemp floor leader.
An educational lobbying group killed their own legislation through direct mail, according to the AJC.
A national advocacy group promoting school vouchers bombarded conservative Georgia voters with glossy mailers tying their Republican state legislator to Stacey Abrams and other “radical left” figures. It backfired in spectacular fashion.
Just days after the American Federation for Children financed the mailers in about 16 Republican-controlled legislative districts, House Speaker David Ralston told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the voucher proposal the group sought to pass is dead for the year.
“I am livid. I’ve been around politics for a long time, but this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my career and one of the most deceitful,” Ralston said. “These are people we have tried to help over the years, and they turned to attack us very viciously.” Ralston added: “That voucher legislation will not move at all in the Georgia House of Representatives this year, period.”
Each mailer featured images of Abrams, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris above a picture of the state lawmaker.
“The radical left want to cancel your right to choose your child’s school,” it read, asking recipients to tell their representative to “stand up to them.”
State Rep. Carl Gilliard (D-Garden City) says Georgia needs more hate crimes legislation, according to WSAV.
The three men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery are already serving life sentences for murder. Tuesday, justice continued when the trio was found guilty at the federal hate crimes trial.
“They were convicted in the previous trial and to come back on a federal level and to be convicted Georgia has truly done the right thing,” says Georgia State Representative Carl Gilliard.
Representative Carl Gilliard pushed for a hate crimes bill in the state before Arbery’s murder. Gilliard believes the publicity of his death is what sparked the passage of the bill in June, 2020.
“Now what has happened is that the justice system has given justice to not just the Ahmaud Arbery family but to the nation,” said Gilliard. “If we’re truly a State that’s too busy to hate we have to look at the laws and the power of the pen and to be able to use those laws to say never again.”
“What happened to Ahmaud Arbery was a lynching. And so we are filing the original 33 bill which deals with the cold cases, lynching cases in Georgia,” says Gilliard. “From the 1800s to up until the current 1900s.”
United States Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Atlanta) has introduced federal legislation to address mental health issues, according to the Ledger-Enquirer.
Warnock toured Dorothy Height Elementary School and participated in a 30-minute roundtable discussion with Muscogee County School District staff members and a student representing the city’s high schools. Warnock said his legislation aims at addressing the mental health crisis facing the state and the nation, and that children should be at the center of the conversation.
“This (COVID-19) pandemic has both unveiled and exacerbated long-standing mental health issues,” Warnock said. “Georgia is the number four state in terms of mental health needs, and we’re near the bottom in terms of mental health care access. So, that’s a recipe for a lot of trauma going untreated.
Warnock’s legislative package includes five pieces of legislation.
Muscogee County provides mental health services in seven of its 54 schools, and Warnock’s legislation could help the district expand its efforts, said Kenya Gilmore, the district’s director of prevention and intervention practices. “We just don’t have enough local providers to do that,” she said. “We’re running into issues, even with the providers that we have not being able to retain the current mental health councilors and social workers that they have.”
“Mental health care is health care, and part of the problem is when we set up this false divide,” Warnock said. “We’re never going to be able to fully address the crisis we are facing until we start placing the same value on mental health.”
United States Senator Jon Ossoff (D-Atlanta) announced $15 million dollars for Rome transit, according to the Rome News Tribune.
Those funds will go to a city transit system that’s in the process of reinventing itself, following a federal audit in 2019 that forced Rome City Schools to provide its own bus system after contracting with the Rome Transit Department for 35 years.
Speaking with reporters after a discussion with local officials at the Rome Area History Center, Ossoff announced the allocation and said he recognizes the importance of transit in smaller and rural communities.
Ed Perry announced he will run for State Senate District 13, according to the Valdosta Daily Times.
“Perry has deep roots in the district where he is a conservative small business owner, decorated veteran and longtime community leader,” according to a statement released by his campaign. “He is running to defend South Georgia’s way of life against the overreach of Atlanta.”
“For far too long South Georgia has been ignored and taken for granted. Now more than ever, District 13 needs a fighter who will stand up for our way of life,” Perry said. “Whether it’s the radical Atlanta special interests trying to impose their way of life onto South Georgia or the attempted leftist indoctrination of our children we see in our schools, it’s past time to stand up and say enough. I’m not running to be a compromise candidate or support whatever way the wind blows on a particular issue. I’m running because I am going to fight for our home and preserve it for generations to come.”
He served South Georgia on the Nashville City Council as mayor pro tem. He also served as a state representative in the Georgia General Assembly and as a state senator in the Georgia Senate.
The Columbus area Fraternal Order of Police members have low confidence in their Police Chief, according to the Ledger-Enquirer.
Augusta Commissioners named Central Services Director Takiyah Douse as interim City Manager, according to WJBF.
Rebels Opponents of the Death Star Spaceport Camden are asking about the source of a text message purporting to be a survey, according to The Brunswick News.
The question sent to residents asked the following question: “Knowing that Spaceport Camden will generate economic investment & support local schools, do you support the spaceport project. Reply: Yes No.”
So many people received the text message that the Camden County Sheriff’s Office posted this response Tuesday on its Facebook page:
“We have been advised our non-emergency line was given to discuss political matters regarding Spaceport Camden; however, the number listed is the administrative office. The Camden County Sheriff’s Office will remain neutral on this political issue; therefore this number should not be called for opinions regarding Spaceport. Before you reach an opinion on this matter, make sure you understand what the ballot is asking and if you need clarification, please contact the Voter’s Registration Office.”
Capt. Larry Bruce, public information officer for the Camden County Sheriff’s Office, said his office is neutral in the debate over the spaceport. Bruce said it’s unclear how the message senders got the contact information to send the texts.
“This is putting the Sheriff’s Office in a position it shouldn’t be in,” he said. “We put a posting stating the Sheriff’s Office is neutral in this debate.”
The Long County Health Department is offering $50 gift cards for the first 50 people who receive the COVID-19 vaccine at a vax drive, according to WTOC.
Statesboro Mayor Jonathan McCollar delivered his State of the City address, according to WTOC.
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