Savannah, Georgia was captured by British troops on December 29, 1778.
The American Colonization Society was organized in Washington, DC on December 28, 1816 to return African-Americans to Africa, with William Harris Crawford, the first Georgian to run for President (1816 and 1824) as a founding member. In 1822, the American Colonization Society founded a colony on the West coast of Africa that would later become Liberia.
The City of Atlanta was re-incorporated on December 29, 1847, changing from a “town” to a “city,” a meaningless distinction, though the date is often cited as the creation of Atlanta.
Good News and Bad News
Last week, Tamara Paquette ran out of gas somewhere in South Georgia on the way to her home in Florida. Luckily for her, Georgia State Patrol officer Sergeant Elbert Slappey was there to help.
[T]he voice recorder, and AAA was going to be four hours before they came to get me.
Things appeared they were just not going to go my way tonight.
Then, I saw blue lights on the horizon, turn on, drive towards me, turn around, then pull up behind. With all the reports I read of cops shooting unarmed people, my stomach turned. I immediately rolled down my window, held my hands on the steering wheel and held the cell phone high enough so I would not be seen as a threat.
I had no clue where I was except for the little blue GPS dot. The officer took control of the conversation, on speakerphone, with the painfully polite AAA dispatcher, in Malaysia. It would be about 4 hours, and even though Sergeant slappy said he would wait behind me, 4 hours is too much. He asked me to get in his car and we’ll go to the gas station.
Arriving at the gas station, a lady named Rachel, loan me the gas can. I filled it. We got back in the car, and when it was time to put the gas in the dead rental car, Sergeant Slappy did the honours. He didn’t want me to get gas all over because the bottle was leaking like crazy. Instead, he managed it, got covered in petrol, wiped his hands on a rag, then escourted me to the gas station to make sure I made it there safely.
It’s great to be able to share a good story about the folks who risk their lives on the roads and streets of Georgia. Thanks to Sergeant Slappey.
Cristy Ethridge, a single mother in Henry County had also been having car trouble and will be happy to put those problems in her rear view mirror.
She had owned the 1996 Ford Explorer for 18 years, and said she had problems with the car for most of that time.
Every fluid leaked, the car overheated and the transmission was shot, Ethridge said.
“Everything was leaking in my garage. We’re always changing out cardboard boxes under the car to catch the oils,” said Ethridge.
For all intents and purposes, the car was a money pit, using money she didn’t have.
The single mother of two teenagers said she lost her job last year. She was unemployed for a year before becoming an accounts manager at a pest control company in August.
The family has not been on a vacation in more than 11 years, Ethridge said, because her car couldn’t make it out of Henry County.
On Dec. 19, Ethridge’s 15-year-old daughter Avery was home from school and noticed a white SUV in their driveway. When her brother Evan got home, he noticed a red bow on the hood.
The teens called their mom at work to tell her about the car.
“I told them to go check it out. Inside, they found a note that said “Merry Christmas Cristy” and there were the keys and a title,” Ethridge said.
Ethridge says at first she could not believe it, but the longer it sat there, the more it started to sink in. The one thing that was missing was a name.
“The Scripture that comes to mind is Matthew 6: 1-4 that says when you do good deeds for people you’re supposed to do them in secrecy,” Ethridge said.
“It’s a true blessing,” said Ethridge, who credits her faith in God for helping her through the hardest of times. “It means so much more than my words can ever even express. I’m a very faithful person. I had lost my job and I was out of work for a year, but I knew that I’d be taken care of. I know that God has a plan for me. I know that everything happens for a reason and I truly believe that.”
If you’d like to be part of a belated Christmas miracle for another single mom who needs reliable transportation, click here and make an online donation. More than $4000 has already been raised.
The matriarch of Claxton Bakery, Mrs. Delorease Middleton Parker has passed away. For many people, Claxton Fruit Cake is the only brand worth buying.
A study by the Urban Institute says that Atlanta has the largest commercial sex economy in the nation, with a 2007 value approximated at $290 million.
Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens will speak to the Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST) Law Enforcement Training session on Jan. 14, 1-3 p.m., in the Atlanta Administration and Conference Center (AACC) Auditorium on Mercer University’s Macon Campus as part of Mercer’s observance of Human Sex Trafficking Awareness and Prevention Week on the Cecil B. Day Graduate and Professional Campus Jan. 11-16.
The Hancock County Courthouse, which burned nearly five months ago, will be rebuilt with the same outside appearance, but a more efficient interior.
As an avid visitor to Georgia’s Historic Courthouses, part of the story is particularly interesting to me. From the Macon Telegraph,
Carter Watkins Associates Architects Inc., from the city of Monroe, will draw the blueprints and manage the construction site.
Joe Watkins, co-owner of the architectural firm, said the county’s insurance will pay the total cost of $6.6 million to rebuild the courthouse.
Carter Watkins Associates has completed restoration work on 21 courthouses across the state.
And it has a connection to the Hancock County Courthouse.
“The weird part about it is we got our start at the Walton County Courthouse in Monroe, Georgia, when we first started our firm, and it’s identical to the Hancock County Courthouse,” Watkins said.
The Walton County Courthouse was gutted for renovations in the 1960s, Watkins said. Then, about 20 years ago, the firm was tasked with getting the courthouse back to the way it was before the renovation.
So employees traveled to Hancock County, where “the sister courthouse” was.
“We hand-documented everything (and) we hand-drew everything,” Watkins said. “We copied Sparta identically to put (the Walton County Courthouse) back together. … Now we’re using Walton to restore Hancock, so we’re coming full circle.”
I have been told by a Walton County resident that when their courthouse was being rebuilt, they contacted the manufacturer of the wooden trim, which was still in business, to ask if they had any information about the original trim. Unexpectedly, the firm not only had information, but they also had the wood-cutting knives that were used in the original, and were then used to cut new trim for the renovation.
Molly Ball writes in The Atlantic, about a kinder and gentler Erick Erickson.
In August, he wrote, “I increasingly find conflict between my faith and some conservative discourse.” He cited the right-wing furor over undocumented minors, Ebola, and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Shortly after I visited him in Georgia, he announced that he had been accepted to the Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta, to pursue—part-time, between radio broadcasts—a master’s degree in biblical studies.
He told me about a man who had come up to him to rant about immigrants ruining schools and neighborhoods. “I’m like, ‘Why are you so angry?’ ” He thinks conservatives suffer from a persecution complex. “I hear it in radio. I see it in comments at RedState and in e-mail and on Twitter. When you as a conservative go out there and pound your fist on the table and say, ‘They’re coming to get me,’ who wants to say, ‘Yeah, I’m coming to your side’? I mean, be happy!”
Don’t you get angry?, I asked. Well, sure, he said: at Republicans, for not keeping their promises; at the president, for not doing his job; at the political system. But he explained that he was pointing to something more pervasive. “What I mean is that conservatives are in a constant state of hair-on-fire, yelling anger,” he said—a toxic mind-set that prevents them from seeing straight. “That anger has spread outside the normal bounds of political issues into everything” from the food they eat to the movies they watch.
In this year’s gubernatorial election, Governor Deal made strong overtures to Jewish voters, and now his pollster, John McLaughlin, will be working with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Republican strategist John McLaughlin will advise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign ahead of the March 17 election.
McLaughlin has strategized for Netanyahu and Likud in the past.
He will work together with Netanyahu’s Israeli strategist Aron Shaviv in the current race, Likud sources said Tuesday.
Presidential Race 2016
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush soared in the polls of the 2016 Republican Presidential Primary, primarily because his name was in the news a lot after he announced he is giving serious consideration to the race.
He takes nearly one-quarter — 23% — of Republicans surveyed in the new nationwide poll, putting him 10 points ahead of his closest competitor, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who tallied 13%.
Physician Ben Carson comes in third, with 7% support, and Sen. Rand Paul and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee are both tied for fourth with 6%.
That marks a drop in support for all but Christie and Bush from the last CNN/ORC survey of the field, conducted in November. That poll showed Bush in the lead, but only taking 14% of the vote, while Carson came in second with 11% and Christie tied Rep. Paul Ryan for fourth with 9% support.
Bush’s 10-point lead is a milestone for the potential GOP field — it marks the first time any prospective candidate has reached a lead beyond a poll’s margin of error in the past two years.
GOP primary voters are about evenly split on whether his support for allowing some illegal immigrants to stay in the United States makes them more or less likely to support him, or has no difference on their opinion of him.
Forty-two percent say his description of illegal immigration as an “act of love” make them less likely to support Bush, but another 39% say it makes no difference to them.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) will hit the road in January for another book tour, and his folks say Jeb Bush’s decision-making process won’t affect his plans.
Bush announced in mid-December that he would “actively explore” running for president. Now Rubio is gearing up for a busy January, when he will launch his new book, “American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone.”
“I know for a fact that the news last week didn’t change any of our team’s plans. Sen. Rubio will have a very aggressive travel schedule next month,” said a senior Rubio advisor.
Rubio assured a group of top GOP fundraisers at a dinner at the W Hotel in Washington earlier this month that Bush would not push him out of the race.
He said he would make a decision about the presidency irrespective of the intentions of any other candidate, said one GOP fundraiser who attended.
“When you reach a point where you are thinking about running for president, as I am, what you have to make your decision is on is not on who is running. It’s on whether you think that’s the right place to achieve your agenda and serve your country,” Rubio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Rubio’s top financial backers say Bush’s likely entry into the 2016 GOP primary doesn’t hurt him as much as it does candidates more aligned with the party’s establishment, such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee.
In the LA Times, Mark Z. Barabak writes about the dynamics of a 2016 GOP nomination campaign.
Republicans face another wide-open contest for their nomination — and, with it, a gravitational pull from the right flank of the party. That wing of the GOP is far more conservative than the country as a whole, potentially making the winner less appealing to a broader November electorate.
“The stark reality that Republicans face is that the nation is younger and it’s more diverse ethnically,” said Dick Wadhams, a Republican strategist in Colorado, a state expected to be among the hardest-fought in 2016. “We’ve got to have a Republican who can speak to that reality.”
Bush starts out with a number of considerable advantages, not least an expansive nationwide network of donors and political loyalists dating from when his father and older brother ran for president and served in the White House.
He is also the favorite of many establishment Republicans eager to avoid the sort of prolonged and acrimonious primary battle that undercut the party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, by pushing him rightward on issues like contraception and immigration.
But it is too soon to call Bush — or any candidate, for that matter — the Republican front-runner.
The party remains deeply divided between its governing wing, which is eager to show voters that Washington can work to implement functional conservative policies, and insurgents like Paul and Cruz, who favor a more ideological and confrontational approach.
“This nomination is going to be a fight,” said Scott Reed, a veteran GOP strategist who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. “It’s not going to be a layup for anybody.”
Georgia’s Senior United States Senator, Johnny Isakson, is not on TheHill.com list of ten Senators who could lose in 2016, though only two of the ten are Democrats and eight of the endangered Senators are Republicans. Upside: Harry Reid (D-NV) is one of the two Democrats.
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