Florida threatens to sue Georgia over water

Florida’s lawyers are donning their dressiest jean shorts and combing their mullets in preparation for federal court as Governor Rick Scott said he will file suit against the Peach State over waterflows into the Apalachicola basin.

“This lawsuit will be targeted toward one thing — fighting for the future of Apalachicola,” Scott said. “This is a bold, historic legal action for our state. But this is our only way forward after 20 years of failed negotiations with Georgia. We must fight for the people of this region. The economic future of Apalachicola Bay and Northwest Florida is at stake.”

In the past, Florida has sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river system. But a recent ruling went against Florida in its push to limit Georgia’s withdrawals. Much of the problem comes from metro Atlanta taking water from Lake Lanier, a major reservoir on the Chattahoochee River near that city.

Florida’s oyster industry has seen a near collapse in the last two years because of reduced water flow and drought.

Earlier in the day, Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson held a U.S. Senate field hearing where they heard about the impact that drought and reduced water flows have had on Apalachicola Bay.

The United States Supreme Court exercises original jurisdiction over lawsuits between states under Article III. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution,

Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced Tuesday that he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in the decades-long tri-state “water wars” and slow down Georgia’s water use.

Because Georgia has not negotiated in good faith to fairly share the waters that flow between our two states, we are announcing today that Florida will bring suit in the U.S. Supreme Court next month to stop Georgia’s unchecked consumption of water that threatens the existence of Apalachicola fisheries and the future economic development of this region,” Scott said in a statement.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said Georgia has enacted responsible water conservation measures and the action was politically motivated.

“Gov. Scott’s threat to sue my state in the U.S. Supreme Court greatly disappoints me after I negotiated in good faith for two years,” Deal said. “More than a year ago, I offered a framework for a comprehensive agreement. Florida never responded. It’s absurd to waste taxpayers’ money and prolong this process with a court battle when I’ve proposed a workable solution.”

 

House District 54 Gets Competitive

The election to succeed State Rep. Ed Lindsey, who is running for Congress in 2014 has become competitive as the field of announced candidates increases to four.

Angelic Moore, a Republican, announced her campaign in April and has held several fundraisers; she worked for former Fulton County Chairman Mike Kenn, a Republican, and served as Atlanta Chair for Newt Gingrich in 2012.

Former CNN anchor Loretta Lepore announced yesterday that she will also run as a Republican. Lepore served as a press spokesperson for former Governor Sonny Perdue and serves on the Board of the Conservative Policy Leadership Institute, which is chaired by Rep. Lindsey.

John McCloskey is also running as a Republican.

Attorney Beth Beskin, who ran as a Republican against Sen. Horacena Tate in 2010, has not yet announced, but last week she registered a campaign committee with the Georgia State Ethics Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission.

Republican National Committee Meeting in Boston

The Republican National Committee convenes its summer meeting in Boston, where it will hear from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

The big news coming out of the RNC will be whether rules governing delegates to the national conventions are changed.

Ben Ginsberg’s power play inside the Republican National Convention last year, however, rankled many by imposing rules changes that undercut states’ rights to pick their own delegates. In a chaotic pre-convention fight, some initially feared the rule changes opened the door for Mr. Ginsberg’s boss, Mitt Romney, to name his own nominating delegates. But it was soon determined that the rules applied only to 2016 and later.

Virginia RNC member Morton Blackwell, founder of the Conservative Leadership Forum, added that “these Ginsberg power grabs were unprecedented.”

Mr. Blackwell, who served in the Reagan White House, personally wrote RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, urging him to dig in at the RNC summer meeting Wednesday through Aug. 17 in Boston. Mr. Blackwell and his supporters want the word “shall” restored to rules that mandate states choose their delegates, displacing the word “may” that Mr. Ginsberg successfully inserted last year.

The rule at issue spells out the penalties for a state that holds a presidential nomination contest before April 1. The fear of two penalties keeps most states in line.

Twitter better than polling?

A sociologist wrote that Twitter can be data-mined to predict election results because of a strong correlation between the amount of tweets mentioning a candidate and the later vote totals. This is like saying that there’s a strong correlation between the amount of money a campaign raises and spends and its electoral results: it may be true, but it’s not particularly useful. Nonetheless the sociologist predicts the end of political polling:

Digital democracy is here. We no longer passively watch our leaders on television and register our opinions on Election Day. Modern politics happens when somebody comments on Twitter or links to a campaign through Facebook. In our hyper-networked world, anyone can say anything, and it can be read by millions.

This new world will undermine the polling industry. For nearly a century, conventional wisdom has argued that we can only truly know what the public thinks about an issue if we survey a random sample of adults. An entire industry is built on this view. Nearly every serious political campaign in the United States spends thousands, even millions, of dollars hiring campaign consultants who conduct these polls and interpret the results.

We found a strong correlation between a candidate’s “tweet share” and the final two-party vote share, especially when we account for a district’s economic, racial and gender profile. In the 2010 data, our Twitter data predicted the winner in 404 out of 406 competitive races.

Yesterday, I wrote my initial thoughts about this fantasy. Among the points I made:

There seems to be some confusion over the roll that polling and pollsters play in modern political campaigns. It’s not simply predicting the outcome of an election, which is not terribly difficult in and of itself. A poll, no matter how accurate, conducted the day before an election or after the fact is of no use to political strategist.

The main difference is that polls allow you to gauge attitudes with a battery of questions and determine where correlations exist between attitudes or demographic information and vote choice. I don’t know how you could do that with Twitter alone.

A pollster who is wildly off more times than not but always gives his candidate advice that leads to a win is more valuable than one who correctly predicts the outcome of the election but is powerless to suggest to a campaign strategist, manager or candidate how to affect the outcome in a way favorable to the candidate.

Stuart Rothenberg also shared his thoughts in Roll Call.

Rojas asserts that he and his co-authors of a new paper “predicted the winner in 404 out of 406 competitive races” after looking at more than 500,000 tweets that mentioned Republican and Democratic candidates for Congress in 2010.

Normally, when political scientists or journalists write about “competitive” races they are talking about contests where at least two candidates have at least some chance of victory. Obviously, there weren’t 406 “competitive” House races in 2010 under that definition — at the Rothenberg Political Report, we rated just more than 100 House races as “not safe,” and a far fewer number in the truly competitive categories — so Rojas must be using the term to describe contested races.

Most races aren’t real competitions, of course. Relatively few House challengers run robust campaigns, and voters generally are unfamiliar with challengers.

Since House re-election rates have been over 90 percent in 19 of the past 23 elections, you don’t need polls or tweet counts to predict the overwhelming majority of race outcomes.  In most cases, all you need to know is incumbency (or the district’s political bent) and the candidates’ parties to predict who will win.

Political scientists and professional pollsters I have spoken to are interested in learning what tweets may tell us about voters and campaigns, but Rojas’s opinion piece — including his view that “digital democracy” will put professional pollsters out of work — promises far too much and delivers far too little.

This morning I would add that the “study” also ignores the fact that Twitter has become an advertising medium in politics, as has Facebook. To the extent that incumbents win 90% of their races and usually have more campaign resources, it’s not surprising that they would have higher twitter numbers. And where social media have become a part of campaigning, the amount of money spent on social media is likely to reflect overall budgets.

Snellville Update

Snellville City Councilmen Tom Witts and Bobby Howard are running for reelection in the November elections this year. You can follow their campaigns on Facebook: Re-elect Tom Witts and Re-elect Bobby Howard. It will be a fun-filled season of campaigning there.

Dave Emanuel, who serves on City Council wrote about the campaign kickoff for Witts.

As a fellow member of the Snellville City Council, I’ve worked with Tom for almost two years, and what I have seen is a true public servant who gives of himself for the benefit of others, and does so at the highest level of ethical standards. Many of the people in attendance last night expressed the same thoughts and while the words may sound like typical campaign season rhetoric, they are an absolutely accurate description of Tom Witts. Take the time to review Tom’s accomplishments and you’ll agree.

Snellville celebrated its 90th birthday on Monday, and among the artifacts on display were the city’s original handwritten charter from 1923.

The city’s planned Veterans Memorial project will move forward, having already received more than $25,000 in citizen donations and $15,000 in corporate donations.

Mayor pro tem Tom Witts invited three Veterans Memorial committee members to speak at Monday’s council meeting, in an effort to update residents on the progress of the much-lauded memorial. Former mayor pro tem Barbara Bender, former councilman Chad Smith and Bob McCann, a West Point graduate and the project’s civil engineer, presented the concept, drawings and facts surrounding the memorial.

To date, 254 bricks and tiles have been sold to people who want to honor a veteran with a permanent spot on the memorial. Those sales total about $25,000. Corporate donations total another $15,000. Those interested in purchasing bricks or tiles have until Oct. 1 of this year to do so, to have those bricks or tiles in place at the dedication ceremony planned for Veterans Day 2013.

If you’d like to donate to the Veterans Memorial, you can purchase a tile engraved with a veteran’s name, or a personalized pave through this website.

And because it wouldn’t be a meeting of Snellville’s Mayor and anyone City Council without a fight or at least some nasty words, Mayor Kelly Kautz took the opportunity.

At one point during Schulz’ comment, the mayor left her seat and dais to ask city attorney Tony Powell a question. [Snellville Farmers Market Chair Gretchen] Schulz’ husband, Kurt, gave a passionate remark in regards to that action.

“I can’t believe how rude you are,” he said. “Your problem is you don’t know how to be a leader.”

 

Terrapin Station

Loggerhead turtles set a record for their number of nesting sites in Georgia with at least 2241 documented nests on Georgia beaches. From the Savannah Morning News:

The count had reached 2,243 by Tuesday morning, according to www.seaturtle.org. That’s the site where the dozens of volunteers, researchers and agency employees who patrol Georgia’s beaches each day for nests and hatchlings log in their findings.

[Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Mark] Dodd expects the final nest count to be at least 15-20 nests more than last year, though still short of the 2,800 nests the federally threatened species needs each year to be considered recovered.

Turtles are still nesting, though more slowly as the season winds down, and there are 11 nests of unknown species documented. Post-season genetic analysis will determine how many of those nests can be added to the loggerheads’ tally.

Both North Carolina and South Carolina are having record nesting years, too, Dodd said.

Statewide nest totals have climbed steadily since 2009, the longest such span in 25 years. That’s an encouraging change from the usual up and down fluctuations in loggerhead nesting, Dodd said.