Bluestate Georgia

Southern Mythology regarding the Civil War

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 09:48:00 -0400

There is a persistent myth held by many southerners that the reason for secession of the southern states was “states rights” rather than slavery.

Here is a link to the secession declarations of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas. All four clearly state that the attitude and actions of the northern states toward slavery is the precipitating cause of the secession. The South Carolina declaration even goes so far as to say that states do not have a right to prohibit slavery within their borders by ignoring the Fugitive Slave Act. So much for “state’s rights”.

No matter what a person’s attitude is toward modern regional politics, perpetrating clearly nonsensical historical myths doesn’t serve any good purpose.
So if you’re doing it, stop it.

When will we southerners stop falling for cornpone buffoonery?

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:04:00 -0500

I’m about as southern as it’s possible to be. My family landed in Virginia in the late 1600s, worked their way southward through the Carolinas, and entered North Georgia in 1825, as a result of the removal of the Creek Indians, and the subsequent land lottery. My accent is thick enough that I’m sometimes incomprehensible to people from other regions.

Yet when I see an interview on the national news, and realize the person being interviewed has a southern accent, I brace myself and wait for some backwards, reactionary, flat earther or thinly disguised racist nonsense. Thankfully it doesn’t always come, but the southerner says something bizarre often enough that I would never place odds against it.

This morning I was reading through the Georgia Pundit newsletter, and found that two GOP members of the Georgia House, Jason Spencer of Woodbine, and Charles Gregory, of Kennesaw, have introduced a nullification bill, declaring that Georgia is not subject to federal law.

As entertaining as this might be at the local League of the South meeting, for a serious legislative body to have clownish bills like this presented makes Georgia a laughingstock. So in honor of those two fine denizens of the cornpone red rubber nose circuit, I present this clip from the 1940’s radio comic Senator Claghorn, in hopes that southern politicians, especially Georgia politicians, will take heed and stop behaving like buffoons.

Sorting out the Douglas County GOP racial kerfuffle

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:43:00 -0500

The Georgia GOP, like the national GOP would really like to shake the widely held observation that they are the party of older white men. They don’t want to make changes in their attitudes toward minorities, but they’d like to present a better public relations face. They would love to stamp out the White House watermelon patch post cards, Obama food stamp cartoons, witch doctor cartoons and t-shirts, and racist conspiracy theories which swirl around in the GOP base like an uncontrollable maelstrom.

At the same time RNC chair Rince Priebus was meeting with African-American Republicans in Atlanta, the Douglas County GOP was denying a seat at the GOP’s state convention to the chair of the Georgia Black Republican Council. The incident is summarized in this article, with updates, from Political Insider, Jim Galloway’s column and blog at the AJC

A short summary is that on a 3-2 racially split vote, the Douglas County GOP board denied Michael McNeely a seat at the convention. Due to the ensuing embarrassment and “bad optics”, as someone called it, the state party overruled the vote of the Douglas County GOP (the details on how this was done are not clear to me at this time).

Douglas County is a county on the verge of turning blue. The non-Hispanic white population of the county is in decline, and has dropped to 48.5 % as of the 2010 census. Furthermore Obama won the county in 2008 and 2012. The county is on the verge of becoming solidly Democratic. The changing demographics combined with behavior like this from the GOP will likely speed up this transition and make it irreversible.

Fact check of Steve Stockman's State of the Union fact checking

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:42:16 -0500

jecarter4:

Georgia Gwinnett College and Progressive Georgians

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 09:23:00 -0500

A story ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this morning entitled Tough Times at Georgia Gwinnett College.

As a Georgian I saw nothing unusual about the story. The weak commitment to education of the Republican majority in Georgia is leading to devastating cuts in yet another institute of higher learning here.

What interested me was the comments below the article. One commenter blamed the cuts on “the underprivileged”. Another comment blamed it on immigrants.

Progressives in Georgia absolutely have to take an in-your-face approach to both the cuts themselves, and the bigotry which gets stirred up when the issue arises.

Education is how people advance, and the Democratic Party of Georgia and progressives here have got to fight and roll back the Libertarian nonsense which puts forth the notion that only those from families who are already affluent enough to afford it should be able to attend college.

College needs to be cheap and it needs to be high quality.

We need to be contacting our legislators, even those of us in conservative districts, and energetically advocating for not only maintaining the current levels of funding for education at all levels, but improving the system.

As for the xenophobic and racist comments often accompanying the sort of article at the link above — answer them directly. The article made no mention of undocumented immigrants, yet a couple of posters jumped in to blame Georgia’s crappy commitment to education on immigrants.

We need to start pushing back on this nonsense in a big scale way. I’m not saying we need to be shrill (in fact we shouldn’t be), or make pie-in-the-sky demands (we should learn the issues and figure out how each proposal gets funded). But if we don’t start fighting why are we even here?

If you are reading this, and you are a Georgia citizen, I ask you to do two things which will only take a few minutes. Go to the link above and leave a comment on the article. And go to the website of your state legislator and leave them a comment expressing concern (or outrage, take your pick) over the cuts to Georgia Gwinnett College.

Georgia Teaparty rebranding and Karl Rove

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:01:00 -0500

Get ready for the Tea Party vs Rove cage match. The Tea Partier on this video seems to be taking the advice of Redstate, and fleeing the tea party label, though.

The Toxicity of the Tea Party Label

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 11:21:07 -0500

It’s clear the Tea Party is a damaged brand. The Tea Party movement pushed candidates in GOP primaries who, to the horror of the Republican establishment, suffered a humiliating string of losses.

Not only that, the number of people identifying themselves as Tea Party has dropped to around 8% of the population.

It’s gotten so bad that Karl Rove has set up a fund to fight the Tea Party in primary races, the conservative website Redstate has proposed dropping the Tea Party name, and local tea party leaders are resigning from Tea Party groups to join organizations with other brands.

The Redstate article, entitled Tea Party 2.0: Focus on the 4 R’s & Fight Back, actually makes some good observations, although the solutions are somewhat hilarious.

For instance, the article points out:

To make matters worse, the Tea Party movement has an attrition problem called age.

All-too-often, Tea Party meeting attendees are grandparents fighting to save America’s future for their grandchildren. Yet, the grandchildren are nowhere to be found. Why?

The solution proposed by the article?

If you’re fighting for your kids’ future, get your kids involved—and have them bring some friends.

This has hilarious possibilities for comic awkwardness at family gatherings. Imagine being a twenty-something, and your grandparents take you aside and ask “We’d like for you to come to our meeting of angry septuagenarians ranting about Obamacare and Agenda 21 over Chik-Fil-A sandwiches.”

The Tea Party is, after all, in aggregate, the crazy old racist grandparent or aunt posting chain emails about conspiracy theories on facebook. The twenty year old is the young embarrassed relative who doesn’t want to unfriend the crazy older relative, but wishes they’d find another hobby.

The Tea Party was brought on by a very specific point in U.S. history, and with the passing of that point, there is no turning back the clock.

It was the point at which the first African-American president was elected ,but the changing demographics hadn’t yet reached the point where the new national progressive coalition could withstand a fierce backlash in an offyear election season. It was the last gasp of an older generation of conservatives. The attrition by age isn’t a symptom. It’s the root of the disease. There is a good reason why statistically few young people were involved in the Tea Party, and why inviting them won’t work. The country is changing, and the Tea Party movement represents the past.

I suspect that until the gerrymandering successfully carried out by the GOP erodes by the relentless force of changing demographics, outbursts and backlashes by the Tea Party and it’s spin-offs will continue to have an effect for a few years. But overall, it’s a movement in a death spiral.

How important is the issue of who pays for GA senator's lunch?

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:32:30 -0500

This is a re-post, which I sent to my generic blog by mistake.

I have to admit mixed feelings about the news that Republicans in the Georgia Senate have asked lobbyists to pay for their committee chairs’ weekly lunches.

On the one hand it really seems to be just a modest lunch. On the other hand it makes sort of a joke of the attempts to reign in lobbyist supplied perks.

Frankly, if the $173 stipend for things like lunches the legislators already get isn’t enough, I’d rather it be transparently raised. It’s better for the public to pay expenses of legislators, and know what those expenses are, than for a new system of smaller, but more frequent, lobbyist provided perks to be implemented.

Why did Bill Heath hide behind a printer?

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:22:30 -0500

This could have a more general title like “Why do politicians have bizarre and stupid responses to questions or criticism?”

Bill Heath is a Georgia state senator for district 31, which covers all of Haralson and Polk counties and part of Paulding county. The area is northwest of Atlanta, on the Alabama line.

I have no reason to believe that Heath is stupider than average for a Georgia Republican politician. Yet he hid behind a printer to escape questioning from a local reporter after sending out a bizarre form email in response to emails from Georgia citizens.

If you haven’t followed the whole story, click on the links above to come up to speed. What I’m going to peruse here is Heath’s responses, and what might have been a more rational response to both the Georgia citizens who sent the emails, and to the reporter. I’m going to put aside the politics, and just focus on his potential sane and intelligent (or at least not stupid) range of options.

First the emails: A better approach (and one not as likely to attract reporters) would have been to have a robo-message stating something to the effect:

“Thank you for your email. I happen to disagree with you. Chip Rogers is a fine man, etc”

This would have been both predictable (often good in a canned response), and final.

Once the reporter arrived, assuming the email I outlined was used, Heath could have said: “I don’t have but a minute, but I stand by the email. Chip Rogers is a fine man … etc”

But assuming the actual, crazy email that he sent was already out in the wild, a partial walkback would be in order:

“I regret some of the wording of my response, but I think Chip Rogers is a fine man, and I was inundated with form emails and responded a bit too … etc”

Of course, instead, we were treated to Heath hiding behind a printer, something that somehow lacks gravitas and dignity.

Why did he do it? Well, my own view is that the GOP in Georgia has become both arrogant and a little on the crazy side, so Heath was behaving true to form. The question is, how long do the voters in Haralson, Polk, and Paulding counties want to be represented by a senator who is, to say the least, somewhat odd and unstable.

Some things are just too funny to describe effectively. This is...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 09:01:17 -0500

Some things are just too funny to describe effectively. This is GA senator Bill Heath exhibiting the dignity appropriate for a GA Republican.

Why I Don't Think Barrow is the Most Electable Democrat

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 08:39:00 -0500

There is a notion prevalent out there that the best chance for a Democrat to win the U.S. senate seat being vacated by Saxby Chambliss is to choose the admirably resilient conservative Democrat John Barrow of Georgia’s 12th Congressional district.

Even the national press is getting in on that meme in articles like this one in Salon.

I think the assumption that our task as Democrats is to entice the Dixiecrats who left the party for the GOP to return to the party would be a serious mistake. The Dixiecrats are dying off here as certainly as their older conservative white counterparts are in other parts of the country.

We need to be energizing the base which makes the progressive Democratic party Georgia’s future: minorities, young voters, environmentalists, young labor activists, and other parts of the progressive coalition.

Campaigning for someone who, for instance, is equivocal on the notion that health care is a right for all citizens is not going to engender enthusiasm among the Democratic Party’s natural constituency.

As much as I admire Representative Barrows’ ability to survive a hostile environment, I’d rather he stick to his district. We need to run a candidate who is a pragmatic progressive. Our biggest obstacle is a lethargic Democratic Party of Georgia. We need to break out of that with a candidate who makes it a joy to knock on doors and work in phone banks.

Barrow is not that candidate.

Why is the GOP Willing to Advance Such a Clearly Racist Scheme?

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 08:09:00 -0500

I don’t use the word racism often in the course of political conversations. The use of the word usually generates a series of defensive and pointless insults, and doesn’t do anything to get at the root of whatever policy issue is being discussed.

But sometimes racism is the only accurate word to describe something. The attempts by the GOP to dilute the minority vote by converting a select few states into proportional electoral college allocation is a clear example where racism comes into play.

There isn’t any question of why the GOP would consider this desirable. In 2012 African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians hammered the GOP with humiliating losses.

So why doesn’t the GOP do the logical thing, and attempt to build friendship with those communities?

The answer is rooted in the nature of racism in the United States. A large portion of the white community, not limited to the GOP base, but more assertive there, believes that whites have a birthright to rule the country. The Tea Party signs saying “Take Our Country Back” seemed perfectly reasonable and logical to them. They couldn’t see any racism in it, because they’d been raised in a system in which the consensus candidates among whites win the presidency and both legislative branches, so the concept of taking the country back didn’t seem like a dog whistle. It seemed to be the logical thing to demand.

When I was a child Georgia’s county unit system diluted even the votes of those blacks who managed to weave through the barriers set to voter registration. The system was declared unconstitutional in 1963. Now the GOP is trying to implement this racist system on a national scale.

You might say the GOP isn’t doing this as an attack on minorities, but as a pragmatic attempt to use the tools at their disposal to win in an electorate that isn’t kind to them at the moment.

But I would say that the use of a racist gerrymandering scheme to dilute the minority vote is not only morally repugnant, but destabilizes our representative democracy.

So we should stop dancing around the elephant in the room. The GOP is advancing a racist plan to undermine and destabilize democracy in a desperate move to cling to power.

My Initial Thoughts on the 2014 Open GA senate seat

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:58:27 -0500

The news that Saxby Chambliss is not going to run creates an opening for Georgia Democrats to rebuild the party even if we don’t take the seat. Here are a few initial thoughts:

Progressives should campaign vigorously for the Democratic candidate unless it’s someone truly awful. The party is in disarray, and this is a chance to not only rebuild, but to rebuild with progressives positioned well within the party.
In the primary, we should not accept a consensus blue dog, neither should we go for broke. The candidate needs to be moderately progressive. We don’t have to settle for a blue dog, and in fact it would not energize the progressives needed to build a ground game. On the other hand we have to choose a candidate who can make a good run for middle class votes.
Even a close election could shift the momentum to the Democrats, and energize the party for future races. Anything over 47% is really a win in my view.
We should campaign in all 159 counties. Concentrating on seven or eight counties would be as bad as not having a candidate.
Ground game, ground game, ground game. We should start nowwith voter registration, GOTV, and building contact lists.

This is an excellent chance to resurrect the Democratic Party of Georgia. The likelihood of the GOP picking a lunatic in their primary is high, but it’ll do us no good if we don’t do the work.

attempts to gerrymander electoral college are crazily dangerous

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:18:24 -0500

I’m going to keep this post short because the implications are so glaringly obvious that there isn’t a lot to say.

The plans being floated from within the RNC to gerrymander the electoral college so that only the white vote really counts in presidential elections are insanely dangerous. It’s a reaction to the fact that the GOP has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, and that the reason for this is the increase in minority voting strength.

The scheme is to convert the allocation of electoral votes in states which vote blue in presidential elections but which currently have GOP control at the state level by proportion rather than winner-take-all. If the proposal were to do this in all states it might be worth considering. But the net effect of only doing it in blue states is that in states like Georgia and Texas, which have large minority populations but which vote red in presidential elections, all votes would be allocated to the GOP. In states like Ohio and Wisconsin, which often vote blue, the votes would be split.

This means that the likelihood of the loser of the popular vote winning the electoral vote increases dramatically, and that the winner will nearly always be the GOP. It also means that the vote of an African-American or Hispanic citizen counts less than that of a white citizen.

I find it hard to believe that the GOP is proposing this when they are already having problems attracting minority voters, and it’s also hard to believe that any serious state government would attempt to implement the plan. But I’ve seen some pretty foolish things done by the GOP lately, so this makes me apprehensive.

This is so clearly a racist proposal that the implications for the stability of the electoral system as the percentage of minority voters increases are dire. I genuinely hope that the GOP has not gotten that stupid.

Ayn Rand/Tea Party Asshattery and the contemporary Democratic Party

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:30:00 -0500

I deliberately made the title of this post a bit provocative because I want to make it clear exactly what I mean, and how damaging I think the late 20th century swing to the crazy right of the U.S. political system has been. But I’m not just doing it to attack the Tea Party or the Ayn Rand followers. Their influence has peaked and is now in steep decline. Pretty soon the Tea Party won’t be large enough to hold a real Tea Party, with teacups and saucers.

I’m much more concerned with the extent to which the Democratic Party has accommodated the “small government” mythology, and how to draw a line in the sand and move forward. The Democrats, the party which should have continued to be the party which represents the interest of the poor and the disenfranchised, allowed the Right to set the narrative for nearly thirty years.

When I was in my early teens in the 1960s, I read all Ayn Rand’s books. It makes sense that Rand would attract many intellectually curious teens. Her works were pulp fiction, with larger than life heroic characters, consistently evil villains, and very little grey area. They were crudely drawn, but they presented ideas beyond the sword and sorcery novels which were the alternative pulp reading for teen-aged boys. I didn’t really think much at that time about how her views on the sacred nature of property rights and her thorough rejection of compassion and altruism would play out in a real world which was much messier, with many more complex moral issues than the cartoon world of her books. At fourteen years old I had enough issues going on in my own life without developing a sense of nuance.

By the time I was eighteen or so, I began examining poverty and race, the role of money and corruption on the political system, and a host of other things for which laissez faire didn’t have an answer, and began moving steadily to the left. The Civil Rights movement was unfolding all around me, so I saw the role the federal government was playing in enforcing social justice in the face of resistance by local reactionaries. That was as much as I needed to learn about the proper limits of state’s rights.

As I was moving leftward the political landscape in the U.S. seemed to be moving rapidly rightward, due to a backlash driven by white reaction to the Civil Rights and antiwar movements, Nixon’s Southern Strategy of drawing the segregationist Dixiecrats into the GOP, and Lee Atwater’s strategy of building a disciplined right wing coalition with the use of “wedge issues”.

As the Right gained more power and undermined the programs set up with the New Deal and War on Poverty, the Democratic Party largely became “GOP LIte”, putting forward the notion that the abstract principle of “small government” was a Democratic Party principle, too, and often implying that the Democrats didn’t really care about the poor, the sick, immigrants, the environment or the rights of workers any more than the GOP did.

Now that Tea Party over-reach and the sheer force of changing demographics have damaged the GOP, the Democratic Party is in a very good position to stake out a claim to being the progressive, compassionate party, dedicated to social justice.

To do this we have to come to peace with several conclusions.

1) “Small government” is an idiotic goal in a nation of 312,000,000 people. We should avoid unnecessary and stifling bureaucracy, but the government is going to be large, complex, and expensive, no matter who we elect to power. The GOP’s inclination is to use government for military adventures, bedroom policing, and “wars” on drugs, the Democrats (when they are behaving as Democrats) for social programs, but neither party is trying to move toward “small government”. The question isn’t size of government, but what the government is actually doing.

2) Altruism and compassion is a good thing, and in fact the only way to promote social peace in a huge, diverse population. The Ayn Rand/Tea Party notions of “rugged individualism” are about as meaningful as your average Chuck Norris movie. Fun in a lowbrow sort of way, but limited in their ability to solve problems on a wider scale. Helping each other is not only the right thing to do, but it brings about social stability to everyone’s benefit.

3) The government has a large role to play in a wide variety of aspects of our lives, from ensuring that minority rights are protected, to aid in disasters, both large scale and personal. Rightwingers often say “but not with MY money”. Well, I didn’t like paying for Bush’s war in Iraq either. We can argue about how much money goes into what programs, but the issue of whether helping people out in times of need is a valid government function is off the table. Tea Partiers can gripe about it over their Chik-Fil-As, but health care, the environment, poverty, and minority rights are all valid and legitimate government roles.

Summed up, there is a lot to discuss regarding which approach to issues like poverty and the environment have the most efficacy. But as far as I’m concerned the question of whether or not the government has a direct and important role in solving these problems is not negotiable, and I don’t think it should be for the Democratic Party at large.

Why Is the Pentagon Blocking LGBT and Progressive Websites?

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 11:40:39 -0500

Why Is the Pentagon Blocking LGBT and Progressive Websites?:

monsterpolitics:

hatethepolicestate:

By Dana Liebelson

Gay and lesbian Americans have been able to serve openly in the military ever since President Obama repealed ”Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in September 2011. But online, some Pentagon computers appear to force the LGBT military community behind closed doors, blocking military users’ access to LGBT advocates’ and other progressives’ websites, while conservative sites remain fully accessible, according to John Aravosis of AMERICAblog. The military now blames faulty computer software for the de facto censorship, but gay activists say the Department of Defense has known about the problem for over a year—and still hasn’t fixed it.

Aravosis—a journalist and activist who defended a US Navy sailor for challenging DADT in 1998—learned from a military contact that his website was blocked on the Pentagon’s official computer system. He then had several other contacts take screenshots of websites that were blocked on Pentagon computers. Aravosis discovered that LGBT websites like the Human Rights Campaign blog and OutServe-SLDN, a website co-founded by Air Force officer Josh Seefried that supports gay members of the military, were blocked. Progressive sites like Daily Kos made the blocked list as well.

But the conservative websites of Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, as well as anti-gay rights groups like the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, were accessible:

Zeke Stokes, a spokesman for OutServe, told Mother Jones that the organization and its 6,000 affiliated LGBT service members have been notifying the Pentagon and local commanders of this issue since the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in 2011, but the Pentagon failed to adequately respond until this past weekend, when Aravosis pointed out the problem.

The Department of Defense issued a statement on Facebook on Friday that said it “does not block LGBT websites” deliberately. Rather, the pages “were denied access based on web filters blocking the Blog/Personal Pages” category. (Military officials have long blocked workers’ access to websites they consider non-secure, personal timewasters, or otherwise unfit for consumption in office hours.) Aravosis tells Mother Jones he found this initial statement “disturbing,” because websites like Ann Coulter’s blog and Red State, a conservative news blog, both appear to fall in this category, but were not blocked. “They didn’t seem to recognize the possibility of a problem, and appeared to have no intent to investigate,” he says.

Click the header link above to read the full article.

This will not help Chuck Hagel’s case with gay community concerning his nomination to be President Obama’s Defense Secretary

Until the Georgia Democratic Party gets its act together, forget about national party support

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 08:03:00 -0500

I would love it if the national Democrats started viewing Georgia as as a battleground, and started pouring money into the state democratic party. Not only is that not likely to happen, but I think the national Democratic Party might be wasting its money at the moment if it did.

I’m reluctant to criticize people who are doing work in areas where I haven’t been involved. I’ve been primarily a local community activist, working on things like historic preservation and environmental issues. I’ve been a small-time but regular contributor to Democratic electoral campaigns for decades, but I haven’t been directly involved in the party itself until recently.

Exciting things are going on nationally for the Democratic Party, and that momentum should be translating into excitement and aggressiveness here in Georgia. The same demograptic trends which are strengthening the progressive coalition nationally are at work here in Georgia. The GOP is pushing itself further and further onto the fringe of American politics, so we should be able to make inroads into segments of the Georgia population where the GOP has been recently dominant.

But the Democratic Party seems frozen into a defensive fetal crouch.

We are not running candidates. For an electoral political party that should be a no-brainer. The Libertarians are running candidates more aggressively than we are. The fact that of 14 candidates running in the recent special elections only one was a Democrat is positively alarming.

This isn’t a progressive vs pragmatist vs blue dog issue. Hell, if any of those three parts of the party were out there fielding candidates it would be an improvement. This is a matter of dysfunction as an electoral party. We need to be recruiting and developing candidates everywhere, and we need to be building functioning organizations in every county, no matter how “red” that county is.

The GOP is already practically wearing a clown costume, and they are still winning elections here, so we can’t depend on GOP missteps to swing the state toward us.

And we’re not faced with an “either/or” question of building county parties versus running candidates either. For a party which is supposed to be one of the parties in a two party system, those activities should be complementary.

The Democratic Party needs to be building itself precinct by precinct, county by county, and along the way we should be running candidates for school boards, county commissions, city councils, state House and Senate, US House and Senate, and every statewide office.

Georgia Democrats absolutely have to get more aggressive

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:00:56 -0500

Let me start with a softening statement. It isn’t the fault of Georgia Democrats that the deep South polarized to the benefit of the GOP in the years since the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We all know the story of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, to recruit the segregationists into the GOP. It was a strategy that worked for many years, until states like Georgia are practically a GOP lock for the governor’s office and the statehouse.

That’s a strong current to be swimming against. But the Democrats have to swim against it if we’re going to avoid becoming a fragmented series of local area cliques.

Which brings me to the four special elections for Georgia house and senate seats Tuesday. There were 14 candidates, only one of whom, Natalie Bergeron in district 21, was a Democrat. In fact the Libertarians fielded candidates, so if you looked at these elections alone, you’d assume that the two parties in Georgia were Republican and Libertarian.

Really, fellow Democrats, is this the best we can do? Seriously?

My second complaint is that I read about district 21 and Ms. Bergeron’s race on the Sunday before the election. Granted I should be keeping up with local politics more regularly, but I’m on every freakin’ Democratic Party mailing list at every level. I get fundraising appeals for races in Montana and Alaska, New Hampshire and Florida, yet no one sent an email saying “Hey, there’s a Democrat running in a north metro race, could you help out?”

I sent a small, very late donation as soon as I found out, but if someone had asked, I would’ve given more help, and there are thousands of Democrats out there like me who will help out with things if someone bothers to ask. Our time isn’t unlimited, so the answer will sometimes be no, but for God’s sake we can’t do anything if we don’t know what to do.

I spent Saturday morning stuffing envelopes for the Cobb County Democratic Party, which was a fine thing to be doing. But my time would’ve been better spent phone-banking or canvassing for the active election going on just to the north of me.

I’m not trying to assign any blame here. I have access to the same information as other people in Georgia. But there are many enthusiastic Democrats in metro Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. We should have been all over the district 21 race like a swarm of killer bees, contributing, helping with office tasks, phone banking, and doing anything possible to free up the candidate and local volunteers to focus their time where they deem important.

As for the other three races gimme a freakin’ break. Are we ready to just sublet Democratic Party office space to the Libertarians? They’ll make better use of it.

Shame on the five House members from Georgia who voted against Sandy aid

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 19:06:46 -0500

Have we come to this, Georgians? Are we at the point where we elect legislators who deny help to other Americans who have experienced a disaster.

I know many decent Republicans. We argue politics, sometimes those arguments are heated, but I consider them decent human beings.

The five Georgia members of the U.S. House who voted no to Sandy aid, Broun, Collins, Graves, Price, and Woodall deserve the censure of all compassionate and decent Georgians. Other GOP House members from Georgia voted in favor of the aid, as all of them should have.

If the GOP doesn’t clean house of these folks, the Democratic Party should make a special effort to oust them.

Georgians are better than this.

Happy New Year and Merry Fiscal Cliff Drama

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:08:06 -0500

I took a little break over the holiday week, then followed the fiscal cliff theatrics a bit. I usually focus on Georgia politics, but am going to just do a short general post to get back in the blogging habit.

Those of you who are twitter users can follow me @larryfeltonj I tend to be a bit on the zany side on twitter, since the 140 character limit lends itself to bringing out the Henny Youngman in me. Also on twitter, hashtags I follow are #GOPCivilWar #fireBoehner and the ever popular insane asylums of twitter, #teaparty and #tcot

Tweeting well is quite an art form. The best person I’ve observed at it is Andy Borowitz. at @BorowitzReport

I’m following an excellent group of tweeters, so a good way to forage for progressives on twitter is to go to my profile, and click on my “following” link. I won’t even try to list the good ones here. There are so many witty, bright progressives on twitter your best bet is to see for yourself.

There are a lot of funny tea partiers, too, but of course the humor there is inadvertent.

As for the fiscal cliff, was anyone surprised at all? The GOP has become the Wile E Coyote of political parties, but not all Republican House members are insane. My guess is that a lot of winning votes this coming session are going to consist of Democrats + non-Tea Party Republcans.

So Happy New Year. I’m having a good time.