Georgia in the News

Georgia has been in the news quite a bit lately for a wide range of stories.  Where to begin?


How about with state Rep. Judy Manning?  Quoted in my hometown newspaper, she says the following:

“I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim. ..."

For the record, I personally find the Mormon religion to be strange.  I say that with the recognition that many people find the Christian religion to be strange -- along with Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and pretty much any religion to which one is not an adherent.  I also don't think it's necessarily bigoted to vote for a candidate based on his or her religion.  The presidency is an important job and if your faith is important to you, I'd imagine you'd want someone of similar beliefs in the Oval Office.  That being said, I would not have characterized my reservations about Mitt Romney's religion so carelessly in a newspaper article.  "It's better than a Muslim" -- that is quite a tag line for Mitt Romney's campaign and I'm completely sincere when I say that he should use it, he needs a little pizzazz.

Up next:  Georgia's war on fat kids.  There was an article in Salon this week about the anti-fat kid billboards that have popped up all over the metro Atlanta area recently.  This is apparently an effort by Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) to let us know that "fat isn't cute" and fat kills and being fat is awful and unhealthy and just sucks all-around.  I think a better use of the money CHOA  spent on this marketing campaign ($50 million!) would have been a lobbying campaign to the state Board of Education about restoring recess (and lots of it) to elementary and middle schools.  Or what about going all Jamie Oliver on the people who set the menu for school cafeterias?  Doesn't that seem like a better way to promote healthy eating and practices in kids than to put up a bunch of billboards calling kids fat and telling them to be embarrassed and ashamed about it?

Georgia has its very own Solyndra with a failed ethanol venture costing US taxpayers $64 million and Georgia taxpayers an additional $6.2 million.  Sweet.  Do you see how easily the government throws money around?  Do you see how careless they are as stewards of our hard-earned paychecks?  It should make you sick.  We fought a revolution for transgressions less egregious than this.  Bring back George III!

And finally, the Birther debate continues in the Peach State.  A Georgia judge is allowing a case to move forward that would prevent President Obama from being listed on the ballot in November because he's not a US citizen.  Okay.  I'll admit that I thought something was funky with his birth certificate based on the fact that he refused to release it, but I always thought it was a stretch that his parents had an inkling at his birth that he might want to be the President of the United States one day, so they needed to hide the fact that he was allegedly born in Kenya (that's what the Birthers think, right?).  I'm not a constitutional scholar, so I'm confused about another part of this saga as well:  Obama's mother was a US citizen, doesn't that make him automatically a US citizen regardless of where he was born?  If I had been born when my parents were traveling out of the country, does that mean that I couldn't be president?  Seems a little unfair.

To top all of this off, the Dawgs lost their bowl game for the second year in a row.