Calling Bullshit On Violence In Georgia

It was refreshing and surprising, sadly, to hear Dick Williams call-out a questioneer during a U.S. Representative Paul Broun gathering at the end of today’s Georgia Gang show as an example of negativity in Georgia news and politics.

Williams was refering to a deeply misguided person who asked *Who’s going to shoot Obama?* to Rep. Paul Broun at a Tuesday, February 22, 2011 townhall meeting at the Oglethorpe County Commission chamber.

Whether in public or within family gatherings and conversation, violence-laced claptrap and rhetoric should not be tolerated, especially here in a state where it’s been allowed to flourish, without pushback, for far too long. Let’s hope the Secret Service is making that jackass squirm now.

Rep. Paul Broun is so deeply out of it that the offensive question did not register as deeply wrong, immediately, within him. Or else he, Broun, would have called it out right then and there, live as it happened, at the town hall meeting. He did not do that. He said merely, *Next question.* To laughs. Pitiful.

It took Blake Aued going back and clarifying a question he could barely hear (and a follow-up one too), and writing about it on his blog. Aued’s name, for doing so, has gone nationwide over the weekend. See Twitter for a quick example of the power of Aued’s blog post on the matter.

And these are just the folk who could manage to spell his name right.

City of Atlanta Malaise

Mayor Reed, at his speech to the Atlanta Press Club last week, Monday January 31, 2011, said there was a *pall* over Atlanta. And that we citizens needed to snap out of it. And think big. Look to pie-in-the-sky dreaming and shiny, glory-ridden kinds of projects to get us over our dark funk. Something along the lines of the Olympic games! Remember those? I hardly do.

The thing about living in COA (City of Atlanta, and I have for over 20 years now) is that it is a city mired in deep, determined, and wearisome bureaucracy. It’s hard to be cheerful, hopeful, have fun and think big when you’re beaten down from years and years of battling bureaucracy, over and over and over again, just for the most simple of services and responses.

My small Home Owners Association (HOA), for example, is beaten down financially with the weight of the extreme water bills we’ve had to pay for almost two years now. I tried, to no avail, to get help from my city council person, with literally reams of documentation sent to that office on this matter. To no avail. I was told we had no problem, and that all was fine. This was over a year ago. We now know there were some extreme problems at the Watershed Dept.

At the time, over a year ago, I went to the Dept. of Watershed management personally. To no avail. I’ve called and emailed, over and over again, assorted local news media personnel. To no avail, despite their numerous media attentions to the matter of city water bills.

And that’s just one department! Every department is a struggle in futility. Just getting a new Herbie Curbie from the city takes a monumental effort of citizen resolve and determination. Just finding an email or a phone number for an APD community contact is a struggle. How many times have we all been put on hold when calling 9-11? And we’ve all heard the horror stories of trying to get a building permit from COA.

After years of doing battle with the bureaucracy that is City of Atlanta, I feel worn down and wiped out. I feel that *pall* Mayor Reed talks about, in my spirit… at the thought of having to do anything that involves City of Atlanta. I think often about about moving out of City of Atlanta now, something I never used to do.

Mayor Reed’s administration seems to be energized to try to break through some of our crippling bureaucracy. I just hope our crippling *pall* doesn’t get to them too. We residents are about as low as we can already go.

We’re looking to Mayor Reed to talk us back up to a point where we can even CONSIDER calling downtown for a new Herbie Curbie, let alone start thinking, with any hope of renewed energies, of anything big and futuristic and hopeful for this city.

UPDATE: As I wrote this editorial, CBS-Atlanta was working-up a classic, un-sexy example of the daily bureaucrat struggles of just one intown Atlanta neighborhood… to add a traffic light or not. See their news package here. This neighborhood had to beat a very loud drum just to get the city to meet with residents and solicit their input over this critical matter. It is also critical that we have local media support by independent news outlets such as CBS-Atlanta to get City of Atlanta officials to just return a phone call or read an email from a resident. Fortunately, CBS-Atlanta is always responsive to residents’ concerns. Always.

New Blog – Look Under The Gold Dome

NOTE: I’ve started a new blog for the 2011 Georgia General Assembly legislative session, so I’ll mostly be posting over there for the time being.  The blog is Look Under the Gold Dome. Please come visit!

The Rise of the Big Media Three – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

I once made a ton of media at the beginnings of places like Kyte.tv and uStream and Vimeo and iReport. And strew that media around all over those places. Maybe others too I’ve forgotten all about by now. I was kinda surprised that some sites, such as Kyte.tv, are still going.

Honestly, now if it’s not Facebook, YouTube or Twitter (and my personal fave Twitter photo/vid upload app – TwitSnaps) I never even bother with tinkering around in the garages of other media sharing platforms.

With the rise of the Big Three I’ve gotten far less experimental, if at all, with the many other assorted media platforms out there. And that’s a pity, but it’s far more convenient to stay on three farms rather than dot the landscape with dozens of wee media sprinkles here and there that in a couple of years you forget all about.

I’m anxious now that I’ve always had, for reasons unknown, a superfluous two YouTube channels. And I stay awake thinking one day, soon, I simply must consolidate those into one. And then brand-out a separate corporate channel too. And be sure to put some Shout on that nice new skirt after that soy sauce spill. And the dog needs a flea med refill…

Oh woe is me. How the multimedia chores never end! What new media sharing platform are you liking that I should try to not ignore?

Mad Men, Mad Money, North Georgia

Oh victimhood. It sure doesn’t look pretty on our menfolk, eh? Worn like a hairshirt on our men of bigtime capitalist action plans? On our Georgia Republican leadership? Stuff just ain’t purty, any way you examine it. If you must.

Bernie Marcus popped-up on CNBC recently. In a bizarre, aging-capitalist ramble of a rant against the Obama Administration. The whole weirdness led… absolutely nowhere. And had nothing to do with the hardly-suffering Marcus himself, but was rather on behalf of a few whining, broke cronies. See here.

Yes, Bernie Marcus made a lot of people money. (I am one who stashed away a little of Bernie’s money myself… to see me through a divorce and single parenthood times. I am grateful to have had it, too.)

But the Home Depot folk who made the most money, the serious big bucks made by a handful of working class Joes who busted their butts right on up to a C suite at Depot, I Sarah Palin-betcha plenty of those people live in North Georgia right now. However, these far tougher times reveal that only a precious few could hold on to or manage their wealth… up there in North Georgia.

Been to North Georgia lately, folks? Someone called it PVC Nation. The entire landscape is moreorless bankrupt. Looks just like in the photo above. Nathan Deal is the human equivalent; now the North Georgia Wasteland poster child of greed and speculation, in boom times, gone wild.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the Obama Administration or Tim Geithner or Nancy Pelosi or stimulus money or keeping hope alive. But it has everything to do with bad business practices much of North Georgia over-indulged in during the housing bubble of the mid-2000′s, like some crazed Big Mac bender.

Delighting and drooling in the boom housing times they willingly, gleefully lavished on themselves in a doomed river of (no doubt perceived as highly deserving) easy money. A mad, bank-driven, get-even-richer scheme of land speculation blessings – as if boom times and wacky lenders like the Community Bank (see link at bottom for more on Community Bank) were a prayed-for gift from Jesus Himself.

And dig me when I tell you kiddies, any money people made while working for Home Depot did not come easy;  it came from long years of hard work. But I diverge.

No one owes any of these whining types who are now whining to the heavens over their cash flow issues, such as Proxy Man Marcus, a guarantee of boom times and rivers of cash from any bank on any corner. (Again, Marcus is hardly suffering, but rather whining like a nutter on behalf of a few buddies he flew around in his Gulfstream last week. Go figure.)

See Bernie whine on their behalf.

What I want to know is where in the world did they ever get off thinking a wild profit and forever-good times were a right they were granted for the sheer good luck of having been born a white businessman in America? Huh? That one just makes me scratch my head in bewilderment.

Stick with ‘em long enough though, and eventually they all get around to blaming their white men-woes not just on the Obama Administration but also on that tried and true evil – The Media. Nathan Deal’s already launched that worn-out whine.

More on the matter of North Georgia repercussions here. It is the stuff novels are born from.

Failed Georgia

This past summer I drove several times from downtown Atlanta south to Luthersville, GA to drop/pickup my kid at a Girl Scout camp just a mile outside of that sleepy little Georgia town.

The drive took about an hour or so, down I-85 south a’ways. Along the entire car ride, I followed an existing rail line. One that ran almost to the very backdoor of the pretty 270-acres of camp in the heart of red clay Georgia – a part of the state  I like to call “Tara World” as it’s the general area, give or take 50 miles or so, where Margaret Mitchell located Scarlett’s famous childhood crib, Tara.

I imagined a gorgeous Twelve Oaks plantation nearby as I drove along. Dumb-ass county bucks haulin’ ass over the pretty, verdant Georgia fields along the way on their magnificent horses.  (“Peggy’s Mind Poison” I also like to say.)

Actually, I kinda lie. I wasn’t imagining any such thing on my last pass through Luthersville, GA. Rather, I was fuming. Filled with angry, ugly thoughts in my mind about Governor Sonny Perdue and the entire dumb-ass Georgia Legislature.

I tossed in GDOT, GRTA, ARC, and any other ridiculous alphabet soup of any Georgia state bureaucratic-ridden entity that had failed the citizens of little Luthersville, Georgia so terribly.

Failed me in my gas-guzzling rides back and forth to Luthersville that could have been so easily traversed by rail in a traffic-less 40-minutes or so. If only there had been a commuter train to take us back and forth from the city to that sweet little place.

The if-onlys sure are piling up when it comes to commuter rail and Georgia.

Poor Luthersville. It looked so sad last summer. Depressed. On its last good leg, with maybe one  convenience store, a bank and a Dollar General still open.

Luthersville was still struggling to put up a good front though, like some aging, penniless aunty and her brave display of near-moldy Chanel Red lipstick at a far-younger family member’s wedding she’d been politely invited to because, after all, she “is still family.”

Interview with Help A Reporter Out’s Peter Shankman

more about “MUR Interview: HARO’s Peter Shankman“, posted with vodpod

When We SHOULD Blame It On The Media

When a comedy show rant can do what the collective wisdom of MSM “journalism” can’t seem to. From Philly.com:

The Stewart piece also got the kind of eyeballs that most newsrooms would kill for in this digital age — planted atop many, many major political, media and business Web sites — and the kind of water-cooler chatter that journalists would crave in any age. In a time when newspapers are flat-out dying if not dealing with bankruptcy or massive job losses, while other types of news orgs aren’t faring much better, the journalistic success of a comedy show rant shouldn’t be viewed as a stick in the eye – but a teachable moment. Why be a curmudgeon about kids today getting all their news from a comedy show, when it’s not really that hard to join Stewart in his own idol-smashing game.

Full post here. I used to think no one was trying to kill journalism, just the obsolete delivery platform called newspapers. Now I’m not so sure. Could be that Old Journalism needs to wither on the vine alongside their precious newspapers too? Hmmmm…

New Staff Finds White House Lacking In Latest Technology

Moving into the White House, Obama’s folk found things not to their I-liking. More like seriously out-of-date and way behind the times. Reminds me of media in Atlanta. Such as the (now former) newspaper editor who once told me the Internet was “like CB radio.”

On the other hand, if they’d have moved a bunch of Georgia media and politicians into the White House this week, those clowns would have been in way over their I-heads. They relentlessly remind me of tales of senior management in corporate America who still have their secretaries print-out their emails. I kid you not, kiddies. Yes, the people in charge are that techno-challenged. Believe.

From The Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2009:

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

Full story here.

If A Media Blogger Is Thrown Out of Media Meeting And It’s Not On YouTube, Did It Really Happen?

The only thing more pathetic than a media trade association “ejecting” an invited speaker from their meeting about changes in media is that no one taped the rather rude ejection process and put it on YouTube. What a bunch of slow-witted, pointless dinos. From media guru/blogger Jeff Jarvis’ (the ejectee) blog:

But after I finished talking and sat down to hear the next panel, I was ejected from the meeting. It wasn’t anything I said, I don’t think. It was that they now wanted a closed meeting. As I was rather unceremoniously rushed out, still noshing on my cookie, grabbing my coat and hat and trying not to let the door hit me in the ass on the way out, I turned to the room and said, “One last thing: Think open-source, people.” It got a laugh and even a hand.

I was angry – insulted and embarrassed. But the problem is worse for this trade group and its industry. Talk about an echo chamber. What these people need is hear more new voices – newer than old me. What they really need to do is share their challenges and ideas openly and hear new perspectives and new answers from unexpected sources. Hearing the same old stuff from the same old group will get them nowhere. Witness the last 15 years.

Full post here.

Longtime Atlanta Media Dude To Work Inauguration

If you’ve never worked a media project in Atlanta with Jeff Jeffares you’re either a hack or thirteen-years old. Jeff’s been creating ATL-related media since before Zeus had a lightening bolt. And he just keeps on going… this time with a directing gig at an Obama inaugural ball. From the AJC:

Next week, Jeffares will fly to Washington, D.C., to help an old friend from Atlanta’s WAGA-TV, Carroll Platt, who is in charge of directing cameras at five of 10 official inaugural balls, including the Neighborhood Ball, at the Washington Convention Center. Jeffares, who has already submitted his name for Secret Service clearance, does not know which ball he will film yet.

Wonder if I could pull cable in Narcisco Rodriguez? Of course I could!

The Political South: My How We’re Changing!

Tom Baxter of Southern Political Report post-morts the post-election southern landscape today. Most  interesting analysis:

Adding further complexity to the picture is the ribbon of blue counties which begin in Charleston, S.C., and thread through the heart of last week’s red states all the way to Chickasaw County, Miss. These counties, which encompass most of the Black Belt, gave Obama some of his biggest majorities anywhere: He garnered 87 percent, the highest county total I could find for either candidate, in Macon County, Ala., and Jefferson County, Miss. They’ve voted solidly Democratic in the past, but never simultaneously with Democratic majorities the size of those in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Charlotte and other big cities across the South.

All this suggests a South with some familiar landmarks, but also one primed to change very dramatically over the coming decade. It’s easy to imagine, given the herculean challenges facing him, Obama losing the states he won last week in 2012. Given the age of McCain’s core supporters, it’s not inconceivable either that Obama could win states he lost this year.

But the South has shown that in one of the cricitical elections of our history, it was not all of one mind. And it’s unlikely ever to be again.

Full SPR article here. Heck, give a Cracker a laptop, some free broadband out in the scrub pines, and Lordy knows what might happen! From Bloomberg.com:

Obama has also made broader Internet access a goal and insisted that broadcasters focus more on public service. In a statement to the FCC last year, he called for `new rules promoting greater coverage of local issues and greater responsiveness of broadcasters to the communities they operate in.’

The above article in-full here.

When Twitter Just Won’t Do

Reason #4578 to be glad you don’t live in Clayton County, Georgia:

A police helicopter will fly over Clayton County’s 58 voting precincts this afternoon to track the longest lines and monitor any potential problems.

Clayton County Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell dispatched the helicopter to help determine where to place 12 extra voting machines for the after-work rush.

Full massive waste of taxpayers’ resources here.

This Ain’t No Mud Club. No CBGB. I Ain’t Got Time For That Now.

Lemme ask you Dear Reader… would you waste your precious time teaching social media apps and skills to a group of (laid off likely) professional… let me say that again… PROFESSIONAL journalists who had made such pitiful personal forays/investments into new media that they had no personal laptop to bring to the party/workshoppe? That, rather, they were expecting to learn new journo-entrepreneurial ways on borrowed gear belonging to the state (a university for example), or some such other journo-charity case?

This ain’t no home for unwed mothers out here, kiddies. If you’re a serious journalist and want to continue to be one, yet are not serious enough about social media to scrounge for the most basic gear you will have to have to wield it, then you can sit on your decaying front porch of dead-tree products and rock ‘n yearn for days of yore and that long dried-up corporate-journo tit.

Times done changed. Wind done gone. Let’s put this post in the Lacks Curiosity Of The World Exploding Around Them category.

Marxist Revealed

Dude who’s done these posters, including that most iconic image of this election year of Obama in the above style, is from Charleston, South Carolina. Who’d have thought?!

Still Life On Video With Pomegranate

Still Life On Video With Pomegranate

Originally uploaded by SpaceyGracey

Traffic Conditions In Atlanta Via Twitter

Follow atlantatraffic on Twitter for Atlanta traffic updates. Couldn’t we just add the Twitter updates to a GPS somehow and voila… the very best real-time app for Atlanta’s traffic nightmare we’ve all been searching for? (Can you do that now somehow? I don’t have a GPS device in the car. Just Google maps.)

Atlanta traffic incidents and conditions do have a Twitter hashtag and it’s: #atltraffic. I encourage much more use of it!

UPDATE: 9:30am – Right now “Atlanta” is a hot “trending” topic on Twitter. Go figure that. But I bet it has something to do with the saving graces of the Twitter hashtag #atlgas for this here town during our recent gas availability, or lack thereof, issues. People are STILL using that thang. Sanjay adds his thoughts to the ATL gas matter here. I also advise reading anything he has to say on the matter.

It Might Be Spam If…

…you receive an email like this:

Dear ____________ ,

Recently I viewed your resume online, and I felt you would be an excellent candidate for an opening we are trying to fill based on your Industrial background. A brief job description about the Construction Laborer vacancy is included.

Construction Laborer

Competitive Salary

Applicants should have great communication and organizational skills.

A Speech On Life By David Foster Wallace

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

Atlanta Hurricane Chasers

Expectant dad Amani Channel is geared-up and off to SC with his freelance co-hort, Mario. Amani’s wife is not real happy about all this gallivantin’ around, not with her looming due date. (See video.) But what’s a freelance TV-type to do? It’s hurricane season; make hay while the sun shines. You can follow Amani and Mario’s excellent weather-related adventures via Amani’s Tweets on Twitter here. Amani’s live-streaming channel on uStream.tv is here.