Michael Phelps has so far emerged unscathed from the controversy created by the photo showing him smoking from a bong, with his sponsors still standing behind him. However, he still could face criminal charges if it's determined that he was smoking marijuana, which shouldn't be too difficult considering there's a photo and Phelps has already confessed:
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott says he will charge Michael Phelps with a crime if he determines the Olympics hero smoked marijuana in Richland County...
...Possession of marijuana is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail or a $570 fine, plus court costs.
But Lott seems to be the only person talking about making a case against Phelps. Both the USC and Columbia Police Departments said they would not pursue charges.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
South Carolina Sheriff Excited About Phelps' Bong
From Huffington Post:
More Money Needed for Public Defense in Georgia
From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
In what may be its final stand, Georgia’s public defender council voted Monday for emergency spending and a budget far exceeding Gov. Sonny Perdue’s recommendation.
The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council is seeking more funding when other state agencies are slashing their budgets to make up for a revenue shortfall. Council members said the defender agency needs the money to meet its constitutional obligations.
The request goes to the Legislature, where some lawmakers want to strip the council’s board of its power. Senate Bill 42, which would turn over authority to the defender council’s executive director, recently passed a key committee by a 5-4 vote.
On Monday, the council voted to request $1.4 million in emergency funding to keep the agency afloat through the end of the fiscal year, which ends June 30. Separately, it voted to ask for $48.3 million for fiscal 2010, more than $12 million more than what is being recommended by Perdue.
Before the vote, executive director Mack Crawford cautioned against it.
“I think it’s suicidal, to be honest with you,” he said. Asking for more when other agencies being ordered to get by with less may do more harm than good, he said.
Dawson County Commission Chairman Mike Berg, a member of the council’s board, agreed. “You know everybody else is cutting back,” he said.
But Walker County Attorney Don Oliver, another member, said the council is asking for the bare minimum. “This agency has never been fully funded, and the money is there,” he said, referring to an indigent defense fund.
In 2004, lawmakers voted to fund the new defender system through increases in court fees and criminal fines. But the fund has been collecting millions of dollars more than what the Legislature has given the agency.
On Monday, the council voted to ask the Legislature to hold on to money collected by the fund. Whatever money is left over —- beyond what is appropriated to the defender agency —- would then be used to cover unexpected costs, such as fees for defending someone like courthouse killer Brian Nichols. Whatever money is not used for the agency would be returned as grant money to counties, the council recommended.
Holder Confirmed as Attorney General
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
The Senate confirmed Eric Holder as U.S. attorney general on Monday, putting him in position to oversee President Barack Obama's plans to overhaul U.S. legal policy in the war on terrorism.
The Senate voted 75-21 to approve Holder, a deputy attorney general under former President Bill Clinton. Aides said he would be sworn in on Tuesday as the first black U.S. attorney general.
Holder, 58, is a former federal judge, U.S. prosecutor and prominent white-collar attorney.
Obama last week designated Holder to oversee plans to close the Guantanamo prison for terrorism suspects, and develop new policies on detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects.
The project is a centerpiece of Obama's push to restore America's image, which has been tarnished by charges of human rights abuses in the antiterrorism campaign launched by former President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks.
"At a time when our moral authority in the world is threatened by the immoral acts that were sanctioned from the top, we need an attorney general who puts civil liberties first," said Senator Roland Burris, an Illinois Democrat who filled the Senate seat vacated by Obama.
The new attorney general must also protect the public against terrorism and "put people first" in combating Wall Street crimes, Burris said during a debate on the nomination. "We can be certain that Eric Holder will do these things."
Monday, February 2, 2009
The Global Wealthy to Our Rescue?
From Too Much:
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin delivered the opening keynote address last week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, before an elite gathering that included a record 1,400 CEOs from around the world and over 40 heads of state.
Putin fit right in. His remarks would strike all the right notes — and anticipate the themes that would bounce around throughout the forum’s five days.
Only “mutual trust,” Putin would assert, can bring the world out of global economic meltdown, along, of course, with an ongoing commitment to making the world safe for big-time investors.
“We are convinced that those who create attractive conditions for global investment today,” Putin declared, “will become the leaders in restoring the world economy.”
And creating those “attractive conditions,” Putin would explain to a reporter who asked him “if the shrinking number of billionaires was a positive to be taken from the credit crisis,” means keeping the world a place where grand fortunes can continue to accumulate.
Putin has had highly publicized run-ins, over the years, with several Russian super-rich “oligarchs.” At Davos, he vigorously protested his image in the West as a “billionaire slayer.”
“It was never my goal to stamp out billionaires,” Putin pronounced, adding that should anyone, acting within the law, gain a billion or two, then “God bless him.”
Putin would not entertain, even for a moment, the possibility that the chase after billion-dollar fortunes may have somehow contributed to the global economic meltdown. Neither would any other mover and shaker at Davos.
The forum’s endless panels and speeches systematically ignored the impact of grand accumulations of private wealth on the world economy. One session did promise a look at “Hard Lessons about Global Imbalances,” but the “imbalances” in question turned out to revolve around currency reserves, not top-heavy concentrations of income and wealth.
Forum organizers titled another session “Threats to Society.” Did maldistributions of income and wealth count as a “threat”? Not quite. The panel focused instead on “illegal drugs and counterfeit goods,” the global increase in “illicit activities and transnational crime.”
This studied silence on the concentration of the world’s wealth should hardly count as any sort of surprise. That wealth, after all, has been concentrating in the pockets of the same wealthy who drop in on Davos every year. These exalted souls could hardly be expected to acknowledge the consequences of their own fortunes — and how they’ve amassed them.
But those consequences remain the biggest hurdle to global economic recovery. A world where wealth has tilted overwhelmingly to the top, where average people must go deep into debt to get by, where grand fortunes translate into the political power that stymies needed reforms, will forever be unstable.
At Davos, the rich and their retainers did their best to fudge that reality. They worked hard to strike a sober, problem-solving pose. They spent less on parties. One top global public relations executive, Howard Rubenstein, even suggested that business leaders should pay, out of their own pockets, for the half-hour helicopter ride from the Zurich airport to the Davos snowy slopes.
“They should avoid anything that appears super fancy or super rich,” the PR expert intoned, “or thumbing their noses at taxpayers during a time of austerity.”
On that score, the world’s bankers and corporate leaders largely succeeded last week. But they still face a more daunting task: reclaiming their credibility in a world no longer so easily vowed by riches and those who hold them.
“The wealth creators of recent years,” summed up two British journalists covering the Davos scene, Ashley Seager and Larry Elliott, “have suddenly become the wealth destroyers.”
Saturday, January 31, 2009
G-d Help You Should You Ever Get a Call from Israel
They made a call to Spain yesterday:
A day after a Spanish court ordered an investigation into an assassination of a Palestinian militant in 2002, the Spanish government has said it will cancel the investigation, and change the law to prevent such investigations being undertaken in the future.
The moves came after Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni telephoned the Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos on Friday. Livni said after the call Moratinos told her he 'would fix it.'
The Spanish judge on Thursday ruled the assassination of Salah Shehadeh by an F-16 air strike on a home on July 22 2002, which resulted in fifteen people killed, including nine children, and more than 100 wounded, should be investigated as a war crime. He placed seven current and former Israeli government and military officials, including two current ministers, under investigation. They are Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who was defense minister at the time, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who was then heading the Shin Bet agency, Likud Knesset candidate Moshe Ya'alon, who was chief of General Staff, Dan Halutz, the then commander of the Israel Air Force, Doron Almog, who was OC Southern Command, then-National Security Council chief Giora Eiland, and the defense minister's military secretary, Mike Herzog.
Moratinos, according to Israel Radio, has since told Livni his government will amend the authority of the Spanish courts to prevent such investigations from being launched in the future and limit the courts' jurisdiction.
Livni told Moratinos, "This is very important news for the Israeli public. Unfortunately, the legal systems in the free world are used by parties with interests who have no connection whatsoever to the rule of law or the values of the free world."
"It's a good thing that the Spanish government has decided to stop this phenomenon. Israel will continue to work with other governments in the world in a bid to stop similar groundless prosecutions."
Continue.
And don't you wish you could have listened in on the call from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to then-President G. W. Bush a couple weeks ago?
On Monday Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, told a group of local government officials in Ashkelon in a speech that he had demanded U.S. President George W. Bush interrupt a speech he was giving, and telephone Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and instruct her to abstain on the UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, a resolution Rice had largely put together in conjunction with other foreign ministers.
"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor,” Olmert said in his speech which was in Hebrew but was translated and reported by several news organizations, including The Associated Press.
"I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone.’ They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me."
Bush, said Olmert, was unfamiliar with the resolution.
"He said: ‘Listen. I don’t know about it. I didn’t see it. I’m not familiar with the phrasing," said Olmert.
"I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor."
"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor. He (Bush) gave an order to the secretary of state, and she did not vote in favor of it — a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and maneuvered for. She was left pretty shamed," said the Israeli prime minister, whose office on Tuesday confirmed reports of the conversation were accurate.
A White House spokesman said the comments as they were reported did have “some inaccuracies,” but did not deny the reports. The State Department said the notion that Olmert altered the vote was “100%” untrue.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack however confirmed Rice spoke to President Bush in the lead-up to the vote, and received a call from him after he had spoken to Prime Minister Olmert.
Full story at Big News Network.
Torture of Prisoners in Louisiana
By New Orleans-based Jordan Flaherty for San Francisco Bay View:
The torture of prisoners in U.S. custody is not only found in military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. If President Obama is serious about ending U.S. support for torture, he can start here in Louisiana.
The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is already notorious for a range of offenses, including keeping former Black Panthers Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox in solitary for over 36 years. Now a death penalty trial in St. Francisville, Louisiana, has exposed widespread and systemic abuse at the prison. Even in the context of eight years of the Bush administration, the behavior documented at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola stands out both for its brutality and for the significant evidence that it was condoned and encouraged from the very top of the chain of command.
In a remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola, 25 inmates testified last summer to facing overwhelming violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly a decade ago. These 25 inmates - who were not involved in the escape attempt - testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell and threatened that they would be killed. They were threatened by guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons. They were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were bloodied, had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily functions and beaten until they signed statements or confessions presented to them by prison officials. One inmate had a broken jaw, and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years.
While prison officials deny the policy of abuse, the range of prisoners who gave statements, in addition to medical records and other evidence introduced at the trial, present a powerful argument that abuse is a standard policy at the prison. Several of the prisoners received $7,000 when the state agreed to settle, without admitting liability, two civil rights lawsuits filed by 13 inmates. The inmates will have to spend that money behind bars - more than 90 percent of Angola’s prisoners are expected to die behind its walls.
Continue reading.
Friday, January 30, 2009
The Police and Oscar Grant
Police illegally tried to confiscate video cameras from all the people who filmed them murder save their lives from Oscar Grant.
Soldiers Committing More Suicides
What could possibly be bothering our men and women in uniform? I guess we'll see after the study.
From Big News Network:
From Big News Network:
Suicides are increasing amongst US military personnel.
The rate amongst active duty soldiers was particularly high last year with the number of soldiers taking their own lives rising to 143, up from 115 the previous year.
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have intensified, suicides within the forces have been rising.
Lengthened combat deployments and long periods away from family are two of the factors which are believed to have contributed to severe depression amongst the ranks.
The US Army has now commissioned the National Institute of Mental Health to do a study of factors affecting soldiers' mental health.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
I Can't Get Fired
Anyway, it's a really good episode.
If you're only going to watch one, this is it.
No, no, no. This is the one to watch. Tightrope walker.
If you're only going to watch one, this is it.
No, no, no. This is the one to watch. Tightrope walker.
Patenting Thoughts
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to review a decision in a patent case which put a question mark over the ability to patent such things as software and financial strategies.
Law firm Finnegan LLP said on Wednesday it was asking the top court to reconsider the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's decision to side with patent examiners in rejecting a method for hedging against energy cost changes.
The so-called Bilski case turned on whether an inventor can patent an abstract process, something that involves nothing more than thoughts, and was closely watched by software makers, Internet companies, investment houses and other businesses.
The appeals court ruled on October 30 that Bernard Bilski's hedging method could not be patented because it was not tied to a machine and did not result in a transformation.
The appeals court, in its opinion, also acknowledged that it expected the Supreme Court to consider the case.
Finnegan LLP partner Michael Jakes said he expected the Supreme Court to agree to review the case. "They seem to be interested in this particular issue," he said. "I think they're looking for a case on what processes can be patented."
Business methods were widely considered unpatentable until a 1998 ruling by the same appeals court. One of the best known examples of a business method patent is Amazon's (AMZN.O) one-click process to buy goods on the Internet.
Bilski and Rand Warsaw founded the company WeatherWise to sell services based on their hedging method that is used by some utilities. The U.S. patent office rejected their patent application in 2000 and the patent board upheld the rejection in 2006.
$1,000,000 Prize- Banks, Blind and Deaf Schools, or Fox Broadcasting?
From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The $1 million game show prize that Georgia schools Superintendent Kathy Cox won for charity last summer is in limbo because of the personal bankruptcy filing by Cox and her home builder husband.
The investment firm hired to create an account for distributing the money to three public schools for blind and deaf students returned the check to Fox Broadcasting Co. in December, according to Cox and her attorney.
The company, Fidelity Investments, did not want to become involved in the bankruptcy case, Cox attorney Karen White said.
White said it is not clear when, or if, the schools will receive the $1 million Cox won last August on “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?”
Lawyers representing the creditors of Kathy Cox and her husband, John, are considering going after the prize money.
White said Fox could simply keep the $1 million. A Fox spokesman said the company was not prepared to comment.
Kathy Cox, in a statement issued through a spokesman Wednesday, said she still wants the money to benefit the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon; the Georgia School for the Deaf in Cave Spring; and the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf in Clarkston.
“It’s sad that banks and lawyers are standing in the way of making that happen,” she said. “I’m hopeful that this money will still end up where it belongs.”
The Coxes filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy Nov. 17, citing $3.5 million in debt related mainly to John Cox’s Fayette County home building business.
White said the bankruptcy trustee representing creditors has asked for records concerning the prize money.
“Whether he will ultimately assert that the state has a superior legal right to that of the [school fund’s] legal right, I don’t know,” she said.
A lawyer representing the bankruptcy trustee confirmed Wednesday the creditors might make a claim on the prize money.
“It is what we’re looking into,” said attorney Alex Teel. “As of yet, we haven’t seen those documents.”
While documents show the couple’s troubles stem from debt associated with John Cox’s home building business, the Coxes spent more than half of a 45-minute recorded bankruptcy hearing Dec. 30 fielding questions about the prize money.
During the hearing, John Cox said his wife nearly backed out of the game show appearance because of their financial troubles. The couple said they first met with a bankruptcy attorney Aug. 1, five days before the taping.
“You were so emotional, you didn’t want to go to the show,” John Cox said in an aside to his wife, “and I said, ‘Just go, it’s for a good cause. It doesn’t matter what happens to us.’ “
Georgia's Gingrey Kissing Rush Limbaugh
Obama Obama All The Time
He got his stimulus bill through the House with no Republicans voting for it.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Uh, Mr. Obama? What is that Lobbyist Doing Here?
Thanks to x_3mta3 for introducing us to the wonderful machine that is the Obameter (and even more thanks for the magical inauguration souvenir that is the Obama Stocking Cap!), I spy that Mr. President is making an eenie weenie exception to his no lobbyists working in the White House rule. Oh, no big whoop, he only lobbied for Raytheon. They only make loads of money off of war. That only should be considered war profiteering, but let's call it necessary for defense and the economy. Great. If that hat wasn't so sparkly...
On his first day, President Obama signed an executive order placing restrictions on lobbyists working in the White House, as he promised to do during the campaign. We rated it Promise Kept.
But we've since learned new information that is prompting us to keep a closer eye Promise No. 240 and move the needle to Compromise.
The executive order Obama signed includes a waiver clause. The executive order says a waiver may be granted if "the literal application of the restriction is inconsistent with the purposes of the restriction" or "it is in the public interest ... . The public interest shall include, but not be limited to, exigent circumstances relating to national security or to the economy."
And a waiver seems to be in the works already -- for William J. Lynn III, the appointee to be Deputy Secretary of Defense. Lynn was formerly a lobbyist for the giant defense contractor Raytheon.
Fulton County Commissioners Threatened With Dirty Jail Time
From The Atlanta Journal Constitution:
A federal judge on Tuesday threatened Fulton County commissioners with fines or incarceration if they don’t provide adequate funding for the county jail.
In a three-page order, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob put officials on notice they could be held in contempt if Sheriff Ted Jackson is not provided the necessary resources to bring the jail into compliance with a court order.
Atlanta and Fulton County news Shoob issued the order in an ongoing case filed in 2004 that alleged the jail was understaffed, crowded, dirty and dangerous. In February 2006, Shoob approved a consent decree, under which the county pledged to improve conditions.
Shoob’s court-appointed monitor recently expressed concern over the county’s decision to cut the sheriff’s budget from $98 million to $93.4 million. The monitor believes such a reduced budget will not enable the sheriff to comply with the consent decree, Shoob said.
“The county defendants should be aware that it is their obligation to budget sufficient funds to enable the sheriff to comply with all requirements set out in the consent decree,” Shoob wrote. “This obligation is unconditional.”
“Holding people in jail is expensive and the judge is making it clear there’s no way around that,” said Lisa Kung, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.
Kung said ways costs could be cut if the jail were not a “dumping ground” for people with mental health issues and for those who commit “poverty crimes.” There also should be a way to streamline procedures so detainees can more quickly post bond and be released, she said.
Hamas Using Camel, Lion, and Monkey Shields
From Big New Network:
A month ago, it was attracting families - he says the zoo drew up to 1,000 visitors each day. He points at the foot-long hole in the camel in one of the enclosures.
'This camel was pregnant, a missile went into her back,' he tells us. 'Look, look at her face. She was in pain when she died.'
Around every corner, inside almost every cage are dead animals, who have been lying in their cages since the Israeli incursion.
Qasim doesn't understand why they chose to destroy his zoo. And it's difficult to disagree with him. Most of them have been shot at point blank range.
'The first thing the Israelis did was shoot at the lions - the animals ran out of their cage and into the office building. Actually they hid there.'
The two lions are back in their enclosure. The female is pregnant, and lies heavily on the ground, occasionally swishing her tail. Qasim stands unusually close to them, but they don't seem bothered by his presence.
As he takes us around, he is obviously appalled at the state of the animals. The few animals that have survived appear weak and disturbed.
'The foxes ate each other because we couldn't get to them in time. We had many here.' There are carcasses everywhere and the last surviving fox is quivering in the corner.
The zoo opened in late 2005, with money from local and international NGOs. There were 40 types of animals, a children's library, a playground and cultural centre housed at the facility.
Inside the main building, soldiers defaced the walls, ripped out one of the toilets and removed all of the hard drives from the office computers. We asked him why they targeted the zoo. He laughs. 'I don't know. You have to go and ask the Israelis. This is a place where people come to relax and enjoy themselves. It's not a place of politics.'
Israel has accused Hamas of firing rockets from civilian areas. Qasim reacts angrily when we raise the subject.
'Let me answer that with a question. We are under attack. There was not a single person in this zoo. Just the animals. We all fled before they came. What purpose does it serve to walk around shooting animals and destroying the place?'
Inside one cage lie three dead monkeys and another two in the cage beside them. Two more escaped and have yet to return. He points to a clay pot. 'They tried to hide', he says of a mother and baby half-tucked inside.
Qasim says that his main two priorities at the moment are rebuilding the zoo and taking the Israeli army to court. For the first, he says he will need close to $200,000 to return the zoo to its former state - and he wants the Israelis to cover the costs. 'They have to pay me for all this damage.'
We ask him why it's so important for Gaza to have a zoo. 'During the past four years it was the most popular place for kids. They came from all over the Gaza Strip. There was nowhere else for people to go.'
Monday, January 26, 2009
Director of National Intelligence Confirmation Hearing
From Secrecy News:
“There is a great deal of over-classification,” admitted Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the nominee to be the next Director of National Intelligence, at his confirmation hearing last week.
“Some of it, I think, is done for the wrong reasons, to try to hide things from the light of day. Some of it is because in our system, there is no incentive not to do that, and there are penalties to do the reverse, in case you get something wrong and don’t classify it.”
“So I think we need to do fundamental work on the system,” he said in response to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden at the January 22 hearing.
Continued.
Major General Smedley Butler
From Chapter 4 of War is a Racket (the short book is readable online) by Smedley Butler, Major General- United States Marine Corps, awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor, Distinguished Service Medal, and Republican Candidate for Senate 1932.
A few profit -- and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation -- it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted -- to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.
Why shouldn't they?
They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!
Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
States' Rights Victory
From the New York Times:
Continued.
WASHINGTON — President Obama will direct federal regulators on Monday to move swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile emission and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday evening.
The directive makes good on an Obama campaign pledge and signifies a sharp reversal of Bush administration policy. Granting California and the other states the right to regulate tailpipe emissions would be one of the most emphatic actions Mr. Obama could take to quickly put his stamp on environmental policy.
Mr. Obama’s presidential memorandum will order the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the Bush administration’s past rejection of the California application. While it stops short of flatly ordering the Bush decision reversed, the agency’s regulators are now widely expected to do so after completing a formal review process.
Continued.
Out-Golf and Gardens. Five Minutes Ago- Downtown Baseball. In- Theater District.
The Chronicle's editorial today seems to start out poking fun of our get-rich-quick schemes here in Augusta (the race track, a canal downtown, a new baseball stadium, cable-cars on Broad Street, and everyone's favorite- the Golf and Gardens) and goes on to rave about how wonderful it could be to restore the Miller Theater. But then:
The comments following the column didn't indicate a lot of public support or momentum that direction. What is it about Augusta and these big ticket items that no one wants?
We could take a lesson from little North Augusta and their Riverview Park and Greeneway. Augusta could do something similar and even better. We have the canal path already connecting downtown to lovely Lake Olmstead Park. We could buy or build a gym downtown near the canal path. That would be affordable, healthy, social fun for Augustans, and a steady stream of traffic for downtown businesses. The city could rent out bikes downtown and kayaks or canoes at Lake Olmstead. We already have disc golf and a great baseball stadium there. We could also easily catch some more money from Greenjackets games without building a second stadium. If parking is really a problem there, let's set up a park-and-ride shuttle downtown on game nights so people can hang out on Broad Street (maybe even at the Miller) before the game and then get dropped back off again after. We have buses.
Our feeling is that it would be terrific if they're right -- and the theater district could have room for the old and the new. It would be a terrible shame to lose the Miller now.
Still, it would be a greater sin if, by restoring the Miller, we lose either momentum or public support for a new state-of-the-art performing arts center. If we have to choose, a newer, larger, modern performance hall is the way to go.
The comments following the column didn't indicate a lot of public support or momentum that direction. What is it about Augusta and these big ticket items that no one wants?
We could take a lesson from little North Augusta and their Riverview Park and Greeneway. Augusta could do something similar and even better. We have the canal path already connecting downtown to lovely Lake Olmstead Park. We could buy or build a gym downtown near the canal path. That would be affordable, healthy, social fun for Augustans, and a steady stream of traffic for downtown businesses. The city could rent out bikes downtown and kayaks or canoes at Lake Olmstead. We already have disc golf and a great baseball stadium there. We could also easily catch some more money from Greenjackets games without building a second stadium. If parking is really a problem there, let's set up a park-and-ride shuttle downtown on game nights so people can hang out on Broad Street (maybe even at the Miller) before the game and then get dropped back off again after. We have buses.
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