Radical Georgia Moderate

Here’s a photo featuring Lt. Governor candidate Ralph Reed, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and others standing next to the chartered plane that would fly them to a golf outing in Scotland. Click to enlarge:

I can’t wait to see this in campaign ads. From a Washington Post article.

The siren’s song of NCAA 2007 for the Xbox 360, which won’t even be released until July, proved to be too tempting for me to resist. When Best Buy sent me an e-mail offering 10 percent off anything ordered online, that was the final straw that bent my will toward the monopolists EA and Microsoft. My Xbox 360 should arrive late this week or early next week. I am weak. I am not sticking to principle here. But, c’mon, this is the first screen grab I saw:

Project Gotham will have to tide me over until I get my NCAA Football fix.

Related, does anyone want to buy a Gamecube with two controllers, two memory cards, and +/- 10 games? I’ll update this post with a full list when I get home tonight, but these are the games I remember off the top of my head:

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Madden 06
Metroid Prime I and II
NCAA Football 2004
Resident Evil Zero (I’m pretty sure it’s Zero, but need to double check)
Starfox Adventures

Also, I lent Mario Sunshine to my brother. Hopefully he hasn’t sold it. And there’s a third-person shooter I can’t remember the name of. Maybe one or two more.

UPDATE: The action game is Dead to Rights. There’s only one memory card, but there’s also a rare promotional copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which was ported from the Nintendo 64 and given free to people who pre-ordered The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker.

Also, my Gamecube is one of the older ones with the hi-def component output that they quit making at some point, and I have the cable for it, which is also hard to find (I had to order mine from Korea). Here’s a photo of all the schwag:

UPDATE 2: I have an ad on Craigslist now.

You can listen to my interview with John Dashler, an independent candidate running for governor, on the Georgia Podcast Network. We discuss ballot access issues, immigration and nefarious attorneys using intimidation tactics on businesses. It was a hoot.

This site has some history about the building. I appear to be in the minority relative to commenters on that site and all the news coverage I read in that I actually think it would have been neat to repurpose it instead of tearing it down. I was first acquainted with it when I accompanied Amber to her drug test for her current job, which was conducted in a suite inside. It’s unfortunate that it was already boarded up when I took these, because I wanted to get some photos of the lobby, which had these ornate 1950s designs that I don’t really know how to describe.

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Here are a few photos from the Decatur Arts Festival, being held today through Monday. I might take and add some more tomorrow:

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Kenny Boy and Jeffrey were convicted today. It’s a shame they will likely go to a white collar resort prison, because the thought of them being assaulted and sodomized makes me smile. This will have to suffice:

The charges for which Lay was convicted carry a maximum penalty in prison of 45 years in the corporate trial and 120 years in the personal banking trial. The charges for which Skilling was convicted carry a maximum penalty of 185 years in prison.

Popular Science (by way of CNN) has a good article breaking down the net neutrality debate into digestable terms. I favor net neutrality, and will try to sum up why as concisely as possible:

The Internet, as it exists, provides a platform where small start-ups and individuals’ ability to communicate with customers is equal to that of massive corporations. This equal access to the pipe has led to countless innovations that never could have happened had the Internet been the domain of just a few well-heeled corporations and individuals. For example, most open source software projects would have a tough time surviving in the new tiered model. Blogs and podcasts likely would never have been invented had the Internet been tiered.

My gut appears to be right about there being a plant among our commenters here. Really, I’m not on a witch hunt, I just can’t stand paid shills shitting in the comment pool. The envelope please…

Adam, whose last name I know but don’t think it’s totally necessary to reveal right now, left a comment on the Flying Biscuit thread from last Wednesday. He also left a similar comment on the AJC web site about the sale of the Flying Biscuit. Both comments concluded with the phrase, “Yes, I’m a biscuit eater too! Won’t you join me?” No human being speaks in marketing slogans like that, which is what drew my attention to begin with.

Johnny Isakson, Georgia’s junior U.S. senator, by many accounts, is a sane, pragmatic moderate when compared to many of his GOP brethren (and the post-2000 version of Democrat Zell Miller, for that matter). That’s why his support of the Linder/Boortz Fair Tax boggles my mind somewhat.

The Fair Tax, you might have heard, is a proposal to do away with the federal income tax and fund government with a sales tax. Here’s the bizarre twist: it would give lower income families refund checks for taxes they paid on vital goods.

Why not just, umm, not tax people to begin with? Does this proposal not create the same sort of bureaucracy many Fair Tax advocates claim to despise? For that matter, don’t those checks sound an awful lot like the same sort of welfare many of its proponents claim to despise? Doesn’t it create more reliance on government, not less?

It’s a utopian fantasy that would be a disaster in practice. I can’t fathom how someone like Isakson would throw his weight behind it. Then again, Isakson’s voting record isn’t all that moderate. His “moderate” label can only be justified cosmetically, not substantively.

Check it, I have a new Georgia Political Digest column.