As this column goes to press, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are presumably somewhere in South Georgia, rumbling through a string of rural counties on a bus ride to Savannah for a big rally and fundraiser. It should be quite a road trip.
Take on a project like “Trouble in God’s Country” and you inevitably spend way too much time plowing through government documents that most people don’t even know about, let alone actually read. One such document is the 2023 Overview and Recommendations report from the House Rural Development Council.
I remember thinking during that period that covering sports had been good training for covering politics, but never did I imagine that those two sets of experiences might somehow converge a half-century later.
Time was when Albany was the center of commerce and political power in southwest Georgia. Back in my newspapering days, nearly a half-century ago, the governor, George Busbee, and State Senate majority leader, Al Holloway, both hailed from Albany.
Data from the nonprofit County Health Rankings & Roadmaps helps put Georgia's health outcomes, like a range of other socio-economic measures, into a national context.
The Georgia State Senate has established a new committee to study Artificial Intelligence, aka AI. The jokes, of course, pretty much write themselves.
We don’t have time to deal with the half-dozen or so federal agencies that show up in such situations.
In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the poverty-stricken American South constituted the biggest threat to the nation’s economy. “It is my conviction that the South presents right now the nation's No. 1 economic problem,” FDR wrote in a message to a Conference on Economic Conditions of the South.
The trip from Watkinsville, Ga., to Alamo, Ga., covers a little over 140 miles and, according to Google Maps, should take about two hours and 40 minutes. It’s pretty much a straight shot down U.S. 441. You’ll cross I-20 at Madison, go through Milledgeville and then hit Dublin, where you’ll cross I-16, and then make the final half-hour run to Alamo.
In Georgia’s 2022 governor’s race, Brian Kemp, the Republican incumbent, defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams 54%-to-46%. In the 1990 race, Zell Miller, the Democratic lieutenant governor making his first bid for the state’s top office, defeated GOP State Senator Johnny Isakson by the same margin.
