DEMOCRATS DON'T TRUST THEIR OWN PEOPLE
AND WE SHOULDN'T EITHER

GOT ANOTHER EMAIL FROM HOWARD “THE SCREAMER” DEAN yesterday….one more of those things that he invites the reader to write the media, then attempts to put his words into your letter.
More...

MORE ON LITTLE RICHARD
and
COUNCILMAN HENRY "FLIP-FLOP" FICKLIN

QUICKIE MACON UPDATE….HERITAGE FESTIVAL It appears that there are not a few upset with our revealing City Hall’s plans to bring Little Richard into the mix during October’s Music and Heritage Festival.
More...

LITTLE RICHARD PENNIman TO PLAY MACON IN TWO WEEKS
WE THINK
AN EXCLUSIVE FROM THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE

We have it from a most reliable source that “Little Richard” Pennington will be playing his hometown of Macon the weekend of October 7-9, which has also been designated ‘Georgia Music and Heritage Festival 2005’.

More...

E-LOST??
LOST

We lost.

Big time. Overwhelmingly.

71% to a measly 29%. /b>

More...

B>The problem was the working gals, those women of the evening, the prostitutes who once plied their trade in quaint downtown Macon.

More...

SAYING "NO" TO TAXING OURSELVES TO DEATH

VOTE NO TO E-LOST: This is the day residents of Bibb County vote on a controversial penny-added sales tax sponsored by school super,Sharon Patterson and her rubber stamping, spineless Board of Education.

More...

A SLIGHT CHANGE IN FORMAT

Good evening from miasmic Maconga, where it remains hot and sweltering and summer-like even now on the cusp of the autumnal equinox.

For the next couple of days or, the portion of this b'log, PICTURE OF THE DAY will go on hiatus. It's only temporary. But I am working on a slight change of format which should make reading and navigating THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE a little easier.

Instead of publishing an entire article on this front page, I will only put a title, or a slight teaser like an opening sentence here. The remainder will be found sub rosa by clicking on MORE. It means more info will be able to be displayed here in the wide and open.

Thank you for your patientia.

Luke Angelo
AKA The Cyber Brat Out Of Hell (and several other things too raunchy for a family oriented web site)

FALL AIN'T FALLIN' VERY FAST

The weather is cruelly hot for mid September, less than a week before the autumnal equinox. High temperatures are running about ten degrees higher than normal.

Fall is beautiful in Middle Georgia. So far not really, this year. Ground is too dry, the remaining crops in the field are largely burnt dead, our garden is a casualty of the heat….no fall tomatoes in 2005. And that, of course means we shall taste our next one in June, 2006, when our first fruits start coming in. I won’t buy a tomato in any super market….at any price.

Autumn is a long term thing here in deep Dixie, as is spring. We don’t really have much of a winter. January is fairly cold, providing a few nights of light frost. But by February things are usually warming up to the point of light jackets. March is down right delightful; many of us plant our summer garden then.

My pop has a few rules which drive me nuts. Like right now. He always shuts the AC off by Labor Day. No matter what. It won’t come on again until late June. Sometimes July 4th. The Old Man hates spending money on utilities and does his level best to keep costs down.

No matter how much I suffer. He probably suffers too, but is just stubborn enough not to admit it.

He’s not a ‘rules guy’, not one of those martinet parents who do everything by somebody’s book. Except in the saving of utility money. He also hates to put money into a gas tank which helps explain why we do so much damn walking around here. Why drive a half mile to the nearest Kroger when you can walk…..and lug a twenty pound bag of cat food back up the hill. Right.

Once this hot wave is over, and the weather channel seems to think it will linger for another week or more….a weather channel which is batting something less than .300 these days….and the cool weather infiltrates our tropics, then will be the time for more seasonal, outdoor activity.

THAT 'OTHER' NEWSPAPER

THERE IS A RUMOR FLOATING AROUND THE LEFT COAST that Rob Reiner, sometime actor and activist, will seek the Democrats’ nomination to run against governor Arnold Schwartzenegger. Honestly, could you bring yourself to vote for some fat, balding slob widely known as ‘Meathead’?

MARY LANDRIEU, Senator from Louisiana, corruption capital of the Deep South, brought a new meaning to the word ‘spin’ last week in her outrageous interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Got to be honest here, I have only heard excerpts, but what I heard was stomach churning. This level of the shameful spectacle of a United States Senator telling bold faced lies throughout her alloted air time hasn’t been heard since Ted Kennedy faced the press while covering his ass after he murdered Mary Jo Kopeckne in 1969.

DON’T FORGET….VOTE NO TO THE BOE’S SPECIAL OPTION TAX if you live in Bibb County. Early returns have been small….gives the ‘no’ voters a fighting chance.

And remember, it’s not that I oppose education. I just oppose the current crop of cowardly souls who make up our current Board of Education. I do not trust these folk any more than I trust our Superintendent of Schools, Sharon Patterson, who seems to like jumping through hoops in her efforts to quash innovation and initiative on the part of classroom teachers.

LOTS OF GRAFT AND SCAM OUT THERE IN THE WAKE OF KATRINA. Local police have already nabbed one car load in possession of counterfeit treasury bonds. Local Pastors have warned us of scammers masquerading as refugees….trying to bilk local congregations of their hard-earned milk of human kindness. There are probably more of these bad guys than any of us might imagine. On the internet? The day the levee broke we were inundated with emails from obvious con artists.

We ought to be vigilant about the hundreds or thousands of jailed felons the state of Louisiana was forced to release from their cells. Mayn of these joined the general population and simply vanished. How many of them are right here in river city?

NO, HORTENSE, I DIDN’T WATCH THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH LAST NIGHT. I know I should have, but I didn’t…just listened to some music and did my home work. Oh, and did a little writing. Working on a short story. With a surprise ending. But no president. No comments on what he said. No comments on any vindictiveness from the Party of the Mythic Jackass. Nada. Nothing. Nihil.

REMINDER….GUN SHOW coming to the Macon Centreplex on September 24th and 25th. At least I think there is. I checked that venue’s calendar and found that it has not been kept up to date. Anyway, we believe there is a two day gun and knife show the weekend next. Check it out. Be glad to talk with you there. I plan to purchase a firearm for my nieces. They’re four and seven and old enough to learn to use firearms.

UPCOMING IN THE ELEVENTH HOUR….Couple of good things. This week we look at the confrontation between Mayor Ellis and members of the Macon City Council this past week. Was alcohol involved? That, and we conclude the series on culture in the Downtown, which was delayed one issue because of the immediate threat of City Hall’s adding parking meters to the ambience of the Downtown.

In two more weeks, we look at another idiotic attempt by the city government to hinder the growth and development of in-town businesses, this time by slapping an extra tax on restaurants which have outside seating. The issue is a little complicated and will require more space to examine than we have here, but it appears to me that the Ellis Administration is trying to squeeze Mom and Pop shops out of existence. Why? Who the hell knows.

WRITING FOR THE ELEVENTH HOUR is a very different thing from writing for the MACON TELEGRAPH.

Of course my own experience in publishing anything in the daily was limited to Letters to the Editor. I noticed with some regularity not that my prose was altered, but that my words were simplified, or dumbed down. I remember once typing ‘Spelunking’, which some helpful dork changed to something like ‘cave exploring’. When it came out a day or two later.

ELEVENTH HOUR would never do that.

I used to write an occasional letter to the Editor every week or two until Rick Hutto ran for Council. He made a pledge, a promise, actually, that not one of his lawn signs had ever been placed on a lawn except with permission of the owner.

Wow. That very morning a Rick Hutto sign was found on our lawn. No permission. No nothing. Here was proof positive that a pol had either lied or his troops had screwed up.

Hutto is a pretty nice guy for the most part, and a good councilman who takes that job very seriously. He seems, however, to lack a sense of humor. It may be due to the fact that he is a lawyer by trade or, perhaps, because he worked for the Jimmy Carter during that rascal’s single, hapless administration. Most lawyers I know are mirth challenged, unless they are drunk or at least drinking. Maybe they secretly loathe themselves and their ethics.

So I wrote a letter….and it hit the fan. The letter mentioned the sign’s placement and said something about voting. Sadly, I wasn’t eighteen at that point and my name, Luke Angelo, wasn’t on the voting rolls. So I was suspended for all time from ever writing a letter to the editor of the Telegraph Almighty by the rotund, also humor-challenged, martinet running the editorial page.

The Hutto sign? Still in our garage. I have used it several times, stapling targets to it for rifle and pistol practice at our shooting club. Hey, makes a great target.

There is a reason for all this, other than to give the Telegraph a hard time. There are some good, intelligent people working there. But they exist in a geographic where the level of education is among the lowest in the entire nation. For this reason, The Telegraph is very much ‘dumbed-down’, written at a level commensurate with the academic level of the larger community. This is sad.

The local daily, therefore, joins the educational bureaucracy which continually teaches down to the norm rather than attempting to elevate students (and readers) by stretching their minds.

Between thee and me, my experience with the Macon Telegraph is the main reason why I would never consider writing for a paper in a small, hidebound city that does not revere learning and the written word.

Ciao

LETTER FROM HOWARD DEAN AND A RESPONSE

I received this evening an email from DNC national Chairman Howard Dean, former governor Vermont and quondam candidate for the presidency now held by George Bush.

Chairman Dean requested us to write letters to the editor of several newspapers in our area. The subject, the upcoming Senate vote to confirm John

The letter said in part: >>>>But we know enough to see a pattern -- and I've made up my mind about John Roberts. He's the wrong man at the wrong time for our country -- a trait that he shares with much of the Republican leadership, including the president who nominated him.<<<<<

After reading Governor Dean's letter, and the 'talking points' he so thoughtfully provided to the faithful, assuming, apparently, that we are sufficiently brain-dead that we need help in setting our thoughts down on paper, I would like to say the following:

John Roberts is right man at the right time to become the next Chief Justice of The Supreme Court. Governor Dean, however, is the wrong man at the wrong time to continue to lead the Party of the Mythic Jackass to any measure of success in 2006 or even 2008.

Does paranoia run in your family, Howard?

Luke Angelo
Macon, Georgia

THE ROBERTS HEARINGS

DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU but I, have not been following the Senate Judicial Committee’s inquisition of John Roberts. More and more I find myself shying away from what passeth for ‘news’ these days, and no amount of partisan Q & A, or half-baked commentary by pundit and talking head is going to change my mind.

I hope they confirm Roberts…and do it along something other than party lines. The fact that he is distrusted by many conservatives and liberals says he must have done something right over the past couple of decades.

It is quite possible that the greatest legacy of the Bush years will be in the appointments of two or more Supreme Court judges. Hard to tell from outside the Beltway…inside that ribbon of concrete all is confused legaleze and political posture.

The idea of a three part government, each part in a kind of tension with each other in what they like to call in schools ‘checks and balances;, is as old as the Greeks and Romans. It was the genius of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention that that they created a document so simple, so plain, so direct that the checks and balances actually work. Compare our seven page Constitution with the huge, convoluted document the Europeans created as they staggered their way, unsuccessfully so far, towards a kind of European Union. Lawyers….modern lawyers….created that hideous constitution. Statesman, men with vision created ours.

We must not allow the kind of thinking that would like to see a EU come to fruition to enter our own judicial process. We do not need to cite law or precedent from beyond our own borders to affect decisions of the courts, the Supreme Court especially.

Lawyers tell me that the law is a beautiful thing. These guys see it as a whole, a kind of philosophical system not unlike, the metaphysics of Plato who believed in a universe related, interdependent, organic, and symmetrical. Yet not all lawyers are philosophical. Often detested by those outside their profession, lawyers as a class are thought of as largely insensitive, money grubbing, greedy boobs.

Greek thinkers like Plato and Socrates before him came to despise orators (lawyers) who ‘make the worse appear the better cause’. They were describing the shysters and ambulance chasers of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.

Roberts will probably make a good chief justice. Certainly, if his health holds well, he could sit on the court for twenty, or thirty, or perhaps forty years, given the longevity usually associated with the Supremes. And he has a genuine philosophical appreciation of the law and the Constitution which governs it.

FIREWORKS IN CITY HALL
Hizzoner Explodes....or is it Implodes?

YOU COULDN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP…..An unruly legislature gets together in special session and votes down an administrators expensive pet project. Moments after the vote, an enraged CEO, in this case an elected mayor, draws himself up to his full, towering 6’5” and, reeking of alcohol, charges into the legislators’ private inner sanctum where he confronts at least two of the people who voted down his proposal.

Was the mayor drunk? I have no idea, but witnesses president tell us there was a strong odor of alcohol about the man. I guess it depends on what the meaning of ‘drunk’ is, eh?

Fiction…nope just the aftermath of yesterday’s special City Council meeting in the course of which, by narrowest of votes, with two key councilmen in absentia, the gang of fifteen (well, fourteen since Philomena Mullis is recuperating long term in the Philippine Islands) turned down a proposal that would have given the city a $500,000 thousand dollar federal grant for the air port.

Now on the surface, this seems like a foolhardy act. But, the stumbling block lies in the fact that the Mayor’s team did not have its own ducts in a row. They were unable to answer some very pointed questions poised from the council….and when all the facts and data are totaled up, it looks as if the five hundred thou might have cost the city more than it was worth….possibly more than the original grant proposal.

There is no question that the mayor’s presenters were long on rhetoric and short on fact. According to one council member there were three separate sets of conflicting figures on the table….and the executive branch could not say with any assurance which set was correct.

This morning Ms. Lucas was heard on WMAC’s early A.m. Kenny B. and Jami G. show. The segment itself was a gem. The listening audience was treated to what had to have been one of the best interviews ever conducted here in the Mid State.

Fifteen minutes following the broadcast, I had the good fortune to meet up with Ms. Lucas on the River Walk. We talked. The results of this most fascinating double whammy….radio interview followed immediately by accidental personal encounter….will be the subject of my next column in THE ELEVENTH HOUR….but a week away from the news stands, good people.

SPEAKING OF THE RIVERWALK….there is a rumor making the rounds of the downtown that Mayor Ellis is planning to jet to Seattle with members of his administration to check out the river walk there. Now, there is a most excellent river walk in Columbus (Georgia) and another in Savannah. In Macon’s everlasting hour of financial crisis doesn’t it seem logical to save time and money….money mostly…for Hizzoner and his hangers-on to inspect the closer facilities.

The current version of Macon’s river walk is a delightful experience for young and for old. Strolling its length is a wonderfully egalitarian experience…walkers tend to say something pleasant to everyone they meet. If you look under the bridge by the park and the Otis Redding statue, you can just make out about a hundred yards down the line the next lap extending along Central City Park down the length of the levies. The connection should be completed around the first of the year.

Sadly much of the current walk will likely be destroyed by any construction the DOT will undertake in its proposed reworking of the I-16, I-75 connector.

VOTE NO TO THE EDUCATION SPECIAL OPTION TAX!!!!

JUST SAY NO TO THE NEXT SPECIAL OPTION SALES TAX

IT SNUCK UP ON ME….maybe on some of you as well. But in eight days we Bibb County-ites get to vote on another Special Options Tax, this one at the request of the county school board.

THE TELEGRAPH has the propaganda mill humming along in full gear right….’news’ stories and editorials. They want the thing to pass. I don’t and I will tell you why, briefly.

First, please understand that yours truly is not against education. Not at all. But I am against what the local school board has been doing…or not doing…for decades. It has been that long since a decent public school education was available hereabouts to all but a few. Like the kids in the IB program at Central.

Voters gave their approval to grant the BOE the power to levy taxes less than a year ago. That was a mistake.

The school board of Bibb County, individually and collectively, is simply not up to the job of running the school system. His is a gaggle of poorly led, inadequate, political misfits. That’s our BOE in a nutshell.

Then there is the problem of the Superintendent….an appointed, not elected position, Sharon Patterson, herself an open, raw ganglion of politically-correct nerves, a person incapable of leadership, devoid of any ideas that might get the county out of the cellar in the state’s hierarchy of all things educational. Sources do tell me that Ms Patterson is considering running for larger, state-wide office, which makes her sojourn here in the Slough of Despond the most temporary of treks.

So, point one is that the Bibb Educational Cabal is leaderless and rudderless. Remember the case of Mr. Greg Doherty? He was the Central teacher crucified over a harmless joke at a school basketball game. Somebody complained to Patterson, she fired the teacher quite publicly without benefit of ever meeting with the man. Public opinion forced her to back off, but the teacher took the moral high road and quit teaching.

And the board said nothing. Their silence speaks volumes about the kind of educators, or educational leaders they are.

Do not trust this herd of non-thinkers with your education dollars.

Do we need new schools? Sure we do. But let’s get some new blood on the board, fire Patterson, and try to inject a little common sense into the school leadership.

9/11

I didn’t plan to do anything special to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11 other than put some horrific pictures of the events of that tragic day on the PICTURE OF THE DAY section. But is done with some regularity since it is my heartfelt belief that we must neither forget nor minimize the intensity of that day.

The Utnited States was attacked directly….her own soil was befouled by the slaughter of her innocent citizens by an outside, political-religious force masquarading as the peace-loving religion of Islam.

Most of the attackers were Muslims from Saudi Arabia, our sweet and wonderful ally in the Middle East with all the oil reserves. We kiss Saudi ass all the time. Guess we will within the foreseeable future. This is sad. The nation has had thirty-two years to rid itself on foreign energy sources…and we seemed to be off to a good start, once, with towering windmills, alternate fuels, solar panels, more ecologically friendly house construction. But we blew it folks.

Our energy policy is short-sighted, greedy, exploitive, and simply stupid. The German war machine soldiered on for years with gasoline and diesel fuels made from shale. Where do the world’s largest deposits of oil bearing shale lie? Why, right here in the Western U.S., with smaller reserves in economically distressed locations such as large tracts of Upstate New York.

But we don’t touch it. Not to the degree we could. We don’t use the anthracite coal that underlies much of the Appalachian mountain chain. Coal is ‘dirty’, ecologically un-pretty to the myopic tree huggers who so terrify government on every level.

Natural gas is being withheld by the energy companies. We have it first hand from an engineer who was involved in drill and capping gas wells in southern Alabama during the late 1970’s. Said this learned man, “There is enough gas here to supply the country’s needs for hundreds of years.” But the oil companies and their cronies in government will never permit one fossil energy source to appear a better bargain than the others. That might mean competition….and the energy plutocracy demands monopoly, absolute monopoly, once a dirty word back in the days of T.R. Roosevelt and his trust busting buddies. The policy now seems to be to pump just enough natural gas to keep the prices sky high.

Nuclear power, anyone? Works well in the rest of the world. Well, maybe not Chernoble. Fairly cheap, reliable. Of course we wouldn’t build a plant on the San Andreas Fault or along the southern gulf coast.

Screw the consumer. And screw him with total government connivance. He can be convinced to pay anything to keep his lavish life-style going strong. Yeah, screw the bastard…that’s the way of mammoth business, build your wealth on the backs of those you can violate.

Nobody ever said the economic engine was either fair or carried out on a level playing field.

So what does this do with 9/11? Simple, we need the oil from the Middle East, even though if we had a true energy policy we wouldn’t have to be there for oil. We could be waging a more noble war, a war to avenge the folks who were killed and maimed on 9/11.

But we are fighting a confusing war. We soldier partly for oil, partly for revenge, partly to maintain American ideals, partly to maintain an over-lavish life style.

A LITTLE NIGHT HUMOR

recall ellis dot com

“Doctor,” gushed the junior Senator from the Empire State, “Between my duties in the Senate, my running for president, and keeping an eye on Bill’s philandering, I honestly don’t know if I’m coming or going.”

“Dear lady,” replied the psychiatrist, “What I want you to do is to remove all your clothes, get on your hands and knees, crawl to the fall wall over there,” indicated with a casual wave of the hand, “then turn around and crawl back here to my desk.”

The former First lady thought this request a little unusual, but Dr. Moldspore had a reputation of being the very finest shrink in Washington. He commanded a hefty twenty-five hundred dollars an hour, after all, right up there with the most expensive corporate lawyers in the land. He simply had to be good.

So she obeyed, removed her clothing, got down on her hands and knees and painfully made her way to the far wall and back. Panting a little, she leaned on Moldspore’s desk and looked at him expectantly.”

The good doctor shook his head, and fixed her with his best professional gaze. “Frankly, Mrs. Clinton, I can’t tell if you are coming or going either.”
==========================================================

And on an even more sexist note: I don’t know if it was Governor Blanco’s sex or politics that got more in the way of her performance as Louisiana’s chief executive during the Katrina Crisis last week. Sorry to say this, but not all women are cut out to lead…especially in times of turmoil. There are exceptions, of course, and many male leaders aren’t any better to be sure, but there seems to be some element in the fair sex that makes them better at nurture than kicking ass.

The hapless woman seemed unable to make the kind of hard executive decisions circumstances warranted. Food and medical supplies were withheld from the refugees in the stadium even though there was plenty stacked up just a few yards away. She was unwilling to gain control of the criminal element in New Orleans just after the flood. She couldn’t bring herself to get tough with the lawless looters running amok throughout the Big Easy.

Gives me, at least, pause to reconsider the nature of female leadership. Inevitably questions ranging from the effect of PMS caused by Menses, the monthly visitor, will come out wherever Ms. Clinton is coming or going.

Yes, the notion is ugly to many, and totally un-PC….but denying human nature and ignoring the many differences, physical, psychological, and inborn between men and women could have far-reaching consequences for our nation in a little more than three years.

I am sick of Political Correctnmess in all its forms anyway. PC is robbing our language of much of its anglo-saxon vitality, and is turning many of us, including elected leaders, into a congregation of mush brains.
========================================================

THIS JUST IN: Recall Ellis Dot Com and its next date with destiny is November first of this year. At that point the ladies of Recall and their lawyer will face off against the assembled legal team representing Mayor Ellis to determine whether the Recall movement meets the legal requirements to continue in its horribly mangled efforts to throw Hizzoner out of office.

This little movement, made up primarily of short-sighted, bored housefraus and a few hangers-on, is a prime example of a grass roots movement that began with much sound and not a little fury two summers ago and never lived up to its own hype.

Recall, you see, although claiming bi-racial support, is seen in the larger community as a way of bringing down the first elected black mayor in Macon’s history. The pride of African American voters, who now outnumber their white counterparts, will not allow them to vote jack out no matter how bad a mayor he may be.

The anti-Ellis movement is largely racial. The community would be better served if the good ladies would put their time, effort, and money into some kind of advocacy work, or do some serious investigation the nature of corruption and malfeasance, real or imagined, found inside City Hall.

And please remember we make a distinction between ‘racial’ and ‘racist’.

SNUBBED BY CITY HALL

CALLING CITY HALL……CALLING CITY HALL: Twice now we have asked the higher powers at The House of Pain, AKA The Macon City Hall to return phone calls about the Heritage and Music Festival which is scheduled to take place in October.

First request….to the Mayor; second request…..to Angela Chapman. Both requests were made to the same person, the busy little gatekeeper who guards the gateway to the inner sanctum of Hizzoner’s fiefdom. Each time I identified myself and mentioned that I wrote for THE ELEVENTH HOUR. No return calls, nothing, nada.

I think there is a hint here…a hint I should be getting. It’s called being frozen out, out of the information loop. Noticed it first two months ago when Ron Wildman stopped giving me a heads up for the Mayor’s irregular and often hastily called news conferences.

Maybe it was my repeated questioning the man and his police chief about gang activities….at the mall. Remember, just after we had a knifing there back in the early summer. Mall Merchants knew then some of the panic downtown business people often feel.

I don’t know, but, and this is a very big butt folks, it matters not. It remains our task to expose official foible, folly, foolishness, and funny business among those who would levy taxes and spend the city into bankruptcy. Nothing can or will stop us from doing our duty and serving as the horsefly designated to bite the ass of inadequate officialdom.

IT IS A FACT THAT THERE ARE A FEW GOOD PEOPLE on the City Council. It is also a fact that they are in the minority.

TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH I have spent very little time watching the mess along the Gulf Coast. Not only is it depressing, but it’s a waste of time. It’s too much like watching the O.J. or Mikie Jackson trial or any of the other unimportant little excesses the modern news editor likes to embroil himself and his troops in.

Like all of us, I have heard a few of the outrageous charges being hurled, mostly by liberals and democrats, or liberal-democrats, mostly directed at President Bush.

Bush, you see, is always responsible for everything. At least anything when it goes wrong. This kind of thinking is insane, it is also based on a series of outright lies.

Case in point Bush is responsible for rejecting the so-called Koyoto Accord. His fault. His and his alone. Not one of the bastards ever mentions that the Senate voted 99 to 0 to reject that poorly designed treaty.

In the far leftish mind-set, Bush is stupid, he stole the election of 2000, was directly responsible for 9/11, gave tax breaks to the rich, hates Negroes and, presumably, other minorities, is allied with the evil Christian Right, and promotes the use of (shudder) firearms…etc., etc., etc, ad nauseam.

He isn’t any of those things, of course. We were clearly better off with the current president than we would have been with the vacillating, overly careful and pedantic, Alsie Gore. And any comparison with Boston Brahmin John Kerry, he whose glory days lay in a few months afloat and three paper-cut wounds. There must be something in the beer they drink up in the Bay State to return a man like Kerry or, even worse, Rotundus Kennedy to the Senate year after year. It’s an Irish thing, I suspect. And they think we southerners are racially divisive.

So with the aftermath of Katrina. There will be lots of blame to go around for the death and suffering, but before The Screamer Howie Dean and his gaggle of like-minded democrat goons hurl too many bric-a-bracs, they need to look at the ineptitude of some of their own.

They might start with the empty-headed bimbo who runs Louisiana.

PARKING METERS COULD SIGNAL THE END OF MACON'S DOWNTOWN
From The Pages Of The ELEVENTH HOUR

This Week's Column From THE ELEVENTH HOUR turns a little off topic.

I SPENT THE BETTER PART OF LAST WEEK pounding the downtown pavements. You know, ‘park and walk’. Practice what y’all preach, Luke!

The object…a final bit of research on the KULTURE QUEST series, a look at a few of the Poplar street survivors, business locations that came through the terrible devastation of an expensive, cosmetic, urban renewal project, sometimes called ‘Hurricane Ellis’, an undertaking so disruptive that it drove traffic away from this main thoroughfare for many, many months.

This is the monument more lasting than bronze that Jack built, with the help of the Federal Government, of course.

Over the week I talked to at least two dozen downtown business owners. Their current major concern? City Hall’s rush to place parking meters throughout the district, a shortsighted attempt to raise revenue by placing a de facto tax burden on the backs of those who can least afford to pay it.

I am asking myself this very minute why make the effort to pinpoint deserving pockets of culture within our city if officialdom is hell bent on destroying what some are working so hard to build?

As this is being written the administration is firming plans with an Atlanta outfit called Central Parking Systems, which will presumably get richer as the City’s merchants see their already marginal revenues evaporate.

Placing parking meters downtown is, perhaps, the stupidest idea to come out of City Hall since ‘Machine Gun’ Ronnie Thompson purchased an armoured personnel carrier back in the seventies, a ‘law and order’ response to presumed threats of urban violence.

The damn things will clearly hurt local merchants who have to compete with the burgeoning mega shopping complexes in North Macon and the teeny-bopper-infested Colonial Mall.

It is already nearly impossible for a business to survive in the inner city given the perception among outsiders that the area is ‘dangerous’. North Maconites have no incentive to trek downtown to shop.

Parking meters will only drive customers away. Nobody is suggesting adding the metal monsters to Ingleside Village. And the Mall.? Why there is room in the huge lots that surround that sprawling complex for thousands of meters, rows upon rows of them, neatly and symmetrically arranged like the silent crosses in a manicured military cemetery. Maybe the powers that be are bent on turning the city’s venerable commercial district into a graveyard.

A tax by any other name…

Why isn’t the Chamber of Commerce or the Downtown Council up in arms about this asinine proposal? Are these guys anything more than gutless, glad-handing ribbon cutters? How about a little outrage, guys? Use a little of your moral authority, if you have any?

Two Councilmen who represent the Downtown are Alveno Ross and Henry Ficklin. Generally voting in lock-step with Hizzoner’s wishes , Ross will most likely support a meter proposal. Ficklin, ever the consummate politician, frequently cited as a possible mayoral candidate, will hem and haw a bit, claim to have the support of merchants no matter how he votes, stick his moistened finger in the air to test the wind, and cast a ballot. How he votes on this most critical issue may well decide if he has any political future beyond public skirmishing with Stebin Horne.

Do we want a viable downtown? Or is the city proper about to become a place where we work by day, but never drop a dime except for lunch? More...

FIRST THOUGHTS ON KATRINA

Before look briefly into the Hurricane Katrina mess I have a BBC link for you at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4216508.stm written by a Brit, a chap who has the advantage of being over there and can look upon Yankees with just a bit of objectivity. I have no idea how long that link will last….so don’t waste time.

In a nation, a world, as ideologically divided as is ours, the blame, the recrimination, the pathetic political posturing are nothing astonishing. Weigh ins by the anachronistic NAACP, the Hipper Hopper Kayne, and assorted black leaders form one predictable dissenting wing. Liberals, most particularly leftish politicians and like-minded media mavens, blame President Bush, from whom all inadequacies flow. (Poor bastards just can’t get over the elections of ’00. ’02, and ’04; they still think Bush a consummate moron.) Then there is TV news…’news entertainment’, that is, bringing unimaginable images into our waking consciousness twent-four hours per diem.

We are confused as a people. Americans are generous. We want to help, our hearts ache for the victims. Some of us, however, elected long before Katrina landed stateside that we would not watch the action-turned-disaster unfold via our personal boobish tubes. This decision was made simply because we were tired of (read ‘bored’) the kind of super saturation modern news broadcasting seems addicted to. Thus, a small remnant of us were spared the blatant overkill.

And remain spared, somewhat aloof from the embroiling fray being waged over our neighbors along the gulf coast.

The NAACP came out, not long ago, with a suggestion (demand) that we create a fund for the victims of Katrina such as was done for the families of those killed on 9/11. Just one more dumb idea. Even worse than the dim-witted notion called ‘reparations’.

I didn’t like the fund set up after 9/11, quite frankly. But there is a huge difference between the two events: When the ARAB MUSLIM TERRORISTS attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, it was an assaualt by our enemies, enemies of our state, our civilization, our way of life. Katrina was a ‘natural disaster’…that’s all. It was not caused by man, no matter what the global warming claque might think. Nature is neither good or evil, it simply is. There have been natural disasters uprooting Homo Sapiens and his more primitive antecedents all through pre-history. They will be with us as long as their remains life on earth.

You don’t pay financial compensation for acts of nature.

NIHIL HODIE

It's Saturday Night, do you know where YOUR kids are?

There won't be an entry today....well, not a real one. A little too busy right now to update. It has been what might be called 'one of those days'. Now they never tell us anything specific about the 'those', so I guess we can compare the expression with 'depends on what it is'. Language is so much fun.

See you tomorrow.

Ciao,

Luke

GEORGIA'S PISS POOR SAT SCORES
Part 3

So who to blame?

For the terrible showing Georgia kids made on the 2004 SAT’s. Do we blame politicians, teachers, school administrators, school boards, superintendents of education, parents, kids? The answer, of course is yes to all, as in “all of the above'’

But that’s a cop-out. Lets look at where most of the fault lies in my ever so humble opinion.

First and foremost most of the damage is the direct result of the fragmentation of the family. So, the majority of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of parents and children, school-age children, the kids taking the tests and learning precious little during their roughly six hours per diem in a Georgia Public School.

You can’t tell me that parents are so stupid, even the undereducated ones, that they do not have a clue about what kiddo is accomplishing in school. And you can’t tell me, further, not with a straight face, anyway, that teens and pre teens inside those schools are unaware of the inadequacy of the teaching they are exposed to.

Kids are smarter than that. So are their parents. Trouble is too many parents simply don’t give a damn; their offspring follow suite.

It is a relatively simple matter for a parent, any parent, single or not to get off his or her ass and start making a regular appearance at sonny-boy’s school and to begin telephoning teachers at night to find out exactly what lamby-pie is accomplishing academically and just what his deportment is. It’s not a hard job.

Tell you a secret. Worked in our family, worked in families from before the founding of the American Republic. Kid gets in hot water at school, he gets in hotter water when he gets home….when the dreaded note is handed over to mom or dad, when the phone call from the teacher or principal comes in informing the family that Johnny has been a bully on the school ground or was caught smoking in the boys’ room.

Barbaric? Medieval? Absolutely. Families must adopt the attitude that says ‘kid, it’s me and your teachers against you, not you and me against the teacher’. Support the teacher. Demand more and more from the person(s) who often sees your child more hours a day than you do.

And while you are demanding, set some standards for your kid and demand some really high standards from him. And the hell with his ‘self-esteem’. True self-esteem comes from genuine accomplishment, not from some mealy mouthed parent telling some little bastard that he’s a great kid when, in actuality, he’s nothing more than an obnoxious turd, a pimple on the derriere of the human race.

Couple of tricks? Try this one, hold a study hall in your home five nights a week. It should last two hours…two solid hours during which there are no trips to the fridge or talking on the phone. Every child in a family should have his own study place….his room, or just a corner of a room. Doesn’t have to be some fancy spot that Martha Steward would approve of. When child or children have finished all assignments, and have them checked over by a conscientious parent figure, then the rest of the two hours should be devoted to reading. That’s READING. R E A D I N G R E A D I N G . I don’t mean sports, fashion, or music magazine, I mean books….books on a kid’s grade level. Books that will both stimulate and challenge.

During the two hours, mom and pop, you are supervising your offspring, keeping them on task, keeping them off the phone no matter who calls, keeping them from TV, radio, video games, cell phones, and the entire panoply of high and low tech devices that eat into study time. And you, parents dear, are not watching television yourselves during this time…nor playing with Junior’s Game Boy. You are involved with your kid’s homework right from the git-go.

Simple. You don’t need to be a PhD to mentor your child’s academic progress. If you don’t, he won’t have any. Progress, that is.

It is high time, folks, that we as individuals start putting our kids’ needs above our own wants. Your little guy probably doesn’t want to study….that is completely understandable….but you have to be the parent, you have to MAKE HIM. Try it.

Yes, most of the blame for Georgia’s poor academic performance belongs to the parents and the children involved.

But they are not along in the long line of total inadequacy that dominates the twenty-first century version of the Education Game.

GEORGIA'S SAT SCORES: PART 2
Or Why I Hate Democrats Just A Little More Than I Do Republicans

Take a minute, please, and familiarize yourself with an email sent out this morning by the Democratic Party of the State of Georgia. Fortunately in these days of dumbing down and lowest common denominators, it does not require much effort to read and inwardly digest even the most complicated message a modern politician can devise. I’ll take a break and leave a quick leak while you peruse the following:

Georgia’s “Abysmal” SATs “at Home in the Cellar”
Perdue “hasn’t lived up to campaign promises on education”
(Atlanta) The bad news is in: Georgia is last in SAT scores. Today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial “At home in the cellar” and Columbus Ledger-Enquirer’s “We’re back on the bottom" wrote of Georgia’s decline.
As the AJC notes in their editorial:
“In his 2002 gubernatorial campaign, Sonny Perdue promised Georgia voters he would boost SAT scores.
‘We're dead last in the nation in SAT scores. If that doesn't convince you we need to try something new, nothing will,’ said Perdue in a TV commercial.
Well, Georgia is ‘dead last’ again in the SAT, based on the scores released Tuesday by the College Board. Perdue probably hopes that voters have forgotten that TV spot. It's obvious the governor himself hasn't given it much thought since the election.
He's done little to fulfill his pledge to "try something new" in either overhauling SAT scores or education in general. He devoted his first term to rolling back the education reforms and class size reductions set in motion by his predecessor. There has been barely any perceptible change in what or how students in Georgia are taught.” [emphasis added]
Governor Perdue argues that the Governor’s Cup has been put in place to improve scores. But the hard reality is that trophies don’t help much without the resources to teach our children.
“Gimmicks don’t cut it when you slash school funding by nearly $1 billion dollars and you pack more and more children in the classroom,” said Bobby Kahn, Chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia.

The message sent out less than twenty-four hours after word of Georgia’s Cellar Dwelling 1994 SAT scores were released by the state DOE. “WE’RE NUMBER FIFTY!!!!”

Governor Perdue was elected in 2002. He ran, in part, on a platform of improving education, citing the strengthening of SAT scores as but one goal of his soon-to-be administration. Remember that the last Republican governor this state had was way back in the grim days of Reconstruction….One hundred and thirty or so years earlier. Further, both houses of the legislature were, during the same period, dominated by democrats, primarily of the ‘yellow dog’ variety, diehards who blamed the GOP for the Civil War and every societal ill that could be culled from the pages of the good old reliable King James Bible.

The current state of education in the Peach State is due in great part to a government ruled entirely by the Party of the Mythic Jackass. The GOP has not had a chance to work out its agenda.

Let’s see. Perdue elected in 2002. By 2004 (last year for the temporally challenged among us) his policies have had two years to sink in. Two years versus one hundred and thirty years of an inbred political and educational hierarchy, Democratic machine largely ignorant and short-sighted.

You know the kind…the undereducated local politician who cannot or will not see beyond the end of his political power base, a tiny county, one of a hundred and fifty-nine separate pathetically small fiefdoms. It is these guys who have kept Georgia in a kind of scholastic Dark Ages.

Hmmmm. It doesn’t take advanced math to see that the Dems have jumped the gun on this one and are only shooting themselves in the foot as they leap.

The fact is Georgia’s SAT scores have improved somewhat since Perdue began his term as Governor. Advances have been modest, to be sure, but they do exist.

What both parties ought to be addressing is the nearly two hundred spread between white and black kids taking the SAT. That is the great shame revealed in the recent statistics.

Nobody is talking about it, of course. For that would border on racism and we must never, ever point to any statistic that puts the black student in a bad light.

Of course individual black kids do every bit as well or better than white kids whether on tests or in the classroom. No problem there. But when the black race does so poorly as a whole on standardized testing it tells us in no uncertain terms that they are being cheated.

Who is doing the cheating? The Democratic Party, largely, which has led the state for far too long. And the Black leadership, a fact we pointed out in this space twenty-four hours ago.

TOMORROW: Where the blame really belongs.