Radical Georgia Moderate

Ah, the plot thickens.

U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson held a meeting with [his] staff this morning and told them he’s decided to seek another term in the U.S. Senate rather than run for governor in 2010.

Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle likely would have sat out the 2010 governor’s race if Isakson had run. With Isakson out, that leaves insurance commissioner John Oxendine as the only declared candidate (that I know of, at least). While formidable, he’s not the near-lock for the nomination that Isakson would have been.

That should make for good theater in next year’s session. We might get to see Glenn Richardson’s mean streak!

• I could spend years at the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center and still not read everything I wanted to read. The Atlanta Journals and Atlanta Constitutions I read from the 1930s on microfilm were amazing, as were the collections of high school yearbooks from the 1920s and 1930s. You should check it out sometime. More on my research project later.
• I agree with Shelby and Thomas Friedman. The McCain-Clinton gas tax holiday is the basest sort of pandering. Some of you may not like Friedman, but that particular column he wrote was spot-on:
  

  It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

• Provocative commentary from former governor Roy Barnes:
  

  “Out of a nation of 304 million, is this the best we have?”

  That was how Roy Barnes, former governor and lifelong Democrat, replied when asked about the presidential contest featuring Republican John McCain and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

  “I’m not excited about any of them,” Barnes added.

  Sounds like sour grapes that his boy Edwards never caught on. I hope we can all at least agree that the candidates on both sides are better this time out than they were four or eight years ago.

• File under “sweet baby Jesus we’re still having this discussion?” Enjoy this segment from Bob Costas’ show. Do a shot every time you hear the phrase “Wild West” or “anything goes” correlated to “the blogospehere.”

  Prop yourself up on something, call ahead for a cab home, and try to suppress your giggles when Bob Costas opines about the “tone of gratuitous potshots and mean-spirited abuse in the blogosphere,” which is immediately followed by a torrent of gratuitous potshots and mean-spirited abuse from Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights.

  I wish people would quit pretending like asshattery is somehow limited to a particular medium.

You’re a state agency tasked with building all of Georgia’s roads and many of its other forms of transportation. Demand for “congestion relief” (widening roads) is at an all-time high, and demand for mass transit is increasing. You’re operating at a $7.5 billion deficit. Your chief who was supposed to clean up widely-acknowledged corruption and inefficiency within your agency recently revealed she’s having a relationship with a commissioner who cast the deciding vote to elect her. The commissioner is out, and she probably will be soon.

Things look bad. But cheer up. There’s a solution so obvious that it’s downright astounding that someone hasn’t thought of it first. What is it?

Insurance fraud, of course.

More specifically, insurance fraud involving Transformers.

All GDOT needs to do is to get a couple of Transformers to come in and rip out all of Atlanta’s roads and MARTA lines. We can claim act of God (or giant metal alien robot), collect all the insurance money, then use it to build a real mass transit system and better roads.

If we have access to an Autobot, we can just tell it there are Decepticons hiding under the roads and in the MARTA tunnels or something. If we have access to a Decepticon, we can just tell it flat out we want it to commit insurance fraud and offer it a cut. They’re evil, afterall. Either way, we need to get them to also destroy a few buildings so that it’s not totally obvious we’re just ripping up the infrastructure to collect the insurance.

You’re welcome.