Marijuana use is more acceptable than ever in Georgia, with a majority of residents saying it should be made legal for both medical and recreational purposes, according to respondents in a poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

About 53% of Georgians surveyed said marijuana should be legal for adults, a high point from previous AJC polls. By comparison, 46% of poll respondents in 2017 said marijuana should be legalized for any purpose.

The poll indicates that attitudes about marijuana have changed eight years after Georgia passed a law allowing patients with an approved medical condition to consume it. Dispensaries could finally open in Georgia as soon as this spring.

Medicinal marijuana is even more popular than recreational use, according to the poll. An additional 23% of respondents said medical marijuana should be legal.

“Make it legal. People are doing it anyway, so why have a penalty attached to it?” said Patricia Harris of Newnan, a retiree from the health care industry who took part in the AJC poll. “In so many states now it’s legal, not just for medical purposes.”

The AJC conducted the survey to find out the preferences of Georgia voters on a variety of issues as legislators are meeting at the state Capitol to consider new laws.

The AJC’s poll included 860 registered Georgia voters and was conducted Jan. 9-20 by the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs. The margin of error is 3.3 percentage points.

Some poll respondents such as Jon Lippold of Marietta were more reluctant to embrace full marijuana legalization.

Lippold, who works in information technology management, said he supports allowing marijuana consumption for people with legitimate medical issues, but it could be abused if anyone were allowed to use it.

“My concern is if you legalize it, where does it go? If it’s fully legal, how are they going to control and monitor it among bus drivers or if pilots start using marijuana?” Lippold asked.

Georgia lawmakers in the majority-Republican General Assembly have shown little appetite to expand marijuana beyond medicinal use. No bills for recreational marijuana have been introduced by legislators from either political party so far this year, and previous proposals didn’t advance.

Meanwhile, registered patients are closer than ever to being able to buy the drug that state law has permitted them to consume since 2015.

Two companies have been awarded licenses to produce and sell low THC oil to the state’s 25,000-plus patients and 18,000 caregivers. Low THC oil is allowed for patients suffering from several approved illnesses including severe seizures, Parkinson’s disease and terminal cancers.

The Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission voted unanimously Wednesday to approve rules for inspections and distribution, a key step before the product can go on the market.

The AJC poll showed just 7% of Georgians surveyed said marijuana should be entirely illegal. About 15% of respondents said marijuana should be decriminalized and treated like a traffic ticket, but not legalized outright.

Conservatives were less likely to embrace marijuana than liberals and moderates.

The poll showed that 37% of conservatives back legalizing marijuana for recreational or medical use, compared with 77% of people who identified themselves as liberals and 58% of moderates.

Substantial majorities of Georgians support President Joe Biden’s pardons of people convicted on federal charges of simple marijuana possession. About 79% of poll respondents either strongly or somewhat approved of the marijuana pardons, while 15% opposed it. The rest said they didn’t know.

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 24, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 25, 2024

The dust is beginning to settle after last night’s New Hampshire primary. Former president Donald Trump won the Republican primary with 54.3% of the vote, netting him 12 delegates to the Republican National Convention. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley came in second with 43.3% of the vote, garnering her 9 delegates. Other candidates together took 2.3%, but none of them won any delegates.

There has been a lot of noise today about whether the New Hampshire results spell good news for Trump or bad news. While the result keeps him in the front spot for the Republican nomination, I fall into the category of observers who see bad news: more than 45% of Republican primary voters—those most fervent about the party—chose someone other than Trump. 

As David French pointed out in the New York Times today, Trump is running as a virtual incumbent, and any incumbent facing a challenger who can command 43% of the party faithful is in trouble. President Gerald Ford discovered this equation in 1976 when he faced Ronald Reagan’s insurgency; President George H. W. Bush discovered it in 1992 when he faced a similar challenge from right-wing commentator Patrick Buchanan. While both Ford and Bush went on to win the Republican nomination, they lost the general election. 

More important than opinions or history to indicate what the primary indicated, though, is Trump’s apparent anger about Haley’s showing. Politico’s Playbook noted that he “rage-posted” about Haley’s speech after her strong finish with posts that lasted far into the night. Ron Filipkowski noted that at 2:19 this morning he was still at it, posting: “NIKKI CAME IN LAST, NOT SECOND!”

In addition to attacking her from the podium, Trump appeared to threaten her when he warned her about “very dishonest people” she would have to fight. He said she was not going to win, “but if she did, she would “be under investigation…in fifteen minutes and I could tell you five reasons why already. Not big reasons, a little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, but she will be under investigation within minutes, and so would Ron have been, but he decided to get out.”

The tactics Trump might have been suggesting became clear this afternoon, when the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Jeff DeWit, resigned after a recording that appeared to show him trying to bribe Arizona Senate candidate and fervent Trump supporter Kari Lake to stay out of the Senate race was leaked to the press. The tape itself was clearly contrived to show Lake as if she were in a campaign ad, defending Trump and America, but it includes DeWit’s pleas for her to stand aside for two years, presumably while the Arizona party regroups with less extremist candidates, and his request that she name her price. 

This sordid story reflects a problem in the state Republican parties as MAGA supporters have tried to take over from the party establishment. In Arizona, challenging the 2020 presidential election—remember the “Cyber Ninjas” who audited the Maricopa County vote?—ran the finances of the Arizona party into the ground. Lake has continued to insist, without evidence, that the election was stolen, and she and other MAGA activists have called for purging the party of all but the Trump faithful. The recording positions Lake as a Trump loyalist fighting against party operatives.

In his resignation letter, DeWit claimed the recording had been “taken out of context” and said he had been “set up.” He noted that Lake has “a disturbing tendency to exploit private interactions for personal gain,” calling out “her habit of secretly recording personal and private conversations. This is obviously a concern given how much interaction she has with high profile people including President Trump,” he added. “I believe she orchestrated this entire situation to have control over the state party,” he wrote.

DeWit said he had “received an ultimatum from Lake’s team: resign today or face the release of a new, more damaging recording. I am truly unsure of its contents,” he wrote, “but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk. I am resigning as Lake requested.”

It seems clear the Trump team is eager to consolidate power behind him no matter what it takes, especially in the face of what appears to be his weakness. Rising authoritarians depend on the idea they are invincible, so being perceived as vulnerable—or as a loser—hits them much harder than it does a normal political candidate. 

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel—who was recorded on November 17, 2020, pressuring two Republican officials in Michigan not to certify Joe Biden’s electors in a county he won by 68% and promising the officials to “get you attorneys”—has urged Haley to drop out of the race. Traditionally, party chairs stay neutral in primary contests. Tonight, Trump posted a threat to donors: “Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country…. Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” 

For her part, Haley has vowed to stay in the contest. While observers point out that there is very little chance she could actually overtake Trump, it’s also true that either Trump’s obvious mental lapses or his legal troubles could knock him out of the race, in which case she would be the most viable candidate standing.

Curiously, what happened to Trump in New Hampshire was what, before the election, pundits suggested could and maybe should happen to President Joe Biden: a challenger would show that he was weak going into the 2024 election. 

Instead, despite dirty-trickster robocalls in a fake Biden voice telling Democratic voters not to show up vote for Biden, he appears to be on track to win 65% of the vote as a write-in candidate—he wasn’t on the ballot—while Representative Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson, who were on the ballot, together appear to have garnered just under 25%.. 

On Monday, Miranda Nazzaro of The Hill reported that the creator of ChatGPT banned a super PAC backing Phillips for misusing AI for political purposes. Billionaire Bill Ackman, who has been in the news lately for his fight against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, attacks on former Harvard president Claudine Gay, and threats to media outlets that pointed out plagiarism in his wife’s doctoral dissertation, donated $1 million to Phillips’s super PAC.  

There was other good news for the Biden camp today, too. Sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have surged by 80% under Biden, with a record 21 million people enrolling this year. Trump has promised to get rid of the program, saying that “Obamacare Sucks!!!” and that he will replace it with something better, but neither now nor in his four years in office did he produce a plan. 

Biden also received the enthusiastic endorsement today of the United Auto Workers union, whose president, Shawn Fain, had made it clear that any president must earn that endorsement. Biden stood with the union in its negotiations last year with the big three automakers, not only behind the scenes but also in public when he became the first president to join a picket line. “[Trump] went to a nonunion plant, invited by the boss, and trashed our union,” Fain said, “And, here is what Joe Biden did during our stand up strike. He heard the call. And he stood up and he showed up.” “Donald Trump stands against everything we stand for as a society,” Fain told the crowd.

More news dropped today about the damage MAGA Republicans are doing to the United States. A report published today in JAMA Internal Medicine estimates that in the 14 states that outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, 64,565 women became pregnant after being raped, “but few (if any) obtained in-state abortions legally.”  

Finally, Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News confirmed this evening that although MAGA Republicans have insisted the border is such a crisis that no aid to Ukraine can pass until it is addressed, Trump is preventing congressional action on the border because he wants to run on the issue of immigration. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told a closed meeting of Senate Republicans that “the nominee” wants to run his campaign on immigration, adding, “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.” “We’re in a quandary,” McConnell said. 

Jennifer Bendery and Igor Bobic of HuffPost reported that Trump today reached out to Republican senators to kill the bipartisan border deal being finalized, “because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” one source said. “The rational Republicans want the deal because they want Ukraine and Israel and an actual border solution,” Bendery and Bobic quote the source as saying. “But the others are afraid of Trump, or they’re the chaos caucus who never wants to pass anything.”

“They’re having a little crisis in their conference right now,”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Striking coal miners outside courthouse, Russell County, Virginia, November 19, 1989.

Newspaper assignment sheet attached to print verso identifies photographer Jonathan Newton: "Granville Blankenship (right) shows fellow striking miners the stuffed animal he bought his granddaughter for Christmas. The miners were gathered at the Russell County courthouse."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographs

Georgia State University Library

Stacey Abrams: Music Midtown Cancellation Will Cost Georgia’s Economy $50 Million

- Festival’s nixing linked to state’s permissive gun laws

The cancellation of Atlanta’s Music Midtown festival “will cost Georgia’s economy $50 million,” Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said in a statement.

Festival organizers nixed the Sept. 17-18 gathering, citing “circumstances beyond our control.” But “multiple officials” told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the decision “stemmed from ongoing legal fallout of a permissive gun expansion that was signed into law in 2014,” the newspaper reported.

The festival - which typically bans firearms on the grounds - was unsure whether that would be possible this year in the wake of a 2019 Georgia Supreme Court ruling.

So Music Midtown is off. Refunds will be issued.

“We were looking forward to reuniting in September and hope we can all get back to enjoying the festival together again soon,” organizers said in a statement.

Abrams excoriated Gov. Brian Kemp (Q) for his support of loosening gun laws.

“It's shameful, but not surprising, that the governor cares more about protecting dangerous people carrying guns in public than saving jobs and keeping business in Georgia,” she said.

Future, Jack White, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance were to headline the 2022 festival.

8/2/22

This is a developing news story and may be updated as more information is obtained. If you value such information, please support this Substack.

On Dec. 1, a woman immolated herself with a Palestinian flag outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.

Now, according to the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department, the woman — referred to in their report as “Jane Doe” — is alive and “in stable condition” at Grady Memorial Hospital, where she has been since the immolation.

After repeated requests for her name, the department stated to this reporter in an email that it “does not disclose the identities of victims”. Repeated inquiries to Grady, which is a public hospital, went unanswered. The hospital houses the Walter L. Ingram Burn Center.

“Jane Doe” is 27.

When asked if they had made any comment to tell the public that she was still alive this entire time, the official at Atlanta Fire Rescue Department said they “shared the last updated with local media via email on 12/21/23. The release stated: ‘The victim remains hospitalized in critical condition. The security guard, who attempted to assist the burn victim, has been released from the hospital.’” Several internet searches on that quote produce no results. This would also indicate that "Jane Doe" went from critical to stable condition without public notice. 

Aaron Bushnell immolated himself at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, explaining “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” and shouting “Free Palestine!” repeatedly as he burned alive. So, his case — unlike many other self-immolations including Gregory Levey, Raymond Moules, Timothy T. Brown, Malachi Ritscher and others — has received some attention. Thus, “Jane Doe” being ignored fits with the usual pattern. Bushnell is the exception — probably because he livestreamed it. See “Ignoring Immolators Lulls the Society to Sleep.”

As Bushnell was burning himself alive, an officer pointed a gun at him, barking orders as if he constituted a threat. A security guard, Michael Harris, sustained injuries working to rescue “Jane Doe” — but there were similarities, where she was actually viewed as a potential threat.

At one point, the police report for “Jane Doe” refers to it as being a case of “arson”.

Much of the media coverage and general discussion of her self-immolation in December focused on if she had done damage. The Atlanta Police Chief said: “We believe this building remains safe, and we do not see any threat here.” The Israeli government released a statement: “It is tragic to see the hate and incitement toward Israel expressed in such a horrific way.”

Police records indicate that they obtained a search warrant and entered an apartment they believed to be associated with “Jane Doe” — initially using a drone:

The drone was able to relay information as to the layout and the belongings inside. After it was deemed "safe" entry was made with bomb technicians. While clearing the apartment no improvised explosive devices were located.

The police report also noted:

During the search a Quran was found in the bedroom along with a [sic] Arabic dictionary and a Hebrew dictionary. The bedroom bookshelf contained books related to fiction and fantasy. A "Drug use for grown ups" book was on the bookshelf as well. Two journals were seized from the bedroom. A thumbdrive was seized from the bedroom as well. A laptop computer was seized from the kitchen counter. A copy of the search warrant was left in the living room of the apartment. The front door [of] the apartment was secured before law enforcement left the premises.

When pressed for more information in compliance with an Open Records Request under Georgia law, Atlanta Fire Rescue Department claimed: “There is an ongoing and active investigation for the incident in question, which is why the only releasable information has been shared via the incident report. Investigative documentation is not available for release until the investigation is closed.”

Getting it all wrong at Georgia Public Broadcasting

Last Friday Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB), the ONLY television and radio entity serving all of Georgia, announced it is cancelling its most popular in-house produced program, Political Rewind on June 30th. The show, nearing its 10th anniversary, grew from a once-a-week program on Friday afternoons to five days a week at 9:00 a.m., with a rebroadcast at 2:00 p.m., a podcast, and a…

View On WordPress

From this article:

“ ‘As the largest newspaper in the South, we’ve got an active audience in a part of the country that is at the center of a lot of important stories,’ Mr. Morse said. ‘I think we have the ability to be an essential source of news, not just for Atlanta, but for the South.’

“Mr. Morse, 48, joins The Atlanta Journal-Constitution amid a crisis in local news. More than 2,500 newspapers across the United States have closed over the last two decades, as revenue from print advertising dwindles, leaving one-fifth of Americans with limited access to local news.”

just doing what Republicans do!

For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name. @atavist issue no. 149, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” is now live:

No one could be certain when the Handcuff Man had staged his first attack. Adamson claimed that he’d been terrorizing Midtown since the late 1960s, that he drove a white Lincoln, was about five foot ten, and had black hair and glasses. A sex worker said that the Handcuff Man had picked him up in Piedmont Park in 1977, asked him to take shots of liquor, then assaulted him. The victim managed to flee with a stab wound to the shoulder, and later saw the man again at the park eyeing other male hustlers. He didn’t report the crime because he was afraid of being outed to loved ones.

In 1984, Susan Faludi, then a twentysomething reporter a few years out from becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote a front-page story about gay hustlers for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She asked her sources about the dangers of their lifestyle and learned that “the greatest fear on the street right now is invoked by the specter of ‘The Handcuff Man,’ a man who reportedly picks up hustlers, offers them a pint of vodka spiked with sleeping pills and then handcuffs and beats them.”

Sen. Raphael Warnock has once again kept Georgia blue in a special runoff Senate election.

The Democrat defeated Republican former football star Herschel Walker in Tuesday’s runoff, giving Warnock a full six-year term following the other runoff election he won just last year. The 2021 election made Warnock the first Black senator elected to represent Georgia, and now, he's the first to do so for a full term.

With 95% of results reported, Warnock had 50.73% of the vote to Walker's 49.27%. Decision Desk HQ called the race for Warnock at 9:48 p.m. ET.

His win ensures Democrats will have 51 seats in the next Senate, maintaining control of that chamber despite the House of Representatives narrowly flipping to Republicans. The victory further underscores the surprising strength of Democrats’ performance in the midterm elections, which are typically punishing for the party in the White House.

It also adds fuel to criticisms of former president Donald Trump, who had endorsed Walker and whose picks for candidates in key races across the country largely flopped.

Tuesday’s runoff was necessary because under Georgia law, neither candidate managed to achieve over 50% of the vote in the midterm. When the ballots were counted, Warnock had about 49.44% of the vote to Walker’s 48.49%. With more than 3.9 million ballots cast, less than 40,000 votes separated the pair in November.

But this runoff was not like the last one.

In January 2021, Warnock’s defeat of Republican Kelly Loeffler helped ensure the Senate would be narrowly controlled by Democrats in the first two years of the Biden administration.

But following a historically strong showing in the midterms by Biden’s party that turned a much hyped Republican “red wave” into more of a ripple, Democrats managed to keep control of the Senate thanks to wins in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada.

Still, retaining Walker’s seat remained important to give Democrats some room to breathe in the Senate and also to increase their odds of holding onto the chamber in 2024.

There were signs of some GOP strength during the midterms in Georgia, where voters comfortably reelected Republican Brian Kemp as Governor, dashing Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams’s hopes once again following her loss to Kemp in 2018.

But despite both being Republicans, Kemp and Walker were not exactly peas in a pod. While Trump had endorsed Walker as part of his MAGA movement, the former President had previously directed his ire at Kemp for refusing to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in 2020.

Kemp campaigned with Walker during the runoff after they avoided each other during the midterms, with Republicans hoping moderate conservative voters who had backed the Governor might now throw their support to Walker too. Democrats, meanwhile, hoped these voters would either cross party lines to support Warnock or sit the election out entirely.

Ahead of Tuesday’s Election Day, there had been tremendous and record-breaking turnout among early voters in the state. Democrats won a lawsuit to allow early voting on Saturday, Nov. 27, against Republican objections. The day followed a state holiday that historically had celebrated Confederate general horsefucker Robert E. Lee.

Following his slim lead in the November election, Warnock had remained a slight favorite to win the runoff, with experts predicting that Black, educated, and suburban voters would be turned off by Walker’s many controversies as a candidate.

The final stretch of Walker’s campaign had also worried some Republican allies, with the candidate choosing to take five days off for Thanksgiving despite the close race and Warnock’s serious fundraising advantage. Revelations also emerged that the football star had claimed Texas — not Georgia — as his residence for tax purposes, leading to renewed accusations of carpetbagging.

Walker, who had a habit for delivering unintelligible answers on everything from gun violence to the economy to healthcare, had been plagued by accusations of domestic violence by his ex-wife, as well as another former girlfriend who came forward last week.

The Daily Beast reported in June that Walker, a critic of fatherless Black homes, had a second son whom he had not publicly acknowledged and whose mother had sued the candidate for child support. Walker was subsequently forced to admit that in addition to his son Christian Walker, a conservative social media influencer, he had three other children.

The Walker campaign was rattled again months later by reporting from The Daily Beast in which a woman said he impregnated her in 2009 and then paid for her abortion — claims he continued to deny despite revelations that the woman was the mother of one of his children.

Weeks later, a second woman said she was so disgusted by Walker’s denials that she felt compelled to reveal that she too had had an abortion at his urging when they were in a relationship in the 1990s. Again, Walker — who campaigned as an anti-abortion evangelical who wanted a total ban on the procedure with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the pregnant person — denied the woman’s claims.

Prioritizing victory at all costs, top Republicans and Christian leaders opted not to abandon Walker over the abortion scandals. “I don't care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles,” said Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association. “I want control of the Senate.”

But the abortion claims and denials evidently caused outrage among some of those close to Walker, as son Christian used his large social media following to publicly turn on his father, calling him a deadbeat and a liar.

"Every family member of Herschel Walker asked him not to run for office because we all knew (some of) his past. Every single one. He decided to give us the middle finger and air out all of his dirty laundry in public while simultaneously lying about it," Christian tweeted. "I’m done.”

One unnamed Republican official allied with Walker told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Christian’s comments were so damaging that he would be “solely to blame if Herschel loses the race.”

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 1, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

Drugmaker Eli Lilly announced today that it will cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month, bringing costs for people with private insurance and those without insurance who sign up for Lilly’s copay assistance program into line with the $35 cap for Medicare recipients Congress imposed with the Inflation Reduction Act last August. Republicans all voted against the Inflation Reduction Act and explicitly stripped from it a measure that would have capped the cost of insulin at $35 for those not on Medicare. They continue to oppose the measure. On February 2, 2023, newly elected House Republican Andy Ogles (TN) introduced his first bill: a call to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, claiming it “took a gigantic step toward socialized medicine.” The bill had 20 far-right cosponsors. At the time he introduced the bill, Ogles presented himself as an economist with a degree in international relations from Middle Tennessee State University. Since then, an investigation by NewsChannel 5 in Nashville revealed that he took one course in economics and got a “C” in it, and that his resume was similarly exaggerated across the board. Ogles won a seat in Congress after the Republican state legislature redistricted Nashville to make it easier for a Republican to win there. Lilly’s announcement in the face of Republican support for big pharmaceutical companies is a bellwether for the country’s politics. Biden has pressured companies to bring down the price of insulin—most notably by calling for such legislation last month during his State of the Union address—and is claiming credit for Lilly’s decision. But there is more to it. The astronomically high price tags on U.S. insulin compared to the rest of the world have become a symbol of a society where profits trump lives, and there is growing opposition to the control pharmaceutical companies have over life-saving drugs. A number of other entities, including a nonprofit company in Utah called Civica Rx, the state of California, and a company run by billionaire Mark Cuban, have all promised to produce generic insulin at a fraction of what pharmaceutical companies are currently charging. Lilly's announcement is likely a reaction to the changing moment that has brought both political pressure and economic competition. The company’s leaders see the writing on the wall. The administration continues to work to create positive change in other measures important to ordinary Americans. This month ends temporary increases in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, previously referred to as “food stamps.” At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress boosted SNAP payments, keeping as many as 4.2 million people out of poverty. Congress ended those extra benefits late last year through the Consolidated Appropriations Act that funded the government. About 42 million Americans receive SNAP benefits, and the end of that boost will cut those benefits by $90 a month on average. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack wrote an op-ed at CNN today, promising that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, will do its best to protect families losing the expanded benefits. It will work to adjust benefits to rising prices, expand school lunch programs, and promote access to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. “Our country was founded to support the prosperity and potential of Americans in every corner of the nation,” Vilsack wrote. “Under President Joe Biden’s administration, we’re making good on this promise.” Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. Congress passed the amendment in 1972 and sent it off to the states for ratification, but they imposed on that ratification a seven-year deadline. Thirty states ratified it within the next year, but a fierce opposition campaign led by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly eroded support among Republicans, and although Congress extended the deadline by three years, only 35 states had signed on by 1977. And, confusing matters, legislatures in five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to take back their earlier ratification. In 2017, Nevada became the first state to ratify the ERA since 1977. Then Illinois stepped up, and finally, in 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, putting it over the required three quarters of states needed for the amendment to become part of the Constitution. But now there are legal challenges to that ratification over both the original deadline and whether the states’ rescinding of previous ratifications has merit. The Senate hearing was designed to examine whether the deadline could be separated from the amendment to allow the amendment to be added to the Constitution, but it was far more revealing than that. Faced with the possibility that the ERA might become part of the Constitution, right-wing leaders insisted that the ERA has “just one purpose left,” as the Heritage Foundation put it: “Abortion.” They claim that since, in their view, women are now effectively equal to men across the board in employment and so on, women’s current demand for equality before the law is simply a way for them to capture abortion rights. Catholic bishops of the United States have written to senators to express “alarm” at the ERA, warning it would have “far-reaching consequences” with “negative impacts to the common good and to religious freedom.” They claim it would require federal funding for abortions and would prohibit “discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ and other categories.” “We strongly urge you to oppose it,” they wrote, “and any resolution attempting to declare it ratified.” This fight highlights that the attempt to stop government protection of individuals is really about imposing the will of a minority. A piece by Megan O’Matz in ProPublica today explored how an anti-abortion law firm has been sowing doubts about the 2020 presidential election as part of a long-term strategy to end abortion rights. Led by former Kansas attorney general Phill Kline, whose law license was suspended a decade ago for ethics violations, lawyers at the Thomas More Society worked to restrict access to the vote and to stall President Joe Biden’s inauguration in order to keep Trump in office. Their efforts thrived on disinformation, of course, and the echoes from the testimony released recently in the defamation case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox Corporation continue to reverberate in the fight against public lies. In that testimony, both Fox News Channel hosts and top executives admitted that they knew Trump’s claims of victory in the 2020 presidential election were lies but spread them anyway to keep their viewers from abandoning them for another channel. Now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has given exclusive access to 44,000 hours of video from the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to one of those hosts, Tucker Carlson. Today, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) did an end run around McCarthy to address the problem of disinformation directly at the source. They sent a letter to Rupert Murdoch, chair of the Fox Corporation, and other top Fox executives, reminding them of their damning testimony and reminding them that “your network hosts continue to promote, spew, and perpetuate election conspiracy theories to this day.” They wrote: “We demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior.” It is an important marker, and if the Fox Corporation can read the writing on the wall as well as Eli Lilly can, it might shift the focus of the Fox News Channel, which already seems to be trying to pull its support for Trump and give it to Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But that protest is unlikely to change the behavior of right-wing members of Congress. Yesterday, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Mark Green (R-TN) blamed the Biden administration for the deaths of Caleb and Kyler Kiessling from fentanyl poisoning after their mother, an attorney and conservative activist, testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security. But the young men, along with 17-year-old Sophia Harris, died in July 2020, when Trump was president. When senior CNN reporter Daniel Dale asked Greene’s office why she had blamed Biden for the deaths, her congressional spokesperson, Nick Dyer, “responded by saying lots of people have died from drugs under Biden and ‘do you think they give a f*ck about your bullsh*t fact checking?’” Dale also asked him to comment on Greene’s lies about the 2020 presidential election yesterday. Dyer answered: “F*ck off.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

The apology letters that Donald Trump-allied lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro were required to write as a condition of their plea deals in the Georgia election interference case are just one sentence long. The letters, obtained Thursday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request, were hand-written and terse. Neither letter acknowledges the legitimacy of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in Georgia’s 2020 election nor denounces the baseless conspiracy theories they pushed to claim Trump was cheated out of victory through fraud. “I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” Powell wrote in a letter dated Oct. 19, the same day she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties. “I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia and of Fulton County for my involvement in Count 15 of the indictment,” Chesebro wrote in a letter dated Oct. 20, when he appeared in court to plead guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the election interference case, declined Thursday to comment on the contents of the letters. Powell and Chesebro were among four defendants to plead guilty in the case after reaching agreements with prosecutors. They were indicted alongside Trump and others in August and charged with participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally keep the Republican in power. The remaining 15 defendants — including Trump, lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — have all pleaded not guilty.

Front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today.

Raintree County Articles

11 October 1957 issue of Variety had a massive spread for the premiere of Raintree County.

Below is from the Atlanta Journal Constitution 17 Sep 1956. His outdoor scenes were shot in Kentucky.