Quote For The Day

George Chidi is a familiar name to anyone who followed the Occupy Atlanta fun. In a "break-up letter", published by Creative Loafing, he lets loose. While he exposes the many problems many of us suspected existed within Occupy Atlanta, the following stuck out for me.

The tent protest against AT&T's decision to shift roughly three percent of its workers from union wireline jobs to non-union jobs in the U-Verse division was so little respected that the union itself did not meaningfully participate.

People who say the left doesn't police its own have not been around the left leaning activists I've encountered. When Occupy Atlanta first got off the ground, I looked to the movement trench warfare veterans, of which there are many in this town, to gauge the seriousness of what was going down in Woodruff Park.

The reactions ranged from curiosity to utter disdain. Essentially the attitude was "they don't know what the eff they are doing and they will probably eff a lot of things up".

Good rule of thumb when dealing with new movements; always look to see how they are received by the established movement community and you'll have a good idea of their true impact.

About That New Welfare Drug Testing Law.....

Recently, Governor Deal signed a law requiring all applicants for welfare in Georgia to first pee in a cup.

As many, including yours truly, pointed out during the legislative debate, Florida already has a similar law which not only did its own study committee recommend against but is currently tied up in appellate court due to that pesky thing called the 4th Amendment (and based on previous rulings, including a seminal one from....where else....Georgia)

Well, it gets better.

Not only is Florida's law probably unconstitutional, as predicted by experts, it not only doesn't work, it actually costs the state money.

Ushered in amid promises that it would save taxpayers money and deter drug users, a Florida law requiring drug tests for people who seek welfare benefits resulted in no direct savings, snared few drug users and had no effect on the number of applications, according to recently released state data.

Since an overwhelming number of applicants have passed the test and the law requires the state to reimburse the costs of the test to anyone who passes, after four months, the program has actually cost taxpayers over $45,000.


Doesn't work. Costs money. Violates the Constitution.

Governor Deal and the rascals managed to hit the bad governance trifecta.

Quote Of The Day

Ta-Nehisi Coates on lazy pundits not taking the time to research before spewing memes,

And then there are pundits who write more than they read, and talk more than they listen, and prefer an easy creationism to a google search.

The context here is comments by Juan Williams about the lack of marches protesting black on black violence on Fox  Sunday Morning. Coates lists half a dozen such marches and rallies from the past year.