Jay Bookman

The day has come.

Beginning tomorrow, April 4, the Bookman blog will be moving to its new headquarters and URL at http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/jay-bookman/. Please bookmark that site, and change your RSS feeds if you follow the blog through that approach (http://www.ajc.com/rss/weblog_entries/jay-bookman/).

The change also means that those wishing to comment will first have to register a user ID, complete with a working email address. Registration can be accomplished at the homepage, ajc.com — the link can be found at the upper right. I’m told that user names cannot have spaces in them, so Joe Hussein Obama, to pick an example, would have to register as JoeHusseinObama. Once you have registered a display name, you can use it on any ajc.com blog.

The change is needed to make the blog accessible to readers across a variety of modern platforms, from smart phones to I-pads to Kindles to laptops to PCs. I know that most of you have become comfortable with the way we’ve been doing …

Continue reading A new home tomorrow for Bookman blog »

Note: This post includes material published here earlier, as well as fresh material discussing a similar tax plan proposed in Louisiana by Gov. Bobby Jindal. It is posted as the electronic version of today’s AJC column:

On the final day of the 2013 legislative session, a group of Republican legislators introduced “The Georgia Fair Taxation Act.” By doing so, they set the stage for what may prove to be the most important legislative battle of next year’s session, or potentially the decade.

“This bill is the beginning of the discussion to eliminate the income tax in the state of Georgia,” state Rep. Tom Kirby of Loganville said in announcing the legislation. According to Kirby, he has already conferred with and agreed to work with Senate President Pro Tem David Shafer, who has proposed similar legislation on the Senate side.

To offset the billions in revenue that would be lost by eliminating both the personal and corporate income tax in Georgia, Kirby says, the state sales tax …

Continue reading Will Ga. GOP dare to raise your taxes? »

Barack Obama has never claimed that his political opponents were motivated by racism. Others may have occasionally made that argument on his behalf, but Obama himself has never done so. However, his conservative opponents love to condemn him for it anyway.

Ben Carson, the black neurosurgeon from Baltimore who has become the latest conservative flavor of the month, clearly doesn’t hesitate to play the race card. In a radio interview Tuesday, he claimed that liberals who criticized his recent comments on gay marriage “are the most racist people there are because they put you in a little category, a box. ‘How could you dare come off the plantation?’”

“They want to shut us up completely, and that’s why the attacks against me have been so vicious,” Carson said in a talk radio interview. “I represent an existential threat to them. They need to shut me up, they need to get rid of me, they can’t find anything else to delegitimize me, so they take my words, misinterpret them, and …

Continue reading Ben Carson proclaims himself a martyr »

It’s fitting that the last remaining obstacle to a Senate immigration deal has been a demand by the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of corporate America, including agriculture, for a large “guest worker” program to continue to provide cheap, docile labor, and for higher immigration quotas for high-tech workers.

That has been the root of this issue from the beginning. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the same political pressures that are now demanding a continued supply of cheap labor had also prevented government from active enforcement of immigration law both at the border and in the workplace.

It was about money and power. Those who had money and power wanted more of both, and illegal immigrants were a tool for achieving it. I mean, what part of “profitable” don’t you understand?

Georgia provides a great example: The housing boom created a need for cheap construction workers, and as long as politically powerful developers and farmers needed their labor, neither the state’s …

Continue reading Immigration issue has always been about cheap labor »

According to Sue Everhart, chair of the Georgia Republican Party, the push for marriage equality isn’t about equality at all.

It’s a massive financial scam.

As she told the Marietta Daily Journal:

“Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”

That’s the kind of weirdness you get when irrational bigotry tries to rationalize itself. Rather than acknowledge to yourself that yes, you are indeed treating people as second-class citizens, you invent a reason that you find less threatening to your self-image:

“I’m not a bigot. I’m just …. concerned about fraud. Yeah, that’s the …

Continue reading The bigotry that dares not speak its name »

In a “cri de couer” published in the Wall Street Journal last week, Liz Cheney rallied her fellow conservatives to the true cause, warning darkly that “if we don’t defend our freedoms now against the onslaught of President Obama’s policies, we won’t have to wait until our sunset years for American freedom to be a distant memory.”

Among other things, she writes:

“President Obama is the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office….

The president has so effectively diminished American strength abroad that there is no longer a question of whether this was his intent. He is working to pre-emptively disarm the United States. He advocates slashing our nuclear arsenal even as the North Koreans threaten us and the Iranians close in on their own nuclear weapon. He has turned his back on America’s allies around the world and ignored growing threats.”

It’s one thing to disagree with and criticize a political opponent. However, it takes a special type of paranoia-laced arrogance to …

Continue reading And Republicans wonder why they are viewed as radical? »

2009 Superintendent of the Year Beverly Hall

It shouldn’t be so stunning, but it is.

Former Atlanta School Superintendent Beverly Hall — a one-time national superintendent of the year who ran the Atlanta school district with an authoritarian hand — has been indicted on racketeering and other charges, as have 34 other administrators, principals, teachers and others, in the Atlanta cheating scandal.

If convicted, Hall faces as much as 45 years in jail, and the grand jury has recommended that bail be set at $7.5 million. Given that Hall is not a great threat to flee the country and poses no danger to anyone, that bail recommendation sounds exorbitant. Frankly, it sets off warning signals that the case itself may be an overreaction, but we will see.

I’m not trying to defend Hall by any means. If she did do the crime, she should do the time, although it is possible that the charges will be bargained down if she admits guilt and returns the bonuses “earned” through cheating. As it …

Continue reading Beverly Hall indictment a stunning turn of events »

As a rule, I stay away from political commentary at the close of the business week Friday, but I want to dedicate this one to the “ethics reformers” in the Georgia Legislature:

“My, oh my, you sure know how to arrange things
You set it up so well, so carefully
Ain’t it funny how your new life didn’t change things
You’re still the same old girl you used to be.”

– Jay Bookman

Continue reading Remember, ‘every form of refuge has its price’ »

“Ethics reform” bills should never be written in secret, at the last minute, behind closed doors, by those who have a lot to gain by gutting them.

Because when that happens, as it did this week in the Georgia Legislature, bad things happen. You get a bill that masquerades as reform but in reality changes little and in important ways makes things worse.

Let’s begin with the “attorney loophole.” In a last-minute change to House Bill 142 — a change that had not been included in previous House or Senate versions of the bill — legislators in effect exempted attorneys from the state’s lobbyist disclosure and ethics law. Because the language was changed in secret, we don’t know who is responsible for it. But we do know that it creates a massive loophole in the law, because some of the most influential people lobbying our elected officials have law degrees.

In fact, the bill itself is evidence of that influence. As a result of the change they apparently sought, attorney/lobbyists do …

Continue reading Gov. Deal should veto this so-called ‘ethics reform’ »

On the final day of the 2013 legislative session, a group of Republican legislators introduced “The Georgia Fair Taxation Act.” By doing so, they set the stage for what may prove to be the most important legislative battle of next year’s session, or potentially the decade.

“This bill is the beginning of the discussion to eliminate the income tax in the state of Georgia,” state Rep. Tom Kirby of Loganville said in announcing the legislation. He also said that he has already conferred with and agreed to work with Senate President Pro Tem David Shafer, who has proposed similar legislation on the Senate side.

To offset the revenue lost by eliminating both the personal and corporate income tax in Georgia, Kirby says it would be necessary to increase the state sales tax by three to 4.8 percentage points. In metro Atlanta, that would produce a state and local sales tax of roughly 11 or 12 percent. And as we’ll see, the actual number would be higher still.

In addition, the reach of …

Continue reading Georgians, prepare to pay much higher taxes »