A sportswriter's account of horror on NOLA & democracy denied in Cobb

Today we're just coming to grips with the horror levied on dozens of revelers on Bourbon Street in the early hours of New Year's Day, and I found it notable that Ken Suguira, a sports writer with the Atlanta Journal Constitution penned - in my mind - one of the more poingant pieces of journalism from the scene. There to cover the University of Georgai's football game, he was, instead, thrust into action reporting on a terror attack. In Georgia's Cobb County - a decidedly (now) "blue" county has a deadlocked 2-2 commission split after the state's GOP-heavy general assembly redrew the county's commission district map - which drew an elected commissioner out of her district barely a year into elected office. A judge Tuesday affirmed that - let's call it what it is - partisan tactic. The unseated commissioner - Jerica Richardson - called it what it is: "precedent that the General Assembly has the blanket permission to remove a sitting elected official, at any time, and for any reason. " Meanwhile, outside Augusta, a similar bedroom community county had toyed with incorporating all of its unincorporated areas to surround the only two incorporated cities in that county in what's a naked attempt to "freeze" a purported rise in the number of (ahem) "radical activists" in the growing hamlet of Grovetown (my hometown). Local conservative talk radio host Austin Rhodes fears "public housing" and "public transit" there and eventually creeping into the hoity-toity gated community area of the county some 7-10 miles away. Knowing that town's history, as I do, it's incumbent on me to remind Austin that Groetown's history is rife with "low income" housing and "public transit" back when frontier folks took the PIcayune train "to town," but I digress. Conservatives fear democracy; seek to smother it to sleep whenever possible in Georgia it would seem.