Rep. Scott doesn’t want any federal laws about employment.
Alvin Payton (Valdosta Mayor Pro Tem and City Council District 4) asked:
What is your view or your stance on this current minimum wage law being increased to livable wages?This was at the Chamber Federal Legislative Lunch with Rep. Austin Scott (R GA-08) yesterday.
Answer from Rep. Scott: Continue reading
He’s against war in Syria, he wouldn’t give a straight answer about
labelling GMOs, and he’s still chasing the windmill of abolishing ObamaCare.
See for yourself.
Many thanks to Chamber president Myrna Ballard for keeping videoing open.
Here’s a video playlist:
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 4 September 2013.
VLCoC event notice.
Stuart Taylor wrote for the VDT today, Congressman Scott visits: U.S. representative outlines upcoming legislative session, offers opinion on Syria, immigration.
-jsq
I agree with the pathologist who did the second autopsy and found new evidence, Dr. William Anderson:
“My recommendation is to redo the investigation,” Anderson said Wednesday morning. “Open it back up and find out what happened.”
Jordan Conn wrote for Grantland yesterday, A Death in Valdosta,
Multisport athlete Kendrick Johnson was found dead in his Georgia high school’s gymnasium in January. Authorities ruled it an accident, but Johnson’s family believed something very different — and a second autopsy appears to support their suspicions.
I don’t always agree with Rev. Rose, but I still do on this one: the number of people colluding to cover up a thing like this would be most impressive.
However, the GBI is involved, and after the Quitman 10 are now several years without a “speedy” trial, GBI involvement taints the case. So with the new evidence let’s see a new investigation.
The Grantland story is confused about Continue reading
Finish it and then send we the taxpayers and ratepayers a bill? What kind of deal is that? So Southern Company already dodged a Fitch downgrade by delaying a decision, and now GA PSC wants to put it off for years more. That also delays solar deployment in Georgia, putting us still farther behind.
Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday, Ga. approves deal on nuclear plant costs,
A debate over the rising cost of building a nuclear power plant in Georgia will be delayed for years under an agreement approved Tuesday by Georgia’s utility regulators.
The elected members of Georgia’s Public Service Commission unanimously approved a deal that will put off a decision on whether Georgia Power can raise its budget for building two more nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle (VOH’-gohl) until the first of those reactors is finished. An independent state monitor has estimated the first reactor will be finished in January 2018 at the earliest.
Regulators will continue monitoring company spending but will not make a decision on raising the bottom line budget figure.
So GA PSC will keep watching costs run over budget but will do nothing about it.
Oh, wait, it’s actually worse: Continue reading
Alcohol Prohibition didn’t work. Prohibition of marijuana and other drugs actually failed in much worse ways than alcohol prohibition did. I don’t always agree with The Economist, but about this I do: it’s time to end the failed War on Drugs and ramp down the expensively bloated U.S. prison system.
Uncle Sam Will Enforce Prohibition,
Our September 22nd 1923 issue examined the impact of America’s experiment with alcohol prohibition. The newspaper encourages a similarly liberal approach to drug control today.
We wrote: “A law is not necessarily a good or wise law because it aims at doing something which is desirable. If it is impossible of strict administration, it will not only fail in its object, but, what is far more serious will bring both law, legislature and executive into open contempt.”
Continue reading
Where is the Alapaha Water Treatment Plant that has had 20 violations in the past 10 years, for which the Lowndes County Commission had Lovell Engineering write a letter to GA EPD and then approved a no-bid contract to the same firm? April Huntley supplied this pictorial answer. -jsq
Take Highway 84 east from Valdosta GA:
After passing through Naylor GA look for this neighborhood on your right (Lake Alapaha Hidden Cove):
Continue reading
TEPCO
that lied about deadly levels of radiation at Fukushima
is part of the industry
Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning brags about
as producing
“nuclear power as a clean, safe, affordable solution for this world’s energy future”.
SO and Georgia Power are building two new nukes at Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River, including parts by Korea’s document-forging Doosan. Forging as in lying, as in what the Korean press is now calling the Korean nuclear mafia of power companies, vendors, and testers. Stateside U.S. NRC is refusing to supply Congress with safety documents. And when I asked NRC if they were going to take account of Doosan in their webinar about foreign ownership of U.S. nuclear reactors NRC staff told me Vogtle was an unbuilt reactor and they were only dealing with existing power reactors. Which is very strange, considering their Commission Direction explicitly refers to unbuilt and not-even-permitted Calvert Cliffs 3 in its subject.
And considering Doosan’s online map of its customers includes
not only six not built yet,
Vogtle 3,4, Summer 2,3,
Duke Energy’s Levy County 1,2 (since
cancelled),
but also nine operating nuclear power reactors,
Entergy’s
Waterford 3 (west of New Orleans; remember the dark Super Bowl?),
TVA’s
Sequoyah 1 and 2 near Chattanooga and
Watts Bar 1 near Knoxville
(all
within 500 miles of here) plus
Entergy’s
Indian Point 2 and 3 near New York City and
Arizona Public Service’s
Palo Verde 1,2,3 near Phoenix, Arizona.
With Vogtle 2 and 3, that’s fifteen reactors in the U.S.
supplied by document-forging Doosan.
OK, 13 now that
Levy County 1 and 2 won’t be built.
How about we say the same soon about Vogtle 3 and 4? That they won’t be built? Probably Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers could say that. GA PSC, Georgia legislature, or SO CEO Tom Fanning could say that. We’re listening.
-jsq
At the Waycross Seven Out Superfund Site meeting, caller Anthony Samsel said (42 minutes and 10 seconds into the video) of a site in Massachusetts:
I was the first person to track contamination of the ground to aquifers that travel several miles; plastics, formaldehyde, from a plastics manufacturing plant, and there was contamination of city wells with a lot of cancer clusters and a lot of sick, dead, and dying people.
He was talking about the Wells G & H Superfund Site in Woburn, MA, where, according to EPA,
The groundwater was contaminated with industrial solvents, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE). Soil on the five properties was contaminated with VOCs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and pesticides. Sediments in the Aberjona River were contaminated with PAHs and heavy metals such as chromium, zinc, mercury and arsenic.
Thirty years later, that one is still toxic.
In a 29 September 2011 coment Samsel said Continue reading
GBI finally released video of prisoners being beaten with hammers by guards
after the
2010 prisoner strikes
for wages
instead of working for free for things like
call centers and building weapons.
Two guards
pled guilty in 2012
to conspiracy, assault with injury, and coverup.
But GBI mysteriously hasn’t been able to identify
the guard seen in this video beating handcuffed prisoner Kelvin Stevenson
with a hammer.
Mary Ratcliff 29 August 2013, Video released of Georgia guards beating prisoners with hammer,
At the beginning of this video, you hear a prison guard shouting, “”Get down! Just get down! Get down! Get down!” presumably to the other prisoners. That exclamation is followed by, “Oh (inaudible) guy over there with his hands hitting him … and a damn hammer!”
The deplorable beatings you’re witnessing occurred Continue reading
It’s not so much what you know as what you can prove, says a concerned father, and the mother wants better representation for others whose children like her daughter have gotten caught in a felony with little if any evidence at school.
Mrs. Watkins said after her daughter was
tackled at school be a deputy,
she found “there are a lot of children in the judicial system
that may not have good representation.”
She and Mr. Watkins and George Boston Rhynes
are starting an organization to at least show concern.
George said in one visit to juvenile court
he encountered two families with problems with
probation and law enforcement knocking down doors and searching without
search warrants.
Mr. Watkins wants to help people know their rights. Things we older folk may have done as children now there are laws against, and the children and their families need to know things like the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor, and the importance of writing things down. “Details is all that matters.” Later he noted that Continue reading
