Political Notes

A big loss for Georgia: Dr. Daniel W. Rahn, a respected figure in the University System as the president of the Medical College of Georgia and a leading player in the shaping of the state’s healthcare policy, has decided to…

We have noted before the General Assem-bly’s fondness for giving tax breaks and other financial gifts to corporations and special interest groups. It’s something they do with a passion and the state treasury, as a result, loses more than $1…

Judicial panel: President Barack Obama will have several judicial appointments to make for the federal courts in Georgia this year, including four District Court judges, three U.S. attorneys and three U.S. marshals. The state’s congressional Democrats have set up a…

On the afternoon of Jan. 21, Gov. Sonny Perdue went before a joint hearing of legislative budget writers and said he really didn’t care what the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama did with his economic recovery legislation that would funnel…

National Guard general: Gov. Sonny Perdue has promoted Col. Joseph M. Wells to Brigadier General in the Georgia Army National Guard, making Wells the first African American general officer in the 276-year history of the Georgia National Guard. “With his…

One of the hallmarks of Gov. Sonny Perdue’s administration has been his consistent cutbacks in state formula funding for Georgia’s public school systems. In nearly every budget he’s proposed since first taking office, Perdue has included large “austerity cuts” in…

Forming their teams: Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, who’s putting together a campaign team for the 2010 governor’s race, has named AFLAC CEO Dan Amos as his finance chairman. Bill Byrne, former Cobb County Commission chairman and an unsuccessful GOP candidate…

We now know what happens when push meets squeeze. As the economic recession deepened in the last six months of 2008, Georgia’s political leaders found themselves squeezed by dropping tax revenues at the same time they were being pushed by…

For a while there, Zell Miller had quite a career going as the last angry man of Southern politics. In the fall of 2003, as he was preparing to step down from his seat in the U.S. Senate, you could…