Splish, Splash! Some Augusta taxpayers think they’ll be taking a bath if they vote for the proposed $250 million SPLOST 8 package because of what’s in it and what’s not.
That’s why political activist Brad Owens and others have formed a Say No to SPLOST 8 PAC to try to defeat extending the penny sales-tax on March 16.
“We want to educate the voters that this is a bad deal,” Owens said.
One thing Owens & Co. object to is the inclusion of $5 million for a water park. “Seed money,” city officials call it to entice private developers. There’s also $1.5 million for a zip line to zip folks back and forth across the Savannah River, (if they do come back once they zip out of Augusta) but not a penny for repairs to the New Savannah River Lock and Dam, which the U.S. Corps of Engineers seems hell-bent on tearing down, causing the river to drop three to four feet in downtown Augusta. And if that happens, before long you could see folks zipping back and forth over a glorified mudhole.
The package also includes $25 million for planning and design work on a new $228 million James Brown Arena. Owens and PAC members oppose spending money on designing a building when the bonds to fund it haven’t been approved.
Another sticking point is that stormwater by any other name is still stormwater, and calling it “grading and drainage,” and allocating $20 million for it doesn’t fool anybody. City officials renamed the stormwater allocation after a few sharp-eyed people noticed and said,
“Hey, wait just a minute! Aren’t we already paying for stormwater improvements?”
Things like that do not instill confidence in folks about what their government is doing.
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The PAC also doesn’t like the fact that city officials slighted museums and cultural activities when putting the SPLOST 8 package together. There’s no funding for the James Brown annex to the Augusta Museum of History or for the Lucy Craft Laney Museum, the Jewish Museum or the proposed Georgia Military Museum.
And to make matters worse – which nothing could be worse, now that I think of it, than being completely left out – is that spokesmen for those entities weren’t allowed to make the case for their projects before the commission.
Here’s an Idea
List each initially proposed SPLOST 8 projects individually on the ballot line by line and let voters decide which ones they want to pay for.
The only problem with that would be thousands of ballots would be dropped off in the middle of the night by people who love water slides and ziplines. Of course, if someone found out about it and objected, they’d just yell “voter suppression,” and call anybody who tried to challenge the results “conspiracy theorists.” Then Twitter, Facebook and You Tube would silence the conspiracy theorists by canceling their accounts.
Quote of the Week:
“What’s the rush? Well, I think there’s not been a rush. The commissioners have been on zoom since last March. I think if anything, people are getting really relaxed on Zoom meetings.”
— Augusta Commissioner Catherine McKnight when asked, “What’s the rush?” after her motion to re-open commission chambers for in-person meetings April 13th was voted down last week.
Sammie is Chasing After Gold Cross Again
It will soon be time for the city and Gold Cross EMS to renegotiate Gold Cross’ contract to provide ambulance service in Augusta. So people were suspicious that Augusta Commissioner Sammie Sias, a retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major, had launched a preemptive strike when an anonymous Gold Cross employee sent commissioners an email with a long list of complaints about the way the company’s “superiors” treat its employees.
References to superiors instead of managers also raised suspicions because people in the military refer to their superiors while civilians more often refer to managers or supervisors.
People were suspicious because Sias was the architect of the Augusta Fire Department’s failed attempt to take over the ambulance service in Richmond County, an attempt that probably cost former Fire Chief Chris James his job because firefighters who were forced to ride ambulances and work back-to-back overtime were enraged by the treatment.
Public Safety Committee Chairman John Clarke looked into the complaints and deemed them to be “unsubstantiated” and sent an email to all concerned to that effect but extended the invitation to the aggrieved employee to meet with him and Gold Cross to discuss the matter. Clarke’s e-mail triggered one from Sias wanting to see Clarke’s investigative report documenting the employee’s complaints as being unsubstantiated.
Then, here comes another anonymous email from the aggrieved employee stating he could not meet with Clarke and Gold Cross because he had to protect his job. The anonymous employee also called on Gold Cross employees to walk out for three days beginning on March 1 after calling in sick the night before and securing a doctor’s excuse.
Well, to make a short story, shorter, nobody walked out, but the employee’s email account disappeared. And Sias’ comments at the next commission meeting were a lot shorter than they would have been if there had been a walkout, although he couldn’t resist trying to get in a few licks on Gold Cross which he takes every opportunity to do.
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Gold Cross responds to thousands of calls a year, but anytime they don’t respond as fast as the people having the emergency think they should and Sias hears about it, he has them come before the commission to reenact the event. Of course, he didn’t do that when the fire department ambulance crew took the oxygen away from an elderly man with COPD to replace it with theirs but couldn’t get it to work, causing the poor old fellow to have a panic attack. Then they dropped him on the ground as they were carrying him to the ambulance. He died at the hospital shortly thereafter.
Living Through Coronadoom
I wrote to my linguist friend Richard Noegel recently because I hadn’t heard from him for too long a time. I told him I thought it was about time to re-run “Yazoo – A Buy Centennial Story,” but wasn’t sure I could find my copy and asked him to send me one if he still had his in his computer. I also asked whether he’d been hiding during the pandemic that’s ruining so many lives. A day or two later, he responded, and, as usual, in a most entertaining fashion, which I had to tone down quite a bit from its original version because some people don’t … well, you know. They get offended over the least little thing.
“What a delightful surprise!” he began. “I think of you very often, but the whole Coronadoom has made a mess of everything. The public libraries are shut down, so I have not yet been able to send you what I promised you months and months ago, which is a few chapters from a book written by my Dad’s first cousin Charles Noegel some time ago now. Hilarious stuff! Memories of Madison County, Florida, in the 1920s.
You can go to the library right enough (sometimes–they are closed on rather a mysterious schedule), but they have furniture piled up against the shelves so you can’t get near them. And you can’t touch anything. Including the copy machine, so I await the return of access to the public library’s copy machines so I can do it myself and make sure it’s done right. But DEAR GOD … ! I really oughtta just send you the book.
It’s so weird there. You really cannot touch a thing. I went into Appleby without my Islamic veil one day, and they totally freaked out. I didn’t go back. Propaganda has a negative effect on me. I cringe when I hear “We’re all in this together.”
“Oh,” I think. “Oh, no! No, we are not!”
It’s astounding how nearly the entire population are possessed of a slave mentality. I don’t wear the face-diaper anywhere ever. Not in the post office, where a young woman literally shrank from me when I went to stand in line. Literally shrank away from me. I laughed and said, “You watch too (expletive deleted) much TV. If you are too afraid to leave your home, then don’t leave your home.” Seemed simple enough to me, but people do believe their TV sets. The whole thing is a media event to prepare the slaves for the Great Reset.
Nor in the grocery store. I don’t wear the face diaper there either.
I was stupid enough to try to tell somebody (some Yankee carpetbagger at the Aiken County Farmers Market–a woman) that if anything were really happening, they would not have to be told about it at all, let alone 24/7. You would know it! You would see refrigerator trucks on every block, storing the bodies of the unburied dead because local mortuaries would be unable to bury them. You would see earth-moving equipment out and about as the county struggled to dispose of the dead in mass graves. The obituary columns would be 30 pages long today and 60 pages tomorrow and 200 pages the day after that. You would personally know dozens or scores of people who had died from the Coronadoom. And do you see—have you seen—anything like that at all? Ev-Ah?
To my surprise, she actually answered.
“Well, it is happening. It’s all over the news.”
I said, “First of all, it’s ‘noise,’ not news, okay? But let’s skip over that for now. Just tell me this: Where is it happening?”
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“Somewhere else,” was her devastatingly insightful reply. Shattering, that’s what it was. Shattering. That’s right. She actually said that. It flashed through my mind that I had just seen in real life what Pogo used to call, “mentable gymnasticals.” The sheer will to self-deception is amazing.
The whole thing is simply not to be believed. Is it any wonder that we have seen a victim of elder abuse ensconced in the White House? And if that whole “campaign” dog-and-pony show was not a kind of TV documentary of serial elder abuse, then what was it?
Another time at the Aiken County Farmers Market, I also hollered at a stupid woman. She had been walking behind me, and when I turned around, she stopped suddenly like Lot’s wife or something, and it startled me, so I said, “What’s wrong?”
And she said–through her face diaper–“Well, you don’t have on a mask …”
And I actually shouted at her: “Turn off your (expletive deleted) Tee Vee!” And as I walked to my car, I thought, “Who was THAT?!” I was disturbed at my reaction. I thought, “Steady, bro, steady!” But that didn’t last long, I assure you. I had to phone the farmer that I buy raw milk from, and he said that he would never go to the Farmers Market again, so now I just drive out to his farm on Wright’s Mill Road, and he and I avoid the whole lunatic asylum that our country has become, even here in the South, where I had thought a few down-to-earth, sensible folks still survived, but I was a fool. I am beginning to feel truly sorry that millions of people are, in fact, not dying from Coronadoom. It would do us all a world of good.
Anyway, you try to point out to people that there is no diagnostic test for this “disease.” Might as well ask to saw their leg off with a hacksaw. It just does not compute. Dopes. That nobody even knows how it is spread. Fools. And voters all!
I once even sent somebody the CDC all-cause mortality statistics for 2019 and 2020 (through 31 Oct). That was on 2 Dec. last, 500,000 fewer all-cause deaths than in 2019. And were 250,000 folks gonna’ die in each of the two remaining months of last year? Hmmm….
Hopeless.
And this virus, well, turns out the damned thing can learn! It hangs around the doors of restaurants but not around tables. In California, things are far more advanced, natch. In that paradise, you can go out and about during the day but not at night becuz that is when the Vampire rages the streets. (This, of course, in the state where the largest city had to shut down city hall because of bubonic plague in 2018.)
Well, I gotta git goin’. Yazoo article (updated w/new info and footnotes) is at “GASSAR.” click on “articles.” https://gasocietysar.org/
Do you ev-ah come to the Garden City anymore? We could grab my cousin Tom Turner and have lunch someplace and chew the fat. He’s always good for a laugh.
fondly,
Richard”
Chapters from Cousin Charles’s book coming one o’ these days …
Gone to the Dogs
Since voting in America has gone to the dogs with dogs and cats receiving absentee ballots in the mail and voting, these famous dogs have become politically aware, especially since Joe Biden cleaned up in the Nov. 3 presidential election, cementing the Biden Grime Family’s close and lucrative association with the Chinese Communist Party President XI Jinping. On the big TV screen at their favorite hangout, “Bones Bar & Grill.” Newsmax is interviewing National Senior Fellow Horace Cooper on China’s threat to man’s best friend.
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(The jukebox in the corner is playing Elvis Presley’s “A Dog’s Life.”)
If I had my life to live over
I know what I’d liked to be
A pampered pet of a rich brunette
Sitting on my mama’s knee.
Someone to love me
Someone to care
Rubberduck dubble little fingers through my hair.
I need a dog’s life
What a life, that’s good enough for me
That’s good enough for me.
If I had a bone to be picking
A picking chicken or a steak
Curled up there in an easy chair
Man, that won’t be hard to take.
I’ll always be faithful
That’s what I’d be
Never bite a hand that feeds me, no siree.
Just lead a dog’s life
What a life
That’s good enough for me.
That’s good enough for me
Merle: Hey, turn that music down. I want to hear what he’s saying there on TV.
Carl: Let the jukebox keep on playing. Let that record roll around.
Merle: Turn it down!
Cooper on TV: As they’ve done in other industries, Bejing has manipulated the pet food supply in China by undercutting the competition – in this case by using inferior, even dangerous products – to become the world’s leading pet food ingredient exporter.
Elvis: I’m all shook up! About six years ago, hundreds of us were poisoned by food from China that had something bad in it.
Jerry Lee: Great balls of fire! It’s going to happen again! And I’m not ready to die.
George: Calm down, both of you. It scares me half to death too, but we shouldn’t panic.
Jerry Lee: Be Bop a Lula! Joe Biden is putting China in the doghouse and us in the grave.
Merle: China murdered all the dogs in 1952. They went out on patrols at night and slaughtered every dog they could find.
Kitty: (shudders) All the ones they didn’t eat, you mean. It wasn’t God who made Honkey Cats like me. It was poisoned food from China that drove half of us crazy if it didn’t kill us.
Merle: Listen.
Cooper on TV: Biden conspicuously uses his pets as political props in the White House should recognize the Chinese threat and stop excusing China’s bad behavior especially when it puts American pets at risk.
George: What about putting our owners at risk by opening the Mexican border and letting hundreds of Covid positive illegals into this country while telling American citizens to lay low and wear two masks?
Elvis: Ain’t that a shame? And then he calls the governors of Texas and Mississippi “Neanderthals” for letting people go back to work to make a living.
Merle: Neanderthals? He wishes he had enough sense left to be a Neanderthal. And he’s so weak he can’t even hold a press conference or give a State of the Union speech, even with a teleprompter. No wonder the Dems want to take his football with the nuclear codes in it away from him.
Carl: Just how long do you think the Democrats are going to let this embarrassing situation go on?
Kitty: As long as they can keep making believe in this heartbreak U.S.A.
George: Not much longer.
Merle: He’ll probably trip over his dog again and hit his head, and that will be it.
George: Yes. They’ll blame it on the dog.
(The jukebox in the corner is playing Elvis’s “Hounddog.”
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog
Cryin’ all the time
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
Cryin’ all the time
Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit
And you ain’t no friend of mine
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