December 2009 Archives

The vote was taken and the deed is done: healthcare reform legislation passed the U.S. Senate in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve with every Democratic and independent senator voting for it and every Republican voting against it. No big surprise there. It is also no big surprise that we will continue to hear the big lie from right-wing blowhards that this piece of legislation is so bad that it will knock the Democrats out of power in 2010.

Tom Price, the Republic congressman from Roswell, has become quite the political attack dog since he left the Georgia Senate for the U.S. House. He has reached that point in his political maturity where, if Nancy Pelosi were to make the comment that the sun rises in the east, Price would issue a statement insisting that the sun rises in the west and smearing Pelosi as a fascistic communist for daring to suggest otherwise.

A few days before Republican members of the Georgia House caucused to nominate a replacement for the lobbyist-romancing Glenn Richardson as speaker, a Democratic strategist summed up the worst-case scenario for his party:

"The worst thing that could happen to Democrats is for Republicans to elect someone honest as speaker," he said.

The attempt by Republican members of the Georgia House to elect a new speaker and clean up the mess created by the Glenn Richardson scandal is dredging up another controversy from the recent past: the stealth maneuverings to give Gov. Sonny Perdue an undisclosed tax break that was worth $100,000 to the governor.

There was never any doubt about the outcome, but in case you wondered, Kasim Reed has officially won the Atlanta mayor's race after a recount Wednesday by Fulton County election officials showed that he finished 714 votes ahead of City Councilwoman Mary Norwood.

It took less than 72 hours for the speaker of the Georgia House, one of the most powerful people in state politics, to be smashed, destroyed, and run out of office. Just like that, Glenn Richardson's political career is finished.

And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to growl, the rest of the story. The divorced wife of House Speaker Glenn Richardson granted an interview to Fox 5 TV Monday and said that the factors in Richardson's recent suicide attempt were "power and control," not depression.