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When I drove a taxi part-time while an art student in Milwaukee I learned that a prestigious club barred people of color and Jews. Women were also excluded except in the company of members.That was kind of shocking to a naïve kid from Michigan’s rural upper peninsula, especially since many of my pickups at that club were judges, lawyers, CEOs etc. – the naïve kid expecting people of that status to be enlightened.

In his critique of Barack Obama’s “declining presidency” yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Fred Barnes makes some accurate observations. The assessment that Obama’s administration is flailing due to the lack of a defined vision for his second term is fair. Indeed, the Obama re-election campaign never shifted away from an anti-Romney message long enough to establish any sort of primary goal for moving America boldly in one direction or another. Barnes also concedes that the “scandals” currently making headlines have little to do with the President himself or the ineffectiveness of his six-month-old second term.

One of the reasons Georgians fear when the Legislature meets may best be seen in the changes made in the way you now must pay taxes on your automobiles.

Becoming effective March 1, 2013 was the Title Ad Valorem Tax legislation. Its prime purpose, enacted in state after state by hard-core conservatives, was to eliminate the so-called “birthday tax” of paying ad valorem taxes to counties each year.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) unveiled a plan this week to automatically restore voting rights to people convicted of nonviolent felonies.

The move won praise from civil rights advocates who have long called for reform in the state, one of several with unusually harsh felon disenfranchisement laws.

“For too long, Virginia has been successful in implementing a law designed to target minority voters…

This week I got a mailing from the National Review, a conservative magazine. Printed on the envelope was “RESIST! He may have won the election. But he hasn’t won the fight.”

The “He,” of course, is President Obama, whose picture was also visible on the outside of the mailing. So what fight is the National Review calling its readers to join? It can’t be the fight to reduce the deficit. The deficit has been falling for several years, at the fastest rate in history.

Let me suggest again that while we know that the PATRIOT Act was sitting on the shelf just waiting for an opportunity to be enrolled and passed into law, that the AUMF was waiting in the wings has received less consideration. But, if the interest in a “unitary executive” whose authority is above the law was real, then making the Commander-in-chief during wartime a constant was just as important a component of the re-establishment of the sovereignty of the term-limited presidency.

In 1916 the Argent Lumber Company commenced work in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Beginning in 1904 several whaling and sealing operations commenced along the northern shore of South Georgia Island in the far South Atlantic Ocean.

Argent was one of a number of similar lumber companies that operated in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia beginning in the 1880′s. The various whaling operations began on South Georgia somewhat later, the first and most successful being the Argentine Fishing Company (Compañía Argentina de Pesca).