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Perhaps Governor Nathan Deal and his insurance commissioner, Ralph Hudgens, have as their heroes the likes of Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.

History recalls all of these prominent figures hell-bent on insisting that their individual states could “nullify” acts of Congress, and not pay attention to the laws of the United States. They saw nullification as a remedy when they felt the Federal Government as reaching too far and absorbing the powers of the individual states.

I read your op-ed in The New York Times yesterday, and your decision to push your message through America’s most widely read news source still baffles me. I can only assume you were attempting to reach the American people. But why? Americans do not support military action in Syria in the first place. Do you even read The New York Times?

Half dozen of the other. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

Creatures of habit have an advantage. When they repeat what’s failed in the past, it comes as a surprise. Add to that the cliché and the euphemism as instruments of deception and you’ve got the essential ingredients of clandestine enterprise. John McCain has been running his own foreign policy shop at the International Republican Institute (set up by Congress in 1983) for so long that it has probably become a cliché.

Hard as it is to believe, we almost went to war because our president “issued” a metaphor. And how exactly do you “issue” a metaphor anyway? Our president knew it wasn’t an actual red line since he said it and didn’t draw it, but had it been real, couldn’t we have just gotten an eraser out, or just started with a clean slate? Oops, a clean slate is a metaphor – not something real. Fortunately for us and especially fortunate for those in Syria who would have been blown to paradise for being inside the metaphorical red line… damn, there I go again.

Failure is written all over the Joint Statement on Syria issued on September 6th meeting of the Group of 20 in St. Petersburg. Only 11 of the 20 leaders present – the U.S., Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Saudi Arabia –  signed on to the condemnation of Damascus. Thus the opposite of the international moral consensus that is supposed to be the foundation of international law.

Worse from the standpoint of the Obama administration, the text of the statement does not endorse military action.

One recent evening, I was cleaning up the kitchen after dinner and feeling very happy. Yes, the activity was mundane, but I was where I’d chosen to be, doing what I’d chosen to do. And my surroundings were so pleasant–my inviting kitchen opening onto a colorful living room adorned with plants, and the summer night sounds coming in through the open window.   All of this suddenly felt SO precious to me, SO different from the day before, which I’d spent mostly in jail.

Thanks to a leak by the group, Public Citizen, we now have access to some of the contents of the next international trade agreement, The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This deal is being reviewed and commented on by 600 some corporations with the usual representation of environmental, labor and social-justice concerns – zero. This corporate wet-dream is so secret that even the few U.S. senators who’ve had a peek are not allowed to publically discuss its provisions.

There is no “moral argument” for killing. None whatsoever. Think about it. Killing to prevent killing makes no logical sense. The drive to kill is always an emotional one, always colored by something other than reason. Killing is violence, no matter how it’s done, and violence is a crime of passion, always. Anger, hatred, jealousy, hubris, arrogance. A human being cannot kill another without that passion, and with it, reason is lost. The words “humanitarian” and “war” don’t belong in the same breath, at least not without the stipulation that they are irreconcilable.

Though the effort moves so slowly, President Obama has said that he will remove our combat troops from Afghanistan by 2014. It can’t come soon enough, in my opinion.

Yet now the President is considering imposing some sort of military action in another part of the world where peace has been elusive for centuries, this time in Syria. This worries me.

Ezra Klein from the Washington Post wrote a thoughtful piece last week on the connection between the runaway costs of medical care and college tuition. He argues that since these are two goods that people need so badly, there is very little leverage for the consumer and, therefore, no pressing reason for colleges and health care providers to curtail the rapid increase of costs.

Klein also sees a similarity in how the Obama administration plans on making the two industries more accessible to all Americans, namely by moving both from pay-for-service models to pay-for-performance models.

Protection is a racket and insurance is the handle. The insurance commissioners in every state are why a single payer health care system for all Americans was infeasible. So, here we’ve got Ralph Hudgens, a graduate of the University of Florida, explaining how obstructing the free market and milking the populace works.

One thousand and fifty eight words and not a single one was “dream.” That’s how far Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was into his famous 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before he gave voice to the phrase that would crystallize a movement, personify his too-short time on earth, and cast his legacy that would endure long past the final echoes of an assassin’s gunshot disappeared into the Memphis night.

Although it is years late to the party, the Wall Street Journal is finally acknowledging the negative impact that low wages have on the American economy, albeit in a twisted, delusional manner. A front page graph from Monday’s WSJ shows the decline in employee wages since 2010. The caption underneath the graph reads:

“Economists fret that stagnant wages are hampering growth in the U.S. as consumers, the biggest driver of the economy, are reluctant to spend more unless their pay grows. Workers think they can’t push for raises because they feel they have limited bargaining power.”

Once upon a time, almost no women held any kind of political office unless it had to do with children or schools.  Even then, the higher up and top offices were always held by men.  If you are young, you may wonder why this was so.  Why was our country  – on every level of government and business — not using half of the adult population to run things?  Why waste all that brain power?

Why don’t Cumming city officials use e-mail?

A bunch of old white men run Cumming, the Forsyth County seat. Last year, Mayor H. Ford Gravitt created a controversy by ejecting a citizen who was videotaping a City Council meeting–in clear violation of Georgia’s open meetings act. Politifact even weighed in on the case.

Fortunately, Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens has gotten involved to enforce the law, but old ways die hard up in the hills…

Black women stand at the intersection of two well-developed ideologies in America, one about women and one about Black people. In 1944, a Black woman organized others in her community to protect and defend Black women and girls against violations of sexual assault in the Jim Crow South.

I have been completely unable to write since July 20. OK, really July 16 because July 20 was just me moping because Helen Thomas died. That’s more than a month. I’ve taken a vacation since that time. Spent a week at the beach, watching birds. Sun, sand, salt water and seafood. Driving with the top down. Friends. Still, nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. I look inside, and I am completely empty. I see something outrageous and the best I can muster is a decidedly un-outrageous “Meh.”

The Georgia legislature, in its great (yawn) wisdom, saw fit to grant Georgia Power the power to charge us ratepayers in advance for two nuclear reactors. The 16 billion dollar plus reactors are under construction at Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River just south of Augusta. CWIP (Construction Work in Progress) was passed as the Georgia Nuclear Energy Financing Act.

In testifying at the committee level many citizens argued against the proposal brought by a legislator, known technically as a lapdog.

Tennessee’s third largest city is quite conservative, as larger cities go. That’s to be expected for a town in the most conservative part of one of the country’s most conservative states. But something a little different has taken place in Knoxville, and now a city once known for its coal-produced gray haze has dramatically reduced its carbon footprint and become one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country for green jobs. And it all started on the watch of an oilman mayor’s watch. This is the story of how that came about, and how it’s still happening.

It was September 1952, and Richard Nixon was in hot water. Nixon was then running for Vice President on the Republican ticket under Dwight Eisenhower.  With his campaign people already looking ahead to 1956 with what the Smith System people call the “see the big picture” mindset, his campaign treasurer suggested setting up a fund to reimburse Nixon for expenses relating to campaigning: long-distance phone calls, travel in excess of normal reimbursement, campaign materials, et alia. Contributions would be limited to $1,000 per contributor, with their identities not known to the candidate.

Profound technological changes have compelled us to rethink the proper boundaries of privacy. Email, internet and other technology changed the ways ordinary Americans communicate with each other and their world. Technology, such as the government’s Prism program, has enlarged the government’s means of surveillance. It’s a new game. We need new rules.

Just plain ignorant: House Speaker John Boehner issued a second scathing rebuke of fellow republican Rep. Steve King after the Iowa Republican stood by his idiotic comments characterizing most young undocumented immigrants as “drug mules.” Boehner blowtificated “I want to be clear, (after years of making incredibly stupid comments himself) there’s no place in this debate for hateful or ignorant comments from elected officials.

All of a sudden, Congress is having second thoughts. The New York Times reports that the strategy of letting the National Spy Agencies build haystacks to look for needles is going to be reconsidered by Congress. This is good news.

Backers of sweeping surveillance powers now say they recognize that changes are likely, and they are taking steps to make sure they maintain control over the extent of any revisions…

Sometimes we don’t realize the beauty around us. Another Gwinnettian chimed in the other day, extolling the beauties of Jekyll Island when visiting it the first time, after living in Georgia for several years.

“It’s so beautiful and peaceful,” she said, ready to return.

We should not be surprised that many newcomers to Gwinnett and Georgia do not know of the virtual undeveloped beauty of the Georgia coast. Unlike Hilton Head Island and much of Florida, Georgia’s beaches aren’t condo-ed away from the people.

Helen Thomas will always be a hero to me. None of that “shero” stuff. You’re either a hero or you’re not, no special designation if you’re a woman. Helen was a reporter, not a reportrix or a reportress. A reporter, a journalist. A real journalist. She covered 10 — count ‘em — 10 presidents. She questioned John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all with the same sharp, penetrating style that made presidents and press secretaries alike uncomfortable because an honest answer might seem very impolitic.

You would think with the Democrats having eight years in the presidency, that by the time the 2016 election came around, the Republicans might be in good shape. After all, the Obama presidency, so far, has not especially distinguished itself. And its effort to reform Medicare with Obamacare has met stiff opposition by many, those on the left and right.

The thinning of the cities was no more a happenstance than the thinning of the electoral herd is now. After the civil rights era and the rioting in the cities, the powers that be took fright and embarked on an agenda to distribute the population — build suburbs and roads and sell people cages on wheels to get there. Disinvestment in the cities and the reduction of services was part of the agenda to promote “urban removal” and replace people with commercial structures and parking lots.