Coweta County
Where mayonnaise is a beverage.
Page 1 of 10 pages 1 2 3 > Last »
Nov 2008
Oct 2008
|
Twelve Good Men and True
|
|
Mon 13 Oct 2008 12:52
by Kevin McGehee
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Coweta County]
[Courting Disaster]
|
Maybe eleven. Plus me. Starting a week from today.
I’ve been called to sit in judgment of some poor schmuck who’s run afoul of the law. I don’t know who or how or whether he did it or not. I’ll find out all that next week, but won’t be able to tell you anything about it until it’s all over—if I actually get picked for the jury.
If I do get picked, it will be only the second time. The first, in California 17 years ago, was on a DUI case and our verdict was guilty.
According to the instructions the judge gave us on that occasion, it “need not” have been, even though we all found beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did drive under the influence. We were told that if we found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, we “may, but need not” return a guilty verdict. I took that to mean we had the right of jury nullification, if we wanted to exercise it. Nobody was going to be in a position to second-guess us if we returned a repeat DUI offender to the streets. At least, not legally. Of course, none of us objected to the DUI law, so the question never came up.
I’ve seen a lot of arguments about jury nullification, and both sides have good points but I think the integrity of the citizen jury is unduly compromised by making a verdict subject to review based on the jurors’ reasons for voting the way they did—especially if the result is acquittal. I may think the system today goes overboard sometimes in tilting the scales in favor of defendants, but there is good reason why we make it harder for the prosecution than for the defense in criminal cases.
Years ago when we lived in Fairbanks I became friends with a local fully-informed-jurors activist who was later convicted of jury tampering.
How did he commit jury tampering? He took to standing outside the courthouse handing out FIJA pamphlets.
He never referenced particular cases, and had no way of knowing which person he spoke to was a juror on any particular case; the only way for him to do so would be to attend those trials, and the authorities were already preventing that. Either the jury-tampering law in Alaska is overly broad (and thus in need of some jury nullification in its own right) or my friend’s trial was an outrageous miscarriage of justice. It left a bad taste in my mouth about the Alaska judicial system’s view of the citizen jury, and it’s probably just as well I was never called to serve while we lived there.
I’ll be very interested to learn how jurors are instructed here in Georgia.
|
Sep 2008
|
It’s Not Just Mail Carriers
|
|
Sun 28 Sep 2008 11:25
by Kevin McGehee
2 comments
[Coweta County]
[Here's Your Sign]
[Wackadoodle]
|
Rude and distracted drivers in Coweta County—longtime readers of The McGehee Zone may already know about the tailgating and center-line crossing that goes on around here—have sent three rural mail carriers to the hospital this summer.
Betsy Tomlinson, a substitute carrier who’s driven all 15 of Sharpsburg’s routes, described the trend and the increasing “near misses” more bluntly.
“They’re rude. The drivers are just rude,“ she said.
She described impatient drivers who follow too closely, and then slam on their brakes at the last minute or “sling out” into oncoming traffic to pass the carriers instead of waiting until there are safer sections to pass. While postal carriers pull off the road when they’re able, the problem with Hwys. 154 and 16 is that there aren’t a lot of places where the carriers can pull over.
“They’ll get right up on our rear end,“ Tomlinson said. “I’ve had people behind me, follow me and watch me box the mail, stop after stop, and after they pass, they honk their horn at me. They get mad because I’m blocking their way, and I’m doing my job. Everybody out there is trying to do their job.“ » Mail carriers feel they’re ‘sitting ducks’ for wrecks
A couple of weeks ago on our way home from dinner in my wife’s car, we were aggressively tailgated by a driver who didn’t like that Chris was obeying the speed limit. No matter what she did this lunatic didn’t back off for more than a couple of seconds—and then as we turned off the highway toward home, Rage Boy honked to make sure we knew his bad behavior was all our fault.
More recently, we were waiting to turn in at a local store, a left turn which mean we had to wait for oncoming traffic. When that traffic cleared, an idiot in a red pickup leaving the store honked at us for making our turn instead of letting him make his ahead of us.
Doesn’t it seem to you that acting rudely at a woman driver when her husband is in the car with her is kind of a dumb thing to do? That may be why none of these nutless wonders followed us to reiterate their displeasure face to face.
In my own truck, I was recently tailgated and nearly rear-ended by a woman in a pickup who was simply not paying attention to her driving. When I slowed to turn off, I watched in my rearview mirror and saw the precise moment when she realized she was about to plow into the rear end of my Bronco at 45 mph. And because my A/C is still out and I had my rear window partly rolled down for ventilation, I heard the screech of her tires as she locked up her brakes to avoid the collision.
What I don’t know is whether she was wishing, as she drove on after I made my turn, that she’d worn her brown pants. If I’d been in anything less massive myself, I probably would have been. At least she had the good grace not to honk at me for her mistake.
What will inevitably happen is that one of these rude yahoos will cross paths with another, and they’ll kill each other. Hopefully before they end up killing someone who’s merely stupid, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
|
Jun 2008
|
I Cannot Disagree
|
|
Mon 30 Jun 2008 23:48
by Kevin McGehee
68° and fair
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Coweta County]
|
Saturday evening, on our way to the fairgrounds, Chris and I saw a ten-mile-long backup on northbound I-85 due to a series of accidents not far from our own exit. Vehicles in the backup attempting to leave the interstate four miles from the accident scene were backed up for at least another six miles.
The interstate is undergoing extensive work through Coweta County, and in my opinion the planning for the project has been an extended fustercluck.
It’s time for Coweta County residents to avoid travel on Interstate 85, if possible. In less than a week, there are been three massive multi-vehicle traffic accidents on the interstate in our county that have jammed traffic for hours.
Each of these major wrecks took place in highway construction areas. Stormy weather may have contributed to two of the pileups.
Even before these recent multi-vehicle accidents, authorities reported a significant increase in wrecks on the interstate within the past year. For well over a year, every mile of I-85 in Coweta—plus a stretch south of Coweta in Meriwether and a much longer stretch in South Fulton north of Coweta—have been undergoing construction. That construction will continue at least for another 18 months. The scheduled deadline is for the work to be completed by the end of 2009. Too often construction deadlines are not met.
As the construction has progressed, more barriers have been erected. There have been recurring lane changes and shifting of traffic. When the new inside lanes that are now being constructed are completed, workers will begin rebuilding the outside lanes. We will experience more and more lane changes and more and more barriers during the next 18 months.
» It would be a good idea to avoid travel along dangerous I-85
For miles, I-85 effectively has no shoulders. The posted speed limit has been lowered from 70 to 60, with signs proclaiming the limit is “strictly enforced”—but the prevailing speed remains as it was before the work began.
Did I mention “no shoulders”? As in, where the @#$!! is a trooper or deputy supposed to pull somebody over?
Very bad planning. The only thing worse I can imagine is for all that traffic to detour onto Coweta’s surface roads. Fortunately not everyone who travels I-85 reads the Times-Herald. Or this blog.
|
|
It’s Field Day
|
|
Sat 28 Jun 2008 12:11
by Kevin McGehee
0 comments
[AK4MC]
[Humor?]
[Coweta County]
|
Today at 2:00 p.m., hams across the country begin “Field Day,“ a 24-hour activity designed to practice emergency-power operations, make contact with a lot of other hams far away, and if possible show off the hobby to interested prospective new hams.
My club will be having its Field Day fun at the Coweta County Fairgrounds in Newnan.
|
|
DeGeorge for Coweta County Commission
|
|
Fri 27 Jun 2008 12:54
by Kevin McGehee
87° and partly cloudy
in Coweta County, GA
0 comments
[Coweta County]
|
To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld—and as proved yesterday—sometimes you have to choose your candidate for the reasons you have, not necessarily the reasons you want or wish you had.
I mentioned last month that I didn’t know enough about the two candidates for county commissioner in my district, to really have any idea which to vote for. Well, I think I’m probably going to vote for Gary DeGeorge.
First (and least substantively), he was the one who contacted me seeking my support. That’s one of those little things that make a lot more difference than they should, and which John McCain could stand to think about. Now, DeGeorge admitted that he sought me out because I have this blog, which apparently has some local readership—but his opponent, Rodney Brooks, didn’t even respond to a League of Women Voters survey. DeGeorge, being younger, has some grasp of the possibilities of the “new media” in politics, and is trying to use them. (I do kind of wish he weren’t using MySpace for his campaign site, but at least he has one.)
Two other things have tipped me toward preferring DeGeorge, one being:
Brooks said he doesn’t understand why the county commissioners stopped a Wal-Mart from coming to Ga. Hwy. 154 at Interstate 85.
“We lost a large tax base,“ Brooks said. Many residents of the fourth district are going to Peachtree City’s Wal-Mart and taking their sales tax dollars with them.» Candidates oppose passenger jets here
That Wal-Mart issue was as close as I’ve come in a long time to an outright NIMBY position, but others also opposed it who live nowhere near that interchange. The Times-Herald editorialized against it, citing its proximity to a considerably larger, existing Wal-Mart, and the need for massive road and intersection improvements to handle the traffic—improvements that the developers weren’t offering to cover. The cost of making that location workable for high-impact retail would have eaten a huge chunk of the sales-tax benefit Brooks envisioned. Furthermore, sales tax revenue contributes a great deal to government spending; not necessarily so much to residents’ standard of living. Coweta needs a wider and more balanced range of economic development. Minimum-wage retail has its place, but we’re not exactly hurting for those jobs as it is.
And for the record, if people who live in my part of the county are shopping at a Wal-Mart in an adjacent county, it may be due in part to the fact that so many of my neighbors’ jobs are not in Coweta. Priorities, people.
One more matter that enters into my thinking on county politics is the commission chairmanship. Of Georgia’s 159 counties, only Coweta County does not have a chairman specifically elected to that post by the voters. Rather, each year the chairman is elected by the members of the commission itself. There is some talk of bringing Coweta into line with the rest of the state, and I tend to agree—but it’s not a major issue to me.
This issue has had its profile raised a little bit after Commissioner Leigh Schlumper, the incumbent in my district who is not seeking re-election, was passed over for the chairmanship this year and sued for discrimination. The lawsuit raises other complaints besides the chairmanship, which I think deserve to be aired if they have any basis—but on the chairmanship itself I’m fairly confident what a court would have to rule.
The claim is that the county has a rule prescribing a sequence of rotation that essentially made 2008 Schlumper’s “turn” for a second term as chairman. However the chairmanship remains the subject of a commission vote. The rotation sequence, if binding, essentially dictates the outcome of a commission vote, which I think a court would rule the commission cannot do merely by ordinance. As long as the commissioners elect their chairman, they should be free to use their own best judgment from year to year in making that choice. For his part, DeGeorge agrees. Brooks would prefer that the chairman be elected countywide, so that the power now held by a non-elected county administrator would be wielded instead by an elected official, directly accountable to voters.
As I said, I think the voter-elected chairmanship is probably a better way to go than the current, rotating chairmanship—but a lot would depend on how the powers of the office are balanced against those of the other commissioners. Lacking a definite plan for such a transition I am not inclined to give that issue alone a great deal of weight in deciding my vote.
I think DeGeorge deserves a chance.
|
|
That’s My Congressman
|
|
Tue 17 Jun 2008 9:50
by Kevin McGehee
75° and fair
in Coweta County, GA
1 comment
[Coweta County]
|
I think I must be unusually lucky in that I almost always manage to have an elected representative worthy of my respect.
Westmoreland said he was contacted by a constituent about a petition asking the U.S. Government to “drill here, and drill now” for oil. “I hope you will all go and sign that,“ Westmoreland said.
But it gave him an idea, and he’s drawn up a petition just for congressmen. Bills in Congress can become so convoluted that it can be hard to tell whether someone is for or against something.
But Westmoreland’s oil drill petition is very simple. The petition was rolled out last Thursday, Westmoreland said, and asks congressmen to sign if they support more land-based drilling, more offshore drilling, and more refineries.
At that, Westmoreland was met with thunderous applause by the crowd gathered in the community room at the Publix at Thomas Crossroads.
“That is as simple as it gets. So there is no wiggle room in there for anybody to say that they were for something or against something,“ Westmoreland said.» Lawmaker petitions Congress to drill for oil
Contact your member of Congress and tell him to sign Rep. Westmoreland’s petition.
|
May 2008
|
The Short Bus
|
|
Thu 8 May 2008 13:48
by Kevin McGehee
0 comments
[Coweta County]
[Here's Your Sign]
|
So I’m driving along on a state highway here in Coweta County—one on which the posted limit is 55—and I come up on a parade.
About a half a dozen vehicles are stuck plodding along at 35 behind a short bus with the logo of a day-care chain that we have in the area. Apparently this has been going on for a while because eventually the two vehicles immediately behind the bus pull out and pass on a double-yellow.
The bus driver is riding his brakes and acts like he’s lost, or on something. A third vehicle—a pickup with a trailer—tries to follow the other two that escaped, but oncoming traffic robs him of his opportunity.
One location of this day-care chain is not very far from my home; I start to worry that if I don’t get out of this parade I’ll be behind this short-bus driver for most of the afternoon. There’s a traffic light coming up, and I consider my options:
I could make a left at the light and end up taking a long way home, the only advantage being that I don’t have to look at the bus’ slow-moving backside anymore. I could stay put and hope the short bus isn’t going my way. Or, I could duck down a short detour to the right, come back around to the light from a different direction and hope that between being able to go faster and the timing of that light I’m able to get there before the bus has gotten through the intersection.
I take Plan C. It works. It shouldn’t have worked; there were too many variables against it. I should have ended up taking that other, longer way home. But the bus was waiting at the light as I got there, and the intersection was clear so I could make a right turn and wind up ahead of the parade.
For all I know that bus is still leading those other drivers, only just now getting to the next major intersection on that stretch of highway.
I think that day-care chain needs to hire people whose short-bus experience is driving, not riding.
Afterthought: Maybe the driver thought he was a portable school zone…
|
Page 1 of 10 pages 1 2 3 > Last »
|
|
