Truth

This is the day for truth.  With truth, we do not deceive ourselves.

On this day in 2020, reggae singer Johnny Nash (I Can See Clearly Now) and rock guitarist Eddie Van Halen died.  On this day in 2019, drummer Ginger Baker and comedian Rip Taylor died. Impermanence is swift.

The last of the Harvest Moon is gone and the moon refreshes itself today.  At 7:05 a.m. this morning, 0% of the moon was illuminated, although the New Moon didn't rise over this part of the globe until 7:38 a.m. The first sliver of the crescent Hunter's Moon will set at 7:42 p.m. tonight.

It's Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd's birthday.  The former Red Sox pitcher turns 61 today.  Last night, the Red Sox beat the arch-rival New York Yankees, 6-2, in a single-game Wild Card Playoff. Red Sox fans still remember the 5-4 wild-card loss to the Yankees in 1978.  Last night's game provided a modicum of revenge for that game.

In an opinion piece in yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Patricia Murphy documented many of the ties between the Buckhead secession movement and Trump's continued Big Lie concerning the 2020 election.  Not only does the movement leader Bill White have close ties with Trump, but the Georgia state representatives who've sponsored the legislation for secession called for a special session in November to look into alleged fraud in the 2020 elections. Two were subsequently stripped of their committee chairmanships for undermining the Georgia election results, but they nonetheless went to Arizona as part of the recent election "audit." 

White and the cityhood proponents claim the secession movement "isn't political," but any process that divides a new municipality out of an existing city, creates a new representative government for that new municipality, and requires state legislation and an election to pass the effort is irreducibly political.  The fact that the leadership has close ties to the disgraced, twice-impeached former president and the so-called Stop the Steal movement is telling as to which side of the political spectrum the scheme was hatched and how they would govern if elected to city leadership.

There is a reason this movement is being driven by out-of-state Trump supporters. The right-wing operatives pushing this through are doing so now only because they want to drive their Republican base out to vote in 2022, a non-presidential year, and to create division in an increasingly Democratic part of the state that recently went for Joe Biden and elected two Democratic Senators. 

Campaigning against Atlanta has long been a successful political strategy in rural Georgia.  Even if they fail, the politicians looking to carve up this turkey will still be recognized for taking on that "big, dirty city." And all the closeted bigots can clearly hear the dog-whistle racism in the complaints about "criminals" and "rising crime" and "effective policing."