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Born May 18, 1953; got saved at Truett Memorial BC in Hayesville, NC 1959. On rigged ballot which I did not rig got Most Intellectual class of 71, Gaffney High School. Furman Grad, Sociology major but it was little tougher than Auburn football players had Had three dates with beautiful women the summer of 1978. Did not marry any of em. Never married anybody cause what was available was undesirable and what was desirable was unaffordable. Unlucky in love as they say and even still it is sometimes heartbreaking. Had a Pakistani Jr. Davis Cupper on the Ropes the summer of 84, City Courts, Rome Georgia I've a baby sitter, watched peoples homes while they were away on Vacation. Freelance writer, local consultant, screenwriter, and the best damn substitute teacher of Floyd County Georgia in mid 80's according to an anonymous kid passed me on main street a few years later when I went back to get a sandwich at Schroeders. Had some good moments in Collinsville as well. Ask Casey Mattox at www.clsnet.org if he will be honest about it. I try my best to make it to Bridges BBQ in Shelby NC at least four times a year.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Vince Dooley, SEC's Greg Sankey, The Georgia Gube race and so called Christians backing GOP Kemp a Trumper and SOBs.

        Vince Dooley the UGA coaching legend and Donald Trump who called U Bama Heisman Trophy Winner Derrick Henry a son of a bitch last fall in Huntsville Alabama two days before the Titans played the Seahawks in Nashville; Dooley endorsed the Super Trumper Bryan Kemp for next Governor of Georgia.

    Dooley ought to know better. Now more than ever, SEC Football is in play this fall in the Ga Gube race and in the Bama 3rd Congressional race that borders the Ga/Bama line from Weiss Lake and the Leesburg Gun Shop in the North to Auburn University and Opelika on the south end sliver.

   Lot of Auburn grads along that border and way on into Atlanta as well. And US Carolina's Will Muschamp was raised in Rome Georgia where his father coached James Dickey's alma mater, Darlington Prep School.

    So it's a barrel of Race politics as Kemp's opponent is a woman of color.

   Brian Kemp is an active member of the Emanuel Episcopal Church in Athens Ga but apparently never read the great Sermon of the Great Episcopalian preacher Fleming Rutledge on the legacy of Will D. Campbell. And it doesn't appear he was listening if Barbara Brown Taylor of nearby Clarkesville came over to his church as guest presenter of The Gospel.

   His wife, an Argo was a UGA Cheerleader, and her father a wealthy insurance executive. So maybe that had more to do with Vince Dooley's endorsement than the politics of Mike Hubbard, Herschel Walker and the poison of Trump interpretation of Kaepernick and how he Trump came to call all people of color who don't follow his line on the matter Sons a bitches. Did Condi Rice ever say anything. I'm pretty sure Richard Shelby hasn't uttered a peep to date even with his Roy Moore tipping points, but Nick Saban did say something a day after Derrick Henry stayed in the locker room in Saturday's Down South. I know cause I heard Paul Finebaum say so!


     And it is a test for the alleged new direction of the Southern Baptist Convention under the presidency of JD Grear. How many white Baptists in Georgia will vote for a Black woman this fall and who among them will escape the cloud of Fox News when they make their decision?

    Dooley's shepherd of Herschel Walker, Mike Hubbard moved to Auburn where he did the same for Bo Jackson, then flipped the state house in Bama in 2010 from Dems to Republican mostly Super Trumpers.

    And Hubbard's son as an aside just graduated from Marshall Frady and my alma Mater Furman, which also provided the great education to longtime archivist for the state of Alabama Edwin C Bridges.

   I haven't consulted Bridges, and Frady passed away in 2004 but I doubt they have the enthusiasm for Kemp Dooley has displayed, and for certain they would not give Donald Trump a pass for calling Derrick Henry and Mark Ingram sonsabitches.

    So here we are with immigration DACA, NRA politics and school safety, Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta which sponsors ten Syrian refugee families and this Kemp clown running in Jesus name to be the Governor of the same state that elected Jimmy Carter 50 years ago.

    Here Coach Dooley, why don't you enlist some retired SEC Coaches in a group read with Paul Finebaum this fall of Vandy (SEC) Proff Jon Meacham's Soul of America. I think Greg McElroy the Rhodes Scholar nominee could read along with you as well as a select group of students from the Honors Program at Bama and Nick Saban's Catholic Youth Ministry at St Francis in Tuscaloosa.

   Last night on Fox News, the mouthpiece for Donald Trump's America, Tucker Carlson said "The overwhelming majority of Humanities Professors teaching in American Colleges and Universities today have no Integrity"

    Will you Coach Dooley leave that statement uncontested and Fox News and outside special interest ad buys carry the day in your Beloved Georgia and your Alma mater Auburn; or is it time for elevated discourse in this contest that is rapidly gaining the Nation's Attention.

Friday, July 20, 2018

What Marney, LD and Stewart A. Newman were gettin at

      Friends this is a work in progress, my last chance to write something worthy of the New Yorker magazine. I got published in the Christian Century once, and Momma made it to the Atlanta Constitution before I did. Point being this is not my first rodeo but could be one of the finest in the end game, the downgrade as actuarials assert I got about seven years left at best.

   Don't worry about me, just doing heavy reading compliments of Cousin Neil Fox wife Debi, Phd in George Macdonald and all that CS Lewis and Tolkien bring to the conversation. UPS brought Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life to my front porch in Bama Monday and I got deep into Chapter Seven last night.

   It Delivers, Chapter Seven.

   Debi is a good woman about 12 years younger than me, half German and in these last 12 years, Orthodox Catholic. We've had several civil phone conversations over the last few days--she lives within  5 miles of Sara Palin in Alaska best I can figure--and she already has a comment about Obama and Elizabeth Warren overreach in my email inbox I will publish in this blog at appropriate juncture if the Lord Tarries.

   She writes well, in fact I think she has a master's in communications or business clarity or something, so come back a few times for that.

   So How Did the Fox Family get here from WD Shorty Fox and his boundaries in the Smoky Mtn hills of East Tenn and then a little further south Appalachia, Rome Ga,  with an 8th Grade education and Nanny with a second Grade Education, WD born in 95 as in eighteen and Nanny, Mary Alice Helton in 1900.

   Well here is our story as a set up for my receptors to Peterson's Chapter Seven, with a little of Momma's side of the family thrown in and Neil's Momma's Uncle Bonson Barnes, School Supe of Kings Mtn, NC in the 60s who in retirement had a longstanding radio broadcast SS class in Robeson County; you can still get the tapes and I hear listen and maybe watch on Utube.

     John Updike in 96 came out with his Novel Beauty of the Lillies. Google the Review in the LA Times. Over Four Generations a devout Calvinist family loses their faith, but the fourth generation joins a 70s cult near the Twice Burned Over District of Upstate New York and the whole American experience which of some quarters got us to Donald Trump starts all over again. I didn't do Updike justice but for purposes of this blog something like that. That's why you should google the the LA Times. That's what it's there for.

   Ha.

    So Papa drank some hundred 80 proof  shine on a couple occasions on Walden Creek just east of Chinky Pen but his Methodist convictions troubled him about it. By Age 20 he had been to Chicamauga Park with some costly cigars and a John B Stetson hat and the prettiest girl on the Creek, Mary Alice. But about the time he was a Band Sawmiller in Conasauga Tennessee in the mid 1920s where Uncle Fremont and Aunt Juanita and their and my Dad's Double first cousin Joanne Helton was born;  and Nanny was running the boarding house for the pulpwooders he came under conviction and had a rededication cause he figgered he had six children and his Brother in law Henry was a Preacher and the devils 180 proof wasn't the way to go.

    From that he had two sons who became ordained Baptist preachers, as was a son in law, two daughters who taught Sunday School, another who frequented the high end stores in Atlanta but was drawn to good Methodist preaching and named her only son Brannon, after T Perry Brannon, the Christian Missionary Alliance radio and tent Revival preacher of Chattanooga Tennessee for whom my Grandfather was a prayer warrior when he put up his tents for sometimes a month long revival in and around the textile mill villages of Rome Ga in the 30s and 40s.

   And from that my first cousin's husband had a part in the funeral of Truett Cathy, the founder of Chic Fil A, my sister is among the best Sunday School teachers in Upstate SC, Momma's brother was a Baptist preacher as is my first cousin's daughter on Momma's side.

   So the true Religion is all we know.

   So How did cousin Debi become an Orthodox Catholic and some cousins on Momma's side Messianic Jews and Daddy's first cousin the Chaplain for Nascar.

   I can't explain it all. That's why I want you to read the LA Times Review of Updike cause it appears our family ain't the only one.

    I Remember a piece in The Atlantic back in the 80s. Literary Baseball. Said The Centerfielder Cannot Hold.

   Our Centerfield is my Sister and Cousin Tim Wood, in my estimation. The rest of the fox solar system is a little ragged, they are the diapason.

    The Diapason for my considered opinion in Baptist life mid 20th Century was Carlyle Marney, LD Johnson and Stewart A Newman. They were in line with George W. Truett of the first half. Molly Marshall mighta come along a little left of Center and maybe Martin Luther King and Clarence Jordan and Martin England, but it was a noble leaning and if I understand Peterson Chapter Seven they were at the heart of the Gospel. I think Dorothy Day was with them but as you will see when I post Cousin Debi take on Warren and Obama, Day is foreign to her experience and trajectory.

   One great point I think Peterson makes in chapter 7 is you can't have the prophetic witness of Bonhoeffer, Day and in my Baptist experience Newman, Marney and LD without the common language, and sometimes flawwed or sophomoric Sunday School lessons that kept my grandfather looking up seeing himself in the flesh as citizen of the third Shift at Celanese in Rome Ga with eternity to come as his citizenship was in another world simultaneously with his time on earth; you can't have the prophets without a tradition for them to have a foundation so they will have something to prophesy about and be understood. Peterson makes that point--I haven't done him justice in this paragraph--magnificently in Chapter 7. Marney and friends were on to it 50 years ago in my formation; Peterson has a beautiful condensation in Chapter 7 covering Descartes, Dostoyevsky, Nietzche and pre enlightenment and what came with Newton, MIlton and the scientific revolution.

   Later I may take a flight of fancy with Peterson's look at cathedrals as laid out like the Cross of Jesus to emphasize suffering, and the tale in Cormac McCarthy's Texas Trilogy about the calambrium (sp).

   What I think Jordan Peterson is getting at, and what Marney, Furman Chaplain LD Johnson and Baptist Joint Committee's James Dunn mentor and my friend Stewart A Newman were about  mid 20th were wise learned men in their generation holding the center so Day and ML King and Clarence and Martin and to a lesser degree Molly could do their thing.

   Much more about LD, Marney and Newman and their life and times and legacy later.
  
   But a bunch of Bastard ( bastard in the OT Will Campbell definition of the word, also see Harold Bloom The American Religion) fundamentalists blew all that up in the last quarter of a century and now we got Trump as the Bushes eased us into it with their religion card, an outgrowth of Lee Atwater's Nigger Memo. See Wuthnow Rough Country.

   But I digressed from the Heart of Jordan Peterson. And let me be clear, Cousin Debi is no Birch Society fundamentalist couching herself as an Orthodox Catholic.

   But she is calling for a Civil Divorce, an American two state solution because abortion and Identity politics as she has come to recognize it, the Fox news version of Obama/Warren statism is more than she can stomach.

     In a recent conversation she said politely I , Stephen, live in Alabama and don't travel as much as she does, have never lived in Europe or Australia. That is true, but I do have some cosmopolitan friends and quite frankly read more widely than many of them.

    This is not a pissing contest, a lot is at stake, but I would be surprised if Jordan Peterson with his deep thinking on Nietzche--Newman was doing some thoughtful thinking on Nietzche in 77 when he talked to me and my Dad at the Shoney's in Gaffney SC as was President Carter last Sunday in Plains Ga--with his online Conversations at the Quillette site can't reconcile more with Mark Noll at Notre Dame, my friend Randall Balmer at Dartmouth and Obama's conversation with Marilynne Robinson in the essay collection the Givenness of Things; want come down on Cousin Deb's Civil Divide more than he will Sara Palin, Steve Breitbart Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Liberty University and the "mendacity" embraced by the Anti abortion movement since Roe V Wade.

     I respect Cousin Deb's convictions on life. But George W. Truett and the best of the Baptist  church state tradition, the Catholic Tradtion of Richard McBrien . I agree with Debi and Peterson Jesus and the best of the Christian Tradition transcends all this mess, but Debi's two state solution by necessity is political;  and I like my group with its better angels than these hooligans she is on the verge of casting her lot with.

   Right now, honestly, I am willing to cast a ballot for Republican Ben Sasse of Nebraska if it will help us survive this Trump disaster. But a two state solution with all the charlatans I witnessed in the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, I think Lincoln had a better idea for his time, and now Jon Meacham with his book on the Soul of America; rather than saying Sara Palin and Tucker Carlson are the way forward, the resolution the reconcilers.

    In his book on President Carter and what the leftovers of the Texas Regulars did to him by the time Nancy got Ronald outfront, Randall Balmer talked about how Carter's Baptist Laison Robert Maddox said abortion troubled them all as a political wedge issue.

   So here is Dr. Fox's email and we'll attempt to tie up some loose ends in the coming weeks.

   Quoting:
         Here is my primary objection to all things and politicians “progressive,” Obama, Clinton, Warren, et al.

        Any political stance that holds that centralized government’s charge is to decide what’s best for people to think, do, or support is counter to my understanding of what our Constitution outlines as government’s job. Obama et al. (plug any modern-day leftist into this slot) think that the average American needs to be re-educated about right and wrong, and that we can be legislated into “right” thinking. Uh-uh. Despite the very great political differences the founders had, there was a common moral foundation that included the dignity and protection of the human person from conception to natural death, a clear view of how we might best support the basic building block of society (the intact family), and, later, a commitment to funded education, agreements on how to protect  our communities, and a clear prescription on government and individual’s roles in how to defend our nation. I absolutely believe that identity politics, leftist (read Marxist, Socialist, or Communist) infiltration of higher education and of government, the breakdown of traditional family units and the rise of sexual licentiousness, and the demise of sheer common sense is to blame for where we are now. Obama et al. happily, it seems, ushered in policies, people, and practices that contributed to the undoing of the moral and civic foundation that undergirded the great nation of America. Notice, I didn’t say it was the only great nation, but it’s the best nation I’ve ever been to on earth.

And, I’m wondering why you would think you could even begin to characterize my Catholicism. You know nothing about me or about my formation or background. Just sayin’.

Check out the Intellectual Dark Web. Those are my intellectual compatriots, but they aren’t my leaders. Above all, Christ is King, and He can be found at work through many hands of many stripes, very, very few of whom, I would venture a guess, are involved in politics.

Quote me if you’d like.


   End Quote

  And here is a March 2018 piece on Jordan Peterson and Identity politics and folks center left who may dismiss him cavalierly:   https://quillette.com/2018/05/22/jordan-peterson-failure-left/



Friday, July 13, 2018

Four Conversations with President Carter

   Sunday July 8 I was in Plains Georgia for President Jimmy Carter's Sunday School class. I got in the overflow room and he came in there for a few minutes of conversation before going in the sanctuary for his Popular Sunday School Class. He asked where people were from and when it came my time I volunteered I was from Collinsville, Alabama where my Grandfather had been a Lincoln Republican. I asked him if not to early in the morning to entertain such notions could he comment on the difference between his great friend of Alabama the Lincoln Republican Judge Frank Johnson and the current crop.

    With a big smile he said, Well there is a difference. Then he got somber and said some of you may know Frank Johnson was my nominee to be attorney General, but he had a bout with ill health and withdrew his nomination. Then Carter said I have gotten to know many great Americans in my lifetime and if not the greatest American, Frank Johnson is very near the top.

    I saw Carter at Furman circa 74 but didn't have a chance to speak to him then. My Good friend the former Chaplain Jim Pitts, whose father was Nixon's barber, has told me on several occasions about his lunch with Carter after a presentation Carter came over to SC to give in Charleston during the SC SBC. This was in 73 or 74. Carter was in town to present the Macdowell Award for Baptist citizenship to Martin England, a founder of Koinonia Farms, and the man widely known to be the initial courier of ML King's letter from the Birmingham Jail to the wider world. Pitts went with then Governor Carter, Martin and Mabel England to lunch, just the four of them.

     In 1993 I was in a Press Room in Birmingham for a CBF convocation where Carter spoke. I said Tom Edsall of the Wash Post in his 83 Book New Politics of Inequality said it was independent oil producers in TX Ok and La who were energized by a windfall profits tax on oil during the Carter Administration to work to make him a one term President. Edsall said thisfaction had bankrolled Birchers and the right wing as far back as Joe McCarthy to have a voice of their own in the US Congress.  As Fundmanentalist leader Paul Pressler's family had long time been in the oil business, Exxon in particular and were marinated in right wing politics for several generations againt Civil Rights and Lyndon Johnson, had he thought about that aspect of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. He said it had not crossed his radar but found it very interesting.

    In 2007 I was in Atlanta for the Inaugural meeting of the New Baptist Covenant where John Grisham and others spoke. there were many workshops. I attended one on immigration and Carter was there and I spoke to him briefly.

    In 2012 Carter was a keynote speaker in Americus Georgia the opening night for a weekend anniversary celebration of Clarence Jordan and the founding of Koinonia that was key component of the evolution into Habitat for Humanity. I got up front to ask Carter if he was aware Lester Maddox nephew, Baxter Wynn, a Furman trustee and staffer at FBC Greenville was out front in Greenville to come around to honoring the Martin Luther King Holiday.

   I'm not sure Carter completely understood me but again there was a big smile and he said something to the effect Times Change.

    So I'm well aware there have been other more substantive exchanges with Carter including my fellow Furman grad Marshall Frady and his national pieces when Carter was elected President, and my friend Randall Balmer and his new religious political bio of Carter.

   Find Balmer's book. It's a good one.

   I did get to ask a President of the United States a question and bring to his attention my noble Grandfather, my Mother's father, and I am proud of that.

   Post script. On January 31, 2009 I attended a New Baptist Covenant Convocation at the Iconic 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Marian Wright Edelman was there as was Kate Campbell who opened for Emmy Lou Harris in Europe in 2002. Church was packed Standing Room Only when President Carter spoke, I was standing right under the stained glass window when President Carter pointed to it from the Pulpit and reminded the gathered the face of Jesus was blown out in the bomb that killed the four little black girls in September of 1963 just a few weeks after Martin Luther King's I have a Dream Sermon in D.C. and two months before President Kennedy was assassinated.

   I did not speak to Carter that day but was in the crux of a historical moment. Two people down from me to my left was Wayne Flynt, Harper Lee's best friend in Alabama.

   I was there that day for once right where my Momma wanted me to be.

Thursday, July 05, 2018

The Axis of Evil and Trump's Alabama

        The title of this blog is from a sermon I heard by the grand Fleming Rutledge in one of the wealthier Episcopalian congregations in Birmingham during the Bush 41 administration. It was published in a collection by Will Willimon in the Best of the Duke Chapel as she also preached it there.

     She says in France as Hitler infiltrated the country neighbor turned on neighbor and many switched sides weekly, much like DeKalb County Alabama after the Battle of Chicamauga during the Civil War where Rebecca Brindley Clayton lost a Great Grandfather and three of his brothers and the Home Guard came into play at the expense of a distant relative among others up on Lookout Mountain. See previous blog.

      So we are in a similar moment in Alabama now in Trump era buttressed by Scott Beason of FBC Gardendale, Alabama and Rick Burgess on the radio.

   FBC Gardendale's recent pastor was Steve Gaines who just stepped down as the President of the Southern Baptist Conventions after two raucous annual gatherings. Some say there is a Sea Change with this NC preacher JD Grear. When people at FBC Gardendale and FBC Spartanburg SC stop voting in lockstep with Beason and Trey Gowdy, maybe I will believe them.

     Marie Griffith of Chattanooga Tn gets it right, the political tsunami effect of the Fundamentalist takeover.

        http://religionandpolitics.org/2018/07/10/southern-baptists-gender-hierarchy-and-the-road-to-trump/


       But let's get local, not to provoke anybody unnecessarily, but Harpers Magazine says this is a serious moment in Bama. I think they are on to something as I saw it coming in 2006 when I got voted out of the local Baptist church, and before that.

       In October 2012, the 9th to be exact, Long time Regional Judge David Rains was the guest of honor at a reception as his longtime bench was being challenged by a good natured fundamentalist, but a fundamentalist nevertheless Jo Nathan Bell. I talked to Judge Bell a couple weeks ago in a fast food restaurant and before I knew it was in a snake pit of Baptist preachers who called me a liberal and said I didn't believe the Bible. Regrettable incident but I told them they didn't understand it, that the politics of their view of abortion was chocked full of Mendacity--not a Christian virtue whether you read the KJV or whatever-- and my sister taught a better Sunday School class than their wives did, a more literate and informed "Christian " world view than their experience and reading equipped them for, not to mention Rick Burgess.

    Cause when their Sunday School lesson has them voting for Trump who called a Heisman Trophy winner Derrick  Henry a son of a bitch, and they utter Roll Tide every other breath, something is arry; not to mention they didn't understand their new Republican School Supe Jason Barnett very well.

         Well back to the meet and greet for Rains 6 years ago. Official hosts where advertised as former School Supe Sammy Clanton and his wife, Democratic power Broker in NE Bama John Baker and Wife, The Myers brothers Jackie and Donnie and their Wives, Jeff Chandler and wife Claire and Jeff Patton and wife Terah. Also Clyde Killian and wife Sandra (parents in law of a fundamentalist Baptist preacher in Nearby Cedar Bluff who shares a birthday with me and near Kin to Mary Katherine Reed, chair of the UB ama home ec department in the 60s, a HS Classmate of my Mother, Reed whose Mother was a Killian) and Johnny Mack Edwards and wife. JMack a credit to the community who taught History for a long time at the high school as the legend goes states rights the primary cause of the Civil War.

    Also present were Donzella Bobo longtime chair of the Plainview HS Home Ec Dept in Rainsville, Alabama whose product Jeremy Pruett is now head coach of the U Tenn Vols; Donzella a force in the local Baptist church and her husband J. R.; and Teresa Solomon Bowen and husband, he like Jeff Chandler also on the City Council.

   And a fellow name David Ryan, long time deacon and former City Council member whose name was brought to the attention of Sojourner's magazine editor at a packed house at Furman University the winter of 2006 after a three alarm drill in Downtown Collinsville.

   Jeff Bailey says it was three alarms. I was just trying to make it to the water board.

      And in this group supporting a Democrat just six years ago in a county that went 80 percent Trump in 16, Judge Rains now on the board of the Alabama Humanities Foundation well something is in flux for sure. Also in that group was another City Councilman married to the Coker Sisters the other brother in law who ran for School Supe. The Coker Sisters are part of the wealthiest Methodist and influential families in town in a family owned Nursing home that hires a lot of Hispanics.

      So point being you can imagine how it had a lot in common with what Abraham Lincoln was trying to figure out in Illinois in 1856 

    Lincoln facing party realignment in 1854. Each group asserted itself as the core of a new political coalition. Some prohibitionists were nativists, some nativists were antislavery, and many abolitionists were prohibitionists. Some Whigs were all or none of the above, just as some Democrats. German immigrants, the largest growing  swing group in Illinois, were overwhelmingly anti slavery and diassfected with the Democrats, but feared the nativists and hated the prohibitionists. Even as old partisan lines dissolved, old partisan rancor heightened. Old Dems mistrusted old  Whigs while third party Free Soilers still mistrusted men from both of the regular parties, Within the Abolitionist ranks, the Free Dems acted  as an internal body hostile to pro Nebraska Dems but also to anti slavery Whigs. Anti-Douglas Dems despised Pro- Douglas Democrats while still loathing Whigs. Necessity would seem to have brought all those opposed to Douglas together, but the talk of fusion made them warily circle each other with mutual suspicion. 

    That Quote from Sidney Blumenthal second in his quartet on Lincoln, Wrestling with his Angels. Great Reading. We may talk about Douglas and Manifest Destiny and the Illinois Central this fall but right now lets focus on NE Bama political dispositions.

   The kicker was in that election these 8 couples and Ryan had a strong inclination to stay status quo with an honorable democrat. These school teachers and politicians in a town of 1700--recent HS graduating classes have averaged in low 70s--were okay with a bluedog democrat. But the local preacher's fourth son who shoulda known better given his brothers were Duke and UVA grads was an operative for Jonathan Bell and that year's wonder pol state Senate Candidate Phil Williams, an ordained Baptist minister himself--big on abortion light on immigration justice in a sliced and diced gerrymandered state district--and the fourth preacher's son helped unseat the clear choice of his Daddy's congregation where my Momma was baptized in 1936.

   And at the time Jason Barnett was still toward the tail end of his 16 years as a teacher and assistant principal at Collinsville school. Two years ago he was elected as a Republican to be School Supe for Dekalb County Schools. He is on record saying giving his 16 years experience in Collinsville, he is open to a conversation that would give the kind of undocumented Hispanics he has come to know citizenship upon graduation from HS after six years discipline and scholarship in the school system in communities where they have been well vetted!


    So about five miles east of us now Mallory Kagan is vying to unseat 6 term or more US Congressman Mike Rogers who wants to get us out of the United Nations. And Bear Bryant's standout Danny Ford first cousin Craig Ford is running to be my next state Senator.
 Most know Danny became head coach of Clemson and won it all in 81 with Gaffney's Tim Childers, nephew of Libby Mitchell, Furman grad and former LT gov of Maine. I think she may read this now that her name is in it. Steven Wash Too!!!!!
   So read the Harper's Piece on Bama . Read Jon Meacham who was raised on Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga about fifty miles NW of here. Read Meacham's Soul of America and Lets stay in touch now through the midterms. I'm just getting started long as I'm welcome at Don Chico's on Thursday nights