Christmas is almost here and the signs of the season are all around us. Atheists are suing to have manger scenes removed from town squares. School boards are banning the mention of Christmas in the classrooms. Teachers are told that they can’t have any symbols of Christmas near their students. That includes every thing, from Nativity scenes to Styrofoam Santas.  Christmas carols cannot be sung in school assemblies, and even the color red is banned in some public schools because it might be misconstrued as a symbolic Christmas color. Perhaps we should repaint all the fire extinguishers in the …

As has been the case with the last several national election campaigns, it seems that there is much more noise than there is substance. Each week, some new immaterial element takes center stage as the media attempts to make the biennial election stampede into an audience-grabbing reality show.  Most of it is nonsense, having little to do with the important issues that make the 2012 election the most critical one in modern U.S. history.  But nonsense is what sells soap and selling soap is what keeps the networks in business. The two major political parties know this and use that fact to steer …

The problem with the Transportation Investment Act, also known as the TSPLOST, is that it looks more like a sideshow con game than it does a focused transportation solution.  Admittedly, Cobb County has many valid transportation needs. But most of the projects that are currently on the project list are not what’s needed and are simply place holders for our money to be stashed until the various regional commissions decide how they’re going to spend it.  You see, the so-called TSPLOST is not a SPLOST at all. Its real designation is the special district transportation sales and use tax. It’s the…

Here’s a riddle for you: When is an income tax not an income tax?  To get to the answer, let’s take a look at the way incomes are taxed. There’s the ­­personal income tax that 53 percent of us are familiar with. Most of us automatically pay this tax to the federal government before we can spend even one dime of our paychecks.  Allegedly, the other 47 percent don’t pay any income taxes at all—so they think.  That 47 percent includes the government-designated poor, those who are unemployed and those who have so many deductions that their taxable incomes fall below the minimum 10 percent tax …

Whenever we get close to Halloween, I can’t help but think of the last scene in the movie The Twilight Zone, when Dan Aykroyd, as the ambulance driver, says to the patient: “Do you want to see something really scary?”  Then, of course, we see something really scary and the movie ends.  One can draw some parallels between that movie and the Cobb County government, which is getting scarier with every passing day. The biggest difference is that the scariest things are those that we don’t see, or aren’t allowed to see.  Cobb’s new economic development policy is full of those things we don’t get …

Last week, a headline for a television news story read, “Is Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party of the Left?” Well, as you may have guessed, the story that followed had little to do with the headline, and the question was never answered.  I hate loose ends, so allow me to tie up that one. Is Occupy Wall Street similar in any way to the Tea Party movement? Yes. They both involve large numbers of people, sometimes carrying signs. Beyond that, any similarities are tenuous at best. Take a look at the origin of the Tea Party movement. It got its name in February 2009, when CNBC’s Rick Santelli, …

If you look up the word “contrived” in the dictionary, don’t be surprised if last Tuesday’s Regional Transportation Roundtable regarding the Cobb County TSPLOST project list is one of the definitions.  Needless to say, the deck was stacked in favor of the project list, particularly the billion-dollar light rail from Cumberland Mall to the Atlanta Arts Center MARTA Station.  The room was packed with representatives from engineering firms, the Chamber of Commerce and a herd of bicyclists, who for some reason think that this rail line will improve biking in Cobb County, so most of the public …

I love the smell of barbecue in the morning. The smell, you know, like tomatoes and mustard mixed with vinegar. It smells like hickory.  Ah, Labor day, the only holiday on the calendar on which we celebrate labor by not working. Of course, there are many of us who do work on this day, including health care workers, bus drivers, airline personnel, a lot of retail and grocery workers, and people in numerous other industries that don’t enjoy the luxury of shutting down on a weekday.  Many executives and salaried workers also put in eight hours on Labor Day, simply because they have much more …

Cobb Countians are nothing, if not charitable. In fact, the Atlanta Regional Commission must think we are the most charitable people they’ve ever seen.  I’m sure the ARC watched with interest as we gave away the fruits of our labors for numerous unnecessary projects in the 2011 SPLOST, and following that, the regional commission must have gotten a lump in its throat as some citizens begged the Cobb County Board of Commissioners to raise our property tax millage rate to cover previous mismanagement by the Cobb government.  Now, drawing from the P.T. Barnum aphorism that there’s a sucker born …

Remember when we thought of the SPLOST as a temporary tax that was supposed to be used only for “Special Purposes”? We voted on the tax thinking that in a few years, after the Special Purpose projects were paid for, the tax would go away.  Well the SPLOST turned out to be such an easy way to raise taxes without raising the ire of the voters that what we thought of as temporary has become permanent. Sure, we get to vote on whether or not to continue it, but apparently our county has become so reliant on the SPLOST that not continuing it, we are told, would cause the loss of our bond rating.  …

Rumor has it that we might be experiencing somewhat of a soft economy. In fact, some people are saying that it’s the worst economy since the Great Depression. They cite weekly jobless claims hovering around 400,000 for as long as recent memory serves. The unemployment rate is staying above 9 percent and everyone in Cobb County is tightening their belts—everyone but the Cobb County Board of Commissioners, that is.   Just a few weeks ago, we were told that the commission needed to raise our property taxes to cover a budget shortfall of, oh, I don’t know, $15 or $20 or $31 or $38 million. Even …

If you’re reading this on Monday, then tomorrow is Armageddon. The United States will default on the interest payment for its $14.5 trillion debt, no Social Security checks will be mailed out, we will stop paying our soldiers, Americans will start dying in droves because there will be no money for Medicare and Medicaid, our bond rating will be downgraded, and interest rates will soar.  And it’s all the fault of the Tea Party. Now if you’re reading this on Wednesday, you will find that none of those things happened and, of course, it will be the president and the rest of the liberals in …

If we were on the Chinese calendar, 2011 might be called the “Year of the Tax.”  The year began with an opportunity to reduce our sales tax by nearly 17 percent, but instead we chose—by a 90-vote margin—to continue the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, ostensibly for “low taxes and no debt.”  The 1-percent SPLOST was touted as a vehicle that would make our community more livable and more attractive to businesses. We were told that if the SPLOST didn’t pass, senior centers would be closed, library hours would be shortened, services would be cut, property taxes would go up and blah, blah…

Back in April when Cobb Commission Chairman Tim Lee floated his idea to close parks, libraries and senior centers and increase the property tax rate by only a half mill, I wrote: “Very likely, this proposal is simply a way to scare Cobb citizens into accepting, not just a half mill tax increase, but the entire ball of wax; a 1.5 to 2.0 mill increase that will be permanent and will cover the entire $31 million budget hole. This will increase the actual tax on a $200,000 home by $100 to $140.”  Well, here we are in July and guess what: The Cobb County Board of Commissioners has not only …

In case you haven’t heard, Cobb Commission Chairman Tim Lee is proposing a 17 percent millage rate hike on the property owners in the county. If approved by the Board of Commissions, it will increase the taxes on a $200,000 home by about $111; a larger home would be more. I guess Lee feels that since the bad economy has significantly decreased home values over the past three years, we wouldn’t notice a 17 percent millage rate increase.   Perhaps that’s true for families who still have jobs, but for those who are out of work or underemployed and struggling to make ends meet, it’s just another …

Throughout my life, the Fourth of July has been a fun celebration with lots of noise, food and fireworks. There’s patriotic music, flags waving, politicians making speeches, and everyone goes to bed with a belly full of good ol’ American spirit.   On July 5, it’s back to the old grind, and the patriotic spirit is about as cold as the left over baby-back ribs that you grilled the day before.  Politicians resume their misleading tactics, and the progressives pick up where they left off: bashing everything that is good and wholesome about this country.  Perhaps that wouldn’t be the case if, …

By Tom Maloy So you just paid your bills for the month and you have a few bucks left over. Congratulations! What’s that you say? That electric bill was a real killer, what with the heat wave and all.  Yeah, well it’s going to get a lot worse—not the heat, but the electric bill. That is if the Environmental Protection Agency has its way.  You see, when the liberals lost the debate about cap and trade, they didn’t give up. They just did an end-run, so now instead of mandating higher energy costs through a constitutional legislative method, they will do it with questionable EPA regulations …

By Tom Maloy When Social Security was first proposed back in the 1930s, the story went, “Social Security? Sounds like a joke and it ain’t funny.” The comeback was, “Well, that’s because you won’t get it until you’re 65.” Well I guess you had to have been there. My Dad said it got a lot of laughs during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, but I didn’t see the humor in it when Dad told it to me nearly 60 years ago. A lot of water has gone beneath the bridge since then, and I have been receiving Social Security for several years now. So you could say, I “get it.” I’m living the joke and …

By Tom Maloy If you haven’t been attending the weekly meetings of the Georgia Tea Party (GTPI) lately, you may have gotten the impression that we have gone silent, or that we aren’t as active as we’ve been in the past.  That is not the case. While in the past GTPI has gotten a lot of attention from our rallies that attracted thousands of participants and media, we haven’t hosted one since last July 16, one week before the mid-term primary election.  Our objective for that rally was to excite the voters, give them a way to educate themselves about the candidates from all parties, and encourage…

By Tom Maloy After giving much thought to the subject of this week’s column, I found myself faced with a conundrum: Should I write a serious piece about Andrew Weiner’s shorts, or go for the less important topic of whether or not to raise the national debt ceiling? After a few grueling seconds of deliberation, and even though the story’s potential for double entendre humor is almost irresistible, I decided to refrain and leave the complex mystery of the congressman’s bulging skivvies to real reporters whose forte is reporting hard news.   While not nearly as exciting, the debt ceiling is …