#plains ga

[rfkwaistgrabber]

Day trip to plains and raided the trading post - all of these are originals and from the official campaign ^^

[newstfionline]

The un-celebrity president

By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, Washington Post, August 17, 2018

PLAINS, Ga.--Jimmy Carter finishes his Saturday night dinner, salmon and broccoli casserole on a paper plate, flashes his famous toothy grin and calls playfully to his wife of 72 years, Rosalynn: “C’mon, kid.”

She laughs and takes his hand, and they walk carefully through a neighbor’s kitchen filled with 1976 campaign buttons, photos of world leaders and a couple of unopened cans of Billy Beer, then out the back door, where three Secret Service agents wait.

They do this just about every weekend in this tiny town where they were born--he almost 94 years ago, she almost 91. Dinner at their friend Jill Stuckey’s house, with plastic Solo cups of ice water and one glass each of bargain-brand chardonnay, then the half-mile walk home to the ranch house they built in 1961.

On this south Georgia summer evening, still close to 90 degrees, they dab their faces with a little plastic bottle of No Natz to repel the swirling clouds of tiny bugs. Then they catch each other’s hands again and start walking, the former president in jeans and clunky black shoes, the former first lady using a walking stick for the first time.

The 39th president of the United States lives modestly, a sharp contrast to his successors, who have left the White House to embrace power of another kind: wealth.

Even those who didn’t start out rich, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have made tens of millions of dollars on the private-sector opportunities that flow so easily to ex-presidents.

When Carter left the White House after one tumultuous term, trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, he returned to Plains, a speck of peanut and cotton farmland that to this day has a nearly 40 percent poverty rate.

The Democratic former president decided not to join corporate boards or give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.”

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said that Gerald Ford, Carter’s predecessor and close friend, was the first to fully take advantage of those high-paid post-presidential opportunities, but that “Carter did the opposite.”

Since Ford, other former presidents, and sometimes their spouses, routinely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Carter was 56 when he returned to Plains from Washington. He says his peanut business, held in a blind trust during his presidency, was $1 million in debt, and he was forced to sell.

“We thought we were going to lose everything,” says Rosalynn, sitting beside him.

Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”

With book income and the $210,700 annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents.

Carter has been an ex-president for 37 years, longer than anyone else in history. His simple lifestyle is increasingly rare in this era of President Trump, a billionaire with gold-plated sinks in his private jet, Manhattan penthouse and Mar-a-Lago estate.

Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics--a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle greeting other passengers and taking selfies.

“He doesn’t like big shots, and he doesn’t think he’s a big shot,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.

Carter costs U.S. taxpayers less than any other ex-president, according to the General Services Administration, with a total bill for him in the current fiscal year of $456,000, covering pensions, an office, staff and other expenses. That’s less than half the $952,000 budgeted for George H.W. Bush; the three other living ex-presidents--Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama--cost taxpayers more than $1 million each per year.

Carter doesn’t even have federal retirement health benefits because he worked for the government for four years--less than the five years needed to qualify, according to the GSA. He says he receives health benefits through Emory University, where he has taught for 36 years.

The federal government pays for an office for each ex-president. Carter’s, in the Carter Center in Atlanta, is the least expensive, at $115,000 this year. The Carters could have built a more elaborate office with living quarters, but for years they slept on a pullout couch for a week each month. Recently, they had a Murphy bed installed.

Carter’s office costs a fraction of Obama’s, which is $536,000 a year. Clinton’s costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000 and George H.W. Bush’s is $286,000, according to the GSA.

“I am a great admirer of Harry Truman. He’s my favorite president, and I really try to emulate him,” says Carter, who writes his books in a converted garage in his house. “He set an example I thought was admirable.”

But although Truman retired to his hometown of Independence, Mo., Beschloss said that even he took up residence in an elegant house previously owned by his prosperous in-laws.

As Carter spreads a thick layer of butter on a slice of white bread, he is asked whether he thinks, especially with a man who boasts of being a billionaire in the White House, any future ex-president will ever live the way Carter does.

“I hope so,” he says. “But I don’t know.”

Plains is a tiny circle of Georgia farmland, a mile in diameter, with its center at the train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 campaign headquarters. About 700 people live here, 150 miles due south of Atlanta, in a place that is a living museum to Carter.

The general store, once owned by Carter’s Uncle Buddy, sells Carter memorabilia and scoops of peanut butter ice cream. Carter’s boyhood farm is preserved as it was in the 1930s, with no electricity or running water.

The Jimmy Carter National Historic Site is essentially the entire town, drawing nearly 70,000 visitors a year and $4 million into the county’s economy.

Carter has used his post-presidency to support human rights, global health programs and fair elections worldwide through his Carter Center, based in Atlanta. He has helped renovate 4,300 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, and with his own hammer and tool belt, he will be working on homes for low-income people in Indiana later this month.

But it is Plains that defines him.

After dinner, the Carters step out of Stuckey’s driveway, with two Secret Service agents walking close behind.

Carter’s gait is a little unsteady these days, three years after a diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. At a 2015 news conference to announce his illness, he seemed to be bidding a stoic farewell, saying he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”

But now, after radiation and chemotherapy, Carter says he is cancer-free.

In October, he will become the second president ever to reach 94; George H.W. Bush turned 94 in June. These days, Carter is sharp, funny and reflective.

The Carters walk every day--often down Church Street, the main drag through Plains, where they have been walking since the 1920s.

As they cross Walters Street, Carter sees a couple of teenagers on the sidewalk across the street.

“Hello,” says the former president, with the same big smile that adorns peanut Christmas ornaments in the general store.

“Hey,” says a girl in a jean skirt, greeting him with a cheerful wave.

The two 15-year-olds say people in Plains think of the Carters as neighbors and friends, just like anybody else.

“I grew up in church with him,” says Maya Wynn. “He’s a nice guy, just like a regular person.”

“He’s a good ‘ol Southern gentleman,” says David Lane.

Carter says this place formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality. His farmhouse youth during the Great Depression made him unpretentious and frugal. His friends, maybe only half-joking, describe Carter as “tight as a tick.”

That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said Carter’s edict eliminating drivers for top staff members backfired. It meant that top officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.

“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Eizenstat said. “Plains is really part of his DNA. He carried it into the White House, and he carried it out of the White House.”

Carter’s presidency--from 1977 to 1981--is often remembered for long lines at gas stations and the Iran hostage crisis.

“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” he says. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”

He said he regrets not doing more to unify the Democratic Party.

When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of “keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

“I always told the truth,” he says.

Carter has been notably quiet about President Trump. But on this night, two years into Trump’s term, he’s not holding back.

“I think he’s a disaster,” Carter says. “In human rights and taking care of people and treating people equal.”

“The worst is that he is not telling the truth, and that just hurts everything,” Rosalynn says.

Carter says his father taught him that truthfulness matters. He said that was reinforced at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he said students are expelled for telling even the smallest lie.

“I think there’s been an attitude of ignorance toward the truth by President Trump,” he says.

Carter says he thinks the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has “changed our political system from a democracy to an oligarchy. Money is now preeminent. I mean, it’s just gone to hell now.”

He says he believes that the nation’s “ethical and moral values” are still intact and that Americans eventually will “return to what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s decent and what’s indecent, and what’s truthful and what’s lies.”

But, he says, “I doubt if it happens in my lifetime.”

On Church Street, Carter points out the mayor’s house with his left hand while he holds Rosalynn’s with his right.

“My mother and father lived in that brick one,” he says, gesturing toward a small house across the street. “We use it as an office now.”

“That’s Dr. Logan’s over here.”

Every house has a story. Generations of them. Cracked birdbaths and rocking chairs on somebody’s great-grandmother’s porch. Carter knows them all.

“Mr. Oscar Williams lived here; his family was my competitor in the warehouse business.”

He points out the Plains United Methodist Church, where he spotted young Eleanor Rosalynn Smith one evening when he was home from the Naval Academy.

He asked her out. They went to a movie, and the next morning he told his mother he was going to marry Rosalynn.

“I didn’t know that for years,” she says with a smile.

They are asked if there is anything they want but don’t have.

“I can’t think of anything,” Carter says, turning to Rosalynn. “And you?”

“No, I’m happy,” she says.

“We feel at home here,” Carter says. “And the folks in town, when we need it, they take care of us.”

Every other Sunday morning, Carter teaches Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist Church on the edge of town, and people line up the night before to get a seat.

This Sunday morning happens to be his 800th lesson since he left the White House.

He walks in wearing a blazer too big through the shoulders, a striped shirt and a turquoise bolo tie. He asks where people have come from, and from the pews they call out at least 20 states, Canada, Kenya, China and Denmark.

He tells the congregation that he’s planning a trip to Montana to go fishing with his friend Ted Turner, and that he’s going to ride in his son’s autogiro--a sort of mini-helicopter.

“I’m still fairly active,” he says, and everyone laughs.

He talks about living a purposeful life, but also about finding enough time for rest and reflection. Then he and Rosalynn pose for photos with every person who wants one, including Steven and Joanna Raley, who came from Annandale, Va., with their 3-month-old son, Jackson Carter Raley.

“We want our children to grow up with a heart of service like President Carter,” says Steven, who works on Navy submarines, as Carter once did.

“One of the reasons we named our son after President Carter is how humble he is,” Joanna says.

Carter holds the baby and beams for the camera.

“I like the name,” he says.

When they reach their property, the Carters turn right off the sidewalk and cut across the wide lawn toward their house.

Carter stops to point out a tall magnolia that was transplanted from a sprout taken from a tree that Andrew Jackson planted on the White House lawn.

They walk past a pond, which Carter helped dig and where he now works on his fly-fishing technique. They point out a willow tree at the pond’s edge, on a gentle sloping lawn, where they will be buried in graves marked by simple stones.

They know their graves will draw tourists and boost the Plains economy.

Their one-story house sits behind a government-owned fence that once surrounded Richard Nixon’s house in Key Biscayne, Fla. The Carters already have deeded the property to the National Park Service, which will one day turn it into a museum.

Their house is dated, but homey and comfortable, with a rustic living room and a small kitchen. A cooler bearing the presidential seal sits on the floor in the kitchen--Carter says they use it for leftovers.

In a remodel not long ago, the couple knocked down a bedroom wall themselves. “By that time, we had worked with Habitat so much that it was just second-nature,” Rosalynn says.

Rosalynn Carter practices tai chi and meditates in the mornings, while her husband writes in his study or swims in the pool. He also builds furniture and paints in the garage; the paint is still wet on a portrait of a cardinal that will be their Christmas card this year.

They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own yogurt.

On this summer morning, Rosalynn mixes pancake batter and sprinkles in blueberries grown on their land.

Carter cooks them on the griddle.

Then he does the dishes.

[newstfionline]

In Plains, Ga., an evangelical politician like no other

By Harry Bruinius, CS Monitor, July 11, 2018

PLAINS, GA.--It’s the morning after his and Rosalynn’s 72nd wedding anniversary, and former President Jimmy Carter is walking slowly into the crowded sanctuary at Maranatha Baptist, his hometown congregation here in rural Plains for the past 40 years.

He stops to peer over the people sitting together closely in the sanctuary’s pews. “Are there any visitors here today?” he asks, his lips pursed with just the slightest of grins. The congregation laughs, knowing that when he’s not teaching his Sunday school class, only 25 to 30 of his neighbors join him at Maranatha’s Sunday service.

There are more than 10 times that number here today--self-described pilgrims, long-time admirers, and journalists. At 93, the nation’s 39th president has been giving such lessons here since 1981, about 40 Sundays every year since the time he left office. He’s slowed down since surviving brain cancer three years ago, and President Carter has only three more classes scheduled the rest of this year.

As he walks around the room, asking folks where they’re from, Bertice Berry is grinning, too. She’d driven down from Savannah this morning, taking extra time to wind through the back roads driving west with her daughter Fatima and “white sister” Brynn Grant. They wanted to see their home state’s country sights, they say.

“I just needed it,” says Ms. Berry, a sociologist and member of Savannah’s Christ Church Episcopal, the first official congregation in Georgia’s history. “I guess I’ve been really down over the political climate in the country, and I needed to feel restored. My heart longed for what this all is.”

Preserved by intention and circumstance, Plains is still in many ways a place that many imagine as a kind of pastoral ideal: small-town rural America, where residents hold to simple but strongly held virtues, commit themselves to local civic engagement, and attend small congregations of neighbors, churches that give ‘em that old-time religion.

The Carters, in fact, have long structured the daily rhythms of their lives together around this small congregation at Maranatha. The night before, they took the half-mile walk over to the home of their close friend Jill Stuckey, a leader at Maranatha. She hosted a dinner in honor of their 72nd anniversary with about 10 old and new friends and some of his family.

“The Carters didn’t stay long,” Ms. Stuckey says. “Even though it was a special evening, President Carter had to prepare for his Sunday School lesson the next morning.”

In 1976, during a stop at the home of a North Carolina political supporter, then-candidate Carter sparked a wave of raised eyebrows across the United States when he professed to be a “born again Christian.” It was before the full blooming of the religious right and the Reagan revolution to come. At this time, just as many had questioned the implications of candidate John Kennedy’s Catholicism 16 years earlier, many “Washington elites” and journalists alleged that Carter’s conservative evangelical faith might make him the kind of person who would, say, claim to receive messages directly from God.

In fact, it is fair to say that Carter then and now understands the world entirely through the lens of his Southern-rooted Baptist faith--a faith that indeed infused his politics, he’s said. “Despite what I consider to be a constitutional and biblical requirement for the separation of church and state,” he wrote in 2005, “I must acknowledge that my own religious beliefs have been inextricably entwined with the political principles I have adopted.”

And his 1980 defeat in many ways marked a moment in which Carter’s fellow Evangelicals mobilized into one of the most powerful political subgroups in the country, and the core of the Republican Party to this day.

If some 8 out of 10 white Evangelicals express support for President Trump, many enthusiastically, Carter has in many ways remained a voice for the small minority of Evangelicals, those 2 in 10 who see the nation and their faith in different terms.

There are many “still searching for harmonious answers to most of the controversial religious and political questions,” Carter wrote in his book “Our Endangered Values.” “It is in America’s best interests to understand one another and to find as much common ground as possible.”

Still, politics rarely finds a place in Carter’s Sunday school class, church members and others say. “You want him to get up and say, Trump is bad, and all that,” says Berry, politically far to the left of the former president. “But spiritually, we don’t need that. We need, like he says, only you are responsible for your actions. He’s a great leader by his example, and by his life.”

Like a lot of other Maranatha members, Mary Jo Dodson, Carol Anderson, and Mildred, a resident of Plains since 1958 (who asked that her last name not be used), head over to The Silo Restaurant and Bakery after Sunday services most weeks.

The three took their usual table in the back room--an after-church ritual they’ve been doing, well, for at least a few decades, they say, spanning back to when the place had different owners and different names.

At the entrance of The Silo, just inside the front door, a “missing man table” is placed under a black POW-MIA flag. The empty place setting is flanked by a Bible, a candle, and a single red rose, along with other symbols of sacrifice.

“Miss Rosalynn, she was my Sunday school teacher back when I was 10 or 11,” says Ms. Dodson, drawing out her vowels. “We used to go to their house for the lessons sometimes.” And at Maranatha, she says, “we pretty much do everything together.”

The church’s longtime organist, Carol Anderson, 60 years in Plains, explains how members of the congregation do almost all the work together, taking turns to serve as custodians, caretakers of the sanctuary and church grounds, as well as the church’s other needs. The Carters have always taken their turn to contribute, she says--in the past mowing the lawn or even cleaning the toilets.

“They’re down-to-earth everyday people,” says Mildred, as she eats her fried chicken and white beans with ham hocks--which people joke is the vegetable down here. “They’ve never put on any airs--they’re just one of us, that’s all.” Mildred’s been a Maranatha member from the start. The congregation had its 40th anniversary in 2017, after breaking from Plains’s more conservative congregation in 1977.

Carter, who took up woodworking years ago, constructed the sanctuary’s large wooden cross. He also built some of the nursery’s chairs and tables, as well as the large table in the vestibule. He also made the church’s mahogany collection plates.

“People ask, what was the best advice you’ve gotten from President Carter,” Maranatha’s newly installed pastor, Brandon Malloy Patterson, says to the congregation during a Q&A before the former president walks in to teach his class.

“Well, the first one, he gives a lot of advice on marriage,” says Pastor Patterson, noting that Maranatha is his first full-time posting. “And the latest one he’s given me was, don’t look at any other woman.” The congregation laughed, since the pastor two months earlier had begun his first year of marriage. “He’s very big on being completely committed to one another.”

There’s a common American evangelical theme implicit in this congregation, too, a theology in some ways rooted in a letter of Paul to the Corinthians: God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak of the world to confound the mighty.

A Millennial, Pastor Patterson says it’s been a very hard transition moving to rural Georgia, since he’s always preferred living in the bustle of big cities.

But as he notes, he speaks with a heavy lisp. “My voice is weird,” Patterson tells those gathered. “But God said, Brandon, I’m going to do something weird with you. Think about it: I’m short, I have the craziest hair, I have this lisp, I have a high-pitched voice that likes to crack, but there’s a God who said, Brandon, let me use you to speak to 500 people.”

After his greetings, the former president began to teach his lesson on a momentous passage, Deuteronomy 6. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.”

“And shall love the Lord thy God with, what?” Carter asks the class. Most respond: “With all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might.”

But it’s what follows that most interests him in the chapter--the exhortations to keep God’s commands close at hand. Carter notes how commands were sewn into their clothing, posted on their doorposts, and bound to their wrists. They were to teach their children daily, and ponder them morning to night.

“This command to love God Almighty as your only God, and to have no other gods before him, and to love God with all your heart, that was the foundation of God’s promise to Abraham about 600 years earlier,” he says.

Afterwards, Carter laments the decline of Biblical literacy in the US, citing Gallup polls and even a bit by Jay Leno years ago, when he was a guest. The comedian went on the street to interview people about the Bible, Carter recounts. “One of them said, the sixth commandment is, thou shalt not admit adultery.” Another person said, “The epistles were the wives of the apostles.” The congregation erupts in laughter.

But the point, he says, is that people must learn the basic principles of the Bible to pursue the Christian life, and especially the teachings and perfect example, he says, of Jesus Christ.

For many conservative Evangelicals, the focus is more upon the atoning blood of Christ and the price paid for the forgiveness of sins. Carter, however, focuses mostly on the life and difficult teachings of Christ, which “reveal the meaning of God.”

And Carter sees the revelations of God through Jesus Christ as requiring an even greater commitment to living a moral life. Love your enemies; turn the other cheek; murder and hatred differ only in degree, not kind. Lust and adultery are one and the same, too. Forgive 70 x 7.

“It’s a profound and challenging and far-reaching standard that we Christians have to follow the example and laws described by Jesus Christ in our daily lives,” he says. “Does that put a responsibility on you that you didn’t feel before?”

“I’m not trying to burden anybody,” he continues, “and I have the same problem accepting as a Christian the ideals and goals of a transcendent life, a life that is worthy of God’s approval.”

Carter concludes, then, with what Baptists have long emphasized: the complete liberty of individual.

“That’s a very sobering thing, is it not? To know that what we do is up to us,” he says. “Who makes the decision to love and not hate, or be generous and not stingy, who makes that decision?”

“If we have a life at this moment of which we’re not proud, or if we’re not satisfied, we have an opportunity this moment to change it,” Carter says. “Because every one of us many times every day makes a basic decision: This is the kind of person I choose to be.”

“What could be better?” Carter concludes. “That’s what Christianity offers, not only an opportunity, but an obligation, to look at ourselves at every moment, ask God for forgiveness, study the life of Christ in prayer, and then make the decision, This is the person I want to be.”

[jamht1972]

www.atheists.org

[jamht1972]

"In the state of Georgia, canvassers registered about 90,000 people who had never voted before, mostly minorities and young people, earlier this year. 50,000 of those did not end up on the voter rolls and the Republican secretary of state refused to even respond to inquires as to why. A lawsuit has been filed over it, of course.

Earlier this year, organizers fanned out across nearly every one of Georgia’s 159 counties and registered nearly 90 thousand people who have never voted in their lives, most of them people of color, many of them under 25 years old. But when the groups checked back in late August, comparing their registration database to the state’s public one, they noticed about 50,000 of the registrations had vanished, nearly all of them belonging to people of color in the Democratic-leaning regions around Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus.

Georgia’s state minority leader Stacy Abrams (D), whose group The New Georgia Project led the massive registration drive in March and April, told ThinkProgress what happened next was “deeply disturbing.”

“We asked the Secretary of State to meet with us. We wanted to understand if we were doing something wrong, or if there was another database we didn’t have access to. But he refused to meet with us,” she said.

Joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Georgia NAACP, the organizers asked twice more for a meeting about the missing registrations. When early voting began across the state and they still had not heard from the Secretary of State, the New Georgia Project took them to court. In arguments on Friday, Francys Johnson, president of the Georgia NAACP, asked Fulton County Superior Court Judge Christopher Brasher to compel the state to process every valid registration.

“In 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, we were only able to know there were problems when it was too late, when people started showing up to the polls and they were not on the voter rolls, and folks were already disenfranchised,” Johnson explained to ThinkProgress over the phone. “We must catch that disenfranchisement before it takes place.” Lawyers for Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and three counties who are also the target of the suit countered that state law sets no deadlines for processing voter registrations, and emphasized that any voter unsure of their registration status can always cast a provisional ballot. Those who do so must return within three days to present additional documentation or otherwise cure any problem with the system. But the NAACP and New Georgia Project called this remedy “unacceptable.”

“I cannot tell you what little return we actually see in terms of provisional ballots,” Johnson said. “The election is decided the night of the election. It’s not really a ballot at all.”

The secretary of state’s office accused the group of turning in fraudulent registration forms, but they could only identify 25 of them. A rate of less than 1% is extraordinary in voter registration drives. And either way, it is the job of that office to go through every form — which the canvassers must turn in, even if obviously false — and put the valid ones on the voter rolls, something they have failed to do. This is genuine voter suppression."

I guess we are lucky they aren't imposing Poll taxes and Literacy tests, as they did 50 years ago?

[jamht1972]

Republicans in Georgia don't want minorities and the poor to vote. Though they will rarely say it in so many words, it is quite clear those groups, most likely to vote Democratic, aren't that welcome at the election polls.

The Bibb County Board of Elections killed a plan that would have had early voting on a Sunday. Many people cannot get to the polls on a Tuesday, because they work. The wealthy have an easier time, of course, going to vote whenever they want.