By: Cal Beverly -- Wed, 10/19/2005 - 1:15pm
Woo. That's old. How did this get dug up?

The Democratic Party of Coweta County is holding an evening meeting in Senoia on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 6:30 p.m. The meeting will be held at the Historical Society which is on the corner of Couch Street and Standing Rock Road. We are holding these evening meetings so that people who cannot attend on Saturday mornings will still be able to participate in the democratic process. We always welcome interested parties from Peachtree City and West Fayette County. Please help us make these evening meetings a success.

Source: http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=28435

Over the last few months, there has been growing evidence for a tsunami hitting the Eastern Coastal regions of the Americas on April 1st, 2007. Although the evidence comes in the form of parables, the reasons for the event are straightforward. In summary, over the last 2000 years, people have chosen to follow Paul or other ideologies over that of Jesus. His main message, “Love your neighbour as yourself” has been drowned out and the results are poverty, oppression and war. These are fuelled by ideologies such as consumerism and capitalism, which are particularly prevalent in the West.

worldends.co.uk stresses the need for the removal of all ideologies in opposition to following Jesus enabling the formation of the ideal human society. One underlying ideology is wisdom (“common sense”) which has been highlighted using the number of the beast; the 666th name in the Bible is Solomon who was famed for his wisdom.

This has a bearing on the date of the tsunami. The opposite of wisdom is foolishness, and Palm Sunday falls on April Fools’ Day this year. The tsunami on this date represents anti-wisdom, anti-666 and the first step towards removing all ideologies opposed to following Jesus.

The North American continent has a picture of the whore of Babylon drawn onto it from the outline of Hudson Bay, with Labrador representing the Scarlet Beast as described in the Book of Revelation. Babylon has significant Biblical relevance, and is predicted to be destroyed by a mountain being thrown into the sea (Revelation 8:8).

The tsunami will originate from the island of La Palma (note that the name sounds similar to “Palm” as in Palm Sunday). A volcano on the island will erupt causing a landslide into the sea. The volcanic dust cloud will also cause the full moon to shine red as predicted in the Bible (Joel 2:31).

New evidence has arisen from events exactly one month before the predicted date. On March 1st 2007, a volcano erupted on the island of Sicily. The name of the island sounds like “silly” which has relevance for the same reason that April Fools’ Day does. On March 3rd, the lunar eclipse caused the moon to shine red, paralleling events predicted for April.

On the occasion of my first-ever “blog” I’d like to congratulate every candidate who has put his and her heads on the public chopping block.

Even the most campaign-hardened candidate must reel in dismay at times from the verbal assaults that come their way.

Sometimes the assaults have some basis in fact, but often it’s just unmitigated personal dislike, even hatred.

Peachtree City Mayor Steve Brown is likely the most hated local candidate I’ve seen in more than 30 years. I can recall one more hated in nearby Griffin from three decades ago, but he is likely long dead and immune to our opinions.

The raw hatred of Brown by his opponents reflects most badly on those very opponents. There is just no justifiable reason for such public and private displays of bad manners and bad mouthing.

No lives are at stake here. No nation is going to war as a result of one PTC mayor’s decisions. The whole anti-Brown campaign is just ugly, ugly, ugly.

Is Brown so virtuous? No, he is a mouthy public figure in his own right, but he generally starts at some public policy position, rather than from a staring point of personal hatred.

Is he right often? That’s the rub: About the issues he has caught the most flak about, he generally is correct in his initial positions.

His mistakes have come from his too-ready mouth doing battle with other personalities.

Let’s review just one issue to begin with.

The Tennis Center and the old Development Authority of Peachtree City: Brown was right to blow the whistle on both.

The only defense of the old DAPC now amounts to this: They were a bunch of good old boys just trying to do good for the community. And the good old boys gave us a “world-class” tennis center. Let’s examine those two arguments.

Those community leaders ran the old DAPC out of their back pockets. They kept precious few records, despite being required to by state law. Several of them served on the board of directors of either a lending bank or a bidding contractor.

Assuming the absolute best of motives, the board did a bush-league job of keeping financial records and meeting minutes, despite knowing they should do better. If they had performed the same way on their day jobs, they would have been justifiably terminated.

There is no recorded vote on more than a million dollars in loans to the DAPC. There’s no paperwork financial trail to determine where that money went.

How can any reasonable person praise this old board? Their motives alone just don’t cut it.

So far, every person who wants the old way to return simply glosses over the very real failings of this old DAPC.

Folks, such glossing over the plain facts represents either stupidity or plain willful blindness to painfully obvious failures. Please, get some clues as to how real life and real business and real government is supposed to operate.

I have printed letters and Free Speech items lamenting the overthrow of the old DAPC. I have to wonder how otherwise supposedly intelligent people can be so ignorant of the facts clearly in front of them.

The good old boys’ motives are irrelevant — I repeat, irrelevant — in light of their patently obvious ineptness in running a governmental entity responsible to state law and the taxpayers.

They may be and may have been great individuals personally who excelled in business and other private ventures. But only an extremely foolish person would defend their record-keeping and financial astuteness in overseeing a public entity. Peachtree City government is well rid of the old DAPC.

And by the way, who asked for a world-class tennis center? Six hundred elite tennis club members? I never got to vote on that expenditure, and neither did you. That was decided in good old boy fashion.

The city had several decent public tennis courts before that center was dreamed of. I used to smack a few racquets at Pebblepocket and Glenloch before my belly began hiding my feet. The city would do well to spend some money keeping those facilities up to minimum standards instead of providing a publicly-financed exclusive country club for the elite few and some traveling tournaments.

If you argue in favor of the old DAPC, at least address the conflicts of interest, the abysmal record-keeping and the lack of minutes of supposedly public votes on more than a million dollars in loans. Have the intellectual honesty to address the obvious problems.

Should PTC taxpayers pay off those loans to the DAPC?

Five of the six mayoral candidates raise the “moral” issue and say, “Yes, we should.”

First of all, explain what you mean by “moral.”

If we want to start doing the “moral” thing in government, I have a few places to start before we get to a tennis center.

In view of our tight financial situation, please address how you will pay for “moral” obligation.

Will you raise taxes? Will you float a “bricks and mortar” loan, obligating tax revenues for years into the future? Will you ask the city voters to approve a bond referendum to repay the loan, which will also raise taxes?

How will you meet this “moral” obligation?

Way back when, I wrote a column that said, Yes, the loan should be repaid. But I think it should be repaid by the new DAPC, using part of the hotel-motel tax receipts, since this was the funding mechanism envisioned at the time for pay-off of the debt.

Will it take a long time? Yes, probably. The banks, which should have sought better record-keeping and more due diligence at the time they made the loans, should take what they can get. Maybe their current boards of directors will be a little more careful about potential conflicts of interest in the future.

And maybe Peachtree City government, including its authorities, will get more real about the differences between necessities and luxuries. We can but hope ...