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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsGA gov still crying about the All Star Game; blames everyone but himself for this fiasco
Governor, several Republicans continue criticism of Major League Baseball
MARIETTA, Ga. The fallout and rhetoric surrounding Major League Baseballs decision to pull out of its planned All-Star Game in Atlanta continues to reverberate in political circles.
Gov. Brian Kemp along with State Attorney General Chris Carr and state GOP Chairman David Shafer met at a Marietta restaurant to highlight what they believe to be a cost to local businesses.
The three along with other Republican supporters gathered at AJs Seafood and PoBoys in Marietta to highlight what they say was a decision that will penalize small businesses near the Truist Park.
Theyve gotten hit by COVID-19 and now theyre getting hit by a decision they had no control over and thats not right, Kemp said.
Channel 2 Action News reporter Christian Jennings spoke to Andy Erbacher who owns the restaurant. He says the business has struggled to stay afloat during the pandemic and he was looking forward to possibly having extra people in town to try out his food. His restaurant sits some seven miles north of the baseball stadium.
I was prepared not just for one day but three days this.. people come to our restaurant to eat before they go to a game, said Erbacher.
Georgias Attorney General Chris Carr joined the governor at the restaurant. Carr said the state is now facing five different lawsuits over the voting bill. Carr says he still cannot believe some of the language used to describe the law.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/cobb-county/governor-several-republicans-continue-criticism-major-league-baseball/U2BLY4ED5RBSVKIRGHHLLFIRKE/
SoCalDavidS
(9,998 posts)He would sign the bill all over again if he had the chance to do it over.
Maybe all the repubs can patronize this guy's restaurant, and give them business. Does he honestly think that a restaurant 7 miles from the stadium was going to do a ton of business? There are plenty of businesses that don't have an ASG to look forward to, so he needs to suck it up, and move forward.
CatWoman
(79,302 posts)they lied to the Cobb residents and said it wouldn't cost them anything, then levied huge taxes on them to build the new stadium.
pwb
(11,287 posts)blame others. Yep.
abqtommy
(14,118 posts)had no control over and thats not right, Kemp said.
Oh really? Seems to me like every Georgia voter has a say in responding to YOUR mess, Kemp.
Beartracks
(12,821 posts)I guess tax cuts and less regulations aren't always the best way to a corporation's heart, eh?
I hope the good people of Georgia remember next campaign season that it's been Kemp and his fellow Republicans that are pushing Georgia toward being a pariah state.
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CatWoman
(79,302 posts)Baiye, a native Georgian who now does security work, heard all the chatter about voter suppression leading up to Election Day. In the final month of the campaign, voting rights advocates took Kemp to court over an "exact-match" policy that held up 53,000 pending registrations, mostly of people of color, many over small typos, like a missing apostrophe or hyphen. The prior month, all but two polling places in a rural, predominantly black county were targeted for closure. The county eventually backed off the poll closures, though a new plan has since resurfaced that would affect fewer black voters.
Kemp and Abrams were adversaries over voting rights, and, in the campaign, they came to personify the debate between election security and access. In 2014, Kemp called for a criminal probe of registrations collected through the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit formed by Abrams, whose primary mission was to register new voters, particularly young adults and people of color.
Then, in July 2017, Kemp's office removed 560,000 people from the voter rolls for infrequent voting. His office portrayed the purge as innocuous voter list maintenance, which secretaries of state regularly perform the year before an election. But the number of voters purged was unusually high. Some Democrats accused Kemp of trying to manipulate the electorate ahead of his run for governor.
By last November, Kemp and Abrams were embroiled in one of the most closely watched elections in the nation. Still, Baiye wasn't sure what to make of the allegations that were flying. "[Y]ou hear about people going out of their way to cheat or manipulate the system," he said, "and you think ... these things aren't real."
But the 2017 purge likely gave an advantage to Kemp and other Republican candidates, an analysis of election results and state voter files shows. Purged voters were more likely to live in Democratic precincts, an APM Reports analysis found. Specifically, the data shows that, of the purged registrations that could be matched up to precincts, nearly 47 percent were from precincts that Abrams carried by more than 10 percentage points last November. (Those precincts made up just about 39 percent of overall votes.) Meanwhile, voters in strong Kemp precincts were under-represented on the purge list. Registrations from those heavily Republican precincts accounted for more than 43 percent of the purges. Such precincts made up over 51 percent of votes.
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/10/29/georgia-voting-registration-records-removed