Good morning! Let’s start the day with a slow clap for today’s offering from the AJC’s Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist, Mike Luckovich.
And now, the rest of the Reads:
- This Tom Friedman column is nearly a week old, but I’ve been dying to share it since last week, mainly because of this perfect paragraph:
Donald Trump is running against pluralism. Bernie Sanders shows zero interest in entrepreneurship and says the Wall Street banks that provide capital to risk-takers are involved in “fraud,” and Ted Cruz speaks of our government in the same way as the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, who says we should shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” (Am I a bad person if I hope that when Norquist slips in that bathtub and has to call 911, no one answers?)
- The increase in tidal flooding correlates to the increase in rising sea levels.
- Replacing lead water lines could cost U.S. cities around $32 billion (with a B).
- Older women: they’re not just presidential candidates.
- Many House Republicans are really, really not excited by the possibility of Candidate Trump.
- Barry Loudermilk (R-CD11) draws a primary challenger: William Llop of Sandy Springs.
- Governor Deal lauds Georgia’s film industry tax breaks.
- Meanwhile, the House considers a pipeline moratorium.
- Rick Ross wants you eat at his new Macon restaurant.
- Point to Macon, but Atlanta is still a great food town.
- One explanation for why Facebook is barely tolerable these days.
- Former teacher and current rapper Dee-1 got a great record deal, paid off his student loans, wrote about it, and gave us this video.
- The best Atlanta suburbs for Millennials. (SYAC: it’s Doraville, Dunwoody, Decatur, Duluth, Smyrna, Milton, Suwanee, Kennesaw, Norcross, and Woodstock.)
- “How,” you might ask, “do you keep coming up with all of these timely, relevant, Hamiltonian links? Will you ever be satisfied?” No, I will never be satisfied! Not until each of you has streamed the cast album and been reminded of at least $10 worth of ways that our founding fathers were inimitable (and original), brilliant, flawed, and unquenchably dynamic. So, This Week in Hamilton: it won the Kennedy Prize for Historical Drama. (Last week was the Grammy’s; prior to that, it was the George Washington Book Prize, an Obie, and a MacArthur Genius Grant for Lin-Manuel Miranda. No Nobel yet – but watch your back, President Carter!).