Carter wants to remind voters of how corrupt Deal is. He's also been hitting him on this:Democrat Jason Carter is calling for an independent investigator to review the handling of ethics complaints against Gov. Nathan Deal that were at the center of three lawsuits filed against the state ethics commission.Carter, who is running against Deal in November, made the request in a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Sam Olens. The complaints date back to the 2010 campaign, and Deal was cleared of any major violations by the commission.
Since then four former commission employees have claimed retaliation for work investigating the Deal complaints, and a jury sided with one of them in April. The state has decided to settle with the other three. - Online Athens, 6/25/14
And this:State Sen. Jason Carter has sharpened his message against Gov. Nathan Deal as he more aggressively embraces the Democratic party line on education and healthcare policy debates that could decide the election.Within the last week, the Atlanta Democrat outlined his unequivocal support for the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a proposal that’s vilified by many conservatives. And he used a statewide education conference to push for increased training for teachers, a typically Democratic voting bloc he said has suffered on Deal’s watch.
Carter’s campaign recognizes the November election could hinge on these issues, and it’s ground that Deal is happy to fight over. The governor’s budget this year included a surge in education funding. And Deal has long argued a Medicaid expansion is too costly in the long run. - Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/16/14
http://politics.blog.ajc.com/...
And Deal's latest good news isn't that great:The ad you see above is Jason Carter’s most biting criticism yet on Gov. Nathan Deal’s education policy, claiming the governor shorted schools out of billions of dollars to help his “big corporate friends.”
“I’ll be a governor who cares about education every year – not just election year,” the Democratic state senator intones.
The spot, which was released online this morning, is a speedy response to a pair of attack ads from Deal’s campaign that will hit the airwaves today and continue through the month.
Both of Deal’s 15-second spots, which you’ll find below, question why Carter voted for the three budgets before he ran for higher office but decided this year to oppose the state spending plan.
That proposal included a more than $300 million increase in K-12 funding, which Deal is quick to trumpet on the campaign trail and Carter dismisses as a campaign ploy. - Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/19/14
Carter has a lot to hit Deal with but the ethics probe has left a few unanswered questions:A deeper look at the numbers behind the CNBC ranking, though, suggests that there is precious little reason for the governor to be celebrating the cable network’s assessment of the state.Georgia’s ranking is based on its comparative performance across 10 categories: Cost of doing business, economy, infrastructure, workforce, quality of life, technology and innovation, business friendliness, education, cost of living and access to capital.
Georgia’s only No. 1 rankings across all those measures came in just two categories — infrastructure and workforce.
In a discussion of its methodology for the rankings, CNBC explains that its infrastructure assessment considers, in large part, “the value of goods shipped by air, waterways, roads and rail.” As CNBC correspondent Scott Cohn helpfully explains — in the governor’s own press release, incidentally —“Georgia ties for first [with Texas] in infrastructure with America’s busiest airport and one of its busiest ports.” Essentially, then, one of the state’s top rankings in the CNBC survey is based on little more than the fact that it has a large airport and a large port.
Georgia’s other No. 1 ranking, for its workforce, is similarly faint praise. Again, here’s the CNBC methodology for that category: “We rate states based on the education level of their workforce, as well as the numbers of available workers. We also consider union membership and the states’ right-to-work laws. While organized labor contends that a union workforce is a quality workforce, that argument, more often than not, does not resonate with business.” In other words, Georgia gets this top ranking on the “strength” of having a lower-paid workforce.
And indeed, a Bloomberg study from earlier this year, based on information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, notes that Georgia ranks 30th among the 50 states in the percentage of workers earning the minimum wage, at 4.8 percent, with 19 percent of the population living in poverty. Similarly, a 2013 Forbes study based on BLS and other data puts Georgia 23rd in its ranking of how easy, or hard, it is to make a living in each of the 50 states.
Georgia’s only other top-10 ranking in the CNBC assessment came in the “economy” category, in which the business network looked at “economic growth, job creation and the health of the residential real estate market” along with the number of major corporations headquartered in the state. - Online Athens, 6/25/14
Click here to contribute to Carter's campaign:It's time to get some answers.Georgia taxpayers now owe more than $3 million for the cover-up of an investigation into Gov. Deal's 2010 campaign, and we deserve to know why.
This is what we do know:
Georgia's top ethics officials were forced from their jobs after drafting subpoenas as part of an investigation into whether Gov. Deal's 2010 campaign used contributions to personally enrich Gov. Deal and his friends and family.
In April, a Fulton County jury awarded more than $1 million to one of those employees, agreeing she was forced from her job because she was investigating Gov. Deal.
Now the state has settled with three other ethics officials who were connected to the investigation or who refused to go along with the cover-up.
Gov. Deal's admits his office played a direct role in selecting a new director for the commission, even while he was under active investigation. That new director then canceled the subpoena requests and ended the investigation.
Here's what we don't know: What would the ethics officials have discovered if the subpoenas had been issued and the full investigation was completed?
You deserve to know. So today, I delivered a letter to the Attorney General asking him to appoint an independent Special Assistant Attorney General to reopen and complete the investigation.
We need to restore honesty and integrity to the governor's office. We can only do that with your help.
Please consider contributing to my campaign now so we can reach more voters with our message of building an honest government that works for everyone:http://www.carterforgovernor.com/....
Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Jason
