Some bad-loser Georgians have been signing a petition saying they want to secede from the United States now that Barack Obama has been re-elected. (Apparently, they don’t remember how badly the state’s earlier effort to secede went.) But some Atlantans are now offering an alternative petition. They say they want to stay in the United States and secede from Georgia if it leaves the union.

You can find the Atlanta petition here: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-city-atlanta-leave-withdraw-state-georgia-and-remain-part-united-states/Dldp5hKT

The text of the petition reads like this:

The City of Atlanta continues to suffer deprivations of economic, civil, religious, and political freedoms imposed upon it by Georgians (who are hostile to Atlanta).

In the event that Georgia is successful in its effort to secede from the Union, we the people of Atlanta wish to remain in the United States. We love our country. We are dedicated to it. And we are committed to preserving its rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers.

We would also like to annex Athens, Georgia, Decatur, Georgia and the parts of Macon, Georgia made famous by the Allman Brothers.

R.E.M.’s announcement last year that they had “decided to call it a day as a band” elicited immediate analyses, retrospectives, and personal reflections in newspapers, music and entertainment magazines, and websites. In fact, articles about R.E.M.’s music and legacy continue today, almost one year after they announced their retirement. Just this past July, Stereogum published an analysis of R.E.M.’s albums and, a month earlier, A.V. Club ran the last of a six-part story about the band. Regardless of how laudatory these remembrances, many of them shared an uncomplimentary opinion: The authors said that R.E.M. was once a great and influential band but had been neither for almost two decades. In other words, R.E.M.’s legacy began with 1982’s Chronic Town EP, peaked with 1992’s Automatic For The People, and then faded through 1996’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi. Following this album, which was also the last album with drummer Bill Berry, many critics said that R.E.M. ceased to matter. What happened?

Students who work for a University of Georgia newspaper are protesting a decision they say gives control over stories to non-students. Students at The Red & Black newspaper walked out Wednesday night after a non-student was named editorial director with final say on editorial content, The Athens Banner-Herald reported.

bohemiansouth:

Madeleine Peyroux put on a great show tonight at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta’s Little Five Points, not far from her birthplace, Athens, Georgia. Taken with instagram

About 150 Occupy Athens protesters marched through downtown Athens, with a spokesman saying the march was intended to show the group’s strength and give newcomers an opportunity to join the movement.

Darn it. I think some of us are still under an injunction against demonstrating in Athens. What’s the statute of limitations on such things anyway?

Atlanta has widest income gap between rich and poor of all the major U.S. cities, the U.S. Census reported on Wednesday. New Orleans ranked second, followed by the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C. …

Rounding out the list of 10 big cities with the largest gaps between high and low income are Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Gainesville, all in Florida; Athens, Ga.; New York; Dallas; and Baton Rouge, La.

 Cities in the South seem to have more than their share of inequality, don’t they? Maybe, this kind of thing happens when you’re pro-business, anti-union workers?

Tom Poland with a timely recollection about tornadoes. It starts this way: March 31, 1973. Athens, Georgia. We had no Weather Channel. We had no Internet, no cell phones or mobile devices to warn us. We had radio, which doesn’t work too well when the power lines go down. We did, however, have one sure-fire way to see what the weather was up to. Look out the window.

That afternoon, March 31, I looked out the window of the mobile home Dad bought for me to live in and saw white, hard rain driving sideways past my window. The huge oak behind the trailer bent over beyond belief. And then, trembling, the mobile home rose ever so slightly before settling off-kilter onto its concrete block foundation.

Testifying in his own way to R.E.M. and most anyone else he’s encountered over the last five decades throughout Athens and environs has been the legendary William Orten Carlton, known to his thousands of friends as “Ort.” Blessed with a vast memory and encyclopedic knowledge of things trivial and highly important, Ort has also felt imbued when visiting Philomath. In fact, he claims some credit for inspiring “Can’t Get There From Here.” Feeling uplifted by what he sensed in Philomath, he told friends (including R.E.M. members) it served as a sanctuary to reflect and write (Ort writes about beer, regional foods, music, small towns and various recondite matters for the Athens newspaper, Flagpole.). Whenever he sought revelation and insight, Ort said, “Philomath is where I went.”