By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | “Surprise, surprise, surprise,” as Gomer Pyle often said.
The new principal owner of the Atlanta Hawks says that he wants a new play pen (read new arena) for his professional basketball team.
Our first thoughts are simple. “Good, Tony Ressler. Find some private money to pay for it.”
Mr. Ressler, 55, is a Californian who founded Apollo Global Management after the collapse of Drexel Burnham, Lambert. Mr. Ressler has previously belonged to a group which purchased the Milwaukee Brewers. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and holds a MBA degree from Columbia University.
Among his partners in the Atlanta Hawks purchase is Grant Hill, 1994 ACC player of the year from Duke University and after 19 years in the NBA, retired from the professional ranks. He’s now a television basketball analyst.
We liked having last year’s improving Hawks around, but what with so many trades, who says they’ll do better next year?
As to a new arena, however, we suspect the over-anxious Atlanta city officials are falling all over themselves to come up with public money for a new basketball arena. That, too, is another big surprise.
Gwinnett has many distinctions. However, it’s been missing one: we’ve never had a Gwinnett-based governor of Georgia. Closest we’ve come in recent years is that George Busbee, once out of office, chose to build a home in Duluth. He’s also the only Georgia governor buried in Gwinnett.
But on the horizon: maybe there’s hope. Senator David Shafer keeps moving up the GOP ladder, now as president pro tempore of the Georgia Senate, the number two position. He’s our most likely candidate right now, though to gain the office, he would have to go up against Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle. He probably could beat Cagle for the nomination, reasoning that the state’s largest Republican vote is in Gwinnett.
It’s common knowledge in Gwinnett that the City of Duluth was named for that same-named city in Minnesota. But where did the Minnesota city its name?
Garrison Keillor gave us the answer recently. He writes:
“On July 2 in 1679, Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, first reached Lake Superior, about where the city that bears his name – Duluth – now lies. He was a French soldier and explorer, and had visited Montreal on several occasions. In 1675, he bought a house there, and started thinking about making a trip to the headwaters of the Mississippi River. He became friends with the Sioux Indians, and in 1678 he set out with seven French followers and three Indian slaves, intending to broker a peace agreement between the Sioux and the Ojibwe Indians north and west of Lake Superior, and firm up the tribes’ fur trading relationship with New France. He negotiated the peace treaty, arranged some inter-tribal marriages, and encouraged the tribes to hunt together, before moving west to explore the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers”
Now you know.
After proposing term limits in the last edition, one guy’s concern: “Term limits would mean that the bureaucrats would be in charge.” There’s something to that. But in a way, the continuing-to-get elected professional politicians amount to bureaucrats in themselves. At least we would get rid of that half of the total bureaucrats with term limits.
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