Well, this must have been an interesting conversation. The White House hosted a conference call last night with a bipartisan group of 34 governors about President Barack Obama's plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees into the U.S. over the next year.
We're told Gov. Nathan Deal, who joined dozens of other GOP governors in opposing the policy, was briefed on the conversation. It lasted 90 minutes and was said to broach the "rigorous screening and security vetting process" in place before a refugee from the war-torn country can travel here.
The White House's dispatch added:
Several Governors expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to better understand the process and have their issues addressed directly by representatives of the agencies responsible for the refugee and screening programs. Others encouraged further communication to ensure that governors are able to better respond to questions from the public about the refugee screening and resettlement process.
The state opposition to the refugees, which comes after the spate of terror attacks in Paris, is somewhat toothless. Even Deal acknowledged there was little he could do to bar refugees from Georgia.
But one of your Insiders tells the tale in today's dead-tree edition of how momentum is gaining in Congress to shut down the refugee resettlement program.
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On that note, a poll commissioned by FOX 5 shows that most Georgia voters support Deal's decision to oppose the resettlement of refugees. It shows that 58 percent of Georgia voters approved of the decision and 35 percent disapprove. Some 7 percent are undecided.
The poll by OpinionSavvy was conducted Monday evening and involved 469 registered voters in Georgia. It has a margin of error of 4.5 percent. Read more here.
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As most of the Republican presidential candidates try to outdo each other on bellicose rhetoric on ISIS and refugees, Jeb Bush has staked out ground to the left of Georgia Democrats Hank Johnson and David Scott. From Bloomberg News:
"The answer to this is not to ban people from coming," Bush said Tuesday in an interview with Mark Halperin and John Heilemann for Bloomberg Politics' With All Due Respect. "The answer is to lead, to resolve the problem in Syria."
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Sam Nunn thinks you've been sleeping too soundly. At Politico.com, the former U.S. senator from Georgia, Richard Lugar and Des Browne raise the prospect of an ISIS with nuclear material:
…[A]s leaders prepare for the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., in March 2016, there is still ample cause for concern. Today, more than 1,800 metric tons of weapons-usable materials remain stored in countries around the world, some of it still too poorly secured and vulnerable to theft. A recent report on a sting in southeast Europe exposed another chilling reality: a black market in nuclear materials. Compounding the threat is the fact that it doesn't take much material to build a bomb and the technical know-how needed to do it is more accessible than ever.
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On Tuesday, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association voted unanimously to proceed with establishing a museum exhibit that will tackle the topic of African-American involvement, as slaves and soldiers, in the Civil War. Our AJC colleague Ernie Suggs has the details here.
But at that same meeting, Stone Mountain Park police chief Chuck Kelley described last Saturday’s gathering of Confederate enthusiasts who protested plans to put a monument to Martin Luther King Jr. atop the mountain. Reported Kelley:
"They were in the Yellow Daisy parking lot. They gave some speeches there. There was no opposition. They gave their speeches and they walked to the top of Stone Mountain and stayed up there a couple hours and then walked down.
"The only real issue that we had with that was – they also had a group that called themselves the Three-Percenters. I don't know what that means, but they were dressed in military attire…and carried AR-15 weapons. There were seven in that group….
"We had several officers walking with the group. The visitors on the trail pretty much didn't pay much attention to the people carrying the Confederate flags, but we had quite a bit of concern from the public, as the people with the rifles walked up….I explained to them that currently, Georgia law allows them to carry those weapons.
"We didn't have any trouble at all. One of the security group had an asthma attack, and I had to give him an injection."
What are Three Percenters? The Anti-Defamation League says they're "part of an anti-government extremist movement" that promotes "the idea that the federal government is plotting to take away the rights of American citizens and must be resisted."
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This could be a turning point in the decades-long fight over water between Georgia and Florida. From our AJC colleague Dan Chapman:
A settlement doesn't appear imminent, though, between the long-warring states that disagree over how to share the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers. But the move toward compromise, announced last week, brightened the outlook of one key water wars observer.
"I'm delighted," said Ralph Lancaster, an attorney the U.S. Supreme Court appointed to be a special master to resolve the watery dispute. "And I can't overemphasize the fact that I'm delighted to see both the word 'settlement' and the word 'mediator' in the reports and to know that you're moving toward that process."
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U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Coweta County, said the marathon Hillary Clinton testimony before the Benghazi committee was "a trap" designed to make Republicans look "cruel." Buzzfeed picked up a video that appears to have come from a Nov. 10 fundraiser for state Rep. Micah Gravely. A taste:
"Now to me, that was us stepping in a trap because we should have known that she was going to go on and just stall, debate, filibuster, on these answers to make it go as long as possible, so we would look cruel," he continued....
"You know, a lot of people have said, 'she did great, you know, no harm, she did really good, she handled the committee.' I don't know where in the world you can be proven a liar on national TV and think you had a good week, but they think that is having a good week, that she was caught in a lie," Westmoreland said.
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You don't see a candidate's adviser bash him on the record every day, but Ben Carson -- and the 2016 campaign writ large -- is not exactly conventional. From the New York Times' Trip Gabriel:
"Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East," said Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security. He also said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so "we can make him smart."
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And then there were 13. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal announced last night that he was leaving the presidential race. WSB-Radio conservative talk-jock Erick Erickson, a Louisianan, offers an ode to Jindal that includes this succinct summation of his failed campaign:
Bobby Jindal gave Louisiana a lot of hope. Unfortunately, he was never able to capitalize on that in a Presidential race. He couldn't find a reformist message and was crowded out. At home, resentment with his budget cuts and politics led Republicans to start vocally criticizing him. On the campaign trail, Jindal became known more as a bomb thrower than a policy wonk. With Louisiana as his base, he did not have the deep pocketed billionaires other candidates had just by virtue of residency in states with those billionaires.
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