There’s so much trouble in the A-T-L.

A failed city branding campaign, kill-crazy cops gunning down innocent citizens, fucked up weather…right now, Atlanta’s hardly a desirable city. And of course…there’s more.

• This just in…firing gay workers in Georgia is legal…as it is in 32 other states. Of course, at some jobs, they keep the more flamboyant of us around for comic relief. Or at least that’s what I’ve seen in the corporate jobs I’ve worked.
• If city legislators have their way, Fulton County, the hub of the city of Atlanta, may be split into two separate counties. Mainly, it’s the rich white suburbanites that want to excise themselves from us po’ middle-to-lower-class brown folk. And even if that’s not the case and they have some obvious and non-racist or non-classist reasons for doing so, they’d better pipe up quick. I mean, with a headline like “White Atlanta suburbs push for secession”, you know it’s got to be something serious.
• So US Airways decided to rescind on their $9.8 billion hostile takeover build. Workers shouted, prayed and chanted “Keep Delta My Delta”. Good for you! Now you can go back to offering shitty customer service, you slags. I guess with Home Depot in increasing turmoil with more top brass stepping down, Joya Williams on trial for trying to sell Coke secrets to Pepsi, Vick getting the “thug” treatment for a particulate ‘like marijuana’ in a gag water bottle, Atlanta needed something to keep it Atlanta, what with its lack of distinctive tourist traps and all…
• …oh…that’s right…there’s the Aquarium! Where beluga whales and tiger sharks meet their demise even with numerous warnings from the Humane Society. Slow Learner Lunch Special at Cafe Aquaria anyone?
• If you ride MARTA with any regularity (that means not just to the airport, Turner Field, the Dome or Philips Arena to avoid parking), then you have to accept this somewhat sobering and scary reality: if the terrorists were to hit the rail system, we would ALL be fucked. I guess it’s not enough that Georgia doesn’t spend any money on bioterrorism…but those road-whore legislators don’t spend any money on any sort of mass transit systems either. Commuter rail from Macon to Atlanta to Athens? Chile Please. Folks here are so anti-mass transit its just plain ridiculous. A major metropolitan area with a 3rd-tier transit system in 2007 is utterly pathetic.

  Meanwhile, the city still suffers through huge traffic snarls (which everyone complains about), there’s a serious dearth of walkable communities, and the city only seeks to improve traffic by…wait for it…wait for it…building more roads! Why can’t mass transit get any love here? Are race relations polarizing state and city politics that damn much?

• Speaking of the whole bioterrorism response, we should be pretty concerned that employee relations at the CDC are sucktastic right now. What if an epidemic breaks out and people there are too pissed or lack morale to make sure we’re all OK? I really hope they get it together…2/3 of their employees are not happy. That’s 6,000 folks. 6,000! Real talk. And I’m not even including their 5,000 contractors.

Technorati: CDC, coca-cola, commuter, delta, fulton county, georgia aquarium, home depot, MARTA, us airways