Gov. Deal's very bad, terrible, not so good day.

I don't know what was on Gov. Nathan Deal's schedule for Friday.  Maybe something good happened for him.   But he couldn't have been very happy with the news.

There were four stories on Friday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution front page;  three of them were bad news for the governor.

#1.  The jury ruled in favor of the former director of the state ethics board, who had charged that she was forced from her job for aggressively investigating charges against Gov. Deal in a 2010 campaign finance violation.  She was awarded $700,000 plus back pay and legal expenses.   This cannot be good news for the governor in the midst of his re-election campaign.

#2.  The governor has previously been sharply criticized for refusing to extend Medicaid coverage available through the Affordable Care Act that would have given more than 600,000 additional Georgians health insurance -- almost entirely paid for by the federal government.   Today's story adds to that.   It would also have provided health coverage for all of the state's prison inmates -- and saved Georgia taxpayers an additional $20 million a year.    Gov. Deal had said he refused the Medicare deal because we couldn't afford it.

#3.   The state's food stamp program is in such a mess, with such a backlog (65,000 cases as of late February), that the federal government is threatening the loss of $76 million in federal funding.  The state agency is working overtime but still has about 5,500 cases backlogged.

Gov. Deal's ethics problem -- plus now the court evidence that the engineering of the investigator's 'firing' leads directly to his office -- brings up questions of abuse of power and political corruption.

The other two involve the Governor's priorities.   He likes to brag about Georgia having the lowest tax rates of any state in the nation.   I wonder how low we would be on a measure of state services to its citizens, especially those who most need the help of safety net services.  What's so great about having the lowest taxes?   You could eliminate schools and have even lower taxes.  Would that be good?

I've been strongly opposed to this governor ever since he followed the crowd and became a Republican representative in the U. S. House.   I thought some of his tactics in the 2010 campaign were despicable, especially his endangering LGBT teenagers by telling lies about their very fine Youth Pride center and making it a target for haters -- just to try to score points against his opponent.

I knew Nathan Deal's parents, who were both school teachers in my home town of Sandersville.   He seemed to be a nice little boy -- and then I went away to college and had no further contact with him.

But he has not turned out to be such a nice man.   Maybe politics corrupted him.   I don't think his parents would approve.   They were good people.

Ralph