Ralph Reed Lost!

EXCLUSIVE: Creative Loafing talks to Dallas Austin

Creative Loafing's Mara Shalhoup is the first reporter to talk to Dallas Austin since his arrest, trial and pardoning in Dubai.

Grady Patient List

Earlier today I stopped by Grady Hospital to visit a friend.

When I stopped at the information desk to ask what room my friend is in, the desk clerk wrote my friend's room number on a scrap piece of paper. The scrap paper is actually a patient log that lists the full names and room number of people who were patients at the hospital on April 8. My scrap lists Jones through Lewis.

There's not much I can do with the information, I suppose, but I do find it disturbing that Grady Hospital is essentially handing out lists of patients' names to random people who stop by the information desk. I'd be mighty peeved if my name and room number, past or present, was being handed to strangers, especially since matching a patient's name to a room number could conceivably reveal the nature of someone's hospital stay -- "Room 7K04 -- he must have cancer," "Room 2A16 -- that's the infertility clinic," etc.

Ralph Reed in a nutshell

Garrison Keillor on Ralph Reed:

"If a preacher secretly accepts a bucket of money from a saloonkeeper to organize a temperance rally at a rival saloon and maybe send in a gang of church ladies to chop up the bar with their little hatchets, this would strike you and me as sleazy, but others are willing to make allowances, and so Ralph Reed's political career is still alive and breathing in Georgia."

Read the rest on Salon.com.

And if you still haven't read Doug Monroe and Josh Latta's hilarious illustrated biography of Ralph Reed, you're missing out.