BAR TALK: The Crusader
Has U.S. Attorney Alice Martin run amok? The government is investigating. The victims of her failed prosecutions believe they already know the answer.

The American Lawyer
by Scott Horton
July 01, 2008

In March 2007 the U.S. government charged Axion Corp., a small business in Huntsville, Alabama, with illegally giving technical drawings for a Blackhawk helicopter part to manufacturers in China. The prosecutors seized Axion’s assets and took away its government contract business. The company won an acquittal at trial a year later, but by that time, it was out of business.

Axion is the latest in a string of aggressive prosecutions brought by Birmingham U.S. attorney Alice Martin. Those prosecutions are marked by convictions overturned and innocent men wronged. Two judges have openly questioned whether she knowingly prosecuted innocent people. The American Lawyer has learned that the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility has opened an investigation into allegations of misconduct that were made by Axion against Martin.

A Mississippi native, Martin was a federal prosecutor in Memphis and an Alabama state court judge. She has strong ties to the Republican establishment-her mentor is William Canary, a powerful Republican campaign consultant in Alabama who has close ties to former White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

Her first step into the national spotlight came with the prosecution of a group of HealthSouth Corporation executives on fraud charges starting in 2003. Seventeen corporate officers were convicted, but CEO Richard Scrushy, on whom all eyes had been focused, walked out of court a free man.

Next, she drew notice for her wide-ranging investigation of corruption into Alabama’s two-year college system. In connection with the investigation, she dispatched U.S. marshals to Montgomery to serve subpoenas on Democratic lawmakers on the floor of the legislature-a move that was stopped when the legislators pointed out that it might be a crime.

But she is best known for her crusade against former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat. Martin tried to prosecute Siegelman on corruption charges, but dropped the case the day after the trial began. She then passed the baton to her colleagues in Montgomery, who brought a second, successful case against Siegelman on the basis of allegedly improper campaign donations by Richard Scrushy. An appeal is pending.

The Siegelman prosecution has been widely criticized as a frame-up by Martin, and the prosecution is now the subject of a probe by the House Judiciary Committee, which is trying to determine if it was brought for political reasons.

She most recently gained notoriety for the failed prosecution of Axion, a company started by Alexander Nooredin Latifi, an intense and amiable entrepreneur who emigrated from Iran as a young man in the 1970s. He learned engineering, and slowly built the company. At its peak, the business had 60 employees and was estimated by a federal court to be worth $50 million.

In March 2007 the government charged the company and its owner with violating the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) by sending technical drawings for a Blackhawk helicopter part to a Chinese manufacturer. The prosecutors in Birmingham, led by Martin, sought forfeiture of Latifis assets and obtained an order that wrought havoc with the company’s government contract business.

After the government secured the asset freeze, no charges were brought against Latifi or the company until March 2007. Then Axion’s defense counsel-Henry Frohsin and James Barger, Jr., of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz’s Birmingham’s office-made a tactical call to waive Axion’s right to a jury trial. Frohsin and Barger were concerned that Latifi’s connections to Iran would be played against him. “At the time of the indictment, the White House was beating the drums for possible conflict with Iran. Since the case would be tried in northern Alabama, where the defense industry and Army are colocated, we felt that we should avoid the possibility of xenophobia,” says Frohsin.

After the trial started in October, the government’s case collapsed quickly. What Axion had attempted to have made in China was nothing more than a tungsten blank, from which Axion intended to mill the actual part. The government was forced to acknowledge that the drawings furnished to Axion by its contractor had not been labeled “restricted,” but instead were given a legend of “noncritical” and “uncontrolled,” meaning that Axion had no way of knowing that their use was restricted. Moreover, the drawings had long been accessible on the Internet.

As the case progressed, the government’s own witnesses were forced to concede that Blackhawk helicopters, equipped with the part in question, had actually been sold to China with U.S. government approval, demolishing the government’s claim of a breach of secrecy. Not only that, but the prosecution was aware of these sales before the case was ever brought.

Still, the prosecution would not withdraw the case. It was ultimately dismissed by Judge Inge Johnson of the federal district court in Birmingham, who wrote, “Evidence was received . . . that at least raises the possibility in the eyes of the district court that the government continued to investigate and prosecute the defendants even after uncovering evidence demonstrating that the defendants were not guilty.”

Another failed case, another investigation. A Justice spokesman says that the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates allegations of misconduct by Justice attorneys, is investigating Martin for “allegations of political prosecution involving both the Northern and Middle Districts of Alabama, arising out of the prosecution of former Governor Siegelman and other matters.”

Knowing what she did, why did the Martin bring the case? She declined to comment for this article. But for a prosecutor, the appeal of a national security case involving arms sales to China is obvious. Or it could be, as Henry Frohsin believes, that “the fact that Alex Latifi was Iranian American was more than tempting for the Department of Justice to try to create a poster child for their arms export control activism.”

Once the case was battered, why did the government persist? The answer, say defense counsel, is that the prosecutors were convinced they could convert an asset freeze and the threat of substantial prison time into a plea bargain. And the Justice Department has made a great show of prosecuting AECA cases.

Having won the case, Baker, Donelson then put the government on the defensive. The firm filed a motion, arguing that the case was not brought in good faith and that the government should compensate Axion and Latifi for legal costs. Judge Johnson agreed. She wrote that the AECA “framework allows the government to effectively shut down an accused business regardless of whether the business is later acquitted at criminal trial. This result is unfair to potential defendants and, in this case as a practical matter, ruined Axion’s business.” She awarded $363,000 in costs, attorneys fees, and interest to Axion.

Alice Martin has not directly addressed the outcome in the Axion case. She issued a press release on May 30, indicating that the government will have to reconsider the way it approaches asset forfeiture cases, or at least be prepared to pay the target’s attorneys fees if it loses. Martin is also fighting the award of attorneys’ fees on procedural grounds, claiming that the freeze orders against Axion and the decertification of the company as a government contractor had in no way harmed the business. Her crusade continues.

The Crusader Has U.S. Attorney Alice Martin run amok? The government is investigating. The victims of her failed prosecutions believe they already know the answer. By Scott Horton From the Axion decision: “Evidence was received [indicating that] the government continued to investigate and prosecute the defendants even after uncovering evidence [that they] were not guilty.”

Scott Horton teaches at Columbia Law School.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Now that we convinced some key United States Senators to delay the vote on Bush’s spying bill and legal immunity for the telecom giants until after the Fourth of July, Independence Day holiday – keeping the Constitution out of the fire for at least a few more days – it’s normally that time of year when we all take a summer break.

In normal times of peace and prosperity, we could all break out the barbecue grills or head for the boat on the lake and pop off some firecrackers and revel in the inherent beauty of American freedom.

Alas, this is no normal year and these are not normal times.

If I were one to put any mental stock into Biblical prophecy, I would say there is plenty of evidence to say these are “the end times.” Floods, forest fires, droughts, food crises, wars and rumors of wars (will Bush-Cheney bomb-bomb Iran before they leave office?)

This has become something of a joke amongst the so-called Birmingham Gay Photographers Club, so named by me for a group of mostly bachelors who get together and go camping from time to time and specialize in photographing nature. Since most are over 50 and are not married, they also like to make gay jokes about each other. It’s a guy thing. (Sorry ladies, and gay people : )

Because of the serious nature of the times, I promise not to write about what I had for breakfast today or the latest on my Revolutionary Garden.

Instead I feel like a little government and media criticism.

While you all know how I feel about the monopoly, corporate press in Alabama, meaning the Newhouse newspapers in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile, I do check in from time to time just to see if they are getting the message over there in corporate-chain medialand.

And ever so subtly, it looks like the pendulum is beginning to swing – if just a tad.

Anyone who knows anything about the culture of newsrooms knows it takes a long time to change anything. We’ve hammered their lousy Web design for so long that I just get burned out on bothering.

The Birmingham News has now turned its Website mostly into a series of blogs – as if readers turn to newspapers for blogs – although the programmers at Advance still don’t understand that what readers need is a news page that quickly tells them what the important news of the day is going to be. Not just yesterday’s news posted at 4 a.m. The news that is happening NOW in Washington, New York, London, or Bagdad – or Clay, Alabama.

“It’s going to be a sunny day today,” is not the lead story, guys and gals. Sorry to break it to you.

And while we still refuse to link to it, if you are so inclined to keep up with what newspapers in Alabama are covering today about what happened yesterday, you can do it easily enough on this page:

Alabama News

If you go there and hit the Birmingham News and then search around for the Editorial Page, which is incredibly hidden to the point where we wonder if they are just ashamed of it, you will find an editorial from Sunday FINALLY acknowledging that the Bush Justice Department’s Inspector General’s office released a report last week saying politics and ideology played a paramount role in everything the department has done during the tenure of President George W. Bush, including the hiring of interns.

The editorial page editor of the paper, Bob Blalock, who everyone says is a “nice guy,” a euphemism for “not so smart,” received an interesting honor recently from the University of Alabama’s College of Communications (my alma mater). In their new public relations brochure to keep alumni up on the goings on of the department, the redesigned Communicator – which you can download and read as a pdf file here – you can read the blurb about him receiving the alumni of the year award for print journalism.

You can also read a puff piece about First Lady Laura Bush’s reading program, which she apparently formed to help out her illiterate husband.

And of course Mr. Blalock was awarded this honor by the new dean, whose picture is all over this issue, who as it happens also served in the Texas Air National Guard at the same time as Bush. You remember the story about how Bush went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 to work on a political campaign in Alabama.

Some coincidence, eh? More of Karl Rove’s handiwork in Alabama?

Nah, that would just be a lefty conspiracy theory, right? Then why did they take that entry on his curriculum vitae off the Website after I asked his secretary about it and pointed it out to the former dean? We just report. You decide…

Meanwhile Blalock’s editorial page, while finally telling its readers about the politicized Bush Justice Department in the Sunday paper, has a simple conclusion to draw from it. It was just “dumb.”

The only thing we can conclude is that if the Bush Justice Department was just “dumb,” then the Birmingham News editorial staff must just be “dumber,” since the most important case in the country of this corrupt, political justice occurred right under their noses.

It is quite interesting and curious that one of the two star reporters here who carried the Bush Justice Department’s water in perpetuating this Republican brand of political justice recently left the paper, as we reported here, even though he told me he was happy here just a few months ago after winning a freaking Pulitzer Prize for his reporting supporting the Bush Justice Department’s view of the world.

And since it took several days for the News to discover, digest and pass on the story about the report, I guess it will take them even longer to get around to passing on the most important story this week out of Washington.

That is, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat, issued a subpoena to the Department of Justice this week demanding documents in the ongoing investigation of politics at the department, including the Siegelman case. You can download and read the document here on the committee’s Website.

The DOJ has until July 9 to produce those documents, including e-mails. That deadline falls on the eve of the day when the committee is expecting to hear from former Bush political adviser Karl Rove. This could be the most interesting news in the month of July, unless of course Senator John McCain gets the domestic terrorist attack he needs to win the presidential election.

Rove has been subpoenaed to appear and testify under oath – or face arrest for contempt of Congress. Of course he has so far refused to honor the demand to appear, citing White House executive privilege, even though it is not clear how conversations with the president were involved – unless Bush was fully in the loop in the investigation of Siegelman.

Now if that were the case, it would add another interesting tidbit to the considerable list of reasons why Bush-Cheney should be impeached, even though it is obvious this Democratic Party-controlled Congress has no stomach for impeachment in this historic election year.

Now here’s an interesting morsal to savor as you chow down on Fourth of July barbecue and burn the flag for true Independence from tyranny. The ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar S. Smith, a Texas Republican, of course, has said that if Conyers subpoenas and arrests Karl Rove, he will try to subpoena and arrest Alabama’s famous GOP whistleblower Jill Simpson to testify at the same time.

Well, we have it on good authority that if he tries to do that there might be a problem. There is a certain sea-going cruise planned in the land of the Czars in the days ahead. Where will Karl Rove be on July 10?

Stay tuned in blogland. You may never find out in mainstream medialand, unless it’s just plain too late…

I guess the aggressive progressives got to some of the Democrats in the United States Senate.

The vote on retroactive immunity for the telecom giants has been delayed until July 7, according to a hurried and brief statement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon.

This is how the potential victory, at least in the short term, was reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group that has fought as hard as any other for our Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches…

THE SENATE DELIVERED AN UNEXPECTED REPRIEVE ON TELECOM IMMUNITY THURSDAY NIGHT, deciding to delay the vote on the FISA Amendments Act until after the July 4th recess!

Earlier in the week, the mainstream press was reporting that the immunity bill would see swift and uncontested approval. Senate leaders emphasized that passing an immunity bill this week was one of their highest priorities. And yet, in the end, the bill simply wasn’t as uncontested and noncontroversial as the pundits and politicians thought it was. Overwhelming grassroots action and the efforts of Senators Dodd, Feingold, and Bingaman were critical in giving allies a broader window of opportunity to make an impact on telecom immunity legislation.

For more, click here…

I guess we won’t have to serve them those Florida tomatoes with the salmonella sauce after all : )

Guest Editorial: Cheers and Jeers
From DailyKos.com
by Bill in Portland Maine

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Dear President Bush,

It’s been awhile since we talked. Just busy, I guess.

Anyway, I want to Congratulate you. You win. In fact, you win big-time. It’s time for me to admit it: you came, you saw, you kicked ass.

Over the course of the past seven and a half years, you and your wingman Dick Cheney have gotten virtually everything you demanded, much if it without a fight.

You used a national tragedy to clamp down on Americans’ civil liberties and launch a war against a country that neither caused that tragedy nor threatened us at all.

You pretty much halted government-supported scientific research and environmental protection in their tracks. You did nothing to solve the health care crisis.

You politicized the Justice Department. You worked hard to breach the church-state levee in the government, and then played patty-cake while the real levees collapsed into countless people’s back yards. You gave big business (especially big oil, big finance and big military-industrial complex) free reign to “self-police.” You made your elite base very, very rich, while using your shiny lapel pin to awe-strike your poorer, more ignorant base.

I mean, you are so talented that you even managed to break the Census Bureau. My gosh, even Reagan couldn’t figure out how to do that.

And through it all you avoided repercussions. Even losing GOP House and Senate majorities hasn’t slowed you down much.

There’s so much raw evidence to impeach your ass that it would be as easy as Dick Cheney shooting a lawyer in the face. The rap sheet is a mile long. Yet you remain 100 percent unscathed, threatened by nothing more than a pretzel getting stuck in your craw. That’s amazing. My peasant hat is off to you.

Seriously, all you’ve “suffered” (if you can call it that) is low approval ratings. Big deal. As long as you have your 25 percent “base” that thinks you walk on water, you can do anything you want. Smirk. Dance. Ride your bike. Wave. Swagger. Intimidate the Democratic leadership with the word “Boo!”, beat the traditional media so senseless that when you say “jump” they put on rocket shoes and blast off for the stratosphere. Smirk some more. Clear some more brush. Hell, you can do pretty much anything you damn well please.

So, sincerely: congratulations. You may have wrecked the country and your party, but so what? You got everything that you, George W. Bush, wanted out of your time in office. You should have no regrets, since you telescoped your intentions to everyone well in advance (yes, even back in school).

And in seven months you’ll retire and open up a Texas-size think tank disguised as a presidential library that will perpetuate your propaganda and your policies. (“Oh look, Heritage Foundation … you have a baby brother!”)

Many will say your administration was a failure, but that only works if they’re thinking about the welfare of the country and its 300 million citizens. Your presidency was never about them (just ask the Supreme Court) – it was about you taking care of your circle of rich, power-hungry, war-mad cronies while simultaneously setting out to prove how much the federal government can suck. On that score, you may indeed be the best president ever.

Love,
Billy

P.S. Hugs to Laura and the twins.

Will the real Democrats please stand up … and filibuster?

Ad 2: The Senate just adjourned for the night and will take up the FISA legislation Thursday morning. Obviously, there are some important people who have some thinking to do.

But not before taking a test vote:

Senate Nears End of Surveillance Bill Debate

One of the most important votes in the history of the United States Congress will take place perhaps tonight. Since you will not see coverage of this on CNN, you better watch the blogs and C-SPAN 2.

As we reported last Friday, the cowardly Democrats who control the House of Representatives voted with the Republicans in favor the new domestic surveillance bill, granting a back door form of legal immunity for the telecom giants. They made it where a judge can grant the companies immunity – based solely on a piece of paper showing President George W. Bush authorized the illegal spying on Americans in the wake of 9/11 himself.

Scott Horton writes today at Harpers.org: Will the National Surveillance State Prevail Again?

His buddy Glen Greenwald at Salon.com, owned by the Washington Post, carried this detailed account: FISA A Significant Victory for the Democratic Party? Not…

One blog commenter says:

Victory is still possible in the fight against warrantless spying and immunity for the telecom companies that collaborated in previous illegal spying. There are signs of significant divisions in the Senate that we may yet be able to exploit to defeat the Senate version of HR 6304.

The divisions are deep enough that there still isn’t a Senate version of the House bill, or a bill number, and there are still multiple ways we could win this fight.

One strategy is to find a Senator willing to filibuster, and thereby block a vote. The aggressive progressives found one:

Senator Feingold Will Filibuster FISA

Then, the Washington Independent has now verified that House members may have been swayed by donations from the telephone companies such as ATandT and Verizon. Surprise! Surprise!

Telecom Donations Tied to FISA Vote

According to the Daily Kos, the Senate may vote tonight or there may be a filibuster.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., took to the Senate floor this afternoon to talk about the FISA bill and to detail, point by point, the failure of the Hoyer/Rockefeller capitulation. Here’s the statement he and Sen. Dodd released yesterday announcing their intent to filibuster:

“This is a deeply flawed bill, which does nothing more than offer retroactive immunity by another name. We strongly urge our colleagues to reject this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation and oppose any efforts to consider this bill in its current form. We will oppose efforts to end debate on this bill as long as it provides retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that may have participated in the President’s warrantless wiretapping program, and as long as it fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

“If the Senate does proceed to this legislation, our immediate response will be to offer an amendment that strips the retroactive immunity provision out of the bill. We hope our colleagues will join us in supporting Americans’ civil liberties by opposing retroactive immunity and rejecting this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation.”

Another good place for good blog journalism on this issue is the TPM Mukraker.

In a related story, the Washington Post this morning carried a story about the ISP Charter Communications’ plan to spy on customers and sell the information to advertisers.

Charter Halts Plan to Track Surfing Data

Are newspaper editors just not paying attention to this battle? They are either AWOL or just on the wrong side of this fight. The telephone and cable companies are as much of a threat to newspapers as bloggers and craigslist.org. Why won’t they fight back?

But the big question for the day is:

Will Senator Barack Obama, who promised we are “not a country where wiretapping is done without warrants,” before we made him the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, stand up and join the filibuster? Will Senator Hillary Clinton stand with us?

If not, we may just have to crash the convention in Colorado in August and put someone else in there. Hey Al Gore? Hey John Edwards? Want to be president?

by Glynn Wilson

Maybe this will convince the Alabama press corps that politics was paramount to the exclusion of impartial justice in the Bush Justice Department.

The United States Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, which is charged by law with the conducting “independent investigations, audits, inspections, and special reviews” of DOJ personnel and programs “to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct, and to promote integrity, economy (and) efficiency,” released a report on Tuesday concluding that politics and ideology were indeed used unethically and illegally by the department in the hiring process between 2002 and 2007.

Hundreds of highly qualified lawyers who applied for internships and jobs were rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups – especially ANY environmental group – or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, the report concluded, while preferential treatment was given to those with Republican ties and conservative affiliations on their resumes.

After digesting the report, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to implement Inspector General Glenn Fine’s recommendations.

“Yet again, the Department has been putting politics where it doesn’t belong,” Conyers said in a statement. “The report concludes that under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ tenure in 2006, several Department officials including Michael Elston violated federal law and Justice Department policy. We already know from the Committee testimony of Monica Goodling that she ‘crossed a line’ in hiring career attorneys as well.

“When it comes to the hiring of nonpartisan career attorneys, our system of justice should not be corrupted by partisan politics,” Conyers said. “It appears the politicization at Justice was so pervasive that even interns had to pass a partisan litmus test.”

The report’s recommendations include a statement making clear that in future hiring and firing decisions, all decisions should be based on merit.

“Political affiliations may not be used as criteria in evaluating candidates and that ideological affiliations cannot be used as a proxy to discriminate on the basis of political affiliation,” the report says. Department leaders should be “vigilant to ensure that political or ideological affiliations are not used to select candidates.”

According to Birmingham attorney Doug Jones, who represented former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman early on in his travails with the politicized Bush Justice Department and still represents some of the legislators now under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Birmingham, the details of the report are no surprise to anyone who has followed this story over the past year.

“This report is nothing new to those who have been involved with or closely followed the Justice Department,” Jones said. “What is not included though is that the practice is much broader than the Honors program and extends to U.S. attorney’s offices across the country.”

Two things happened that has allowed the Bush administration to stack the Justice Department with young Federalist Society lawyers, Jones said.

“First, after 9/11, DOJ was able to bring on a whole slew of new assistant U.S. attorneys. Then, in a move to stack the deck, Ashcroft’s DOJ began offering early retirement benefits to senior lawyers, resulting in career prosecutors leaving the department and being replaced by young Republican/Federalist Society lawyers,” he said. “Just like with the Judiciary, the influence will be left for years to come.”

In the heart of the report, investigators focused on the DOJ honors program, which places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in jobs there. While historically the program had operated under the control of senior career officials, under Bush’s first Attorney General John Ashcroft the control of the program changed.

In what could have been a worthy attempt to reach out to a range of students outside the so-called Ivy League, hundreds of qualified applicants were rejected because of their ties to liberal or progressive nonprofit groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, or who had clerked for judges or legislators with ties to the Democratic Party.

Concerned Justice employees had raised alarms about the politics of the department last year when they sent a letter to Congressmen who had been examining whether political considerations led to the dismissal of at least nine U.S. attorneys. That investigation now includes the probe into whether Siegelman was prosecuted for political reasons, to remove him as a political threat from future elections in Alabama.

The report is the first in a series of studies investigating the role and reach of political appointees in hiring and enforcement at Justice during the Bush years. The studies cover the prosecutor firings, problems in the civil rights division and problematic statements by former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, who took over after Ashcroft resigned – and then resigned himself last August the same week Bush political adviser Karl Rove resigned from the White House.

You can read the full final report here.

Now will the press in Alabama tell the people the truth? Or will they bury or ignore the report? Stay tuned…

Birmingham News staff writer Brett Blackledge, who won a Pulitzer Prize for investigating mostly Black Democrats who work in Alabama’s two-year college system and also happen to be into public service by serving in the state legislature, is taking my advice and leaving the paper to take a job in Washington, D.C. with the Associated Press.

While I broke the story on an e-mail list on Friday that his days were numbered, here is the first mention of the departure in the paper, in Executive Editor Tom Scarrett’s little column that normally deserves scant notice since it usually says nothing about nothing.

We face a special challenge at The Birmingham News because we are losing a special reporter. Brett Blackledge, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, is leaving our staff to become an enterprise reporter in The Associated Press’ Washington bureau, doing investigative work on national security and intelligence issues. It’s a great opportunity for him, but a great loss for us in Alabama.

Watchdog Reporting Biggest Job?

And like I’ve said on the blog and the radio before, the Birmingham News‘s idea of watchdog journalism is sort of the like the Bush Justice Department’s idea of justice: All the time and money goes into investigating mostly poor Black Democrats, while the big time corruption of rich White Republicans is completely ignored.

When Blackledge did his first hit job on Jill Simpson, I told him he should use the clout of that Pulitzer to get the heck out of here and go to work for a real news organization somewhere else.

Good luck Brett. And good riddance. Alabama’s political system has been screwed up bad enough by bad reporting from the “Bug Mule” papers before. Now perhaps we can begin the real job of media reform in this state.

For those of you interested in following the news on media reform, there are a number of stories today on the Poynter Institute’s site that talk about the problems of the traditional newspaper industry, including an analysis from the New York Times saying this year could be the worst ever for newspapers, and another from Ad Age saying “the sky is falling! It’s totally falling, for real!”

Guest editorial by Bob Fertik
Democrats.com

On Thursday and Friday, the American people were betrayed twice by Steny Hoyer and the Bush Democrats.

On Thursday, 80 Bush Democrats voted to give George Bush another $163 billion to occupy Iraq and plunder its oil for another year, even though 68 percent of Americans want to bring our troops safely home this year.

On Friday, 105 Bush Democrats voted to give immunity to George Bush and the telecoms for illegally wiretapping American citizens even before 9/11, and to allow Bush and the telecoms to keep doing it, thereby shredding the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

We’re red hot with anger. But as the saying goes, “don’t get mad – get even.”

As of today, we’re getting even – by declaring war on Steny Hoyer and the Bush Democrats. With your support, we will defeat them one by one until all of them are replaced by an “Aggressive Progressive” Democrat, or until they see the light change their wretched votes.

And we’re starting today with John Barrow (GA12), who betrayed us on both votes. Watch Barrow pledge his complete devotion to George Bush during Friday’s warrantless wiretapping debate.

Georgia’s primaries are on July 15 – just 3 weeks away. And Barrow is facing a dramatic primary challenge from State Senator Regina Thomas. Thomas doesn’t just look different – she thinks different. She wants to bring our troops safely home from Iraq immediately. And here’s what she told me on Friday.

I was really appalled at the actions of Congress and especially my Congressman from the 12th District in Georgia, John Barrow, for voting in favor of the Bush-Republican surveillance bill that would make it very easy, without a warrant, to wiretap any American citizen.

On Friday, Regina Thomas became our first endorsed candidate of 2008. And that was not just because she’s an “Aggressive Progressive” – but also because she can win.

In Georgia’s Democratic Presidential primary on February 5, 70 percent of the voters in GA12 were African-American. Thomas isn’t running on her race, though, but rather her record of accomplishment over 12 years in the state legislature. This has Barrow running for his political life by avoiding every chance to debate Thomas because he simply cannot compete.

In a few hours, our endorsement raised over $1,176 from 31 donors. Today we’d like to raise $20,000 by encouraging 2,000 of our 500,000 subscribers to contribute $10 each.

Can you help?

www.actblue.com/page/bushdemocrats

In 2005-6, we raised nearly $80,000 for pro-impeachment House candidates through ImpeachPAC (and helped elect Keith Ellison in MN05), so I know what we’re capable of.

Let’s send a message to Steny Hoyer and his Bush Democrats: that the Democratic Party belongs to us and starting today we’re taking it back.