Folsom Wants to Solve Difficult Economic Problems

by Glynn Wilson

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. Feb. 6 — Congressman Artur Davis is trying to make history in the Deep South state of Alabama by trying to follow on the coattails of his Harvard cohort Barack Obama, who made history by being elected as the first African-American president of the United States, a country that has wrestled with the issue of race since its founding.

Glynn Wilson

Jim Folsom Jr. talks about Alabama’s economic problems with the Downtown Democratic Club

And nowhere in the country does race play a more prominent role in political life than Alabama, the state famous from the highway in Selma to the jails of Birmingham as the battleground state for Civil Rights.

It must have seemed like interesting political theater for Davis to hold his official announcement for governor first in downtown Birmingham, on the same appointed hour a figure from Alabama’s Old Guard was to address the Downtown Democratic Club.

But there is a problem with this picture. Jim Folsom Jr., the state’s Lt. Governor who served as governor for part of one appointed term in the early 1990s, comes from a long tradition of populists, who fought hard on the race issue all the way back to the 1930s, when poll taxes were used to keep blacks and poor whites from voting. His father, “Big Jim” Folsom, did more for the little man than any governor of Alabama in the 20th century, symbolized by his famous “farm to market” roads.

Folsom is now orchestrating a highway bill of his own through the state legislature, at a time when President Obama is pushing a stimulus package with billions of dollars for roads and bridges and other infrastructure.

Davis is a young Congressman, 41, with an excellent resume for a poor, fatherless son of Montgomery. He has distinguished himself as a student at Harvard and Harvard Law School, as a prosecutor and a Congressman, who publicly led the House Judiciary Committee investigation into the Bush Justice Department’s political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.

Since Obama’s election, however, Davis has decided to abandon his duties on the important House Judiciary Committee as a Congressman to run for governor, leaving many of his constituents — and potential voters for a Senate run in the future — wondering why he is leaving them high and dry.

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Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis Will…

by Glynn Wilson

When Alabama’s Lt. Governor Jim Folsom Jr. walks to the podium to speak to the Downtown Birmingham Democratic Club Friday at noon, in the Harbert Center, he will not be announcing his intention to run for governor, sources say.

But in another room in the same building at the same time, other sources say Congressman Artur Davis will fire the starter’s pistol in the race, an unprecedented early announcement with the election still a year and a half off.

Folsom’s campaign has decided to focus attention on the fact that Davis has announced that he is NOT going to do the job he was elected to do — so he can run for governor.

Wayne Madsen is now reporting that Davis, who gave up his position on the House Judiciary Committee several weeks ago and said it was so he could run to be Alabama’s first African-American governor, has decided that it is more important to gain the support of the Business Council of Alabama, headed up by Leura Canary’s husband, Bill Canary, a major Republican official in the state and ally of current Republican Governor Bob Riley, than in getting to the bottom of political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.

Folsom, on the other hand, when asked later today if he will run, will take the high road, according to an advance draft of his remarks obtained exclusively by the Locust Fork News-Journal

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by Glynn Wilson

We have known all along that the smoking gun was hiding somewhere, nestled down in between the cracks of all the ongoing probes of the Bush Justice Department. In fact we have known that there are way more than one smoking gun hiding in the bushes behind the misdeeds of George W. Bush’s White House — and that Karl Rove’s fingerprints are, without a doubt, all over them.

There are a few more smoking guns to chase down before we are through, all of us dedicated to disclosing the worst crimes of the Bush administration, that is, before the cowboys all ride into the sunset back to Texas.

There are still e-mail servers to chase and hidden documents to go after, material no one’s even thought to stick their noses into, yet.

But if you look closely at a couple of largely ignored reports from two of the hardest working investigative reporters digging into these stories, one of the smoking guns is right in front of our faces.

Jason Leopold with his fairly new investigative reporting site The Public Record has unearthed one of the guns, while Wayne Madsen on his proprietary Wayne Madsen Report is handling the smoke (no link available).

Leopold is now reporting that the chief of staff to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, has been cooperating with special prosecutor Nora Dannehy by providing “damaging information” on meetings and conversations between Gonzalez and former Bush political adviser Karl Rove showing direct political involvement in the decisions to fire U.S. attorneys around the country.

Sampson is said to have provided Dannehy with an important piece of evidence that bolstered her case against Gonzales: the former Attorney General was aware of and helped create a list of federal prosecutors to fire.

The list is the gun.

Gonzales testified under oath before Congress in April 2007 that he played no role in creating such a list, telling Jeff Sessions, Alabama’s junior Republican senator:

“I have searched my memory. I have no recollection of the meeting…. I don’t remember the contents of this meeting.”

But according to multiple legal sources, Leopold writes:

Sampson is said to have told Dannehy that Gonzales met regularly with White House officials in the Office of Political Affairs, headed by George W. Bush’s former senior adviser Karl Rove, about the identities of the federal prosecutors that should be placed on the list and subsequently fired.

If that turns out to be true, then it’s enough of a smoking gun to bring both Gonzalez and Rove up on charges of a criminal conspiracy. Although there are indications Ms. Dannehy is looking for a way to let them off the hook by dancing around the issue of a direct “intent” to commit a crime, and on whether the firings were indeed specifically intended to thwart public corruption cases.

Before we get to the motivation for why Ms. Dannehy might not want to pursue criminal charges against anybody from the Bush White house, there’s more.

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