Retired AFL-CIO President Stewart “Buck” Burkhalter was inducted into the Alabama Democratic Party Hall of Fame Friday night by new AFL-CIO President Al Henley.

Alabama College Democrats President Beth Clayton urges more students and young people to get involved in politics, especially with the Alabama Democratic Party at this critical time in history.

Glynn Wilson

Democratic Party Chair Mark Kennedy recognizes Stewart “Buck” Burkhalter with a Hall of Fame award for a lifetime of service as head of the AFL-CIO of Alabama. Other Hall of Fame inductees included Dr. Paul Hubbert and Joe Reed of the Alabama Education Association, and Ruth Johnson Owens of the Alabama Democratic Women. More coverage in the works, including LOTS of video. Candidate qualifying starts in the morning.

More photos below…
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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Woke up this mornin’
there was frost on the ground.
Opened up Facebook,
and there was hot air all around.

I’ve got the bad news blues,
the bad news blues, baby.
What you gonna do…

The bad news is, the Republicans are still in charge of all three branches of government in my home state.

The good news is, more and more people are waking up on the Web and finding out that is a bad thing.

In the interest of keeping you abreast of what is in store for you in year-two of the Republican so-called “super majority” in the Alabama legislature, check out this article from the Dekalb County Times-Journal.

Conservative Senator Shadrack McGill, who replaced long-serving Democrat Lowell Barron, gives some indications of what is in store next year. In addition to “tweaking” the much criticized anti-immigration law, getting rid of the state retirement system for public workers and destroying teacher tenure, McGill indicates he will be doing everything he can to get rid of the Forever Wild program for preserving some of the state’s most valuable and environmentally sensitive areas for future generations.

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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

The people of Alabama have barely had time to digest their Thanksgiving turkey and do a little Christmas shopping for their families before the radical Republicans in the Legislature and their corporate media mouthpieces start talking about doing more damage to the state after the first of the year.

Could it be that House Speaker Mike Hubbard of Auburn is so pissed off at his favorite football team for losing to Alabama on Saturday that he just had to call up the Army Corps of the Associated Press to drop another bombshell on the people on Cyber Monday?

I mean, can’t we just sleep late every now and then on a rainy Monday before the forces of darkness spoil everything with more gloom and doom?

Hubbard indicates the Republicans sat around over Thanksgiving and cooked up another evil plan to destroy education in a state that is already near the bottom of every ranking in the country on education. He says the Republicans plan to push changes in retirement benefits for new public employees and to try to legalize charter schools.

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” Hubbard is quoted as saying in the Gannett-owned corporate chain Montgomery Advertiser.

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Glynn Wilson

Artur Davis sucking on a cocktail in Homewood

by Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Congressman Artur Davis is a sore loser with questionable judgment, according to former state Supreme Court Justice Mark Kennedy, now head of the Alabama Democratic Party.

Davis, who held the congressional seat covering much of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa and the Black Belt as a Democrat for eight years before jumping into a losing run for governor, is now making the rounds of conservative blogs bashing the Democratic Party and making all kinds of wild accusations. Apparently this is an attempt to make himself famous and switch to the Republican Party to run for office again, perhaps the U.S. Senate seat held by Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa.

“It calls into question his judgment,” Kennedy said in an exclusive interview. “Only after being soundly defeated and repudiated by his constituent base does he now come out and continuously attack the system that he was actively a participant in.”

Kennedy said he wishes Artur would have been as proactive in advocating for working families and the poor while he was in Congress “as he is now being proactive in attempting to grab headlines.”

“I don’t understand what his deal is,” Kennedy said. “He’s now going to be remembered, by many of us, as a man who has repudiated his party. He continues to make these allegations but refuses to provide proof, I guess all because he’s a sore loser.”

For a man who desired to be the first African-American governor of Alabama, which would have been a historic event, to make a campaign contribution to the Republican nominee for governor in Mississippi who was running against a qualified African-American Democrat, he said, “Just crosses the line with me.”

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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Where to start?

When you are in the superhero save the world journalism business, sometimes it is hard to know which crisis to chase, which people to save.

Did you ever wonder how Superman did it? I mean, how did he choose which disaster to prevent? Which people to save?

Other than his city of Metropolis, I mean, and his girlfriend, Lois Lane.

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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

The skies are grey. Rain’s on the way. It’s about time to take the canoe off the Chevy van for the winter and remove the futon mattress from the back too.

But I’m not quite ready for that. There must be one more useful trip in the works before the holidays take over the news and the weather turns ugly.

Oh, wait. Checking my Facebook events, it appears the Occupy Birmingham group is planning a road trip protest on Dec. 3 to the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden where Alabama prison officials tend to hold all the alleged illegal immigrants before deporting them back to Central and South America. This might be a newsworthy trip.

The first I heard of the place was in an interview I did with Democratic Party chair Mark Kennedy recently at the AFL-CIO convention near Montgomery. In case you missed it, he referred to the place as a “gulag,” named after Gulag the government agency in Russia that administered Soviet forced labor camps.

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One of the main sponsors of Alabama’s strict new immigration law, Republican Senator Scott Beason of Gardendale, was quietly ushered out as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday in advance of the next session of the Alabama Legislature.

Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh said Senate Majority Leader Jabo Waggoner of Vestavia Hills will lead the Rules Committee for 2012, according to the AP.

Marsh claimed the Republican leadership made the change for “the most efficient operation of the Senate,” although there is little doubt the move came in the wake of all the ongoing controversy since Beason wore an FBI wire in the gambling corruption case and referred to customers of a casino in a predominantly black county as “aborigines.”

Beason, his comments and the immigration law have all been the subject of national controversy of late.

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