Due to the strange district maps that come out of the meat grinder of political gerrymandering, rich Mountain Brook Republicans are thrown in with white Baptists in Gardendale and country folk in St. Clair County. The district neighbors the Sixth District, designed to be a place where a minority candidate could get elected in Alabama. Since 1992, the people of the Seventh District have been represented by Spencer Bachus, who now faces an insider trading ethics probe for personally profiting from information gleaned from his position on committees in Congress.
The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative agency, is investigating Bachus, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, over possible violations of insider-trading laws, according to individuals familiar with the case. According to the Washington Post and other news organizations, Bachus has been a frequent trader on Capitol Hill, buying stock options while overseeing the nation’s banking and financial services industries. Investigators recently notified Bachus that he is under investigation and that they have found probable cause to believe insider-trading violations have occurred.
The report first surfaced on the CBS investigative show 60 Minutes, and since then, Gardendale Republican State Senator Scott Beason has decided to challenge Bachus in the Republican primary.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Gardendale Republican Senator Scott Beason thumbed his nose at the Justice Department Tuesday while addressing the tea party on the status of Alabama’s controversial anti-immigraiton law on the first day of the 2012 session of the Legislature.
He said when the Republicans talk about “clarifying” the law, that really means they will be making the law even “stronger.”
“And if the Obama Justice Department doesn’t like it,” he said, “frankly, they can lump it.”
He also claimed the Occupy movement had to bring in protesters from “out of state” to oppose him.
Most working people in America don’t have the time to pay close attention to the daily ins and outs of politics. What they know of the political system they hear from quick blurbs in passing on television news while they are busy providing dinner for their families, or what they hear on the radio in the car on their commute to and from work. More educated liberal Democrats tend to get more of this news from public radio, but for the average Southerner, this tends to come from talk radio.
More and more people are getting their news from social networking tweets on Twitter and Facebook, but unless they take the time to delve into the details of the story links, they will still only obtain a superficial outlook on public policy debates.
For those who take the time to find an independent journalist to follow closely, they will over time end up with a better understanding of how democracy works, the so-called “sausage factory” that is government.
One thing that I think tends to sometimes escape the understanding of the average American, who now tends to believe there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, is the extent to which the party in power gets to set the daily agenda for what issues are brought up in public debates in Congress and state Legislatures. This is one of the most powerful tools any political party has to control what we all talk about on a daily basis, whether people fully grasp this or not.
Editor’s Note: I apologize in advance for what I’m about to say to my friends who live in the reality-based community in places such as New York, Washington, D.C., on the West Coast and in Europe. I would rather eat nails (which would be hard considering how many teeth I have left) than to have to write this story. But I feel a certain obligation to let people the world over know just how bad things are in a place called Alabamaland.
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It should have come as no great surprise considering where we are, but I must say, I was a bit taken aback when I saw this story hit Pam’s List yesterday and when I got the e-mail message from the Alabama Democratic Party responding to it.
You see, my friends, we have a new Republican state Senator in the Northern part of Alabama who is named after a famous character from the Bible. Although his mommy and daddy couldn’t spell very well, I’m sure Mr. and Mrs. McGill had the best of intentions when they named their son Shadrack.
Surely even my atheist friends will remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They were allegedly thrown in a fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar II, the King of Judah, but walked out alive thanks to a surprise appearance by someone named “Christ.”
Well, it must seem like a modern-day version of being forced into a fiery furnace for Mr. McGill these days, because every time he opens his mouth, something crazy comes out, and he gets written up in the press somewhere like he is a complete moron.
ANNISTON, Ala. — Several hundred union workers showed up at a “Save Our Jobs” rally here Monday night in the face of a threat by Republicans in Congress to claim reductions in the federal deficit by slashing up to 1,000 civilian jobs at the Anniston Army Depot. The American Federation of Government Employees and the Alabama AFL-CIO led the rally and are launching a campaign to get the public involved to try to save the jobs.
The Republican plan, which goes far beyond the deficit reduction proposal and military spending cuts put on the table by the Obama administration, could also result in a hiring freeze, furloughs for workers, pay freezes, a drop in the pay of the remainder of the depot’s 4,000 workers and an increase in employee contributions to their pension funds.
Everett Kelley, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the union leadership are trying to figure out how to combat the “travesty” and the “disaster” such drastic layoffs would have on the community.
Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard showed up to speak to firefighters and police officers in Huntsville on Friday and to launch a trial balloon about a new Republican plan to raid the state retirement system, which most people learned about on Facebook because the people of Alabama love to share the links to the near-monopoly Newhouse news Website al.com.
Of course even though this mega news organization that owns the three largest newspapers in the state in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile, not to mention television stations and other media properties, readers really didn’t learn much of anything about the plan from the report.
It took two bloggers to report and write this story, and this is about all we know.
Hubbard said “changes must be made” to the current Retirement Systems of Alabama, which includes more than 300,000 active and retired members. (As an ethical disclaimer, that includes my 85-year-old mother : ) About 100,000 people receive checks from the retirement fund, while 170,000 active members contribute to the system, but of course the Republicans would not only like to rob the fund. The party members would also love to shrink the size of government and get rid of some of those state employees, especially those who vote for Democrats, making the fund even more insoluble.
Female Air Force Colonel to Challenge as a Democrat
by Glynn Wilson
The race for Alabama’s Sixth District Congressional seat is about to get interesting enough to draw attention from around the country now that one tea party Republican has decided to challenge another in the primary, and an interesting new female candidate has decided to jump in as a Democrat.
State Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale, one of the chief sponsors of Alabama’s draconian immigration law which has drawn scorn from around the country and hampered industry recruitment efforts, announced Thursday that he would challenge Rep. Spencer Bachus in the Republican primary to be held this year on March 13.
Designed as a Republican district to sit alongside the minority Democratic Seventh District, the Sixth District runs from Tuscaloosa north of Interstate 59 up through Hueytown and Gardendale all the way to Warrior in Blount County, then curves east toward Springville and runs all the way to Ashville in St. Clair County. It runs from there south to Pell City, Childersburg and all the way past Clanton. (See map).
Bachus was first elected to Congress in 1992, but he came under scrutiny and national criticism in recent months, landing on the CBS investigative magazine show “60 Minutes” in a segment on Congressional insider trading, an unethical but not illegal practice where members of Congress profit from knowledge they gain due to their seats on key committees. Even the tea party and right-wing talk radio shock jocks in conservative Alabama are now calling for Bachus’s head, so many encouraged Beason to challenge him this year.
A federal appeals court has balked at deciding a controversial legal case pitting the Alabama Education Association and its ability to raise membership dues against the new Republican administration dead set on weakening public employee unions and suppressing votes for Democrats.
According to a court filing that just popped up online from the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, the federal appeals court panel tossed the state’s appeal in the case back to the all Republican Alabama Supreme Court. The professional organization for teachers won a victory in a lower court and obtained a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a law passed by the new so-called “Super Majority” of Republicans in the state Legislature, a law written to prohibit payroll deductions to groups that use some of the money for “political activity.”
The appeals court panel indicated it would be “constitutional” for the Legislature to block the payroll deduction if the organization is guilty of “electioneering.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
