A new day is dawning in America, and President-Elect Barack Obama is hiring, according to the e-mail inbox today.

And the state Democratic Party people are in on some of the decision making (see below).

For those interested in working in the Obama administration, here’s the online link to alert them to your interest:

http://change.gov/page/s/application

You fill out a simple form, submit it online from the site and they promise to email you a more detailed application at some point in the near future.

There are hundreds of mid and lower level political appointments to be made. If you have a qualification they’re looking for, they may be interested and even more interested if you also volunteered for the campaign. (The jobs are, after all, political appointments.)

This also came in today:

Alabama Democrats Form Presidential Advisory Council

Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Joe Turnham today announced the formation of a party-sponsored Alabama Presidential Advisory Council. The Council will serve as a catalyst for recommending persons for public service in the new Obama Presidential administration, specifically those who are eligible to become Presidential Appointees for Alabama.

The Council will consist of approximately 21 persons, made up primarily of Executive Officers of the State Democratic Executive Committee, Alabama’s DNC Members, and several at-large members. The party has asked the three Democratic Members of Alabama’s Congressional Delegation to participate as well.

“This Council is similar to the one we formed in 1996 after the Clinton-Gore re-election,” Alabama Democratic Party and Council Chair Joe Turnham said in a press release.

“This Council consists of a diverse representation of our party leadership from a regional, racial and constituency level [and] provide an open, consistent and transparent vehicle on which qualified Alabamians who want to serve may place their names for review,” he said. “In the absence of a Democratic, statewide-elected U.S. Senator or Governor, this Council can assure that the broadest consensus can be reached as to qualified persons whose names should be submitted to President-elect Barack Obama for consideration.”

“The choice of nominees is solely the prerogative of our new President,” he continues. “However, the broad consensus, stemming from a recent sampling of our over 1,000 elected Democrats and dozens of party officers from across Alabama, is that they wanted the state party to take a lead role in advocating to the new administration as to whom Alabama Democrats would like to recommend for federal appointments.”

The Council held its first meeting Monday in Montgomery and will meet periodically as the appointment process progresses. Those persons interested in consideration or participation in this process should contact Alabama Democratic Party Executive Director Jim Spearman at 334-262-2221 or jim(at)aladems(dot)org .

While you may have to stand in line to vote on Tuesday, Nov. 4, it looks as though it will be a beautiful day with partly cloudy skies and a high of 74 degrees.

If you have not seen a sample ballot yet, you may want to look at these sites before you go to the polls.

2008 General Election Sample Ballots

As usual, the League of Women Voters have some good non-partisan information about the election on their fine Website.

Just about everyone is recommending a vote for Amendment 1 on Tuesday in Alabama even though it’s not heralded as a very good piece of legislation. And there are other amendments on the ballot that do not apply to every county in the state.

I say if you don’t know enough about a race or an issue to make an informed decision, just check the box for the Democratic Party at the top and vote a straight ticket and let everybody else determine the rest. Head for the nearest bar or celebration party and get ready to celebrate the Obama landslide.

I’ve never agreed with the mainstream news media or most of the pundits who say that people should vote whether they know enough or care enough about the candidates or the issues to get informed about them.

If you are reading this, you are most likely not too much of an ignorant, dumbass, redneck. So go vote.

If you are one of the idiot, idealogical Republicans who like to send me hate mail, I hope you break your leg and can’t make it to the polls. You are as much to blame for the problems in this country as the frat boy, Texas prince, fuck-up you voted for twice in 2000 and 2004.

As Hunter S. Thompson would say if he were alive and blogging today, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Once this election for president is over, the fight begins to turn Alabama blue again.

If Bob “Cowboy Boots” Riley and his little buddy Karl Rove and the Newhouse corporate press in this state think they are going to take over the Alabama Legislature for the Gay Old Pedophile party, they are sadly mistaken. As broke and incompetent as the Alabama Democratic Party seems to be sometimes, we suspect this election will change some things and get more smart people involved here.

Hey, we could be wrong. But that doesn’t happen very often, now does it?

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

The dogwoods in Alabama are beginning to turn red, but the color of the nation on the electoral college map is trending mostly blue, blue, blue.

If the numbers hold up for another two days, Barack Obama will become the first half-black American elected president in history, only 146 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 44 years since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Judging by some of my hate e-mail of late, there are some right-wing militia nuts who can’t handle this possibility. They are threatening a counter-revolution if Obama wins.

Glynn Wilson

The dogwoods turn red…

It makes one wonder where in the fuck they have been for the past eight years as President George W. Bush just about destroyed this nation’s freedoms in the name of Christianity and “conservatism.”

It is almost impossible to know what they even think they mean when they call Bush a conservative and me a liberal these days, since Bush presided over record federal borrowing and spending and created the biggest federal government in our history, and since I have been almost the lone voice in the South trying to save our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures in the face of the FISA vote for Bush’s massive spying bill.

The only thing I can figure is that these people are either morons, or what they stand for is not the United States of America but the Confederate States of America.

Someone, and I can’t remember who now, wrote during the 2004 election cycle that what Bush basically represents in the White House is a back-door win for the American South in the Civil War. Perhaps that’s it.

I have puzzled over the question before as to why the radical right here still seems to support Bush in the polls, when just about every other demographic group in the country has finally realized what a lousy president the frat boy, royal family prince from Texas turned out to be.

His administration has been riddled with one disaster after another, from the overreaction to the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 that led to the disastrous war in Iraq, to the failure to rescue New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to the financial meltdown in the waning days of Bush’s failed presidency.

The Washington Post is warning on Sunday that there are going to be some terribly disappointed people come Tuesday.

If they are actually as fired up for action as their warnings, there may be more bullets flying at perceived liberals in the very near future like the nuts who killed the head of the Democratic Party in Arkansas and the Unitarians in Knoxville.

What will the Bush Justice Department do about it? Will the administration just let them slide like they did the meth heads who were released without prosecution in the most recently disclosed plot to assassinate Obama?

We will see. I will be voting for Obama on Tuesday anyway, no matter what the risk.

Reluctantly, I will be voting in a church, which is not exactly where we should be voting in this democratic republic that is supposed to have an “impregnable” wall separating church and state, according to the former U.S. Senator and Supreme Court Justice from Alabama, Hugo Black.

That is one of the ways the South finally won the War Between the States by getting Bush in the White House in 2000. The movement of federal tax money to faith-based programs, and the Bush Federal Election Commission’s total capitulation to allowing voting in churches, was symbolic of the problems to come.

Even now, as Bush is about to finally reach lame-duck status for real, the corporate bureaucrats who took over the federal government under Bush are pulling their final Confederate coup. They are trying to gut every environmental regulation left protecting American consumers against corporate pollution, when we should have spent the past eight years beginning the fight for alternative energy and against the coming scourge of climate change due to global warming.

I don’t know for sure if an Obama administration can begin to fix our economy, our politics or our environment. But I can either go with the campaign of “hope” or give up and die. I choose to try.

One thing I know for sure. Senator John McCain, who knows nothing of economics or even how to use a computer, is not prepared to take on the great challenges we face. And neither is his right-wing nut running mate, Sarah Palin.

A vote for McCain-Palin is a vote for the Confederacy. A vote for Obama is a vote for the new Lincoln.

I like what Princeton University professor Cornell West said on the Bill Maher show Friday night.

“It’s the last gasp of the conservative era, where the economics of greed, the culture of indifference, and the politics of fear have been brought together in such a way that it hides and conceals the plight of the poor and working people,” he said. I hope he is right.

“We’re in a transitional moment,” he said. “The real question is, can we generate a commitment to fairness and justice in the face of greed, can we generate compassion in the face of indifference, and can we generate hope in the face of fear?”

He also said, and I agree, “We don’t need another Clinton. We need a Lincoln. We need a statesman.”

Hear! Hear! We recommend a vote for the Democrat, Barack Obama, on Tuesday.

As for local races in Alabama, the best thing you could do to turn back the clock on George Bush and his political guru Karl Rove would be to vote for Deborah Bell Paseur for the Alabama Supreme Court. If you know anyone who has tried and failed to collect money from an insurance company in the past few years, the Republican Supreme Court is to blame. A vote for the Big D, a straight vote for Democrats, is the way to go.

You can either vote to be a part of history on Tuesday, or you can waste your vote in the effort to stop American progress. It’s your choice.

Washington Money Spent on Shaw Outpaces His Own Campaign

A shadowy group just outside of Washington, D.C., that goes by the misleading name of “The Center for Individual Freedom” has now pumped a total of $1,274,815 into the Alabama Supreme Court race on behalf of Republican Greg Shaw, outspending even the candidate’s own campaign, according to the campaign of Judge Deborah Bell Paseur, his Democratic opponent in the election coming up Tuesday, Nov. 4.

More than $250,000 was added just this week. Though the Shaw campaign started five weeks earlier, CFIF has spent almost two hundred thousand dollars more than Shaw.

The campaign of Paseur renewed its call on Judge Greg Shaw to keep his campaign’s commitment to transparency in funding, as a new link between the Shaw campaign and CFIF became clear. Terry Benham, a Shaw consultant and oil and gas lobbyist, worked along with CFIF on a campaign to promote the appointment of certain federal judges.

On Tuesday, FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission “aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics,” added the following to its Website:

“It’s also the case that a top consultant to Shaw, to whose firm he has paid more than $300,000 in this campaign, is Terry Benham. Since August, 2006, Benham has been affiliated with federal lobbying reports. It’s not clear how much the oil and gas interests might have paid additionally for state and local lobbying, which is Benham’s specialty. And Benham’s biography on the LinkedIn professional networking Web site says that he “has interests…in oil and gas exploration.”

“CFIF has not yet filed as a PAC with the Alabama Secretary of State’s office, a clear indication that they do not intend to disclose their finances by Thursday’s campaign deadline,” said Marion Steinfels, Paseur Campaign Manager. “We are simply asking the Shaw Campaign to keep their commitment to make public the names of those funding their campaign. The people of Alabama have a right to know why this out-of-state group has pumped over a million dollars into Judge Shaw’s campaign.”

The officers and former officers of CFIF have lobbied Congress on behalf of oil and tobacco interests. CFIF has routinely refused to reveal its funding sources, running afoul of election laws while attempting to affect the outcome of judicial races in other states. Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled against them, keeping their television advertisements off the air in West Virginia.

Greg Shaw claims his hands are clean of Big Oil money and influence — so why has he paid more than $1 million to a Washington DC oil lobbyist to run his campaign?

Campaign finance reports filed Thursday show Greg Shaw has paid another $955,000 over the last month to a company run by oil lobbyist Terry Benham. Total payments to Benham have now topped $1.2 million.

Even more, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Factcheck.org this week disclosed that Benham’s Washington, D.C., company pocketed $820,000 in payments from the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, ChevronTexaco, Shell Exploration, and other Big Oil interests over the last two years alone. The non-partisan group also reported that Benham discloses on a Website that he holds business interests in “oil and gas exploration…”

Alabamians know Shaw’s dishonest campaign is being paid for by oil interests. But the latest public disclosure proves that from Day One, Big Oil runs his campaign, too.

“Why is Greg Shaw paying an oil lobbyist to run his campaign,” said Marion Steinfels, Paseur’s Campaign Manager. “It’s time for Shaw to come clean and tell Alabama voters why he hired a political shill for Big Oil to run his campaign for the Alabama Supreme Court.”

This week radio stations across the state refused to continue airing false ads paid for by secret donors to Shaw’s dishonest campaign for Alabama’s highest court. They’ve spent millions attacking Judge Deborah Bell Paseur, but Shaw’s secret donors refuse to tell voters who is paying for their vicious lies and attacks.

It’s time for Greg Shaw to come out of the gutter, and tell Alabama voters why he hired an oil company lobbyist to run his campaign for the Alabama Supreme Court.