Here’s how a definition gone wrong can lead to a debilitating public controversy. But hey, controversy drives traffic, so what the heck, right?

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

It’s been a long time, but the New York Times is back in the business of pumping up the traffic to its Website with news about itself.

Predictably, once again, it is doing the news organization’s reputation more harm than good in the long run. Will they ever learn from their own history? The documents are right there under their noses.

The problem is, it might cost them a massive amount of corporate advertising to tell the truth, and they would lose a few Republican readers in the process.

An explanation is in order. You came to the right place for this one.

On January 12, the new public editor at the Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, ran a column under the headline: Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

That was followed up pretty quickly by a scathing piece in the UK Guardian under the headline: The New York Times public editor’s very public utterance.

The lede?

‘Should the Times be a Truth Vigilante?’ asked Arthur Brisbane. ‘Yes,’ came the resounding reply.

In Brisbane’s column, he said he was looking for reader input “on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

Duh, right?

He cited an article on the Supreme Court in which a court spokeswoman said Justice Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. A Times reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood.”

The other example cited came from the Republican campaign trail, where Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Times columnist Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

In the Guardian piece, a couple of readers’ responses are quoted:

“Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB.”

“If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, then by all means continue to do nothing more than paraphrase those press releases.”

“I hope you can help me, Mr Brisbane, because I’m an editor, currently unemployed: is fecklessness now a job requirement?”

You should look up the meaning of fecklessness, because apparently, it is and has long been a news business job requirement, precisely because of the argument about objectivity I am about to make in the end.

But wait, there’s more.

According to the Guardian, Brisbane had clearly not been expecting this excoriating and one-sided a reaction. He has since tried to clarify his views.

“What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing. I was hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question.”

“My inquiry related to whether the Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut ‘facts’ that are offered by newsmakers when those ‘facts’ are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.”

My response is don’t report it if you know it’s false. So what if you get beat on the story by Fox News? They have a million viewers. You have a million readers. It will all come out in the wash.

But according to the Guardian, which just had to get in on the traffic boom too, “This only added fuel to the fire.”

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post had a new, young liberal blogger weigh in.

What are newspapers for?

Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times public editor, has posted a remarkable piece that’s generating attention on Twitter, because it gets at a core question: What is the role of newspapers in a political world that’s awash in distortions and lies?

Greg Sargent points out that the Times itself amplified Romney’s false assertion about Obama three times without any rebuttal. And he concludes that “any Times customer reading them comes away misled. He or she is left with the mistaken impression that Obama may have, in fact, apologized for America, when he never did any such thing … in all those three cases, the Times helped the GOP candidate mislead its own readers — with an assertion that has become absolutely central to the Republican case against Obama. Whatever the practical difficulties of changing this, surely we can all agree that this is not a role newspapers should be playing, particularly at a time when voters are choosing their next president.”

The American Journalism Review has also weighed in on this in a piece under the headline: Real Time Fact-Checking.

All of this controversy caused Mr. Brisbane to come back with another post, in which he laments that his piece “generated way more heat than light.”

Here’s the Light

As my regular readers will recognize, this is a long-standing theme of this Web publication. I recently addressed the key question here in this piece: Rethinking Objectivity in American Journalism.

This is exactly the core problem we face not only in the news business in this country, but in the constant struggle to even attempt to have a coherent, informed public dialogue about politics, public policy or anything else. And here the guy who is in a position to potentially shed some serious light on the question is totally ignorant of the early history of the New York Times for which he writes, even though he has the prerequisite degree from Harvard to get hired by the paper.

It’s not his fault. Apparently there’s no one at the Times who actually knows what the term “objective journalism” was supposed to mean, because during the last half of the 20th century, the original meaning was lost and it was converted into a money-making device like snake oil was in 1898.

If this is the kind of inane conversation we are going to be subjected to at this late juncture in our history, we might as well all go bathe ourselves in snake oil.

I mean, what good is a college education if you don’t comprehend the point?

To reiterate my argument here in as simple a way as possible: Objectivity is a term from science. The idea is to come up with theoretical questions to test with hypothesis by gathering evidence and subjecting them to testing.

It is not the average daily newspaper reporter’s job to do this as the “business” is structured today. As the Ben Bradlee character said in the “All the King’s Men” movie, the film about Watergate, “It is not our job to print the truth. It is our job to print what people tell us.”

Therein lies the rub.

Readers want newspaper reporters to tell them the truth. But it takes a lot of brains, hard work and experience to be able to pull this off on deadline. So readers should rightly seek out people with the brains and experience who are willing to work at it to actually find out what the truth is and tell it like it is.

In fact, there are documents that if unearthed and written about could show that the original idea for objective journalism, at the New York Times no less, was about science, not capitalism. We are decades down the road from this and living our entire lives based on one big gigantic meme. It is a virus that plagues our culture and pollutes every conversation we have.

If we do not come up with a great big antidote for this, and soon, it could literally kill the world, or at least the human species. In my view this bad information is a bigger threat to our health than cancer or heart disease. If we form public policy on the basis of someone’s opinion that “there is no such thing as global warming,” for example, then we are freaking doomed.

The way I handle it is to deride the liars when they say something wrong and stupid, and the news organizations that report the lies, like I did the other day talking about the Republicans in Alabama. Of course the Birmingham and Huntsville papers cannot do this. They would have been out of business a long time ago if they even tried.

But if more news organizations would do that, perhaps politicians and others would not be so willing to tell lies in public. Liars like Mitt Romney know that whatever they say will make it onto television and be reported in newspapers too, because that is the nature of competitive capitalist news.

The unstated motto is: “Give people what they want, and let every moron decide for themselves what to believe.”

In this world, all opinions are equal — even if they are based on false community gossip, or a book written before there was a field of inquiry called science.

We used to say, “You have every right to your opinion, but not your own set of facts.”

I don’t know if they teach this at Harvard or not, but I learned in Philosophy 101 at the University of Alabama that there are “matters of opinion,” and there are “matters of fact.”

It seems to me that if President Obama never once in any speech actually apologized for America — and believe me if he did we would know it, because it would be all over Google – then for any news organization to report that without immediately pointing that out as a lie is not serving its audience well, only its advertisers. These days, that means corporations for the most part. And these days, the corporate CEOs lean Republican, so it serves their interests to have lies printed in newspapers like the New York Times. From there, they can be picked up by cable news commentators, bloggers and local politicians who repeat them to even win seats on the local school board.

Thus the vicious cycle of lies continues to destroy us.

As it happens, before I learned about this story last night, I happened to catch the movie Quiz Show on cable. If you want to become totally cynical about America and the media, watch that and see what happens in the end.

Kill the Meme

I have said this before and I will say it again, and again, and again, until enough people finally pick up on it and it becomes the antidote to the information virus. The only way to stop a meme is for someone who knows what they are talking about to post the truth online and let it travel around the Web until it kills the bad disease and destroys the career of the person willing to spread it.

I think it is pretty safe to say at this juncture that we pretty much destroyed the reputation of George W. Bush in this way, even though it was not in time to prevent his reelection in 2004.

As long as President Obama stays on course and keeps telling the truth, we will destroy his competition in 2012. We have that power now on the Web Press. We are about to eclipse Rush Limbaugh on radio and Fox News on TV. In fact, I think we have already.

Anybody want to bet me a 12-pack of Sweetwater Georgia Brown on that? I’m still looking for one or more takers for the presidential election of 2012.

These changes might not come about in Alabama just quite yet, but give it time. We will prevail in the end — unless they kill us first.

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

At Occupy protest encampments across the country this week, the controversy that was all the rage had to do with the defense budget bill just passed by Congress. The paranoia was palpable, and for good reason, considering how the issue was covered by the mainstream, corporate news media — and the implications for protesters worried about being arrested and detained indefinitely without due process as they carry their protests into an election year in 2012.

While much of the debate over the policy on detaining suspected terrorists on domestic soil was probably lost on much of the country now in a shopping frenzy with only a week to go before Christmas, even at the Occupy Birmingham encampment downtown activists were not happy with President Barack Obama. One even suggested he was taking a look at voting for Mitt Romney, the Mormon from Massachusetts, “because at least he represents a minority.”

“What?” I asked.

Come on people. Let’s look at the facts.

According to the initial Associated Press account, the one that probably appeared buried in many daily newspapers on Sunday, Congress did pass a $662 billion defense bill this Thursday “after months of wrangling over how to handle captured terrorist suspects without violating Americans’ constitutional rights.” The wire service depicts the story as a “fierce struggle over provisions on suspected terrorists that have pitted the White House against Congress, divided Republicans and Democrats and drawn the wrath of civil rights groups.”

Yes, the White House initially threatened to veto the budget bill, but dropped that warning on Wednesday, justifying its position by saying last-minute congressional changes no longer challenge the president’s ability to “prosecute the war on terror.”

Now let’s look at how the issue is being covered by the elite Web media out of New York and D.C.

Writing for the Harper’s magazine’s Website, my good friend Scott Horton interviewed Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on the subject. Greenwald’s new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, examines the emerging doctrine of impunity for politically powerful elites in the United States.

HORTON: You start your account of the doctrine of elite immunity in the United States with Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon. How did this one decision, among the numerous incidents you describe, provide a point of rupture in the nation’s rule-of-law tradition?

GREENWALD: American history is suffused with violations of equality before the law. The country was steeped in such violations at its founding. But even when this principle was being violated, its supremacy was also being affirmed: resoundingly and unanimously in the case of the founders. That the rule of law — not the rule of men — would reign supreme was one of the few real points of agreement among all the founders. Arguably it was the primary one.

There’s an obvious element of hypocrisy in this fact; espousing a principle that one simultaneously breaches in action is hypocrisy’s defining attribute. But there’s also a more positive side: the country’s vigorous embrace of the principle of equality before law enshrined it as aspiration. It became the guiding precept for how “progress” was understood, for how the union would be perfected.

And the most significant episodes of progress over the next two centuries—the emancipation of slaves, the ending of Jim Crow, the enfranchisement and liberation of women, vastly improved treatment for Native Americans and gay Americans — were animated by this ideal. That happened because “blind justice” — equality before law — was orthodoxy in American political culture. The principle was sacrosanct even when it was imperfectly applied.

The Ford pardon of Nixon changed that, radically and permanently. When President Ford went on national television to explain to an angry, skeptical citizenry why the most powerful political actor would be fully immunized for the felonies he got caught committing, Ford expressly rejected the rule of law. He paid lip service to its core principle — the “law is no respecter of persons” — but then tacked on a newly concocted amendment designed to gut that principle: “but the law is a respecter of reality.”

In other words, if — in the judgment of political leaders — it’s sufficiently disruptive, divisive, or distracting to hold powerful political officials accountable under the law on equal terms with ordinary Americans, then they should be exempt and the rule of law suspended, all in the name of political harmony, of “moving on.” But of course, it will always be divisive and distracting, by definition, to prosecute the most powerful political leaders, so Ford’s rationale, predictably, created a template for elite immunity.

The rationale for Ford’s pardon of Nixon was subsequently legitimized, and it created a precedent for shielding the most powerful elites from the consequences of their lawbreaking. The arguments Ford offered are the same ones now hauled out over and over whenever it is time to argue why the most powerful among us should not be held accountable: It’s not just for the good of the immunized criminal, but in the common good, to Look Forward, Not Backward. This direct assault on the rule of law was pioneered by the pardon of Richard Nixon.

This analysis is quite interesting and you won’t find it discussed hardly anywhere in the mainstream corporate news media in the U.S., except perhaps on MSNBC or Current TV.

It is true that from the first day in office, President Obama adopted a policy of “looking forward, not back.” In fact, I broke the first story about that back in 2008, about the time Alabama’s Artur Davis was whispering in Obama’s ear at the White House Christmas party and considering running for governor.

I thought it was a bad idea then and still do. Would it not have worked out better for everybody in the long-run if Congress had continued and finished its investigation of Bush administration officials who engaged in turning the Justice Department and the federal courts into a political arm of the White House? Perhaps if Karl Rove were rotting away in federal prison today, we would not have to see his pasty white face on Fox News clips spinning the news on a regular basis on the more liberal cable shows on MSNBC.

But let’s get to the crux of the controversy.

HORTON: In a speech he delivered recently in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama used Theodore Roosevelt’s concept of New Nationalism as a rhetorical foil. Do you agree that Roosevelt’s vision of a nation dedicated to “real democracy” sets the right tone for an age suffering from elitist triumphalism? And do you think Obama is likely, in a second term, to take any meaningful steps against the problems you describe in your book — particularly relating to accountability?

GREENWALD: Many of the themes sounded in Obama’s Kansas speech were valid and appropriate, but that matters little. Obama is in campaign mode, and what he has convincingly demonstrated is that the inspiring, passionate speeches he delivers have little relationship to his actions.

There is zero basis for believing that Obama will change course on any of these matters in his second term. There is always another election ahead that apologists can cite to justify bad acts (You have to understand: it’s vital that Democrats win the 2014 midterms). And Obama has displayed no interest whatsoever in holding elites accountable for criminality: not just political actors, but financial elites as well.

If anything, it’s even more unlikely that he would hold elites accountable in his second term. In November, 2008, the New York Times explained why presidents have an incentive to shield their predecessors from prosecution: “Because every president eventually leaves office, incoming chief executives have an incentive to quash investigations into their predecessor’s tenure.” In other words, by shielding those who came before him, Obama ensures that he can commit crimes with impunity as well. That’s why all elites — political, financial, media — are motivated to defend and preserve this lawbreaking license for their class.

Really?

That’s an interesting argument, coming from a couple of elite lawyers operating at the epicenter of elitism in New York and Washington, D.C.

But before I get to my final analysis on that point, let’s look at the Sunday story out on the issue from the Washington bureau of AP.

In typical sensational fashion, the wire service depicts “a bruising battle in Congress,” after which the Obama administration “retained the right to investigate and try suspected terrorists in civilian courts.”

That’s what civil libertarians want, right? Due process for everybody? No secret military tribunals?

But bound by its objective pledge to cover both sides of the story, AP reports that “officials say” the defense budget bill “raises a host of questions that will complicate and could harm the investigation of terrorism cases.”

Really?

I’m not so sure, but let’s continue looking at the reporting.

AP says the administration “waged an uphill fight against a majority of Republicans and some Democrats trying to expand the role of the military while reducing the role of civilian courts in the fight against terrorism.”

It was the latest effort by conservatives to keep open the U.S. military prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to place terrorism suspects in indefinite detention and to designate military commissions as the preferred alternative to civilian courts for meting out justice. In the end, the administration came away with one major victory. Gone from the defense bill during House-Senate negotiations was a provision that would have eliminated executive branch authority to use civilian courts for trying terrorism cases against foreign nationals.

The new law would require military custody for any suspect who is a member of al-Qaida or “associated forces” and involved in planning or attempting to carry out an attack on the United States or its coalition partners. The military custody requirement does not apply to U.S. citizens or to lawful U.S. residents. The president or a designated subordinate may waive the military custody requirement by certifying to Congress that such a move is in the interest of national security.

The AP then goes on to quote University of Texas law professor Robert M. Chesney, who says the bill “will ramp up the political costs” when the administration decides to hold a civilian criminal prosecution for a detainee and does leave the president “with flexibility” to have civilian trials. “Therefore the law is neither quite as bad as its opponents say nor as useful as its supporters think.”

It seems to me it was the Republicans, most especially Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, who fought the Obama administration’s efforts to keep using civilian courts and retain due process. It was the president himself, a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, who stood up for those principles, while the Republicans were trying their best to trash American freedoms in the name of “fighting terrorism.”

Then there’s one more column to consider, this one from Alternet out of San Francisco, which ran under the headline Obama Says He Won’t Detain Citizens, and That’s Good Enough for Us!.

What the Occupy protesters and American citizens need to understand is this: “the detention powers in the (defense budget bill) aren’t new. Bush rammed them through an intimidated Congress after 9/11, and they were later limited to a degree by a series of Supreme Court decisions.”

Not that the battle is not worth fighting, because it is, and for good reasons.

The bill “reaffirms and codifies those executive powers, 10 years after the attacks, and severs them from 9/11.” It is “probably right that this administration won’t detain U.S. citizens accused of terrorism — which doesn’t do much for the due process of non-citizens — but what about President Chelsea Clinton or a lunatic like Michele Bachmann? What about the next administration to feature a Dick Cheney?”

Indeed.

That’s what I tried to tell the right-wingers back when we were fighting against legal immunity for the telecom giants and the preservation of the Fourth Amendment when they had no problem with Bush and Cheney taking away their rights against unreasonable searches and seizures — as long as they didn’t go after their guns. I probably wrote a hundred stories on Liberty vs. Security during the Bush years.

But perhaps the most revealing political comment from Greenwald is what matters here.

“Obama is in campaign mode…”

No truer words have ever been spoken. This is about politics, people, pure and simple.

The president feels he must come off as a hawkish moderate to win the general election next year. We will see if it works. That would not be my advice on how to win, but it’s obviously why he went after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, whose death is now being billed as the top news story of 2011.

Plus, it has been clear from the start that President Obama is not going to willingly give up any of the executive powers built up by Bush and Cheney as they tried to bring back the so-called “Imperial Presidency.” The main reason is that he is the first African-American president and has received more death threats than any president in history, according to the Secret Service.

Our hope is that the Obama Justice Department will keep its focus on right-wing terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, not so-called “eco-terrorists” — environmental activists who got added to the terror watch lists by the Bush Justice Department and the new Department of Homeland Security. It is a fake category that should never have been added in the first place.

And, let’s hope the rules of detention wanted by the Republicans are not applied to peaceful Occupy protesters as they ramp up their demonstrations next year. I do not think that is the “secret plan” of the Obama administration, as indicated by the paranoia I heard from Occupy protesters in Birmingham.

If this administration goes the wrong way on this question, Obama will probably not be re-elected next November, and that would be a terrible tragedy for this country. In my view, any Republican allowed back in the White House at this juncture would be a bad thing for the country. Period.

My advice for the president? Get out of the White House and take to the streets on the side of the Occupy protesters and against the drastic disparity in the distribution of wealth in this country. That will earn you back the left base you need to defeat the Republicans come November.

And by the way, thank you very much for this — lest it get lost in the holiday blizzard of Christmas news.

The Obama Justice Department just announced the prosecution of CEOs at the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Friday.

“They are the highest-profile individuals to be charged in connection with the 2008 financial crisis,” according to AP.

Perhaps the Occupy protesters might want to tip their hats or their holiday wine glasses to that fact.

Stay warm out there, and take a break if you can for Christmas.

The big fight in Alabama next year will be in Montgomery when the Legislature goes back into session in February. Watch this space and we will continue to bring you the latest on what the Republicans have planned next. Here’s one example.

The Bad News Blues: See What the Republicans Have Planned for You

Merry Christmas, y’all!

by Glynn Wilson

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Someone once said that practicing journalism is like capturing “history on the run.”

Sometimes when you are a fly on the wall at important events you think you are witnessing a historical moment. But it is sometimes hard to tell for sure. Like they say, only time will tell.

Did any of the reporters covering George Wallace’s inaugural address in 1963 have any idea what a seminal moment that would be in American political history?

Could anyone have anticipated that the groundswell of rage embodied in Wallace’s fiery rhetoric would lead to such a transformative movement for full-scale civil rights in the United States? Or that Wallace’s message and style would result in such a rising tide of so-called “conservatism” in American politics, a tide that has not yet fully dissipated over the country — or Wallace’s homeland of Alabama?

In conversations I had with my good friend Spider Martin before he died, it was apparent that those covering the events of the 1960s did have a sense that they were witnessing big historical moments. Spider was a photographer who covered a lot of the seminal clashes in civil rights history back then. He was there on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. You can see some of his photographs on the National Park Service Civil Rights Trail. And you can see him running in and out of the television news footage often used in documentaries of the time.

He later became the official photographer for George Wallace, however, and witnessed the man’s runs for governor and president up close and personal. From 2001-2003, I taped interviews with Spider about those days. One of these days I will get around to writing some stories up about what he said. He died in April, 2003, before we could finish the book we were working on together.

In 1965, I was only 8-years -old, living in a white flight suburb east of Birmingham. We were isolated from that history, except for what we saw on the evening news at dinner time. The local newspapers didn’t cover the protests or run pictures of Bull Connor’s dogs or fire hoses.

Many people in Alabama and across the South and the country are still isolated from it, which is one of the reasons the so-called “New Conservatism” started by the likes of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater and perfected by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush still survives to this day.

People who live in isolated rural or suburban communities with no opportunities for exposure to the diversity of the wider world and higher education tend to live in and cling to the past.

Even the Alabama Democratic Party, the party of Wallace, was still clinging to this past in many ways until the most recent election cycle, when the Republican Party finally completed its mission of becoming the party of bigotry and hate, the party that hates the government so bad it wants to run it completely into the ground so that it doesn’t work anymore at all.

The heirs to Wallace’s legacy in Alabama now have names like Scott Beason, Mike Hubbard and Shadrack McGill.

But there is a problem with the way these politicians are attempting to further their own political ambitions by following in Wallace’s footsteps.

If you go all the way back to 1963 and actually read the text of Wallace’s inaugural address, you will see that he was at least for education, not out to destroy it.

True, he was for educating white kids, not the black ones, but he considered it part of his mission and one of the reasons he got elected to stand for education of Alabama’s poor people. He was a Populist, after all, not part of the moneyed elite.

“… the farmer in the field, the worker in the factory, the businessman in his office, the housewife in her home, have decided that the money can be better spent to help our children’s education and our older citizens,” Wallace said, “and they have put a man in office to see that it is done.”

He went on to develop the community college system in the state, and I am here to tell you that chances are, I would not be here writing these words today if it had not been for that decision. My college education started in a community college. It was the teachers there who inspired me to study English, History, Political Science, Sociology and Journalism and go on to the University of Alabama for a Bachelor’s degree and later a Master’s, then to pursue a Ph.D. in Tennessee and teach there and in New Orleans.

The Republicans in charge today seem hell-bent on destroying educational opportunities except for the rich kids of white folks who can afford to pay for it. Wallace at least stood up for poor white people. The Republicans running for president, governor, the Legislature and the state Supreme Court these days seem to stand only for the 1%, a term popularized by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have a point.

Now let me get to mine.

I believe I witnessed some interesting history the other night in Montgomery, history you won’t see covered anywhere else. You see, I was the only reporter in the room last Friday night when the Alabama Democratic Party held its annual Hall of Fame dinner in Montgomery. It was not the only time in my career to be the only reporter in the room. At the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans once, I was the only reporter in the room with Rudi Giuliani. That got covered by UPI because I was there.

The event in Montgomery this weekend did not rate one single mention in any newspaper in the state, or on a single local television news broadcast, which I find quite odd.

True, a lot of what I witnessed was the passing of the old guard of the Democratic Party, which ruled my home state for 136 years. But I also saw something new.

While the party honored Paul Hubbert and Joe Reed of the Alabama Education Association as they pass from leadership positions in the party, the new head of the party, Mark Kennedy, did a couple of extraordinary things right in front of my eyes. For one, he declared that “there are no more back rooms” in the Alabama Democratic Party, and he encouraged young people to take up a leadership role. He refused to read the list of long-time dignitaries in his pocket, and he vowed not to have any speaker over 40 at next year’s event.

Kennedy is the son-in-law of George Wallace, having married Wallace’s baby girl Peggy in the early 1970s. He was also the only Alabama Supreme Court justice who ever beat Karl Rove’s political campaign company in a judicial election in the state, in 1994, even though he retired in 1998 rather than face the negative whisper campaign again.

Kennedy decided to re-write a little history for the Montgomery event. He re-cast Wallace’s speech from 1963 and gave it a new ending.

In case you are unfamiliar with the language from Wallace’s speech, you can watch the video below and read the text here. Here’s the key paragraph.

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

In his address to the Alabama Democratic Party Hall of Fame dinner crowd, Kennedy changed the wording, ending it this way (see video here or here):

“Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say justice today … justice tomorrow … and justice forever.”

Now as you know, I don’t have much faith in parties or much of anything else. Just a sliver of hope that this could hold true.

Justice?

In this state?

Imagine that…

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.

“I think Forever Wild was originally a good program, but some good programs need a sunset,” McGill said.

He indicated his top priority in the Senate will be to push pro-life legislation. He will be working with Rep. Kerry Rich, an Albertville Republican whose House district includes portions of southern DeKalb County, to push a bill reducing the amount of time a pregnant woman can wait to have an abortion. It would also require reporting on every abortion performed in the state.

“I’m passionate about pro-life bills,” McGill said. “In fact, that’s probably going to be my top priority in the upcoming session.”

McGill said he was also working on a plan to reduce personal property taxes in a state that already has one of the lowest property tax rates in the country, especially on timberland used by out of state paper companies — that pay no corporate income taxes here — for pine plantations to make paper products.

“I’m looking at proposing a bill that after seven years, that will reduce out (all property taxes) to zero,” McGill said.

McGill indicated he would re-introduce a bill that would tie the pay of legislators to the salaries of teachers, a bill that was not even taken seriously last year by other Republicans.

McGill was asked if he supported the removal of Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, from his position as Rules Committee chairman after testimony in a gambling corruption trial revealed he called some Alabama people “Aborigines.”

“Scott Beason is my roommate,” McGill said. “Scott did a tremendous thing for the state of Alabama with all of the corruption that was going on. … No, I did not support that decision. That was made by leadership, and I did not have a voice. The slur was calling folks down south Aborigines. I don’t think his intent was pure in making that statement…You first have to say that an Aborigine is less than you in order for it to be an offense to you. I sent an email to the Republican Party that said, ‘Hey, I think I’ve got some Aborigine in me.’”

When asked about the immigration bill, McGill said something that might get him in trouble with other Republicans, since it seems to coincide with the Obama administration’s position.

“The state doesn’t need to be dealing with it (immigration law and policy) in the first place,” he said. “It’s a federal issue, and it’s very cumbersome for the state to have to deal with.”

But then he indicated he had heard there were truckloads of pregnant women coming to America from Latin America to have babies.

“That ties the mother to the nation as well,” McGill said. “In times past, we have had no problem bringing in immigrants to work for farmers and do things we didn’t want to do in a blessed economy. The problem was getting them to leave once they got here. If we apply some tough immigration laws, then we can amp up our efforts to bring them back in on a work visa to satisfy the work force. And then we don’t have to worry about them leaving. They will leave on their own like they are doing now because we’ve got tough laws in place.”

McGill said there will be some teachers who lose their jobs because of the immigrant exodus from Alabama. But according to the newspaper’s report, he expressed no remorse for that.

The working people of Alabama need to ask themselves: Is this really the kind of representation you want in Montgomery? If so, keep voting Republican. If you want better leadership, you might consider finding a Democrat to vote for — or start supporting a third party, and I don’t mean the tea party.

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.

But I guess the new Wall Street-backed New York Times likes that place, since it is where the Decatur chicken farmers get their workers now since all the Mexicans left the state in droves due to Alabama’s draconian immigration law. While the Times seems to think the law is working fine, and the news media in Alabama don’t seem to know quite what to think, I’m wondering how the Occupy Wall Street movement and related controversies could be utilized to reach out to the mass audience of average, working folks and get them to realize how we need to reform our politics to create a more perfect union.

I suspect the average Alabamian — and this includes a lot of rank and file union members — is less than sympathetic to illegal immigrants and not on the side of college student protesters either. In Nixon’s day, the so-called “silent majority” sided with police against the hippie protesters, until police shot those students at Kent State.

Go back a few years in history from that incident, and you will find most people in Alabama were not on the side of Martin Luther King and the civil rights protesters — until CBS News and the New York Times took the violence of the Dallas County police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and put it on the national news.

Watching peaceful protesters being beat up with billy clubs and tear gassed turned the stomachs of a lot of people, even an old Alabama State Trooper I once knew, who resigned in protest and went on to make pottery from Alabama Clay on Lake Martin and become a folk artist.

Events like this in history tend to change people, and change things, even the course of politics.

The backlash from the immigration law in Alabama is one thing, but even tea party sympathizers can relate to the rip offs we have all suffered from the run amok corporate capitalism of Wall Street, which nearly caused a global depression in 2008 and 2009, if not for the bailouts from Bush and Obama. Yet nobody is happy with how Wall Street has used the federal tax money, and our economy and our country still teeters on the brink of disaster — yet few of the bankers that sold us the bill of goods are in jail, yet.

Those of us in the know about such things watched in disgust when the Birmingham media kept its ratings and circulations high during the show trial of Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford, who is now in jail for his part in bankrupting Jefferson County. But was there a single story that actually analyzed why the county went broke to build a “world class” sewer system?

Not that I ever saw. Langford was simply responding to criticism from the environmental community in seeking a new sewer system, since the old one was leaching raw effluent into the Cahaba River. The deal to build the new one was structured by the same Wall Street bankers who nearly collapsed the world economy. But there has been no criticism of them in the Birmingham press. They seem satisfied that the black mayor is in jail. It serves the prejudices of their largely white, suburban audience.

So like a lot of places in this country today, where the mainstream, corporate news media has become part of the problem, not the solution, we are building the alternative place on the Web where people can Google the truth.

This week, a group of national labor leaders came to town on a fact-finding mission about the immigration crisis. Now if we could just get them interested in the rest of the political picture.

I am still betting that President Obama will be reelected next year, mainly because there is no universally popular and credible Republican opponent on the stage.

But it is also a sure bet that a majority of voters in Alabama and much of the South are still not quite ready to vote for a black Democrat. Now that the tea party Republicans control all three branches of government in Alabama, we are in for a long haul to catch this place up with the rest of the nation, on race and a lot of other economic questions, including the role of organized labor in the work force.

The good news is organized labor is fully engaged now in Alabama and ready to take the fight to Montgomery next year. This will get interesting. Stay tuned, but have a nice holiday break. We all deserve some time off to give thanks for what we have left.

Let’s just not grow complacent and forget that we have a long way to go to turn things around in this country, and in this state. People need to see that someone is on their side.

It is crystal clear the Republicans don’t give a damn. So it will be up to the Democrats this time around. Will they rise to the challenge and figure out ways to capture the public’s imagination again? We will see.