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.
More Americans trust President Barack Obama to influence the direction of the country than the Republicans in Congress. According to the latest Gallup poll on the subject, 46 percent of Americans say they want the president to have more influence over the direction the nation takes in the next year, while 42 percent said they would rather have the Republicans in Congress calling the shots.
U.S. preferences have been closely divided on this question since early 2011 after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. But President Obama has consistently had a slim advantage, suggesting a real lead for him, according to Gallup.
In general, Democrats want Obama to have more influence and Republicans want the Republicans in Congress to have more influence. Independents are more likely to prefer Obama.
Two steelworkers tell their story about how they lost their jobs when Mitt Romney and Bain Capital took over the steel plant in Kansas City and eventually shut the place down.
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.
You’ve got to admit, this country has gone weird. Maybe it’s always been so, but if a Massachusetts Mormon wins South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, you know something is not right with the world.
Most of the pundits are predicting that an uber-rich Mormon from Massachusetts is about to be the Republican nominee for president. According to the Irish odds-maker Paddy Power, the largest bookmakers in Europe, Mitt Romney is the odds on favorite to win the South Carolina Primary at 2-5. Newt Gingrich should take second at 7-2, while the odds on Rick Santorum stand at 11-2. It’s 25-1 for Ron Paul, 33-1 for Rick Perry and 100-1 for John Huntsman.
If Romney wins there, experts say it is going to be hard for his rivals to continue their presidential campaigns, to raise the money to go on and build a national infrastructure to take him on.
The same press release from the Paddy Power press office has Romney the 1-8 favorite to become the Republican nominee, but he only has a 6-4 chance of becoming president. The black guy from Hawaii, President Barack Obama, is favored 8-11. I’ll take that bet and throw in a 12-pack of Sweetwater Georgia Brown.
According to Gallup, Romney has finally broken the 30 percent barrier among Republicans. In the latest poll on the subject, Gallup reported that Romney has “finally surpassed 30 percent support among Republicans nationwide and is now their majority pick for the GOP candidate most likely to win the party’s 2012 presidential nomination.”
The percentage of Americans who identify themselves as independents politically went up in 2011 to 40 percent of the public, the highest percentage Gallup has measured since tracking the issue over the past 60 years.
But contrary to the image portrayed of the public in the mainstream media in the United States, more Americans still identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans. According to Gallup’s latest survey on the subject, 31 percent of Americans say they are Democrats while only 27 percent admit to being Republicans, perhaps because of the pathetic showing of the morons and dingbats making idiots out of themselves so far in the Republican Primary race for president.
Gallup records from 1951-1988 — based on face-to-face interviewing — indicate that the percentage of independents was generally in the low 30 percent range for much of the last half of the 20th century. In recent decades, Gallup has observed a pattern of increased independent identification in the year prior to a presidential election, and a decline in the presidential election year. The only exception to that was in 1992, when independent identification increased from 1991, perhaps the result of President Bush’s high approval ratings in 1991 and Ross Perot’s independent presidential candidacy in 1992.
Democrats Maintain Party Edge
There was a two-point increase in independent identification from 2010 to 2011, from 38 to 40 percent. The increase in independent identification came at the expense of Republican identification, which dropped from 29 percent to 27 percent, while Democratic identification held steady at 31 percent. The net result of those changes is an increase in the Democrats’ advantage in party ID over Republicans, from two points to four points, according to Gallup.
Pennsylvania Republican Rick Santorum, the former Senator and Fox News contributor who pulled a surprise second in the Iowa Caucus, has emerged as the Christian conservative still standing in the presidential race of 2012. He only lost to Massachusetts Mormon Mitt Romney by 8 votes.
As readers of The Locust Fork News-Journal know by now, we are always on the lookout for writers who can connect the dots to help educate the masses on the contradictions between what politicians say and what they do. We believe if more people understood the difference between rhetoric and policy, we could get people to vote in a way that actually forms a more perfect union.
One writer who has emerged in an American newspaper who seems to get this is Jay Bookman with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I recently added his column link to the news page where you can find the link to check on a regular basis.
In today’s column, Bookman takes on Santorum’s views on privacy.
Oh Alabama
The devil fools
with the best laid plan.
Swing low Alabama
You got spare change
You got to feel strange
And now the moment
is all that it meant.
Alabama, you got
the weight on your shoulders
That’s breaking your back.
Your Cadillac
has got a wheel in the ditch
And a wheel on the track
The tea party Republican Congress will go down in history, alright – as the worst rated, the most unpopular Congress in history.
A new record-low 11 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, according to the latest survey on the subject, the lowest single rating in Gallup’s history of asking the question since 1974. This earns Congress a 17 percent yearly average for 2011, the lowest annual congressional approval rating in polling history.
This discord in Washington caps off a year in which Congress fought bitterly before reaching a last-minute agreement to lift the debt ceiling, instructing a bipartisan supercommittee to cut more than $1 trillion from federal spending by the end of November. That objective was not reached, and the supercommittee ultimately announced that it could not reach an agreement, and disbanded. Also, this majority-Republican Congress will be known as the “Do Nothing Congress,” for opposing anything and everything President Barack Obama proposed to get the economy moving again.
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.
