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.
As video spread of an officer in riot gear blasting pepper spray into the faces of seated protesters at a northern California university Friday, outrage came quickly — followed almost as quickly by defense from police and calls for the chancellor’s resignation, according to National Public Radio.
In the video, an officer dispassionately pepper-sprays a line of several sitting protesters who flinch and cover their faces but remain passive with their arms interlocked as onlookers shriek and scream out for the officer to stop.
University of California Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi said in a statement Saturday she was forming a task force to investigate the police action and the video images she said were “chilling.”
The Locust Fork News-Journal can now claim the distinction as one of the first Web only publications to hold a membership in a state professional press association in the country, an indication that the Web is growing up and moving beyond the era of the anonymous blog.
The board of the Alabama Press Association, made up exclusively of newspaper publishers and editors, voted this week to approve membership for Glynn Wilson’s Web publication, according to Member Services Coordinator Tay Bailey.
“We are extremely pleased that the board saw fit to approve our membership in the state’s professional press association, and we hope to work with the board to write some guidelines for what constitutes the Web Press to pave the way for the future of online news,” said Wilson, editor and publisher of the News-Journal, a daily Web publication started five and a half years ago on the so-called “Information Superhighway” at the domain name or Web address LocustFork.Net.
While the association’s board has discussed the Web in the past, and considered adding a Web category to its annual awards for the Best Newspaper Contest, it has yet to be approved, according to Ms. Bailey.
This move is just one building-block step to constructing an alternative, independent Web Press in this state and country, Wilson said, where all the founding documents, laws and court precedents use the term “press,” as in Freedom of the Press, so Web publications that replace print newspapers cannot be called “blogs.”
In an interview Monday with the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain visibly struggled to explain his position on President Obama’s Libya policy.
The video is particularly damaging for Cain, according to the Washington Post, since he has struggled on matters of foreign policy in the past.
Asked if he agreed with the president, Cain said, “Okay, Libya,” and then was silent for about ten — yes, ten — seconds, before asking, “President Obama supported the uprising, correct?”
Jack Abramoff may be the most notorious and crooked lobbyist of our time, according to CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
He was at the center of a massive scandal of brazen corruption and influence peddling.
As a Republican lobbyist starting in the mid 1990s, he became a master at showering gifts on lawmakers in return for their votes on legislation and tax breaks favorable to his clients. He was so good at it, he took home $20 million a year.
Politico Reports Herman Cain’s Damage Control Marked by Inconsistencies
Political Analysis
by Glynn Wilson
A new political news Website in Washington, D.C. is becoming a major player in Washington politics less than four years after launching on January 23, 2007.
Politico, financed by Robert Allbritton, chairman and chief executive of Allbritton Communications, which owns television stations in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, all affiliated with the Disney-owned ABC network, broke a story on Halloween Eve accusing Republican front runner Herman Cain, the former chairman and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza who is originally from Georgia, of inappropriate sexual behavior with at least two women during his tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s.
At least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, according to “multiple sources,” Politico said in the breaking news story on the subject.
After reporting that the restaurant association had reached financial settlements with two women, Cain and his spokesmen offered what Politico called “a shifting and inconclusive series of responses (see video above).”
Democratic Party Chairman Mark Kennedy answers questions on Alabama’s strict, new immigration law. Watch the video to see what he had to say and share it with your friends and family. You won’t find this kind of honest coverage anywhere else, not in the newspapers, on local television news, on cable news or even in The New York Times.
Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Mark Kennedy talks about the role of labor in politics in the state and country and the agenda for the Democratic Party in the years ahead in this exclusive interview with The Locust Fork News-Journal.
Al Henley of Montgomery was elected president of the AFL-CIO of Alabama this week. In this exclusive interview with The Locust Fork News-Journal, he talks about the state convention, what organized labor’s plans are for the next year in Alabama and the presidential election of 2012, and how unions are planning to use new technology to get its message out to the American people.
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.
