What is needed?

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., April 24- As I was driving south on Highway 431 the other day after descending the mountaintop in Huntsville at Monte Sano State Park, a jumble of thoughts rumbled around in my head about what to say on how to fix the problems we face with politics and the press in Alabama and the old US of A.

It would be easy to look around and say the situation is hopeless. The great masses in this country are by and large too ignorant and religious to educate. They depend way too much on TV news for information, and they are not particularly computer savvy.

And it is clear the press is way too interested in corporate advertising money to go out of its way to do the job that is needed.

Glynn Wilson

Scott Horton speaking on media reform

Even an educated writer like Scott Horton does not know enough about communications research or the workings of the Web to say much about the future.

(Read the full text of his remarks here).

It is easy to bash the corporate, chain press in this state for blatantly promoting moneyed interests, which just happens to fall to Republicans in this era as it was Bourbon Democrats in the 19th century after Lincoln freed the slaves. And it is easy to criticize the newspapers and TV stations for eschewing alternative facts that are freely available on the Web for anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to see.

It was somewhat heartening to see a nice crowd of people in Huntsville show up to the media reform presentation Tuesday night. But it did not exactly inspire hope to see that the average age of those in attendance was, well, older than me, and I turned 50 this year.

And as I look on the Web at the goals of the North Alabama Media Reform group, there is not one single word about the power of the Web to transform our media habits and make our politics and governance smarter. The chief goals of the group involve trying to bring liberal New York radio to the Alabama airwaves, which might be nice to listen to for liberals, progressives and Democrats. But it has about as much of a chance of reforming the media or the political landscape here in Alabama as a farmer telling a pig not to eat the slop dumped in the pin every day. (Sorry for the farm analogy. Guess it was inspired by passing so many farms in North Alabama on this trip : )

The group quotes Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and president of the group Free Press.Net, which bills itself as “a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media.”

But it is worth pointing out that McChesney was a sports stringer for UPI and wrote about rock ‘n’ roll before going into academe. In other words, he was not a political reporter or an investigative journalist. And he was tenured on the basis of other kinds of research long before he became the media critic darling of the American left.

Saying so is not to disparage his work, just as pointing out Horton’s weaknesses should not be seen as taking anything away from the great work he’s done on the Siegelman story. Without Horton’s blog columns on the Harper’s magazine Website, there would not have been such a national outcry in Siegelman’s case and most likely no report on “60 Minutes.”

But now that he has stopped blogging on a daily basis, where are the people of Alabama supposed to turn to find out what’s going on about other stories that come along? Is it possible that a site like this one with the creative combination of a news and blog interface might be able to attract some mass readership beyond the partisan e-mail lists that pass around news for free and allow motivated readers to comment?

It is obvious from the Karl Rove inspired rants from a couple of reporters for the Birmingham and Mobile papers that the state’s “Big Mule” papers are not going to change their tune. Maybe the people of Huntsville have a better chance of bringing about some changes in that local paper’s outlook, although the coverage of Horton’s appearance in their hometown does not inspire much hope.

This headline and story are so far removed from the reality of what actually happened at the event that it is a real wonder the people of Huntsville bother to read it at all.

Siegelman lauds pair who helped get him out of jail

And coverage in the Decatur Daily, a paper Horton credited with being one of the better small town papers in the land, was not much better, even though old executive editor Tom Wright was there himself. (The link is not freely available online).

As I have indicated before in this space, the answer to reform what the future looks like is in the hands of Web publishers who know what they are talking about when it comes to understanding the difference between objectivity in journalism and objectivity in science - and how to resolve those differences by correcting the mistake journalism historians have been making on this point for close to 100 years. You would think someone in the high tech capital of Alabama would have some inkling of this, in Huntsville, a place Horton referred to in his address as “Alabama’s brain.”

For the uninitiated, here are a couple of links to get started researching this issue. (I’ll have more to say about this in the days ahead).

Objectivity in science

Objectivity in journalism

I cannot tell you how many attempts have been made by journalists and scholars to illuminate this in recent years, although most of those efforts have fallen far short of what is needed.

McChesney himself, as quoted on the media reform Website, puts it this way:

“Journalism should not just report two sides that are spinning you and they say, ‘We report you decide.’ We don’t need that - that’s not journalism. Journalism is hearing what they’re saying and then investigating to see who’s telling the truth. That’s the value added genuine journalism does in a free society.

“And, people in power don’t like genuine journalism. They never have. Thomas Jefferson, he was the first one to criticize journalism when it went after him. But, he understood in principle you couldn’t have a free society without it. It’s simply impossible. It’s as true today as it was in 1791.”

That is all well said and good, but by itself, it is not going to be enough.

If the progressives in this state and country want to change things, they are going to have to learn to support alternative media outlets economically that actually have a chance to reach something of a mass audience online. Totally one-sided Democratic Party sites and lists and publications are not the answer. They have their place, but they are just “singing to the choir” so to speak.

In spite of being lumped into that class of blogger by the Alabama press, we are not a tool of any political party. We search for the truth through objective facts, and we look at the big picture.

The problem with a lot of local reporting these days is that the reporters and editors cannot see the forest for the trees. There may be all kinds of little corruptions going on in the community college system and the Legislature. But to focus on the little stuff ignores the larger problems in the world being caused by the most corrupt administration to ever occupy the White House.

That is a story you will not see on any TV news channel, national or local, not even “60 Minutes,” and it is not a story you will see fleshed out by any newspaper in the United States, not even the New York Times or the Washington Post. They may get out the little bits and pieces, just as the Associated Press and Reuters wire services do. To link it all together takes a writer with a broader and more experienced point of view to put issues into a fuller perspective.

Horton is good at it, and there are a few other fine magazine, book and Web writers we link to from time to time. But a prime example of what I am talking about is demonstrated in our coverage of the controversy over the Bush administration’s drive to browbeat Congress into granting the telephone companies immunity from lawsuits, you know, in the current debate over the so-called spying bill aimed allegedly at foreign “terrorists.”

To keep up with that story, the only real place to turn are Websites like this one, where we have covered each development and gone to great lengths to connect the dots, also drawing on the work of the Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos (linked in the blog roll).

If you are new here or missed this coverage, you can catch up under our category in the free archives called Liberty vs. Security.

Perhaps the North Alabama Media Reform group might be willing to expand its operations to cover the entire state, because dog knows this state needs media reform. As I told some people at the event, there is no history of media criticism in this state, in part because the university journalism schools are funded largely by the corporate, chain news outlets. There is no Alabama equivalent of the Columbia Journalism Review in New York.

Well, of course, except here at LocustFork.Net, where we are pioneering the alternative Web Press based on almost 30 years of journalism and academic experience. And we are doing it right here in Alabama, not out of New York. A liberal blog indeed…

Glynn Wilson

Mobile Press Register reporter Eddie Curran (left) made a fool out of himself at the event, interrupting and talking on a cell phone, while former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (top right) called attorney Jill Simpson “a true American hero” for blowing the whistle on Republican political prosecutions.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

It is hard to believe it has only been three years since we launched The Locust Fork Journal, the Weblog part of this Website. It seems like a decade has passed.

They say time flies when you are having fun. Maybe time drags when your self-appointed task is to document the bad news in Bush’s world.

It was three years ago this week that this blog became live on the Web. Perhaps this a good time to reflect on that time and on what we’ve learned doing it.

Three years ago, a jury in Birmingham failed to convict HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy for direct knowledge of cooking the books in one of the worst corporate fraud scandals in American business history.

Two years before, I had made a conscious decision to abandon a quest for an academic career and to get back into journalism full-time, a decision motivated in part by my own trauma after the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001.

But after one hell of a run as a free-lance journalist working out of New Orleans, I moved to Washington, D.C. to try and get in on the media fight to stop George W. Bush from being reelected to a disastrous second term. Alas, not enough people listened. So here we are in 2008 still having to listen to the dumbest, worst president in American history lie on TV on a daily basis.

In my last assignment working for the Bill Keller New York Times in the winter of 2005, I covered the Scrushy trial in Birmingham and made enough to pay cash for a Chevy van. It had long been a dream to mount a canoe on a van and write from the road.

By April, 2005, I was living that dream and back in DC doing some free-lance reporting for the now defunct States News Service, thanks to an old friend from Vestavia, Brooks Boliek, who was and still is the Washington bureau chief for The Hollywood Reporter.

I was sitting in front of an iMac computer at the desk in his kitchen in Silver Spring, Maryland, checking my e-mail and reading the Washington Post after a night out listening to blues at the Half Moon Barbecue, when I heard from my programmer in Knoxville, Tennessee that the blogging software was live online and available for Web publishing.

So as I often like to do on a Sunday, after reading the Sunday papers, I sat down at the computer with a strong cup of coffee and wrote this column.

Original Cowboy Blog

Since then, I have written hundreds of columns and breaking news stories and news features and investigative reports and blog posts, reaching out to thousands of readers, and I dare say we have had some fun - and made a difference here and there.

On no story is that more apparent than the story of Jill Simpson’s affidavit in the case of Alabama’s former Governor Don Siegelman, who was jailed by a federal judge in spite of much evidence that to do so would be a miscarriage of justice and based on corrupt, political actions by the Bush Justice Department.

Hundreds of bloggers have since joined us in covering that story, most in the wake of the story as depicted on the CBS News magazine show “60 Minutes.”

In the wake of that story, we have received a number of comments on the blog and in e-mail congratulating us for making a difference in Siegelman’s case, which is still not over.

But if you take the time to scan these Web musings in the archives, you may notice that there is an underlying theme to it all that has still not fully penetrated down to the masses, which means there is still much work left to do.

Sure, other blogs and magazines have picked up on it since. But it actually goes back to columns I was writing at Southerner.net before the LocustFork.Net Website went up in March 2005. It even goes back to the ending to a story I wrote in January 2004 on the Bush-AWOL situation.

That theme is and must remain the continuing fight to keep the American government from backsliding from a democratic republic into a monarchy from which we came.

This has become even more clear to me as I have watched the Home Box Office series on John Adams over the past few weeks.

Unfortunately the TV mini-series has its drawbacks, chief among them the fact that Adams is not the most exciting of the American founding fathers to watch in action. He is a short man of considerable ego who was never as popular in his time or in history as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, even though he was the first vice president and the second president.

But it is in many ways the legacy of John Adams that we fight for here at LocustFork.Net on almost a daily basis.

It was Adams who led the fight at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776 to break from the British monarchy and create a new and independent nation founded on the natural rights of man. It was Adams who led the way in setting up a government based on laws passed by men, not derived from God to the throne of a king.

And in spite of some mass sentiment to the contrary, it was not a Christian nation he envisioned. Freedom of religion was a necessary part of the plan to get all 13 colonies to go along. Without a significant nod to the pastors of the day, there would never have been enough public support to ratify the Declaration of Independence and raise an army to fight the British.

I was laughed at in 2004 and scorned in 2005 for raising the monarchy issue. But now if you do a Google search for “Bush and Monarchy,” you will get 85,800 hits, starting with this one:

The Neo-Monarchy of George W. Bush

We were one of the first independent news outlets to call for Bush’s impeachment three years ago. Now if you do a Google search for “Impeach Bush,” you get 140,000 hits.

Based on a study of the traffic numbers, there are still millions of people in Alabama and America who have not embraced this thing called a blog. And based on my experience in conducting an informal focus group with people in the South, we have a long way to go to convince enough people of these facts to turn things around.

The so-called mainstream media is still profiting from a Sir Walter Scott, Pollyanish and overly romantic view of the notion that everything will work out fine as long the press panders to people’s base prejudices in the name of objective profits.

But we will not stand idly by and watch this great experiment in individual liberty go down in the flames of history at the hands of the Bush’s and Cheney’s of the world, aided at every turn by the economic and social conservatism of the corporate press.

If you would like to join us and help us keep up this fight, we need your help to raise enough money to keep at it on a daily basis. Please consider making a donation today.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

There are no victory gardens anymore.

Are you old enough to remember victory gardens? If not, did you learn of victory gardens from your study of history?

Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit and herb gardens planted at private residences in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom during World War I and II to reduce the pressure on the public food supply brought on by the war effort, according to Wikipedia.

In addition to indirectly aiding the war effort these gardens were also considered a civil “morale booster” - in that gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown. Making victory gardens became a part of daily life.

Amid regular rationing of canned food in Britain, a poster campaign (”Plant more in ‘44!”) encouraged the planting of Victory Gardens by nearly 20 million Americans. These gardens produced up to 40 percent of all the vegetable produce consumed nationally.

We could live in a world of victory gardens now. It could have been different, if only our child king president had not been so personally insecure and hell bent on political victory at any cost. Instead of lowering taxes on the rich, he could have asked the people to join him in shared sacrifice to create a safer future. But no, he just had to go his own way and fill his government with the incompetently loyal - and to hell with the rest of us.

By tradition in the South, I planted a garden this week, the first week of April. It is certainly not a victory garden, because there can be no victory in Iraq - no matter what John McCain says.

It is simply a labor of love with the earth in bad times.

I planted cantaloupes, sweet corn, cucumbers, collard greens, green beans and three kinds of tomatoes, along with some marigolds to keep the bugs away, sun flowers for beauty and the seeds for bird feed and a couple of gourd mounds for bird houses.

As I plant my seeds in the ground and read about victory gardens on the Web, I often think of George Orwell and his Victory Gin, that bad grade of liquor manufactured by Oceana for the working classes.

And I wonder, as Orwell did, why I bother to write sometimes.

In 1947, Orwell wrote an essay entitled “Why I Write.”

In it, he says:

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in - at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own - but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.

They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all - and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.

But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose - using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Perhaps I write for all of those reasons, or none of them, although the idea of blogging perhaps lends itself to the last.

I would like to see the American people come together and create a better world, but I do not hold my breath with a lot of hope that it will ever happen. We can only try to prevent a world described by O’Brien, Winston Smith’s torturer, in 1984.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face . . . for ever”.

No, I will not live in that world. I will tend a garden with love - and hope enough people come around to the same point of view. I think I will plant an American flag in my garden along with a scare crow and call it a Revolutionary Garden.

With the rising price of gas and food in Bush’s world, there is something to be said for spending $1 for three tomato plants - and eating tomatoes with every meal for four or five months out of the year from July to October or November. Imagine a tomato a day for 150 days from an investment of 33 cents. There is not an investment bank or public stock that pays anywhere near that kind of a return on investment.

Maybe you should plant a Revolutionary Garden too…

Not Without A Fight

“Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either [aristocracy or monarchy]. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There (was) never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
- John Adams

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

As Home Box Office prepares to run its series on United States founding father John Adams beginning March 16, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book John Adams by David McCullough, perhaps this is a good time to reflect on where democracy stands on two of the film’s key lynchpins: The Boston lawyer’s reverence for the rule of law and his commitment to personal liberty.

Is American democracy over and done with, on the verge of collective suicide?

Or is there a chance to ring a little more liberty out of this great experiment before it collapses like the holy Roman Empire?

As they say in journalism school, there are two sides to every story.

If left to the ravages of King George and his religious supporters who have no problem with the idea of being led by a royal family who derive their power from God, we can kiss this democracy goodbye.

But as we are seeing at ballot boxes across America, there is a resurgence of “hope” in the turnout for revolutionary presidential candidate Barack Obama. Young Democrats are turning out in record numbers to vote for the first Black man in American history to have a real shot at the White House.

But King George will not go silently into that lame duck good night.

President George W. Bush continues his ignorant drive to destroy democracy in the name of creating a great empire to dominate the world. And it is profoundly ironic that he has fooled the masses in one of the most anti-federal government states in the union in the quest to destroy the rule of law and personal liberty in one fell swoop of history.

While Bush was browbeating Congress this past week to codify into law the most sweeping violation of individual liberty and privacy in the nation’s history by continuing to push for unlimited executive branch powers to spy on Americans, his loyal servants in the U.S. Justice Department in Alabama were trying to run raids on the Statehouse to arrest any viable Democrats in future elections.

While people across America are rising up against King George and fighting against the war in Iraq and the destabilized economy by voting in record numbers for Democrats, in Alabama, the people and the press seem to blithely go along with the hostile takeover of the government by Federalist Society lackeys.

As a student of great contradictions in society, this is one of the most confusing of them all. How can the people who voted so many times for George Corley Wallace now support a federal takeover of the Alabama Legislature?

If an American president had tried this in 1970, a hundred thousand people would have shut down the State Capitol in Montgomery with their protests. But today, the working class population of Alabama is so lulled into slumber by the contradictory rhetoric that they have laid down their arms and gone to sleep.

Bush campaigned on the same anti-federal government platform as George Wallace. When he took over the White House on the basis of that campaign, he immediately began to consolidate executive power like no president in American history.

This is so true that the so-called “liberal” New York Times ran a piece in the Sunday paper under the headline: Bush’s Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms His Legacy.

Affirms his legacy? Give us a break.

I say fuck King George - and his legacy.

Where are the people of America and Alabama who will stand with me and John Adams against his legacy? If you are with us, affirm it with your comment below.

“Trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
- John Adams, 1772

More Distortions Hit The Web in Siegelman’s Case

Under the Microscope

by Glynn Wilson

Sometimes in winter, even when there is rare snow on the ground in Alabama, it is better to sleep late. If for no other reason than to give the other Web publishers time to get their acts together before it’s time to put up the morning headlines.

There are some people in the South who have so little regard for what our esteemed president likes to call “the Internets,” however, that they bungle not only the online version of things, but the print edition too.

Knowing in advance that the Birmingham News was going to try one more time today to attack poor little Jill Simpson, a former life-long Republican from North Alabama, and kiss the ass of disgraced former Bush political adviser Karl Rove, I poured the coffee and began searching al.com for the headline. This is what I found:

Internet headline goes here

Upon the final click for the print version, poor Internet readers who take the time to figure it out finally get to this headline in the Opinion section: Siegelman’s Siege. It’s sort of like the Great Tennessee Valley Blackout of 2008. Obscure the story for the people who are not savvy enough or connected enough to get it.

Glynn Wilson

Don Siegelman on trial in Montgomery

But before we deal with that alternate reality, there are a couple of headlines we need to get to first.

The little Birmingham News reporters have gotten themselves a big time interview with Karl Rove, that mastermind of Bush politics who managed to take over the Alabama Supreme Court a few years back - by fooling the Birmingham and Mobile newspaper reporters with assertions of “jackpot justice” and such. You know, the same Karl Rove they used to call “Bush’s brain” - before we figured out he didn’t have one.

Rove denies lawyer’s Siegelman assertion

They bought it hook line and sinker then, and they are still buying it now. Since they don’t read things on the scary new “Internets,” they didn’t follow the story about Rove having to resign from the White House in disgrace last August in an attempt to avoid facing a subpoena to testify under oath before Congress in a host of national scandals.

Surely they ran an AP story about that in the print edition, but perhaps they were too busy to read it.

Foremost among the charges, the one that most directly affects Alabama, you know, the Birmingham News’ home turf, was the very idea that the Bush administration would fire federal prosecutors and even put former governors on trial for purely political reasons. That just couldn’t happen in the, pure as the driven snow, American judicial system, could it? And right here in honest little Alabama?

Scott Horton at Harpers.org does a fine job of refuting these stories, but we are wondering if the good people of Alabama are reading it. You see, it’s only printed on the “Internets.”

The Alternate Reality of the Birmingham News

The Net vs. The Web

Before I get into a more detailed refutation myself, let me first try one more time to explain to people the difference between the Internet and the Web. It is important, whether you get it or not.

I know this causes the folks at the Birmingham News much grief, because they are not in charge of their own Web site. They just crank out the print edition like they always have, and then turn it over to Advance Communications programmers to stick on the Web with what I like to call “shovelware” software at 4 a.m.

Since they have so little regard for the “Internets,” they don’t bother to check their headlines like they would for the newspaper. Thus the headline glitch. Sorry, but I’m still laughing: Internet Headline Goes Here, Insert Anti Siegelman Headline Here, etc.

Just so you will know, the Internet (singular) is the series of wires and computers hooked up by phone lines and cable lines all over the world that make it possible to do things like check e-mail - and get on the World Wide Web to read things like the online version of newspapers. The only way to read anything on the “Internets” is to pull up a Website in a Web browser. So the headline should have been: Web headline goes here.

Or better yet, they should have just put the actual story headline in their like everybody else : )

Since it’s obvious the programmers over at Advance don’t know the difference, and don’t care, that’s what you get.

But I suppose that is a minor thing and a difference that is lost on most people, so let’s get to the other headline.

Alternate reality goes here.

Since you can read the alternate story yourself, there’s not much need to quote from it at length. Let’s just summarize.

The poor little reporters at the Birmingham News, who are mostly relegated to writing unglamorous local stories about two-year colleges and the minor shenanigans of city councilmen in small towns and such, must get their adrenaline going pretty good when they have a chance to talk to someone as “big time” as Karl Rove. I mean he worked for THE PRESIDENT in that big White House in Washington and he is REAL IMPORTANT.

Talking to him might even get you on the front page, so why bother to ask a tough question? Just pick up the phone, hold the receiver and listen as God speaks. Take down what he says and print it as gospel.

And to heck with the word of one of our own little Alabama citizens, a lawyer no less, who HAS gone to Washington and testified under oath.

There was a time in the newspaper business when sworn testimony mattered. It was considered more believable in a “she said, he said” dispute.

Not anymore, apparently. This is the age of the “Internets,” when you can’t believe anything unless the Christian Republicans say it IN PRINT.

Nevermind also that Karl Rove is a Machiavellian atheist, and probably gay, not that there is anything wrong with that : )

But in this alternate reality, as long as our would-be king George W. Bush still loves him, Rove’s word is still as golden as the Good Book itself.

This is for the record and disputes the main allegation in the story against Ms. Simpson, to wit:

Simpson’s latest allegation that she met with Rove is one she had not made publicly before the “60 Minutes” interview, either in published reports, her affidavit or testimony before congressional lawyers.

This sentence, like another one in another Birmingham News story the other day, which I pointed out myself to editors there to no effect, is aimed like a charge at Ms. Simpson as if she did something wrong.

Simpson raised claims she has not made in previous interviews, in an affidavit or in sworn testimony before Congress.

Republican questions case against Siegelman

What are they thinking? Do they think Congress wanted to wade into the “gay” mine field on this story? With allegations floating around about Sen. Larry Craig in a Minnisota airport mens room? Of course not : )

It’s as if in this alternate print reality they live in down in that new newsroom of theirs in downtown Birmingham, they just can’t get their heads around the fact that Karl Rove worked his evil politics in Alabama just as he did in Washington.

The politics of Bush and Rove got us into this ill-conceived and costly war in Iraq and now has our economy teetering on the brink of a recession. It’s an Orwellian brand of politics that has the grand reputation of America on the ropes around the world for our willingness to go along with secret CIA prisons and torturing prisoners. And, it’s a type of politics that is willing to destroy the great American criminal justice system by using the courts to eliminate political opponents, even if they have to lie and cheat to pull it off.

There was a time when these things mattered in the newsrooms of America, and Alabama. It’s obvious now that the almighty dollar has completely taken over.

For the record, and I’ve already indicated my willingness to testify to this, I have heard from Ms. Simpson all about her dealings directly with Karl Rove, over and over again and late into the night on the telephone on many occasions. I have seen the documents which back them up.

But Ms. Simpson and her lawyer in Montgomery are not going to release any more documents until Karl Rove and the other participants in this scandal, including assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin, are called to testify under oath. And for good reason. They have a pretty good case building up that might land some people around here in legal hot water themselves, including the new head of the Alabama Republican Party, and Mr. Franklin at the so-called Justice department down in Montgomery.

The House Judiciary Committee has many of the documents already. And the members, including Rep. Artur Davis of Birmingham, thought enough of them to call a hearing and not only get Jill Simpson to testify. Respected Birmingham attorney Doug Jones testified under oath as well, pointing out a series of important key events that the poor readers of the Birmingham News still do not know. He said the Department of Justice had indicated there was no case against Siegelman and that the charges were going nowhere, until someone in Washington ordered a top down review of the case - after Mr. Siegelman decided to run against Bob Riley in the 2006 election.

Could that simply be coincidence? Not likely.

Coup de Grâce

Somehow that is all lost on the Birmingham News staff, including the editorial section, where we can now get to the coup de grâce.

Then there was Dana Jill Simpson, a Rainsville lawyer who has been lobbing would-be bombshells for months about the Republicans’ alleged vendetta against Siegelman. On “60 Minutes,” she claimed Republican strategist Karl Rove personally asked her in 2001 to try to get evidence Siegelman was cheating on his wife.

A word about this: It’s not as if Rove hasn’t dabbled before in Alabama politics, and it’s certainly not as if Rove is above playing dirty.

The problem is Simpson. She has dribbled out damaging allegations in such a way as to undermine her credibility….

Well, I guess someone down there finally got onto the “Internets” and figured out that yes, Karl Rove had been here, in Alabama. And yes, he’s a dirty, sleaze ball political dirty trickster who would make George C. Wallace’s campaign bag men look like kindergarten bullies.

But it still doesn’t matter, right? Let’s just treat is as a funny, insignificant fact…

But the problem is Ms. Simpson, they say, who “dribbled out” damaging allegations? Undermined her credibility?

I mean she told the New York Times, Time magazine and me about them last June, ad nauseum. And she laid them out in the fall in documents presented under oath before Congress. It’s just that no one has reported that particular part of the story until now, and of course the Birmingham News never tried. It’s because of how the national television news media works.

The CBS News magazine show “60 Minutes” liked the part of the story about how Mr. Rove wanted Ms. Simpson to look into Don Siegelman’s sex life. It was what we call in the business “something new” or a “new angle” or “advancing the story” or “new details.” It’s not only sensational and scintillating. It’s downright sleazy. And of course it helped get the national audience interested, and I’m told it worked. The show’s ratings were off the charts - except in that part of North Alabama and Southern Tennessee where it was blacked out, of course : )

Gay Rumors

Quite frankly, I did not want to report on that part of the story because it opened the door to bring out all of the other Karl Rove allegations about Mr. Siegelman, a tactic he’s used in every political race he’s ever been involved in. That is to say, what the “60 Minutes” story points to, without revealing it, was that what Rove wanted Ms. Simpson to investigate was this: Whether Don Siegelman was gay.

In political reality, as opposed to science reality, it didn’t make any difference if the allegations were true or not. The rumor can be enough in politics.

Rove did it to Ann Richards in Texas when he was running George W. Bush’s first campaign for governor, and it worked on her. Bush won. That is well documented.

He has already done it to Hillary Clinton.

And this part is lost on the reporters and producers in New York. The same sort of rumor in Alabama helped George Wallace defeat George McMillan in the 1982 race for governor, the next closest election in the state before the 2002 race between Siegelman and Riley. If memory serves, Wallace won by something like 30 votes per precinct in Alabama’s 67 counties. I know for a fact the gay rumor was floating around about McMillan from the Wallace crowd, because I heard it myself and even repeated it to then Birmingham News managing editor Tom Bailey.

But apparently, in addition to just not liking Mr. Siegelman, the Birmingham News and Mobile Press-Register reporters actually believed the rumors. And maybe they still do. I heard those rumors in the bars of Montgomery myself back in 2004 while researching Bush’s time in Alabama in 1972, when he was AWOL from the Air National Guard and working for Red Blount’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Another reason I didn’t report it initially was because it is a long and complicated story with way too many characters to get down in a newspaper or magazine story. It would take a book to document Don Siegelman’s story - and now Jill Simpson’s role in it.

The other reason is that Ms. Simpson failed to find any evidence of a homosexual relationship between Mr. Siegelman and his long-time aide Nick Bailey. So why bring that to light at all?

When the New York Times and Time magazine first broke this story on June 1 of last year - based on two leaks, not investigative journalism - the focus was on the new affidavit itself that brought out sworn evidence for what Mr. Siegelman had been saying all along: It was a political prosecution directed from Washington.

The Whistleblower

Here was a Republican lawyer acting basically as a whistleblower, willing to swear that it was true, and that neither Mr. Siegelman nor Mr. Scrushy got a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Now that is a big story, even in Birmingham, Alabama, which is why I got involved in covering it from that day forward. That weekend, I went to Rainsville and interviewed Ms. Simpson for eight hours and poured over boxes of documents and came away convinced that what she was saying, under the threat of perjury, was true.

The Birmingham News staff, or more likely the management, still don’t believe it, in part because they did not bother to investigate the story from day one. They got beat on the story by the “liberal” New York Times and the little Locust Fork Journal, published on the “Internets.” And they were not going to back down from supporting “you the man” Bush and Gov. Bob “Cowboy Boots” Riley, who have been so good for the state’s economy.

And even in the face of an extensive investigation by the producers at “60 Minutes,” they will not take a good long peak into the reality box. They have to stay in their unreality box, handed to them by loyal Bushie Republican operatives, because it is the economic box that supports them.

There’s really no other way to interpret the delusional reporting that goes on around here, except for maybe the snow. I know for a fact that some of those folks learned a better form of journalism in the universities of the South. But for the sake of the money, they will go on reporting it wrong, either because they have convinced themselves it is right. Or because their conservative bosses demand it.