Actor and filmmaker Sean Penn talks with Raul Castro about Obama, Guantanamo, and the Pentagon; and with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on human rights in his country and the next U.S. administration.

To read the full cover story on this in The Nation magazine online,
here’s the link.

Glynn Wilson

A flock of American robins [Turdus migratorius] went absolutely crazy today over the dogwood berries in northeast Jefferson County. I had to take a break from blogging to get some shots. Here’s one of the best. The temperatures eased back up into the 50s today after our early winter weather here, and the sun was shining some too, for a change. It’s too bad all the fall color disappeared in a flash. We missed it this year. Maybe we’ll get another chance at a camping trip soon…

Georgia Dome
by Dwayne Hood

ATLANTA, Ga. — The fat lady has sung.

The confetti has been swept from the floor, inauguration plans are made, and America is closing a chapter on one of the worst presidencies in our history.

Political honeymoons are nice but inevitably short lived. In the coming year, Americans will awake to the sad fact that Barack Obama is just another man, like all of the other men that we’ve elected to our nation’s highest office. He is not a messiah who can walk on water, feed the masses, or resurrect our economy from eight years of deregulated greed.

But Obama is refreshingly intelligent and has surrounded himself with brilliant, experienced people with differing views. He has assembled an impressive cabinet in a short period of time. And sadly enough, they will be called into service before January 20th because our present government is dysfunctional.

The remnants of the Bush administration are quietly stepping aside as the nation and the world waits to see how this new president and the Democrat-controlled Congress will confront two wars and the worst economic crisis since our Great Depression.

Here are a few predictions of what will and will not happen during the next four years.

The Democrats will not rub the Republicans’ noses in their loss as the GOP did to Democrats in 1995. The Obama administration will govern to the center and work for compromise with Republicans. And some Republicans will reach back across the aisle because they don’t want to be found on the wrong side of history. An age of continual gridlock will slowly thaw into reason and moderation.

The economic crisis will get worse in the coming years and the Obama administration’s mission will be damage control in preventing a deep, painful recession from imploding into a full-blown depression. There will be further job cuts, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and tax payer-funded bailouts. But we will eventually bottom out and slowly rebuild ourselves into a smaller but stronger economy able to weather 21st-century global challenges.

Obama will call upon Americans to sacrifice. That is a concept unknown to a majority of people. Our president’s response to a national crisis will no longer be a call to go shopping. It will be to work more, spend less, and do without.

The legacy of the Obama administration will probably be a Marshall-type plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and become energy independent. They will also address the dangers of global warming. There will be a bridge loan to the Big Three automakers with many strings and conditions attached. But it still may not be able to save all three. The Big Three may become the Big Two, but a segment of our manufacturing base will survive. And our remaining automakers and suppliers may eventually be merged into international auto conglomerates led from abroad.

The heyday of the American union is also over. The power of organized labor will surrender to the realities of globalization. There will still be unions but their power to control entire industries has ended.

And sadly, Joe “the gaffe machine” Biden is probably right. Obama will face an international challenge within his first year in office. We may even suffer another terrorist attack on our shores. But this new president will meet the challenge without landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier.

The war in Iraq will dramatically downsize into a troubled occupation. Most of our troops will be withdrawn in the coming four years. This will happen for several reasons. We do not have the billions of dollars necessary to keep 150,000 troops there for another four years. Al-Qaeda is also reconstituting itself into a force threatening enough to redeploy more forces into Afghanistan. And the Iraqi government is calling for our withdrawal.

As our troops withdraw, there will be widespread violence but it will be no worse than what we have seen in the past five years. The Iraqis will survive but their government will not be a democracy. The ultimate winners of our unnecessary invasion will be Iran which will coerce and control an Iraqi government amenable to their demands.

The United States will regain the moral standing among nations that was squandered during the past eight years. We will stop torturing prisoners and will shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Other constitutional violations such as illegal wiretaps, secret prisons, and politicization of the Justice Department will end. But many abuses of the past administration will go largely unpunished because of presidential pardons.

Some campaign promises will also fade to the harsh realities of an economic collapse. The health care and education issues in America will worsen because money and political willpower will be focused elsewhere. We can only put out so many forest fires at the same time. Priorities will be made and health care and education will languish.

Attention on illegal immigration and gay marriage will also decline. The collapse of our markets is already creating a silent, undocumented society of unemployed workers. The influx of new aliens will lessen as job markets dry up. And gay unions will continue as society debates the semantics on what to call it. Political fervor will die only to be kick-started by the GOP as a tired campaign issue in four years. But ultimately, gay marriage will recede from public view much like gays in the military, gays on television, and gays in the workplace, etc.

One of the overreaching victories of an Obama administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress will be future appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. The judicial pendulum will thankfully swing back to the center with at least two new appointments. That will rescue our court and our civil liberties from a possible Joe McCarthy-type conservatism.

The Republican Party will also reinvent itself into a kinder, gentler, and much smarter alternative to the Democratic Party. The GOP now stands at a serious crossroads. The Sarah Palin social fundamentalists want to pull the party farther to the right into a modern day puritanism. Nothing could make the party more irrelevant.

But new leaders such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford will lead the party back to the center. They will succeed because evangelicals will stop trying to vote their way into heaven and will trade their rigid ideology for moderates who can govern. The future GOP will have to open itself to different demographics in order to survive.

The Civil Rights Movement will also evolve away from grievance politics and white guilt to focus on paralyzing conditions African Americans inflict upon themselves. New spokespeople will promote jobs, education, marriage, health care, child care, and community activism. While discrimination will still exist and be decried, new leaders will call for less protest and more personal accountability.

The social and governmental torch is being passed to a new generation of Americans in both political parties. The culture wars of the past 40 years are being set aside to confront the most serious challenges of our lifetime. American history teaches us that great leaders are not born or simply elected into greatness. They are created by the trials and times in which they serve.

We now stand at the threshold of those times and trials. The next four years will determine who answers the call to our national destiny.

Dwayne Hood is a former newspaper reporter from Alabama who now spends most of his time in more academic pursuits, although he writes this weekly column exclusively for The Locust Fork News-Journal.

by Glynn Wilson

The voting machines are not even locked away in the closet yet from the presidential election of 2008 and candidates are already lining up at the trough to get into the horse race of 2010 in Alabama.

Glynn Wilson

Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham

Media critics have long complained about the coverage of politics since the press often uses sports metaphors, specifically the sport of horse racing. The academic complaint is that by keeping up with the status of the winners and losers, the press tends to ignore the real issues that should be of concern to voters.

The problem with politics today, especially local politics, is that people don’t vote for candidates on the basis of where they stand on the real issues anyway. And on key economic and social issues, there aren’t many candidates for public office in any event who disagree.

Everybody is for jobs and education and against abortion, it seems, and of course you have to be married with children. Otherwise, how could you ever produce a winning TV ad?

People vote for people on the basis of whether they like them or not, which is often based on how they look and whether they share the same religion, apparently, especially in a place like Alabama, despite our historical role in erecting the wall separating church and state.

Politics is not about qualifications, either. George W. Bush proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

And since you know blogs, they have to be fed, not so unlike a daily newspaper — or a horse — it’s time for our first “article” on the 2010 Alabama governor’s race.

Now the first horse out of the gate is obviously Artur Davis, the Birmingham Congressman with little name recognition in the rest of the state.

Davis glommed onto Barack Obama early on in the presidential race, using as his platform what’s left of the old New South Coalition machine put together by former Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington. And since Obama won in a landslide in November, Davis is now in an enviable position vis a vis the new administration in Washington.

Glynn Wilson

Democratic Party Chairman Joe Turnham

He has not hesitated to start flaunting his new influence with the Alabama Democratic Party, basically dressing down state party chairman Joe Turnham in public recently for presuming to start a series of meetings to advise the new president on possible political appointments in the new administration from Alabama.

Davis, Turnham Differ on Process for Appointments

That was not the smoothest move on the part of Davis, who showed that perhaps he has the ego of a Harvard lawyer and does not share Obama’s savvy when it comes to finessing his potential rivals. I mean the guy is not even so nice to his friends.

Democratic Party officials and operatives are looking at the polls from Alabama in the presidential race and wondering how in the world Davis thinks he has any chance at all anyway, considering something like 80 percent of white voters in Alabama did not vote for the black guy. They voted for the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket in numbers only rivaled in places such as Oklahoma.

Davis made an appearance this past weekend at a trial lawyers retreat hosted by billionaire attorney Jere Beasley, we’re told, and got a standing ovation. So there’s some indication Davis is trying to wrap up the support of the trial lawyers early on.

But we’re also told that the Jefferson County Democratic Party, which could act as a base for Davis in his race, is virtually non-existent at this point. No money. No organization. So it is unclear what base Davis expects to have in this Old South state.

Davis also does not seem to share Obama’s technological proficiency. While there have been a number of stories out of late about how Obama will be the first president in the White House to use e-mail on a Blackberry to communicate, Davis and his entire staff seem almost incapable of returning phone calls, much less answering questions of Web journalists via e-mail.

They just don’t seem to get it.

So Democrats are looking at other options.

The obvious first choice will be Jim Folsom Jr., who made his comeback in Alabama politics two years ago by winning his old job back as Lt. Governor without mounting much of a campaign at all. He has the name recognition and should probably be considered the front runner, even before the first polls have been taken.

The Associated Press went ahead and did their first story on Folsom this week.

Folsom Considering Run for Governor, Again

There are some potential problems with a Folsom candidacy, chief among them his obvious Old South name and his lack of creativity for bringing Alabama into the twenty-first century. He doesn’t do e-mail or return phone calls either.

Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks has also been mentioned, but we understand he may have some personal problems that could derail his candidacy.

Glynn Wilson

Charles Barkley at an Obama fundraiser in Birmingham last year

Then there’s always former Auburn and NBA basketball star Charles Barkley to consider, although he has apparently pushed his ambitions back to 2014.

And let’s face it. Since Alabama tends to be a conservative, red state, the Republicans might be more interesting to watch anyway, if you are a horse race handicapper intent on picking a winner.

Bradley Byrne, the head of Alabama’s beleaguered two-year college system, could get the nod as Gov. Bob Riley’s heir apparent. Birmingham attorney Luther Strange has been mentioned, although he might be more likely to run for Attorney General to replace Troy King. Troy University Chancellor Jack Hawkins may also jump into the race, as well as “Yella Man” Jimmy Rane, state Treasurer Kay Ivey and Tim James, according to stories in Alabama’s Newhouse newspapers.

And then there’s Attorney General Troy King himself, although we suspect he has developed a certain kind of infamy that may knock him out of any race he decides to enter.

The hottest rumor out of Montgomery right now is that Davis is running for governor not to win it, but to develop name recognition around the state for a future run at the U.S. Senate. And there’s also an indication that Davis will pick up the support of his old friend Bill Canary at the Business Council of Alabama in the primary. There appears to be a cynical strategy afoot to get a black man on the Democratic ticket so a Republican victory in the general election would be a virtual certainty.

When I heard this news I almost booked a one-way ticket to Portland, Oregon. As photographer Spider Martin used to say, “Alabama God-Damn.”

If that is the plan, I don’t want any part of it. Maybe the best thing to happen is this.

When the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta gets around to tossing out the conviction of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, maybe he should get back into politics and run for governor, again.

Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman

After surveying the landscape of my poor home state after moving back here in recent years, it has become quite obvious why Siegelman had the loyal following of many people here. He is the best candidate the Democrats have ever had for governor in this state’s history, with the possible exception of George C. Wallace. But that was another time. There was no Republican Party to speak of here then.

I wasn’t here during Siegelman’s one term as governor, so I can’t vouch for how effective he was as an administrator once he won the office he had vied for his entire adult life. But perhaps having been humbled by nine months in a federal prison and tens of thousands of dollars of debt for legal fees, maybe he can mount a comeback and be better at it.

I know one thing from my dealings with him over the past few months. He can cook a pizza and talk on the phone and send an e-mail message all at the same time. If I could find a single other politician in Alabama who could match those multi-tasking skills, I might support them myself editorially.

So if you want to have a chance of obtaining our endorsement to be governor of Alabama, prove you have what it takes. Start by sending me an e-mail message.

If none of them can manage that, maybe we should just opt for a celebrity like Barkley. I don’t have any idea what kind of an administrator he would make. But I suspect he would be an effective communicator, and a lot of fun to boot. And he may be the only Democrat who could win.