WASHINGTON D.C. — The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that federal disaster aid has been made available to the state of Alabama and ordered federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts in the area affected by severe storms, tornadoes, straight-line winds, and flooding during the period of January 22-23, 2012.
Following is a summary of key federal disaster aid programs that can be made available as needed and warranted under President Obama’s major disaster declaration issued for Alabama.
The American Federation of Government Employees Local 1945 in the Anniston-Jacksonville area of Alabama says about 1,000 U.S. government workers are about to be laid off and their work assigned to contractors in other locations. So they are planning a “Save Our Jobs” rally for Monday, Jan. 30, at the Anniston Meeting Center Monday beginning at 5:30 p.m.
“Union member or not, we are in this fight together,” the union says in a press release announcing the event. “When one employee is cut the entire community is affected. With everyone’s help we can stop this attack on federal employees. We need to fight back and this meeting is the first step.”
CLAY, Ala. – This lone portrait of Tinkerbell was about the only thing that survived from one demolished home in the Pilgrim’s Rest subdivision off Deerfoot Parkway in Clay after a series of freakish winter tornadoes ripped through the heart of Alabama early on the morning of Monday, January 23, killing at least two and injuring more than 100, according to official estimates. More than 200 homes were totally destroyed, according to the American Red Cross, while many more were heavily damaged from Oak Grove to Center Point, Clay and points east all the way to Springville.
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.
On the final day of 2011 as I sit here sipping my coffee trying to remember, perusing the other top story lists and trying to figure out a way to sum it all up from here, one thing occurs to me. While the protesters in the Arab world and the Occupy protests are making all the lists, I can’t find one single mention of the protesters in Wisconsin or the reenergized efforts of organized labor across the U.S. on any of the lists.
Could it be that the American news media’s anti-union bias is at work here?
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
Democratic Party Chair Mark Kennedy recognizes Stewart “Buck” Burkhalter with a Hall of Fame award for a lifetime of service as head of the AFL-CIO of Alabama. Other Hall of Fame inductees included Dr. Paul Hubbert and Joe Reed of the Alabama Education Association, and Ruth Johnson Owens of the Alabama Democratic Women. More coverage in the works, including LOTS of video. Candidate qualifying starts in the morning.
A delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders from the AFL-CIO arrived in Birmingham Wednesday to investigate Alabama’s recently-passed anti-immigrant law.
With the passage of House Bill 56, Alabama has taken a huge step backward into the 1950s, according to a statement from the AFL-CIO’s Website.
They are calling the law one of the harshest immigration laws in the country and saying it “invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.”
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.
