Guest Editorial
by Barack Obama

This weekend, our family will join millions of others in celebrating America. We will enjoy the glow of fireworks, the taste of barbeque, and the company of good friends. As we all celebrate this weekend, let’s also remember the remarkable story that led to this day.

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, our nation was born when a courageous group of patriots pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the proposition that all of us were created equal.

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Alabama’s senior Republican Senator Richard Shelby is having to backtrack today on comments he made at a town hall meeting Saturday in Cullman, which may have been made in retaliation for recent reports alleging that White House counsel Graig Craig violated Shelby’s attorney-client confidentiality when he talked to North Alabama lawyer Jill Simpson about representing her before her testimony in the Siegleman case before the House Judiciary Committee, as we reported early this morning in this story.

Shelby’s office is calling a Cullman Times report “incomplete” and a “distortion” of his comments on President Obama’s citizenship status during a town hall meeting Saturday.

When asked during the meeting whether there was any truth to the rumor that Obama was not a United States citizen, Shelby said, “Well his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president.”

According to the Politico, a Washington-based publication, Shelby spokesman Jonathan Graffeo issued the following statement:

“The Cullman Times article contains an incomplete account, and therefore a distortion, of Sen. Shelby’s comments regarding President Obama’s citizenship. At the town hall meeting in Cullman, Sen. Shelby laid out the Constitutional qualifications for the Presidency and said that, while he hasn’t personally seen the President’s birth certificate, he is confident that the matter has been thoroughly examined.”

The Times stands by its reporting as complete and accurate, according to a statement on the newspaper’s Web site. The paper is also seeking video or audio recordings from the meeting to verify the report.

According to FactCheck.Org, the birth certificate of birth from Hawaii is authentic.

Some people area asking: Is this a Trent Lott moment?

But we do have much more work to do building the Web Press…

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

We aren’t going to have George W. Bush to kick around anymore after Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. So what’s a liberal-tarian blogger to do?

In our case, that’s an easy question to answer. We will be right here continuing to develop the next evolution in the Web Press and building the infrastructure to replace newspapers as the primary information source for a democratic nation.

It’s probably true that half of our blog archive involves Bush bashing, but it’s also true that it contains a wealth of information about what went down in The Bush Years, and shows how we were on the story warning people long before Bush’s corrupt incompetence led to an implosion of the Republican Party and the historic election of Obama.

Like Obama, we are focused on moving forward, politically and technologically. We will be here for every policy fight we must face to transform this country into something that is sustainable into the future. We recognize that the problems are great and the challenges daunting.

But we are not quite ready just yet to completely let the Bush administration off the hook for the problems they created, most notably on the environmental front — and in the system of justice this country must depend upon to be conducted impartially, if we are to succeed and excel as a free nation. There are people still who should be required to face justice, chief among them Bush’s former political adviser Karl Rove.

At the same time, we are committed to moving this technology ahead by thinking about and building the Web Press of the future, the next iteration in our evolution, so to speak. Call it LocustFork.Net 2.7.

While some newspaper companies have made strides in moving to the Web to replace their nearly obsolete printing presses, many of the old newspaper corporations have just not fostered the culture to ensure we have A PRESS in the future. Make no mistake. There can be no American democracy without a free press.

And it has to be called The Press, not a blog, not only because that is what we are all conditioned to follow, but for legal purposes.

Every legal case that establishes and extends our rights of free speech and press refer to “the press,” which was granted special rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The press does not have to mean — it cannot mean much longer — a printing press using ink and paper.

Our legal structures are not yet fully established to extend our freedoms to the Web Press, which just means that there are many fights ahead before we fully protect these rights.

For starters, the lawyers in the Library of Congress copyright office still have not figured out how to protect a Web publication from theft by print publishers. We often hear about theft from copyrighted print publications by those on the Web, but what about the other way around?

If I break a story here and a newspaper reporter or book publisher takes my reports like they would a wire story and integrate that into what they know and write for print, but fail to give me proper credit and/or compensation, should I not share the same right to sue that they enjoy? Obviously from my experience in the Kitty Kelly lawsuit, that is not the case, yet.

The written word is no longer something that has to be printed out to have value and power. We’ve seen it time and again since the first Web publishers and bloggers came online, but rarely do we see an educated, intelligent conversation about all these changes taking place and how to regulate and deal with them.

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National Polling Shows A Landslide Coming for Democrats Nov. 4

by Glynn Wilson

If the presidential election were held today, Alabama would remain red on the national electoral-college map and the state’s nine electoral votes would go to the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin over Barack Obama and Joe Biden, according to the most recent Capital Survey Research Center poll, although more people in Alabama believe Obama will win on Nov. 4.

About 56 percent of those polled in Alabama say they plan to vote for McCain, the Republican, while only 35 percent say that will vote for Obama, the Democrat, while 9 percent are undecided or wouldn’t say, according to the survey of 554 likely voters conducted on Oct. 2, 6, and 7. The survey had a margin of error of 4.2 percent.

When asked who they thought would be elected president, however, 46 percent said Obama, while only 37 percent said McCain. Seventeen percent were undecided on that question.

The support levels for both candidates have not changed much since April of last year. Obama hit his highest peak in October of last year, when 41 percent of likely voters in Alabama said they would vote for him. McCain hit his lowest point last September at 44 percent.

Meanwhile nationally, the aggregated polling at Pollster.com has the Democrat winning in a major landslide with 324 electoral votes to 163 for the Republican.

Key states to recently change, most likely due to the financial crisis, include Colorado (9 electoral votes) and Florida (27 electoral votes), where Obama has now moved out of the margin-of-error range with a lead of about 50-45 percent.

North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri and Nevada are the only toss-up states now, and McCain could not win the election even if he won them all.

EXCLUSIVE!

by Glynn Wilson

The ailing Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, one of Birmingham’s most important icons from the Civil Rights days, was ecstatic to hear the news Wednesday that the Democratic Party had nominated Barack Obama as the first African-American standard bearer for any political party in American history.

Bonnie M. Fountain

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth

Obama is the first black man to have a really good chance of becoming president of the United States, about 50 years after the struggle for equal rights kicked off in Alabama when Shuttlesworth was still a fairly young man fighting Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham.

“Anything is possible in America,” Shuttlesworth said when told the news of Obama’s nomination in Philadelphia, where he will attend his 75-year-old brother Clifton’s funeral Thursday.

“I’m looking forward to Obama rebuilding our nation and our reputation around the world, which is at an all-time low,” he said.

With his health problems of the past year since he suffered a stroke, Shuttlesworth, 86, was not able to travel this week to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.

But just like Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, one of Martin Luther King’s lieutenants who was interviewed on MSNBC Wednesday, Shuttlesworth reacted emotionally to the moment.

“We need the immediate end to the Iraq war, a sensible health-care plan and a fix for the plunging economy, as well as solutions for our serious problems with education, housing, banking, and the disastrous mortgage situation in this country,” he said. “The world used to look up to us for leadership. We need to regain their trust. I believe Obama is the man for the job.”

Presidential candidate Barack Obama will announce his running mate later today. We are on the e-mail list to find this out as soon as everyone else. And since we are faster than most, we will have the announcement right here as soon as it happens.

If you are not on the list, check back here often throughout the day and hit refresh to find out first.

AP: Obama not ready to name running mate just yet

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate and Senator John McCain maintains a 12 percent lead over Democrat Barack Obama in Alabama, according to Gerald W. Johnson of the Capital Survey Research Center. However, McCain has dropped some 10 points since June while the undecided and other vote increased 10 points.

“The relevant question is where does the undecided vote go?” he asks.

The numbers probably underestimate the Obama vote by 2-4 percent for two reasons, he said. One, cell phone use is heavier for younger and Black A-A voters and just cell phone users are not included in the data and the vote in these categories are primarily Obama. Two, the numbers do not include new registrations which are up for Democrats, including Black and younger voters, and down for Republicans.

Also, he said in a statement, the vote is heavily specified by demographic variables.

“That is, the McCain vote is stronger among voters with higher rates of church attendance, older age, higher income, males and rural residence,” he said. “McCain gets one percent of the Black vote while Obama gets 15 percent of the white vote.”

Read more about it on the Alabama Education Association Website.