Archive for: October 4, 2006

An article in the Montgomery Advertiser asks the candidates for Secretary of State what they think are the most important issues facing Alabama. I learned two important things about the candidates in this race:

1. Beth Chapman gets right down to business letting the people know a trained monkey could do a better job than Nancy Worley. Check out these gems:

Common sense conservative business decisions will be made and never a luxury automobile bought at taxpayer expense

or how about…

Bringing the state into compliance with the Help America Vote Act. This inherited problem will need to be addressed immediately. I will cooperate with the special master/committee established to bring Alabama into compliance. Anything needed of me will be done in order to rid the state of a federal lawsuit and the embarrassment of my predecessor not having properly managed the situation.

or even…

Dead people will not be allowed to vote and absentee ballots will no longer be for sale.

Somebody go grab Nancy some aloe because she just got burned.

2. Nancy Worley likes to speak in the third person. That, or she just had someone copy and paste her answers from a generic campaign brochure. She has a lot of interesting ideas. I’ll give her that. But while we’re grappling with our failure to comply HAVA, is her “take a kid to vote” project really one of the state’s top issues?

I noticed I haven’t seen any of her patented “voter education” ads since the primaries, but I did hear one during the Crimson Tide pregame show on 99.5FM this past Saturday. I wonder how much taxpayer money it cost to campaign herself to educate all of us Bama fans.

• Politics in Alabama links to this post with Alabama Bloggers Roundup 

I almost wasn’t going to write a post about this. Larry is starting to get boring.

Larry Darby, the former hopeful for the Democratic nomination for attorney general, has written a letter to the Alabama Democratic Party asking Lucy Baxley to step down and for him to be named as the party’s nominee for governor. If you’re not familiar, Darby is a freak who denies the Holocust, wants to send out armed posses to lynch illegal immigrants, and thinks it’s okay to assault a homosexual if one of them flirts with you. He’s also an atheist [aside — if the atheism made your blood boil as much or more than the other stuff, you’re a freak too]. His APTV interview with Tim Lennox was especially fun to watch. From his letter:

Decades of cowering down to Judeo-Marxist or Communist popular front activist groups or special interest groups has effectively destroyed the efficacy of the Democratic Party in Alabama. I guarantee that if you put Larry Darby at the top of the ballot in November, I will lead the Party to its greatest days.

The Party was embarassed after his views became known but they [said they] couldn’t take his name off their primary ballots. The Democratic Executive Committee passed a resolution last month asking Larry Darby to no longer run as a Democrat in elections, and they say they can keep his name off the Democratic ticket in future elections.

Almost forgot — the Democrats said no.

• Birmingham Blues links to this post with Dan Thinks Larry Darby is Fun 

I guess we’re at a better place on the Laffer Curve right now. This state has two budgets — the Education Trust Fund and the General Fund. According to a report released from the Department of Revenue yesterday, the ETF is up 10.6% and the GF is up by 13.7%

“Alabama’s economy has seen a dramatic turnaround from just a few years ago,” Gov. Bob Riley said in a written statement. “Earlier this decade, our economy was struggling and the state was losing jobs. Today, we have record growth, net job gains and the lowest unemployment levels in Alabama’s history,” said Riley, who took office in January 2003 and is seeking re-election.

If Riley wasn’t a shoe-in for re-election before, he is now. Revenue is up so much that State Finance Director Jim Main says the legislature hasn’t even thought of a way to spend a quarter billion of it yet. Rest assured that money will be gone on day 1 of their next session. Good economy = good news for incumbents. But if Riley deserves some credit for the state economy, so does Jim Folsom for getting Mercedes. I guess it was a good time to run those commercials.

Maybe whoring off Alabama’s citizens as cheap labor to the world’s large multinational corporations is a good idea after all.

Mark Warner spent his last day in Alabama yesterday. The former governor of Virginia calls himself a “red-state Democrat” and is one of many Presidential hopefuls to visit Alabama since we moved the Presidential primary back to February. He left the governor’s mansion last year after serving the maximum allowable term and has spent much of the year 2006 on the road building up for a possible Presidential run.

He is unique among Democratic Presidential hopefuls in that he thinks he can win a few southern states. I’m not saying he can’t, but I’ll need some convincing. He was a popular governor of Virginia, though, and Virginia has been even more Republican than Alabama since the second half of the last century. Virginia hasn’t gone to a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Alabama voted for Carter the first time.

Warner spent Monday in Huntsville and Mobile. He rounded his trip yesterday with visits to Montgomery and Birmingham. I don’t know if he can carry Alabama’s electoral vote, but he is probably on the short list of Democratic nominees that could carry this state.

• Forward Together, a PAC that supports Mark Warner, links to this post on their blog with Warner is a refreshing change of pace 

I have to be impressed when he at least says something honest.

The violence in Iraq will not stop this year or next, Sen. Jeff Sessions said today after spending Monday in Baghdad and Ramadi, but he believes a new security plan announced by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be effective.

I wonder if he had to get that assesment pre-approved by George Bush. He did also say that withdrawing US troops would further destabilize the region so he wants to keep the troop numbers where they are. This is at least consistent with his June 22 vote against an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of ‘07 which would have required the President to redeploy troop from Iraq by the summer of next year.

Some other key votes from Senator Sessions on Iraq:

• Voted against an amendment that would have created a Senate committee to investigate war contracts awarded during the conflict and required an audit of spending that has already occurred.
• Voted against an amendment that would have forced the President to budget his wars in Iraq and Afganistan instead of using emergency funding to pay for everything. Using the emergency spending makes the President’s budget look a lot more fiscally responsible than it really is by leaving out the hundreds of billions in war costs.
• Voted for H.J.Res.114, the sorry piece of resolution titled, “To authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces in Iraq.”

An 18 wheeler dropped a steel coil on Interstate 59 in Birmingham. No one was hurt. It seems like I remember hearing about this somewhere before. Oh yeah! It’s happened twice that I can remember.

ALDOT says this is the 23rd time a truck carrying a steel coil has damaged an interstate in Birmingham since 1987.