Archive for: October 20, 2006

I picked up a sample ballot from the probate court yesterday (you should check to see if your probate court has one). Even a political follower like myself is confused when looking at all these races. Apparently, I’ll need to make an informed decision about the tax collector and tax assesor of Tuscaloosa County.

One of the races I really don’t care about is for the Court of Criminal Appeals seat 3 with Republican Sam Welch facing Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur. But lucky for me I read a Decatur Daily article this morning which made my job a little easier.

“The primary purpose of the criminal justice system is punishment,” Welch told THE DAILY editorial board on Thursday. “They don’t think like you and I. Many have psychological disorders, so they don’t see right from wrong or when not to cross those boundaries.”

So he claims that many criminals have psychological disorders, and he thinks the way to deal with that is to throw them in prison for punishment? Look, I’m not saying we need to pat criminals on the head, but this guy, with 25 years of judicial experience, is saying that many people that he’s apparently sentenced to prison were mentally unfit to distringuish right from wrong.

“I just think it’s a realistic view on who criminals are.” He said most convicts are under 24 years of age and are high school dropouts who don’t have a job and live with their mother or grandmother.

I’d like to see the study about that he’s quoting. Oh, that’s right. He’s not referencing any study. He’s making an emotional decision because the job he does has apparently gotten to him so much that he can’t make an unbiased assessment. I’d say that’s a good reason to vote for his opponent, Deborah Bell Paseur.

Stan Pate is Tuscaloosa’s resident rich weirdo. I like some of the oddball things he does, but generally he’s just strange — getting into bar fights and such. Anyway, he really doesn’t like Bob Riley. Most of Pate’s business comes from leasing out a bunch of land he owns so it’s no surprise he opposed Riley’s 2003 tax proposal. He ran the ads that famously labelled Riley, “Billion Dolar Bob.”

Apparently, he paid to have an ad run against the governor. Some were run Wednesday and Thursday, but Riley’s campaign complained that the statements were false and television stations in Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville and Montgomery pulled the ad from the air. In it, Pate claims that an October 16 report by the Alabama Legislative Contract Review Committee shows that Riley has handed out $1 billion in no-bid contracts.

But the co-chairs of that committee, Sen. Tom Butler, D-Madison and Rep. Neal Morrison, D-Cullman, said in a letter Thursday that no such report by the committee was produced on Oct. 16 “or any other date.”

Pate is calling Riley a liar and promises that he hasn’t seen the last of Stan Pate! The fact that Stan Pate doesn’t like Riley makes me think maybe I should.

Right now the governor’s race is a shoe-in for Riley — there’s just no excitement to be had except maybe to see how many write-ins were received. Maybe they will even count them up to see how many votes Loretta Nall got.

The lieutenant governor is technically the second-highest office in Alabama, but is it really? Ever since Steve Windom (R) was elected, the office has few responsibilities. Before Windom, the lieutenant governor had some organizational powers over the state senate. Now the job mainly consists being the presiding officer of the parliamentary procedure, sitting on non-constitutional state boards, and keeping your body warm in case the governor croaks. The only real power the position still has is determining points of order and getting to pick who goes first if two senators rise to address the chamber. So even though this race is competitive in the polling, I just can’t get myself worked up over who the winner will be.

I agree with Jeff Vreeland over at Politics in Alabama. The race for attorney general is the most-exciting race on the top of the ballot. John Tyson (D) and incumbent Troy King (R) are polling competitively and they are different enough that you probably have a favorite. And attorney general actually matters, even if it should probably be appointed.

Cindy Irvin, the Republican nominee for House district 80, says her brake lines were cut in an effort to intimidate her. Her opponent is the incumbent Lesly Vance (D), who was not quoted in the Opelika-Auburn article. She says the damage happened either Saturday night or early Sunday morning.

I can’t see an incumbent stooping to this level, but it’s possible that one of his supporters would. I know politics can get nasty, but let’s not try to kill the other candidate — okay, guys?

Patricia Todd (D) is going to be the first openly gay legislator in Alabama. Todd is a white lesbian who fairly won a well-publicized primary election in a majority-black district against a woman who had the backing of a very strong black organization, the Alabama Democratic Conference. She has no opponent in the general election.

At the time, I wondered how long it would take for a Republican lawmaker to use this for political gain. Maybe by saying legislation she sponsors is part of the “gay agenda.” I expected the guy who wants to bury books he disagrees with, Gerald Allen. Or perhaps the guy who thinks God sends Hurricanes to us because of the “perverted lifestyles” of some of our citizens. But no, it wasn’t one of the wacky Republicans — it was the chairman (she prefers the masculine) of the Alabama Republican Party herself, Twinkle Cavanaugh.

And Cavanaugh isn’t just attacking Todd. She’s attacking all Democrats. Cavanaugh has drawn the line in the sand. She thinks you shouldn’t vote for Democrats because there is a lesbian Democratic candidate who is going to win the election, and now all Democrats are guilty by association. She made her views clear in an automated message (click to hear audio) sent to Alabamians to urge them to vote against Rep. Lea Fite (D-Jacksonville). The first part of the message says that,

As a Democrat running in the Alabama House, Lea Fite has pledged his support to gay rights advocate and openly lesbian House candidate, Patricia Todd. Patricia Todd will work to legalize same-sex marriage and gay adoptions. [emphasis in the original]

Actually, Todd has not campaigned for same-sex marriage or gay adoptions. Her campaign platforms were education and jobs. She’s actually said more than once that she wishes people would just get over her sexuality so she can get to work on something that matters.

[Todd said,] “I don’t even know Lea Fite. He has not been supportive of my campaign in any way. Yes, I’m openly gay, but I’m not going down to fight for gay marriage or any other issue on their list.”

Fite said he does not support either gay or straight candidates. “I don’t support anybody but myself. I don’t get involved in anyone else’s campaigns.”

It’s not a big deal that Cavanaugh mis-represented the platform of Patricia Todd. That happens all the time. I just find it sad that the Republican Party has officially become an anti-gay party.

UPDATE: Lea Fite is quoted by the Advertiser as saying,

“This is just nasty politics. It’s a shame that the Republican chairman would stoop to this,” Fite said.”The people around here are so mad that this type message was left on answering machines and when children got home from school they got to hear it.”

• H/T Birmingham Blues
• H/T Doc’s Political Parlor
• H/T The Alablawg
• Alabama Moderate links to this post with Tidbits from Elsewhere - 10/20/06

Al Wiggins, Republican House candidate for district 21, is calling for the Democratic incumbent to either resign as a legislator or resign his position in the state community college system. Randy Hinshaw (D) is the program coordinator for the Central Alabama Skills Training Consortium.

Wiggins’ request for Hinshaw’s resignation was fostered by a Birmingham News investigation into state legislators’ payroll ties to the two-year college system. A reported one-quarter of the 140 members of the Legislature - or their wives - are paid by the two-year system.

Hinshaw says he will not resign either of his jobs, and accusses the Republican of just being upset because he is trailing in the polls. Calling on him to resign either his community college job or his legislator job might not have been a good idea. It’s an unspoken rule that a candidate shouldn’t try to eliminate his competition outside of the ballot box. To call for that makes it look like you can’t beat him at a fair game. It gives your opponent something to talk about and makes me think Wiggins is desperate. It probably would have been smarter just to say he should resign his community college job

Everyone’s buzzing about Congressman Terry Everett (R-Montgomery) not knowing the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims when a Congressional Quarterly editor asked him. To be honest, I’m not that up-to-date on it all. I do apparently know more than Terry Everett, however.

“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.

Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”

That isn’t all wrong. In Iraq, the Sunni majority tend to live in the towns and such while the Shia are more country. The difference is a difference in their religion that has something to do with different families, kinda. It’s actually about who the leaders of Islam were after the prophet died and historical interpretations of the Koran that those two groups came up with.

Wheeler at the Alablawg finds it funny that a person who paints such a rosy picture of the Iraq War doesn’t know anything about the Middle East.

Gee Terry, if you had done your homework, oh say BEFORE the war, do you think your outlook on Operation Iraqi Freedom would have been quite this rosy? Or maybe these facts are why your parroting of the party talking points prognostications upon returning from Iraq in 2003 have proven less than prophetic.

Kathy at Birmingham Blues implies that Everett’s position in Congress should maybe go to someone more qualified:

Everett, who serves as vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence, is clueless.

Red State Diaries sums it up pretty nicely.

From the way people are acting, you’d think he sits on a House intelligence subcommittee or voted for a war in a place full of those two groups or something.

Lee P at A Bama Blog shares my sentiment about the whole thing:

On the “things every Congressperson should know” list, the origin of the schism in Islam doesn’t rank very high. Still, I’d think they should be able to come up with a sentence or two, at least. Something like, “The split came about due to a controversy over who were the legitimate successors to the Prophet Muhammed” would be sufficient.

See, I don’t expect Terry Everett to be a scholar on Islam just because he sits on a House Intelligence committee or because he voted for the war. But the difference and struggles between the Sunni and Shia in Iraq isn’t some esoteric knowledge — it’s probably the first thing you would learn in “Islam 101.” There’s also the fact that there’s an alleged civil war going on between these two. Did he ever go to work one day and think, “So what’s up with this supposed civil war in the country where over 100,000 American troops are?”

I am glad that he admitted his ignorance instead of trying to spin it. As the editor points out,

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.” [emphasis added]

Imagine that. If you get unfiltered, accurate information, you get a realistic outlook on the policies you vote on as a Congressman. Learn well, young padawan. Too bad you didn’t ask to have it explained to you before you voted to go to war.

“Mommy” in this case is the Jefferson County commission. They are holding hearings about how to curb and educate consumers about the dangers of second-hand smoke. The county has not yet discussed banning smoking as the city of Birmingham recently did. But they are talking about forcing owners to put warnings signs up.

Proposed revisions to smoking regulations include requiring all food establishments that allow smoking to post a consumer advisory warning on the hazards of secondhand smoke.

Is there anyone here reading this post that doesn’t know that second-hand smoke is dangerous?  The commission has already enacted a regulation that will cut a restaurant’s health rating by 5 points if they don’t comply with certain “voluntary” provisions.

Governor Riley and Attorney General King have decided not to try to re-challenge the community service grants which were ruled constitutional by a unanimous 9-0 decision by the Alabama Supreme Court. The service grants are a form of pork approved by the legislature to be spent in their individual districts. The grants are distributed by an executive committee that does not include the governor. Riley and King argued that only the governor could distribute the funds.

“Although I disagree with the court’s ruling and have serious concerns about how some legislators have used this taxpayer money in the past, the court has ruled and we will obviously follow the law,” Riley said.

When it was reported that they might ask the court to reconsider the case, I gave some strong criticism of Riley calling for judicial activism to forward his policy ideas for the state.

Conservatives and Republicans say they are against judicial activism, but they are really just against judicial decisions that they don’t like. They will fully endorse and support and call for an activist decsion if it fits their interests.

I take that back for Riley at least. For now.