Alabama ARISE continues their Untax Grocery Tuesday series (I'm late, as usual) with a request that each of us to send our Legislators (one House member and one Senator) an income fact sheet on our home county.
HB 1 -- the "untax groceries" bill -- will give every Alabamian a 4 percent cut on grocery taxes. To pay for this reduction while protecting our school funding, it will end an income tax break that favors the wealthiest taxpayers. Only couples making more than $200,000 and singles making more than $100,000 will see any tax increase. For the very highest earners, income taxes will go up by only about 1 percent of their income.
The charts below, based on the most recent Census data available, show how household incomes stack up across each county. Legislators often find it surprising to learn what the families in their districts really make. Keep in mind two points: 1) The smallest county populations are surveyed every ten years, while larger ones get more frequent estimates; and 2) Since the 2007 numbers reflect pre-recession earnings, family incomes are likely lower for 2010 than these charts indicate.
I'm convinced that facts can win any argument, but they won't be heard without our help. Arm your Legislators with the facts about income levels in their home counties -- the vast majority of Alabamians would see a net tax reduction by the elimination of the state's 4% sales tax on food.
Let me just channel some pro-grocery-tax lobbyist speak here:
Now Senator, you can't go taking the tax off groceries! We'll have to make that up somewhere -- and if you curtail the income tax deduction, a lot of people in your district will suffer. Why you know good and well $100,000 a year is just barely middle class. Hardly anyone can afford to live on that. Cutting the grocery tax will raise taxes on all those poor people in your district who are barely scraping by on $100K a year or more -- you'll be voted our for sure by this huge, majority of $100K plus wage-earners.
The truth? Madison County has one of the highest per capita incomes in the state. 77.6% of households in Madison County report a household income of $100,000 or less. So much for the lobbyist talking point.
Fall 2011 could be the end of PACT, says this disturbing headline from the AP:
Administrators of Alabama's prepaid college tuition plan say it can't pay tuition after the fall semester of 2011 and still have enough money to provide refunds to the 44,000 participants.
[...]
Emfinger and Story said that shows the need for the Legislature to address the program's problems in the current session. The Senate and House have passed separate bills to shore up the program with $236 million, but they can't agree on whether to include a cap on tuition increases.
That has to be a desperation shot across the bow of the legislature. The tuition cap increase is key to the bill's passage or failure.
The university system folks are vehemently - if not violently - opposed to any plan that includes tuition caps. Senator (and Rules Committee Chair) Lowell Barron told Save Alabama PACT that he won't allow a vote on the House bill if the caps are in place. While the AEA will withdraw its support if the tuition caps are removed.
The fate of 45,000 current and future college students is between a Hubbert/Hubbard and a hard place. With a little slice of Barron on top for decoration.
With this mass of motivated, out for blood families and voters looking for a solution, wouldn't you think there could at least be a vote. Lowell Barron is my senator and this is just another in a long line of disappointments.
The legislative session is 2/3's over. tick, tock....
In 2008, my mom, Countrycat, and I went to Iowa to campaign for John Edwards. When we arrived at the headquarters, the perky, happy manager of the headquarters told us we were assigned to the one job neither of us were cut out for: Phone calls. She told us IN A REALLY HAPPY VOICE, that we were to call people and “Ask them to send a vote John Edwards’ way in the caucus!!!” Our twitching eyes and the foam dripping from the sides of our mouths made her nearly trip over her Reeboks trying to get away from us.
After a little bit of moral support from my equally reluctant mother, I finally dialed my first number. As soon as I said the words “caucus” and “John Edwards”, the woman who answered went into hysterics. I tried to apologize for setting off a nervous breakdown triggered by John Edwards’ name, when she screeched in a tone that would make a banshee pee herself: “YOU ARE RUINING MY FAMILY LIFE. DON’T CALL BACK.”
She paused for a second, possibly thinking of ways to kill me and simultaneously bringing scenes from Psycho into my head, and then hung up abruptly.
At the time, I thought she was insane, I now understand.
(The Dem. contenders got off to a later start and, of course, the presence of Turncoat Griffith on the GOP ticket makes that one pretty interesting ...
What do y'all know about the Democrats in this race? - promoted by mooncat)
I ask because I can not find anything really being done by their campaigns or by their supporters around the internet.
Is the GOP primary (which is awesome) that much more interesting?
There is one candidate left in our series of video from the recent Downtown Democrats meeting in Birmingham, where we heard from all six Democrats seeking the 7th congressional district seat. The post on Martha Bozeman has been delayed due to technical difficulties with the video, which seem to have finally been resolved.
We have certainly not forgotten Ms. Bozeman and hope to have a lengthy piece up on her remarks later today or Wed. am at the latest. In the meantime, get informed about the rest of the field at the links below.
Just last Thursday Ron Sparks' campaign referred to Left in Alabama as "an impartial progressive blog."Nice, but it didn't last!
Team Sparks' latest missive slams countrycat -- one of our best, most fair-minded and principled writers -- for plagiarism and calls her an "idiot." Brian has posted the entire Sparks press release here, so I'll just give you a tiny sample of the snark level of Ron Sparks' PROFESSIONAL communications team:
The response comes straight from the crack Davis research staff as cut and pasted by some blogger called CatPaw, or SunDog, or MadCow. (Face it, ain't no blogger got the time to come up with THAT post.)
Yes, Ron Sparks actually paid someone to write that screed and sent it out to professional news media across the state. How embarrassing for his donors. At least they gave us a link.
What is Team Sparks talking about?
Countrycat's post from last Friday: What is Ron Sparks Selling? Which she apparently couldn't have written & researchedherselfbecause bloggers just don't spend that kind of time on their work. Pure, unadulterated BS!
Yes, that post absolutely took a lot of time, and I have a news flash for Ron Sparks and his communications team:Many blog posts take a lot of time -- see this, this, this, this for examples of time consuming articles written by Alabama bloggers. I spent about 15 hours on that last one, for no compensation whatsoever, and the candidate has turned out to be a disappointment, too! We're blogging because we care about good government, because we want to see accurate information find an audience and because it needs doing, and we care enough to sacrifice our own personal time doing it. If someone buys a blogad or makes a contribution, that's great, but no one below Markos is doing this for anything but love.
Ron Sparks has decided to pick a fight with the media and almost any media outlet will do. Last Thursday night in Huntsville, he went after the Birmingham News for questioning his campaign loan. We're flattered he thinks this blog is so influential as to be among the first he needs to discredit, and countrycat is particularly pumped to be at the top of his $%# list, given the reams of positive posts she's written about him over the years. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.
As we've already pointed out, communications from Ron Sparks have sunk to the level of a C-list blog -- a seemingly endless stream of name calling, baseless attacks and unsubstantiated allegations. No reputable news outlet will touch the juvenile tripe they've been sending out about their opponent, so now Sparks is attacking a pseudonymous blogger, a case of "punching down" if ever there was one. Brian is right, this is how to tell your campaign is off the rails, 101.
The Sparks accusations against countrycat are completely baseless.
The plagiarism charge is made up out of whole cloth, or perhaps desperation. Believe me, if we reprint something from a campaign, you know it's from the campaign! Look for the blue boxes.
Countrycat did the digging for that piece herself at Opensecrets.org. Notice she meticulously linked to source material, something the Sparks communication team should do more often; their links are scarcer than hen's teeth, possibly because they have no source material. She called me Friday and we went over it line by line -- you don't want to make a factual error in a post like that. She also asked me to check the math, which is a good thing, since all the percentages were off by two decimal places in the original -- she's a writer, not a math major, lol!
Why does Ron Sparks sanction such a personal attack on countrycat?
This woman is a professional writer, citizen journalist and 5th generation Alabamian (also shotgun enthusiast) with a long history as a Ron Sparks booster. In 2007 she liveblogged the Madison County Democratic Reunion (coming up April 24 this year!) and snapped this photo of Sparks checking out Daily Kos -- "Ron Sparks arrived, gave a barnburner speech, and hung out at the blog for a while:"
A few weeks later she founded Blue Sparks in Alabama, a (now defunct) blog dedicated to boosting Ron Sparks should he seek Jeff Sessions' US Senate seat. When Sparks was taking a lot of heat for insisting on a clear field or no go in the Senate race, countrycat defended his position in this DKos post, Alabama Party Primaries: the Ugly Facts of Life.
There was a lot of criticism about Ron Sparks' desire to avoid a primary challenge. Several comments expressed a lot of disappointment, thinking that Sparks just can't take the heat, isn't tough enough, etc.
I don't believe that - and neither do most Alabama Democratic activists. To understand why, you need a bit of info about Alabama politics and election laws.
Since Sparks has been in the gubernatorial race, countrycat has searched high and low for positive stories to write about him, and was persistent enough to get a phone interview with him on the broadband issue -- one of his better issues. Her criticism of Sparks over the course of the campaign has been reluctant and always includes a constructive component -- when our Nov. interview with Sparks was interrupted by a fire alarm, countrycat used the time to give him pointers on how to make (or tell his web designers to make) his campaign website more friendly to dial-up visitors. She has wanted Sparks to succeed and to be the candidate we glimpsed in 2007.
What does countrycat get for her interest in this political figure, her efforts to draw attention to his ideas and positive attributes and her honest advice when he's off course?
She's called a plagiarist; a catspaw for the Davis campaign; an "idiot." In short, she gets a kick in the teeth.
"The money is gone. We thought we'd be able to give it back, but we can't. It's gone." That's what they told me when I asked for my refund -- which is total BS considering Griffith has about $700,000 in his campaign stash. He's obviously more interested in hanging onto every penny than hanging onto his honor, but where's the surprise in that? We are talking about Parker Griffith here.
The most telling indication that the money isn't "gone" came last week when his new best bud and tanning partner, John Boehner, was embarrassed when a local reporter asked if Griffith would return contributions from Charlie Rangel. Griffith acted (?) clueless at the time, but the next day he "found" Rangel's money ($7000, definitely not chump change) and scrambled to divest himself of it. So, if he can find Rangel's money, he can find mine. He can also find the money contributed by labor unions on behalf of working class folks across North Alabama, as Alabama AFL CIO Secretary/Treasurer Al Henley said today, emphasis mine:
“As demonstrated by the fact that Congressman Griffith returned 2008 money from Congressman Rangel, it’s clear that Representative Griffith can in fact return 2008 contributions. As a result, we renew our request that he return our 2008 campaign contributions because he broke his commitment to us, violated our trust and isn’t serving in Congress as the man who we elected. It’s not really that surprising that Parker Griffith has changed his position on this – again – because that seems to be standard practice for him these days. He’s been telling the hard working men and women who scraped together contributions for his last campaign that he wouldn’t return them after he changed parties but now it looks like he can. It’s no longer a question of whether he CAN return our contributions, it’s whether he will.”
Griffith is facing two Republican opponents in a June 1 primary and undoubtedly figures he's going to need every penny he can scrape together to buy the Republican nomination. I'd like to see this guy start acting like a Congressman and try to "buy" his reelection through acceptable behavior, not money, just for a change.
Here's countrycat's great mashup of video from Al Henley's press conference and Griffith/Boehner's on March 8 -- right before the bipartisan protest.
If you stopped one hundred random people on the streets of your Alabama city or town and asked them "Who is Betsy McCaughey?", I wager not one in ten could answer accurately. But if you ask the same hundred folks "What are 'death panels'", they would immediately tell you they are an Obama plot to kill old people.
Some of these folks are actually quite intelligent; a few have educational backgrounds that would lead one to expect better of them, but what they have in common is a blind reliance on the right wing media for all their current-affairs education. Let me discuss this a bit below the fold.
Where was Parker Griffith yesterday morning? The Tennessee Valley Republican Club had a splendid, packed (despite the rain) symposium between Mo Brooks, Les Phillip, and a picture on the podium of Parker Griffith, whose R.S.V.P. to the event was “yes.”
The picture of Griffith was a source of humor more than once. I told the picture that its time had expired, for example; later in the morning Mo Brooks jocularly flicked the picture while saying that the incumbent is a flip-flopper.
Perhaps Griffith is tired of folks pointedly avoiding him at these events -- he appeared to be inside a roughly 4 foot zone of distaste last time I saw him at a Republican meeting.
Look for the Party of Parker to start holding it's own debates soon. Should be entertaining -- Griffith's already been on both sides of most issues.
I received this email from the good folks at ACCR regarding the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, "which actively supports, works and prays for enabling a Citizen's Constitutional Convention to create Alabama's 7th State Constitution."
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Attached resolution was adopted at the 39th Annual Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast in official assembly Friday, February 26, 2010 at Christ Episcopal Church, Pensacola, Florida.
This resolution calls for support of action by the Alabama legislature to allow the people of Alabama to vote on calling a Citizen?s Constitution Convention to write Alabama's 7th Constitution.
Whereas, the 1901 Alabama Constitution is a mammoth and cumbersome document having well over 800 amendments, making it the longest and most lowly rated constitution in the country, twelve times longer than the average state constitution; and efforts to revise it article-by-article over the last century have produced very little effect, and
Whereas, the 1901 Alabama Constitution was written as a racist document deliberately designed to suppress the poor and to empower the legislature, and
Whereas, the 1901 Alabama Constitution was ratified in a referendum suspected of electoral fraud, and
Whereas, the 1901 Alabama Constitution impedes local government by denying citizens and their communities the power of home rule, and
Whereas, the 1901 Alabama Constitution impedes economic progress of our communities and the State of Alabama in the 21st Century, and
Whereas, the 1901 Alabama Constitution preserves a fundamentally flawed system of funding public schools and other governmental services, resulting in inadequate and unpredictable funding of essential services to the citizens of Alabama, and
Whereas, the 1901 Alabama Constitution imbeds an unfair tax structure, relying on a disproportionate amount of taxes from individual property owners, middle income and working poor families, and
Whereas, the 1901 Alabama Constitution by its character has created legal circumstances that affront the principles of Christian teaching, and
Whereas, there is a growing grass roots movement calling for a constitutional convention of democratically elected citizen delegates from each house legislative district, as evidenced by newspaper editorials and a statewide petition drive, signed by approximately 75,000 citizens calling for such a Constitutional Convention throughout the state of Alabama,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, through its ordained and lay leaders and its members, be encouraged to actively support, work and pray for enablement of a Citizen's Constitutional Convention for the purpose of writing Alabama's 7th Constitution.
FURTHER BE IT RESOLVED, that this 39th Convention of the Episcopal Church in the Central Gulf Coast strongly urges action by the members of the State Legislature, the Governor, and other elected officials of the State of Alabama to support and pass the bills that will be introduced in the House and Senate in the current session that will allow the people of Alabama to vote as to whether or not they want such a convention to be called.
Many thanks to the Episcopal Diocese, for this thoughtful resolution. It's hard to see how anyone who cares about the poor can support retaining Alabama's current disaster of a constitution. We had 5 before this one -- it's time for a change!
The Weekly Standard ran a cover story this week called, "In Denial: The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign." Despite the cute play on words about who is denying what, the article got it all wrong. Climate change legislation is not dead--not as long as publications like this keep putting it on its cover.
This was posted earlier and garnered a little discussion, but I'd like to bring it back for the Sunday afternoon crowd. Basically, the proprietor of Politics Alabama (a blogger of Libertarian bent) and I are doing a few one minute each, pro/con discussions on topical issues and calling the series Counterpunch. The first is related to constitutional reform; look for a new episode tomorrow on the health care system.
Counterpunch, episode 1: Constitutional convention, yes or no?
Alabama's 1901 Constitution was written to lock in the power structure of that time, to concentrate power in Montgomery and guard against innovation and progress. It's succeeded. Year after year the Legislature fails to act on important statewide issues -- ethics reforms, budgetary reform and even economic development issues. The 1901 Constitution gives them a convenient excuse for inaction at the same time it ties the hands of local governments -- 70% of amendments deal with a single city or county.
Article by Article revision isn't working. In 109 years only one article has been revised -- we can't afford to take a thousand years getting to the 21st century. The Legislature will never willingly give up their power and lobbyist perks. Alabama needs a new constitution and a convention is the best way to craft it, with delegates elected by the people and the final document approved by the people.
That's the view from the left.
After we'd agreed on the question, I regretted not insisting that we begin at the beginning with "Does Alabama need a new constitution?" so I tried to address that as well. We're going to do better with health care.
I'd appreciate feedback on effective ways to appeal to people who don't already agree with us -- liberals and progressives need to engage these folks in discussions. I'm convinced we're on the right side of issues more often than not, but all too often we leave the facts to speak for themselves ... and no one hears them.
The higher any DK entry highlighting LIA gets, the higher the profile of this website. To that end, I want to subscribe to fellow LIA-DKers, so come say howdy!
Here's a new video about the late return of paranoid politics. The song is by the defunct band "idiot" on their CD it's all a lie, which was pressed before the movie Idiocracy was a glimmer in the eye.
Yes, it's true. I just encountered an experience that I wish upon no one, but that I'm sure happens too often in America.
I live in Huntsville, Alabama. I was driving home from the downtown area of my metropolitan statistical area which has a population of over half a million people. I was not driving erratically. I signaled when changing lanes. I obeyed all traffic control devices.
Yet, I was pulled over by city police.
Immediately there were three other patrol cars behind my mid-size SUV. Four in total.
I was informed by an officer that my bumper stickers were obstructing my view. I have several liberal bumper stickers on the back window of my 2003 Ford Explorer Sport. A DEM sticker. A "Yes, We Did" sticker from MoveOn.org. A "Veterans for Obama" sticker to company my Operation Enduring Freedom plate, as I am a Veteran. A "Daily Kos" decal. And a "FREE DON" sticker. All but two are completely outside of the transparent portion of the back glass. The remaining two do not obstruct my view whatsoever. I cannot even see them in my rear-view mirror.
While I might not agree, I could understand police looking for reasons to make stops in a downtown area on a Friday night to catch intoxicated drivers. But I was never administered a field sobriety test. I wasn't asked to step outside the vehicle. I wasn't even asked if I had been drinking.
Yet, I was cited. I thought I received a warning, and I was just going to call it a night and go to bed angry.
But upon further inspection, I received an actual citation. I can either pay a fine, or appear in court on the 23rd of March at 5:30 PM. I've reviewed the statue for which I was cited. It applies to the the percentage of visibility through window tinting. Utter bullshit.
I guess the best thing city police have to do on a Friday night in a metropolitan area of over half a million is to pull over and cite individuals for perceived excessive bumper stickers.
I'm writing here because, I'm sure like many of you, blogging is my outlet for things like this.
I've contacted an attorney, who happens to be a friend and a progressive Congressional candidate who is running to oust our local representative, the party switcher Parker Griffith. This is not meant as a solicitation diary, but more than likely we will have to take time off from his campaign to represent me. He'd appreciate your help.
I'm so effing angry. There is no way I'm letting this slide.
I have a couple of interesting polling memos to share. The first is from a Democracy Corps analysis of a number of recent polls on the health care reform bill.
In the wake of the Massachusetts special election, public surveys showed support for health care reform declining to record lows. Yet, in recent weeks, support for reform has started to recover in nearly every public survey and now stands almost even – 46 percent in support compared to 47 percent opposed according to Pollster.com’s current average of public surveys.
I found this next paragraph even more interesting. Why do people oppose HCR? Well over a third oppose it because it doesn't go far enough!
While the uptick in support is certainly encouraging to supporters of reform, almost all of these surveys still show at least pluralities in opposition to the current reform measure being debated. However, when Ipsos probed further, they showed a surprising result. Of the 47 percent who oppose reform, 37 percent do so because reform does not go far enough (meanwhile, of the 41 percent who say they support the current proposals, 12 percent say they do so because they think the current proposals will stop reform from happening). Combining these results shows a majority – 53 percent – that supports reform or something that goes further. Yet, just 35 percent want to kill reform because it goes too far.[iv]
Those 37% of opponents aren't opposed to health care reform, but they don't like the current legislation for some reason -- because it doesn't cover everyone, or they don't like the funding mechanisms, or they think it doesn't do enough to limit profits on illness. These surveys also found that the more people understood the reform package, the more likely they were to support it.
The second item is from the Anzalone-Liszt National Polling Summary that hit my inbox yesterday.
Two-thirds of voters want Congress to keep trying to pass healthcare reform, and a healthy majority (59%) blame politics as usual for the delays. Reform components like the healthcare exchange (81% Favor), requiring insurance companies to offer coverage to all applicants (76% Favor), and helping businesses offer coverage to more employees (75%) are overwhelmingly popular. And despite the chaotic last few months, voters still trust Democrats to better handle healthcare than Republicans.
Those are good numbers. Keep trying up there -- we want you to make some kind of progress. And I'm convinced that after something gets done and the sky doesn't fall, public opinion on HCR will improve. It's nice to get a confirmation that the "Just Vote NO" Republican plan isn't winning over the public.
Every new day brings at least one new Sparks for Governor "press release" into my email inbox. And each one is more dreadful than the last. They've taken a plunge downward: from semi-hysterical and over-caffeinated comic pieces to truly nasty, poorly-sourced mud-slinging.
I don't write that lightly and I don't like criticizing a fellow Democrat in this manner. But if Republicans were sending this stuff out, we'd be all over them. It's just hypocritical to gloss over behavior in a Democrat that we'd vilify a Republican for.
Even Ron Sparks isn't proud of them. If he were, every single one from the past 2 1/2 weeks would be on his Web site with his other press releases. But there's only one of the series posted. A March 10 piece that alleges:
If you ever wondered what $560,000 buys you, it buys a Congressman's vote and a lifelong relationship to do what you want, when you want it.
The basic allegations are that "the health care industry" and "Big Oil" have contributed so much to Davis that he dances to their tune. It's a serious charge and one that deserves serious attention - and supporting data. (See Mooncat's comments about the health care industry donations from a few days ago.)
At the Madison County Democratic Executive Committee meeting last night, Sparks repeated another serious charge: that Davis sold his vote on the 2003 energy bill (HR6) in exchange for $37,000 in oil industry contributions.
I'm sure Davis would love to similarly pick apart Sparks' votes, since the Commissioner asserts that he would never sell his vote. Oh, but wait... as Agriculture Commissioner, Sparks has never had the ability to take public votes. On anything. Which is convenient when you're running against a sitting member of Congress.
All we have are Sparks' public statements and campaign finance disclosure forms. And they aren't nearly as complete as Davis' congressional forms. That's a failure of Alabama law, not Sparks personally.
But when you compare the information available, the picture on who's buying which candidate isn't nearly as clear cut as Sparks would have us believe. Numbers - as well as some other Davis votes on energy-related legislation - are on the flip.
I ask because I can not find anything really being done by their campaigns or by their supporters around the internet.
I don't write that lightly and I don't like criticizing a fellow Democrat in this manner. But if Republicans were sending this stuff out, we'd be all over them. It's just hypocritical to gloss over behavior in a Democrat that we'd vilify a Republican for. 
