Oh please, not four more years of Beth Chapman as Secretary of State.
"I am very happy where I am," she said.
Her announcement came five days after Democratic Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom Jr. announced that he would not run for governor in 2010 and would seek another term in his current office.
But of course, the prospect of running against Jim Folsom, Jr. didn't affect her decision to stay put at SoS. Not at all. Are there any Democrats considering a run against Chapman? We need someone who will insure honest elections where all the votes are counted and all the eligible voters are able to vote.
Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman paid her company and her family out of her campaign funds in 2006. An ethics report was subsequently filed and Chapman was cleared of any ethics violations. While technically not a violation of any state law or ethics law, Chapman showed her lack of judgment and personal ethics.
Chapman was elected in 2006. Here are the payments made after the election in 2007. Essentially bonuses for winning.
1. She paid her teenage sons Taylor and Thatcher $1,000 each on February 24, 2007.
2. She paid Beth Chapman and Associates $10,000 on March 31, 2007. Not marked as a loan repayment but administrative fees of $10,000.
3. She paid Taylor $2,000 again on June 26, 2007
4. She paid Beth Chapman and Associates another $3,252.37 on July 27, 2007
5. And She Gave Beth Chapman and Associates an Early Christmas bonus on December 1, 2007 for $2,500.
I'm trying to figure out what kind of campaign work could have been performed months after the election. If the payments were for legitimate work I question why would it not have been paid and reported earlier.
State court administrators say eligible voters across Alabama are wrongly being denied the right to vote because of a legal opinion by Gov. Bob Riley's office concerning felony records.
The Administrative Office of Courts said Wednesday that, based on information provided by Riley's legal aides, people have been stricken from voter rolls and refused registration when they are actually eligible to cast ballots.
The office blamed the problem on a mistake by Riley's office in listing which criminal convictions disqualify residents from voting or registering to vote.
Riley's office denied doing anything wrong and said the opinion at the heart of the dispute was correct. Court administrators said the practice went on for months, but the number affected wasn't known.
The 358-page report said that White House officials were more involved in the firings than the administration initially admitted, but that investigators were impeded from resolving questions about the White House's actions because several former White House aides, including former presidential adviser Karl Rove, refused to cooperate.
Siegelman has claimed that Rove played a role in pushing for his prosecution, a claim that federal prosecutors in Alabama have denied.
"The report makes plain that, at a minimum, the process by which nine U.S. attorneys were removed in 2006 was haphazard, arbitrary and unprofessional, and the way in which the Justice Department handled those removals and the resulting public controversy was profoundly lacking," Mukasey said, according to AP.
It is unlikely that the Justice Department report will have any direct impact on Siegelman's appeal of his conviction, which is scheduled to be heard by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta in early December.
But as evidence of political meddling in the operations of the Justice Department by the Bush White House mount, Siegelman's claims of being targeted for political reasons start to sound more plausible.
Almost since the scandal broke early last year, there have been clear signs that the plan to fire U.S. attorneys as a means of advancing the Bush administration's political goals was being driven by the White House. That impression has been strengthened as top current and former White House officials, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, have consistently stonewalled efforts to look into the matter.
The OIG investigation was no exception. As the report notes, Miers, Rove and several other Whte House officials refused to talk to investigators, and the White House wouldn't provide internal emails or documents relating to the firings. Perhaps the most crucial of the documents denied to OIG was a memo, written in March 2007, which contained the results of an internal White House investigation into the firings, conducted by associate White House counsel Michael Scudder. Scudder had interviewed top DOJ and White House officials, including Rove, and had compiled a timeline that "appeared to contain information we had not obtained elsewhere in our investigation," according to the OIG report.
I trust the judgement of California Congresswoman Barbara Lee. She was the only one with the courage and the judgement to vote against the Afghanistan invasion and the Iraq invasion. She and other progressives voted against the bailout. Afro-Netizen: post a copy of her floor statement explaining why she and other progressives voted NO to the bailout.
So there is no question that we are confronting an economic and financial crisis.
“But I’m convinced that this bailout plan is not the solution to this mess.
“First, it does little to address the underlying problem – the foreclosure crisis. We need a moratorium on foreclosures and bankruptcy reform to help people stay in their homes.
“Second, this bill should be paid for by the high-flying industry that created this problem. $700 billion should not be given to Wall Street and the Bush Administration unless those who cause this mess pay for it. We should also prohibit the tax deductibility -and my bill the Income Equity Act (H.R. 3876) would do this across the board - of executive compensation in any company where the highest paid corporate officer is paid more than 25 the times the pay of a bailed-out company’s lowest-paid worker.
“And third, we need an economic stimulus package to deal with the crushing reality of the recession that is hitting people hard and growing every day.
“I cannot vote to reward those predatory and subprime lenders who are creating such havoc in the lives of millions of Americans.
NCRC is persistently arguing that Congress cannot pass legislation bailing out Wall Street that does not include rescuing our communities too with:
Loan Modifications – Foreclosure prevention efforts should take the form of broad scale loan modifications styled after the Home Owners Loan Corporation of the 1930s, such as NCRC’s proposed Homeowners Emergency Loan Program (or HELP Now), about which NCRC’s John Taylor wrote in the Spring 2008 issue of Shelterforce.
Anti-Predatory Lending Provisions—Congress should enact protections for homeowners to ensure that unfair and deceptive lending practices do not again lead to a foreclosure crisis. Sen. Christopher Dodd’s Homeownership Preservation and Protection Act of 2007 should be added to the current proposals.
Bankruptcy Reform—Congress should amend bankruptcy law to allow judges to modify the terms of primary mortgages, as is currently allowed for investment properties.
I would also add a call for a national foreclosure moratorium to stop the bleeding and give all the hard-working counselors throughout our country the time they need to work through loan modifications for the borrowers, who have been victimized by their own federal government having ignored their plight while Wall Street profiteered from their abuse
Yesterday the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against Alabama election officials on behalf of citizens who have lost voting rights due to an overly broad definition of which crimes involve "moral turpitude." Secretary of State Beth Chapman is named in the suit, along with Registrars in Jefferson and Monroe counties. Attorney General Troy King is not named, but a 2005 opinion he issued is at the heart of this controversy.
Like virtually all states, Alabama restricts the rights of many felons to vote, but in Monday’s suit the group contends the state is going beyond even its own laws. People convicted of nonviolent offenses like income tax evasion or forgery are at risk of being turned away by voter registrars in Alabama, the A.C.L.U. says.
...
At issue in the lawsuit is not the list enacted in law but an expanded “moral turpitude” list developed by the state’s attorney general, Troy King, in 2005. That list includes about a dozen additional offenses, most of them nonviolent, and several including the sale of marijuana.
The A.C.L.U. contends that the attorney general’s list violates the Alabama Constitution, saying only the Legislature can decide what crimes fit the “moral turpitude” category.
Alabama's campaign finance laws are set up to hide the money trail. There are few limitations on contributions and those contributions are often laundered by unlimited money transfers from one PAC to another so you can't tell who is giving what to whom. I knew all that and was properly outraged, but I didn't realize SoS Beth Chapman's office is just a glorified stenography service for campaigns and PACs with no ability or responsibility to check the accracy of reports.
An Alabama agency that oversees political action committees failed to see a $460,000 reporting error in a PAC formed for presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
...
The Secretary of State's office only posts the information online and doesn't review them for errors, said Robert Johnston, an attorney for the agency.
"The secretary of state does not audit these," he said. "We don't have any enforcement authority on that. We just make it available to the public."
Most of Commonwealth PAC's money came from outside Alabama and was spent outside Alabama -- they just used us as a kind of Swiss bank account because our rules -- and enforcement -- are so lax.
How outrageous is the corrupting influence of PAC money in Alabama? Big PACs spent over $70 million on Alabama elections in 2006, according to a Gannett News Service analysis. That's about $28 for each of Alabama's 2.5 million registered voters. Talk about the finest government money can buy!
For example, Milton McGregor, owner of VictoryLand, a greyhound racing track in Shorter, donated $603,000 on Nov. 1, 2006, to the Alabama Voice of Teachers for Education.
The same day, the teachers' PAC gave $603,000 to Fund for Alabama's Children and Education, which on the same day gave $503,000 to Alabamians For a Better Plan. That group donated $947,000 to Lucy Baxley's gubernatorial campaign committee on Oct. 31 and another $1.1 million to Luc Media, which buys TV advertising, mostly for Democrats.
McGregor declined comment on his contribution.
"(The practice) reduces accountability in government very severely," said William Stewart, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Alabama. "We the citizens need to know who's financing what candidate."
For 6 years now, the Alabama House of Representatives has passed legislation sponsored by Rep. Jeff Mclaughlin (D, Guntersvillle) banning PAC to PAC transfers and for 6 years the Alabama Senate has killed it. The House passed Mclaughlin's PAC to PAC transfer ban for the seventh time (on a 103 to nothing vote) last week.
Now the ball is in the Senate's court (Heaven help us!) so please, contact your state senator and urge them to pass this much needed legislation to clean up election funding in Alabama, and to do it without introducing loopholes to make the bill meaningless. The watering down is already well under way in the Senate:
McLaughlin’s bill is simple: it bans all PAC-to-PAC transfers, except when a PAC transfers money to a campaign committee of a candidate. According to McLaughlin, the bill would give Alabama one of the toughest PAC campaign money transfer laws in the country. Simple enough, right?
Simple — until one examines a Senate version of the bill. Sen. Wendell Mitchell, D-Luverne, introduced a “reform” bill that does not define political parties and political committees as PACs. Because of that, according to the Associated Press, parties and committees could raise money from PACs, mix it together and then make a donation to a candidate, which would make it almost impossible to determine the original sources of the money. That sounds like window dressing for maintaining the status quo.
Use the "Find Your Legislator" feature in the left margin of this page to find both your State Senator and State Representative. If you already know your Senator's name, click on it in this list for contact information. They've held this up for 6 years and they'll do it again unless the people demand better behavior. Honestly, we really do get the government we deserve and the only way to make it better is to get involved.
The Press-Register ran an interesting story over the weekend involving Trey Granger, an election consultant, and Republican Secretary of State Beth Chapman:
He [Granger] said she [Chapman] looked him in the eye and asked if he was running against her in four years.
Chapman said deciding what she will be doing in four years is at the back of a long line of priorities behind eight lawsuits, improving employee morale and other problems she said she inherited when she came into office in January.
"It is childish and immature for anyone to think at this point I am really considering what will happen four years from now," she said.
It might be a little easier to believe Chapman if she wasn't in the habit of issuing press releases intended to advance her future political aspirations. For instance, back in 2003, Chapman issued a press release as state auditor related to voting rights legislation. Such legislation had very little to do with her job as auditor but a lot to do with the Secretary of State's office, which she was gunning for.
Now that's she's Secretary of State, Chapman is issuing press releases about gambling legislation. Which, once again, has little to do with her current job, but helps position her to run for a higher office. However, you'll no longer find that press release on her website as she's had it scrubbed. But you can still see it on the Democratic Party's site.
T.H.E. Social Work Agency Adoption home studies & care management services in the North Alabama area.
Licensed, certified, caring social workers. blog advertising is good for you
