Cottonmouth Press

Guess which state gives unemployed people the least amount of money when they lose their jobs?

That would be Mississippi, which gives a maximum amount of $210 weekly. (Most people get much less.)
But that shameful amount is followed by my home state of Alabama, now giving jobless workers a maximum of $235, even if it’s not their fault because the factory owner sent the plant overseas to Malaysia or China.
But wait, there’s HOPE!
Our fine Legislature gave final approval last week to a package of three bills that raised  the state’s maximum weekly benefit for jobless workers to $255, starting this  July. That’s right, you parent of three kids: you can get up to $255 a week when the factory closes.
What a relief, eh? But guess what???  Heh, heh, heh. That amount of money may be considered TOO HIGH for your kids to get Medicaid health care! So whoopee! The lawmakers in their infinite wisdom have given you a raise and taken away one of your safety nets.

An Associated Press report informs us that Alabama’s current maximum weekly benefit of $235 is 49th in the nation. Slightly ahead of Alabama are Arizona (John McCain’s home state) at $240 and Louisiana, at $258. Does John know what it means to live on $240 a week if you have dependents? Should he maybe be questioned about this?

The increase in Alabama’s maximum weekly benefits brings Alabama’s unemployment compensation program in compliance with federal law.
THIS MEANS THE ALABAMA LEGISLATURE HAD TO PASS THE LAW.  So in case you thought our lawmakers were doing this out of some sense of fair play and enlightenment, fahgeddaboudit.
They HAD TO.

Oh, and the law creates a one-week break in jobless benefits. Our neighbors, Georgia and Kentucky, do not make a wage-earner wait for a week to get the pittance.

JOBLESS MOTHER: I need a paycheck.
LAWMAKER: You should have thought about that before you lost your job, Missy.
JOBLESS MOTHER: They closed the factory. I didn’t have a say in the matter.
LAWMAKER: You should have thought about that before you went to work at that particular factory.
JOBLESS MOTHER: That was 15 years ago. Who knew Vanity Fair bras and underwear would be sent to China?
LAWMAKER: You should have known before you had two children, in that case.
JOBLESS MOTHER: Well, if you had taught me something useful on that subject instead of ABSTINENCE ONLY, I might have been able to get a higher education and become a surgeon.

By the way, the total amount of benefits that can be paid — 26 weeks — remains the same as before.  That would be okay if Alabama had a booming economy and workers could segue from one job into another with relative ease or some months of retraining.
But that’s not the case. An astounding number of plants have closed here and gone offshore.
So an unemployed textile worker or coal refinery worker must drive from one low-paying McDonald’s to the next low-paying Burger King to apply for work, all the while spending $4 per gallon.
The moral of this tale: Hold on to your job at all costs if you live in Alabama.

Posted by Gita under Alabama | No Comments »

Posted by Gita under Alabama | No Comments »

In Alabama, Daniel Lee Siebert, 53, is facing the death penalty for strangling two women and two young boys in 1986. He was scheduled to be put to death yesterday, Oct. 25. But a court has intervened, and he’s alive on death row where he’s been for more than 20 years.
Siebert is dying of pancreatic cancer. His life expectancy is a month, give or take.
Alabama’s Gov. Bob Riley had refused to stay the execution, saying that the fact of Siebert’s terminal cancer is irrelevant. “To not go ahead with the execution (by lethal injection) would mean we had commuted his sentence to life in prison,” Gov. Riley said.It took me a while for that logic to sink in. It had to permeate several layers of brain cells, the outer layer of which is sternly guarded by my bullshit alarm. Then Riley’s sentence was parsed by my left brain, then handed off to my cerebellum which, in its animal memory, stores the same type of reasoning in a primitive cell mass called the POLITICO-FECALIS-MEDIATORUS.

“Ohhhh! I understand,” my animal brain relayed back. “What he means is, ‘We ain’t gonna let no stinkin’ cancer trump our right to snuff him.’”

Daniel Siebert committed a heinous crime 21 years ago when he killed two children and their mom and neighbor. He is no one we need feel sorry for. (His death row drawings are highly pornographic, by the way,  and are for sale.)
The fact that he is still alive is due to a Kentucky case about the nature of lethal injection, on the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court. And until THAT case is decided, Siebert’s execution has been stayed by a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Alabama’s attorney general, Troy King,  and the Goober are pissed off at that. They want to shoot the death cocktail into Siebert’s cancer-ridden body pronto. They say that, by the time the Kentucky case is decided, Siebert will be dead.

Let me reiterate: Siebert will be dead before they have a chance to make him dead.

This is not a blog about the correctness of the death penalty, one way or another. It is about the pigheadedness of politicians who —- what? Want to give the victims’ families closure?
Pancreatic cancer will do that.
Want to teach Siebert a lesson? I think that dying of cancer in prison is doing that.  After all, how much painkiller do you think a convicted murderer with a terminal illness gets? Less than you and I, be sure of that.

No, I think this case just demonstrates how the death penalty plays out politically, at least in Dixie. It is about seeming to be tough and full of righteous indignation, despite the facts of a situation. It is about seeming punitive, at least publicly, because that is what the politicos think the public expects from them.
But I believe if you polled 100 ordinary Alabamians right now, better than 90 of them would say, “Aw, hell, let the man die his natural death. It ain’t like he’s gonna live to see the Super Bowl.”

That’s Alabama logic. And I can’t argue with it. Let it lay.

Posted by Gita under Alabama & Regional | 3 Comments »

You know what? I am glad that the SCHIP program was vetoed.

Bush gave the voters a chance to see what our Congresspeople are really made of when he vetoed that puppy. I am talking about who is going to vote to override the president and provide more health care to children. Or who is going to risk his political career, sticking by the Prez.

Here in Alabama, Land of the Dumb, little Mike Rogers is willing to risk his 3rd Congressional District seat. He is playing right into the Democrats’ hands because the one thing we Alabamians love even more than football is our children.

And, considering that a lot of families here need help with health insurance for their kids, SCHIP is popular and Bush’s veto is not popular. Mike Rogers, who hails from Calhoun County not far from me, was elected by a fairly conservative, fairly blue collar district. He is a Republican-without-portfolio (no real ideas or plans of his own),  and the fact that he got elected speaks more to the fact that the Democrats didn’t fund a candidate to adequately run against him. (Alabama was written off as a lost cause by the DNCC in the past three elections, don’tcha know?) We had a terrific candidate in the person of Joe Turnham, but the DNCC in its wisdom sent big hunks of money to OTHER states with closely contested Congressional seats.

Mikey Rogers did not win based on his ability to go it alone as a popular lawmaker. He will absolutely drive a nail into his coffin when he doesn’t override the health plan veto.

All we need in this state is for ONE GOOD FAIRLY DYNAMIC Democrat to get some money and run against him. It would be so easy to take that seat away from the GOP.

Go on, Mike Rogers and all the rest of the Alabama gang. GO on and vote against children’s health care.  Let that veto stand.
Make my g-damn day.

Posted by Gita under Alabama & National | No Comments »

It has been a nine-year legal battle, but the forces of “I’m gonna tell you what to do with your genitals” have won. Today the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn Alabama’s ban on the sale of sex toys. So now, adults in this state must shop for personal pleasure items across state lines. It isn’t the worst thing that could happen to people. Just the most needless and stupid. I mean, with all the serious crime in this state, why does the attorney general have to enforce a vibrator law?

 Sherri Williams, owner of Pleasures stores in Huntsville and Decatur, Ala.,
had sued the state after it banned the sale of sex toys in 1998 as an anti-obscenity measure. She now says she plans to sue again on First Amendment free speech grounds.

In an Associated Press report, she told a reporter, “My motto has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up.”
Hmm. Somehow that motto doesn’t quite appeal to me. I’d rethink that position.

Alabama’s  law bans the sale of “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”  The law does not ban the possession of sex toys, an important distinction, and Alabamians may purchase sex toys out of state for use in Alabama. Also, they may buy sexual devices in Alabama that have a “bona fide medical” purpose — another important distinction.

So, to review the options, as I see them, one could cross state lines with a plain brown wrapper or two in the trunk. Or one could conceivably put together a line of  “medically assistive devices” that would pass the test of “bona fide-ness.”  Until then, Alabama’s attorney general, the Right Honorable Troy King, is giving store owners fair warning to remove from inventory any playful (not medical) vibrating, penetrating or exciting devices that could be used to bring a person to the peak of pleasure.

The penalty for selling a mere plaything and not a bona fide medical device is steep! Up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine for a first offense. A second offense carries a prison sentence of one to 10 years.

Sherri Williams predicts future court battles over which sexual devices are
legal to sell as medical devices. Whoa, nelly. Can you see your average Baptist granny with a vibrating heating pad in court to insist she used it just for her “arthur-itis?” 

Go ahead. Make fun of Alabama.  Laugh if you will. It’s not like it will be the first time. Or the last.

Posted by Gita under Alabama | No Comments »

We are now officially at that most interesting stage of American politics I like to call the Tabula Rasa Game — that’s Latin for “blank slate.” Gather ’round and hear my tale.

Across the nation, and most recently here in Alabama,  former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee is the leading candidate for president among folks  likely to vote in the Republican primary next year. BUT: Thompson has not yet declared himself to be a runner and we don’t know what he stands for.

This whole scenario is straight out of the wonderful Peter Sellers-Shirley MacLaine movie, “Being There.” If you recall, Sellers played Chance the gardener, an autistic man whom no one really knew. Chance had never left the Washington D.C. estate where he lived and worked until his employer died, and then he was put out on the street.  His simple, TV-informed utterances were mistaken for profundity by all he met. All he had to do was be there, and people projected onto him all their hopes and needs. They started calling him Chauncey Gardener, as if that was his full name. Men and women wanted him to run for president. Meanwhile he was nearly mute with autism, with no education and no ambition other than to be a gardener.

So: The three-ton elephant in the room right now is that Fred Thompson, 64, a former TV actor and a senator from 1994-2003, is playing the Tabula Rasa game like nobody’s business. As long as he hangs back and says fairly little, we can project onto him all kinds of sterling qualities. Wisdom. Seniority. Strength and affability.  

Meanwhile, others are speaking for him and about him. Mike Hubbard, chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, called Thompson “a true conservative”  and “a Southerner who people can relate to and like.”

In this recent July poll, 34 percent of GOP voters said they would cast ballots for Thompson. 

WOW. That’s more than Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and even the 80s wunderkind, Newt Gingrich, all of whom have track records and whose views we know.

Support for Thompson indicates that the race for the Republican nomination in Alabama is wide open, said Brad Moody, a professor of political science at Auburn University, Montgomery. Yes, it is, and I would add to the comments of the learned political scientist my unscientific, political, personal observation.

Lots of Americans are still children at heart, and we want a strong but loving Daddy to make the bad things go away. The victor in this election will be the one who best projects a Gary Cooper-like image onto the blank screen of our hopes.

Strong and silent wins the race.

Posted by Gita under Alabama & National & Regional | No Comments »

Alabamians learned today that $75,375 in taxpayer money is being spent on fixing a leaky, Alabama-shaped swimming pool behind the Governor’s Mansion. The solution to the leaking pool was to build a new gunite pool of the same shape within the 1970s-era original one. It will still be shaped like our fair state, mostly rectangular but with a small protruding bit at the bottom to represent Mobile and Baldwin counties sticking out into the Gulf of Mexico.

A reporter for the Mobile Press-Register paper called around to ask various swimming pool companies to quote prices for gunite pools of the type we po’ folks have in our backyards — rectangular  without the sticking-out places. The quoted prices topped out at $39,000. A bit more than half what Gov. Bob Riley’s new pool will cost.

Now, normally, when the state is about to incur an expense of this type, the matter is brought to the Legislative Contract Review Committee which calls for and awards bids to the lowest bidder. But in this case, the pool bids were not collected by the oversight committee because the situation was declared an “emergency.” (The contractor for the $75,375 pool job was Cox Pools of the Southeast, with offices in Dothan and Orange Beach, Ala.)

Now, you may call me crazy, but I have a small quibble with calling a leaky swimming pool an “emergency.” I just like to reserve big words like that for, oh, say, tornadoes that wipe out entire towns. Or swarms of killer bees attacking a Kindergarten class. Or someone’s head catching fire.

But hey, if the Goober and his cabinet want to say that a leaky swimming pool  is an EMERGENCY, then we have a brand new standard in Alabama. Maybe it will get its own 9-1-1 code.

PANICKY VOICE: Help, emergency!
POLICE OPERATOR: What is the nature of your emergency, Sir?
PANICKY VOICE: Oh, God. Please send help. Our pool is leaking!
POLICE OPERATOR: Is this an inground pool or an above-ground pool please?
PANICKY VOICE: In-ground!
POLICE OPERATOR: Gunite or Vinyl?
(Brief pause while Panicky Voice confers with wife)
PANICKY VOICE: Vinyl! And there are some pool floats and kids in the pool right now!
POLICE OPERATOR: Stand by, Sir, Help is on the way.

To be charitable, I heard that there was some justification for the great need to staunch the pool leaks. Jeff Emerson, a spokesman for our Goober, said the pool had seven leaks and was losing 4 to 6 inches of water a day. “The leak threatened the integrity of some of the other structures at the mansion complex,” he told reporters.

Someone suggested that the pool simply be drained and left empty. But that, said Gov. Riley, would have left an empty Alabama-shaped hole in his yard which would have been a shameful embarassment. 

Posted by Gita under Alabama | No Comments »

You gotta love Alabama politicians.
Our beloved Guvnor, Bob Riley, has paid an election consultant for what amounted to a  32-hour day. Now we know a lot of miracles can happen here in the Bible Belt. But not even the power of prayer has created a day 32 hours long.

So let’s see how and why elections consultant Roy W. Granger III, aka Trey Granger, got paid for working this strange schedule.
Granger was paid almost $40,000 over five months for his consulting work. He was hired by Riley’s people to help Alabama comply with the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA. Riley himself signed off on a pay rate of $100 per hour for Granger.

Meanwhile, Granger held a fulltime job working for Montgomery County, putting in dozens of hours of overtime. He is  elections director for Montgomery County.

An audit by the state’s wonderful Examiners of Public Accounts, the ones who try to keep the books honest, thank heavens, discovered that Granger didn’t really work 32 hours in a single day. That must have been fun for the examiner who found the  discrepancy!

 It seems that the Goober’s legal office fiddled paperwork so Granger could be paid for doing lots of HAVA -related tasks like creating a database of all voters in the state.

Records from the Alabama comptroller’s office, obtained by the Mobile Press-Register newspaper,  show that Granger was paid for 16.5 hours of HAVA consulting work on Oct. 16. On that same day, Montgomery County overtime records show that he recorded 15.5 hours — for a total of 32 hours in one day.

Granger (I can’t resist calling him Trey just once) says he had nothing to do with the strange double-billing that went on.  Here’s a quote from the Press-Register story: “There is no relationship between the documents (the governor’s people) filled out and the time I really worked,” said Granger. “It’s not matched up at all. That’s their document.”

Mmmm.. But Trey, did you or did you not fill out time sheets to get paid from two different offices for being in the same chair on the same days and doing the same work?

Granger is one of four men Gov. Riley appointed to a commission responsible for bringing Alabama in compliance with HAVA. He kinda had to do that. See, the Feds sued the state for missing a 2006 deadline to establish a statewide voter  database. The other three members of the commission agreed to appoint Granger as the manager of their activities, and Riley and his chief legal advisor agreed.

So, while on the clock for a C-note per hour from Riley’s payroll, Granger continued to work his regular 40-hour weeks for Montgomery County, plus 269.25 hours of overtime between Sept. 25 and Dec. 3 — at his usual state employee pay rate.

So to sum up, we have double-dipping,  shoddy record-keeping and an outflow of money from the Goober’s office with no accountability or raised eyebrows until state auditors caught the mess.

I don’t know about you, but I would like to have Granger’s job if he goes to jail at some point. And I pledge not to fudge my hours because, unlike Trey, I would be delighted to have just ONE fulltime job.

Posted by Gita under Alabama | No Comments »

Gustavo Soler, Valmore Locarno and Victor Orcasita are dead because they wanted better food and safer conditions for coal miners in Colombia. I have borrowed heavily from several newspaper, wire and radio reports to write about the trail of shame that began in Alabama and ended with three dead.

Alabama-based Drummond Coal Co. is in a U.S. court this week, accused of hiring paramilitaries in Colombia to kill the three union organizers at its operation in northeastern Cesar province. Drummond, a powerful utility company with huge political clout in Alabama, is being sued by the families of the men slain near Drummond’s La Loma mines.

This is the first time a U.S. company has gone to trial for abuses overseas, under the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act.

The trail of shame from Alabama to Colombia’s mines is clearly marked. Two of the chief witnesses against the coal mining giant were paramilitary fighters employed by Drummond to break union activists. Drummond exported more than 25 million tons of coal last year from Colombia to the U.S. and Europe.
 
At the time they were murdered, Soler, Locarno and Orcasita were pushing for two quite ordinary things: better food for the coal miners at the Drummond cafeteria and better mine safety. The union accused the company of unsafe conditions that contributed to 13 accidental deaths since 1995, and of forcing injured employees to work.

The United Mine Workers of America have been holding coal companies accountable for decades over basic mine safety standards. Drummond mines in Alabama have had cave-ins, fires and other safety problems over the years. But the company’s Colombian mines, opened in 1996, were supposed to be free of pesky union and safety requirements.

The shame of Drummond’s activities doesn’t end there. According to witnesses and trial affidavits, the company for decades has been supporting some violent paramilitary groups in Colombia, groups that have killed area peasants, stolen their lands and fought government efforts to bring paramilitarism under control.

Interestingly, labor lawyers representing the Colombian families in this civil suit against Drummond are using a 218-year-old labor law as a basis for the claims. The Alien Tort Claims Act is supposed to make mulitnational corporations accountable for serious human rights abuses in other countries and give injured parties the right to sue in U.S. courts.

The law is actually a war crimes act. So for the Colombians to win, they must show that the use of paramilitary groups and the slayings amounted to war crimes sanctioned by the state. According to various press reports, the strategy the lawyers will use is to show that union activists there have been systematically slaughtered in Colombia.

Colombian witnesses have said that  Drummond paid paramilitaries to guard the 25,000-acre coal mine and coal-carrying trains against “leftist rebel sabotage.” The mercenaries allegedly were supplied with Drummond pickup trucks, motorcycles and food.

Two paramilitary members, now in hiding outside Colombia,  offered testimony to U.S. authorities about the murders and about Drummond’s relationship to paramilitary soldiers. They are  Edwin Guzman, a former army sergeant-turned-mercenary, and Isnardo Ropero, the former bodyguard for a top Drummond executive.

The trial is now before a federal jury in Birmingham, Ala. The union this week presented affidavits  from two people who say they were present when Drummond’s chief executive in Colombia, Augusto Jimenez, handed over money to the local paramilitary warlord and that the money was for the 2001 killings of union local president Locarno and Orcasita.

Drummond is denying the accusations and challenging the witness’ reliability. The company has said that “Some (of the witnesses) are being paid and/or offered assistance by the United Steelworkers Union.”

How widespread is the use of paramilitary/militia gangs by U.S. corporations abroad? An Associated Press report this week states that the U.S. Justice Department has fined Chiquita Brands  (bananas) International Inc. $25 million this year for giving $1.7 million to militias from 1997-2004.

Colombia’s chief prosecutor, Mario Iguaran, his pursuing criminal investigations into both the Drummond and Chiquita cases. In June, 144 people were killed by paramilitaries operating where Chiquita harvested bananas.

My tears fall tonight for all the people who have died facing down big corporations in the struggle to organize and make a better workplace for themselves and their families. I pray that the jury of my fellow Alabamians will vote in favor of the Colombian families.  That would sound a warning to exploitative multinationals everywhere.

Posted by Gita under Alabama & National | No Comments »

In Alabama, you can sell  guns on any street corner but you can’t sell sex toys.

That’s right. Alabama is a vibrator-free state!

Well, technically you can go across state lines and buy sex toys in Georgia and Tennessee and carry them home. But the Alabama Legislature, in its infinite wisdom and in the spirit of protecting citizens from moral turpitude, a while back banned the sale of sex toys (or “marital aids” as some lawmakers coyly call them).

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court has shown a gleam of interest in this obscure state law, which has been challenged in Alabama courts by adult toy retailer Sherri Williams.  She has been fighting the law for nearly 10 years.

Williams has been in district court three times on this issue and has won twice. But both times her victories were struck down by the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. She filed a petition to the Supremes and has hired well-known First Amendment rights attorney Paul Cambria. Also joining in the appeal petition with Williams are the Free Speech Coalition and the First Amendment Lawyers Association.

( At the very least, this case is a restraint-of-trade case as much as anything else, since the devices are sold in all the neighboring states. You’d think she would win on that, alone.)

Anyway, the Supremes have informed the state of Alabama that it must file an answering brief with the High Court, which is an indication that the case might be taken up in the next session. If so, I would like to be a fly on the wall when arguments are heard.

SCALIA: You say that the sale of the Twizzler-Twister should be banned?
ALABAMA GUY: Yes Your Honor.
ALITO: And the Buzzer-Master?
ALABAMA GUY: Yes, that too.
THOMAS: What about the coke can with the fake pubic hair?
ALABAMA GUY: That one doesn’t vibrate, so that one’s okay.
THOMAS: Whew! Thank goodness.

But seriously folks, I am hoping that y’all have stopped snickering at the Victorian attitudes of our fine Alabama lawmakers because I want to talk for a minute about sexual attitudes in the Land O’ Cotton.

There is a strong strain of paternalism among lawmakers down here. And that paternalistic attitude makes them believe that they are the keepers of the Moral Keys.

Us wee folk need protecting from sexual pleasures derived from plastic thingies made in China.

The same lawmakers also protect Alabamians from casinos, dangerous Mega-Ball lotteries and betting parlors. All for our own good.

They do however let us have SOME fun.

We have fireworks stores at every interstate exit. We can buy guns openly as long as we are of legal age. And we can shoot off the aforementioned fireworks and guns pretty much wherever and whenever we want.

In other words we are free to blow ourselves up at will.

We just can’t blow up a dolly with big red lips and openings in her lifelike vinyl  self.

Posted by Gita under Alabama & National | 4 Comments »