Cottonmouth Press

Don’t believe the Hollywood version of military training in America, y’all.  Recruits in the movies always break under the fierce regimen of boot camp and become respectful, highly disciplined team players. They’d do anything for the guys in their unit because, by golly, they’re all in it together.

In Bush’s all-volunteer army, it’s a different script. A CBS News special report and an article in Stars and Stripes shed light on the rise of gang activity and crime in the military. The evidence comes from an FBI investigation into gang-related violence inside the army and Marines. The FBI study calls gang allegiances “a threat to law enforcement and national security.”

Marines who form gangs that exclude other Marines? What about Semper Fi ?

Chris Grey, chief of public affairs for Army CID, said most of those cases involved misdemeanors. “It’s important to keep the numbers in perspective,” Grey said.

But among the cases are the murder of a soldier during a fight outside a nightclub at Fort Campbell,  a murder charge against a soldier related to a robbery near Fort Bragg, a rape by a soldier at Camp Taji, Iraq, and five drug possession and dealing cases.

“It’s obvious that many of these people do not give up their gang affiliations,” said Hunter Glass, a retired police detective in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the home of Ft. Bragg and the 82nd Airborne. He has been keeping watch on gang activity at the base and across the military.

Gang activity clues like graffiti are appearing in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. The soldier who took photos of the graffiti for CBS News said that he’s been warned he’s a dead man if he ever returns to Iraq.

One army official explains the phenomenon like this: “We represent America – our demographics are the same – so the same problems that America contends with we often times contend with,” said Colonel Gene Smith of the Army’s Office of the Provost Marshal.

I thought that military training was supposed to make our armed forces BETTER than the streets of America. I  believed that white militia gangs and black inner city gangs would, once in the same uniform, link hands to fight the common enemy and take orders from a common superior officer.

It is my opinion that this presidency is shabby and full of lies. Why should Bush’s military be any different?

The president and his veepee are members of a gang: Big Oil’s Boys. Or Haliburton’s Heroes.
Why should his soldiers be any different?
If the only person a green, young recruit trusts is another from the same hometown or racial background, he’ll rely first on his gang.

That doesn’t make it right.
Nothing about this war is right.
Goodbye, Semper Fi.

Posted by Gita under National & Regional | No Comments »

One of the jobs that television, radio and print reporters MUST do over the coming weeks is to tell the public why it should CARE about the Justice Department probe. Most of our fellow commuters and neighbors probably do not think the firing of some federal prosecutors is a big deal.

IT IS A HUGE DEAL.

The U.S. attorney firings last year — including seven on one day in December — came after a two-year effort by senior White House and Justice Department aides that targeted prosecutors for removal based  on their perceived loyalty to the Bush administration and the GOP. The ultimate goal of the firings was to replace the prosecutors with a new batch who would help rig the 2008 elections.

How can prosecutors working for the Justice Department do that? Think back to the travesty in the Florida election of 2000. Thousands of votes can go uncounted when machines have a glitch. Absentee ballots can be lost en masse or forged. It will be up to the federal prosecutors in the state to come down hard on election fraud.

Now, if you pack the ranks of these civil service jobs with Bush and GOP loyalists, how likely are they to prosecute vigorously when the winner is a right-wing Republican?

Let’s say for the sake of argument that you vote GOP. You feel pretty good when your candidate wins the election. Then you realize that the election was rigged. You realize that your friends or neighbors who voted for the Democrat had their votes stolen. Would you feel as good about the outcome? Would you be able to tell your kids or grandkids that we truly live in a Democracy?

Would massive election fraud not make our elected leader no better than a two-bit banana republic dictator?

The ongoing probe at the Justice Department and White House by the House Judiciary Committee has not got a lot of Americans on the edge of their seats. But it should. We need to know what Harriet Myers, former White House Counsel, and John Bolton, a chief of staff, were plotting and under whose orders.  Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez may have just been the messenger boy and the real architects of the firings may have been Karl Rove, George Bush or Dick Cheney.

Either way, we all have a lot to lose or win in this case. We have our democracy to lose if the government’s prosecutors are in office only to convict people whose politics are different from the president’s.

We have everything to win if we learn the truth about the plans this administration is putting in place for the next  — inarguably crucial — presidential election.

Posted by Gita under National | 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 »

This morning, our esteemed pretzeldent made an appearance in Nashville to tour a bakery and to make a speech at the Opryland Hotel.  My office is not even a quarter of a mile away, and I could have walked down to the corner to join the protesters waving signs for the motorcade as it passed by.

But I didn’t.  Instead, I was feverishly drafting a three-page letter to another attorney on behalf of one of my clients, a gentleman with a mental disability who’s about to be evicted from the subsidized apartment complex where he’s lived for almost 30 years.

In addition to the obvious trauma my client would face having to find a new place to live, and the adjustment difficulties all his friends and family say he will have, I had a further concern - there is damn little housing for people who are surviving on Social Security disability.  Every subsidized development he’s visited has told him he’ll be facing a waiting list of up to six months.  That means he’ll be effectively homeless for a period of time, but he’s one of the lucky ones whose family will find him some room on the couch if worse comes to worst.

You will be shocked - shocked! - to learn that housing for the poorest among us has gotten significantly harder to obtain since GWB took office.  Housing assistance has declined as a percentage of non-defense discretionary spending during Bush’s two terms in office from 8.8 percent in 2001 to 7.7 percent in 2006.  It was 10 percent in 2006. (Trying to remember who was in office then… hmm…)

First, they cut Section 8 assistance to local public housing authorities (PHAs).  In case you’re not familiar with Section 8, the voucher program provides direct rental assistance to poor families.  A typical family with a Section 8 voucher pays about 30 percent of its adjusted gross income to the landlord, with the federally funded voucher making up the rest.

But not only did cuts to the program mean that families would have to pay a larger share of their housing costs, it also meant fewer vouchers overall.  Not only are there waiting lists for vouchers in Nashville and throughout the state, but those waiting lists are so long that they’re closed to new families.  (There is hope for Section 8 now that Dems are in charge, but Bush will probably veto it.)

According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) Tennessee for a two-bedroom apartment is $604 . In order to afford this level of rent and utilities, without paying more than 30% of income on housing (in other words, without becoming what we call “cost-burdened”), a household must earn $2,012 monthly or $24,149 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into a Housing Wage of $11.61.

My client gets a check of about $400 a month, significantly less than even minimum wage.  In fact, the NLIHC says, for the first time since its research began in 1998, “the national average rent for a studio apartment exceeds the average Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payment.”  Get that?  Even if my client could pay his WHOLE check for rent (eating is overrated), he probably couldn’t find anything.

And I know that Tennessee is not even the worst of it - compared to a lot of states with more large urban areas, Tennessee’s housing costs are probably positively reasonable.

What’s that?  You’re asking why he can’t just apply for public housing?  Great question!

Nashville is one of the many cities that have embarked upon the housing experiment called “Hope VI.”  To advocates, Hope VI means replacing blighted public housing with scattered-site development that fosters more healthy communities.  To me, it means a loss of about half the public housing units in Nashville and waiting lists of three months were there were none previously.  There is no one-to-one replacement requirement under Hope VI, which is why Nashville could get away with this.  No one knows what happened to the many, many people displaced when their housing developments were torn down.  Some got Section 8 vouchers.  Some got transferred to other developments.  Some got to move back in.

And some, no doubt, ended up sleeping down at Riverfront Park.  But hey, that’s not our problem, and isn’t Sam Levy Homes beautiful now?  Look at those bungalows!

The only good housing decision the Bush administration has made so far is to zero out Hope VI, although it’s probably not for the reasons I have articulated so far.

And then there’s the HUD program that funds my agency and my job, the budget for which has remained essentially flat for many, many years.  We didn’t get a grant in 2006, and if we don’t get one in 2007, we’re toast.  I’m not sure who will write that three-page letter for my client when I’m managing a McDonald’s somewhere.  I’m sure something will get worked out.

Posted by Tracey under National & Regional | 3 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 »

Political cartoonist Doug Marlette, a hero of mine, died this week in a car crash on a wet Mississippi road. The North Carolina native graced the editorial pages of many Southern newspapers during his too-short 57 years of life. His 1988 Pulitzer prize was earned at the Charlotte Observer and the Atlanta Constitution. He gored many political oxen, equally I should add, on both sides of the aisle. Religious hypocrisy was a favorite target of his.

The first cartoon below is a favorite of mine.

The next cartoon earned him hundreds of death threats from Muslims when it was published in 2002 in the Tallahassee Democrat.

 Marlette also drew the ire of North Carolina’s former segregationist senator Jesse Helms, and he angered Christian fundamentalists for his Pulitzer-winning satirical ‘toons about fallen TV preacher Jim Bakker.

God rest you, Doug. I’ll miss you huge.

Posted by Gita under National & Regional | 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 »

The new Harry Potter movie is on a gazillion screens nationwide, and because I read all the books and because I am a total Ho when it comes to being first in line for all that is new (or for anything shiny that moves ) I got there last night for the movie’s opening in Central Alabama.

Try this: Sit in the theater, and every time a character onscreen says the word ‘VOLDEMORT,”  mentally substitute the word “BUSH.”  It really works!

Whenever they say “Azkeban,” substitute “Guantanamo Bay Prison.”  That really works, too!

And when the Dementors appear and suck all the joy out of a human being?

That’s when you mentally substitute the image of  yourself in one of Bush’s secret CIA prisons with absolutely no hope of ever being freed or having a lawyer represent you in an open court of law. That works best of all.

The religious right is correct not to let their kids read the Harry Potter series. But not because the book contains wizards, elves, witches and ghosts which are pagan and not Politically Correct for Christians.

Nuh-unh. The religious right fears the books of J.K. Rowling because they are political mirror images of what a world looks like when power-hungry, repressive forces take over.

But then, I’m just a humble Muggle. What do I know?

Posted by Gita under 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 »