Category: Alabama

Pamela Geller Loves a U.S. Marine

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Which is just one reason why she endorsed Rick Barber:

Rick makes reference to America’s founding as a Christian nation, to “the freedoms given to us by God, our Creator.” Pamela offers to lead “Jews for Barber” and refers to what she wrote about Democrats’ “protect the brand” strategy.

Yesterday was Rick’s birthday, and there’s a bonus here for anyone banned at Little Green Footballs: Every time you donate to Rick Barber for Congress, an angel gets his wings — and Charles Johnson dies a little bit inside.

CPAC: Pamela Geller And Robert Spencer Strike Again

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by Smitty

In the Rock Star Blogger pantheon, few exceed Pamela and Robert for lasting impact.

It’s one thing to carve out a blog, and quite another to do something like bring Geert Wilders to CPAC 2009. What do these two do for an encore? The Freedom Defense Initiative.

This blog in particular looks forward to meeting LtCol Allen West as a part of FDI. May Fortune continue to bless the efforts of these two stalwarts.

Also, Pamela just endorsed Rick Barber, and Stacy McCain approves of that message.

AL2: Rick Barber Update

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Press release from the Barber congressional campaign:

MONTGOMERY – On Tuesday evening, February 16th at 6:30 PM in Pinckard, Alabama, 2nd Congressional District candidate Rick Barber will speak to his largest group of supporters to date. Hundreds are expected to gather at Brown Products headquarters in Pinckard.
Brown Products is a small business owned and operated by the Brown Brothers – Billy, Ron and Ricky – who have thrown their full support behind Marine Corps veteran Rick Barber’s candidacy.
“This nation can no longer afford politicians,” says Brown Products chief Billy Brown. “The only ones who can save us from the destructive force of big government are statesman. And Rick Barber is a statesman.”
The Brown’s have pledged to do whatever they can to get Rick Barber elected. Naturally, Rick Barber is thrilled and humbled by their support.
“I’ve been blown away by the early support of Billy Brown and his brothers,” says Rick Barber. “They believe in limited government principles, and they’ve already proven that they’re willing to fight for them.”
“Their efforts are further proof that small business owners everywhere are deeply concerned about Washington’s attack on the economy,” continues Barber. “Taxing and spending is not the way to promote entrepreneurship and free market competition.”
“The only way Washington can improve the economy is by getting out of the way of entrepreneurs like Billy Brown.”

I met Mr. Brown at the GOP state conference in Montgomery Feb. 7. He was a childhood friend of the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Bobby Bright, but lost patience with him over Bright’s support for the Obama-Pelosi agenda.

Quin Hillyer Argues the Alabama Governor’s Race IN ALL CAPS!

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On Friday I began my American Spectator column this way:

Tim James was Tea Party before Tea Party was cool. Before the federal bailouts, before most Americans had heard of Barack Obama, before Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck became household names, James helped lead the 2003 effort to stop a tax increase proposed by Alabama’s Republican Gov. Bob Riley.
The battle over Amendment One, as Riley’s $1.3 billion tax measure was known, was a defining moment for the state’s conservatives. James, who had challenged Riley in the 2002 Republican gubernatorial primary, sided with the anti-tax activists who organized an opposition campaign that became known as the “Alabama Tea Party.”
Alabama voters rejected the proposal by more than a 2-to-1 margin in a September 2003 referendum and, if politics were logical, James would be the front-runner in this year’s GOP gubernatorial contest. Instead, one recent poll showed that the early leader is Bradley Byrne who, as a state senator in 2003, voted for Riley’s tax-hike plan. . . .

You can read the whole thing, if you haven’t already. My friend Qun Hillyer promised Friday to reply to that column, and has done so at the American Spectator today:

Anyway, overall, Riley’s tax plan raised far more money IN THE SHORT TERM than it would have “cost.” But it did so in the context of one of the smallest combined state-and-local government spending records in the country. Tim James’ father had cut the state budget to the bone, and then Democrat Don Siegelman’s spending hikes were largely taken back through a process called “proration” when the economy temporarily went bad. Meanwhile, among states that have property taxes, Alabama’s property taxes were something like the second-smallest in the nation. Its sales tax rates, though, were absurdly high, and its exemption threshold for paying income taxes started at an absurdly low $5,000 (well below the national average of about $16,000). Plus, huge swaths of land were effectively off the books because of what amounted to a huge exemption on taxes for lands used for timber — even if the timberland wasn’t actually being used in commerce, but just allowed to sit there as a nice big, untaxed private preserve.
What all this meant was that Alabama’s tax system was literally regressive — not regressive in the modern liberal sense of not being “progressive” enough for liberal tastes, but actually more burdensome on the poor than on the rich. . . .
But overall, in the short term, the Riley Plan raised more than a net $1 billion overall, mostly by raising the incredibly low property tax rates . . .
And this was exactly when the second round, i.e., the larger and more supply-side round, of the Bush tax cuts were going into effect, so that EVEN FOR THOSE WHOSE STATE/LOCAL TAXES WOULD GO UP OVERALL UNDER THE RILEY PLAN, THEIR COMBINED LOCAL/STATE AND FEDERAL TAX LOAD WOULD BE SMALLER THAN IT HAD BEEN JUST TWO YEARS BEFORE. In short, even for the 30% who would have been moderately “hurt” by the Riley plan, their overall financial situation, in terms of taxes, would be better than it had been in 2001. . . .

You can read the whole thing. The basic problem here seems to be this: In 2003, Quin committed himself as an advocate of the Riley Plan. Alabama voters rejected that plan by a 2-to-1 margin. And seven years later, Quin is still trying to win the argument.

Or WIN THE ARGUMENT, as it were.

Re-hashing the arguments of 2003 — the “regressive” nature of Alabama’s tax system, the putative benefits of the Riley plan, etc. — is a futile exercise, politically. The voters of Alabama rejected those arguments seven years ago, and I doubt they’re in a mood to hear them again now. If Quin Hillyer thinks Bradley Byrne can win the Republican primary by defending his vote for the Billion-Dollar Bob tax . . . well, good luck with that.

Or perhaps I should say, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

P.S.: How is having “huge swaths of land . . . effectively off the books” a bad thing?

I’m in favor of having the private sector “off the books” as much as possible. That’s why, even when I pay my restaurant bill with a credit card, I always leave the tip in cash. I have never advocated tax evasion (such advocacy can be prosecuted a federal crime), but if the waitress doesn’t report 100% of her cash income to the IRS, that’s none of my business.

‘Almost Never’ Is Once Too Often

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“Certainly, there are lots of socialists on college faculties across the land. Happily, they almost never engage in killing sprees.”
— James Joyner, Outside the Beltway

UPDATE: The plot thickens:

The professor who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said today.
Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, were questioned after a package containing two bombs was sent to the Newton home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg, a professor and doctor at Boston’s Children’s Hospital.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE II: Dan Collins on Twitter calls attention to this from Christopher Knowles:

I was a bit stunned to find out that I attended high school in Braintree, Mass. with the accused shooter at the University of Alabama. Not only that but I also attended high school with the brother she mowed down with a shotgun in 1986. . . .
The story behind her brother’s shooting is a lot more incriminating than people knew at the time, and this is bound to cause a major scandal since the DA at the time is now a US Congressman. . . .

And still more:

I have known Amy since she was 17. Amy has NEVER been able to effectively communicate or connect with another human being. She was just missing that part of her brain…. She left Harvard after getting her degree because she couldn’t get a position in the Boston area.

An interesting story, to be sure.

UPDATE III: And yet even more:

Amy Bishop, he said, “wasn’t mean because she wasn’t someone you could get close to. She wasn’t an attractive girl, she didn’t have friends. She didn’t work at having friends. I think people probably, over time, learned to leave her alone.” . . .
A family source said Bishop . . . was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

And she was a Harvard graduate. Like Ross Douthat and Ted Kaczynski.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

‘Random Tragedy’ Not So Random: Socialist Serial Killer Amy Bishop

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“It’s always baffling to me when people try to politicize random tragedies — usually while they’re breaking news stories with little real information.”
— James Joyner, Outside the Beltway

Joyner is (a) from Alabama and (b) has a Ph.D., and I’m sorry if that caused anyone’s head to explode — “An intellectual? From Alabama?” — but he doesn’t seem to be the kill-everybody-in-the-faculty-meeting type of intellectual, so he’s OK with me.

Joyner is correct about the unfortunate tendency toward instant politicization of major news events. We’ve seen Michael Moore blame the 1999 Columbine shootings on Charlton Heston. We’ve seen Robert Kennedy Jr. blame the 2005 New Orleans flood on Haley Barbour and George W. Bush.

Having recently seen liberal bloggers make fools of themselves by hasty conclusions — “Send the Body to Glenn Beck!” — I certainly wasn’t going theorize about Professor Amy Bishop’s murder spree at the University of Alabama-Huntsville in the absence of facts.

Well, the facts are now starting to pile up like the corpses of Amy Bishop’s victims, so let’s go there, shall we?

  • Bishop was an alumna of Harvard University, which is also the alma mater of Ted Kaczynski.
  • As Instapundit noted last night, at least one of her students described Bishop as a “socialist.”
  • The UAH massacre wasn’t Bishop’s first homicide: “The Boston Globe reported at the time that Amy Bishop had accidentally shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth M. Bishop, an accomplished violinist who had won a number of science awards, in Braintree. Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed today at a news conference that Amy Bishop had shot her brother in 1986. But Frazier offered a different account of the shooting, saying Bishop had shot her brother during an argument and was being booked by police when the chief at the time ordered the booking process stopped and Bishop released to her mother.”
  • Via Dan Riehl and Gateway Pundit, there’s now this news: “Braintree officers who remember the 1986 shooting said that former police Chief John Polio dismissed detectives from the case and ordered the department to release Amy Bishop after a telephone conversation with former district attorney William Delahunt. Delahunt is currently a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts.”
  • Moe Lane is just askin’ questions: “Polio was not forthcoming about why then-DA Delahunt decided not to press charges, or why the documents in the case are apparently not available. Given the circumstances, perhaps the Congressman from MA-10 would like to fill in the blanks, as it were?”

You know who else might want to start asking questions? Republican Joe Malone, who is reportedly considering a challenge to Delahunt in MA-10:

In [the Jan. 19] special election Scott Brown won the 10th Congressional district 59.8% – 39.3% over Martha Coakley . . .
Worth noting is that Brown’s senior team, before they were Romney’s senior team, were Malone’s senior team. Eric Fehrnstrom, Beth Lindstrom, and Priscilla Ruzzo were instrumental in Malone’s runs for Treasurer. The Brown machine is revved up and Joe Malone may reclaim them for his next run.

Polls show Delahunt is in trouble, he’s reported to be considering retirement, and the news that Delahunt was responsible for releasing a Harvard-educated socialist serial killer . . . well, that’s not so good for Bill Delahunt, is it?

The Other McCain: Politicization You Can Believe In!

UPDATE: Professor William Jacobson:

One thing about Bishop’s politics seems likely, however. And that is that she must never have attended a Tea Party or said something nice about Sarah Palin, or we would have heard about it by now.

The BlogProf coins a new term, “Going Professorial.”

Instapundit Interviews Les Phillip

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This was sort of a carom shot of my Alabama trip. My Monday American Spectator column included two paragraphs about Les Phillip, who is running for Congress in Alabama’s 5th District. Friday night, after the state GOP meeting in Montgomery, Ali Akbar and I hung out with Phillip — who smokes cigars — on the veranda of the lobby bar at the Renaissance Hotel. (Photo here.)

Professor Reynolds highlighted Phillip when he linked the column. So, Tuesday night I’m driving home through a blizzard when my cell phone rings and it’s Ali, calling from Phillips HQ in Madison, Ala.: “Glenn Reynolds is on the phone with Les right now!” And today his column appears in the Wall Street Journal with this:

One of the less-noted aspects of Mrs. Palin’s speech was her endorsement of primary challenges for incumbent Republicans, something that is already underway. Tea partiers I talked to hope to replace a lot of entrenched time-servers and to throw a scare into others.
One primary challenger is Les Phillip. He is running against Republican Parker Griffith in Alabama’s fifth congressional district. Mr. Phillip, a black businessman and Navy veteran who immigrated with his parents from Trinidad in his youth, got his start in politics speaking at a tea-party protest in Decatur, Ala., last year.
“Somebody had to speak,” he told me, “so I stepped up.” He did well enough that he was invited to speak at another protest in Trussville, Ala., after which things sort of snowballed. Of the tea partiers, he says, “Their values are pretty much mine. I live in a town in North Alabama where there are plenty of blacks driving Mercedes and living in big houses. Only in America can someone come from a little island and live the dream. I’ve liked it, and that’s what I want for my children. [But] I saw the window closing for my own kids.”
Mr. Phillip has gotten tea-party endorsements, as well as one from Mike Huckabee. The Republican establishment is siding with Mr. Griffith, who only recently switched from Democrat to Republican. That support is perhaps understandable as realpolitik, but it’s not the sort of thing that sits well with tea partiers, who think that too much realpolitik is what rendered the Republican Party corrupt and ossified over the past decade.

Read the whole thing. In another one of those small-world coincidences, Professor Reynolds also mentions Angela McGlowan, whom I profiled in a 2007 feature article for the Washington Times when she published her book Bamboozled., and who is now running for Congress in Missisissippi’s 1st District.

A little humor: At one point during our conversation Friday, I made a reference to which Les responded, “I know. I Googled you.”

Lies! All lies!

Professor Is Denied Tenure, Opens Fire in University Faculty Meeting, 3 Dead

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Unusual and tragic violence:

HUNTSVILLE, AL (WAFF) – Police said a female member of the UA-Huntsville faculty shot and killed three co-workers on campus.
Sources close to the investigation identify the suspect as Dr. Amy Bishop.
Police also have the alleged shooter’s husband in custody. He has not been formally charged with anything.
University spokesman Ray Garner said the three killed were G. K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two associates, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. . . .
Authorities said Bishop, during a Biology faculty meeting, learned she would not receive tenure. She then pulled out a gun and started shooting.

Wow. Denied tenure = murder rampage? There’s more from the New York Times:

“She began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair,” the associate said, referring to a conversation in which she blamed specific colleagues for her problems.
“She seemed to be one of these persons who was just very open with her feelings,” he said. “A very smart, intense person who had a variety of opinions on issues.”

Obviously, I’m expected to add some snark here, but there’s three people dead and so I’m not feeling particularly snarky.