#Governor of Alabama

[deadpresidents]

If it ever has happened when was the last time a governor of a state was assassinated or shot by a assassin? Was it when finestein rose to power?

I'm pretty sure that the last time any Governor was actually shot in an assassination attempt was when George Wallace was running for President in 1972 while he was Governor of Alabama and was paralyzed from the waist down in a shooting at a campaign stop in Maryland. Other than that, I think the only relatively recent assassination attempt where a Governor was wounded was when Texas Governor John Connally was seriously wounded while riding in JFK's limo at the time of President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. Of course, Connally was not the target of that shooting, but he was badly wounded.

Dianne Feinstein never actually served as Governor (she lost a race for Governor of California to Pete Wilson in 1990). As president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, she assumed the mayorship when Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated in City Hall by disgruntled former Supervisor Dan White in 1978.

[catfindr]

[chronicsheepdrawing]

KOSA Bill. In three days, the bill will either pass or be disgarded. Please reblog and sign petitions. to help stop the bill by going to the stop kosa tag so we can not let the bill pass!

The definition of not safe for work content that would be censored under KOSA is vague and would of course target the LGBT community.

[jesseleelazyblog]

Unethical Execution In Alabama

Kenneth Smith, victim of a botched execution last year, has new execution date set for January 25th, 2024

Alabama has a history of botched executions, and the release statement detailing their new protocol for hydrogen hypoxia executions has been heavily redacted.

Sign this petition here to call for a stop to this execution:

If you live in Alabama you can also join this letter/email campaign:

https://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent-actions/urgent-action-jury-voted-for-life-state-resets-execution-usa-116-23/

[dixiedrudge]

22 Year Anniversary Historic March Across Dixie

(A big salute to HK and all of those who participated. Maybe it’s time to do this again. Since we’re all a bit older maybe we could do 10 miles a day instead of 20? – DD) View Source: Sunday, October 13, 2024 would mark to the day the 22 year anniversary held at the Landmark Crown Jewel of the City of Asheville “the Zebulon Baird Vance Cenotaph ” that a gathering of citizens, organizations,…

[bounder205]

[drnicolejoneswadsworth]

Alabama Forestry Commission Centennial

Recently the Alabama Forestry Commission celebrated its centennial (1924-2024). Thank you to Governor Ivey for opening the Governor’s Mansion to celebrate this momentous occasion, and thank you to the Alabama Forestry Commission for your work in protecting one of Alabama’s dominant industries. 

Artist Timothy Joe painted the tower at Flagg Mountain and gifted it to Governor Ivey to commemorate 100 years of the establishment of the AFC. The frame is made from a recycled longleaf pine. #Our67

[batboyblog]

But I don't live in a swing state?!

every 4 years I see people talking about how they live in a red state (or more rarely a blue state) so their vote doesn't matter and I just want to briefly point out that I think nearly every state is either a swing state for the Presidential election, having a key Senate Race that will decide control of the Senate, has one or more key House races that'll decide control of the House, or is having an important Governor's race that'll could flip control of the state

Presidential Swing states:

Arizona

Georgia

Michigan

Nevada

North Carolina

Pennsylvania

Wisconsin

Key Senate Races:

Arizona

Florida

Maryland

Michigan

Montana

Nevada

Ohio

Pennsylvania

Texas

Wisconsin

States With Key House Races:

Alabama

Alaska

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Florida

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

Kansas

Maine

Maryland

Michigan

Minnesota

Montana

Nebraska

Nevada

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New Mexico

New York

North Carolina

Ohio

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Texas

Virginia

Washington

Wisconsin

Swingable Governor Races:

New Hampshire

North Carolina

there are lots of local and state level races that are very important to, but my point was basically odds are very very good, you live somewhere where your vote will help decide what America looks like in 2025. Don't get tricked into thinking just because your state isn't one of the ones always mentioned in the news as a swing state that it doesn't matter what you do

[minnesotafollower]

U.S. States That Could Have Greatest Benefit from Immigrant Labor

This blog has published many posts about the U.S. need for immigrant labor.[1] Now a Washington Post article supplies a national statistical analysis of that need.[2] The article opens with the following general statements: “The plentiful supply of immigrants is one of the main reasonsthe U.S. economy has outperformed that of its peers in the affluent world since the eve of the pandemic,…

[spookyfoxdreamer]

[irishgop]

Ms.Ivey — Governor to you— sets ‘em straight:

"Requiring college officials to entirely remove faith from their lives could well violate those officials' own religious freedom. After all, the First Amendment protects the free exercise' of religion just as much as it prohibits government establishment of religion."

[filosofablogger]

Alabama Wants A Divorce!

It would appear that the state of Alabama no longer wishes to be a part of the United States of America.  Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court took Alabama to task over their extremely gerrymandered district maps and ordered the maps to be redrawn to include at least two majority-Black congressional districts. The ruling was that the current district map violated the federal law, the Voting Rights…

[elierlick]

What’s the real story behind “outside agitators?” Joe Biden, the NYPD, and others have been slandering anti-genocide activists with the phrase since protests began in 2023. I did a deep dive into its history via news and book archives. The term is actually much older than you might think.

The concept of "outside agitators" gained prominence to defend slavery during the Bleeding Kansas conflict of the 1850s. The fight broke out over whether to admit Kansas as a free or slave state. White supremacists claimed abolitionists were “outside agitators” and “anti-slavery squatters” (see the 3rd image). After the North won the Civil War, racist Southerners then accused progressive “outside agitators” of “deluding” the newly freed Black population into believing they were equal to whites (4th image).

The term spiked again in the early 1900s during the fights for suffrage and unions (5th-6th images). Unionists found the accusation ridiculous. Working people don’t need to be union members to participate in supporting them!

The term gained prominence again in the 1960s to defend segregation, reaching a peak in 1969. It became so prevalent that the left began to make fun of Southerners using it so often (7th image). Devout racists, including President Truman and Alabama Governor John Patterson, even called the most respectable protesters “outside agitators.”

When my friends and I were called “outside agitators” at Columbia by our mayor Eric Adams, he wasn’t entirely wrong. We weren’t students and we were there to agitate as Jews for Palestinian liberation. We are invested in our communities and want institutions in our city to reject genocide. Is that a morally harmful position to take? Or is it necessary to ensure disclosure, divestment, and amnesty for students?

They call us "outside agitators" because they know we will win. And after the dust settles, even the most milquetoast liberals will tease those declaring protesters "paid," "ignorant," or "dishonest." It wasn't outside agitators who won suffrage, unions, or healthcare, after all. It was the people.

[mariacallous]

Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”

This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”

In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.

In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”

His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.

These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.

These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.

But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.

[darkeagleruins]

A group of Haitians were dropped off in Sylacauga Alabama seemingly overnight. They came by way of the Biden parole program into this small town in Alabama. When citizens asked for details they were told to shut up.

The mayor is saying the governor assured him they were there for work. The governor of Alabama said he has no idea what they are there for and was never informed by the Biden administration of anything.

How is this happening in America?

[batboyblog]

The governor was firm: Nebraska would reject the new federal money for summer meals. The state already fed a small number of children when schools closed. He would not sign on to a program to provide all families that received free or cut-rate school meals with cards to buy groceries during the summer.

“I don’t believe in welfare,” the governor, Jim Pillen, a Republican, said in December.

A group of low-income youths, in a face-to-face meeting, urged him to reconsider. One told him she had eaten less when schools were out. Another criticized the meals at the existing feeding sites and held a crustless prepackaged sandwich to argue that electronic benefit cards from the new federal program would offer better food and more choice.

“Sometimes money isn’t the solution,” the governor replied.

.......

The new $2.5 billion program, known as Summer EBT, passed Congress with bipartisan support, and every Democratic governor will distribute the grocery cards this summer. But Republican governors are split, with 14 in, 13 out and no consensus on what constitutes conservative principle.

One red-state governor (Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas) hailed the cards as an answer to a disturbing problem. Another (Kim Reynolds of Iowa) warned that they might increase obesity. Some Republicans dismissed the program as obsolete pandemic aid. Some balked at the modest state matching costs. Others hinted they might join after taking more time to prepare.

The program will provide families about $40 a month for every child who receives free or reduced-price meals at school —$120 for the summer. The red-state refusals will keep aid from about 10 million children, about a third of those potentially eligible nationwide.

......

As with Medicaid, poor states are especially resistant, though the federal government bears most of the cost. Of the 10 states with the highest levels of children’s food insecurity, five rejected Summer EBT: Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas.

Like the school lunch program, it serves families up to 185 percent of the poverty line, meaning a family of three would qualify with an income of about $45,500 or less.

......

Some Republicans, in rejecting the aid, found critics in their own ranks. After Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina dismissed Summer EBT as a duplicative “entitlement,” State Senator Katrina Shealy, a fellow Republican, wrote a column with a Democratic colleague warning that “hunger does not stop during summer break.”

In an interview, Ms. Shealy said the state should not reject $65 million “just because Biden is president,” and perhaps just partly tongue-in-cheek wrapped her plea in Trumpian bunting: “Everyone wants to say, ‘America First’ — well, let’s feed our children first.”

Oklahoma initially said it rejected the program because federal officials had not finalized the rules. But responding to critics, Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, sharpened his attack, calling Summer EBT a duplicative “Biden administration program” that would “cause more bureaucracy for families.”

Tribal governments, which have influence over large parts of the state, stepped in. Already feuding with Mr. Stitt, they promised to distribute cards to all eligible families on their land, regardless of tribal status, while bearing the $3 million administrative cost. The five participating tribes will cover nearly 40 percent of Oklahoma’s eligible children, most of them not Native American.

“I remain dumbfounded that the governor of Oklahoma would turn down federal tax dollars to help feed low-income children,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

-------------------------

some of the most stunning highlights of this story.

All I got to say is, let's feed the children? every single Democratic Governor took the money to feed the kids, every governor who rejected it, every single one, is a Republican. If you don't vote for Democrats you are STEALING food out of kids mouths.