Birmingham Blues

Clarence Thomas says he keeps his law degree from Yale in the basement with a 15-cent price tag sticker on it. Seems he’s still angry that Yale’s admissions office decided to accept him back in the 1970’s because it took him a few months to find a job after graduation in 1974. He [...]

You’ve all probably read by now about the New Jersey second-grader who was suspended for giving a picture of “a stick figure holding a gun” to another boy on a school bus. The other kid’s parents complained, and the school suspended the artist for one day.   His mama in turn complained, fearing this will blight her [...]

UPDATE:  Dodd says he’ll filibuster the bill if Reid brings it to the floor.  Go, Chris!
First, our supposedly majority Democratic Congressional leaders decide to let Bush have his way with the Telecom Protection Act new FISA bill. Then Sen. Chris Dodd, who has made restoration of the Constitution a platform in his presidential campaign, [...]

Not, not a pedophile or a gun-wielding disgrunt. In this case, it was the mayor of Bayou La Batre. Y’all remember Bayou La Batre–that’s the fishing village Tim James wanted to build a fake fishing village in, but Hurricane Katrina put those plans on hold. Anyway, the mayor was driving behind a school bus, and [...]

John Archibald, the metro columnist for the Birmingham News, has written an excellent column on constitutional reform and the need for bipartisan cooperation and action in Alabama, wrapped around the OTM Dems forum on Tuesday night.
Fixing Alabama’s constitution will be hard. It will require work, good sense, tenacity, selflessness and faith in people who [...]

A Blues reader kindly sent me a copy of Patrick Cooper’s contest filing, and, as noted in comments below, it’s also available at The Terminal. I’m no attorney, but after reading the filing, it certainly looks like Cooper has a case — assuming everything in it is accurate. Inauguration is scheduled for November [...]

I was really pleased with last night’s Constitutional Reform Forum, which was sponsored by the Over the Mountain Democrats. Approximately 150 people turned out for a high-level discussion of the nuts and bolts of the reform process and the obstacles that stand in the way of a new, improved constitution that would better serve [...]

Patrick Cooper has filed a contest of the Birmingham mayor’s election in Jefferson County Circuit Court, saying Larry Langford should be disqualified because he does not live in the city. Cooper wants the court to void the results and order a special election that would include the remaining qualified candidates.  No word yet on [...]

…Patrick Cooper plans to challenge the results. Cooper says Langford doesn’t actually live in the city of Birmingham despite renting a condo downtown and switching his voter registration before the election.
Local politics: never boring.

I’ll be on the run all day today, so posting may be light. If you’re in the Birmingham area, come to the Constitutional Reform Forum tonight (information here, an online interview with keynote speaker Albert Brewer here).
The vote to override Bush’s veto of SCHIP is scheduled for Thursday, so now is the time to call [...]