Hillary in Montgomery AL - Dec. 1, 2015 60th Anniversary of Montgomery Bus Boycott

The public meeting on December 1st will feature Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Esq. and will include great Civil Rights leaders of the era and the present, Fred Gray and Benjamin L. Crump, along with the first African American woman to lead the American Bar Association, Paulette Brown.

11:00-1:00pm Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church – Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton: The Role of Lawyers in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement

The MIA was organized by Montgomery, Alabama ministers and leaders on December 5, 1955 after the overwhelming success of a one-day boycott by the city’s black citizens who refused to ride the segregated city buses. The boycott was held in protest of the Dec. 1 arrest of Rosa Parks, a local seamstress, who refused to surrender her seat on the bus white passenger. With its president, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a young and largely unknown Southern Baptist pastor at that time, the MIA would lead Montgomery’s Black citizens in a 382-day standoff with the City of Montgomery in opposition to its segregationist policies.

Is a Medicaid Turnabout Coming to the Deep South?

Gerald Dial, a Republican state senator from Alabama, expressed something of an unlikely opinion last week. “Somebody is going to have to pay some more taxes,” Dial said, so that Alabama can boost health insurance coverage for the poor.

Alabama is one of 20 states that have refused to accept federal money to expand their Medicaid programs through the Affordable Care Act. That’s left more than 3 million people across the country, including at least 185,000 Alabamans, stranded in a coverage gap—not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, but too poor to afford insurance on their own. A disproportionate number of those are people of color, and they’re concentrated in Southern states.

But in a few parts of the Deep South, ideological pettiness is starting to give way to practical considerations. Dial’s comments came at the final meeting of a task force appointed by Governor Robert Bentley to study the state’s health challenges, which, to put it mildly, are daunting. Alabama ranks near the bottom of the country in rates of diabetes, sexually transmitted infections, infant mortality, and premature death. More than 13 percent of the population is uninsured, in part because the state has a stringent limit for Medicaid eligibility: parents making over 18 percent of the poverty level, or $3,616 for a family of three, don’t qualify.

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The other bright spot is Louisiana, where Democratic State Representative John Bel Edwards trounced Republican David Vitter in the governor’s race Saturday. Edwards immediately promised that expanding Medicaid will be “among the highest priorities” of his administration. The state legislature passed a financing plan earlier this year that should allow him to do so. That would take more than 220,000 Louisianans off the list of the needlessly uninsured.

Hillary Clinton coming to Alabama to mark Montgomery Bus Boycott 60th anniversary

A father wrote a letter to his daughters about electing the first woman president. It's beautiful.

Dear Bethany and Jordan Grace,

I know, I know. You’re used to hearing your dad say that as long as you work hard and have faith, nothing is impossible. But sometimes it can be hard to even dream of doing something nobody like you has ever done. Trust me, I know.

Growing up, I never expected to see a politician who looked like me become president. But in 2008, I watched in awe as Barack Obama ascended to the highest political office in the country.

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If you study hard, love your family, serve your community, are never afraid to lead, and continue to follow the model of your mother, your grandmothers, and women like Secretary Clinton, nothing should ever stop you from achieving your dreams.

I am doing everything I can to put a woman in the White House because I believe both of you can grow up to be president—and I want you to believe it, too.

Love,

Dad

Would you like a real Black Friday?

You can binge-watch a new horror show "South of Hell" on WE TV. The first 7 episodes are televised Friday.

Southern Gothic horror genre.

Starring Mena Suvari (Kevin Spacey's "American Beauty" all grown up).

Who Turned My Blue State Red?

We have got to vote!!!

Why poor areas vote for politicians who want to slash the safety net.
Source: ProPublica, by Alec MacGillis


It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.

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It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.

But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’s growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated to the point where researchers have detected alarming trends in their mortality rates.

In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

The complete story, and much more at: http://www.propublica.org/article/who-turned-my-blue-state-red

Did No. 2 Alabama have the week off?

Don't ask the highest paid government employee in the country!

Alabama's opponent's offense led by former UAB quarterback

Dec. 1, Hillary in Montgomery!

The Montgomery Bus Boycott began days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus on Dec. 1, 1955.

Outstanding women changing the world!

50 state strategy!

Hillary Clinton announces Alabama leadership team
Source: al.com, by Howard Koplowitz

Just War

Thanksgiving recipe: Cajun boiled turkey?

I have had shrimp boil, crab boil, crawfish boil, every kind of low country boil...and never heard of this!

Of course, I've had deep fried Cajun turkey - unforgettable, delicious, succulent meat - but the cooking oil - we always used peanut - adds to an already expensive meal, and it gets rather old year after year as the 'novelty' wears off - and this: