Steve Flowers: Inside The Statehouse: Finalizing the Republican takeover of Alabama’s courts

  As late as 20 years ago Alabama was known as the worst state in America to do business in when it came to lawsuits. We were considered a wild west everything goes frontier to garnish outlandish judgments from any corporation doing business within our borders. It was truly a jackpot justice system that was almost comical if it were not so devastating. We were the subject of national business magazines, which chronicled the examples of ludicrous judgments that read like a comic book. The National Enquirer could not even compete fictionally with our factual examples of bizarre justice. Time Magazine referred to us on their cover as America’s “Tort Hell.”

Sally Steenland: Abortion is slowly becoming legal in name only

  When does a legal right become theoretical instead of real? If you want to know the answer, take a look at what’s happening to reproductive rights. States across the country are denying women what they need to protect their health and plan their families. And they’re often doing so in the name of religion and God. The laws, which we review below, should concern any American who cares about women’s reproductive health.

Anti-choice laws on the rise

  More than 900 antiabortion laws have been introduced since the midterm elections last November, and more than 60 have been passed. For instance, in Kansas a new licensing law for abortion clinics mandates what size and temperature clinic rooms must be, requires that staff dressing rooms have toilets, that clinics stock particular medical equipment and supplies, and that they be connected to nearby hospitals. Anti-choice legislators came up with 36 pages of regulations, which one doctor called “bizarre” and “out of date with modern medicine.”

Joseph O. Patton: An Open letter to conservatives concerning unemployment

  I went rounds until vertigo nearly set in, bickering with conservatives over individuals in this country who are experiencing a spell of unemployment a while back. If you've heard anything at all about the American economy over the past few years, you should be familiar with the jobs climate. Of course those same conservatives blame it all on Obama... along with the color frosting on their cupcakes, the price of adult diapers in Palm Beach and the weather. But that's beyond the point.

Ian M. MacIsaac: Iceland moves to classify nicotine as a narcotic, its users as gov't-registered drug addicts

  Cigarettes, and nicotine products in general, are--besides caffeine--the most accessible recreational drugs on earth. (Yes, both nicotine and caffeine are recreational drugs. So is alcohol.)

  And yet the eccentric European island nation of Iceland, located hundreds of miles north of the United Kingdom in the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic Ocean, is seeking to regulate all nicotine products in the way many other European nations have begun to do with heroin and its unfortunate addicts, who suffer from the disease of drug dependency.

Gary Palmer: The Price of being the enemy

  The evidence is undeniable – global warming is now a major problem for practically every person in America, including the people of Alabama. If you don’t believe it, check your monthly utility bill or the price of gasoline to see that global warming is a big problem in terms of what it costs you.

  Technically, the problem is not global warming. It began with cooked up statistics that leftist politicians and environmentalists used to push an agenda that will devastate our economy and do nearly nothing to impact the global temperature. A formidable array of politicians and scientists have bought into the proposition that human activity is bad for the planet.

Laurence M. Vance: Whither U. S. energy policy?

  President Obama has authorized the release of 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). The oil reserve is currently at a historically high level of 727 million barrels. “We are taking this action in response to the ongoing loss of crude oil due to supply disruptions in Libya and other countries and their impact on the global economic recovery,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

  The president has also called for a one-third cut in oil imports by 2025, wider use of natural gas, incentives to use natural gas to fuel fleets of vehicles such as city buses, greater production of biofuels, the establishment of four commercial scale refineries producing cellulosic ethanol or advanced biofuels within the next two years, higher fuel efficiency standards for heavy trucks, and for oil companies to make greater use of federal leases to increase domestic oil output. Obama’s 2009 “stimulus package” set aside $70 billion in grants and loan guarantees to promote renewable energy, energy efficiency, and advanced batteries for electric cars.

Philip E. Wolgin, Angela Maria Kelley: Your state can’t afford it: The Fiscal impact of states’ anti-Immigrant legislation

  It has been just over a year since the passage of Arizona’s ill-fated anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070. In its wake, many states put copycat bills on their agendas for the 2011 legislative session. But as most states wrap up their legislative session for the year, only a handful (Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and South Carolina) actually passed anti-immigrant bills, while 26 others rejected them. Even Arizona, which last year saw its anti-immigrant bill largely blocked by a federal judge, joined this movement and rejected a series of even harsher bills this year.

Ian MacIsaac: Still living in Reaganland: The Decline of the middle class through tax rates

  The government long ago declared the end of the recession, but most Americans aren't doing much better than they were two years ago.

  A new piece in this week's issue of reliably muckraking newsmagazine The Atlantic helps explain just what's going on, in an article entitled “Squeezed Dry: Why Americans Work So Hard but Feel So Poor.”

  "Since the recovery began,” author Derek Thompson explains, “corporate profits have captured nearly 90 percent of the growth in real income. Wages and salaries have accounted for 1 percent."

David Azerrad: Constitutionalism: Here are a few things Richard Stengel doesn’t know about

  “Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.”

  Time managing editor Richard Stengel opens his deeply flawed 5,000-word article on the Constitution with this self-evident chronological platitude. Reading through his piece, it soon appears there are a few things he doesn’t know.

Charles C. Haynes: In N.Y., marrying gay rights and religious freedom

  Winners and losers in the battle over gay marriage in New York can agree on at least one thing: Without robust protections for religious groups, the law legalizing same-sex marriages would not have passed.

  Eleventh-hour negotiations between Republican senators and supporters of the bill led to the insertion of strong language ensuring that churches and other religious organizations could not be sued or penalized for refusing to accommodate gay marriages.

  As a result, the Republican-controlled state Senate agreed to bring the marriage bill to the floor for a vote — and then four GOP senators provided the margin of victory.