Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Targeting underage drinking

  In recent years, there has been significant emphasis on warning people about the dangers of texting and driving and rightfully so. The number of accidents caused by texting is alarming. However, the primary culprit for accidents among young people is still due to underage drinking.

  Surveys reveal that 40 percent of Alabama students in grades 9-12 have had one or more drinks within the past month. By age 18 more than 17 percent of teens have taken a drink of alcohol. In Alabama 41 percent of young people ages 18-20, still illegal drinkers, say they have engaged in dangerous binge drinking. The measure for binge drinking is when they have at least five drinks on the same occasion. Among all college students, 61 percent are drinkers and 40 percent are binge drinkers. Again, most of these college students are under age 21 so they are illegal drinkers as well.

Robert Wilkerson: Veterans Day: Crossing out war

  Armistice Day, which was first celebrated on November 11, 1918, was changed to Veterans Day when our government passed a bill to that effect on June 2, 1954. Originally, it was a celebration of the ending of World War I, but today it commemorates the service of those who fought in all wars. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could cross out war?

Laurence M. Vance: A flood of government intervention

  Some Americans are outraged at the federal government for reasons other than the recent government shutdown.

  No, they are not outraged because the National Science Foundation is funding the development of card games, videos and other educational programs "to engage adult learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change" through the $5.7 million Polar Learning and Responding (PoLAR) project. No, they are not outraged because the National Institutes of Health gave $1.5 million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to "study biological and social factors for why ‘three-quarters’ of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not." And no, they are not outraged because of any of the top 100 "wasteful and low priority government spending" documented in Senator Tom Coburn’s "Wastebook."

Eric Alterman: The super-rich and their monster

  As Ian Reifowitz of the Daily Kos pointed out, an article in The New York Times’s business section shows that our tax system has been successfully gamed to the point where the wealthiest Americans pay a much smaller percentage of their income than salaried, middle-class taxpayers. Using 2009 IRS data—the most recent available—America’s top 400 earners, who take in an average adjusted gross income of more than $200 million, paid less than 20 percent of those princely sums to the tax man. Those who only made it into the top 1 percent of earners—a few of whom earn as little as $344,000—paid 24 percent.

Cameron Smith: The confounding southern conservative

  In the South, political perspectives are as likely to be shaped by conversation between friends at the corner store as they are by The Washington Post or CNN. Most of us who take the time to vote make the decision based on the information at our disposal, cast our vote at the polls, and move on with our lives. The choice belongs to us, and we know our interests better than anyone else.

  Or do we?

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: The Armed Forces' impact on Alabama

  Alabama is without a doubt one of the most heavily laden military employee states in the union. In fact, if you took the federal military employment and automobile manufacturing employment out of Alabama we would be decimated.

  When the federal furloughs occurred recently it had a profound effect on Alabama. When the furloughs hit more than 20,000 Alabama workers, mostly civilians, were affected.

Emily Oshima Lee: The costs of delaying the individual mandate

  Despite lower-than-expected premiums for plans in insurance exchanges, major technological issues with the HealthCare.gov website are frustrating consumers who are trying to compare and enroll in a health plan. As a result, some members of Congress have called for a one-year delay of the individual mandate to purchase health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Thousands of Americans, however, have already successfully enrolled in plans through state-based exchanges, making such a delay unnecessary and harmful. Although the administration must continue to urgently repair the federally facilitated exchange website, a one-year delay of the mandate would undermine the success of state-based exchanges and harm millions of Americans, resulting in significantly more uninsured individuals and more costly premiums for consumers in plans both in and out of exchanges.

Robert Wilkerson: Do the right thing, Governer Bentley

  Some of us in our comfortable homes, with our nice cars, and our balanced household budgets may not know it, but thousands of people in Alabama are poor and needy. Thousands don’t have health insurance; therefore, many will suffer, and some will die.

  Their suffering can be helped. The U.S. Government has recognized their needs and made large sums of money available for them through a real sweetheart of a deal. Alabama can get $1.5 billion each year for 2014, 2015, and 2016 without paying anything. Starting in 2016, the state would only pay 10 percent. The money is available to help over 300,000 needy women and children through the expansion of the Alabama Medicaid Program, which will be funded by the Affordable Care Act.

Sheldon Richman: Inflation is the last thing we need

  "Some economists say more inflation is just what the American economy needs to escape from a half-decade of sluggish growth and high unemployment," the New York Times reports.

  One is Harvard economist Kenneth S. Rogoff, quoted in the Times: "Weighed against the political, social and economic risks of continued slow growth after a once-in-a-century financial crisis, a sustained burst of moderate inflation is not something to worry about. It should be embraced." He favors an annual rate of 6 percent.

Eric Alterman: The Tea Party’s forebears are a movement of the rich

  It is an unfortunate irony of our age that describing academics’ work as "journalism" and journalists’ work as "history" risks insult to the respective authors. Each profession suffers tremendously from its prejudice against the other. Academics rarely write with sufficient clarity to communicate outside their specific disciplines and often neglect to draw useful conclusions, lest they be accused of overreaching their evidence; conversely, journalists rarely imbue their stories with sufficient context to reveal a situation’s underlying complexity. As a consequence, even relatively conscientious reporting can be misleading—often focusing to a fault on the "new" in "news."