Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Down-ballot drama

  Last week we highlighted and handicapped the statewide races for the top five constitutional offices of governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, treasurer and agriculture commissioner. All of these offices are held by incumbent Republicans. Therefore, it would be an upset if any of them went down to defeat.

  In fact, currently there are 31 statewide elected offices in Alabama and all 31 are held by Republicans. However, the Democrats have fielded a respectable slate of candidates. We will see if indeed winning the GOP primary is tantamount to election in the Heart of Dixie.

Adam Hersh: Bad policy choices, not bad weather, restraining job growth

  Employment growth rebounded in February, according to last week's employment situation report (PDF) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, proving economists wrong—people can actually work in the cold and snow. The U.S. economy added 175,000 new jobs in February, and revised figures show job growth averaging just 129,000 jobs per month over the past three months.

  Job growth is trending in the right direction, although still short of what is needed to return the U.S. labor market to full employment or drive real wage gains in the near future. The unemployment rate overall crept up one notch to 6.7 percent as more people returned to the labor force, but the number of people employed relative to the overall population remained unchanged.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Private vs. government data collection

  When referring to the massive, super-secret NSA surveillance scheme over the American people (and the people of the world), commentators oftentimes conflate data collection by the government with data collection by private entities, especially those on the Internet. The notion is that it’s all sort of the same thing and that since people are willing to let Google, Yahoo, Amazon, retailers, and physicians know so much about them, they really shouldn’t have any reservations about letting the government do the same thing.

Sally Steenland: Cracking the edifice of injustice

  Almost 60 years ago, a black Korean War veteran named Clyde Kennard applied to Mississippi Southern College after serving seven years in the Army. The all-white school rejected him for a spurious reason. It required him to provide references from five white alumni in his county, yet when he asked for a list of alumni names, they refused to give it to him. Kennard met every other criteria for admission. The school’s president reported Kennard’s enrollment attempt to the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a governmental agency that spied on civil rights workers, along with anyone considered sympathetic to the cause.

Cameron Smith: "Last in, first out" rewards length of service over performance

  At the end of 2013, Governor Bentley outlined the results of his efforts to reduce cost and increase efficiency in state government. Bentley stated that Alabamians elected him and the Republican-controlled legislature to "make state government more efficient and live within our means without raising taxes or cutting essential services." Part of that effort included savings from "right-sizing" the state’s workforce. Unfortunately, the outdated personnel policy of "last-in, first-out," or "LIFO" means that Alabama’s reduced workforce may not necessarily be the best it could be.

Harry Stein: President Obama’s budget resets the fiscal debate

  President Barack Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2015 shifts the political conversation toward our most urgent national problem: creating jobs and growing the economy. This should have been our political system’s primary focus for the past several years, but Congress instead allowed itself to get sidetracked by a misguided focus on austerity and debt. Presidents cannot control the economy, and President Obama does not have a magic wand to make Congress enact his budget. But presidents do have the power to set the agenda and focus attention on issues of their choosing. Setting the agenda on the question of how to grow the economy is among the most important aspects of President Obama’s new budget.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Surprises looming in 2014?

  For the past year it has appeared that this year’s election was going to be less than exciting. Now that the dust has settled it looks like that will pretty much be the case. This lackluster year has been created by the fact that incumbents hold all five of the top constitutional offices and all five, especially the governor, are pretty popular.

  The field is set and the lineup card is in the hands of the scorekeeper. The primaries are set for June 3 with the runoffs coming six weeks later on July 15. The general election will be November 3. More than likely the governor, attorney general, lieutenant governor, agriculture commissioner and treasurer--all Republicans--will be reelected to a second four-year term.

Brandon Demyan: Medicaid overdose: Bigger is not better

  Much has been made about the continual refusal by Governor Robert Bentley to expand Medicaid. In the push to pass the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), President Obama explained in 2009 that "we can’t simply put more people into a broken system that doesn’t work." Medicaid was originally created to provide healthcare to pregnant women, children, and the disabled. Instead of reforming the broken system, Obamacare simply expanded Medicaid to include all able-bodied adults earning up to 138% of the federal poverty line.

Michael Josephson: Confessions of a Lincoln groupie

  I am an Abraham Lincoln groupie. He is my biggest hero. I have a huge collection of books and Lincoln memorabilia, my daughter, Abrielle, was named after him as was one of our family dogs. And by blind chance, my son Justin was born on his birthday, February 12.

  I often visit the Lincoln Memorial and stand in awe of his magnificent eloquence and his legacy of honor, courage, compassion, humility and humor.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Is the drug-war worth this?

  For the past week, the mainstream media has been agog over the arrest of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, much as they’ve gone agog over every other big drug bust for the past 50 years or so. The hoopla surrounding these much-ballyhooed drug busts is to ensure that the citizenry, who have become increasingly disenchanted with the drug war, don’t lose faith and that they continue to support the drug war for another 50 years.