Elizabeth Robinson: Public school choice: A personal story

  Alabama is a beautiful state with many attractions, both in its natural beauty and in the slower pace of living our hospitable people prefer.

  While our drawls and small towns are a quaint reminder of our heritage, the refusal of state policymakers to implement the educational reforms necessary to make our schools more successful and our children more prepared for life after their formal education are definite black marks on our state’s reputation.

Ian M. MacIsaac: Speculatron 2016: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the silent primary from hell

  If the Democratic Party nominates Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, they will win. If they nominate Joe Biden, they will lose. Which way will they go?

  From the beginning of the 2016 “silent primary” of fundraisers, buzz, and public opinion, the vast majority of figurative money has been on Secretary Clinton over Vice President Biden. Despite repeated denials of interest in a second presidential run, she has long seemed the most obvious pick, considering how close she came to being the nominee in 2008.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Down to the last pennies

  The state is now two months into the 2013 fiscal year. This is the year that all financial experts pointed to as the year of reckoning. It was postponed for three years because of the Obama administration’s federal deficit spending stimulus spree. This manna from heaven rained down on all of the states and allowed them to temporarily postpone the pain and suffering caused by the national recession, which has raged now for close to a decade.

Ilya Shambat: The Cheapness of Hitler comparisons

  Hitler comparisons are a dime a dozen, and the more they are used the more the actual wrongdoings of Hitler are cheapened. There are people comparing Obama to Hitler. There are people all over the Internet who are always ready with a Hitler comparison. The more this goes on, the more the memory of the Holocaust is insulted. And the more the real wrongs done in WWII become trivialized.

Cameron Smith: Alabama Supreme Court undermines property rights

  At the end of 2012, while Alabama families were focused on the holidays, the Alabama Supreme Court issued an opinion that undermined private property rights in Alabama and created a significant deterrent to economic investment in the state.

  In 2003 and 2004, M&N Materials, Inc. purchased property in an unincorporated area of Madison County with the intention of operating a quarry. Because the M&N property was adjacent to but outside of the corporate limits of the town of Gurley, residents who opposed the quarry could not stop M&N from using their private property in a manner consistent with their business.

Gene Policinski: Freezing websites is not a legitimate form of protest

  The Web-based protest group Anonymous is asking the White House to consider endorsing a kind of website attack as protected by the First Amendment.

  The group claims the cyberattack tactic – which effectively freezes targeted Web pages for a time – should be protected as a new-age form of assembly and protest.

  “Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time,” says a line in the posted petition on the White House site, “We the People.”

Eric Alterman: The ‘Virtually Voiceless’

   When literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950 that liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in the United States, he meant it as a lament. He noted that while some conservative opposition to liberal thought did exist, its proponents remained inarticulate and could “express themselves” only through “irritable mental gestures.” He also wrote of the fear that liberalism would grow flat and flaccid without a worthy intellectual sparring partner to keep it fresh.

  Liberals today face an even graver situation, as conservatism threatens to run off the rails of reality entirely, and liberalism is thus once again in danger of having no real intellectual opposition to force internal questioning or truth seeking about what works and what does not in the present political era.

Edwin J. Feulner: Coveting the golden goose

  Are tax hikes on the way? Some federal lawmakers hope so. “It’s a great opportunity to get us some more revenue,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, recently said of the upcoming debate over the federal budget.

  You know what that means: calls to raise taxes on the rich. Lawmakers can’t seem to refrain from eyeing the golden goose.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: The ballad of Terry Dunn

  A cornucopia of significant political events occurred during the closing month of the year that may very well have slipped under the radar screen. That is not unusual given the fact that one of the most significant occurrences of 2012 was the demise of the daily newspapers in Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville. The state’s three former largest newspapers in the state’s three largest cities have basically gone out of business and only print a paper three days a week with stale news. The state lost some of its best journalists along with the ability to gather and report investigative inquiries into the machinations of state politics.

Joseph O. Patton: Not on our parade

  The trolls apparently set their alarms early for today. Before the crowds began to assemble in Washington, D.C., social media websites were already littered with hate-fueled, divisive and often race baiting tinged venom. It’s nothing new – such behavior had become common before Barack Obama even took office in 2009.

  The president has been cast as a Muslim, a communist, a socialist, a Marxist… and countless other misguided, typically misapplied terms by those who have no grasp of what any of those words mean. He has been the target of a record number of assassination threats, conspiracy theories… and of course biased, falsehood-driven attacks from tin foil hat-wielding hacks posing as reporters as well as the usual suspects at Fox News.