Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Show us the money

  As the world turns in Alabama politics, the 2013 legislative session is in the stretch run. The waning days will see the final passage of the 2014 budgets, which will begin in October.

  The most controversial and pivotal issue of the session is the infamous Accountability Act. It has sent the legislative session into an acrimonious partisan stalemate. To review the scenario, Republicans came forward with a controversial eight-page Education Flexibility Bill, which gave local school boards the option to opt out of strict state educational requirements. However, when the bill went to a conference committee, it grew into a 28-page bill that was completely different. It became a full-fledged voucher bill which allows a $3,500 tax credit to parents who choose to send their children to private schools.

Sheldon Richman: Liberty, security and terrorism

  “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

  It would be nice if Benjamin Franklin’s famous aphorism were as widely believed as it is quoted. I doubt that Sen. Lindsey Graham and his ilk would express disagreement, but one cannot really embrace Franklin’s wisdom while also claiming that “the homeland is the battlefield.” (The very word homeland should make Americans queasy.)

Michael Josephson: Eight laws of leadership

  Take a look around. Business, education, politics…. If there’s one thing we don’t have enough of, it’s good leaders – men and women who have the vision and the ability to change things for the better.

  Former Air Force General William Cohen wrote a fine book called The Stuff of Heroes in which he identified eight laws of leadership. Here are his rules:

Scott Lilly: Whack-a-Mole budgeting

  The preposterous legislative sideshow taking place around sequestration gives a pretty clear picture of how little the people who were elected to run the government actually know about it.

  Exactly four days after long-anticipated sequester furloughs began for air-traffic controllers, Congress decided the furloughs were not such a good idea after all. It also decided that perhaps it wasn’t a problem caused by an administrator trying to showboat the evils of across-the-board cuts but in fact a problem with the legislation that the members of Congress had crafted themselves—legislation directing that across-the-board cuts be taken from each program, project and activity within the $7.5 billion appropriated for air-traffic operations.

Andrew Kinnaird: Incentives for tax system changes

  April 18th was Tax Freedom Day for 2013.  On average, all income earned prior to April 18th went to pay federal, state and local taxes. This means that Americans were solely working for the government for the first 4.5 months of this year.

  In 2011 alone, 145,579,530 federal individual tax returns were filed. The U.S. Treasury estimates business and individual taxpayers together spent 6.1 billion hours, that’s 696,347 years’ worth of work, complying with tax law in 2011 alone. In light of the fact the tax code is 73,608 pages long, that time frame makes sense. Of course, the word “comply” is used very loosely here. Few know exactly what blanks to fill in with what information and what amounts to add and subtract.  The enormity and complexity of the tax code is overwhelming. Many recognize the pitfalls of the current system and offer feasible alternatives, yet the only changes seem to be even more additions to the tax code.

Sally Steenland: Advocates continue efforts to prevent gun violence

  It’s time to bring back public shaming. I’m not saying that we should throw people in the stocks and humiliate them in the public square, but we should force the senators who voted last week against sensible measures to reduce gun violence to answer for their vote.

  It’s long past time to amplify how cowardly and antidemocratic their votes were—how irresponsible to their office, insulting to those killed and injured by gun violence, and craven to a cadre of gun-industry lobbyists, whose extreme opposition to common-sense gun laws contrasts with the 88 percent of gun owners in this country who support universal background checks.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Misbehavin’

  As the 2013 regular legislative session winds down, let us review some highlights.

  One of the highlights was a lowlight. It did not happen on the floor of the House but late at night at a Mobile legislator’s home while he was on his computer responding to emails. The email he responded to was a generic letter sent by a man in Jefferson County to all members of the legislature. It was not even intended specifically for Rep. Joseph Mitchell.

  Eddie Maxwell, a white, retired, Jefferson County coal miner sent a benign innocent letter to all members of the legislature urging all 140 members not to pass any laws that would restrict gun ownership. Maxwell sent his mass email to all state legislators at 10:54 p.m. on January 27. Rep. Joseph Mitchell responded from his Alabama House email account at 11:59 p.m. and boy did he respond.

Jesse C. Moore: Should the United States subsidize fossil fuel companies?

  The world needs a reliable supply of energy. To ensure that, many countries have granted subsidies and tax breaks to fossil fuel companies to help develop energy resources. However, with the concern over our carbon emissions and over the economic crises that many countries are facing, the wisdom of continuing those subsidies needs to be examined. The fossil fuel companies are now quite profitable. The five most profitable companies in the United States are Ford ($20 billion), Microsoft ($23.2 billion), Apple ($25.9 billion), Chevron ($26.9 billion), and Exxon Mobil ($41.1 billion). The two most profitable companies are oil companies with Exxon Mobil greatly exceeding the profitability of the other four.

David A. Bergeron: Moving away from credit hours in higher education

  The credit hour is currently the basic unit of measurement for student progress in higher education in the United States. The credit hour informs aspects of administration of higher-education institutions throughout the United States, including establishing teaching loads and graduation requirements, and is the basic structural unit of most college-level courses as well as the basis for federal student aid.

  Despite this fact, the term was formally undefined until 2010 when the U.S. Department of Education reluctantly defined a credit hour as the amount of work associated with intended learning outcomes that can be verified with evidence of student achievement.

Charles C. Haynes: No flowers for gay wedding: Discrimination or religious freedom?

  Imagine Robert Ingersoll’s hurt and humiliation last month when his local florist refused to do the flower arrangements for his wedding to Curt Freed, his partner of nine years.

  As longtime customers of Arlene’s Flowers and Gifts in Richland, Washington, Ingersoll and Freed had mistakenly assumed that shop owner Barronelle Stutzman would be happy to provide the service.

  But also imagine the pain Stutzman felt at having to turn down a friend and neighbor. Here’s how she described the awkward scene to KEPR-TV: