Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse - Alabama’s budget year begins this week; COVID-19 has played havoc

  The new fiscal year begins this week for Alabama's government. We have two budgets, a General Fund and an Education Budget. Both budgets have experienced a devastating loss in revenues due to the coronavirus. The Education Budget was drastically reduced from what was originally expected at the beginning of the calendar year in January.

  The Education Budget receives the revenues generated from our sales and income taxes in the state. Therefore, the downturn in the economy is especially heartbreaking for educators, teachers, schools, and universities.

Pessimists have been saying America is going to hell for more than 200 years

  Pessimism looms large in America today. It’s not just because of Donald Trump, the vicar of fear and violence. It’s COVID-19, a faltering economy, the growing power of Russia, and China, fires, and climate change – you name it.

  Journalists and analysts have launched warnings: American democracy is about to end; the American century is about to end; the American era is about to end. If Trump loses, there’s no certainty that the U.S. will make it to the other side of potential political chaos.

6 ways mail-in ballots are protected from fraud

  Voter fraud is very rare whether people vote in person or by mail. That much is clear from a large body of research.

  One of us is a political scientist at the University of Washington, and the other is a former elections commissioner who now studies voting laws. We can explain why voter fraud is so rare – especially for mail-in ballots, which have drawn both the interest and concern of many people this year.

The truth about President Trump’s track record on child care

  On January 20, 2017, reporters at The Washington Post interviewed people who attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration. One of the attendees was a single mother of two from Maryland who worked as a massage therapist; she said that she hoped Trump would follow through on his pledge to make child care more affordable. Yet four years later, as the coronavirus crisis enters its seventh month in the United States, parents are struggling to find child care as they work essential jobs or attempt to work from home while supervising children.

  Not only has Trump failed to deliver on his promise of making child care affordable for families, his administration’s inability to control the COVID-19 pandemic and provide adequate funds to safely reopen and fund child care has threatened the collapse of the entire industry. Due to these policy failures, many child care providers have been forced to shut their doors for good—and many more will follow suit if they do not receive federal help soon.

19 years after 9/11, Americans continue to fear foreign extremists and underplay the dangers of domestic terrorism

  On a Tuesday morning in September 2001, the American experience with terrorism was fundamentally altered. Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six people were killed as the direct result of attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Thousands more, including many first responders, later lost their lives to health complications from working at or being near Ground Zero.

  Nineteen years later, Americans’ ideas of what terrorism is remain tied to that morning.

Foreign investors were big winners from Trump’s tax law

  Three years ago this month, President Donald Trump promised to enact a “pro-American tax reform.” But the tax overhaul that he signed into law late 2017 was anything but “pro-American.” In fact, as the Center for American Progress pointed out when the tax cut passed, some of its biggest winners were wealthy foreign investors. Recent estimates show that the Trump tax law has given larger tax cuts to foreign investors over the past three years than it has to middle- and working-class Americans in all of the states that Trump carried in 2016—combined.

Hank Sanders: Sketches #1737 - Whatever you count, that’s what you will have the most of

  My mother, Ola Mae Sanders, was a very wise woman. She had a seventh-grade education, but she was wise way beyond her schooling. She was a poor person, but she was wise way beyond her poverty. She had a bunch of children, but she was wise way beyond her huge family of fifteen. She was just a very wise woman with many wise sayings. One such saying was, Whatever you count, that’s what you will have the most of.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse - All politics is local

  With it being a presidential election year, an election for one of our United States Senate seats, and all of the interest that goes along with those high-profile contests, it has gone under the radar that most of our cities in the state had elections for mayor and city council seats last month. Mayors serve four-year terms, and to most Alabamians, they are the most important votes they will cast this year.  

  The job of mayor of a city is a difficult and intricate fulltime, 24-hours-a-day dedication to public service. They make more decisions that affect the lives of their friends and neighbors than anyone else. The old maxim, “All politics is local,” is epitomized in the role of mayor. Folks, being mayor of a city is where the rubber meets the road.

Can Trump and McConnell get through the 4 steps to seat a Supreme Court justice in just 6 weeks?

  United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Sept. 18, thrusting the acrimonious struggle for control of the Supreme Court into public view.

  President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have already vowed to nominate and confirm a replacement for the 87-year-old justice and women’s rights icon.

  This contradicts the justification the Republican-controlled Senate used when they refused to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s pick for the Court after the death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped shape the modern era of women’s rights – even before she went on the Supreme Court

  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, the Supreme Court announced.

  Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement that “Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature.”

  Even before her appointment, she had reshaped American law. When he nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, President Bill Clinton compared her legal work on behalf of women to the epochal work of Thurgood Marshall on behalf of African-Americans.