Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1574: Through the eyes of children

  Through the eyes of children. From the mouths of babes. We all, including children, have our perspectives. We reveal these perspectives through our words. On many national and state issues, we rarely view these issues through the eyes of our children. We rarely hear or read the words of our children. This is an opportunity to hear our children on voting. August 6th was the 52nd Anniversary of the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law by President Lyndon Johnson. It is truly a historic day. It is also a good time to share the experiences of our children.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Moore could finish first in special election

  Folks, we are getting down to the proverbial lick log in the much-anticipated vote for the open U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions. After 20 years in the U.S. Senate as our junior U.S. Senator, Sessions left to become Donald Trump’s Attorney General. He probably regrets this decision.

  When the race began it looked like a Roy Moore vs. Luther Strange race. However, the third horse emerged about a month ago. Tennessee Valley Congressman, Mo Brooks, got a $2 million bump from the shooting he endured while a member of the Republican Congressional baseball team. He seized the moment, and Mo’s momentum gave him the “Big Mo.”

Kate Bahn: The value of equal pay to the U.S. economy

  This year, Equal Pay Day fell on April 4. This means that the average woman had to work from the start of 2016 through April 4, 2017 to earn as much as an average man did in 2016 alone. Put another way, women currently earn 80 cents for each dollar that men earn.

  As a result of these factors and others, women can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in earnings over the course of their careers. But it isn’t just women’s individual bottom lines that suffer: The gender wage gap is also a drag on the U.S. economy, and closing the gap should be a top priority of any economic policy agenda that seeks to strengthen and grow the economy. In fact, comparing it to the current top priority of the GOP—tax cuts for the wealthy—equal pay would put twice as much income back into our economy as their current proposed tax cuts.

Domestic terror threat remains serious five years after Sikh massacre

  Five years after the deadly white supremacist attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, there are troubling signals from the Trump administration that it won’t be taking seriously the threat of violence and terrorism from white supremacists and other domestic extremists.

  It was Aug. 5, 2012, when a 40-year-old neo-Nazi walked into the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek and opened fire with a 9 mm handgun, apparently thinking he was attacking Muslims. When Wade Michael Page stopped shooting, six people were dead and four wounded, including the first officer to confront him.

  Nearly three years later, on June 17, 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof, just 21, massacred nine African Americans at the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston in an act of racial terror that shocked the country.

Gene Policinski: Sessions' leak warning to journalists misguided, misplaced

  A threat from the Trump administration, apparently aimed at journalists as part of a larger campaign to prevent widespread government “leaks” that have enraged the president, is the wrong message delivered to the wrong messenger.

  Attorney General Jeff Sessions, only a few days removed from a  challenge from President Trump (issued via Twitter of course) to be tougher on tracking down leakers in the White House and elsewhere, made a statement Friday announcing ramped-up leak investigations and policy reviews–and included  a warning to journalists that they might be subpoenaed in these processes.

Why gutting gainful employment is a bad idea for Betsy DeVos

  On June 14, the U.S. Department of Education, led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, began a process to dismantle the gainful employment regulation. This crucial rule ensures that career training programs produce graduates who find jobs with incomes sufficient enough to repay their student loans.

  Since that time, the Trump administration has taken further steps to weaken the gainful employment rule while it works to rewrite the rule. On July 5, it announced a one-year delay for the requirements that institutions disclose information about the debt and earnings of graduates to students. It also announced that it would create a new process for the more than 2,000 programs that are in trouble under the rule to appeal their results in response to a narrow court ruling that affected about a dozen programs.

Craig Ford: A new school year is starting, but it should be starting later

  Remember when school didn’t start until after Labor Day? In a matter of days, students all across Alabama will start a new school year, and yet it’s only the second week of August!

  Instead of spending the last few weeks of August working summer jobs or on family vacations, teachers and students are preparing to head back to school. Why?

  It wasn’t always this way. In 2012, the Alabama Legislature passed a school start date bill that mandated a longer summer break for our public schools. It was a bill that had broad bipartisan support. Supporters argued that extending the summer break would benefit families, students, employers, Alabama’s tourism industry, and even the government.

How the "religious liberty" executive order licenses discrimination

  The Trump administration’s draft religious liberty executive order, leaked in February, was explicit in its directives and sweeping in its implications. The order President Donald Trump signed in May—the “Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty”—rather than formally codifying a view of religious liberty or instructing federal agencies on how to interpret the law, tasks the U.S. attorney general—currently Jeff Sessions—with advancing his interpretation of religious liberty through administrative guidance. Sessions has already taken steps to oppose workplace protections against discrimination for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Now he will begin extending protections for those seeking a license to discriminate.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Friends and neighbors make the difference

  There is a proven theory espoused by political scholars that has prevailed in southern politics for decades. The premier political scholar, Dr. V. O. Key, first illustrated this repetitious theme that has weaved its way through the southern electorate. He called it “Friends and Neighbors” politics. It is not a complicated hypothesis. It simply means that southerners tend to vote for someone from their neck of the woods. It is a truism in all southern states. However, it is most pronounced in the Heart of Dixie.

  This friends and neighbors vote comes to light in open races for governor and U.S. senator. Folks in Alabama will consistently vote for someone from their county or surrounding counties, or region of the state overwhelmingly.

David L. Hudson Jr.: High Court reverses woman’s conviction for profanity uttered at store

  A Connecticut woman who uttered a slew of profanity at a store manager during a customer service dispute had her conviction reversed by the state high court. The Connecticut Supreme Court explained that context matters in determining whether an individuals’ verbal outburst qualifies as fighting words – defined as words that can cause the recipient to react immediately with violence.

  "Fighting words" remains one of those narrow, unprotected categories of speech that sometimes leads to breach-of-the-peace or disorderly conduct convictions. The U.S. Supreme Court first identified fighting words as an unprotected category in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), defining them as “words that by their very utterance inflict injury or cause an immediate breach of the peace.” Later cases have all but interred the first part of the definition – “words that by their very utterance inflict injury” – but fighting words cases still abound based on the “immediate breach of the peace” definition.