The World Around You

The House voted to do the right thing by not approving shifting funding from the Children First Fund to balance the general fund budget. I offer a thank you to all those who stopped this from happening, whatever your motives were.

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It must be so nice to be Paul Hubbert. He gets to make his own rules as he goes along. First the Alabama Democrats said that none of the programs the Governor wanted to shift to the Education Trust Fund were education-related. Then they said, well a few million dollars worth are. Now they will come out with an education budget that moves a program for alternative schools from Children First dollars into the education budget. It’s wonderful to be the one setting the rules for what is and is not diversion. It just sucks for the rest of us trying to make any sense out of your pretzel logic.

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Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold deserves a lot of credit for coming back to Greenville yesterday. Much was made of his remarks, which were simply intended as an illustration of the problems he saw in Alabama that reflect those in his own state. Nevertheless, he came back yesterday and joined the Mayor of Greenville to experience the exciting new developments in his city. This is just a positive story all around.

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I got my notification this week that it is time to renew my domain registration for The World Around You. It’s made me think that two years here of this may be enough. I’ve done a lot of venting on this site over that time and I now have a number of outlets to bring my opinion to the public. In addition, my job has put a number of additional responsibilities on me over the last few weeks. I think it may be time for The World Around You to fade into the sunset. I plan to continue contributing to Polstate.com, writing my column for the Prattville Progress and rededicating myself to editing ALHotline.com.

It has been a pleasure knowing all of you and I will still post for the next few weeks until my registration expires.

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Count me among the neighborhood residents who are thrilled with the removal of traffic lights on Fourth Street. The Mayor is right and I can personally vouch for having to sit at those intersections waiting for the light to turn when there was absolutely no traffic coming the other way. The only time it causes difficulties is on Sunday when church lets out, but that’s a relatively minor headache in comparison to the daily headaches created by the old method.

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Anyone who bought the argument that defining marriage as between a man and woman was only about “protecting the sanctity of marriage” better take off their blinders. A group of legislators is pushing to ban homosexuals from adopting children. This movement is about lawmakers deciding what is and is not a family. That is not the role or responsibility of government. What’s next? Taking biological children away from same sex couples? It’s not a very big leap is it?

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The headline is not really news, but the union for Alabama state employees has found yet another issue on which they can be wrong.

Legislation backed by ASEA and now making its way through the Alabama Senate would force the state Personnel Board, which has the final say on appeals of state-employee firings, to conduct its deliberations — not just the quasi-judicial proceedings beforehand — in public.

Such a change effectively would hold the Personnel Board to a more strict standard than other governmental bodies in the state when it comes to open meetings.

“We don’t believe the process is fair,” ASEA Executive Director Mac McArthur told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee last week. “Make the whole process, including the deliberations, open to the public.”

Joe Dickson, longtime chairman of the five-person board, says closed deliberations are necessary.

“When we go into a discussion of people’s good name an character, that should not be open to the public,” he said.

The Personnel Board generally hears between 30 and 50 firing appeals a year. The state has about 33,000 employees.

Accusations in firings vary widely, from misusing a government computer to assaulting a mentally disabled person.

Typically, the board will go into a closed session to discuss a firing, then return to an open session to vote. Again, the pending legislation would do away with the closed part of the process.

According to State Personnel Director Tommy Flowers, there are confidentiality problems with opening deliberations, as the board may discuss medical conditions and potentially defamatory information.

They may say they want everything to be aired in the open now, but when something defamatory is brought up in a public session they’ll be outraged.

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The Republicans used stalling tactics yesterday to slow down activity in the House after the Democrats used tactics of their own to pass their own version of a General Fund budget. Things are back ton normal in Montgomery, gridlock.

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I have to say the industry appears to be right on this one,

[Rep. Jay] Love [R-Montgomery] changed his original bill, which defined what acts couldn’t be included on games purchased by children. The version approved Wednesday would codify the voluntary ratings system, which labels some games Mature or Adult.

Knox Argo, representing the Entertainment Software Association, which opposes Love’s bill, said courts have struck down past efforts to turn the movie industry’s rating system into law. The same fate would await Love’s bill, he said.

“You can’t use a private entity’s rating system to make something a crime,” Argo said. An executive from Movie Gallery, also opposed to Love’s bill, said the voluntary system works well in most cases.

Sorry Jay, I think you’re going to lose on this one in court, even if you do get it passed through the legislature.

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My weekly column was published today in the Wednesday (Prattville) Progress:
It’s time for March Madness. I’m from Indiana, so basketball is in my blood. Yet, being from Indiana there is an odd feeling to this year’s tournament. For the first time in my memory not a single one of the big schools in my home state (Indiana University, Notre Dame, and my alma mater Purdue University) will be playing in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

My first memories of the tournament are of watching the 1987 championship game between Indiana University and Syracuse University. At that time I was not so much a fan of the Hoosiers as I was of their All-American guard Steve Alford, but I was rooting as hard as anyone in the state that night. I remember sitting in my parents’ living room watching the clock run down as the Hoosiers looked for the final shot that would give them the championship. I stood as Keith Smart fired from the baseline and screamed when the shot went through the net. I was experiencing my first championship as a fan. It was really a great feeling. I have been a true basketball fan ever since.

Once Steve Alford left Indiana University, I quickly switched allegiances to the other state school, Purdue. The Purdue teams of the late 80’s were some of the best in the school’s history. It was a great time to be a Boilermaker (the Purdue mascot). As I got older, the NCAA tournament loomed larger and larger in my annual ritual.

I can’t remember the first time I participated in a tournament pool at school, but I remember organizing one for the first time in my sophomore year of high school. My best friend and I ran the pool and prided ourselves on doing an efficient job of collecting the money and distributing brackets without the teachers getting wise. The teachers also looked the other way as we checked scores on radios in our lockers between classes (this was before the Internet). Some, even facilitated our habit by turning on a TV for a while during tournament week, especially if one of the state schools was involved. We had to be extra careful when we distributed the winnings once the tournament was over, but we got pretty good at that too.

It happened that this friend and I went on to attend Purdue University together and kept up our basketball habit. Neither one of us were gamblers, but we always took the annual pool extremely seriously. We also followed the Boilermakers men’s and women’s teams more closely than most. We were on campus with the other fanatics when the men’s team advanced to the Sweet 16 in 1998, 1999 and 2000. We were there when Purdue’s women’s team advanced to the 1999 Final Four by winning the regional final in Normal, Illinois. We would have been there to see the women’s championship, but a trip to California was a little beyond our means.

March Madness is electric, and now I’ll get to see what it’s like to watch a tournament with no Indiana teams participating in the party. I’m sure I’ll learn to enjoy it in a new way.

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All it will take is one Senate roll call vote and a floor of 10 mills of property tax will be set for all school systems in the state.

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If this quote is accurate, John Knight is a liar,

“This is Gov. Riley’s budget. This is not my budget,” said Knight. “The big issue was how much were we going to divert from education to fund prisons.”

The Governor did NOT propose using $42 million of Children First dollars (Alabama’s tobacco settlement dollars) to balance the general fund budget, which is what the Democrats have done. There is still hope that this action can be stopped in the Senate, but I wouldn’t put any money on it.

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I want to offer my warmest Welcome Home to the 231st Military Police Battalion as they return to Prattville today. They will receive a police escort through the city later today, and it is well deserved. Thank you all for your service.

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to call Governor Riley’s plan irresponsible and then offer a counter-proposal like this is outrageous. They are taking a budget situation that could be worked out this year and turning it into a crisis for 2007. The dollars they want to take out of the Children First Trust Fund guarantee that we will back in this same position or worse next year. How’s that for responsible government? And they still haven’t figured out how much of a raise the teachers will get, though Richard Lindsey did say on APT’s For the Record last night that 7% is not possible, but they want to work out something more than the Governor’s proposed 4%. The only reason for this is that they can’t let the Governor win on anything and they will get something more than 4%, even if its 4.1%, just so they can say they got more for the teachers than the Governor was offering.

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This is a positive development, there are some systems in the state that are criminally undefunded and this will ensure that taxes which have the most growth potential are flowing into school systems.

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The steady drumbeat is being heard on the altering of sentencing standards. Alabamians are beginning to understand that we cannot keep taxes low and lock everyone up for non-violent drug offenses.

There have to be reductions in the sentences for non-violent crime and alternative sentencing programs need to be made available for those with drug addiction. We also need to put more resources into preventing drug abuse on the front end, as I have said many, many times before.

The more this issue is brought to the forefront, the more people will understand that we can’t have our cake and eat it too. If you don’t want to pay more taxes than you can’t afford to lock all of these people up for extended periods of time.

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