War on Dumb
Birmingham, Alabama, Politics and Other Stuff
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Just two months after Alabama voters approved taking $437 million from a rainy-day trust fund to balance the state budget, the state is facing another fiscal crisis in the form of $30 million more in Medicaid costs, the Anniston Star reports. Perhaps the most striking statistic in the Star’s report is that about 900,000 Alabamians — or about one in six — qualify for Medicaid, many of them children.
Raising taxes to fix Medicaid is an option that’s almost completely off the table.
Earlier this year, legislators offered a bill that would boost cigarette taxes by $1 per pack, enough to wipe out Medicaid’s 2013 budget hole. The bill went nowhere.
And even though there has been talk of new revenue sources in the commission meetings, commission member Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, said it’s not going to happen.
“The governor’s made it pretty clear that he’d veto any tax increase that comes to him,” Orr said. He said there’s not enough political support to pass a tax, much less override a veto
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Southern Living has hired Jenna Bush Hager (the twin on the left, obviously now much older) to be editor at large, The New York Times reports. According to the NYT’s print media reporter Christine Haughney, the Birmingham-based southern lifestyle mag hopes the former president’s daughter can attract a younger readership.
She will contribute to a monthly column calledPaper Napkin Interviewand write for a blog calledThe Daily South. The Southern Living blog will also share content with an inspirational blog,The Novo Project, that Ms. Hager started with her friend Mia Baxter.
Lindsay Bierman, Southern Living’s editor in chief, said that while Ms. Hager, 31, was not hired purely because of her youth, he thought she had the right kind of enthusiasm to contribute to the magazine.
(Source: The New York Times)
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Auburn football deteriorated from a lack of discipline in the locker room, the classroom and, sometimes, the courtroom, Kevin Scarbinksy says.
Chizik was informed of at least some of the issues, and he raised the academic issue with his assistant coaches at one point, but did the head coach really follow through or was he sending mixed signals?
One example: During the second week of the regular season, before the cracks in the foundation began to show up on the field in a lifeless 28-10 loss at Mississippi State, an academic adviser told Chizik there was a problem with one of his Auburn starters.
The adviser said the player wasn’t going to class, wasn’t doing his classwork, wasn’t making much of an effort at all in the classroom.
Chizik’s response: He told the adviser he didn’t believe him.
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On Friday Alabama Examiners of Public Accounts released a blistering audit of the Marshall County Revenue Commissioner’s office. Among their findings:
- He adjusted his own property values downward (and with it, his taxes);
- He did it for other family members, too;
- He let businesses go without paying property taxes they owed the county and state;
- His office botched numerous property valuations, leaving many paying the wrong class of property taxes.
Keep an eye on this story. Not a BFD for Birmingham, but it promises to get interesting.
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When I visit BSC, I always make sure this is still there, hidden of course.
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Photo reblogged from BLOGGING via TYPEWRITER.
IDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT Cash Barnes’s public art project, Take Me To Your Leader, stands on the Atlanta BeltLine. (Photo: David Goldman / AP via The Guardian)
Someone should put one of these in Railroad Park — at night, without permission, notice or comment.
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Prophets are seldom appreciated in their hometowns, but somewhere this guy is having the greatest “I told you so” of all time. I wonder who he is and whether Auburn could hire him to be their new AD.
(Source: youtu.be)
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Twitter and Facebook were easy, if a little scary at first. Once I was plugged in, though, I was off to the races. But somehow Tumblr has been less approachable, at least for me. I never have figured out what it’s for.
At the same time, I’ve had friends who says it’s an amazing platform, and for folks who get into it, there seems to be something worthwhile here
Well, now I’m going to give it a try, if just for a little while, to see where this thing can go that all the other stuff can’t.
I’ll share stuff here, just like in the other places, and I’ll try to put some original content here, as well. I should probably put the usual disclaimers that, while I’ll be sharing a lot of my work and colleagues’ work from AL.com, this is a totally (kind of) different thing. The same sort of rules that apply to my Twitter and Facebook accounts apply here, too, and nothing I put here should be construed otherwise.
If you’d like to follow me, thanks. And if you have any advice for how to get started, or if you know of any etiquette I need to know, please share.
