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Court Fight in the Heart of Dixie

Dyspeptic dueling for an Alabama Supreme Court seat. Another in our Court Watch series.

 

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Summary
Alabama holds the distinction of having had the nation's most expensive Supreme Court races, with $54 million spent from 1993 through 2006. This year's battle for an open seat on the bench seems likely to sustain the pattern, with heaps of cash being thrown down for ads and a tone that has turned ugly.

The attacks in the Alabama campaign have been a departure from what we've seen in high court races in most states this year, with the notable exception of Wisconsin. We wrote about some of the ads in that mudfest back in March and April, but subsequent campaigns in other states have been mostly civil affairs, to the surprise of many observers of recent trends in judicial elections.

In Alabama, though, things have taken a decidedly negative – and misleading – turn.

Paid phone callers claimed that Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur had been given an "F" rating by the state bar association. In fact, the group gives no such grades to judicial candidates, and its president says the false calls are "reprehensible."

A Paseur ad said Republican Greg Shaw is "backed by more than a million dollars tied to gas and oil lobbyists." But that's just her guess. The group she's referring to doesn't disclose where it gets its money, and it deals with more than just oil and gas issues.

A Shaw ad claims that he is "serving Alabama with Supreme Court experience." But Shaw is only a judge on the Criminal Court of Appeals, not a Supreme Court justice. He once worked as a lawyer for two justices.

Analysis
The race between appellate court judge Greg Shaw and retired district judge Deborah Bell Paseur seems likely to cement Alabama's place as the state with the nation's most expensive Supreme Court races. Currently, there is only one Democrat among the nine justices on the high court; Paseur, if elected, would be the second. Alabama is one of eight states where candidates for the courts run with clearly identified party labels.

Falsehoods on Line 1
Just as robo-calls have been deployed in the presidential race, at least one phone campaign of a type known as a push poll (in which the caller appears to be conducting a poll, but spreads negative information about a candidate) has played a role in the Alabama court contest.

We don't have a recording of the call, but according to press reports in Alabama, the caller claims that Paseur got an "F" from the state bar. The calls appear to originate from a Virginia phone bank, though it's unclear who is behind them.

But the Alabama State Bar doesn't do any such evaluations. "Let me make this very clear," said its president, Mark White, in a statement. "The state bar does not conduct an evaluation poll of any judicial candidates. ...These falsehoods and misrepresentations are nothing short of reprehensible." We're with him.

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Member Comments

  • Posted By: Krohn @ 11/02/2008 11:22:58 PM

    The Wall Street crisis was planned the night of Obama's meeting at Bill Ayres home to put Obama in The White House. Together they put a beautiful plan into place.

    This Strategy was first elucidated in the 1966 issue of 'The Nation' Magazine by a pair of radical Socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

    David Horowitz summarizes it as:

    "The strategy of forcing political change through an orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of Capitalism by overloading the Government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
    unquote

    Obama begin with ACORN by funneling millions into their organization. He then trained ACORN to stage protests in banks to force them to issue risky loans or they would be threatened to face racial charges. ACORN was trained to intimidate financial institutions into giving ???Ninja??? loans to people with NO assets, NO job and NO income, who couldn???t afford these loans.

    That caused the housing bubble two years ago it was by ACORN's actions they were able to destroy our credit system.

    As this played out, D-Barney Frank and D-Chris Dodd were able to cover up the millions of improvident loans to these bad risky house buyers. And Barney Frank and his chums successfully were able to block all of President Bush's attempts to put a rein on this problem.

    So Fannie & Freddie was forced to purchase all these failed subprime mortgages.

    Then both Frank and Dodd denied that there were any problems, and refused the Bush Admin. requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the 'minute they failed'.

    Democrats then blamed Bush saying it happened on his watch knowing it would hurt the Republican Party in the election setting it up that Barack Obama could use this to his advantage.

    Karl Marx once compared a Revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.

    Barack Obama is that Marxist mole !

  • Posted By: Concerned Canadian @ 11/02/2008 6:01:31 PM

    Obama's Links To Radicals Starting To Surface!! www.newsmax.com/timmer

    Obama-Farrakhan Ties Are Close, Ex-Farrakhan Aide Says

    A former top deputy to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan tells Newsmax that Barack Obama???s ties to the black nationalist movement in Chicago run deep, and that for many years the two men have had ???an open line between them??? to discuss policy and strategy, either directly or through intermediaries.

    ???Remember that for years, if you were a politician in Chicago, you had to have some type of relationship with Louis Farrakhan. You had to. If you didn???t, you would be ostracized out of black Chicago,??? said Dr. Vibert White Jr., who spent most of his adult life as a member and ultimately top officer of the Nation of Islam.
    White broke with the group in 1995 and is now a professor of African-American history at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
    White said Obama was ???part of the Chicago scene??? where Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. and radicals would go to each other???s events and support each other???s causes.
    ???Even though Chicago is the third-largest city in the country, within the black community, the political and militant nationalist community is very small. So it wouldn???t be uncommon for [Obama and Farrakhan] to show up at events together, or at least be there and communicate with each other,??? White told Newsmax.
    The Anti-Defamation League has denounced Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam as a ???hate group.???
    Farrakhan has called Jews ???bloodsuckers,??? ???satanic??? and accused them of running the slave trade. He has labeled gays as ???degenerates.??? In a 2006 speech, the ADL again condemned Farrakhan when he said: ???These false Jews promote the filth of Hollywood that is seeding the American people and the people of the world and bringing you down in moral strength. ??? It's the wicked Jews the false Jews that are promoting lesbianism, homosexuality. It's wicked Jews, false Jews that make it a crime for you to preach the word of God, then they call you homophobic!"

  • Posted By: Nins @ 10/24/2008 1:04:49 AM

    Watch the crowds at McCain/Palin rallies on this video:

    http://www.youtube.com/user/bravenewfilms

    Then ask yourself seriously: "Do I want this to be my America?"


    Afterwards, watch this political video with Andy Griffith, Opie and the Fonz. It's a blast from the past.

    http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cc65ed650d

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