Bob Martin reports that the perjury investigation of Alice Martin, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, by the DoJ Office of Professional Responsibility, is "being very consciously slow-walked."
This story was first broken here at the Political Parlor over a year ago and involves a perjury complaint filed against Martin in 2004.
2004? I am willing to believe that it is being slow-walked.
BTW, why aren’t Alabama’s major media outlets pushing on this story? Birmingham News editor Tom Scarritt told a Political Parlor reader in September 2007 that "we will continue to ask about it," but I know of no progress report on the investigation from the Birmingham News or anyone else. I only know of one mention in the Birmingham News (in 2004) of the perjury charge against Alice Martin.
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Jennifer Foster in the Opelika-Auburn News:
For about $35,000, two-thirds of NYU students would give up their right to vote.
Think that’s crazy? Twenty percent would take - get this - an iPod Touch.
For the half of the electorate who don’t turn out anyway, it would be money for nothing, but still…
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An observation: Most people with strong feelings on whether Don Siegelman’s prosecution was politically motivated, on either side, believe they are motivated by a desire for justice. Most of those people believe that those who disagree with them are motivated by partisanship over justice.
U.S. Rep. Artur Davis has been close to Bill Canary and the Business Council of Alabama. Some Republicans even thought Davis, a Democrat, was a welcome change to his predecessor, Democrat Earl Hilliard. There are those in the business community who opened doors for Davis, hosted fundraisers in their homes, introduced him to hard-to-reach corners of support, and gave him wider credibility as a potential statewide candidate.
His now very public buy-in on Siegelman’s political prosecution is pushing away these supporters who were somewhat unlikely in the first place. Improbable supporters who saw a statesman are becoming detractors who see a partisan.
Artur Davis’s considerable core support no doubt remains strong. He may have even improved his chances to win the Democratic nomination for governor, if that is his aim, but at the same time he is lopping off some of the broad support that could have aided his campaign in the general election. The Parlor is hearing that Governor Bob Riley’s hard comments in The Birmingham News today are in line with feelings people in the business community have expressed for weeks now.
The Parlor assumes Davis is acting on heartfelt conviction. Whether he should be hailed as a champion of justice or just a Pelosi partisan lies in the eye of the beholder. But the consequence for Davis is that some unlikely support that could have helped him move beyond his district’s safe seat may be committed to making sure that he stays there.
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A two day Secessionist Convention begins in Chattanooga today.
In an unlikely marriage of desire to secede from the United States, two advocacy groups from opposite political traditions — New England and the South — are sitting down to talk.
Tired of foreign wars and what they consider right-wing courts, the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states like Vermont to be able to secede peacefully.
That sounds just fine to the League of the South, a conservative group that refuses to give up on Southern independence.
“We believe that an independent South, or Hawaii, Alaska, or Vermont would be better able to serve the interest of everybody, regardless of race or ethnicity,” said Michael Hill of Killen, Ala., president of the League of the South.
Passports not yet needed for travel to the convention in Chattanooga. But someday…
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The perjury investigation of Alice Martin, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, by the DoJ Office of Professional Responsibility is a story first broken here at the Political Parlor. This weekend it got a look from Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine.
Two questions: why does the DoJ appear to be moving this case not one whit? And why has this not received even a slight mention in the Alabama press (as far as I can tell)?
McClatchy had a small bit on it over the summer, but that has been the only mention I have seen.
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Bruce Baughman, Alabama’s very recently retired director of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency (and 32 year veteran of FEMA), received high marks for the state’s response to Katrina, but offers harsh words for the Bush administration’s re-write of the National Response Plan, calling it a “step backward.”
“Where’s the beef?” asked Baughman, who is Alabama’s emergency management chief. “I don’t have any problems with a framework . . . but it’s not a plan . . . and it’s not national. Who are we fooling here?”
He is not alone. The lead on the story…
A decision by the Bush administration to rewrite in secret the nation’s emergency response blueprint has angered state and local emergency officials, who worry that Washington is repeating a series of mistakes that contributed to its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina nearly two years ago.
Not saying at all that the comments are ill-deserved, but this is characteristic of the kind of piling on that the administration is getting.
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Alice Martin, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, is under investigation for perjury according to documentation obtained by the Political Parlor.
The Office of Professional Responsibility for the Department of Justice is investigating whether Martin committed perjury in a deposition related to an EEOC complaint against Martin’s office. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ultimately ordered Martin to rehire a fired assistant prosecutor and her supervisor, concluding that Martin’s office fired the assistant prosecutor as retaliation for filing a racial discrimination complaint. The EEOC found Martin’s explanation of the matter “simply unworthy of credence.”
The fired assistant prosecutor, Deirdra Brown Fleming, raised the allegations of perjury in Martin’s 2003 deposition. The DoJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility declined to investigate the perjury allegation at the time because the EEOC matter was ongoing.
After the EEOC matter was decided in favor of Fleming and against Alice Martin’s office, the Office of Professional Responsibility re-visited the matter and decided to initiate an inquiry into the perjury allegations, as indicated in this letter (pdf).
A spokesperson for Alice Martin’s office would not comment and referred me to the DoJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, saying that it would be inappropriate to comment on what is actually an OPR matter.
Nadira Clarke, who signed the letter (pdf) saying that OPR was initiating an investigation, said that OPR would not comment on an ongoing investigation.
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Mary Orndorff of The Birmingham News spotted state Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks in Washington, who admitted he was “likely” to stop by the DNC while he was there.
Has anyone anywhere seen any indication that he is not running against Sessions in 2008?
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Bill Clinton, Friday night, April 20 (pdf), at the state Democrats’ Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Birmingham on the costs of doing health care the way we do:
I’ll give you one other number: Fifteen hundred and a hundred and ten. General Motors has fifteen hundred dollars a car in health care costs. Toyota has a hundred and ten. Now, I think I am pretty good at running things. I do not believe I could take over General Motors, spot Toyota fourteen hundred dollars a car and beat them in the marketplace. So we have made a decision, without making it, to give up our car business.
Four days later, Associated Press, Tuesday, April 24:
For the first time ever, Toyota sold more vehicles globally in a quarter than General Motors, preliminary January-March figures show, the clearest sign yet that the Japanese company is on track to overtake its U.S. rival as the world’s top automaker.
A delay in securing a transcript of Clinton’s remarks resulted in a delay in posting.
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If it is true that “that there exists a list within the Department of Justice rating all 93 USAs on what is suspected to be political criteria,” then Tommy Stevenson (associate editor at The Tuscaloosa News) awaits its release via leak or subpoena to find the answer to the question, “Where does Alice Martin rank on the Gonzalez competence scale?”
From his blog:
An appointee of President George W. Bush and a woman rumored to have higher political ambitions in Alabama, Martin has had a couple of high-profile setbacks in recent years.
And more.
FWIW, one lawyer tells me, “Her reputation among the career people is a tad low, to be kind.”
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And where do we not learn it?
According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Americans know less about current events than they did two decades ago. Only 69% of Americans could name Dick Cheney as the Vice-President (compared to 74% who could name Dan Quayle in 1989). Only 66% could name the governor of their state (74% in 1989). “In 1989, fully 81 percent of people knew that the United States had a trade deficit; today, only 68 percent knew.”
But here’s one big difference: the survey respondents who seemed to know the most about what’s going on — who were able to identify major public figures, for example — were likely to be viewers of fake news programs like Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”; those who knew the least watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news.
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Bloggers on a national level are taking note, and now I’m receiving it in email…
In case you missed it, our own Sen. Jeff Sessions has said that one of the reasons we went into Iraq was because Saddam Hussein was saying that he had won the 1991 Gulf War.
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Retail giant Wal-Mart has been fervently anti-union but joins hands with two unions and others in an alliance to call for universal health care:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., AT&T Inc., Intel Corp. and Kelly Services Inc. joined forces with two labor unions in calling for an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system that would guarantee universal coverage by 2012.
46 million Americans don’t have health insurance, an all-time high. About 16% or 1 in 6 Americans. And each year about 18,000 Americans under 65 die due to a lack of health insurance. But back to the story…
[Service Employees International Union President Andrew] Stern said he and [Wal-Mart CEO] Scott met in person to discuss formation of the new alliance, which also includes the Communication Workers of America union, former Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee and John Podesta, who heads the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group that supports Democratic policies.
The group’s diversity reflects the broad base of support for changing America’s health-care system, Stern said. For example, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has opposed attempts to unionize its stores while San Antonio, Texas-based AT&T, the biggest U.S. phone company, is the largest employer of union workers.
Elsewhere, the skies ran blood-red, the lion and the lamb lay down together, and four horsemen of the apocalypse have been spotted.
If you want more than the Bloomberg story linked above, here is the story from McClatchy and CNN Money.
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Cleaning out files…
An interesting op-ed column a bit ago from the Washington Post on the proposed repeal of the estate tax…
The United States is by some measures the most unequal society in the rich world and the most unequal that it’s been since the 1920s. What is the dumbest possible response to this? Identify the most progressive federal tax and repeal it.
Lots o’good reading on the issue there.
Money quote (no pun intended): “The United States is supposed to be a country that values individuals for their inherent worth, not for their inherited worth.”
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Last week, the U.S. House passed a bill that would raise the minimum wage over three years from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour. That is coupled with an estate tax repeal for the benefit of the top 1% wealthiest Americans that would cost the U.S. $268 billion over the next 10 years, and it would cost at least $599 billion in the 10 years after that. For this reason, I expect the bill to be D.O.A. in the Senate.
The minimum wage has been $5.15/hr. since 1997. Its purchasing power is the lowest it has been in 51 years.
How much do you have to make to be self-sufficient in Alabama? According to a 2003 study (pdf file) that looks at self-sufficiency on a county-by-county basis broken down by family type, a single Birmingham resident would have to make $8.09/hr. to be self-sufficient. In Mobile, for example, a couple with an infant and a pre-schooler would have to make $9.76/hr. each for self-sufficiency.
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(R) Jeff Sessions (1-19)
(D) Vivian Figures (33-1)
(D) Artur Davis (1-49)
(R) Mike Hubbard (13-1)
(?) David Bronner (OFF)