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“Now the race is on, and here comes pride up the backstretch. Heartaches are goin’ to the inside.” – Don Rollins This year is shaping up to be the biggest spectacle of a presidential campaign season since at least 1968. There are even a few similarities between then and now. The 1968 race saw the… Read more

“Momentum is only as good as tomorrow’s starting pitcher.” – Earl Weaver, former manager of Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles This is my first column to contain a trigger warning. Turn around now if you have high blood pressure, a weak stomach or might be about to operate any heavy machinery. It gets gruesome after… Read more

“The Army decided I should be on the all-American ping-pong team. We were the first Americans to visit the land of China in like a million years or something like that, and somebody said that world peace was in our hands. But all I did was play ping-pong.” – Tom Hanks as the title character… Read more

“Two’s company; three’s a crowd.” – English adage You may remember the mock bumper stickers and yard signs from our last presidential election saying something to the effect of “Any Functioning Adult – 2020.” Even looking back to earlier elections, at least a few people are always asking, “Why are there only two people with… Read more

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” – Matthew 12:25, popularized by Abraham Lincoln A couple of weeks ago we talked about how Alabama is a state that has pushed all its poker chips in with one political party for the vast majority of its history – mostly Democratic but also Republican in the past… Read more

“Did you ever have to make up your mind? Pick up on one and leave the other behind? It’s not often easy and not often kind. Did you ever have to make up your mind?” – John Sebastian I almost wrote this column a couple of months ago. Upon second thought I decided a column… Read more

“(T)he grand objective of the haves is obstruction … Organization is not always necessary to obstruct; it is essential, however, for the promotion of a sustained program in behalf of the have-nots.” – 20th century political scientist V.O. Key In political science there is an idea developed by scholar Daniel Elazar called state political culture.… Read more

“The time you won your town the race, we chaired you through the marketplace. Man and boy stood cheering by, and home we brought you shoulder-high. Today, the road all runners come, shoulder-high we bring you home, and set you at your threshold down, townsman of a stiller town.” – A.E. Housman It is not… Read more

“You don’t tell your pappy how to court the electorate. We ain’t one-at-a-timin’ here. We’re mass communicating.” – Charles Durning as Gov. Pappy O’Daniel in the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” One of the few advantages of living in a politically one-sided state is we usually avoid much of the unending political advertising as… Read more

“I’ve said repeatedly in this campaign that the president was my opponent and not my enemy, and I wish him well, and I pledge my support in whatever advances the cause of a better America because that’s what the race was about in the first place, a better America as we go into the next… Read more