{"id":338521,"date":"2017-12-08T21:54:37","date_gmt":"2017-12-08T20:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/alabama-the-senate-and-the-nation-will-suffer\/"},"modified":"2017-12-08T21:54:37","modified_gmt":"2017-12-08T20:54:37","slug":"alabama-the-senate-and-the-nation-will-suffer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/alabama-the-senate-and-the-nation-will-suffer\/","title":{"rendered":"Alabama, the Senate and the Nation Will Suffer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Amid all the news surrounding Roy Moore’s race for the US Senate and the seeming willingness of Alabama’s likely voters to send a man of such dubious merit and morality to Capitol Hill (where, admittedly, the bar already is pretty damned low), I keep thinking of a line from the Randy Newman song “Rednecks.”<\/p>\n

It’s the lead piece on his classic ’70s album\u00a0Good Old Boys, and begins with a Southern man lamenting how the north-of-the-Mason-Dixon-line media types make fun of former Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox, the arch-segregationist notorious for using an ax handle to threaten those who tried to integrate his fried chicken restaurant.<\/p>\n

To see more stories like this, visit Moyers & Company at Truthout.<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

“Well, he may be a fool but he’s our fool,” Newman sings, and yep, there’s the upcoming Alabama election in a nutshell. Outsiders are resented and tribalism reigns, no matter how irrational or destructive to self-interest.<\/p>\n

Instead of campaigning about how to get the federal government to help his state pull itself from the clutches of such poverty, hunger and addiction, Roy Moore acts like a false prophet, preaching Islamophobia, homophobia and the dominance of “God’s law” over the Constitution.<\/p>\n

“Thank God for Mississippi” is the old joke: No matter how bad things were in Alabama, there always was a state right next door where things were often worse. Alabama is the\u00a0third “hungriest” state<\/a>\u00a0in the nation, with 18 percent of its population food insecure, behind Louisiana and, yes, Mississippi. It’s the\u00a0sixth-poorest state<\/a>, with some 18.5 percent living in poverty, and the\u00a0third-highest state<\/a>\u00a0when it comes both to murders and the number of citizens behind bars per 100,000 members of population.\u00a0According to the Centers for Disease Control, opioids are prescribed in Alabama\u00a0more than in any other state<\/a>, and a Center for Health Statistics report notes that Alabama’s rate of overdose deaths from opioids has doubled since 2011.<\/p>\n

But no, instead of campaigning about how to get the…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amid all the news surrounding Roy Moore’s race for the US Senate and the seeming willingness of Alabama’s likely voters to send a man of such dubious merit and morality to Capitol Hill (where, admittedly, the bar already is pretty damned low), I keep thinking of a line from the Randy Newman song “Rednecks.” It’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-338521","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}