Michele Bachman made some McCarthy sounding comments on MSNBC the other night and it propelled her opponent Elwyn Tinklenberg to raise record money through Act Blue. In fact Tinklenberg has now raised $268k and rising through Act Blue and most have that has come over the weekend.
Well we think we've found the next Incumbent, Mike Rogers, whose scare tactics should cause us all to be fearful. And we haven't had to look that far.
Rogers released attack ads on Friday equating opponent Joshua Segall as being a liberal because of his father's client and being named to the DCCC Red to Blue list. And he's the one accusing Segall of running a negative campaign. He's going on a Bachman like witch-hunt and he needs to be stopped.
This has just gone too far. We need your help in Alabama where we can win this race.
The script of the Ad you can find on Rogers website. As soon as it comes up on YouTube we will embed the ad.
What's behind Joshua Segall's negative campaign? A liberal.
Segall is supported by leaders of the ACLU, a group that wants to register convicted felons to vote and opposes terrorist surveillance. Segall would keep liberal Nancy Pelosi in power. Joshua Segall is for higher taxes of small businesses. A real jobs killer that would make the economy even worse. Joshua Segall: His liberal values are too extreme.
The leaders of the ACLU that Rogers refers to : Former Alabama State Bar President Bobby Segall who is also an ACLU attorney. Bobby Segall is so respected that he was elected by the members of the Alabama State Bar - Republicans and Democrats alike to the President position.
Here is Bobby Segall's bio from the ACLU of Alabama's website
BOBBY SEGALL has been practicing law in Alabama since 1973 and has served on the ACLU Board since 2003. He is currently with the firm of Copeland, Franco, Screws and Gill in Montgomery, practicing in civil litigation, personal injury, corporate litigation and First Amendment law. Bobby has served as President of the Board of Legal Services Corporation of Alabama, the Montgomery County Bar Association and the Montgomery County Trial Lawyers Association. He has also been a member of the Alabama Board of Bar Commissioners. Bobby was the president of the Alabama Bar Association in 2005 and 2006. He has represented clients in numerous ACLU of Alabama sponsored lawsuits, including a case seeking reform of the state’s education system and various First Amendment cases. He represented the ACLU in James v. ACLU, otherwise known as the second Ten Commandments case. He is a member of the Legal Committee and the Chair of the Nominations Committee
Bobby Segall, from my personal knowledge is a good, honorable, well-liked man and was President of the Alabama Bar Association of which Mike Rogers is a member. Mike Rogers was a plaintiffs lawyer before he entered Congress and now he is a corporate stooge who takes thousands and thousands of dollars from Big Business, Pharmaceutical Companies and Oil Companies.
So Bobby Segall represented ex-felons in a voting rights case. And this Felon Voting Rights issue is a valid dispute over some confusion over which ex-felons should be allowed to register to vote. A number of ex-felons who have not lost the right to vote have been wrongfully scrubbed from the rolls. There has been confusion on this issue in Alabama for a while.
Here is an overview
At issue is a law passed by the Legislature in 2003 that says felons who committed crimes of moral turpitude can’t vote, but those who committed other crimes can. The problem is the Legislature did not create a definitive list of what crimes fall in each group.
The governor’s office came up with a list of more than 400 crimes of moral turpitude that was used until last month to reject ex-felons’ registration applications and remove those already on the voter rolls.
The state attorney general and the state Administrative Office of Courts each developed their own lists that are much shorter than the governor’s.
Mike Rogers calls out Josh Segall for his ties to his father and says Segall is running the negative campaign. All I've seen is Segall telling the truth about Rogers being one of the most ineffective members of Congress, casting a deciding vote on CAFTA and failing to help build infrastructure in his district.
Josh Segall, as a young attorney, is impressive in his own right. He graduated from Brown University which he has been criticized for. Although he is a 4th Generation Alabamian and graduated from the University of Alabama Law School where he started Homegrown Alabama ( an agriculture program). Segall worked a number of national campaigns and speaks knowledgeable about any issue that affects residents of the 3rd Congressional District.
Oh yeah and in today's Montgomery Advertiser the candidates answers to a series of health care questions were published.
Mike Rogers mostly gave his typical one or two sentence answers including addressing universal health care by saying
Free-market reforms are the best answer.
We need to do new and creative things like authorizing the associated health plans and to do things to strengthen Medicare and Medicaid, which are just absolutely essential to our health-care system.
What things are those Mike? Can you even tell us?
Of course Segall gave very thoughtful and provoking answers. He talked about the quality and cost of health care at length.
Rogers clearly is a very dim-bulb that gives the standard Republican crafted answers.
Segall on the other hand understands how prescription drug companies can cut the costs in an number of ways including lowering advertising costs.
Mike Rogers has no real answer for stopping the spread of HIV and AIDS through increased federal funding.Rogers never speaks about preventive care.
Now come on Mike, you've been in Congress for six years and you cannot come up with any more than this.
Josh Segall, although he doesn't have the political rap sheet that Rogers does, has plenty of innovative answers and ideas on how to fix health care in this country
They can negotiate for lower prices, and they can tell these prescription drug companies to stop all the advertising and put money into lowering drug prices and into more research and development.
In this country right now, we do most of the research and development at our universities, and then we give the drugs to these pharmaceutical companies so that they can market them at exorbitant prices.
One, we need to stop sending people to the emergency room and we need to practice preventative care. That means you send them to the doctor, you incentivize going to the doctor instead of going to the emergency room. That's No. 1.
No. 2, is we've got too much paperwork. We've got more paperwork in this country than any other country in world. And we don't have best health care in the world.
And No. 3 is you've got to deal with harm that happens to people in the hospital. This is as unreported an issue as there is in this country. And I believe that a congressman ought to have some expertise on this issue.
We still have people in this country die everyday. We've had over 100,000 die every year in this country -- die -- because of a preventable harm that happens in the hospital. Bedsores, pneumonia, staph infection, getting the wrong medication -- there are a host of other infections people get -- those things are mostly preventable.
And we one, don't talk about those things. We should talk about them. We should know about them. You should know how your hospital performs on those things.
By the way, Alabama is little better than some other states, but not good enough. Blue Cross Blue Shield has done good in pushing Alabama hospitals to be better on this.
Second thing, and it's been a huge thing by the way that Medicare and Medicaid have said they're not going to reimburse for infections that people get in the hospital. That's a huge deal. It's a great deal. The other thing is we've got to have more primary care doctors and we've got to have more nurses.
Nursing is a tough profession. Hospitals are understaffed. Nurses are overwhelmed. They have a huge amount of work, and long shifts. They're not paid enough for that kind of a job. We have more nurses retiring and not coming back at an early age than in most other professions there are. We need to bring nursing back.
I'm asking you to take a look at this race and help us support Joshua Segall.
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