Paying the bills in Bama

For two consecutive months, the state of Alabama has been unable to release the full amount needed to pay the salaries of Alabama public school teachers and support staff.

This comes as the state's education system faces something called "proration," a situation where less revenue than was projected comes into the state's coffers. What comes next is never pleasant. The state starts cutting back, an awful thing to do in Alabama where lavish spending on education is virtually unknown.

In east Alabama, several local governments have taken matters in their own hands, doing the one thing they can to generate more money for local public schools: raise sales taxes. That cash-strapped local governments must fund public schooling - hardly a luxury in our global economy - by raising the most regressive tax available speaks volumes about how Alabama got in the shape it's in.

Times wrong on the South

A story in today's issue of The New York Times shows a bias against the region in presidential politics.

Headlined "For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics," the story is a two-headed hydra. On one hand, it laments that the "centrality of the South to national politics" may have ended on Election Day.

The region’s absence from Mr. Obama’s winning formula means it “is becoming distinctly less important,” said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. “The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.”

On the other hand, the newspaper uses fancy charts to show that Southerners in many Deep South places voted more Republican than in 2004.

So what is it? The South matters or not in national politics? While the Times seems hellbent on showing the South doesn't matter, think about what happened on Election Day:

Obama's overwhelming ground forces broke up the solid GOP South by winning the formerly red states of Virginia, Florida and North Carolina.

For a long time, we've maintained that if a Democrat could win at least two state in the South, it would win the White House. Obama is the first to do it since Jimmy Carter. Unlike the Times' innuendo, the South is important on the national political playing field still -- just because it is becoming more like much of the rest of the country in many places.