Sure, if it’s the right woman. But here in Dixie Alley, the frogs think it’s spring already –

“The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”
— William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951

A strange gold and purple sunset on Saturday, Jan. 11, when 11 people died in winter tornadoes in Alabama: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

CONECUH NATIONAL FOREST – In a glance at the trending news on Twitter and the headlines in the mainstream media, you would think that the most important stories in the country today are about actor Vince Vaughn shaking hands with the president at the college football national championship game, a tiff between members of the British royal family, and an argument about gender between two of the more leftist Democrats running for president.

But here in Dixie Tornado Alley, where deadly storms are now a year around occurrence due to climate change even in the dead of what is supposed to be winter, the frogs and maybe some people think spring has sprung already. It’s mid-January.

The vernal equinox is not supposed to happen until March 19.

But that didn’t stop the Spring peepers, ornate and Southern chorus frogs, gopher and leopard frogs and a small army of spade-footed toads from coming out this weekend to create a cacophony of amphibian mating calls from filling the woods with a roar and a song that could probably be heard in towns across the region.

Mark Bailey of Andalusia, Alabama, a wildlife biologist who lives near the national forest’s Open Pond Campground, recorded the event and shared a video where you can hear it on Facebook.

Meanwhile, as at least 11 people died in Alabama over the weekend when a line of severe thunderstorms came west from Texas through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and into the panhandle of Florida, research now shows that more tornadoes are happening more often and killing more people in Alabama than any other state in the country. Thus the new title.

Alabama will henceforth be known not just as the Heart of Dixie and the Buckle of the Bible Belt. It is now ground zero in Dixie Alley, a new nickname apparently dubbed by the National Weather Service.

“The trends since 1980 in the Great Plains your … tornado alley (of) Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas have been downward and (in Alabama) they’ve been upward,” says Dr. Victor Gensini, a prominent tornado researcher with Northern Illinois University. “So an increase (is happening) in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and portions of the Midwest.”

So in other words, the climate is changing. More powerful storms. More often. Killing more people. Even in winter. The frogs think it’s spring in January.

No such thing, eh? Maybe it’s god’s plan to destroy the planet they think he created for them to pollute.

In a rich bit of journalistic irony, Alabama is also probably the state with the most citizens who deny even the existence of a “belief” that the climate is obviously changing due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels. It is the state that supports President Donald Trump more than any other state, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney’s Wyoming.

But there is a tiny sliver of hope. According to daily tracking polls, Trump’s net approval in Alabama has fallen 14 points since the 2016 election.

“You have a lot of mobile homes, weak frame housing style where you know an EF-0 is going to completely level those types of structures,” Gensini said of Alabama. “Tornadoes happen there at night more prevalent than other places in the Great Plains and there’s a lot of trees in Mississippi and Alabama and portions of the midsouth making it very difficult for tornadoes to be spotted.”

So maybe Mother Nature is doing us a favor?

For all the new readers here and on Facebook who were probably not paying attention back in 2008 when Facebook first started becoming a factor in politics near the end of what I call the “blogging era,” here’s a story you should pay attention to. It had portents of what was going to happen in 2020, and basically foretold what happened in the special election of 2017 when now U.S. Senator Doug Jones bested Republican Roy Moore.

With a little help from a sociology professor at Auburn we ran a ground breaking story that went beyond anything any 20th century print newspaper would or could have produced and showed how Barack Obama won that election and became the first African American president because of demographic changes coming across the country. He became what we call a “majority president” by winning 57 percent of the national popular vote in a landslide that allowed him to also sweep the electoral college vote.

Fighting the Final Battles of the Civil War – America Just Elected Its First Black President: Are the people of Alabama ready for an African-American governor?

By contrast, Donald Trump is what we call a “minority president,” who only won 46.1 percent of the national popular vote. He won the presidency by dominating in rural areas and suburbs around big cities in key battleground states, where black men either voted for the celebrity businessman or failed to turn out to vote for the woman, Hillary Clinton.

Obama picked up the same majority in 2012, handily beating Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The difference between then and now is that Obama was a rock star on the campaign trail, picking up every kind of Democratic Party voter, not just black votes. With an IQ of something like 162, four standard deviations above the mean (average), he had a way of saying exactly the right thing when the television cameras were aimed at him and rolling.

So far in the 2020 Democratic Primary, none of the Democrats have his smarts, charisma or broad national appeal. Sorry my friends. None of them.

Which means that we may not see the prediction come true for a final end to the Civil War until 2024 — unless someone can find 20 Republican senators who will actually live up to their special oath in Trump’s impeachment trial and vote to do the right thing and put country over party.

It’s as if voters are saying, “OK, you had your first African American president. We nominated a woman who should have become the first woman president. But it didn’t work. We got Trump instead.”

Hundreds of stories have waisted thousands of barrels of ink and rolls of newsprint debating the issue of which candidate can “win,” in other words, who can beat Trump in 2020.

Since the “fake news” story got going after the 2016 election, people have retreated from helping us to build the new independent and truly free press for the 21st century and turned back the clock to rely on the big name corporate news outlets of the 20th century, which still rely on the so-called “news values” taught in every journalism school in the drive to “professionalize” the field. This is a long and complicated story most people don’t know, but let’s just for the sake of the argument here, owners of big chain papers didn’t want unions and didn’t want to pay reporters overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

CJR: THE OVERTIME WARS

These values, identified by journalism historians based on content analysis studies of what newspapers covered in the mid-20th century, include “prominence,” which is why most of the news is about celebrities and this president, even when everybody knows he’s lying. And it includes “conflict,” which the media thrives on to get readers, viewers and clicks.

So don’t be surprised when you turn on the boob tube on Tuesday night and watch in horror as the moderators from The Des Moines Register and CNN fall all over themselves to help perpetrate a fight between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren over whether a woman can win the presidency and beat Trump.

I have no doubt that the right woman, with the right credentials, smarts, charisma, campaign organization and money could beat Trump. I just don’t think she’s in this race. Michelle Obama could beat Trump in a landslide, and maybe even pick up more than 57 percent of the vote. Alas, she has her life back, and you can’t blame her for not wanting to get back in this fray to get beaten up in the media every day for another eight years for the dresses she likes to wear.

I won’t be watching, and not just because we can’t seem to pick up broadcast TV out here in the woods and I need to save some cell phone tower bandwidth for more important things. I will be sipping an IPA and listening to the frogs and the coyotes, wishing people were smarter. Maybe if democracy and the planet survive until 2024, we can start to try to turn things around by then. It may already be too late. But one can hope.