re: Birmingham Mayor Threatens to Steer Athletes from UA and Auburn if Bill Passes

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What Bham needs is a Tommy Battle. That man has turned Huntsville into a boom town. Fiscal responsibility, great education, free enterprise, created good jobs in his tenure as mayor. I voted for him when he ran for governor and would do so again. Man has a great business mind and knows how to bring growth to a city and maintain it.

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The deep federal (mostly DoD) investment into Huntsville makes it hard for me to suspect Battle is the significant factor in that boom. Tech industry has been looking for ways to get out of California and into states with less labor/business encumberments for decades. Huntsville already having a STEM background made this eventually sort of overdetermined.

That said, he didn't do anything to discourage the non-DoD growth in the area which in itself deserves credit. The town has a more diverse economic base, so political games being played with the Space Force Command aren't exactly the gut punch it would have been 30 years ago.

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A fan of the wire I see....

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Didn’t really intend it but I can see the connections. There are really only one type of mayor: pro chamber of commerce/real estate developer. You can be aspire to be a left-liberal, but even the mayor of largest city in the US has limited revenue capacity to address large scale welfare programs. NYC is not standing up Medicare For All. Successful mayors have essentially one broad tactic and it would be called centrist liberal from the left or RINO/Rockefeller Republican from the right.


In that respect, there is only one thing a black mayor in a major city can ever really be and it is definitely not going to be anybody that materially helps the large numbers of lower middle to poor urban black people. They’re the smiling face for business as usual, so there will be less popular revolt against said business.

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First off, I like Woodfin

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As far as I got before I had to downvote.

Tommy Battle? You mean the town of where we have nothing but storage center, Dollar stores, Walmarts and fast food businesses?

frick him. He encouraged the rioting in 2020. He's cut from the same cloth as Tricky Dick Arrington....Birmingham's first jailbird mayor.

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You mean the town of where we have nothing but storage center, Dollar stores, Walmarts and fast food businesses?

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When exactly was the last time you were in Huntsville? The downtown area has been revitalized with new Hotels, apartments, restaurants, and trendy micro-breweries. The Lowe Mill area is becoming a new hot spot to buy houses/real estate now that the subsidized housing has mostly been removed off Governor's drive. Campus 805 is thriving as well as Stove House. Mid-city has new restaurants, bars and activities for young professionals. New subdivisions and apartments all over. The list of good companies to work for in Huntsville is too long to list. Name a better place to live in Alabama than Huntsville...it isn't even close. Huntsville was named #1 place to live in the USA. You are either trolling or haven't been to Huntsville in a long time.

Y'all are so funny to me Y'all basically are saying that black people have no place or not accepted anywhere other than the sports arena. IF they aren't on the field or the court for your team, then they damn sure shouldn't hold any position qualifications be damned.

It was just an example of two different styles of leadership. You don’t have to get all philosophical on explaining what’s wrong in bham. We all know what’s wrong in bham.

I'm not confused at all. With the history of Alabama, the south, and the country as a whole, many black men and women were passed over for jobs and promotions that were more than qualified because the person making the decision on said job or promotion preferred to have a white person in the position. Let's not forget that history of redlining, underfunding to HBCUs, lending discrimination, etc. There is a laundry list of unjust practices against the black community. Familiar with the Tuskegee Experiments. We aren't 70 years removed from George Wallace standing in the door way making his passionate speech of upholding segregation. Hell, while I was with an investment bank in Atlanta just last year (2023), I saw a licensed (Series 7 and 66) young black guy with 5 years of industry experience get passed over for an analyst position for a white kid straight out of college with not even an SIE to his name, let alone work experience. So yeah, we get passed over while more qualified all the damn time.