Alabama

[budman]

Riley aide defends his past stands on pot, taxes

By Bob Johnson
The Associated Press
The Montgomery Advertiser
29 July, 2006


Bill Johnson says don't believe everything you read or hear about his colorful adventures as a world traveler, his views on the Taliban or taxes, or his controversial run as a Libertarian for the U.S. Senate in Missouri.

But when Johnson took leave as a member of Gov. Bob Riley's Cabinet this week to become a top Riley re-election campaign official, the move brought new attention to what the 47-year-old Johnson did and said before settling in as an affable Alabama Republican in Montgomery.

In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, Johnson said he was touting the Libertarian Party line when he took a stand favoring legalizing marijuana and prostitution during the 1994 Missouri race. He also said he has never supported the policies of the tyrannical Taliban government that replaced the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan, an issue raised by his statements on a Web site.

And he said he paid all back taxes a decade ago after going 14 years without filing a federal tax return.

Johnson's resume caught the eye of Riley's Democratic opponent for governor in the Nov. 7 general election, Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley, when he moved from being acting director of the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs to being grass-roots director of the Riley campaign, the same position he held when Riley ran for governor in 2002.

"The people of Alabama entrusted Riley with the highest position in this state, and then he entrusted a person with this background to head ADECA, a department that gives out hundreds of millions of dollars in grants," Baxley said. "It's disappointing to see Governor Riley give such authority to someone with this background, and I'm surprised Riley doesn't feel that he deserves better than that on his campaign."

Johnson has been around this track before.

Johnson is a former Birmingham City Council member who has worked for Riley's campaigns since his first successful run for Congress in 1996. The issues of his resume have been brought up in past Riley campaigns and were discussed at length when Johnson first ran for the Birmingham council in 1997.

He was living in Springfield, Mo., in 1994 when he ran for the U.S. Senate as a Libertarian, finishing third in a race won by former two-term Gov. John Ashcroft. Johnson said his primary campaign issue in that race was campaign finance reform. But the part of that race that he still finds himself defending were his statements about legalizing marijuana and prostitution and admitting he had not paid federal taxes in 14 years.

Johnson said he was then and still is opposed to prostitution and drug use, but following the Libertarian platform "I just thought there were better ways to attack the problem than through the legal system." He said he did not campaign on those issues and mostly in campaign speeches talked about campaign finance reform and welfare reform.

"I did not agree with everything in the Libertarian platform, just like Lucy Baxley says she does not agree with everything in the national Democratic Party platform," Johnson said.

As for not paying taxes, Johnson said at the time he "had serious concerns about what the federal government was doing with our tax dollars." He said he resolved those issues after Republicans won a majority in Congress in 1994 and filed all of his back returns.

"I have paid everything the IRS was asking me to pay," he said.

His adventures on trips to 45 countries, including a trip to Afghanistan and a harrowing four-month journey across land from Egypt to South Africa, have been chronicled over the years on Johnson's Web site. One of those entries, from an article he wrote for a Birmingham publication several years ago, includes a paragraph some have criticized as showing his support for the Taliban, which hosted Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"The Taliban ... stepped in to restore normalcy to civil government. To a war-torn country, civil order surpassed the need for civil liberty. The forbiddance of music and equal rights for women seemed a fair price to pay for order and security," Johnson wrote.

He said Friday he was not trying to defend the brutal practices of the Taliban regime, but was trying to show why Afghan people were willing to accept such a totalitarian government after 10 years of war.

"It was what the people in a war-torn country believed they needed at the time and they made the choice," Johnson said.

Always smiling, Johnson talked candidly about his life and his commitment to Riley, citing his work running ADECA and his efforts as executive director of Riley's Black Belt Action Commission.

"He knows who I am as a person and he knows some of the things they say in the media are not who I am," Johnson said.

But University of Alabama political scientist Bill Stewart said Johnson's past makes him an easy target for Riley's political opponents.

"It seems like you're giving your opponents ammunition when you don't have to do it," Stewart said.

While Johnson said he has matured and changed his views on some issues, he said he doesn't regret his many travels, including his "youthful adventure" to Afghanistan when he was a 21-year-old college student.

"I thought it was the patriotic thing to do," Johnson said.

Johnson said he never actually fought with Afghan rebels and that, while in Pakistan before entering Afghanistan, seven different Mujahideen groups rejected his offer to work as a paramedic "because I was a Christian. They said I was an infidel."

Johnson then took a bus into Afghanistan and after a wild 10-hour ride -- passing "blown up trucks and tanks" -- from the border to the capital of Kabul, he was told by U.S. Embassy officials that it was dangerous for him to be in the country. After that, he got on a bus and returned to Pakistan.

After that 1980 trip, Johnson returned to Alabama, where he was a student at Spring Hill College in Mobile. After graduation, he was enrolled at the UAB Medical School but dropped out to resume his travels, which included participating in a car race across South America and "riding on top of a train" in Africa.

In recent years, Johnson has settled down into the life of a quiet government official and lives in Prattville with his wife, Kathy. But he still loves to travel. In 1994, he took Kathy to Paris so he could propose at a famous monastery in western France. The couple went to Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for a honeymoon that also included side trips to Paraguay and Argentina.

[budman]

GUBERNATORIAL HOPEFUL FLASHES FOR CASH

Submitted by admin on May 2, 2006 - 2:19pm.
Press Releases
For Immediate Release

Contact: Loretta Nall for Governor Campaign
Phone: 251-650-2271
Cell: 256-625-9599
email: cnall1@charter.net

Thanks to political columnist Bob Ingram, Loretta Nall is best known lately for two things -- both of them on her chest. "In 55 years of political writing," Ingram noted in a recent column about a photo of Nall, "that was a first for me -- a picture in my column of a woman displaying cleavage ... [my mother] wouldn't have approved of that picture."

Nall, a well-known medical marijuana activist and the Libertarian Party's 2006 candidate for governor of Alabama, isn't one to pass on an opportunity. "When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade," she says. "When God gives you melons ... well, let's not go there." But going there she is, with a new fundraising campaign designed to capitalize on Ingram's touting of her attributes. To raise money for ballot access, Nall is using Flash animations on her campaign web site. Contributors get a glimpse of the buxom beauty's cleavage or waistline -- and big donors are promised an uncensored view of "the biggest boobs in Alabama politics."

All's fair in love, war and politics, says Nall. "I had to go one of two ways -- don a burqa so that maybe people like Bob Ingram will be willing to talk about my actual platform instead of my anatomy, or go with the flow and use dismissive attacks to my advantage. I don't back down easily. This is, if you'll pardon the expression, tit for tat."

Nall faces Alabama's draconian ballot access restrictions -- "the Republicans and Democrats are scared to death of a fair fight," she says -- and must submit 42,000 valid signatures to the Secretary of State by June 6th in order to appear on the ballot with the Democrat and GOP candidates (who face no such hurdle). Her "Flash for Cash" campaign is intended to raise the money required to gather those signatures.

The animations mentioned in this story may be viewed HERE.

Members of the media: For this fundraiser to be effective, I obviously can't allow our final animations to be hyperlinked around the Internet, so we've taken several security measures to prevent this from happening. However, we'll be happy to send non-Internet media sources raw files with the security measures stripped away. Simply contact us to make the proper arrangements. While we proudly consider bloggers an important part of the media, we're sure you will appreciate why we aren't exposing the links. We do hope you'll link to this page, though. Feel free to lift any of the graphics, too.