Jo Bonner is president of the University of South Alabama and in that role is building the school in both students and infrastructure. A couple jobs before that he represented Alabama's Distict 1 in Washington, taking over from Sonny Callahan for whom he was chief of staff beginning in 1989. Joe spent a lot of time in Washignton and has insights on what has changed and what has driven the change in Washington. He, like so many of my recent interviews, is disturbed by what he sees. Joe and I discuss what's changed and what may it may take to return to country to decency to one another and loyalty to the constitution.

Christina Woerner McInnis is running for Alabama Agriculture Commissioner, and the job turns out to be far bigger — and far stranger — than most of us realize. Once she and I started talking, the scope unfurled like a county fair map: everything from how many gallons come through the gasoline pump to whether the grocery-store salad bar scale is honest, all the way to steering timber policy across the entire state.

Historically, candidates have fit a familiar mold: men in cowboy hats, thick accents, and a kind of mythic farm-boss swagger. Christina is a sharp break from that pattern. She's a woman who grew up on the office side of her family farm — the side where you learn not just how a farm works, but why it works. She'll tell you she can drive a tractor and pull a calf, and she can, but her real power is in understanding how all the pieces of a complex system knit together to create a viable, resilient operation.

That's the same lens she brings to the commissioner's office she's aiming for: a deep grasp of how Alabama's many agricultural worlds — fuel, food, timber, regulation, commerce — interlock. She wants to pull those pieces together with intention and clarity, not nostalgia, to strengthen the state's future.

Comments: Cam@CamMarston.com.

Bradley Byrne served in Washington for Alabama's First Distrct from 2014 to 2021. Today, he says, he couldn't get elected as a Republican. He's not Republican enough. The party has moved further right and any act of working with Democrats to find solutions to national issues or creating local opportunities would put a target on his back, almost literally. He, like the other poiticians I've interviewed recently, has received credible death threats and he tells me the story. What's the opportunity in Washtington today? What's the temperatue? Why are the sane people retiring and what happened to their desire to serve? Bradley and I discuss these things in a far ranging conversation.

Feedback? Cam@CamMarston.com