On infrastructure: Infrastructure is the key to unlocking the economic development and tourism potential of the Third District, Segall said. Every county has good job potential, he said, but it takes infrastructure to turn potential into reality, he said. Randolph County is a tourist’s oasis waiting to be developed, but the district doesn’t have the money. “We could be building refineries right now, but we don’t have the roads,” Segall said. And there are 1,000 bridges in the district that are impassible for school buses, he said.

On education: Segall said he believes that public education must be a federal funding priority, from early childhood and early intervention offered by H.I.P.P.Y. programs all the way through college and career technical education. Incentives are needed to encourage people to learn and develop the skills necessary to win and hold good jobs; the money is there, Segall said, but “politicians have been stealing from us for so long” that the money has been wasted in other areas and needs to be reallocated for education.

On taxes: Segall said he believes that the plan Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has proposed to get rid of capital gains taxes is a good one. Segall said he believes in a progressive tax system, where richer Americans pay more than the poor. “People might not love it, but I’m for it,” he said to applause.

Asked about the presidential election: Segall said that he believes that either John McCain or Barack Obama would make a good president. Although this drew strong objections from the partisan crowd, Segall stood by his assessment. Auburn City Councilman Arthur Dowdell chided Segall for his statement and encouraged him to share his real thoughts on the race, “since there isn’t any press in the room.” “There is press in the room.” Segall politely said, pointing me out to Dowdell. Returning to the race itself, Segall said, “The only issue to me is making sure we have a good economy.”

Since I was outed in the group as press, I figured I would make the most of it, so I asked Segall about earmarks. Considering the old saying that federal money is only pork if it goes to someone else’s district, what does he think of the earmark system? I asked. Segall responded that he would propose legislation requiring that “every dime” of federal money be subject to a cost-benefit analysis. “It’s one thing to spend money on a road when people are going to live around it and when you have an opportunity to make that money back,” Segall said, but there’s no accountability in the system as it now stands. What would the cost-benefit ratio have to be for a project to be considered a worthy one? I asked. It would depend on the return the local area or the state would get for the spending, he replied.

On energy: Segall said Alabama could be on the verge of a natural gas boom with the recent discovery of a process that can extract natural gas from shale rock. “If we can do it, that would be huge,” Segall said. In addition, Alabamians can’t forget the nuclear component: “20 percent of the energy in this state is nuclear, and it is safe,” Segall said.

On CAFTA: Segall said that he objects to CAFTA on the basis that Alabamians don’t get a fair shake in the deal. Yes, in exchange for enabling businesses to move their production facilities and factories out of the United States, Alabamians can take advantage of newly opened Central American markets. But since the average yearly income for a Central American family is $1,500, “there’s just not that much they can buy,” Segall said. Segall said he would pursue as part of any free trade agreement provisions that would preclude companies from exploiting a foreign workforce; in many of those countries, there are no environmental standards governing the factories, few if any labor laws and no minimum wage standards, he said. “That’s not fair to us,” he said, and that unfair playing field is why he would vote against CAFTA as it is now and all free trade agreements in the future unless job guarantees are included. Both parties are guilty of pushing free trade agreements that are costing Americans their jobs and pushing the United States toward “more dependence on countries that are not our friends,” Segall said. “Our focus ought to be on our self-sufficiency.” Jobs from WestPoint Stevens, Russell Mills and others have been lost to CAFTA, he said; “What are we going to do to replace those jobs?”

Segall said he would support career technical education legislation and the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a bill that would ensure equal pay for women.

SIDEBAR: I didn’t know who Lilly Ledbetter is, so I looked it up (case background here). Ledbetter, the bill’s namesake, worked as a manager at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden (yes, Alabama) for nearly two decades, not knowing that she was earning smaller raises than her male counterparts. By 1998, Ledbetter’s annual salary was lagging $15,000 behind that of a male colleague with whom her pay had been equal nearly 20 years before. In fact, she was being paid less than all her male counterparts in the tire assembly department – even recent hires with far less on-the-job experience. Ledbetter sued, and a jury awarded her $250,000 in back pay and $3 million in punitive damages. Goodyear appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices ruled 5-4 in May 2007 that Ledbetter wasn’t entitled to compensation, after all, because she had waited too long to file her claim. The Court said that Ledbetter had to have filed her complaint within 180 days of the issuance of the first unequal check, not within 180 days of learning of the inequality. Ledbetter didn’t know, of course, that she was being treated unfairly for nearly 20 years, and she only learned of it then because someone tipped her off in an anonymous note. Congress tried to fix the law to reflect the 180-days-from-when-you-find-out provision, but it was blocked in the Senate by Republicans who said it would increase lawsuits against business owners. Barack Obama voted for the Ledbetter Act. John McCain has said that he supports equal pay for women, but he did not vote on the bill. He did say, though, that he would have voted against the Ledbetter Act because it would increase “frivolous lawsuits” (info on presidential candidates’ positions here). END SIDEBAR

On Social Security: “I don’t believe we need to privatize Social Security,” Segall said, noting that the government “gives away” five cents on the dollar to companies making more than $1 billion a year. Segall said that the corporate giveaways could be redirected to strengthen Social Security. He said he opposes changing the retirement age and reducing benefit payments. “We just need to make it a priority,” Segall said. “I think we have enough money to fund it if we stop funding corporate welfare.”

On health care: Segall said he supports the creation of a health care system wherein all Americans had access to primary, preventative care so that they didn’t have to receive their health care from emergency rooms. He said he doesn’t believe that insurance companies should be able to refuse coverage to applicants based on pre-existing conditions, and that he would support full health care coverage for all children immediately. Segall said that he would support legislation barring hospitals from charging insured and uninsured patients different rates for the same procedure.

On the government’s $700 billion mortgage bailout plan: Segall said that he doesn’t support such measures generally, but “we had to do it.” Noting a statistic he had seen that the government now owns 70 percent of the mortgages in the United States, Segall said, “The last eight years have been about destroying regulation. You could get a mortgage without a job.” And Democrats bear some of the blame, too, he said; their support for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, signed by President Clinton into law in 1999 after being passed by a veto-proof margin, allowed the banking industry to consolidate and enabled the formation of the megabanks that ended up taking on so much of this bad debt. And the timing isn’t great for McCain, Segall said: “McCain has been for deregulation his entire life,” Segall said. And as for the salaries and those multi-million dollar buyouts enjoyed by failed CEOs? “There’s nothing about the free market that needs people to make $100 million a year,” Segall said.

On Iraq: “We need to get out of Iraq,” Segall said. “We’ve made it as safe as we’re going to make it.” Segall noted that Sunni and Shiite Muslims have been fighting for centuries, and nothing America can do will change that. “My opponent doesn’t have the courage to say it, but we ought to get out of their way,” Segall said.

On diplomacy and the military in general: “We should talk to whomever it is useful to talk to,” Segall said in response to a question about Iran. Asked about nuclear proliferation and whether America is a hypocrite when it comes to asking other countries to stop nuclear development while continuing to develop its own such devices, Segall rejected the characterization and reiterated his support for a strong military. “You need a military capable of doing a job. You do need a big military,” he said, noting the many obligations the United States has abroad.

Tomorrow: Part Three: The sit-down