Connecting those dot, dot, dots...

This is hard to explain to someone from New York, or even Washington.

Let's see if I can take you through it quickly before I fall asleep after spending all day in Montgomery covering the show trial of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and Richard Scrushy.

If you wake up Friday and pick up a newspaper in Alabama, there will be three stories on the front page for sure.

The top story will be written as a historic piece about how a Democrat (Don Siegelman) was found guilty of taking a bribe from a wealthy businessman (Richard Scrushy). What they won't tell you is that the prosecution was cooked up in Washington by Karl Rove and company to get Siegelman out of the way - to clear the electoral path of Republican up-and-comers Bob Riley and his son Rob.

The next story down the page will feature a Republican Senator, Jeff Sessions, leading the fight to kill an immigration bill, supposedly backed by President George W. Bush himself. What they won't tell you is that the bill was sent up to Capitol Hill by Karl Rove so that Sessions could publicly kill it - to prove he's no rubber stamp vote for Bush in Washington.

Keep looking down the page, and you will see another curious story, a story taken right out of the political playbook of George C. Wallace. As Siegelman was being sentenced and Sessions was killing the immigration bill, our esteemed governor Bob Riley was all over the TV news asking the good and religious people of Alabama, I'm not making this up, to "pray for rain." He even issued a proclamation declaring June 30 through July 7 as "Days of Prayer for Rain."

OK, maybe ole Karl didn't have time to craft the proclamation himself. It would have come out with a little more panache, like "liberal, activist judges."

If you haven't read the Atlantic magazine piece about this, now might be a good time to go back and do it.

But you see, Alabama is in the midst of a severe drought right now, and Lord knows we could use the rain. What no one around here remembers, however, is that Wallace used to appeal to the masses to pray for rain - everytime he found himself in hot water with the state legislature in Montgomery.

We are just wondering: Considering all the reports in the New York Times, Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Florence Times Daily and the Locust Fork Journal about Riley's connections to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the plot to take down Siegelman in the courts, why is it that no news reporter at any Alabama news organization bothered to call the governor and get his reaction to the Siegelman, Scrushy verdict?

Even if it had occurred to them, the governor would not have been around to give his reaction. Because right after he asked the people to pray for rain, he was whisked off to Washington to have some kind of high level meeting with somebody about something. Could it be that Karl Rove is seriously considering getting Senator Fred Thompson in Tennessee to draft Bob Riley to run as his running mate in the presidential race in 2008?

Nah, that must be a conspiracy theory. Right? How about it right-wing bloggers? Did you figure that one out yet?

You can read all these stories today on the Locust Fork News page. None of them are worth reading by themselves. But when you put them all together, now that makes an interesting read, don't you think?

If I had the power of subpeona on my side, or if I was a really good hacker, I would like to see the phone records for Thursday from the White House, a certain Senate office, the governor's office - and the federal courthouse in Montgomery. It would also be interesting to know who actually wrote that sentence for Judge Fuller - while he was in the courtroom rubbing his nose.