Subterranean Homepage News

By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

Fair and balanced, too!

August 22, 2003 6:00 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

I'm taking Mondays off for the summer. Back here Tuesday.

But don't expect it to look any larger in your photograph than it does to your eye if you're not using a telescope. But if you try a time exposure as the sky darkens -- Mars will rise about 8 p.m. -- and you include some of the horizon, you could have some very nice photos, and learn something, too.

If you have access to magnification and a digital camera, play around. One of the links below even uses a webcam.

This is meant just to be fun. The best photos of Mars will be on the Web Wednesday morning: As soon as Hubble's high-resolution images of the Red Planet are received at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and are digitally processed by the Mars observing team, they will be released via the Internet.

High-resolution files for downloading will available on HubbleSite News Center at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/2003/22, beginning at 6 a.m. Wednesday.

If you're interested in photographing Mars, here are some links to explore:

How to Find and Observe Mars: Before you start photographing it, you have to find it. The Planetary Society offers the tools, along with a simple, basic overview of what's happening. If you're in the Providence area, Sunset on Tuesday, Aug. 26 is at 7:30 p.m.; Mars rises in the southeast at 8 p.m.; it will be overhead at 1:04 a.m. Wednesday.

ClarkVision.com: Photographing Mars with standard photographic equipment: a telephoto lens and a tripod, with a digital camera.

Webcam Astrophotography: "All the pictures on this website were taken with a 10 inch Meade LX200 GPS telescope and a Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000." (This is a $2,500-$3,000 telescope.)

Easy, Low-tech Ways to Photograph the Planets

Sky & Telescope; Sky Photography with Just a Camera; Astro Imaging with Digital Cameras; Planetary Observing With a Camcorder; Mars Profiler (To compare what you see on Mars with a map, you need to know which side of the planet you’re looking at.)

Steve's Astrophotography Page (great links at bottom of page)

Jim Pennington's A Basic Primer On Astrophotography

Taking picture of Mars: A discussion at photo.net, Here are some excerpts.

"...just use fast film, use your lens at it's widest aperture, point it at Mars and give it a few seconds exposure. You'll get Mars and some of the brighter stars.

To reduce trailing caused by the Earth's rotation, you will want to keep the exposure down to a few a seconds (e.g., ten seconds with a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera body, three seconds for a 200mm lens).

A week ago I set up my 500mm f4.5L Canon with a Vivitar 4X eye pc. adapter making approx. a 40X telelscope and with NO problem at all the wife and I were looking at the planet Mars it appeared to our eyes as if it were approx. 1/8" in diameter. with the addition of my 2X-A it was quite easy to see a clear picture of a planet. SO with a decent 400 asa film and a 16X20 size enlargement of my negative I'll have a very very decent size photo of Mars.

Planetary Photography with a telescope.

Local observatories: Journal staff writer Kate Imbrie pulled this together.

Ladd Observatory, corner of Hope and Olney Streets on the East Side of Providence, is open free to the public on clear nights, Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 9 to 11 p.m. For information, call (401) 863-2323.

Seagrave Observatory, 47 Peeptoad Rd., North Scituate, is open on clear Saturday nights beginning at 8 p.m. For information, call Dan Lorraine, (401) 943-4432. The observatory is run by one of the country's oldest astronomy clubs, Skyscrapers Inc. They have an informative Web site: www.theskyscrapers.org.

Frosty Drew Observatory, Ninigret Park, Charlestown, is open on clear Friday nights at dusk, which is around 8 p.m. Telephone: (401) 364-9508. The small, volunteer-run Drew has a reflecting telescope rather than a refracting one, as Ladd and Seagrave have. (Images are easier to view through a refracting telescope, because they are more stable.)

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Why the Record Industry Doesn't Stand a Chance: James Lileks at Newhouse writes so well about the Palestinian Napster that's daring RIAA to mess with it:.

Forget Napster. The newest place to steal -- sorry, "share" -- copyrighted materials is Earthstation 5. They claim 22 million downloads of their software, offer digital copies of movies still in the theaters, and boast that no one will be able to shut them down. They may have a point.

They're located in the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank.

You can imagine the discussions in the Recording Industry Association of America's legal office: "You serve them with papers." "No, YOU serve them." (Pause) "OK, we'll send an intern."

... no one is going to stop stealing music unless he's scared of being arrested, sent to jail and forced to share a cell with a smelly old hippie who sings Mungo Jerry songs all night.

But there will never be enough arrests or convictions to stop the hard-core downloaders; there will never be a technological fix that someone won't find a way around. ...

Cnet has the hard news: In refugee camp, a P2P outpost
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Rockin' on without Microsoft:

Sterling Ball, a jovial, plain-talking businessman, is CEO of Ernie Ball, the world's leading maker of premium guitar strings endorsed by generations of artists ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to the dudes from Metallica.

But since jettisoning all of Microsoft products three years ago, Ernie Ball has also gained notoriety as a company that dumped most of its proprietary software--and still lived to tell the tale.

In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs. Ball settled for $65,000, plus $35,000 in legal fees. But by then, the BSA, a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing provisions for major business software makers, had put the company on the evening news and featured it in regional ads warning other businesses to monitor their software licenses.

Humiliated by the experience, Ball told his IT department he wanted Microsoft products out of his business within six months. "I said, 'I don't care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses,'" recalled Ball, who recently addressed the LinuxWorld trade show. "We won't do business with someone who treats us poorly."

Ball's IT crew settled on a potpourri of open-source software--Red Hat's version of Linux, the OpenOffice office suite, Mozilla's Web browser--plus a few proprietary applications that couldn't be duplicated by open source. Ball, whose father, Ernie, founded the company, says the transition was a breeze, and since then he's been happy to extol the virtues of open-source software to anyone who asks. He spoke with CNET News.com about his experience.

A Q & A follows. Good stuff.

Related: The Quiet War Over Open-Source from the Washington Post.

Also related: Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig: “the extremists in power,”

I don’t even know how to begin this story, so stupid and extreme it is.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was convinced by Jamie Love and others to hold a meeting about “open collaborative models to develop public goods.” One of those models is, of course, open source and free software. Lobbyists for Microsoft and others apparently (according to this extraordinary story by Jonathan Krim) started lobbying the US government to get the meeting cancelled. No surprise there. Open source and free software is a competitor to MSFT’s products. Lobbying is increasingly the way competition is waged in America.

But the astonishing part is the justification for the US opposing the meeting. According to the Post, Lois Boland, director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said “that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights.” As she is quoted as saying, “To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO.”

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She's at center of high-tech voting debate: At the Seattle Times,

Bev Harris, a middle-aged woman who operates a small public-relations business out of her Renton (Wash.) home, would seem an unlikely person to be at the center of a national battle over electronic voting.

Yet in recent months her muckraking, Web-based journalism has helped energize a growing movement of citizens and computer scientists concerned about the potential for fraud in America's increasingly high-tech elections.

... While seeking information last January about a voting-machine company for a book she was writing, she found a Web site "on about the 15th page of Google." The open, unprotected site held some 40,000 files that included user manuals, source code and executable files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based in North Canton, Ohio.

She had exposed a massive security breach. ...

Harris's book is"Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," (Plan Nine Publishing, $15.95).
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Coming soon: car that parks itself: From The Age (Australia),

In a revolutionary development for lazy and skill-deficient drivers, Toyota engineers in Japan have developed a car that can perform a perfect reverse park between two objects.

The system will be launched in Japanese showrooms late next month as an optional extra with the second generation Prius petrol-electric hybrid car, which sells for about $40,000. The system took three years to develop and is being touted as a step towards the ultimate in vehicular automation: the self-driving car.

The self-parking system uses a rear-mounted camera and a computer program to perform its task.

After electronically measuring a parking spot and marking out a "turn-in" point with a virtual flagpole, a computer turns the steering wheel automatically, swinging the rear of the car into the spot followed by the front. It can monitor white lines and gutters, ensuring no scraped wheels and making the driver look like an expert every time.

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Obituary backs 'removal of Bush': Woman 'thought he was a liar': Sally Baron died Monday at 71. Her obit read, "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush." Lee Sensenbrenner of the Madison (Wis.) Capital Times got the story behind the unusual last wish.
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EBay makes a bid for television: At SFgate,

Sony Pictures Television last week taped a pilot for an EBay television show -- with sports personality Ahmad Rashad and former "Daily Show" contributor Molly Pesce -- that, if all goes well, could hit the airwaves in fall 2004.

The show probably would not involve the actual sale of goods, but instead would package feature stories on items for sale on EBay with referrals to the Web site.

Bizarre idea. An infomercial for eBay?
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It's Still The Economy, Stupid: A blog. You know what it's about.

Iraq Today: The English-language paper in Baghdad Salam Pax wants to work for.

LIFE Classic: Rock Parents: From 1971. When Clapton and Cocker and Slick were young.

Using cellophane to convert a laptop computer screen into a three-dimensional display

August 21, 2003 6:03 p.m.

What the sun looks like up close in 3-D: Amazing photos made by scientists in Sweden and Palo Alto. The story is headlined Scientists Image the Three-dimensional Surface of the Sun

Also on this site ( the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory site): Images of Our Magnetic Star
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The Rhode Island accent is similar to the accent heard around Boston and other parts of eastern New England, where dropping the letter "r" after vowels is a trademark. Adding an "r" in other places is also common.

Allan Metcalf, executive secretary for the American Dialect Society, pointed to a famous New Englander for an example.

"President Kennedy said something like, 'Cuber is a concern' instead of 'Cuba,' " Mr. Metcalf said.

Huh? We don't say "Cuber" like JFK -- we thought HE talked funny.

Some do say "I sore it," though. And some saw Gawd and cawfee. But there are lots of Rhode Island accents -- Federal Hill is different from the East Side and then there's Woonsocket...

Is there an official Rhode Island pronunciation for that pie -- PEE-can or p'cahn?
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Soannoying: Adam Gaffin of Network World Fusion points out that webmasters are compounding the damage to our inboxes from the Sobig.f virus that's brought about the collapse of email:

OK, here at Network World, we practice what we preach when it comes to security - so I wasn't too concerned about the the newest Sobig virus.

What is annoying, however, is the roughly 47 million (OK, maybe I'm exagerating, but not by much, I think) automated messages I'm getting from virus scanners at other companies informing me I was a lowlife scum for attempting to send a virus-infected message.

This sort of thing might have been almost useful a few years ago, back before the virus writers realized how much fun they could have with the Outlook address book. But these days, the messages only serve to clog up inboxes everywhere, since there is typically no relationship between the actual sender of an infected message and the person whose address is in the "from" field. So dear antivirus vendors: Instead of sending out press releases every 15 minutes about the latest virus, could you maybe update your software to turn this "feature" off?

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Doc Searls' mom dies: He's been at her bedside in North Carolina for the last two weeks, blogging old photos and memories. He did her proud, no more so than in this announcement of her death today:

Mom passed away yesterday afternoon, surrounded by people who loved her, and could hardly imagine a world without her smile, her wit, her boundless love.

She's in the credits for countless lives, and at the top of mine.

These last two weeks were encores and curtain calls for Mom. In the last three days, when she could no longer speak, she stood on the stage and took in the applause, the gratitude, the love.

My sister says "Love" was her last word.

I'll never stop hearing it.

Eleanor Marie Oman Searls sounds like quite a woman. So does her son.
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Lifting the veil on gender apartheid: National Post of Canada:

France's Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has just appointed a committee to draft a law to ban the Islamist hijab (headgear) in state-owned establishments, including schools and hospitals. The decision has drawn fire ... based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam.

That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.

This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community.

...Sadr's idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.

... In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that "scientific research had shown that women's hair emitted rays that drove men insane." To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.

By the mid 1980s, a form of hijab never seen in Islam before the 1970s had become standard gear for millions of women all over the world, including Europe and America.

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The Antichrist of North Carolina: Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (review) an account of her deliberate attempt to try to get by on the minimum-wage jobs available to many women coming off welfare or re-entering the work force after divorce. From the publisher's blurb,

Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

It sounds like a reasonable proposition -- a sort of Black Like Me for the women at the bottom -- so it was surprising to read in The Progressive that she was called "The Antichrist of North Carolina" by talk-show hosts:

...when my book was adopted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a reading for all incoming students in 2003, the administration expressed its conviction that it was a "relatively tame selection," at least compared to last year's choice--a collection of readings from The Koran.

...On July 10, a group of conservative UNC-CH students, calling themselves the Committee for a Better Carolina, held a press conference, along with a handful of rightwing state legislators, to denounce Nickel and Dimed as a "classic Marxist rant" and a work of "intellectual pornography with no redeeming characteristics."

...The ad charged me with being a Marxist, a socialist, an atheist, and a dedicated enemy of the American family--this last confirmed by a citation from the Heritage Foundation on my longstanding conviction that families headed by single mothers are as deserving of support as those headed by married couples.

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Sufi recipes from Serving the Guest: A Sufi Cookbook by Kathleen Seidel, which seems to exist only online. A sample:

Borani Esfanaj
Iranian Spinach Appetizer

Total time: 3-1/2 hours
Preparation time: 1/2 hour
Chilling: 3+ hours

4 lbs. fresh or 40 oz. frozen spinach
3 cups finely chopped onions
8 oz. (2 sticks) sweet butter
4 cups (1 quart) yogurt
2 tsp. salt

2 tsp. cinnamon or dried mint
2 tsp., freshly ground pepper
4 tbsp. finely chopped garlic

Stem the spinach, rinse it well, coarsely chop and set aside; or thaw frozen spinach and chop it. In a large pan, sauté the onions in butter until translucent. Add the spinach and, stirring constantly, cook for about 5 minutes, until it is thoroughly wilted. Turn off the heat.

In a large bowl, combine the yogurt, salt, pepper, garlic, and cinnamon or mint, and mix well. Add the spinach and onion mixture and blend thoroughly. Allow to rest for several hours to allow the flavors to blend before serving cold or at room temperature.

via wood s lot
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Who's a Sufi? Doris Lessing (author of The Golden Notebook, set in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) is a practicing Sufi since reading The Sufis by Idries Shah in 1964. She writes,

All our associations with the word mysticism are wrong or limited. For instance, the word "Sufism" is a recent German coinage, and not used by Sufis. "Isms" are foreign to the nature of something felt as a process or a development. Ignorance causes bafflement. Highly educated people, hearing the word "mysticism," may say they have no time for table- turning, seances, gurus, whirling dervishes (photo at right), ESP, encounter groups and so on. A familiarity with the ancient ideas behind mysticism has not been part of our curriculum. People who have had 20 years of our kind of education may suddenly fall victim to a charlatan or a cult: they are highly developed in one area but left ignorant and defenceless in others. Sufis say it took 800 years of preparatory work to get Islam to accept them: they take a long-term view of the human condition. Then Islam claimed the Sufis as its property, and in our reference books Sufism is defined as a mystical Islamic sect.

Shah became her teacher and, on his death in 1996, she wrote part of his obit.
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Astroturf alert: "Astroturf" is the catch-all name for form letters that partisans are urged to send ton local publications as spontaneous Letters to the Editor. Editors hate them, and wouldn't publish them if they knew they were canned. (Bloggers Mow Down GOP Astroturf at OJR.)

Burned early, web-savvy editors are now on the alert for incoming Astroturf. Atrios, a lefty blogger who seems to want to keep his day job and his opinions separate -- his blog is called Eschaton; let's guess he's a teacher -- posts,

The Bush re-election site encourages the sending of some pretty creepy astro-turf. Of course, you can also use the site to send your own letters to media outlets. Perhaps we should do that every Friday...

Anyway, if these ridiculous letters start showing up verbatim in your local paper please inform me, and your local editor...

And me, and our local editor. C'mon, if you care that much about your candidate, you can say something from your heart... can't you?
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'Bama Judges Boot Commandments:

(CBS/AP) State Supreme Court justices overruled Chief Justice Roy Moore on Thursday and directed that his Ten Commandments monument be removed from its public site in the Alabama Judicial Building.

The senior associate justice, Gorman Houston, said the eight associate justices instructed the building's manager to "take all steps necessary to comply ... as soon as practicable." Some supporters of Moore vowed to fight the move through civil disobedience.

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Noted:

Baghdad Burning is a blog by a woman in Iraq.

3 Women and 3 Paths, 10 Years Later: The Times catches up with three M.I.T. graduates who were profiled a decade ago as women who might change the face of the computer industry.

Suspended Animation: Pencils down. Disney terminates traditional animation

August 20, 2003 7:03 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

How to rescue an elephant: Fanny the elephant -- renamed Tara when she moved from sad conditions at Slater Park Zoo in Pawtucket to Black Beauty Ranch, a Texas animal sanctuary -- died Aug. 16 at 59. My colleague Andrea Panciera wrote the projo obit (reg. req.), the first elephant obit she's ever written. An excerpt:

But Rhode Islanders who had come to know Fanny from her tenure at the former Slater Park Zoo, where she spent more than three decades chained by her legs in a barn, with only a small area to roam, may be heartened to know that her last years were comfortable.

In addition to gaining a new name, the overweight elephant was put on a diet of fresh fruit and vegetables, hay and elephant chow. She lost 1,800 pounds and recovered from digestive problems, according to the ranch.

Her dried-out skin was bathed and moisturized regularly. And, perhaps most importantly, this animal who had apparently not seen a fellow elephant since being taken by the zoo from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, was given companions.

Fund for Animals writes about Fanny/Tara's life and death, noting her tendency to wander off from the circus led to her isolation. In recent years, she made friends with a younger female, who is now grieving.

There is an interesting backstory here, as well. Here's a 1994 interview by with Eclipse Neilson of Providence, founder of Earth Calls Network, a moving force behind saving Fanny. The interviewer is Betty Swartz, Washington, D.C. director of Friends of Animals. Eclipse -- pictured at right in an undated photo with her dog, Moon -- talks frankly about the politics behind saving Fanny. (Because the interview is so old, the address given at the end is probably not current.)

...the first thing I did was publish an article that stirred up a lot of people. I talked about her suffering and the fact that nothing was being done. Interviews followed the article. And then radio stations picked up on it. It started to snowball and it was great.

The town of Pawtucket then wrote a commentary on my article. They said they didn't understand why the Fanny case was a feminist issue. I had compared her to a woman--aging and suffering. And they just made fun of the whole thing. So, Earth Calls formed a Free Fanny Committee to focus on this one elephant. We knew that what needed to happen was to move an elephant. And if we could move that one elephant, the zoo would begin to crumble.

Hundreds of people called to sign up to help. Something wonderful happened regarding people's relationship with this elephant. It was moving to hear their stories day in and day out--about how they had gone to see the elephant as a child; how sorry they had felt for her; how frustrated they felt that they couldn't do anything. They were glad that finally someone was giving her a voice and not playing politics.

One thing that was especially interesting was that so many homebound elderly called me--people who had started to identify with this elephant.

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Court Rejects Ten Commandments Appeal: AP reports,

WASHINGTON (AP)--The Supreme Court refused Wednesday to block the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from an Alabama judicial building, rejecting a last-minute appeal from the judge who installed the display.

The justices said they would not be drawn, at least for now, into a dispute over whether the monument violates the Constitution's ban on government promotion of religion.

The high court was Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's last hope to avoid a federal judge's midnight deadline to remove the display. It was unclear if Moore would comply. Other state officials have said the monument would be moved.

Related: For Alabama's 'Ten Commandments Judge,' compromising not part of the equation: A profile of Judge Roy Moore, from AP.
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Nigeria stoning verdict quashed: When I saw this BBC story, I thought the long, sad saga of Amina Lawal, condemned for bering a child out of wedlock, was over. No such luck.

An Islamic court of appeal in northern Nigeria has overturned the conviction of a man sentenced to death by stoning for the rape of a nine-year-old girl.

Sarimu Mohammed Baranda won his appeal by pleading insanity and has been ordered by the court to an asylum for psychiatric evaluation.

The punishment of stoning to death has been introduced into the law in Nigeria's majority Muslim northern states over the past three years but as yet no sentence has been carried out.

Lawal's appeal remains to be heard August 27. Here's some background from Amnesty International on the "Sharia Penal Legislation" which punishes adultery by stoning to death.
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What I skipped this summer: It's been a heavy year for news, and many of us burned out on it this summer. The New York Observer asked well-known New Yorkers which stories they ignored.

Does this strike a chord for you? I was war-weary by the time Liberia came along. I've never seen or read the Harry Potters, and reality TV had no appeal after the first Survivor season. Our screen porch has seen more use this summer than our TV.

This blog pretty much ignored the blackout. Despite it being called the Northeast blackout, it skipped most of New England. With relief, we watched from afar. For once, it wasn't our problem.

If you'd like to add yourself to the list of folks who aren't paying attention any more, drop me an email and let me know what stories went on without you.

Internet routing outages during the blackout: Okay, just one blackout link. From Renesys Corporation, an animation showing how Thursday's power outage caused the net to crash. The outages blink on in order, especially around NYC. Interestingly, unrelated outages in the midwest are also included.
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The Gender Genie analyzes text you paste into its form and guesses your gender. I write like a man, it says. How about you?
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August 19, 2003 6:21 p.m.
updated 8.20.03 11:40 A.M.

Crocheting sushi: The phrase stopped me.

The image is just as arrresting.

Artist Clare Crespo of Los Angeles told getcrafty.com,

Right now my craft du jour is crocheted sushi plates and hamburgers with fries. I was crocheting mittens last year, but realized that I didn't need them in LA, so I switched to something I really need - crocheted food! I think it is super child-like and funny and worldly. This is part of this five year-old aesthetic that I'm onto right now.

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First, Alabama Tied in Knots by Tax Vote:

..."We've got a conservative, evangelical Christian, Republican governor trying to get a massive turnout of black voters to pass a tax increase so he can raise taxes on Republican constituents."

...In a stunning subplot to the fiscal crises roiling the states, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley (R) -- who for three terms in Congress boasted that he never voted for a tax increase and was elected governor on a promise not to raise taxes -- is proposing to raise state taxes by a record $1.2 billion, eight times the largest previous increase and almost twice what is needed to close a $675 million budget deficit.

Seizing Alabama's crisis as an opportunity to right historic wrongs, he says the state should act to improve schools funded at the nation's lowest level per child and to lift the tax burden from poor people, who pay income taxes starting at $4,600 a year for a family of four while out-of-state timber companies pay $1.25 an acre in property taxes. The changes would move Alabama from 50th to 44th in total state and local taxes per capita, he says.

"I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad and last in things that are good," an impassioned Riley told a Rotary Club in Prattville the other day as he traveled the state, sleeves rolled up, hawking what he calls Alabama's "Foundation for Greatness."

...The born-again Baptist governor is telling voters in this Bible Belt state that their tax system, which imposes an effective rate of 3 percent on the wealthiest Alabamians and 12 percent on the poorest, is "immoral" and needs repair. "When I read the New Testament, there are three things we're asked to do: That's love God, love each other and take care of the least among us," Riley said in his office in the antebellum state Capitol.

Second, the separation of church and state is taking a beating in Montgomery; here's AP:

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Chief Justice Roy Moore renewed his plea to a federal appeals court Tuesday in his fight to keep a Ten Commandments monment in the Alabama Judicial Building, where his supporters plan prayer vigils and a peaceful, round-the-clock protest.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday declined to accept a request by Moore to stay an order to remove the 5,300-pound monument by a midnight Wednesday deadline. Moore then asked the court to reconsider.

Moore, who installed the monument in the rotunda of the judicial building two years ago, contends it represents the moral foundation of American law and that a federal judge has no authority to make the state's chief justice remove it.

The 11th Circuit earlier this year agreed with U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson of Montgomery, who held the monument violates the constitution's ban on government promotion of religion.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it this way: Alabama having a hard time being part of the United States. Here's the site of the 10 Commandments Defense Fund.

But there seem to be more than two sides to this story: An unsigned letter published in the Huntsville Times yesterday includes,

...I have two questions: No.1, why has Judge Roy Moore set up a graven image in the Supreme Court building? No. 2, why is this man above the rule of law?...

... If the Bible is the criteria by which we will be judged, then all Christians are going to hell because they don't know the difference between spirituality and religion. You missed the whole point of the book.

Are federal marshals going to enforce a federal judge's order to remove the Ten Commandments or not? Who's going to pay the fines? With this, I vote "No" on any new taxes, period. ...

Sweet home, Alabama...

Updated 8.20.2003 /

Associated Press
Aug. 20, 2003 08:00 AM
Alabama chief justice appeals to Supreme Court over Ten Commandments

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Chief Justice Roy Moore asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building Wednesday as supporters held a candlelight vigil to begin a round-the-clock protest.

Moore, who was turned back twice Tuesday by a federal appeals panel, filed a motion Wednesday asking the Supreme Court to stay an order for the monument's removal by the end of the day.

Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor said he expected the stone display to be out of the building "very soon" in compliance with court orders. ...

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A petition "to Stop Ashcroft" at Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean's blog:

"Today, John Ashcroft begins a national tour promoting an extension of the USA Patriot Act (The Victory Act). Sign the petition to stop Ashcroft's erosion of our civil rights. Add your name to the Stop Ashcroft petition, and pass it on to your friends, family, and co-workers. We will deliver your names and your comments to the Attorney General. ..."

That will be a welcome package, don't you think?
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Endlessly searching: I found the link above on a blog called Politics in the Zeros when I browsed blogs in the news directory of Blog Search Engine, another new discovery. ("Daypop Search Index is currently offline" drove me to this discovery.)

Here's the second part of an interview with Daypop's Dan Chan at Search Engine Watch.
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Garrison Keillor on the California recall, in the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News Press.

Californians are more interested in politics than the rest of us and enjoy elections and I trust that the movement to recall Gov. Davis' successor will begin as soon as he is sworn in. Eventually, Web technology will allow Californians to hold an instant referendum on all issues and you won't need a governor, just a state Web master.

Thanks to Doc Searls for blogging the link from his hometown paper.
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Paul Newman Is Still HUD: In the New York Times, the actor and natural foods entrepreneur spoofs the Fox "fair and balanced" suit against Franken, turning his big guns on the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose acronym is the name of his character Hud in the 1963 movie of the same name:

...Newman claims that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, called HUD, is a fair and balanced institution and that some of its decency and respectability has unfairly rubbed off on his movie character, diluting the rotten, self-important, free-trade, corrupt conservative image that Mr. Newman worked so hard to project in the film. His suit claims that this "innocence by association" has hurt his feelings plus residuals.

A coalition of the willing — i.e., the Bratwurst Asphalt Company and the Ypsilanti Hot Dog and Bean Shop — has been pushed forward and is prepared to label its products "fair and balanced," knowing that Fox News will sue and that its newscasters will be so tied up with subpoenas they will only be able to broadcast from the courtroom, where they will be seen tearing their hair and whining, looking anything but fair and balanced, which would certainly be jolly good sport all around.

Arguments will begin Friday in federal court in the real Fox/Franken suit:

Fox is suing the comedian and his publisher, Penguin, arguing that the book's title, "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," violates Fox's trademarked franchise on the words "fair and balanced."

Franken's attorney, noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, argues that it is really a First Amendment issue and that trademark infringement cases must yield to the Bill of Rights.

New York District Court Judge Denny Chin will hear arguments in the case. ...

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The "gravedigger's" blog: Wastenaw County (Mich.) Commissioner Lawrence Kestenbaum is the man behind the popular site The Political Graveyard ("The Web Site That Tells Where the Dead Politicians are Buried"), and now he has an occasionally updated blog of his own, Polygon, the Dancing Bear.
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Salam Pax on the Baghdad hotel bombing.

Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com