Today was voting day and one of the issues on the Texas ballots was for a state amendment that banned gay marriage.

The constitutional amendment providing that marriage in this state consists only of the union of one man and one woman and prohibiting this state or a political subdivision of this state from creating or recognizing any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

And, the Dallas Morning News is reporting that the amendment has passed (bugmenot), with Texas becoming the 19th state to pass such a measure.

With half of the precincts counted, 76 percent of voters statewide said they supported the gay-marriage ban, while 24 percent were opposed. In Dallas County, the margin was narrower, with 64 percent in favor and 36 percent opposed. […]

I can’t say that I understand why so many people feel this way. Though I had a hunch the ban would go through, I didn’t think it would be by such a wide margin.

Remember the Jet Blue flight which had a twisted landing gear and had to make an emergency landing in LA? Well, apparently someone has posted photos from a similar accident which happened in 1992 photos of the damaged landing gear.

The extent of the damage is fascinating in a way — about half the wheel was filed away in the process of landing. That aside, it’s almost worth viewing for the snarky comments alone (”It’ll buff out.”, “Nothing a bit of duct tape won't fix.”, and others).

Update 2005-10-06: Apparently, the pics aren’t from the recent Jet Blue emergency landing but from one is 1992. Wording updated.

As the government began its recovery operations in New Orleans and other Katrina-stricken areas, it prohibited the media from covering this; as Col. Terry Ebbert put it, “You can imagine sitting in Houston and watching somebody removed from your parents’ property. We don’t think that’s proper” And, in this instance, CNN took a reasonable course of action — they sued FEMA. In a memo to their staff, CNN explained their reasoning:

[…]As seen most recently from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, from tsunami-ravaged South Asia and from Hurricane Katrina’s landfall along the Gulf, CNN has shown that it is capable of balancing vigorous reporting with respect for private concerns. Government officials cannot be allowed to hinder the free flow of information to the public, and CNN will not let such a decision stand without challenge.

Some people might give FEMA the benefit of the doubt, that maybe this decision was a gut reaction that they didn’t quite think through. However, considering the amount of red tape that even the local DMV has, I can’t fathom that this was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Fortunately, a judge has granted a temporary restraining order “to prevent emergency officials in the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone from preventing the media from covering the recovery […]”.

Eminent domain is the “power of the state to appropriate private property for its own use without the owner’s consent.”. It’s traditionally used when a public project needs to make use of private land, such as building a highway. I suppose that giving up one's house for the sake of a highway isn’t pleasant for the people that own the land, but perhaps it’s necessary. All the same, eminent domain has drawn the line at taking private property for private use… until now.

In a recently decided Supreme Court case, the City of New London, Connecticut wanted to take away some Fort Trumbull residents’ houses and give that land to Pfizer so that it could build a plant there. The city cited “eminent domain” as their justification but the residents balked at that idea and sued. The case went from the New London Superior Court to the Connecticut Supreme Court and from there to U. S. Supreme Court. And on June 23rd, the Supreme Court ruled against the homeowners.

With that out of the way, a private developer wants to make the most of this newfound power and build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road in Weare, New Hampshire. Naturally, there’s already a house there, though in this case the house is owned by Justice David H. Souter, one of the Supreme Court justices that supported the recent ruling:

On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter’s home.

Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans. […]

Though Clements insists that this is “not a prank”, I doubt his request will go any further than the nearest circular file. All the same, I wish Clements the best of luck — even if his request is denied (or ignored), perhaps this will bring some public attention to this atrocious Supreme Court decision.

(Via: Boing Boing)

USA Today has an article describing what I had suspected for some time — if Bush loses the Wall Street Journal, he loses a strong base of Republican support. Ever since the PATRIOT Act, I’ve not had a good feeling about Bush and I had suspected that others may have felt the same.

This week, there were signs that some of President Bush’s biggest boosters in the media are becoming disillusioned with his handling of Iraq. The Wall Street Journal, the country’s second-largest-circulation newspaper, took these two swipes at Bush:

• On Monday, a long, critical story followed this Page 1 headline: “Early U.S. Decisions on Iraq Now Haunt American Efforts.”

• On Tuesday, a WSJ editorial chided Bush’s June 30 Iraq transition plans with this subhead: “The U.S. drops the Iraqis who've been with us from the start.”

To paraphrase LBJ, if Bush loses the WSJ, he will not necessarily lose Middle America, but he might lose “Upperville.” The ultraconservative Wall Street Journal is a bible for upscale or rich, rock-ribbed Republicans. […]

Though I’m not sure I’d say that the WSJ is Republican “bible” — its main content isn’t usually political — I will concede that its editorial pages lean to the right a good portion of the time. In any case, I hope to see more coverage about this topic (from USA Today or elsewhere) as I’d find it fascinating if the WSJ were an accurate barometer of mainstream Republican support.

It looks like the economy may be picking up and the major stock indices are posting encouraging gains. Just yesterday, the Dow closed up 125 points (1.2%) and all 30 blue chips advanced (yeah, every Dow company had a boost).

More than that, the Nasdaq closed above 2,000 for the first time in about two years (which was just before the second dip of our recession). Even the S&P 500 gained 1.2% yesterday. Though I’m hoping in the back of my mind that this isn’t just a case of holiday-time exuberance, the experts tend to agree that things are looking up:

“By and large, the news is positive, and the economy is perking along so unless we have some sort of terrorist activity or some other negative event, I would expect the positive momentum to continue through the week,” said Andy Brooks, head of equity trading at T. Rowe Price.

It's against the law for police to set up a narcotics checkpoint — but a pretend checkpoint is fine, the Colorado Court of Appeals has ruled.

They were driving to a music festival in far southwestern Colorado when they saw the big signs posted along the road.

“Narcotics checkpoint, one mile ahead.”

“Narcotics canine ahead.”

The passenger tossed something out the window, and they just kept going. That was only the petty offense of littering — a little crime — but it was the start of something big.

It’s against the law for police to set up narcotics checkpoints to check whether any randomly passing motorists happen to have illegal drugs.

But it’s not illegal for the police to pretend that’s what they’re doing, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled Thursday. […]

I’m not sure what the laws are in Texas, but I’d presume that they’re similar. As a non-drug-user, I suppose it doesn’t apply to me anyway, but it’s interesting from a civil liberties perspective.

Charles Weinstein has an otherwise-normal signature that he’s been using for more than eight years — except that it’s upside-down. He's used it on checks, credit cards and other official documents, but the Delaware DMV isn’t accepting it:

He said he trained himself to write his name in this unusual way, working right-side up, as a way to make his mark unique. He said he has been signing his name this way for more than eight years on all official papers, checks, credit cards — even his old driver’s license. It was never a major problem until this week, he said, when he went to the DMV office on Airport Road to change his address.

Weinstein said a window clerk told him to “stop fooling around and sign it right.” When he insisted that what he wrote was his valid, legal signature, Weinstein said the clerk accused him of being a troublemaker and threw him out. […]

Writing one’s signature upside-down is an interesting trick, though I can’t imagine how long it took him to learn that technique or what methods he used to wrap his head around it.

Using an acting analogy, I’m curious whether he used “method writing” (where he actually learned to write the characters in his name upside-down and then wrote those in sequence to form his signature) or whether he merely learned how to mimic the look of his upside-down signature.

(Via the Crypto-Gram newsletter.)

Via the MediaBistro mailing list, I saw a link to this story on C|NET that Google is beta testing a News Alerts program:

People can subscribe to the test Google News Alerts by providing keywords that are related to stories that they would like to receive and their e-mail address at the sign-up page. People can limit their alerts by source and choose to receive them once a day or continuously, as Google crawls the Web. There is a limit of 50 keywords per e-mail address.

The test launch comes a couple of weeks after Google refined its daily news search tools. It now allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets on the Web. […]

I already use Google News as my primary news source and I’m looking forward to trying this. If their setup allows it, I may even try subscribing my cell phone to their News Alerts.

I enjoyed this News In Brief from the latest issue of The Onion:

Half-Asleep Man Pauses 20 Minutes Between Socks
SANDPOINT, ID—Seated on the edge of his bed, Carl Thompson, 38, paused for 20 minutes with one sock on his foot and the other in his hand Tuesday. “Ugh, tired,” said Thompson, who was otherwise silent from 6:30 to 6:50 a.m. During that period, Thompson stared at the wall and teetered perilously close to a reclining position six times.

I can relate to that feeling from when I used to work for Steamatic. Their office is in Fort Worth (about 45 miles from here), and I had to leave at 7:30am each morning just to get there on time. That made for some tired mornings.