The World Around You

Check out week 6 of the Bonfire of the Vanities at Wizbang.

StevenJames demonstrates that you can greatly increase the traffic at your site by placing the words Britney Spears topless on your site. Feel free to try this at home.

UPDATE: Sorry, that’s James not Steven. Apologies James.

WSFA News in Montgomery is reporting,

The Reverend Jerry Falwell and former Presidential candidate Alan Keyes are scheduled to speak at this weekend’s rally in support of Chief Justice Roy Moore’s 10 commandments monument.

John Giles of the Alabama Christian Coalition says people from around the country should start arriving in Montgomery Thursday. He won’t say how many, but he says they do have a permit to rally near the judicial complex for the next 3 weeks. Moore is expected to announce Thursday if he’ll ignore a federal judge’s order to remove the monument by August 20th.

How in the world do you issue a permit that allows a group to rally for 3 weeks? That seems excessive to me. I also will really enjoy the honesty, virtue and credibility that Jerry Falwell in particular brings to the issue. And Alan Keyes is an intelligent man, but most people don’t have a clue who he is.

Off the AP wire,

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Eight former presidents of the state’s largest religious denomination, the Alabama Baptist State Convention, are encouraging voters to approve Gov. Bob Riley’s tax and accountability plan on Sept. 9.

The eight former presidents released a statement Tuesday saying the $1.2 billion plan will make Alabama’s tax system more equitable and “improve and enhance public services to all our citizens, especially the children, the elderly and the less fortunate.”

Signing the statement were the Rev. Dan Ireland of Birmingham, the Rev. Mike McLemore of Birmingham, the Rev. Walter Nunn of Huntsville, Steve Tondera of Huntsville, the Rev. Harrell Cushing of Montgomery, the Rev. Jerry Gunnells of Mobile, the Rev. Fred Lackey of Jasper, and the Rev. Harper Shannon of Montgomery.

Interesting also because Dan Ireland’s lobbying group did not take an official position, but he has now personally endorsed it.

James comments on a post at Southern Appeal predicting that Attorney General Pryor will rebuke Judge Moore for refusing to abide by the federal court ruling to remove the Ten Commandments monument. While I agree with James that this would not be a particularly beneficial move politically, he is a man who stands for the rule of law and make some sort of statement saying he doesn’t agree with the ruling, but thinks it should be abided by.

I would wager that is the more likely scenario.

The Birmingham News lead editorial takes another approach in trying to convince people that Alabama has perception problems.

Those of us who live in Alabama and love it fiercely believe we’ve got a well-kept secret: It’s a good thing all those Yankees don’t know about our state - its beauty, its abundant natural resources, its warm weather, its friendly, hard-working people - or we’d be overrun by folks moving in to share the Alabama dream.

Maybe the secret is too well-kept. Maybe so few people know about Alabama’s charms that hardly anyone is moving here.

Or maybe Yankees and the rest of the country know some things about our state that many of us don’t like to admit or choose not to believe. Maybe that’s why, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, so few people are moving to Alabama compared to the rest of the Southeast.

Alabama trailed every Southeastern state except Louisiana in net migration. Between 1995 and 2000, Alabama gained just 25,800 people more than it lost from migration. Georgia (3rd), North Carolina (4th), Florida (5th), South Carolina (7th) and Tennessee (9th) ranked in the nation’s top 10 states in net migration rates per thousand residents. Those figures count only gains and losses between states, and not foreign immigrants.

Alabama, meanwhile, was 22nd, ranking more like a dying Rust Belt state than a state in the thriving Sun Belt.

The Governor has continually tried to make this point in his efforts to gain support for Ammendment 1. We are losing our best and brightest to better jobs in other states and we are not attracting enough people from the rest of the country. How can this be when we have such low taxes? Because you get what you pay for and we have the services to prove it.

Steven points out that Davis is most certainly doomed, based on the election results from 2002. In order to avoid recall, Davis must get a higher percentage of the vote than he did in the general election.

This begins to raise the question of the appropriate use of a recall. Based on this information, if someone had the resources to gather the meager number of signatures, what prevents them from recalling any official who didn’t get at least 50% of the vote in the last election. The only thing I could see is the need for people to feel that their government is stable and the availability of other viable candidates.

UPDATE: Kevin posts the first recall election poll numbers from MSNBC.