The World Around You

**Tim Russert says the President and Senator Kerry both solidified their bases and the swing voters saw the differences between the candidates, perhaps allowing them to make a better decision.

**Even the Fox News contributors are handing it to Kerry for not getting knocked out of the race tonight. Although Bill Kristol did emphasize the “global test” and Fox already had that part of the tape cued up. We know what they’ll be talking about over the next few days.

**Senator Edwards was interviewed by Brokaw and Russert and did a good job emphasizing what Kerry did well and expanding on it. They then brought Giuliani on to serve as the Bush surrogate. Giuliani re-emphasized the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time party line.

**Bloomberg reports on the three instant polls on the debate, all showing that Kerry won.

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**10:26pm EST - I think it helps the tone of the campaign, especially among their supporters that the candidates were about as cordial to each other as you can imagine they could be. They debated their differences of opinion, but largely avoided assasinating each other’s character. Bravo to the moderator and the candidates for a very substantive and solid debate. It was definitely one of the best presidential debates I have ever seen.

**10:22pm EST - Last question is on Russia. The President believes he has delivered his opinion to Putin. Are we going to do anything other than tell him about how wonderful democracy is?

It looks like the President just wants this debate over. It’s going to be a very odd ending to the exchange portion of the debate, on a very mild tone.

**10:20pm EST - The President just called Jim Lehrer, “Ted”.

**10:18pm EST - Well, we agree that we have to deal with proliferation.

**10:14pm EST - Good use by Kerry of the character question to discuss the President’s certainty and how it can be a weakness.

**10:13pm EST - A nice personal exchange between the candidates on the character issue. And even a few chuckles.

**10:11pm EST - The studio audience is doing a very good job of behaving themselves.

**10:09pm EST - Atrios offers the toll-free number to hear the Bush-Cheney spin live at 10:45pm EST.

**10:06pm EST - Bush appears to have nailed Kerry in his response, but Kerry responded to his response by saying the President was talking about sanctions on Iran that were only placed on them by the US.

**10:04pm EST - Kerry says, “The President did nothing.” with regards to North Korea. And we get the first mention of former President Clinton.

**10:03pm EST - Bush finally appears to getting off of Kerry and talking about the future, with respect to North Korea and Iran.

**9:59pm EST - I’m actually pleased with the course of this debate and the focus on one area of policy. It makes for a much more detailed discussion and a more enlightening one.

**9:57pm EST - The President is severely flustered. Kerry has pushed his buttons. You really saw it in the, “Of course I know Osama Bin Laden attacked us. I know that.”

**9:56pm EST - Kerry just got the first real body blow. Pointing out that the President answered a question about troops in Iraq by saying “the enemy attacked us” and going back to Tora Bora again.

**9:54pm EST - Bush: “We will rue the day.” We will rue the day??? Who talks like that? What happened to Mr. Down Home?

**9:53pm EST - Kerry hit two points that needed to be said. Allawi’s assessment of more terrorists coming over the border and the CIE that predicted a best case scenario of a tenouous democracy with continued civil strife.

**9:52pm EST - Kenny is live blogging as well.

**9:47pm EST - The President keeps hammering the same points and is not diverting from them at all. In fact, when we look at the transcript we will find he has used the phrases “grand diversion” and “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time” at least a half a dozen times at this point. At what point do people begin to wonder whether he is really answering the question being asked?

**9:44pm EST - Halfway through, but the word “Vietnam” has not been uttered. Kerry is effectively tiptoeing around it.

**9:43pm EST - “Has the war been worth the cost of life?” - excellent question Jim.

**9:42pm EST - I just had a Ross Perot flashback, when the President said “Let me finish.”

**9:40pm EST - Kerry is sticking to the “fresh start” theme, but Bush is effectively counterpunching with his criticism.

**9:38pm EST - Counter-punch from John Kerry - hard facts on the real numbers of troops from our “partners”.

**9:36pm EST - President: “To go from a place where people get their hands cut off or are executed to a place where people are free.” I’m sorry, but don’t we execute people?

**9:34pm EST - Is anyone counting the number of the President’s uhs and ums?

**9:32pm EST - Bush had a solid response to Kerry’s criticism of the lack of an alliance. He hit him hard with his own words, and he keeps coming back to the same themes.

**9:28pm EST - Senator Kerry offered his prepared response to the “I voted for it before I voted against it.” Which was “I made a mistake in speaking about the war, the President made a mistake in planning the war. Which is worse?” Not bad, but not a homerun.

**9:27pm EST - The Bush-Cheney instant response is extremely unimpressive. The “facts” under almost every Kerry response includes the supposed votes against the Department of Homeland Security.

**9:25pm EST - The President seemed to stutter start on the question about what criteria he would use to determine when the troops will come home. Now he’s passing it off on his generals.

**9:24pm EST - This debate has begun very well and substantively. Lehrer has asked some very good questions.

**9:22pm EST - “I don’t know how he’s going to pay for all of this.” Well, Mr. President, I’m not surprised.

**9:21pm EST - Kerry falls back on stump speech line about firehouses and police stations in Iraq being funded while their being closed in America. Is it really the job of the federal government to fund police officers and firehouses?

**9:19pm EST - President asks for an extension and gets it.

**9:16pm EST - President’s slip of the tongue - “Sadaam Hussein, uh, I mean, Osama Bin Laden”

**9:14pm EST - Pres. Bush = “He had no intention of disarming” WHAT? Mr. President, if he had no intention of disarming, where are the arms????

**9:12pm EST - Steven is live blogging as well.

**9:10pm EST - Senator Kerry has made the statements he needs to make, projecting strength. He just hit Tora Bora.

**9:08pm EST - Kerry-Edwards offering instant response as well.

**9:04pm EST - Senator Kerry is wasting time already on the first question.

**8:27pm EST - I’m disappointed James won’t be live blogging tonight.

**8:24pm EST - Glenn Reynolds points out some clever live debate blogging by the Bush-Cheney camp.

**6:51pm EST - ABC News’ The Note is posting live links as well. Kerry will be taking the first question and Bush will be delivering the final closing statement.

**6:42pm EST - We should take Dan Froomkin’s challenge seriously. Part of the blogosphere’s role is to do some of the work that mainstream journalists refuse to do.

**6:33pm EST - CBS is reporting on the pre-spin spin by both camps,

Both campaigns have drawn up mock “briefing books” for their opponents.

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani introduced the Bush briefing book for Kerry with a familiar attack on the senator’s alleged vacillation on major policy issues.

“Sen. Kerry has taken so many different positions on the issues facing the country that we thought he would benefit from the overview of the most interesting debate — the one John Kerry is having with himself,” Giuliani said in a statement.

…

For its part, the Kerry campaign’s line is that the Bush presidency is a failure.

“Each month since the handover of sovereignty has been bloodier than the last,” said the Kerry briefing book for Mr. Bush, discussing casualties in Iraq. The book is called the PDB, or Prebuttal Debate Briefing, a reference to the Aug. 6, 2001 presidential daily brief that discussed a possible al Qaeda plot to hijack airliners.

…

“Osama Been Forgotten,” the book quips, and later claims, “Bush has no strategy for Iran.”

The Kerry campaign also distributed CDs to the media titled “Bush Vs. Reality.”

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Here’s how I see tonight’s debate for John Kerry. This is going to be one of the biggest nights for him in the entire campaign. He must effectively counter the President’s charges that he is a “flip-flopper” with something equally pointed. I hope that in the debate prep they were able to craft a response that is just as short and simple, “no I’m not” is not going to cut it.

In addition, he should avoid his Vietnam service like the plague. People are tired of hearing about it and most people have made up their mind about it one way or the other. It is not an asset at this point. I doubt the President will bring it up on his own and I will be extremely disappointed if there is even one question from the moderator on the issue. Let’s move on.

There will certainly be a number of questions on Iraq and the War on Terror. Kerry must differentiate himself from the President in some tangible ways. What would you differently Senator, and please don’t say everything? No one wants to hear you say you would do the same things in a different way and you need to nail down specifics on how we bring other nations to our cause. You can’t turn back time.

Finally, and most importantly, don’t let the President run away from his record. He has a record of mistakes, miscalculations and outright lies. Call him on them . Because of the debate format you may not be able to confront him directly, but you can put the issue on the table. The President made the decision to go into Iraq, he is responsible for the events that have unfolded since. Your position on Iraq has been consistent, but that doesn’t even matter. What matters is that the President made the decision to prosecute the war in this manner and you would have done it differently. Talk about what you would have done, compared with what has been done. It will be difficult in the time you have, but it can be done.

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Former Gov. Don Siegelman’s federal trial will begin Monday. He says he’s excited for Alabamians to know the truth about the charges. He seems quite confident he is going to be acquitted.

The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a four line ruling yesterday that denied the prosecutors’ request to remove Judge Clemon from the case. The fight by Siegelman’s team to keep this judge could do him more harm than he realizes,

Siegelman’s lawyers fought Martin’s efforts to have Clemon removed. The defense may have won a legal battle, but politically Clemon may do more harm to Siegelman than good, said Larry Powell, a political pollster and communications professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

“I think it’s going to be a major problem for Siegelman among white voters,” Powell said. “Clemon is going to be perceived as a Siegelman judge. If he’s acquitted or the charges are thrown out for whatever reason, his critics are going to identify the judge as being the reason.”

**Crossposted at Polstate.com

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Published in this week’s Wednesday (Prattville) Progress:

The first presidential debate of the 2004 campaign will take place tomorrow night in Coral Gables, Florida. Just getting the two major party candidates in the same room together was an accomplishment. It took a thirty-two page memorandum of understanding to explain the agreement the Bush and Kerry campaigns made only a week ago.

Presidential candidates have generally been wary of televised debates ever since 1960 when the way the candidates appeared on television was said to have more of an influence than the words of the candidates. So, based on history, the debate agreement for this year’s presidential debates contains a number of interesting provisions. The one that most obviously harkens back to the sweating Nixon with a particularly unattractive five o’clock shadow is a provision that specifically allows each candidate to bring their own make-up artist. At least we know they’ll look good.

Beyond looks, the candidates’ camps were also concerned about a variety of other aesthetic issues. Another item that reminded me of past debates said the following, “When a candidate is speaking, either in answering a question or making his closing statement, TV coverage will be limited to the candidate speaking. There will be no TV cut-aways to any candidate who is not responding to a question while another candidate is answering a question.” So, we won’t see any embarrassing images of one candidate rolling his eyes, or any other type of reaction, while another candidate is talking.

As I read page after page of restrictions and rules it made me a little sad. Like the perfectly scripted political conventions, political debates with the potential for spontaneity significantly reduced are boring. No wonder the number of people who watch the debates, when the chances you will see something spontaneous are so small.

The candidates get so few opportunities to speak directly to the people, unfiltered by the media, that they must take full advantage of it. Even with the restrictions, the debates could have a significant impact on this very close election. Yet, wouldn’t it be better for American democracy to have true debates between the candidates about the issues of the day? No response in these debates will be longer than two minutes and most will be thirty seconds or less.

Can the problems we face in our country today really be addressed in sound bites? Are we really going to get the clearest picture of the differences between the candidates when their time is so limited. Over the course of three debates each candidate will only speak a total of a little over 90 minutes and most issues will not be addressed in much depth.

If an election is truly a battle of ideas, which we often doubt, then those ideas deserve an opportunity to be fully aired in direct comparison to the alternative. The debates as we will see them are not worthless, but they could be worth so much more if Americans simply demanded it.

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I was asked to pass this website along. Check it out and send it to those who fear homosexuals. http://www.gaymerica.org

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Harvey muses on one of my pet peeves, e-mail hoaxes and rumors.

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I knew this was coming from the moment I read Alabama State University’s Board of Trustees would have final approval over the teacher testing agreement developed by the state. What’s really shameful is they made the vote over the objection of their own counsel. We are going to have teacher testing in the State of Alabama. whether the ASU Trustees like it or not. It’s about time for ASU to accept that and ensure that their students are prepared to take them.

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I’m not sure if this lawsuit will be successful, but the argument certainly has merit. This way of operating may very well violate the separation of powers, which many Alabama politicians don’t seem to grasp in the first place.

More importantly the state legislators who believe they should have the authority to decide individually with very little oversight how any of our tax money is spent need to have their heads examined. The Governor has eliminated his discretionary money and the legislators should be forced to do the same.

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The Mobile authorities are not in fact holding John Paul Chapman as they believed, but instead are holding Jeremy Bryan Jones. The DA had an interesting quote on the matter,

Following the news conference, Tyson urged “anyone who knows anything” about Jones to “immediately” get in touch with the Sheriff’s Department at 574-6397 .

“This is a dangerous sexual predator, and we are very interested in everything we can find out about him,” Tyson said.

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It’s so nice to finally see the Birmingham Board of Education tackling serious issues in the schools.

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A man in Mobile was almost the first death due to Ivan, because of a block of dry ice,

In the 1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency disclosed a 1949 memo listing ways to kill without leaving a trace. Among them: Putting a person in a small, sealed area with dry ice.

Anthony Patrick can attest to the effectiveness of dry ice as a killer. Just after noon on the Wednesday that Hurricane Ivan arrived, the 34-year-old Mobilian almost became Alabama’s first hurricane death.

To prepare for the likely days ahead without power, Patrick bought a 100-pound block of dry ice at an ice store on Old Shell Road, across from Phillips Preparatory School. He laid the dry ice on the floor of his truck’s passenger seat.

“I took a right on Old Shell, but by the time I got to Dreamland (Bar-B-Que), not even a quarter-mile, I was having a hard time breathing and I thought I was just winded,” Patrick said. “By the time I got to about Wilmer Hall, I was having a real hard time breathing and I thought I was having a panic attack or an anxiety attack or something.”

Patrick doesn’t normally suffer such attacks, but he didn’t feel pain in his chest, as he’d expect with a heart attack, he said. Seated in the small cab of his truck, with his air conditioner on high and recycling air rather than bringing in new, he had no reason to suspect that the block of frozen carbon dioxide was slowly asphyxiating him.

“When I got up to near St. Paul’s, I knew something wasn’t right, so I called my wife and left a message on her cell phone. Then I called my home phone and she answered and I told her I could barely breathe and asked her to call 911.”

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Violence is such an ugly thing and we see time and time again that violent kids don’t just appear for no reason, they are created through a pattern of violence in their lives, which is why these kinds of stories aren’t surprising.

Chapman gave this account of the incident: Two eighth-grade girls had a fight in the school hallway Friday afternoon. A teacher broke up the fight, the girls were taken to the office and suspended. The girls went back to class to wait for their parents.

According to the police report, Ames, who is the mother of one of the students, and her two other teenage daughters entered the room and along with the eighth-grade daughter began fighting with the other student and the student’s younger sister. Three teachers and Principal Jeanine Bell witnessed the fight and broke it up and the suspects fled.

The mother and her daughters left the building when a substitute teacher said she was calling police, Chapman said. The other student suffered a broken arm, one teacher reported an injured hand and bruises, and Bell also was bruised, she said.

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(Notes on the top searches at Google News)

**Davis Cup: Spain knocked out France, which sets up a big final with the United States. Come on, can’t the world let us win at something?

**Iraqi National Guard: When you are forced to arrest a senior member of the National Guard in a country you hope a democracy will flourish, you have a problem.

**Glen Johnson: The 35 year old stunned the boxing world with a ninth round knockout of Roy Jones, Jr.

**Gordon Brown: The man who would replace Tony Blair.

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The Alabama Board of Education will work diligently this week on a budget proposal to put before the legislature that includes the not surprising increase in revenue for the Education Trust Fund. Why is it not surprising? We had one of the worst years for Alabama tax collection you can imagine in the previous year. We really had nowhere to go but up.

The budget Morton and the board have begun preparing likely will propose funding for the following:

537 additional teachers.

235 additional counselors - all for elementary schools.

155 additional librarians.

128 new assistant principals.

$15 million more for the Reading Initiative - up from the $40 million that will be spent in the fiscal year that begins Friday.

Almost $15 million more for the Math, Science and Technology Initiative - up from the $237,000 to be spent in 2004-05.

The numbers Robert Morton proposed for additional teachers, librarians, counselors and assistant principals is based on staffing needs recommended by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools for a host of schools that do not meet SACS standards. SACS is the predominant agency that accredits schools across the state.

In 1995, state law tied funding levels for teachers, counselors, librarians and other school employees to SACS standards. Those standards increased in 2000. But due to shortfalls in tax collections for schools for the past four years, the state has not been able to fund positions at SACS standards.

“It’s the law of this state that we fund the number of teachers, librarians, counselors and others at SACS standards, and we have not been doing that and we just all feel now that we need to do this,” Robert Morton told the board.

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Kudos to Terry Gross for finally giving Bill O’Reilly what he deserves.

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See all those people running for the hills? Those are former Clinton aides who just learned that all of their e-mails from their time in the White House will be available to the public through the Clinton library in January 2006.

Their 20 million E-mails will be available for snoops on the fifth anniversary of Bubba’s 2001 departure from Washington, when other papers will see their first release at his library in Little Rock, Ark. Here’s what we know: E-mails about classified information will be kept secret. Bill Clinton has only two E-mails on file: a test E-mail and a note of congrats to Sen. John Glenn as the Mercury astronaut flew the space shuttle. That’s because Clinton probably marked his E-mails “personal,” legally keeping them from release. But it’s unlikely that aides and interns in the first big-time E-mailing White House did the same. And pressing “delete” won’t help: Most were archived on the hard drive.

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Purdue eased by Illinois on the road this afternoon in their Big Ten opener. They will go into South Bend next Saturday undefeated. Today’s performance was not impressive, but any time you can pick-up a road win in conference, it’s a plus.

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I’m disappointed with the Montgomery Advertiser’s headline on one story this morning: Report Cites Conflicts for Lawmakers. Alabama was ranked 8th out of 47 states for the quality of its financial disclosure laws. That’s good news, but we don’t find it out until the 9th paragraph.

The Center for Public Integrity gave Alabama a grade of “C” for its financial disclosure laws, which ranked it eighth among the 47 states that have such laws. It said the state routinely reviews filings for accuracy and completeness and requires extensive disclosures. But it said disclosure requirements for the lawmakers’ spouses are not as thorough.

Alabama state legislators receive about $30,000 a year in salary and expenses to work a three-month regular session and occasional special sessions and usually have other full-time jobs.

**UPDATE: If you want to see your legislators financial disclosure forms CPI has posted them here.

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Many, many people are smiling this morning at the mental image of Wetumpka Mayor R. Scott Golden looking out from behind iron bars.

Court records show he was 56 minutes late to hear a motion to dismiss him as attorney for George Hoey Morris. Morris is suing the Covington County Sheriff and District Attorney for $1 million for confiscating materials alleged to be child pornography and for the resulting financial loss and damage to his reputation.

Fuller wouldn’t comment on the matter, but his court clerk’s official minutes of the proceedings showed that the judge convened what was to have been a 2 p.m. hearing at 2:56 p.m. and asked Golden “why he was 56 minutes late for court today.”

The minutes don’t show what reason Golden gave.

“Counsel Golden is being held in civil contempt of court today and will be held in custody for two days, or in lieu of custody counsel may pay a total fine of $235,” the minutes stated.

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This week’s edition of my column, published in the Wednesday (Prattville) Progress:

I have to share my Ivan story. At five o’clock last Wednesday evening we made a family decision that there was no reason for us to stay in town to see how bad things were going to get. If the storm got bad enough, the chances of one of the large trees around our house causing harm was high. After securing our possessions as best we could, we decided to get out of town and found the first available hotel rooms going north, in Nashville. So we made a reservation and left.

My wife and I packed ourselves, my mother-in-law, two dogs and our baby daughter into our small SUV and headed north at around 7:00 that night. With several stops along the way, we arrived at the Holiday Inn in Murfreesboro, Tennessee around 11:30. When I arrived at the front desk and informed the night manager that we had a reservation, I was told we did not. It turns out in the confusion before we left Prattville I had jotted down the address for the wrong Holiday Inn. I had made a reservation at a hotel in the Nashville area, but this wasn’t it. After a quick phone call to their toll-free number I was able to determine the location of the hotel where I did have a reservation and we arrived there sometime around midnight. The night manager had been expecting us, as we were the last scheduled check-in for the night. We got our key and proceeded to our room. We all settled in for the night and flipped on the television to see the coverage of Ivan as it came ashore. We fell asleep sometime soon after and were awakened by the hungry cries of the baby later on Thursday morning.

We received periodic updates through the day from my father-in-law by cell phone and we followed the news reports online as well as on television. Many local news sites did an excellent job of keeping those of us who had left the area informed about the latest developments here. By the end of the day it was clear that our home was probably without power and downed trees were very likely. We went to sleep Thursday night believing we would be returning on Saturday to allow an opportunity for utilities to be restored and roads cleared. When we awoke on Friday morning and turned on the weather, our thoughts changed. Ivan had turned east and the rain in Nashville had stopped. In fact there was no rain in our path. The only issue that remained was power. Would it be on when we returned? After ascertaining that my power had been restored at my in-laws’s house, we decided to return a day early and deal with whatever may be waiting for us.

Thankfully, our house was not significantly damaged. We had a 100 foot plus tree fall across our backyard, but it only damaged our fence. We felt very fortunate, as I am sure so many of you do. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone touched by Ivan as you go through the process of recovery.

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I hope Carlinda Purcell knows what she is walking into. As the first woman and the first African-American to serve in the post, she will be bearing a large burden. I’m sure she will be a wonderful leader for a troubled system. Clinton Carter has done an acceptable job for a long time, but the system has a lot of potential for improvement. I would like to personally welcome Dr. Purcell and offer best wishes. Good luck!

UPDATE 2007: Welcome to all those from Rochester looking for information on your potential new superintendent. Check out my latest post here.

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Evidently Ivan isn’t done wreaking havoc yet.

Ivan’s back and ready for round two with the Gulf Coast.

The storm system that tore through southern Alabama as a hurricane last week returned to the Gulf of Mexico as Tropical Depression Ivan and, in Wednesday’s 10 p.m. National Weather Service advisory, was upgraded to a tropical storm.

At press time, Tropical Storm Ivan was about 214 miles south of New Orleans, said Mark Linhares, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Birmingham. It was moving west- northwest at 13 mph and packed maximum sustained winds of 40 mph, with higher gusts to the north and west of the eye.

Linhares said Ivan is expected to remain a tropical storm, although it might strengthen some. It is expected to make landfall around 7 p.m. Thursday, just east of Houston.

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The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members are appointed by the Governor and serve at his discretion, were put under great pressure yesterday to reverse a previous decision to parole a female prisoner who had murdered her husband. They made the decision to release her based on testimony that seemed to indicate the woman and her children had been abused.

Those on the other side could only refute those charges by claiming it was character assassination and that if there had been abuse someone should have known about it. Well, people did know about it, but unfortunately her mother, who kept detailed accounts of the abuse did not testify:

Melanie Lowery’s 82-year-old mother, Willie Gray, crumpled in her wheelchair after the decision.

Neither Gray nor Melanie Lowery’s sons chose to speak at the hearing. Gray said she regretted her decision.

“I’m sick, but I wish I would have gone,” she said.

Gray kept detailed accounts of her daughter’s suffering and began recounting them for the news cameras.

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Sometime last night TWAY passed the 50,000 view mark since June 18, 2003. Thank you everyone for continuing to come and visit!

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Tom Parker knows no one believes he deserves to be a Supreme Court Justice and he knows he can’t defeat his Democratic opponent on the merits, so he has decided to just smear the entire Democratic ticket in hopes it will give him a victory.

Parker said President Bush, the Republican standard-bearer, is an outspoken Christian and supports the Christian right’s social agenda, as he does, “in contrast to the pro-abortion and pro-homosexual position of the leaders of the Democratic ticket.”

Parker said he isn’t ascribing those views to his Democratic opponent, Robert H. Smith, but he says Smith is “running as a Democrat, knowing what his party stands for.”

Smith says he’s an Alabama Democrat like former chief justices Howell Heflin and Bo Torbert, and isn’t promoting any Washington agenda of the national party. He said his experience handling jury trials and making decisions on appeals “gives me the edge on experience.”

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The Alabama Democratic Party disqualified its candidate for district judge in the Bessemer cutoff yesterday, in part because she gave a campaign contribution to her opponent. That’s just weird.

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Talk Left does a very effective job of explaining why Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions (R) is wrong about the DNA bill that he and Sen. Kyl (R-Arizona) are holding up in the Senate.

So not only does Sessions not realize that if the innocent man is in jail, the guilty one is walking free, able to strike again, but he thinks that testing students for drugs is more important than saving women from future rape by identifying and locking up past rapists.

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Kevin Hayden has assembled a list of progressive blogs by state, and The World Around You is appropriately listed among them.

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The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that a car wash in Jefferson County was not liable for $851,935 lost in a jewel theft.

Ziva Jewelry had sued Car Wash Headquarters after a sales representative’s car came out of the wash line and, when an attendant waved that it was ready, an unknown man jumped behind the wheel and sped away.

When the car was found 15 minutes later, $851,935 in jewelry that had been padlocked in the trunk was gone.

The Supreme Court’s 7-0 ruling upheld a decision by Jefferson County Circuit Judge Scott Vowell, who dismissed the California-based Ziva’s suit without letting a jury hear it.

“We’re disappointed,” Ziva attorney Mike Roberts said.

In a first-of-its-kind case for the Alabama Supreme Court, the justices said they had never addressed whether a car wash or valet parking service is liable for the loss of contents hidden inside a vehicle left in its care.

The Supreme Court decided that a business is liable for lost property which it knew was in the vehicle or property it would reasonably expect to find in a vehicle, such as a spare tire and jack, but not for items that were hidden.

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There had been some doubt about whether the school systems hardest hit by Hurricane Ivan would be allowed to shorten their school calendars. Dr. Joseph Morton, Alabama State Superintendent of Education, eliminated all doubt yesterday by stating clearly that lost days would have to be made up.

In the public schools, the missed days can be subtracted from Thanksgiving, Christmas and spring breaks or tacked to the end of the academic year, Morton said. It’s up to the local school systems to decide.

“This policy has been applied consistently to schools in the northern part of the state that had ice and snow problems and to schools that have had tornadoes and fires,” Morton said.

Ivan closed numerous public school systems throughout the state, including

those in Escambia, Conecuh, Covington, Elmore and Butler counties. Morton said he has had difficulty contacting many local superintendents because of the loss of electrical and telephone service.

Last week, Morton advised schools statewide to close in preparation for Ivan. The hurricane made landfall overnight Wednesday then moved northward.

Morton said he has given affected school systems permission to postpone the fall administration of the Alabama High School Graduation Exam, which was scheduled for this week. Students must pass all five sections of that test in order to graduate.

Morton said state funding hinges upon students attending class at least 175 days and teachers working 182 days.

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