Burnin’

The State: As the South’s population booms — projected to constitute 40 percent of the nation’s population by 2030 — a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds the percentage of people in the region identifying themselves as “Southerners” is slowly shrinking.

The AP-Ipsos poll conducted last month found 63 percent of people living in the region identified themselves as Southerners. That mirrors a trend from a University of North Carolina analysis of polling data that found a decline of 7 percentage points on the same Southern identity question between 1991 and 2001, to 70 percent.

“Does it mean that being a Southerner no longer has any meaning? I don’t think it does,” says Larry Griffin, a sociologist at UNC who analyzed the AP polling data. “It just has a very different kind of meaning.”

Are the qualities that have long been ascribed to the South really true anymore? Are Southerners really more hospitable than other Americans? Does family really count for more down South? Are depth of faith, loyalty to home, reverence for history and sense of place identifiably “Southern” traits?

The South has become “sort of like a lifestyle, rather than an identity anymore,” says James Cobb, author of the newly published Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.

TNYT: The Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera urged Britain and the United States on Tuesday to investigate a British newspaper report that Prime Minister Tony Blair had dissuaded President Bush from bombing the station’s headquarters in the Persian Gulf.

Mr. Bush was said to have referred to the idea of bombing Al Jazeera’s studios in Qatar, a close Western ally, according to a document quoted Tuesday in The Daily Mirror. The tabloid said it was quoting from a leaked government memo said to contain a transcript of a conversation by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004.

The Bush administration has frequently depicted Al Jazeera’s broadcasts as showing anti-American bias.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, told The Associated Press via an e-mail message, “We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response.”

By a unanimous vote, the Federal Election Commission issued Advisory Opinion 2005-16 which concludes that the Fired Up! Network of blogs qualifies for the “press exception” to federal campaign finance law. The Commission adopted the draft opinion without revision.

The AO states:

Fired Up qualifies as a press entity. Its websites are both available to the general public and are the online equivalent of a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication as described in the Act and Commission regulations.

The Commission concludes that the costs Fired Up incurs in covering or carrying news stories, commentary, or editorials on its websites are encompassed by the press exception, and therefore do not constitute “expenditures” or “contributions” under the Act and Commission regulations.

Lot 49 further notes this passage in the ruling: “…an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity…”

Citizens of this nation owe U.S. Representative John Murtha (D-PA) our deepest gratitude. One need not agree with his proposal that we withdraw our troops from Iraq at once to salute this decorated Marine. Merely recognizing that he acted with honor by creating much needed debate on the war, is enough. Which makes it all the more difficult to digest Rep. Jean Schmidt’s (R-OH) inane rhetoric.

click for Quicktime video

Flickr user, Lorabelle, recently moved to Bluffton from upstate New York. She’s already captured some great images of the Lowcountry’s natural beauty. Here’s one of the May River–the lifeblood of the town.

Locals are rightly concerned about the state of this precious tidal river, given the massive development (and run off from said development) taking place in Bluffton at this time.

Nebraskans are notorious for being straight shooters. Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator from the Cornhusker State is no exception. Earlier this week Hagel took President Bush to task for his comments criticizing Americans who would dare question his decision making in regards to the war in Iraq. Given that Hagel is a decorated Vietnam War vet, he has strong legs to stand on.

According to U.S. Newswire, Hagel said, “the Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them.”

Hagel also said the Vietnam War “was a national tragedy partly because members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the administrations in power until it was too late. To question your government is not unpatriotic — to not question your government is unpatriotic,” Hagel said, arguing that 58,000 troops died in Vietnam because of silence by political leaders. “America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices.”

Pinion raised his fists in mock combat. “I’d kill a few of them sum’bitches before they even touched me with one of their ropes, by God. The sight of all that white trash under the sheets gets me hot enough to shit fire.”

Ron Hogan of Galley Cat, details the brouhaha over Brad Vice’s short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.

The University of Georgia Press (the book’s publisher) has announced that it is withdrawing the collection from bookstores.

“On October 13,” according to UGA’s official statement, “the Press learned from the Tuscaloosa Public Library that one of the stories in Vice’s collection, ‘Tuscaloosa Knights,’ contained uncredited material from the fourth chapter of the first section of Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama, a publication of the University of Alabama Press. UGA Press immediately froze stock of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train and contacted Brad Vice for his response. Vice admitted that ‘Tuscaloosa Knights’ borrows heavily from Stars Fell on Alabama and that he had made a terrible mistake in neglecting to acknowledge Carmer’s work. He further stated that he had done this without any malicious intent whatsoever.”

In addition to recalling the book from circulation and allowing the publiciation rights to revert back to Vice, UGA will also re-assign the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction it gave Vice last year to one of the other finalists.

In his apology to UGA, which he made available to Galleycat when contacted for a statement, Vice acknowledged that he relied heavily on Carmer’s description of a 1927 Klan march in writing “Tuscaloosa Knights.” “I made a terrible error in judgment by omitting to acknowledge this due to my ignorance concerning the principles of fair use,” Vice concedes. “I am sad to learn the omission will mean the demise of the book, a labor of love I have been working on since I was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama. Though I am deeply saddened by this prospect, I am made even more sad by the impression of impropriety these allegations of misconduct have left on my hometown, a place I care for deeply. This book was supposed to be my love letter to Tuscaloosa, and I am grieved that it would be read in any other way.”

Ironically, this controversy may end up helping Vice sell more books. Especially, if Vice is vindicated of any wrongdoing. Jake Adam York of Story South is one of Vice’s defenders.

When I first read Vice’s story — he sent it to me and to Jim Murphy so we could reprint it at Thicket, the site we’ve dedicated to Alabama writing — I heard the echoes of Carmer right away, and I thought Vice had done a smart thing. He had written his story right on top of Carmer’s, set his own characters in the very Tuscaloosa Carmer described among the very Klan that disgusted Carmer. It seemed to me a clear case of allusion.

To make the case for intentional, deceptive plagiarism, one must say that Vice’s intention is to hide from us the inspiring and well-quoted source, must say that Vice assumes we will not (could not) make the connection between his work and Carmer’s. It assumes that Vice’s quotation is meant not to evoke Carmer’s text but to pillage and thereby erase it.

I discovered a new poet yesterday while browsing the available reading at Bluffton Coffee House. His name is Matthew Thorburn and his first book of poems is Subject to Change.

Here’s the first stanza of a poem I’m particularly fond of:

In Lansing

Black coffee, for starters, and sun
sneaking through a scribble
of cloud. Holidays over and still
in from out east: you and me,
Kay, and cold day-old light–
dishwater or thereabouts. And pale,
the sky through these trees, blue
that’s almost not blue; a bird’s egg
or as if colors were verbs–

I love how evocative this language is. It transports me completely to January in the Upper Midwest, and strangely enough that’s a place I like to be.

New York Metro: Villard is paying an $80,000 advance to the creator of a religion designed to make fun of intelligent design. This summer, Bobby Henderson, 25, an unemployed slot-machine engineer, posted a much-forwarded open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education declaring that “there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design” on his Website. He contends that a huge, invisible beast made of spaghetti and meatballs created the world about 4,000 years ago (pasta of that vintage has been found in China, he points out). The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which will codify Pastafarianism, is set to come out on Valentine’s Day. “My hope is that readers won’t know if I’m trying to make a point about pseudoscience or if I’m a complete nut,” says Henderson. “I’ll be really disappointed if it doesn’t spawn a cult.”

[via Kottke]

USA Today: Entrepreneurship turned eBay founder Pierre Omidyar into one of the world’s richest men. Now, he’s betting it can ease one of the world’s most daunting problems: poverty.

Omidyar, who started eBay 10 years ago, will announce Friday that he is donating $100 million for a new Tufts University program to generate millions of tiny loans, some as small as $40, to finance entrepreneurs trying to escape poverty in India, Bangladesh and other poor countries.

The gift is a big endorsement of social entrepreneurship — a field of growing interest for the new generation of technology entrepreneurs. The shift could recast traditional philanthropy dominated by non-profits such as the Ford Foundation built on Old Economy wealth.

The microfinance industry began about 30 years ago in rural Bangladesh when economics professor Muhammad Yunus launched what is now Grameen Bank. It has 3.7 million borrowers, virtually all women, relying on the bank’s nearly 1,300 branches covering 46,000 villages. Repayment rates are 95% to 98%, says Grameen Foundation USA, the bank’s U.S. affiliate.

Since Grameen’s launch, a network of other microlenders — as many as 10,000 — has sprung up worldwide, lending about $24 billion annually, says the Microcredit Summit Campaign, funded partly by Omidyar. Over the next 10 years, he expects the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund could unleash $1 billion in loans, many to women, as capital is repaid, then lent again.

Omidyar, with $10 billion, ranks No. 18 on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans.