Editor’s Note: Editor and Publisher Glynn Wilson usually writes a weekly column on Sunday.

by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher

LOCUST FORK RIVER, Blount County, Ala., July 30 – “I am haunted by waters,” author Norman Maclean wrote in the conclusion to his memoir A River Runs Through It.

It is a line that will be familiar to anyone who watched the movie produced by Robert Redford about fly-fishing on the Big Blackfoot River in Montana.

“Poets talk about ‘spots of time,’” Maclean wrote. “My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”

Maclean was a great American writer, not just a regional writer, who learned to think and write – to create art – first working for a newspaper, I suspect, then a university.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amy Goodman, the best selling advocate of a free press and an independent media,
will speak in Birmingham Saturday, September 17, at 7 p.m. in the Hill University Center Alumni Auditorium.

The distinguished journalist is co-author of the best selling book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media That Love Them. She is a commentator on the documentary film, “Independent Media in a Time of War” and host of the daily radio and television program, “Democracy Now.”

The auditorium is located at 14th Street South and University Blvd. There will be a reception at Bare Hands Gallery, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., at 109 Richard Arrington, Jr. Blvd. South, and a book signing at Hill Center following program.

The event is presented by the Birmingham Peace Project and the program is free and open to the public. Donations will be accepted to assist with presentation costs and to benefit Democracy Now!

For more information on Amy Goodman, visit DemocracyNow.org.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has issued an Action Alert against New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for his July 22 column: “Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide.”

Friedman says the federal government, in the form of the State Department, should “produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report,” to “focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.” He also wants the government to include “excuse makers,” which, according to FAIR, includes “a majority of Americans, according to recent polls.”

I must say I used to love reading The New York Times and admit that I have reported and written for that once great newspaper. Perhaps this entire episode can be chalked up to post-9/11/Jayson Blair stress syndrome, but I stopped reading Mr. Friedman’s columns a couple of years ago when he flip-flopped on the war in Iraq. You see he was for it and against it, sort of like Sen. John Kerry on the funding for the war, about the time I was trying to tell the national desk that something was fishy in Bush’s D.C.

The Times plans to start charging for editorial columns in September, so Mr. Friedman’s audience will no doubt shrink considerably at that time. Somehow I doubt the FAIR action alert will do any good anyway, since all the activist’s e-mails will just go unread by the management at the paper. And besides, the State Department will ignore Friedman. Why shouldn’t we?

I’m sure there were newspaper columnists all over the land who stood with McCarthy and his blacklist during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Luckily, they are long forgotten.

The state of Health Care in the richest industrialized country in the world is a disgrace. More than 45 million Americans do not have health care coverage, including many poor women, children and the aged.

A bill was introduced in Congress in February of this year that would provide for comprehensive health insurance coverage for all U. S. residents. It is cited as the “United States National Health Insurance Act (or the expanded and improved Medicare for All Act), aka, HR 676.

The bill was introduced by Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, who will be the keynote speaker at the Birmingham event, according to Sabrina-Marie Wilson. The bill faces major opposition from the Republican controlled Congress and the White House.

Hearings are being conducted around the country for citizens to tell their personal stories as to the impact of the lack of health insurance on their lives, according to an organizer of the local public hearing to be held Saturday, August 20, 1-6 p.m. on the University of Alabama Birmingham Campus.

The event is being organized and sponsored by a group called Healthcare Now.

“Two years ago, most people in the U.S. believed that we could not get a single payer national healthcare system in the United States. But now the people are becoming more sophisticated,” the group says on its Web site. “Together, we are building a large movement for a national, universal, comprehensive single payer healthcare system that will provide excellent healthcare for every person in this country.”

A number of corporate “family” newspapers refused to run the Doonesbury comic strip on Tuesday, which features a fictional president saying Rove is “earnin’ his nickname . . . Turd Blossom.”

Some newspapers ran the strip, but edited out the “Turd Blossom” reference.

“It has been widely reported that President Bush does in fact call Rove by the nickname, so it is unclear what the newspapers expected to accomplish by censoring the strip,” says Art over at Progressive U.

G. B. Trudeau, author of the strip, refused to cave in to pressure from the conservative papers, and included a second “Turd Blossom” reference on Wednesday.

Trudeau’s jabs at Rove and the president have grown more caustic as the week went on. In today’s strip, the president tells Rove that as “punishment” for the leak, he is going to promote him to Supreme Court justice, explaining that it is a family tradition to reward people who make mistakes.

You can see all the strips for the week here at the Slate Daily Dose.

Sen. Bill Frist, the Republican Majority Leader, broke with President George W. Bush in the past couple of days and decided to push for federal funding of stem cell research – in spite of a threatened veto from the White House.

The activist group StemPac, which had been running broadcast and blog ads going after Sen. Frist, has decided to pull the attack ads and instead launch a letter writing campaign to thank the Senator from East Tennessee.

“For too long the promise of stem cell research has been held back by the ideology and ignorance of a small group of extremists,” said StemPac organizer John Hlinko. “The will of the majority has been ignored and hope for millions with debilitating illnesses has been needlessly delayed. For two long months, we have waited for the Senate to vote on HR 810, a critical stem cell bill that passed overwhelmingly in the House, and that has broad bipartisan support. That wait may now be over, thanks to the courage of Senator Frist. It took a lot of courage, and he deserves credit.”

The New York Times ran a story about this yesterday, but did not credit or quote the most visible group fighting for Frist’s support.

What do you know, folks. The Birmingham Post-Herald finally got around to publishing my letter to the editor yesterday on how Senator Jeff Sessions embarrasses Alabama by kissing up to Karl Rove and George Bush.

It’s the lead letter. When you hit the link, you have to scroll down to where it says Your Views and the headline reads, “Sessions embarrassing to Alabamians.”

I also sent the letter to the Birmingham Snooze, the Montgomery Advertiser, the Mobile Register and a few other corporate chain newspapers in the state, where the letter was apparently ignored completely. So much for free speech and press in Alabama. I guess you have to be a good little professional Christian to get a letter published in a Newhouse or Gannet-owned media property in this DOG forsaken state.

How did I find out they published the letter? They actually took the bait and identified me as the editor and publisher of Locust Fork Publishing and included the domain name, LocustFork.Net. So a reader e-mailed me this morning with the following comment:

More Smithsonian Photos

William Jennings Bryan (seated at left) being interrogated by Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Trial, July 20, 1925.

Marcel C. LaFollette, an independent scholar, historian and Smithsonian volunteer uncovered rare, unpublished photographs of the 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes “Monkey Trial” in the Smithsonian Institution Archives. The nitrate negatives, including portraits of trial participants, and images from the trial itself and significant places in Dayton, were discovered in archival material donated to the Smithsonian by Science Service in 1971.

Science Service is a Washington, D.C.-based organization founded in 1921 for the promotion of science writing and information about science in the media. Watson Davis (1896-1967), the Science Service managing editor, took these photographs when covering the Scopes trial as a reporter. In the 1925 trial, John Scopes was tried and convicted for violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. William Jennings Bryan served on the prosecution team, and Clarence Darrow defended Scopes.

In 2005, SIA restored fifty-two of the negatives with funds granted by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee. Shown here are twelve of the images. All photographs were taken by Watson Davis, Managing Editor of Science Service, while he was in Dayton, Tennessee, June 4-5, 1925, and July 10-22, 1925.