It would appear that Tariq Ramadan “has won”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/26/ramadan an important victory in his legal battle against his exclusion from the United States.

bq. A federal judge on Friday gave the U.S. government 90 days to act on the visa application of a renowned Muslim scholar who has been kept out of the United States for two years … [I]n forcing the government to make a decision about the scholar, Judge Crotty rejected — sometimes in mocking tones — many government arguments that would have given federal officials broad power to exclude people from the United States without giving any reason. … despite the wide latitude federal officials have to deny visas, Judge Crotty wrote, “it cannot do so solely because the executive disagrees with the content of the alien’s speech and therefore wants to prevent the alien from sharing this speech with a willing American audience.” Further, Judge Crotty wrote: “The First Amendment rights of Americans are implicated when the government excludes an alien from the United States on the basis of his political views, even though the non-resident alien has no constitutionally or statutorily protected right to enter the United States to speak.”

I meant to mention Philip Connors’ sharp and funny piece about working for the _Wall Street Journal_ (to be found in the “most recent issue”:http://www.nplusonemag.com/toc4.html of _N+1_, but not available on the WWW) last week, when I was writing about newspapers, editorial policies etc. His description of Bob Bartley, late editorial-page editor for the newspaper:

bq. Bob Bartley, who has since passed away, was among the most influential American journalists of the second half of the twentieth century … He was fairly soft-spoken and his posture was poor. He rarely smiled, but when he did he looked like a cat who’d just swallowed your canary. His abiding obsessions were taxes and weapons. He thought taxes should be cut always and everywhere, except for poor people, and he thought Americans should build as many weapons as possible … Bartley was appalled by the very idea of poor people. In fact, he’d once said he didn’t think there were any poor people left in America – “just a few hermits or something like that.” (This quote can be found in the _Washington Post_ Magazine of July 11, 1982.) On this issue, Bob Bartlley was the intellectual heir of an old American idea expressed most succinctly by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher: “No man in his land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his _sin_.” For Bob Bartley, the agrarian pictures of Walker Evans and the homoerotic pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe were morally equivalent. Both depicted human beings in a sinful state of filth and degradation, and such images had no place in an American museum.

As you may have noticed by now, I like maps. In fact, geography was the only elective I took in high school, two optional years in addition to the two required (no, I didn’t go to high school in the U.S. as you are likely able to guess from that info). Those classes included lots of material of less interest to me (e.g. leading mineral producers in the world and what shrubs grow in the tundra), but we also got to look at maps a lot, which was the main reason I was hooked.

*

Given these interests, I was excited to find Quikmaps this morning, a service that lets you annotate Google Maps, save them, go back and edit them, and in the meantime post them on your Web site. There have been other related services (GMapTrack comes to mind), but none have managed to do this as well as Quikmaps. I have been using Wikimapia for some map annotation purposes, but it’s not so good when the locations you are specifying have limited appeal. The one problem with such independent little upstarts is you never know how long they’ll be around (e.g. GMapTrack is nowhere to be found) so it’s not clear how much time and effort one should spend creating maps.

Nonetheless, if you want to explain to someone how to find you or want to annotate your favorite locations (or just restaurants) in town, this seems like a very helpful service.

UPDATE 11:30am CST: The site is down, but the “quikmaps guy” has posted a note on Digg to say he’s working on getting it back up asap. In the meantime, you can at least take a look at the homepage on duggmirror.

UPDATE 1pm CST: It’s working now here.
[thanks]

[*] I have purposefully avoided embedding a map here. I don’t want CT page loads to be too taxing on the Quikmaps site. It should be busy enough dealing with the digg effect .