“In the first installment of her series on Virtue, Margaret Berry introduces you to 10 charities that know the value of 10 bucks.” —The Morning News Five of these organizations are already on my list for giving. At least some should probably be on yours too, whether it is only ten dollars or many times that.

“Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday?”

Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

If St. Valentine’s heroism lay in standing against unreasonable state interference in marriage, gay couples may be in particular need of his succor today, as the ignorant backlash — state-sponsored terrorism — against non-heterosexual marriages proceeds. I know I have been celebrating the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision saying nothing short of extending the right to marry to gay couples will be consistent with equal rights under the current constitution. My elation was, of course, premature. If you are not following the news from my state, our (Mormon) governor Mitt Romney and other social reactionaries have just convened a constitutional convention (actually, it had been planned for months before the Supreme Court decision, but the issue moved to the top of the agenda) to try to amend the constitution to take the legs out from under gay marriage. Successive versions of the proposed amendment have been shot down and the convention adjourned without success. But the battle is not over yet, they will reconvene in March, two months before the scheduled May implementation of extending marriage licenses to gay couples.

Some of the maneuvering around this issue seems as illegal as it is outrageous to me. For example, the favored version of the amendment would retroactively make gay marriages (since the earliest the amendment could be adopted, if successful, would not be until mid-2006) revert to civil unions. Now, I’m no legal scholar, but isn’t this tantamount to making something retroactively illegal? And isn’t the principle that ex post facto laws are unacceptable one of the cornerstones of our legal system? Also, Romney is contemplating issuing an executive order forbidding state officials to grant marriage licenses to gay couples no matter that they are entitled to them. My guess is that he hopes that the litigation to force him to reverse this blatantly defiant and illegal order would take long enough that he could prevent all the marriages that would otherwise ensue until the longed-for amendment. What, is he bucking for a cabinet appointment in the second Bush administration or something? And isn’t the idea of the constitution, state or federal, ‘defining marriage’ an obscene perversion of its scope and purpose?

Listening to all the public debate on this issue, the argument that strikes me as the most sensible says that, instead of extending the right of marriage to gays, we should take it away from heterosexuals as well. The State should be in the business of extending certain rights and duties to spousal unions, so it should regulate civil unions for everyone, and forget about marriages. It has no place in the business of regulating what is essentially a religious sacrament, which homophobic couples should be welcome to seek in their homophobic churches if the idea of a loving union between same-sex partners somehow threatens the security of their marital vows. I cannot speak for gay couples but it strikes me that, instead of seeking to be able to proudly state they are ‘married’, they ought to join us heterosexual couples who are becoming ashamed to say we are ‘married’, ashamed at what a vehicle for bigotry and irrationality ‘marriage’ has become.

Firefox is the latest name under by which we refer to the Browser Formerly Known as Firebird Which Was The Browser Formerly Known as Phoenix. Try it once, if you haven’t already, and you won’t need persuading. These arguments apply to the Mozilla browser as well, BTW.

It would have been fine if it had happened, actually. But, snopes.com concludes, the photo is a fake, a cut ‘n’ paste job. They display the original, without Fonda in the picture, and it cannot even be established that she was at the antiwar rally in question at all. But the Fonda controversy misses the point. The Right should certainly be threatened simply that Kerry was a Vietnam veteran against the war, Fonda or not.

“If anyone’s ever promised you the sun, the moon and the stars, tell ’em you’ll settle for BPM 37093.

The heart of that burned-out star with the no-nonsense name is a sparkling diamond that weighs a staggering 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That’s one followed by 34 zeros.

The hunk of celestial bling is an estimated 2,500 miles across, said Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

‘You would need a jeweler’s loupe the size of the sun to grade this diamond,’ said Metcalfe, who led the team that discovered the gem.

The diamond is a massive chunk of crystallized carbon that lies about 300 trillion miles from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus.” —Sacramento Bee

Michael Massing, an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review who writes frequently on the press and foreign policy, on the prewar failures of the press to show any skepticism about the Administration’s WMD line:

In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush administration’s pre-war failings on Iraq. “Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper,” declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. “Pressure Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence,” said The Wall Street Journal. “So, What Went Wrong?” asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration’s claims about Iraq. And on “Truth, War and Consequences,” a Frontline documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence analysts testified to the administration’s use of what one of them called “faith-based intelligence.”

Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn’t we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change?when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who’ve spoken out since the end of the war were mute before it. But that’s not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the “intelligence community” was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller, about whose credulous parroting of Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi’s propaganda about the Saddam threat much has already been said here and elsewhere, comes in for particular scorn from Massing. Miller blames her credulity on poor intelligence, about as credible as Dubya’s use of that excuse is. She pleads with Massing, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” But think about it for a moment; that is an essential perversion of the meaning of that maxim. —New York Review of Books

Released Papers Do Not Document Ala. Service. —Washington Post. Someone quipped this morning that if things continue this way, the record of the entire Bush administration is going to depend on dental records.

David Pescovitz: “Say you walk to the bus stop each morning. A context-aware phone would notice that at around the same time every day you move slowly and steadily for a while, stop completely, and then dramatically speed up. After noticing this pattern, you phone might ask you if you’d like to tie specific preferences to this particular activity. At that point, you could then set the device to ring while you’re walking but switch to silent once you board the bus.

The phone could also be programmed to respond to calls in different ways, depending on what its owner is doing. For instance, Schmandt explains, if a call comes when he’s riding the bus, he’d like the caller to receive a message to the effect of: ‘It’s not a good time for Chris to talk. Would you like to text message him instead?’ The agent would then ask the caller to stay on the line while the message is delivered. That way, Schmandt adds, he can decide whether to break routine and actually take the call.” —The Feature