Paper Trail

Bouncing down an empty country road, past browning cotton fields lined with signs advertising church services and cheap guns, historian John A. Lupton hunches over a minivan's steering wheel and ignores his aching back. He has been traveling for six days -- covering five states and more than 1,400 miles -- in a mentally exhilarating and physically exhausting pursuit of anything handwritten by Abraham Lincoln, as well as documents addressed to him: a frayed envelope the president addressed to a Confederate sympathizer; a dirty sheet of paper filled with the grumblings of a cotton farmer; a faded journal entry with notes about property rights that Lincoln scrawled in the margins.

Less than three years after the last major revision of its domestic surveillance guidelines, the FBI is preparing to loosen its restrictions on monitoring Americans. If this is not halted, we might find our privacy eroded beyond repair. Agents are already free to search the public Internet and the federal government's vast and growing databases for information on groups or individuals — even if they aren't suspected of wrongdoing — without approval from a supervisor. Under rules implemented in 2008, they can go still further, digging up information in broader commercial databases, or consulting state and local law enforcement records, provided they open an "assessment.

Thanks to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, California voters can ask for a paper ballot this November election if we want a paper trail for our votes. SB 1438, which requires electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail, won't go into effect until January 2005. Whew! Mary Jacobs Los Angeles

When Jerry Tejeda was a teenager, financial stability was just about the last of his concerns. He was in a gang and was sent to juvenile hall several times for a variety of crimes. At one point, he was homeless. Then, when he was 18, he and his girlfriend, Josephine, had a son. "The birth of my son changed my life; it was a spiritual and emotional awakening," Tejeda said. "I didn't know how to be a husband or a father, but I didn't want my son to feel the fear and loneliness I had felt.

WHY does disposable culture stick around? What makes us cling to materials we're meant to throw away? In "The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898-1911)" (Bulfinch: 132 pp., $50), Nicholson Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano, suggest that it's partly a matter of time -- that the "low and pandering art" of one generation is documentary evidence to the next.

An accountant who investigated the huge earnings overstatement at HealthSouth Corp. said he didn't find a paper trail linking the scheme to fired Chief Executive Richard Scrushy, who is on trial in the fraud. While the testimony by Harvey Kelly in federal court in Birmingham, Ala., could help the defense, Kelly also said he wasn't really trying to find out who was behind the conspiracy while working with a team that sifted through HealthSouth books filled with bogus entries.

Re "Reversal of Ballot Printout Plan Urged," Nov. 22: I am gratified to see that Secretary of State Kevin Shelley understands and acknowledges the widespread distrust of electronic voting systems by many voters and has been proactive in finding a solution. His new requirement that such systems have a verifiable paper ballot printout will do much to alleviate this distrust and return voters to the polls. I believe it is imperative, and not too much to ask, that we know our vote is being counted in the way we have intended.

Florida voters at the epicenter of the 2000 presidential election debacle will probably cast a ballot for George W. Bush's successor on a machine that gives them proof they voted -- and for whom. Heeding Gov. Charlie Crist's call, state legislators are poised to require that all Florida counties be equipped with voting machines that provide a paper trail of each vote by fall 2008.

Whenever we hear or read about natural disasters, we usually focus on the physical impact. How many lives were lost? How many houses destroyed? But after the media attention diminishes, those who have suffered through the disaster must get on with their lives.

When Tom Nolan began researching his biography of author Ross Macdonald a decade ago, he made a happy discovery: The renowned Santa Barbara mystery writer had been a lifelong pack rat. Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, died in 1983 at age 67.

If you've got rosary beads handy, please say a prayer for the leader of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Last week was not a good one for Cardinal Roger Mahony, and there may be no letup in weeks to come if a certain monsignor continues to testify in a deposition being taken as part of a civil case against Mahony and the diocese. Msgr. Richard Loomis, former vicar of clergy for the archdiocese, said under oath that in the year 2000 he wrote a memo advocating that the archdiocese inform police about allegations of sexual abuse by a now-defrocked priest named Michael Baker.

Forget most of what you read, learned, recorded or thought so far about the 2009 season. As usual, it was just people guessing, fudging, lying and/or trying to sell magazines, newspapers, pop-up ads and/or radio advertisement or billboard space in South Bend, Ind. "Best Wishes to Charlie Weis in the 5th year of his college coaching internship. -- Linebacker Alumni." Wait until that wise-guy Weis gets a load of this. Final score: Notre Dame 35, Nevada 0. They say the biggest improvement in college football comes between weeks one and two. Let's hope that includes reporters, ESPN talking heads, coaches, cab drivers and South Bend's merry pranksters.

Re "Canada's Conservative Party overcomes Bush comparisons," Oct. 15 Isn't it wonderful that, in Canada, the winners of Tuesday's parliamentary elections were known in time to be in Wednesday's newspaper? Neither the words "are leading" nor "preliminary returns" appear in the report. That is because Canada uses paper ballots. Procedures for counting votes in the precincts provide a reliable prediction of outcome and include controls against vote manipulation. No chads. No missing computer data.

My hubby, Eric, and I got into an argument about T.I. while driving back from the Neil Diamond concert the other night. (I know, it's not typical to mix the Jewish Elvis and Atlanta's illest, but that's the poptimist life we lead.

For 60 years, happy diners at the now-shuttered Homestead tacked dollar bills to the walls, dated and inscribed with a line or two to mark the occasion. A tradition in the high-desert hamlet of Inyokern, it made the cozy, wood-paneled restaurant a place to remember. So when a man last week used 10 of the bills -- some inked with the word "Homestead" -- to pay part of a court fine, a clerk remembered.

Bouncing down an empty country road, past browning cotton fields lined with signs advertising church services and cheap guns, historian John A. Lupton hunches over a minivan's steering wheel and ignores his aching back.

Dick Clay, a burly German-Irish Hoosier with mustache and beer belly, doesn't look much like a Filipino. But he made a daring escape from Kuwait disguised as one--with fake Philippine documents ingeniously forged by a loyal friend. Clay, 46, managed to slip across the Iraqi-Jordanian frontier last week with 34 Filipino employees by pretending he was one of them.

Mark Waldrep was working as a recording engineer when he spotted fledgling DVD technology and realized it would someday replace compact discs in commercial popularity. He founded AIX Media Group, and in 1997 his company was one of the first to release a DVD title in the United States.