It's wonderful that a federal court has ruled against the display in a government building of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's tacky, 5280-pound granite Ten Commandments, but am I crazy to think the ruling is going to hurt Mary Landrieu as the Louisiana Senate runoff approaches? I know it's not the same state, and I know there's no direct connection, but hey, a lot of people believe a memorial service in Minnesota doomed Democratic Senate candidates as far away as Colorado and New Hampshire, so why is it so hard to imagine that this will be used (by the GOP, by talk radio) to rile up fundamentalists and conservative Catholics in Louisiana?

Whether or not it affects Landrieu, this is going to get ugly -- Moore has thirty days to take the thing down, which means the deadline is a week before Christmas. The self-righteous howls will be deafening, and I worry about serious civil disobedience if anyone tries to remove the thing by force.

A telling detail about Moore's character, from AP via (who'da thunk?) Fox News:

Moore installed the monument after the building closed on the night of July 31, 2001, without telling any other justices. But he did tell television evangelist D. James Kennedy, who had a crew from his Coral Ridge, Fla., ministry film the installation and offered videotapes of it for a donation of $19.

Moore has appeared numerous times on Kennedy's nationally syndicated religious television show.