IBM developerWorks reviews JDE, the Java development environment for Emacs. I do nearly all my work using NT Emacs and JDE these days.

The Republicans in the Senate crammed through the confirmation of Ted Olson as Solicitor General, despite his history of misdeeds. You can see how the votes went down at the Senate web site. Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia voted yea, as did Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Jim Jeffords and John Rockefeller of West Virginia did not vote.

The house of cards around Ted Olson seems to be collapsing. He’ll probably be confirmed anyway.

You can now post to Usenet using Google Groups.

The beta release of JDK 1.4 is now available from Sun.

The big political news story of the day is that Jim Jeffords, the Republican Senator from Vermont, is widely expected to become Jim Jeffords, the Democratic Senator from Vermont. This, of course, would throw the balance of power in the Senate over to the Democrats, giving them a 51-49 advantage. (The Republicans are supposedly putting the full court press on first term Democratic Senator Zell Miller from Georgia in hopes of getting him to defect and even things out again.) Anyway, while you might think that I’d be happy about Jeffords’ defection, it actually makes me kind of sad, because it pounds another nail into the coffin of the “liberal Republican.” There are tons of conservative Democrats in Congress, but there are fewer and fewer liberal Republicans — generally northeasterners who are more liberal on social issues than your standard issue right winger. At one time, these guys dominated the Republican party, but they are hurtling toward insignificance. It’s too bad, really.

The Register has posted the winners of its Email Disclaimer Awards.

Looks like all those stories about outgoing Clinton staffers vandalizing their offices and stealing things from Air Force One were fiction.

I went to see Shrek this weekend, with no expectations whatsoever. I didn’t even check out the reviewer consensus at Rotten Tomatoes before heading out. I thought it was laugh out loud funny in places, and very good overall.

Everyone knows about the links between the Dubya White House and the energy industry, but never have I seen the problem laid out so clearly as in Gregory Palast’s column, Smells Like Texas. The thing is, I’ve been to the Exxon refinery in Baytown, Texas that’s mentioned in the column, and it was a pollution emitting cesspool long before Dubya was President or even Governor of Texas. What’s sad is that Dubya did nothing as Governor to improve the situation, and furthermore wants to broaden Texas’ retrograde environmental policies to cover the entire United States. Eliminating the budget for the EPA’s civil enforcement group is particularly dastardly. I find it depressing that the Democratic leadership hasn’t been screaming about this from the rooftops, but I don’t find it surprising.