The not-so-liberal guys at the Economist did a bit of digging and discovered what Molly Ivins already knew — which is that Dubya screwed up Texas before he started screwing up the United States. In Dubya’s defense, Texas was pretty screwed up even before he became governor.

Just for the record, Gracenote is about as sleazy as it gets. They turned the contributions of thousands of people to an open project into a profit-making enterprise that’s being used to bludgeon the very users that did all of their work for them. The lesson here is that you should be careful about which causes you contribute your effort to. People like Craig Mundie bash the GPL, but if you’re doing something on your own time, it’s licenses like the GPL that make sure that some greedy bastard won’t take your work and try to sell it back to you.

Craig Mundie to Linus Torvalds: I see your Sir Isaac Newton, and raise you Alfred North Whitehead, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.

I don’t have time to respond in detail to Andrew Leonard’s appraisal of the world of Free Software in a post-Eazel world, but suffice it to say that there’s lots to disagree with in there.

From one single term President to another: Jimmy Carter tells Dubya to quit exaggerating the energy crisis.

Sun to drop support for Java after the 1.4 release. FUD or an April Fool’s joke, you be the judge.

It’ll be interesting to see the fallout from this letter written by the editor of Out magazine, urging his boyfriend, a major league baseball player, to come out of the closet.

You think Tony Soprano knows how to blue box? Kevin Paulsen’s report on mob-sponsored phreaking for profit in Las Vegas is a fascinating read.

So John Ashcroft is holding voluntary prayer meetings before work every morning that all of his employees are invited to attend. If you ask me, that’s inappropriate. I don’t hold his religion against him, but I feel like he ought to practice it in private, outside the context of his office, especially given that he holds a high position in the federal government. I think that it’s reasonable to assume that many employees would feel uncomfortable if they refused to attend such a meeting if it were held by their boss, even if attending such a meeting conflicted with their own beliefs.

A bunch of people sent me links about the “energy crisis”. I haven’t gotten around to sifting through them all yet because I’m still completely swamped at work, but I promise that I will. Anyway, I appreciate all the stuff people dug up, and I hope to post something here in the near future about what’s driving this whole “energy crisis” thing. I’d like to do it this week, since Dubya has designated this week as energy week.