A Federal Appeals court ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance violates the establishment clause of the constitution thanks to the “under God” that was added in the fifties. Maybe now we can roll back the pledge to keep the patriotic stuff and get rid of the religious stuff.

This Thomas Friedman column is too good to pass up. You have to love the irony of being Iran right now.

Now that a remote exploit in OpenSSH was discovered, the OpenBSD project has had to update the tag line on the project home page:

One remote hole in the default install, in nearly 6 years!

Still pretty impressive.

Joining the ranks of companies to commit massive accounting fraud is WorldCom, which also happened to use Arthur Andersen as its auditor. It turns out they lied about $3.8 billion in expenses, claiming them as capital expenditures when they were really operating expenditures. It seems there’s a good chance this will destroy the company. It’s really no surprise that the economy is in the crapper — do you feel safe believing the financial statements of any company these days? Unsurprisingly, WorldCom’s CEO claims to be shocked at these revelations. I’ll bet he is.

I just saw the footage of Martha Stewart answering questions about the allegations that she made an insider trade while making a salad on some morning show. I have no idea whether she’s guilty of insider trading, but I was amazed at her answer when asked how she felt about all of the media attention associated with the scandal. She managed to get in the fact that she was a model through high school and college and that she is the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation in the same breath. Such arrogance.

Nicholas D Kristof attacks conventional wisdom on sweatshops in a New York Times column today, arguing that working in a sweatshop is better than most alternatives for people in developing nations. I don’t agree with companies from rich countries exploiting the poor in other countries in order to increase profits, but at the same time one person’s view of exploitation is another person’s view of opportunity. The main thing that concerns me with sweatshops is not low pay, but rather unsafe working conditions.

It’s often forgotten that the US went through a sweatshop phase during the industrial revolution where we were providers of cheap labor under miserable conditions (and there are still plenty of people working in miserable conditions in the US today, sometimes for less than minimum wage if they’re illegal). That, of course, begat the labor movement and in the end led us to being the world’s greatest industrial power. I don’t know if there’s a shortcut from poverty-stricken agrarian state to modern industrial state, or if that path is inevitable, but I don’t think that pulling business out of the world’s most wretched countries is good for them in the long term. Of course, I’m also of the opinion that “subsistence farmer” is the most rotten job in the world. (Well, maybe shipbreaking is worse.)

For the detailed wrapup of yesterday’s big decisions handed down by the Supreme Court, we turn to Howard J Bashman.

The administration’s latest peace proposal for the Middle East can be charitably described as a cynical joke. For one thing, it demands that the Palestinians democratically elect new leaders “untainted by terror.” I agree that the Palestinians desperately need new leadership, leadership that renounces meaningless violence and provides a vision for the future that involves living productively alongside the Israelis and building a modern nation that can participate effectively in the regional and global economy. But if there were Palestinian elections tomorrow, that’s not the sort of leadership that would be elected. I doubt whether there’d even be any such candidates on the ballot. The parties in the election would be the Palestinian Authority (which would of course run Arafat again), Hamas (Islamist candidate), Islamic Jihad (Islamist candidate), and the PFLP (old school leftist candidate). Can we realistically expect the winner of such an election to promote the kind of agenda that Ariel Sharon and the Bush administration demand?

Furthermore, the proposal does nothing to address the concerns that have derailed the peace negotiations that failed during the Clinton administration. Leaving issues like right of return, Jerusalem, and the actual borders of the proposed Palestinian state for later isn’t going to work. Those are the issues on the table, if it were not for them, chances are we wouldn’t have had the current intifada at all.

Finally, the Bush proposal demands nothing from the Israelis. I won’t argue with anyone who says that the current Palestinian leadership is worse than worthless, but it’s not like Israel has leadership that any Palestinian could negotiate with in good faith, either. Ariel Sharon engineered his election by intentionally provoking Palestinian violence and then riding the mayhem into office, and it’s obvious that he has utter and complete contempt for Palestinians, period. The fact that he demands an utter cessation of violence before peace negotiations begin proves that he has no willingness to negotiate with the Palestinians at all. You don’t sign peace treaties with people you’re already at peace with.

And again, looking at this in business terms, what’s the value proposition for the Palestinians? Find some new leadership that will work with Israel and put an end to terrorism, and you get what? The opportunity to potentially have a provisional state if every Palestinian behaves in a way that’s acceptable to the US and Israel? That looks to me like a scam. I want Palestinian terrorism to stop as much as anybody, and I’d love to see the violence on both sides come to an end, but I also know that we’re not getting any closer with crap like the Bush administration is trotting out.

How stupid is John Dvorak? This stupid. Is he so deeply attached to the PC platform that he feels compelled to mock everyone who appears in their ads? I understand that he’s a columnist and thus his job is to say stupid things that provoke people in to writing things like this, but his current column is below even his usual gutter standard. I can’t believe I’m even linking to it. Argh.

Well, here it is, straight from the horse’s ass. A reader sent along that link to the “argument” against the CEDAW, which unfortunately isn’t really an argument at all. The writer, columnist John Leo, spends the whole column tarring PC feminists and talking about the evil ways that people can manipulate the language of the treaty without discussing the text of the treaty itself at all. The text of the convention itself is available at the UN site.