Here’s an interesting Joe Conason find: President Bush’s special envoy for the Middle East, former Marine general Anthony Zinni, is opposed to going to war in Iraq.

I missed the news a couple of weeks ago that Galen Rowell and his wife were killed in a plane crash. What a loss.

Jamie Lee Curtis is pretty cool. It’s almost impossible not to take for granted the massive transformation that takes place before most celebrities allow themselves to be photographed.

“Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.“

“Democracies die behind closed doors.” So says federal judge Damon J Keith in an appellate ruling that it is unlawful to hold deportation hearings in secret without petitioning an immigration judge for the right to do so. After 9/11, the government held hundreds of such hearings without even disclosing the names of the potential deportees. One need only read the international news to see why our civil liberties are a big deal. Yesterday Spain shut down a fringe Basque political party (a move that’s sure to only spawn violence), and in Turkey a hunger strike among political prisoners continued, claiming its 55th death. In the West Bank, thugs executed a mother of seven for being an Israeli collaborator after they tortured her son until he concocted a story implicating her. As great a threat as terrorism is, stomping all over our Constitutional ideals to prevent terrorism is a greater threat, especially considering that I’m not convinced that any of the civil liberties the executive branch has tried to take away have helped to stop future terrorist attacks at all.

“Round up the usual suspects …“

The Bush administration seems to have lost interest in having mere functionaries talk about how important it is that we “liberate” Iraq — Dick Cheney gave a speech seeking to justify going to war on Monday. The question I now wonder about is whether the Bush administration planned on going to war before he was even elected President, or was it just something they came up with opportunistically after 9/11? If they planned on it all along, I wonder why that wasn’t part of the Bush campaign platform. “Elect me, I’ll start a war!”

The Bush administration is making it known that they don’t need the permission of Congress to go to war with Iraq. I would argue that a true leader wouldn’t shy away from making a solid case to Congress (and to their fellow citizens) in favor of war, if such a war were truly justified. If you can’t convince Congress, which tends to defer to the executive branch on military issues anyway, that we need to go to war, then chances are we don’t really need to go to war. Again, this further illustrates the Bush administration’s ongoing executive branch power grab — the ongoing allergy to accountability is troubling in the extreme.

Slate’s Chris Suellentrop profiles Richard Perle, America’s spokesman for invading Iraq.

Should students learning an object oriented programming language start out with a “Hello, world” program? That’s the question David H Steinberg asked in an onjava.com article this week. He does a pretty good job of covering the tradeoffs in the article, and I think that the question is worth some thought. As a writer of technical books, I guess I should attempt an answer.

As far as I’m concerned, “Hello, world” is a fine example, even though it doesn’t really teach you anything about what differentiates Java from other languages. Heck, the most striking thing about “Hello, world” in Java is that it’s more cumbersome to write than it is in most other languages I’ve used. The main purpose of the first program you learn is not to teach you the language, but prove that your environment is set up correctly, that you can successfully compile a program, and that you can execute a program. You can start teaching the student about the language in the next program.