Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. One thing that’s slightly frustrating about the article is that it seems to focus on the pro-life issue. Trent Lott didn’t get into trouble for opposing abortion, he got into trouble for parading his ignorance of racial issues in front of the American people, which enabled his tainted past acts to come home to roost. Frist is a Republican favored by the Bush administration — he’s a conservative. The question is whether Frist is a real escape from Lott’s good old boy-ism. I think we can be fairly sure that Frist isn’t as ignorant as Lott, if nothing else.

I know that I link entirely too often to Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, but hopefully you’ll continue to indulge me. He wrote a post today on racism and the Republican party that’s a must read. His basic point is that Republicans are not inherently racist, but that they cash in on racism to win elections.

So I read an article about why JSP sucks, and this was the first response:

This is why I don’t recommend Java for web development, and just use PHP. With many template implementations out there for PHP, it’s simple to have someone use dreamweaver and just put little {MY_VAR} where the data goes!

How is this in any way better than <%= myVar %> or <bean:write name="myVar" />? To me, it’s not. And you’re throwing out the other 8,000 things that make J2EE a great platform for writing Web applications. In any case, this person is obviously utterly ignorant. The reason they don’t recommend Java for Web development is that they don’t understand it. PHP has its advantages, too. I don’t pick out one crappy feature in PHP and post to my weblog saying that I don’t recommend it due to that feature (in fact, I use PHP). I’m not being defensive of Java here, but I get tired of seeing tons of this shoot from the hip sort of crap every day.

If there’s one thing that remains a constant in politics, it’s nepotism. It kind of makes you wonder whether there’s a genetic predisposition toward monarchy in the human race. People love to put the children of politicians in office, and there are still plenty of monarchists running around in the world. In Hawaii, for example, there are plenty of people who want to secede and restore the Hawaiian monarchy. Why? It baffles me. And for what it’s worth, I can’t think of any politicians that have done such a good job that I would eagerly cast a vote for their kid.

Jabber is making a list of applications that could serve as prior art when it comes to fighting the AOL (ICQ) patent that covers instant messaging.

Is it just me, or does the Bush administration make some creepy, proposal for new violations of our privacy every single day? Today the New York Times reports that the Bush administration is proposing a centralized monitoring system for the entire Internet. Sure, it could be used to monitor the activities of individual users, but of course it won’t. (Insert winks and nudges where appropriate.) The thing that amazes me is that Republicans are supposed to stand for smaller government. It seems to me though, that when it comes to freedom of speech, defense spending, governmental spying on Americans, data warehousing (except when it comes to gun ownership), and our right to practice or reject religion as we see fit, that’s not the case. On the other hand, they’re all about reducing the size of government when it comes to enforcing environmental regulations, upholding civil rights laws, prosecuting corporate criminals, and making sure that all Americans have food and access to health care. You already knew all that, though.

Colin Powell on Iraq: It’s go time.

In my previous item, I overzealously tarred abstinence programs unfairly. Mark Hershberger sent me an email pointing out that abstinence programs have enjoyed some success in Africa, which, in fact makes sense to me. Clearly abstaining from sex until you decide you actually want children is incredibly effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Furthermore, I can see that in cultures that do not encourage abstinence, or even communicate to people (women in particular) that abstinence is an option, doing so would prove effective.

Indeed, my overall problem with the Bush administration’s position is that I don’t believe that they have come to it through empirical evidence, but rather through religious or moral conviction, or even worse, through political expedience. Deciding how to best tackle the population crisis (and STD crisis) in the developing world based on what will get you votes two or four years down the road is cynical in the extreme, and it pisses me off. However, that’s not really an excuse for going all Michael Moore, drawing broad and misinformed generalizations, and trying to pass them off as common knowledge. I’ll do better.

For the Bush administration, promoting abstinence is more than a pipe dream, it’s a keystone of our foreign policy:

Standing before a hall packed with representatives from over 30 Asian countries, Dewey stated unequivocally that the U.S. would seek to block the passage of any international family planning policy that permits abortion or promotes contraception for adolescents. “The United States supports the sanctity of life from conception to natural death,” he said. “There has been a concerted effort to create a gulf by pushing the United States to violate its principles and accept language that promotes abortion.”

One might ask how the promotion of abstinence has worked here in the United States for the last few hundred years. Why can’t we just go ahead and declare that trying to prevent teen pregnancy by telling teenagers that sex is bad is an utter and complete failure? It seems like that’s fairly obvious to most teens. And the real kicker is, even other religious nations aren’t buying our crap:

U.S. delegates argued bitterly against the inclusion of such phrases in the proposal until the last day of the conference, when, faced with an impasse, the conference took a vote — an unusual tactic for U.N. conferences. The U.S. lost the first vote to exclude language on “reproductive rights” — 31-1. They lost the second — over “adolescent reproductive health” — 32-1.

The opposition votes included such bastions of liberalism as Iran and the Philippines. By the way, the Washington Post has done some great reporting on this issue recently as well. More interesting are the cases where we actually find ourselves arguing for our side alongside the same Islamic countries that are basically opposed to every facet of American society.

Followup posted here.

One of the ways you know IntelliJ IDEA is a killer product is that every time you open it, the tip of the day actually teaches you something rather useful.