Here’s the clearest signal I’ve yet seen that John Edwards should drop out of the Presidential race and concentrate on retaining his North Carolina Senate seat:

The other candidates are Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois.

That’s a paragraph toward the end of Newsday’s wrapup of yesterday’s debate among Democrats.

In other news, it seems Howard Dean didn’t turn in a great performance at the debate. He needs to be more scrupulous about being consistent if he wants to win.

Breaking the Word Processor Curve is a piece arguing that OpenOffice.org Writer is a superior word processor to Microsoft Word. I tried it out and didn’t get the same impression. Aside from everything else, Writer doesn’t support revision tracking, the killer feature in Word that is required for collaboration with other people. I don’t think any open source word processor can claim to replace Word until it has support for revisions, preferably in a Word-compatible way.

Update: apparently Writer does, in fact, have change tracking.

SD Times has a piece reporting on the status of .NET 18 months after release. I find it interesting that they cite working with a robust class library as one of the big transitions that developers in old school VB or C++ had to make when moving to .NET. I’m so used to working with languages that have robust class libraries and easily available open source libraries that it just baffles me that people find that difficult. Generally I kick myself when I write something and later find that it was available already, so the idea of giving up on writing code instead of integrating with code that is already written seems bizarre.

The quote at the end complaining about the lack of rapid application development tools for Java comparable to Visual Studio .NET also strikes me as one made from ignorance. I think the Java tools market is pretty darn mature.

Gary Kamiya’s editorial at Salon today accurately captures the subtext of the White House’s decision to go back to the UN for help in Iraq. Here we go:

The Bush administration’s humiliating announcement that it wants the U.N. to bail it out officially confers the title of “debacle” upon the grand Cheney-Rove-Wolfowitz adventure. Not even the world-class chutzpah of this administration can conceal the fact that by turning to the despised world body, it is eating a heaping plate of crow. This spectacle may give Bush-bashers from London to Jakarta a happy jolt of schadenfreude, but it does nothing to help Americans who are stuck with the ugly fallout of the Bush team’s ill-conceived, absurdly overoptimistic attempt to redraw the Middle East.

It goes on from there.

Greg Knauss has done the world a service with the Devil’s Dictionary 2.0. I think Ambrose Bierce would be proud. Worth checking out for “anti-idiotarian” alone.

Matt Haughey conducted an experiment in using a Wiki as a regular CMS and wrote about it. This is what I should be doing instead of what I usually spend my time doing.

Anyone who reads this site knows that I’m a pretty big fan of Josh Marshall’s weblog, Talking Points Memo. Despite its name, Marshall’s analysis nearly always goes far beyond the talking points and provides real analysis that is refreshingly free of oversimplification. In his most recent article for Washington Monthly, The Post-Modern President, Marshall offers the best explanation of the President’s habits of deception and the larger agenda that demands those deceptions that I’ve read. I use the phrase “must read” too much, so it’s almost certainly devalued, but in this case, I emphatically state that you must read this article regardless of your political leanings.

I picked up a copy of what turns out to be last week’s New Yorker at the airport yesterday, and I read the most amazing article about the New York water supply, how it was built, and the workers (called “sandhogs”) who build the tunnels that supply water to the city. Anyone know whether it’s available online?