John Udell has the king of all posts on the Dan Geer dust up, the present monoculture in desktop computing, and related matters.

I honestly have no idea whether George W Bush is going to be elected to another term, but I have some extremely anecdotal evidence that tells me that he may not. You may or may not know that I grew up in a small, ordinary town in Texas. I’ve been working on my parents for about three and a half years now to see Bush as I see him, the obstacle being that they are pretty dyed in the wool Republicans who voted for Bush twice for governor. About 6 or 8 months ago, they got fed up with this mad rush to war with Iraq and said flat out that they wouldn’t vote for him again. (I’ll be surprised if they vote for any Republicans in the next election thanks to the whole redistricting debacle and Prop 12.)

Last night my mom told me that one of my aunts asked her flat out, “What are we going to do about Bush.” This is a person who I could never in my wildest dreams imagine voting against Bush. She’s a social conservative and lifelong Republican from a family of lifelong Republicans who loves America in the “God Bless America” sense. President Bush has lost her vote and support on the virtues of his behavior as President. If Bush is driving away people like my aunt, he’s done.

Christopher Hitchens is well known for his iconoclastic obituaries of popular public figures, so when I clicked on the link to his obituary of Edward Said, I expected something the lines of his demolitions of Mother Theresa or Princess Diana. Instead, I read something quite different.

Following up on a link from yesterday, Dan Geer says he was forced out as CTO of @Stake for signing onto the report critical of Microsoft that I mentioned.

Remember when I said you ought to keep an eye on a Google News search for Valerie Plame’s name? Looks like that search is about to start yielding new results.

The Texas government, in its infinite Republican wisdom, has decided to decentralize its system for handling surplus textbooks. Instead of returning them to the state education agency and letting it distribute them, they’re going to implement a computer system that will let schools publish their surplus numbers and let other schools arrange with them to take them. The system isn’t implemented yet, but the department that handled distributing surplus books has been axed from the budget.

Unfortunately, there are $16 million worth of textbooks currently being held by the state in surplus, and so they have decided to distribute them by letting individual school districts loot them. Schools can come take them on a first come, first served basis as long as they bring their own people to find the books in the warehouse and their own trucks to cart them back home. Isn’t this how all state property in Iraq was handled in the aftermath of the war? I’m glad to see that the exchange of ideas on how to run a country is running both ways in our new relationship with Iraq.

Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach has a report on the fallout of China being falsely blamed for the decline in employment in the American manufacturing sector — a massive tariff. Never mind the recent articles that seem to prove conclusively that increased productivity is responsible for the manufacturing sector shedding employees, blaming China is a lot easier. After all, what’s the alternative? Telling businesses to not be so darn efficient? I’m as ready as anyone for the economic doldrums to come to an end and for employment to go back up, but scapegoating and knee jerk reactions just aren’t going to get us where we need to go, any more than tax cuts for the rich. One thing is certain — a big tariff on Chinese goods means a cost of living increase for every single American.

The Nokia 7600 looks like the coolest mobile phone ever, and of course we won’t be getting it in the United States anytime soon.

Yahoo Messenger has shut out Trillian. I had read not long ago that this was going to happen, and I learned first hand this morning that Trillian had finally been given the boot. The only reason I use a client like Trillian is that the greedy scumbags in the IM world refuse to pursue interoperability, and I have friends on all of the different IM services. If I really want to run ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger on my machine at all times, I’m going to need to buy more RAM.

The Slacktivist has a great post contrasting the faith of Johnny Cash with that of George W Bush, in response to a Washington Times column that just doesn’t get it at all.