The White House has decided to stop responding to requests for information on budgetary matters from Congressional Democrats. Is there anyone who actually thinks this is good for the country?

My fears that Congress had put the kabosh on one of the real feel good stories from Iraq have been confirmed. Some of the money that Congress cut out of the budget for rebuilding Iraq was to have been spent on restoring marshlands that Saddam Hussein drained to punish the Marsh Arabs in the south of the country. Then again, how much is our government spending to prevent the erosion of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana?

He may have loose morals and engage in questionable behavior, but there’s no politician like Bill Clinton. Just reading the interview I link to fired me up a little bit.

I know people with hundreds, nay, thousands of bookmarks. I’m not one of them. Generally, I only use bookmarks for whole sites that I want to keep track of. For particular articles, FAQs, or other reference documents, I just post a link here, thinking that maybe there are other people who care about them as well. I just use this site’s search facility to dig the articles up later if I need them. So my bookmark file is already fairly small. The ones that I do have tend to go ignored, because I don’t really like to take my hands off the keyboard. So it’s easier to use autocomplete to go to frequently visited sites than it is to use a bookmark anyway. That said, Firebird and Google have rendered my bookmarks almost completely obsolete.

Firebird, like Opera before it, has a Google search field built right into the user interface. You can hit Control-K and your cursor appears there, then you just type in your search terms and go. A lesser known feature Googles what you type in the address field. If you type something into the address field (easily reachable with Control-L), and it doesn’t resolve to an actual host, Firebird submits it to Google using the programmatic equivalent of the “I feel lucky” button. So if you type “rafe” in the address field, you are automatically whisked to this site (unless you have a machine named rafe on your network). Google’s first result is generally very reliable, especially in cases where the term is well known. And plus, once you’ve used it once to find something you know you can rely on it in the future. So when I want to read Phil Carter’s weblog, Intel Dump, I just type “intel dump” in the address field. Very simple, very easy (as Chef Tell would say). So long, bookmarks.

Maybe I should advertise this site as “http://rc3.org or Google keyword: rafe”.

Early this year, when we had an incredibly powerful invasion force sitting at Iraq’s border, one of the things that didn’t make sense to anybody was the fact that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t try to make a deal, any deal, with the United States. Everybody knew that regardless of what else happened, as soon as US forces crossed the border Saddam Hussein was on his way out as dictator of Iraq. Surely the fact that he wouldn’t negotiate proved that he was utterly and completely insane, or so the thinking went. Well, as is often the case, there appears to be more to the story.

Update: there’s also a story behind the story. Slate’s Jack Shafer also looks into this.

Time has a story on the wounded soldiers coming home from Iraq. The sacrifices demanded of people who serve their country in the military during wartime is extreme, especially in the Army and Marine Corps.

William Saletan has written up an explanation of why the so-called controversial comments by Howard Dean about the confederate flag really aren’t. It’s a case of willful misinterpretation to score political points on the part of his opponents.

The FCC has adopted the broadcast flag, which screws everyone interested in personal computing or home electronics.

Update: Ed Felten has posted about why the broadcast flag won’t help stop piracy anyway.

Yesterday I read David Brooks’ column in the New York Times, which was widely lauded by the “war of civilizations” crowd, but I didn’t link to it because I wanted to smack it down and didn’t have the creative impulse. Fortunately, the Slacktivist took care of it rather nicely.

Update: Jim Henley ably took a chunk out of Brooks in his response to the column as well.

Novell has acquired SUSE. Anyone wonder what the overarching strategy is for Novell? They’ve been moving heavily into Linux — are they trying to be another Red Hat? One thing’s for sure, I’d hate it if Novell kicked SUSE’s funky chameleon logo to the curb.

I guess this is an attempt at an explanation:

“Microsoft’s major concern these days is Linux and so the combined Novell-SuSE-Ximian really does create a more competitive stack than Novell has. Novell can go head-to-head at the OS level and say ‘OK you have Exchange, we have Groupwise, you got file and print and so do we,'” Enck said.