Snopes has put together the best summary of the events that led to John Kerry’s being awarded various medals in Vietnam that I’ve seen. I point to this only because I’m seeing more and more emails making various accusations and insinuations about Kerry’s service and the truth should be recorded and disseminated.

Updated April 24, 2004: John Kerry has published his service record on his Web site.

Ed Felten is requesting that readers recommend the top five science and technology books every student should read.

Is it time yet to really reflect on the degree to which the current administration got conned by Ahmed Chalabi and his band of merry exiles?

Just a little link to welcome Ralph Nader into the Presidential race.

John Covalesky submitted an email to Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list that contained a semi-revolutionary idea that I’d love to see some politician take up. He points out that corporations avoid billions of dollars in taxes every year through various loopholes. He suggests that we should take away these loopholes and provide the same amount in tax incentives to corporations for providing employees with benefits like more paid time off or tuition assistance. If these taxes are going unpaid anyway, it certainly seems like we could change things so that this underpayment better serves society.

If you haven’t yet, please read the first hand account of Rex Hammock’s meeting with President Bush before reading this. In it, Hammock says the following:

Bottom line: If George W. Bush could spend 25 minutes chatting with everybody in America like he did with me and five other folks today, he would win any election by a landslide.

For what it’s worth, I think this is actually true of just about any politician. How do you think politicians get people to donate millions of dollars to their campaigns? As long as a person isn’t dead set against them, they can probably win them over one on one. That’s the key job skill for a career in politics. That said, I think it’s important for people who don’t want to see Bush reelected to mull that sentence over a few times. It’s easy for me and for most other critics of the administration to fall into the trap where we think of Bush as an out and out bad person.

Back in November 2002, I watched a documentary called Journeys with George, a network producer’s video diary of her time spent with the 2000 Bush campaign. In it, Bush comes across as quite likeable. It doesn’t surprise me that Hammock came away feeling exactly the same.

So I think the key for people who want to see Bush lose is to avoid calling Bush evil, or a fascist, or whatever, and focus on his bad policies and the bad direction he’s taken this country in. Is Bush evil? I don’t think so. Is he wrong nearly all of the time. Yes he is. Take a look at Hammock’s account. Bush spoke to them about how making the tax cuts permanent would help them out and then went out to an audience and explained how hard it is for businesses to plan when the tax code is constantly changing. This entire argument is predicated on the idea that the audience has forgotten that it was the Bush administration that put sunset provisions in for most of the tax cuts to make the future deficit implications seem less bad, even though he intended to later propose that all of the sunset provisions be removed.

There’s a lot more to being a good President than being the type of guy who’s fun to watch a football game with. The thing that scares me is that if Democrats take the tack of demonizing President Bush in this campaign, they’ll only appeal to people who already think Bush is a demon. To mangle a phrase Christians frequently use, the better plan for success is to love the politician and hate the politics, at least when it comes to President Bush.

Rex Hammock has posted a first hand account of his meeting with President Bush to his weblog.

Returning to work seems to have re-lit the fires of technical curiosity under me. Today I’m installing Subversion on my Linux server, and upgrading from Apache 1.3.27 to Apache 2.0.48. I’m also looking at moving Feed on Feeds to my web host so that I can make a blogroll of sorts out of the feeds I’m subscribed to. That’s another nice advantage of a server-based aggregator.

Update: if you’re going to fiddle with Subversion, you need a link to the Subversion book.

Robert Fisk on democracy in Iraq. Fisk addresses one of the things his critics often accuse him of — bigotry against Arabs:

The moment we suggest that Iraq never was fertile soil for Western democracy, we get accused of being racists. Do we think the Arabs are incapable of producing democracy, we are asked? Do we think they are subhuman?

He goes on to answer it here:

Now there are a lot of Arabs who would like a bit of this precious substance called democracy. Indeed, when they emigrate to the West and settle down with US or British or French or any other Western passport, they show the same aptitude as ourselves for “democracy”. The Iraqis of Dearborn, Michigan, are like any other Americans, and they vote – largely Democrat – and play and work like any other freedom-loving US citizens. So there’s nothing genetic about the Arab world’s inability to seize democracy.

The problem is not the people. The problem is the environment, the make-up of the patriarchal society and – most important of all – the artificial states which we created for them. They do not and cannot produce democracy. The dictators we paid and armed and stroked ruled by torture and by tribe. Faced with nations which they in many cases did not believe in, the Arab peoples had confidence only in their tribes.

He continues further, but you get the point.

Don’t read James Webb’s USA Today op-ed without reading Billmon’s follow up. Billmon does a great job of explaining Webb’s background and addressing the somewhat self-contradictory nature of the op-ed.