Worth reading: Phil Carter’s op-ed (PDF) on Bush’s National Guard service. The only thing Carter doesn’t discuss that I wish he did is Bush’s avoidance of service in Vietnam in light of his professed support of the war there.

Looks like Cingular is going to be buying AT&T Wireless after all. Maybe my GPRS service really will work someday.

SecurityTracker.com reports that an exploit based on the leaked Windows source has been created.

You’ve heard about the war on terror. Also worrisome, the war on science, which I’ve discussed before. In this case, the FDA is running scared from social conservatives who want to prevent moving the “morning after” pill to over the counter status. The fact that doing so could actually prevent abortions doesn’t seem to bother these staunch abortion opponents.

I hadn’t yet seen this comparative timeline of the military service of John Kerry and George W Bush.

I just now got around to reading Ahmed Rashid’s article on the current state of affairs in Afghanistan from the New York Review of Books from a couple of weeks ago. What can I say, it’s depressing.

In the New Yorker, Jane Mayer writes about how money for reconstructing Iraq gets handed out in Contract Sport. It also doubles as a political biography of Dick Cheney, and documents how one of the great side effects of the war has been the outflow of billions of dollars to friends of the Bush administration.

Amazon.com’s Canadian site had a glitch (via Boing Boing) this week that displayed the names of people who had submitted anonymous book reviews. As it turns out, among anonymous reviews, many raves are posted by the authors of the actual works, and many pans are written by rivals. I’ve gotten my fair share of negative reviews on Amazon.com, but I can honestly say that I have never posted a negative review of a competing book nor have I posted a review of any of my own books. I’ve also never solicited positive reviews from friends, either. If you ask me, it’s unethical and unprofessional. Oh, and if you get outed for it, it makes you look pathetic. This also illustrates just how much weight should be given to anonymous reviews.

With the big release of documents yesterday, I imagine that the Bush National Guard story is entering its final phase for now. Bush obtained some special favors to get into the National Guard so he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam, and by the end of his service he was too busy or bored to keep showing up regularly. In the end he asked for and received permission to leave the Guard early. Either this bothers you or it doesn’t. One defense of Bush, though, that was also used by Clinton defenders during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, was that polls show that most people don’t care about the scandal and that therefore it should be dropped. That sounds almost logical, but it’s really just a disingenuous way to change the subject. Setting aside the fact that when people are asked such questions, they often say what they feel they’re supposed to say rather than what they actually think, there’s also the issue that they aren’t really qualified to answer. During the course of an investigation into a scandal, people don’t know which facts will be unearthed before it’s all said and done. Just because someone hasn’t heard anything that captured their attention yet doesn’t mean that tomorrow there won’t be a new break that absolutely blows their mind. If a scandal is in the public interest, polls that show that people don’t consider it to be an issue are beside the point.

For all she talks about the relationship between American voters and God, I’m fairly certain that if there is a Hell, Ann Coulter is headed there.