Jim Henley argues that the single most pressing issue we face as Americans is whether we will succumb to fear. The Slacktivist had an interesting post on a related note as well. When you look at the transcript of President Bush’s interview with Tim Russert, his reelection bid hinges on the idea of being afraid and feeling President Bush is the leader who can keep you safe.

I downloaded the latest critical update for Windows to fix some problem or another that will let people take over my computer, and this time it blew up my video driver. Looks like an updated driver hasn’t yet been released, so now to find out whether removing it fixes the problem.

Removing the security update didn’t fix it. That’s not a good sign …

Reinstalling the driver several times seems to have fixed it. Wish I understood why.

Wes Clark has dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination. I think he’d make a darn good cabinet secretary in a Democratic White House.

Alpine is coming out with a car stereo that enables you to listen to and control your iPod from your dashboard.

Everybody is linking to Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column in which he admits to sloughing off his National Guard service during the Vietnam War and getting an honorable discharge anyway. He even got paid for drills that he skipped. This certainly contradicts the Bush line that because he received an honorable discharge, there’s nothing to talk about with regard to his military service. In truth, if Bush would come clean, then there would be nothing to talk about. Many people avoided serving in Vietnam through a variety of means, including Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Dan Quayle. Needless to say, they’ve all had somewhat successful careers as politicians. Bush’s problem is that now he can’t accept the mantle of of being a rich kid who skipped Vietnam through political favors. It should cost him.

Most of the complaints about the Tim Russert interview with President Bush yesterday seem to center on the lack of followup questions when Bush gave vague, irrelevant, or outright dishonest answers to questions he was asked. Is there any chance that the list of questions had to be vetted in advance by the White House? Why else would Russert roll over and play dead? The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus fact checks Bush on some of his assertions today. The nice thing about the interview is it gives the media a lot more fodder for for comparing things Bush says to things as they actually are, which should yield conditions favorable to those who oppose his reelection.

Kevin Drum, of Calpundit, is doing real journalism these days. Specifically, he’s digging through the paper trail associated with George W Bush’s service in the National guard. This is essential work, and it’s actually probably best handled by a devoted weblogger (or an ad hoc team of them). Newspapers are never going to publish scans of the relevant documents and explain what they mean, and they’re certainly not going to publish their ongoing research every day so that people can criticize it and add to it. Kevin’s work could very well find itself being ripped off and incorporated into big media news stories very soon.

Mozilla Firefox 0.8 has been released. You’ve probably been calling it Firebird, but the Mozillians decided to change the name to avoid perpetuating the namespace collision with the Firebird relational database. I just hope they don’t change the name of the email client to Thunderfox. One big new feature is the integration of an installer for Windows into the standard build. There had been an installer available for Windows for several releases, but it was built and distributed outside the core project. Now, Windows downloads are packaged as an installable file. If nothing else, that says it’s getting pretty close to being ready for prime time.

Update: I can’t seem to download the update from the Mozilla site due to there being too much traffic. Is it just me, or should there be a way to download the Mozilla products via BitTorrent? (Less than 60 seconds after posting that, a reader sent me a BitTorrent link, which you can access here.)

Update: Thunderbird 0.5 is also out today.

William Saletan has a concise summary of President Bush’s disturbing appearance on Meet the Press this morning. (Saletan’s opinion is similar to the one offered by Josh Marshall in the Washington Monthly article The Post-Modern President.)

Am I obsessed with President Bush? Almost certainly. What I find most consistently startling is that the lies told by his administration are so huge and so spectacular, that most people don’t even recognize them, simply because congnitive dissonance prevents them from believing that someone they trusted enough to vote for could act the way the President does. The Decembrist (who I seem to link to all the time), does a good job of explaining the degree of dishonesty in the current budget.