Fair’s fair. Slate has been dogging President Bush for his Bushisms (rightfully so) since before he became President. Now they’re turning their cold eye on John Kerry’s inability to articulate himself in a straightforward fashion. Kerry and his advisors would do well to eliminate the need for this to be a recurring feature, but I imagine that Kerry’s highly adorned pattern of speech is a habit that will be impossible to break.

I haven’t taken the BlogAds survey (that you’ll find linked on many weblogs over the past few days) mainly because BlogAds ticks me off. I’m not sure if BlogAds is the one to blame, but frequently when I click on a link to a page that includes advertising served by BlogAds, I get a page containing only the BlogAds and no content, and no way to get to the content. I assume that BlogAds, like most advertising companies, produces completely broken HTML, but I haven’t investigated.

I’m just tossing a requestion out there for recommendations for an open source customer relationship management package. Please send email.

I was going to write up an item on the Gawker Media revenue numbers discussed in this Business 2.0 article, but Nick Denton says they’re all made up, so what’s the point? I can give you my cost and revenue numbers for this site, though. Over the past five years, I’ve received two books from my Amazon.com Wish List (which I very much appreciated), some free books from an editor at a computer book company you know and love, and some Amazon.com referral fees totalling less than $100, which I donated to Habitat for Humanity as promised. I spend about $30 a month on Web hosting, and have spent money on domain registration and so forth, so I’ve spent probably $2000 over the years to keep this thing up and running, plus a lot of time that I would have no doubt frittered away anyway. What can I say? My business model sucks.

The New York Times has an op-ed today that talks about the starting success of movement conservativism over the past 40 years, but it only tells half of the story. Here’s the crux:

To consider the ground that liberals have ceded, one must look back at the union’s founding in a cramped living-room in 1964, a few days after Lyndon B. Johnson had thrashed the first fully paid-up conservative presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Back then, the self-styled “Mr. Conservative” seemed to come from another planet. “When in all our history,” asked the political theorist Richard Hofstadter, “has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus got so far?”

Fast forward to today. A Republican Party that is more conservative than Mr. Goldwater could have imagined controls the White House, Congress, many governors’ mansions and a majority of seats in state legislatures. Back in 1964, John Kenneth Galbraith smugly proclaimed: “These, without doubt, are the years of the liberal. Almost everyone now so describes himself.” Today, a Gallup poll tells us, twice as many Americans (41 percent) describe themselves as “conservative” than as “liberal” (19 percent).

The story goes on at length about how liberalism has been crushed under the boot heel of conservativism over the past few decades, but conservatives are winning the fight for an increasingly shrinking piece of ground. Look at the changes in America over the past 40 years. There’s no question that the biggest losers have been leftists — communism and socialism have been rightfully discredited, and have given way to capitalism in all but a few of the most backward countries in the world. However, most liberals are not leftists.

Behind the leftists, the next biggest losers have been movement conservatives. Let’s start with war. For America, there isn’t a place for mass casualty warfare any longer. People who miss sending Americans off to die by the thousands often encourage people to toughen up, after all, we’ve only lost a few hundred in Iraq. But the American people aren’t buying it — sending hordes of US soldiers to die in large numbers in foreign lands just doesn’t play any more. Conservatives will tell you that’s because we’re a country of wimps now. Chalk it up as a win for liberalism.

Bigotry has gone out of fashion in a big way since 1964 as well, hasn’t it? The racism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry that were core values of the conservative movement are obviously taboo these days. It’s hard to remember that 40 years ago a major linchpin of the conservative movement, at least in the South, was segregation. Liberals never got the Equal Rights Amendment, but women have made amazing progress in the fight for equality, rolling back conservatives every step of the way. A “southern” Republican President has a black Secretary of State, and a black woman serving as National Security Advisor. People have grown so sensitive about identity issues that conservatives are relegated to combatting oversensitivity, i.e. “political correctness.” That’s massive progress.

You can credit environmental progress over the past 40 years or so to liberals as well. Liberals advocated a regulatory agenda for the environment that has cleaned up the environment in this country to an amazing degree. We’re actually taking species off of the endangered species list. There’s a ton more work to do, and ground has been lost since Bush became President, but science and liberalism have teamed up to completely redefine how people understand our relationship with the environment. Even Republicans advocate environmentalism, they just call it conservation.

I haven’t even gotten to the fun part yet — social issues. On church and state issues, the conservatives have been beaten back at every turn. We’re actually having a debate in this country about whether it’s even OK to include “ceremonial deism” in government. Not only does abortion remain legal in this country, but the majority of people intend for it to remain so. Homosexuals are getting married in Massachusetts today. Forty years ago, there was no such thing as “gay rights.” Many things that were stigmatized in 1964 are perfectly OK today.

I could go further, but why bother? Despite all their organizing, spending, and bullying, conservatives have succeeded at slowing the forces of liberal progress, but even under the Bush administration, the constant retreat continues. The assertion that conservatives are the ones with all of the ideas is absurd on its face.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that conservatives are always wrong by any stretch of the imagination. Thank goodness somebody was willing to stand up for private enterprise and limited government all these years. I think that marriage and the traditional family are undervalued these days. The point here, though, is that to paint the past 40 years as a big success for conservatives is to miss the forest for the trees.

By the way, I should mention that the biggest winners of the past 40 years have been libertarians. They’ve been on the side of progress on both economic and social issues.

I really like the fact that Java is statically typed. When I use Perl or especially PHP or ColdFusion, the lack of real types annoys me after immersing myself in Java for the past four or five years. That said, I think that Charles Miller’s suggestion that Java infer types when it can is a good one. As long as something is defined as a particular type originally, I shouldn’t have to tell the compiler what type it is later on down the road when its type is perfectly clear in context. For example, if I’m assigning an element in a collection to the type Foo, I shouldn’t need to cast the element to Foo. If it can’t be a Foo, I’m going to get a ClassCastException at runtime, even with the cast in place. So what value does the cast bring to the table?

Timothy Noah has a funny piece in Slate arguing against the increasing usage of the phrase “make no mistake,” which President Bush has put in heavy rotation. A quick search of the rc3.org archive reveals that I used the phrase once in 2002. That seems to indicate that I’m not subconsciously picking up speech patterns from the President, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

Nick Berg’s Killing: 50 Fishy Circumstances, Contradictory Claims, and Videotape Anomalies. The level of speculation surrounding Berg’s killing fascinates me.

I posted yesterday that the executive branch has asked for extraordinary privileges in handling detainees, and has subsequently demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with such privileges (not that any government should be). Salon reports today that the day before the prison abuse scandal, the Deputy Solicitor General told the Supreme Court that the US government does not torture prisoners in arguing that the executive branch should be entitled to imprison US citizens for as long as it wishes without the right to due process granted in the Constitution. This thing just keeps on growing. Here are some of the questions the article raises:

Did Clement know he was misleading the justices, or was he kept out of the loop so that he could avoid revealing truths that would undermine the administration’s “trust us” arguments in the enemy combatant cases? Did Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers persuade CBS to delay broadcasting the photographs from Abu Ghraib to protect the lives of U.S. soldiers — or to spare the administration embarrassing questions during the Supreme Court arguments in the enemy combatant cases?

If U.S. soldiers and CIA agents are meting out abuse — “mild torture” — to random Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and suspected al-Qaida members elsewhere, what is the government doing to Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi and any other U.S. citizens it may be holding as enemy combatants? And if the Bush administration can’t be trusted to tell the Supreme Court the truth about its interrogation techniques, how can it be trusted with the power to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely, without any oversight from the courts?

Riverbend of Baghdad Burning offers the following advice to America:

I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today’s lesson: don’t rape, don’t torture, don’t kill and get out while you can- while it still looks like you have a choice… Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We’ll take our chances- just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go.

Commentary from Iraqi webloggers aside, the news from Iraq is so bad today that Slate’s Today’s Papers skipped coming up with a pithy headline this morning. Instead they went with “President of Governing Council Killed.” It’s kind of hard to read the summary of today’s news and not think that we haven’t lost Iraq, period. As was widely suspected, we handed Fallujah over to the rebels; the Italians were run out of Nasiriyah by irregulars from the Mahdi Army and have responded by asking the US to lay off of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the current head of the interim government was blown up. Those things stand out from the daily drumbeat of murder and death and the ongoing revelations in the torture scandal. I can’t escape the feeling that if we insist upon staying in Iraq, it’s going to wind up turning into Chechnya.