The Web seems to be abuzz with talk about Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire today. Wonkette has the details. You can download the episode via BitTorrent here if you missed it like I did.

Update: I just downloaded the segment and watched it, and I found it mostly sad. I think Jon Stewart found it pretty sad as well. He couldn’t get the clowns on Crossfire to even engage him in a substantive discussion about what it means to have a substantive discussion. Most awful was Tucker Carlson’s attempts to play gotcha with Stewart with regard to his John Kerry interview. Stewart had plenty of good lines, but he seemed deeply pained by the whole experience, and I felt pained by it as well. Oh, and Tucker Carlson is a clown.

I realized something important when I watched the debate on Wednesday night. I just internalize and gloss over my assumption that politicians almost never say what they mean. It doesn’t even bother me any more. I’m not sure if that’s a mature world view or a horribly cynical one. Let me give you an example. When John Kerry says, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman,” I don’t believe him. I think he’s saying that because he thinks it’s what will get him elected. And to tell you the truth, I don’t even really fault him for it. Sure, I’d prefer to see him stand up there and tell us what he really believes in his heart of hearts, as they say, but politicians who do that don’t get elected. They get laughed out of town. People claim to want the unvarnished truth from politicians, but politicians are nearly always punished in the polls when they say what they really think.

But I think this explains President Bush’s appeal to his most ardent supporters. They think that President Bush is one of those mythical politicians who just says what he believes without considering the political consequences. I feel sad for them.

Over at Manageability, Carlos explains where Google’s desktop searching application finds the data it indexes. Turns out, there’s already a repository for the data that Microsoft collects — Google is just accessing it. That explains why Google searches files associated with Microsoft applications, and leads me to think that it will perhaps be a long time before they add support for data from other applications, and who knows when there will be a Mac version of Google Desktop. (I don’t think never is a bad bet.)

Someone just sent me a link to Google Desktop, a tool for searching files on your own computer. The obvious question privacy watchdogs will ask is to what degree it communicates with the Google mothership.

OK, I’ve installed Google Desktop. It’s really, really fast. Really fast. The computer I installed it on doesn’t have many documents other than source code, but it searches that source code really quickly. Installation is a breeze. It runs a local Web server and has a browser-based interface that makes the desktop application look like just another Web page that Google serves up. It will search Outlook and Outlook Express mailboxes, but I use Thunderbird. I assume that they’ll add support for other forms of mail storage shortly. It also caches and indexes AIM conversations, I assume it’s proxying your AIM connection, but I’m not sure.

Google Desktop seems to work fine with Firefox, but one of its capabilities is enabling you to search Web pages you’ve previously visited, and that capability seems to be IE-only for now. A pity.

By the third debate, things start getting pretty redundant, don’t they?

Looks like Bush just had his “timber company” moment of the night. He called his opponent a liar when he was telling the truth. I’m sure somebody else will have Bush’s quote on Osama bin Laden any second now.

Bush is now attacking Kerry for promising to spend too much money. The guy who presides over the biggest deficit ever.

Well, I ran out of steam fast. Our neighbor came over to watch the debate and I didn’t want to geek out too badly in his presence.

Here’s a real political issue that you won’t see discussed much this year, but that in actuality is very important to the future of this country. The issue is whether the tax burden should fall upon capital or upon consumption. For many years, I’ve felt like taxes on capital gains should be just as high as the taxes on wages for reasons of fairness. I’ve never understood why rich people who earn their money by investing should pay a lower tax rate than working people who earn their money by going to a job that they probably hate. That just strikes me as fundamentally unfair.

What conservative economists will tell you, though, is that taxes on consumption are much more efficient than taxes on capital. So, overall, people are better off if capital is taxed at a lower rate (or not at all). The fact that this policy is horribly regressive is a side effect. It’s an interesting question, and not one that I’ve ever seen an elected official discuss.

The New York Times brings up something that’s been bugging me for weeks, that Bush’s bumper stickers are better designed than Kerry’s. Unlike me, they can point out the exact reasons why that’s the case. What’s particularly troubling is that the rumor is that Kerry had a major role in the design of his campaign logo. I can’t imagine that President Bush had one thing to say about what his bumper sticker looked like, and he’s certainly much better off for it. John Kerry has better things to do than pick out the font for his campaign logo, he should have left that to the experts. One thing the NY Times graphic doesn’t mention is the color selection. Bush is much better off there as well.

Update: Cameron Barrett posts about his logo-related work at the Clark ’04 campaign. The Clark logo that Cam used is a heck of a lot better than the Kerry/Edwards logo.

The world of election malfeasance is disgusting. And the world of Republican election malfeasance is even more disgusting than run of the mill election malfeasance. I think, though, that even in that cesspool we’ll have to create a special category for the Sinclair Broadcasting. You may not have heard yet that the company is forcing all 62 of the network affiliates that it owns to air a one hour propaganda film attacking John Kerry’s service in Vietnam and his participation in the anti-war movement afterward. Josh Marshall has been providing exhaustive coverage of the controversy if you want the sordid details.

Back in March, John Kerry said of the Bush campaign, “These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group I’ve ever seen.” I don’t think any of us could have imagined how true that would turn out to be.

Being the type of person who sits around and surfs the web most of the time, I wasn’t at the Web 2.0 conference that everybody was blogging about last week. I did note with interest that one of the new startups that made some noise is a company called SpikeSource, which features on its management team Ray Lane, of Oracle fame, and Kim Polese, of Sun and Marimba fame. (Remember when people thought Marimba was going to come out with interesting products people would use? Their product was so hyped that computer book writing rock star Laura Lemay published a book about it.) Anyway, SpikeSource is going to be offering IT services based on an open source stack of products. To be honest, it doesn’t sound like a very inspired idea. All sorts of IT services companies are using open source products, so I guess these guys will have to differentiate based on execution.

On the plus side, looking at the technology stack that SpikeSource feels pretty good to me. The only component that I don’t have real experience with is JBoss. I’m still doing my best to avoid EJBs, and have been completely successful so far.

One thing I do find odd is that there’s no mention of career opportunities on the SpikeSource site. You’d think that an IT services provider would need manpower, so why aren’t these guys hiring yet? The other question you have to ask is what kind of coders these guys are bringing on. JBoss has been snapping up open source project leaders left and right to do consulting for them, and the Spring Framework guys have started up their own consulting concern as well. You’d think that SpikeSource would try to establish some cred by hiring the people who’ve built the products in their technology stack. I haven’t seen any mention of that yet.

Update: A reader mentions that any SpikeSource job openings will probably be posted in Asia.

Sun has paid $92 million dollars to Kodak to settle a bogus patent infringement suit that they surely could have won eventually based on prior art. I guess it’s a business decision, but it’s still crap.