I feel like one of my responsibilities is to pay attention to the ravings of the lunatic right, if for no other reason than that when I encounter someone speaking of these lunatics as though they are respectable scholars or thinkers, I’ll be fully armed for argument. The most recent fringe case to make his way onto my radar screen is Dr. Thomas E. Woods, author of a book entitled the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. I first read of the book in New York Times piece by Adam Cohen last week, and this morning I found Eric Muller’s dismantlement of the book and its author by way of Ed Cone.

Fred Kaplan has the big picture report. All in all, it seems like things went pretty well.

Christopher Allbritton is posting periodic first hand updates of the elections today in Iraq.

Looks like our project to turn Iraq into Somalia is right on track.

I don’t care how jaded you are, this editorial will make your jaw drop.

The Struts development team have decided to retire the project and put it into maintenance mode rather than building a 2.0 version that broke backward compatability with Struts 1.2. This is really good news. When I look at the path that many other projects have taken, I realize that big new versions sometimes ruin everything or are largely academic exercises. Is anybody really excited about Perl 6? Perl 5 is great at what it does, and so Larry Wall and friends have gone off to make something completely different. Perl is finished. So is Struts. Making a new Struts would just be writing a new framework altogether, and that’s what the Struts developers have decided to do. Now I can keep Struts on my r

I can’t help but watch with fascination and horror as the President Bush and his supporters try to regulate how journalists apply the English language. Sadly, it’s working.

It seems like far too often I come to appreciate people only after they die. Today I read that architect Philip Johnson had died, and until I read his obituary, I had no idea that he designed my two favorite skyscrapers in Houston, the Republic Bank building (now called the Bank of America building), and the Transco Tower (now called the Williams Tower). The Transco Tower is notable not only for its beauty but also for the fact that it was built a few miles from downtown, so it towers above everything else near it. My other favorite is ChevronTexaco Heritage Plaza or what I always called the Texaco building, which looks like an ordinary glass skyscraper with an Aztec temple planted on top.

When Amazon said that its search engine, A9, would be layering on features on top of Google’s index, they weren’t lying.

Update: Russell Beattie points out that this new feature was done long ago by some online yellow pages in Spain.

Jeanne at Body and Soul has another powerful post on torture. You may not want to read it, but you probably should.