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If you like the Daily Show, you’ll love the commencement speech Jon Stewart gave this year at his alma mater, William & Mary.

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. ...

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.

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. ...

The new New Yorker article from Sy Hersh describing the genesis of the torture program at Abu Ghraib and other American detention facilities is a must read. In it he discusses how the program was specially designed to exploit Arab and Muslim mores. As soon as I heard about the pictures that were released initially, I knew that the torture program wasn’t a bright idea arrived at by a bunch of reservist MPs because the nature of the torture was so perfectly targetted. And it wasn’t just the sexual humiliation that clued me in, it was the heavy use of dogs. My next door neighbors are, as I’ve mentioned before, Muslim Arabs. They consider dogs to be impure animals, and because of their lack of experience with dogs, they’re also afraid of them (even goofy, harmless looking dogs). I would guarantee that whoever suggested bringing the dogs into the prison knew just what sort of effect that would have. ...

Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow loves her iPod a bit too much.