NPR has demoted the host of Morning Edition, Bob Edwards, for unclear reasons. If he’s anything like Paul O’Neill or Richard Clarke, soon he’ll quit his job, write a memoir that excoriates NPR management, and then we’ll see Nina Totenberg and Robert Siegel making the talk show rounds trashing his character and telling everyone he was out of the loop. For what it’s worth, I think Bob Edwards is a great radio broadcaster, and am sad to see him go. ...
Slate’s Fred Kaplan has an article on why he trusts Richard Clarke. It’s worth reading, of course, especially in light of the avalanche of ludicrous attacks on Clarke that the Bush defenders have launched this week in response to Clarke’s 60 Minutes interview.
I’m always a sucker for the clever quip, and it doesn’t get any more clever than the Slacktivist’s terse explanation for not yet having seen a certain movie: I still haven't seen Gibson's Passion -- I'm always reluctant to see the movie when I really liked the book.
Jeffrey Zeldman has written a short CSS anecdote that explains one reason why I don’t do professional Web design any more – browser issues. The other, larger, reason, is that I knew I wasn’t really very good at it. For me, trying to figure out why an application that works fine in development won’t work when I move it to production is less stressful than trying to figure out why I can’t get text to quit wrapping in a nav bar. ...
That SCO license that EV1 bought is getting more expensive every day, as disgruntled customers vote with their feet.
Billmon has another of his amazing quote collections up, this time regarding the White House response to any criticism from former insiders.
Phil Carter of Intel Dump has an informative post on the implications of the Richard Clarke interview and of Condoleeza Rice’s performance as National Security Advisor in general.
The Gartner Group reports that only 32% of Java developers have “genuine knowledge.” That doesn’t surprise me – many developers are terrible. The article basically gets turned into a press release for some crappy modeling product, so there’s no reason to bother reading it. The real problem is that most companies are completely are unable to differentiate between developers with “geniune knowlege” and those that just suck. Therefore both compensation and hiring are completely screwed up. This is one area where offshoring only makes existing problems worse. It’s hard enough to hire top notch developers who are local to a company – trying to hire good developers who live twelve time zones away is nearly impossible, and that’s true whether you’re looking for individual developers or companies that do custom development. ...
It will probably hurt my liberal cred to admit that I haven’t read Al Franken’s book, but the truth is that I’ve never even picked it up. By neglecting the book, I missed out on Franken’s chapter on the Bush administration’s approach to fighting terrorism prior to 9/11, entitled Operation Ignore. It’s available online, and is a nice complement to Richard Clarke’s recent revelations. (Via Oliver Willis.)
So this morning I read Condoleeza Rice’s response to Richard Clarke’s 60 Minutes interview last night, wherein she says that al-Qaeda really was the Bush administration’s first international priority, even though they couldn’t really do anything about it before 9/11. Here’s how she describes the plan, which didn’t have a chance to come to fruition prior to the attacks: Through the spring and summer of 2001, the national security team developed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda -- which was expected to take years. Our strategy marshaled all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures. Our plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived. It focused on the crucial link between al Qaeda and the Taliban. We would attempt to compel the Taliban to stop giving al Qaeda sanctuary -- and if it refused, we would have sufficient military options to remove the Taliban regime. The strategy focused on the key role of Pakistan in this effort and the need to get Pakistan to drop its support of the Taliban. This became the first major foreign-policy strategy document of the Bush administration -- not Iraq, not the ABM Treaty, but eliminating al Qaeda. Is it just me, or does this paragraph make hash of the repeated insistence by the Bush administration in the run up to the invasion of Iraq that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was necessary because of his links to al-Qaeda. The fact that Rice specifically says that Iraq was not part of this master plan is telling, isn’t it? ...