Slate has been working the Arnold Schwarzenegger beat pretty hard, consistently turning out articles discussing why California voters might not or should not vote for him. The most recent entry compares his gubernatorial campaign to his involvement with Planet Hollywood.
The New York Times lead article today “breaks” the news that the US encouraged Iraqi officers prior to the war so that they’d order their troops not to fight. Fred Kaplan wrote about this in Slate on May 21 after reading about it in Defense Times. Al-Jazeera broke this story shortly after Baghdad fell, in early May. I think it’s an important story, but the major US publications are way late on it. That said, the NYT story provides details not found in any story on the same topic thusfar. The story strikes me as important for a number of reasons. The first is that the intimidation factor of the US military is not to be underestimated. If the Iraqi officers thought they’d prevail, they probably wouldn’t have collaborated with the US. The second is that it shows that our creativity doubtlessly saved many US lives, and many more Iraqi lives, by insuring that some brutal battles in populated areas never took place. The third is that we should weigh the effect our “diplomacy” had into the lessons we learn from this conflict. It seems like the bribery might have been just as effective as Donald Rumsfeld’s brilliant military theories in insuring a short war. ...
One of the most gratifying things about watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “candidacy” for governor of California has been seeing real, self respecting Republican politicians offer their support and talk him up as a bona fide contender in the media. In my experience, Republicans tend to be the people who tell us that those Hollywood types should stick to making movies or singing songs or whatever and butt out of politics, but I guess that really only applies to Hollywood liberals, given that the most venerated Republican politician of the twentieth century was an actor, and their current position on a bodybuilder governing the fifth largest economy in the world. The thing about it is, I’m not against celebrities entering politics or against them speaking their minds on the topics of the day, I’m all for it. If you’re given a platform by your fame and you have something to say, go right ahead. What I’m against is people voting for an unqualified lunkhead whose every utterance confirms that he has no idea what he’s talking about, and that hasn’t happened yet, although I suspect that it will. ...
This interview with John Hamre (formerly a deputy Defense secretary under Clinton) from GovExec mentions that the criminals that Saddam Hussein let out of jail prior to the US invasion of Iraq are contributing to the security woes there. Looking back, I wonder if at that point the general release of basically everyone that the government had improsioned was a sure indicator that Saddam knew that the invasion was inevitable and that there was no way the Iraqi army could stand up to the US. Most people here knew that both invasion and victory were inevitable, but I think the conventional wisdom has been that Saddam is an idiot who throught that war could be averted or that Iraq could somehow win. I don’t see any rationale that explains emptying the jails other than that Saddam knew how the war was going to go down, and that having thousands of additional violent criminals (on top of the ones that he employed as part of the regime) would make the ensuing occupation more difficult. ...
You knew that IBM was going to countersue SCO, the question was when it was going to happen. It’s happened. Some of IBM’s claims directly counter allegations made by SCO, and others are just extra salt for SCO’s wounds. We can hope that this will be the end of SCO once it’s resolved.
Yet another reason to switch to Firebird: Notepad popups.
Eric Sink: Geek Gauntlets (further discussion of marketing for geeks).
One of my hobby horses is complaining about spending billions of dollars (and backing out of treaties) to build missile defense systems that don’t really have much of a chance of really working. Fred Kaplan has an update on the most recent evidence that we’re wasting our time and money.
I’m not sure if it’s embarrassing for the whole country or just California that Arnold Schwarzenegger is being treated as a legitimate candidate for governor of the nation’s most populous state. Because Gary Coleman is also on the ballot, and I really don’t see how one is any more qualified than the other.
Nick Bradbury uses a game PC for development, too.