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Two news bits from the Islamic world, one sobering and one disgraceful.

Judge Charles Pickering’s appeals court nomination has been rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee. President Bush, please don’t lecture us about bipartisanship and then nominate right wingers to the federal bench. Update your maps: the name Yugoslavia has officially passed into the annals of history. I wonder if this means that Yugo cars are now collector’s items. Jonathan Krim summarizes the ongoing ICANN controversy in today’s Washington Post. Paul Krugman attacks reflexive anti-conservationism on the part of Republicans today in his NY Times column: ...

Not much posting lately due to a rather heavy workload. I haven’t even been reading the papers. I wish I could link to stuff I hear on the radio, though, there have been a lot of interesting stories on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Marketplace lately. Today was the deadline for Arthur Andersen to plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges for shredding Enron documents. They refused, and they’ve been indicted. if they lose in court, they’ll be barred by the SEC from auditing public companies. If that happens, it’s all over for them. Just the fact that they’ve been in legal trouble has already cost them several big clients. Andersen was trying to find someone to buy them out, but couldn’t find any takers, which makes sense. Would you buy the company knowing that there’s a good chance you can just poach their best employees and clients as the company circles the drain? ...

The Spinsanity guys take their typically evenhanded approach to the Charles Pickering confirmation issue today (unfortunately, you have to be a Salon Premium subscriber to read it for now). Their verdict is that both sides are exploiting the controversy for political gain, which is, of course, true.

Mozilla 0.9.9, get it. I’m always a sucker for a story on the teaching of evolution, because I think it’s a subject that’s a touchstone for a lot of the general anti-rational feeling that’s pervasive in society. The Ohio State Board of Education is coming up with a new curriculum, and proponents of “intelligent design” are demanding that it be given equal footing with natural selection. Never mind that this is a science curriculum, and that intelligent design is superstition, not science. It’s depressing to see how many people don’t understand the scientific method or its value in this day and age. This basic formula for scientific inquiry is the basis for most of the positive aspects of our modern lifestyle, and yet the majority of people don’t even understand what it’s about. ...

Robin Miller is reporting at NewsForge that AOL 8.0 will feature the Gecko HTML rendering engine that underlies Mozilla in place of Internet Explorer. If this is true, it means that all you lazy people who just coded your sites to work with IE had better get to work fixing your sites so that they are standards compliant. I’m still using Mozilla pretty much exclusively as my browser, and it’s definitely getting close to being ready for prime time. ...

An idle question: how are we supposed to catch this guy, when we’ve never been able to catch this guy? If you’re wondering whether to watch the 9/11 documentary on CBS tonight, read this review from the Philadelphia Enquirer.

What’s the other side of the national missile defense coin? Preparations for using nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Syria. It sure looks like we’re planning on expanding the possible uses of nuclear weapons beyond simply as serving as a deterrent to other countries attacking us with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Of course our past and current nuclear postures are classified, so it’s difficult to say how much of a change this is. The question is: why the leak? ...

For future reference: Struts Catalog. Just to prove that I don’t always post bad news, here’s a positive item. Real Spanish chorizo is finally available in the United States. There are few things better than real Spanish or Portuguese cured sausage. Sun sued Microsoft again. Does anybody care?

rc3.org is nothing if not balanced. Here’s a Byron York article, submitted by a reader, that defends Judge Charles Pickering’s record. It raises the valid point that Pickering was confirmed unanimously by the Judiciary committee in 1990 when he was appointed to the federal bench. It also presents a lot of facts that speak well of Pickering. My gut feeling on this is that liberal watchdog groups and Democratic Senators learned how to treat judicial nominees from the Republicans during the Clinton administration, and are generally taking a more obstructionist tack. The Byron article is mainly a response to this report from PFAW. ...