Connecting The Dots…

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The Philadelphia Inquirer: New woe as jobless aid ends.

The NYTimes: Dividend Tax Cut: Winners and Losers. via Garret.

CommonDreams.org: Corporate Personhood Is Doomed (boy that title is a little too optimistic…). via Garret. via a great MetaFilter thread.

Democracy Unlimited: First Local Government in the United States Refuses to Recognize Corporate Claims to Civil Rights. via Garret.

The Founding Brothers struggled with where to draw the line between Federal and State governance. They probably couldn’t foresee the rise of Corporations competing with the Federal government and States for rights. It’s an evolution that’s been slow and subtle over the last 100 years or so. Probably due from our transformation from a farming to an industrial economy. Simple generalizations slamming Republicans won’t do. But if the Dems want a platform – I’m with Garret – this is it. They won’t go for it however. No one bites the hand that feeds them.

And hey – if you didn’t catch the drift – go check out Garret’s site. He’s knocking on a door I’d like to see opened up by other webloggers. Common you Dem webloggers… this is what you should be talking about.

Founding Brothers

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To understand the news of today, you gotta have an appreciation for the history of the past. Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis is a terrific book for just that. You get what feels like genuine insight into the politics and relationships of the revolutionary generation. By sharing the conflicts that occured between Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Burr, Madison, Jefferson and Adams, Ellis sheds light on their characters and principals. It’s not the fairy tale they teach in school. It’s a drama with the weight of the world on their shoulders. The book simultaneously brings the founding fathers down to earth and at the same time grows your respect for them. No longer semi-deities they are people who knew their actions would and could have consequences far reaching beyond their time. An educational and fun read.

Merry Christmas Everybody

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Wanted to wish you all a safe and happy holiday. I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned – this is my true thanksgiving holiday.

Garret shares the following wishes, that I gotta repeat…

no more lives torn apart,
that wars would never start,
and time would heal all hearts.
every one would have a friend,
and right would always win,
and love would never end.
this is my grown-up christmas list.

Go to Garret’s for the rest of the lyrics. Says it all doesn’t it?

Founding Brothers Is Timely

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I’ve been reading Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis and can’t believe how timely it is. The book focuses on six moments in the early history of the nation and the main actors in them. You get a real sense of who the Founding Fathers were, what they cared about, their characters, their principals. It’s a fun read. Really it is.

One thing they cared passionately about was the balance of power. Their views ranged widely. Paint them in the widesest strokes and you have those that believed in strong federal government with emphasis on economic and foreign policy and those that believed in strong local (state) government.

It’s that tension that has more or less defined American politics for the past two hundred years.

Consider that dynamic when you read the next two stories:

At the NYTimes – Cities Urge Restraint in Fight Against Terror.

And in a bill that will probably be overturned (make your bets), a local government in the United States to eliminate corporate claims to civil and constitutional privileges. via dangerousmeta.

JSP Does NOT Suck!

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JSP does NOT suck! Uttering those words is against the conventional wisdom of so many at javablogs.com and elsewhere. I feel the expectation from many Java developers – for JSP to provide easy seperation of HTML and logic – by default – is unreasonable. If that were it’s main goal – then it’s a failure. But if you look at JSP as a PHP/ASP/CGI competitor – feature for feature it’s stands on it’s own two feet. What’s missing is the availability of it for your average web dev hacker.

Don’t you think MovableType could be written in JSP? Of course it could. And it probably would be easier to maintain, more scalable, and easier to extend.

But not to deploy. The market for MovableType would shrink to such a size as to not make it worth the effort.

Seperation of logic and design in JSP does suck. But honestly – is it any better with CGI, PHP, or ASP?

Just as in apps developed with those languages, if the goal is for designers to manipulate HTML and avoid dangerous logic code, then you embed a templating language for them to interact with. Would you let a web designer touch your CGI scripts? Hell no! Then why would you in your JSP?

MovableType does this. Why couldn’t a JSP app do the same? Fact is – they can.

There are a growing number of templating languages that suit this purpose and are available for Java developers today.

Saying JSP sucks is like saying Perl sucks.

And that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Contribute Sounds Cool

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Has a company finally put *all* of the pieces together in an easy to use, cheap, package? Macromedia’s Contribute sounds cool. Gotta give it a whirl.

This comes via part three of Jonathon Deacour’s Conversation with Joe Clark. Whadda quote!: “The larger CMSs are a kind of protection racket: You buy our system for six figures, and then you keep paying us every year to maintain your license, and also you’ll have to hire a person trained in our ways to keep your system up and running. Fail to do any of that and your entire site crashes. It’s extortion, really, and high-end CMSs are dogs in so many ways?they can’t produce valid code, their URLs are appalling, and they are difficult to use. In essence, big CMSs are mainframe systems, with the same need for constant nursing and non-stop tending by codependent system administrators as those old mainframes.”