“Murdoch is strongly, if not firmly, in the Obama camp. How that plays out on Fox is another question,” Wolff said yesterday. “He actually has relatively little ability to affect what’s on Fox, assuming he doesn’t want to fire Roger Ailes, which I don’t think he does. But I do think he would prefer him to be a little less unreconstructed.”

The opinion-led US news network became intrinsically linked with the Bush administration and its key pundits have enthusiastically backed John McCain.

In the article, to be published on Friday, Wolff says Murdoch, partly due to the influence of his third wife Wendi, is “becoming a liberal - sort of”.

“Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can’t be missed - he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about [Fox pundit] Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not possible that he would give Fox up - because the money is the money; success trumps all - in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a `community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

I thought Republicans were the ones who praised non-governmental action over official state action?

This is so cool, and it solves a real problem for websites: making it really, really easy for people to update the content. The alternative up until now was to use a wiki or blog, but for basic editing of a simple website by non-technical users…that really doesn’t work so well.

I don’t know why—it’s not that much work to use the WP admin backend—but this seems to make blogging seem much more inviting to me. I basically just took the relevant code from the Prologue theme, modified it a bit (adding a “Title:” field, for example) and found the correct WP hooks to put it in Plugin form.

I’m actually thinking about releasing it as a real plugin. When I mentioned this to my friend James, he recommended the name “Posthaste.” James is much better at naming things than me, so I took his recommendation.

If this sounds interesting to you, you can download it and try it out. If it seems useful to other people & actually works well enough, I may submit it to the WP plugin directory. I tested it with a handful of the most popular themes on the WordPress Theme Directory and it seemed to work with them all.

A few notes:

• If you leave the “Title:” field blank, it takes the first 40 characters of the post content & makes that the title.
• It posts to your default category…unless
• If you have a category named ‘asides’, it will put posts with empty titles in the ‘asides’ category. You can then style them as asides, which is what I do on this blog.
• If you want to change any of this behavior, there’s no options page or anything: you’ve got to edit the php file.
• It only has the most basic CSS applied. To customize it, you can add custom CSS to the ‘styles/local.css‘ file.
• Your theme needs to use wp_head() for it to work. If you’re using a new theme at all, it probably does.
• There’s an ongoing problem with Prologue in WP 2.6. I fixed it, I think, by changing the auth_redirect() code. If you know more than me about these matters, and my “fixing it” this way was a bad idea, please let me know. (This was supposedly fixed in Prologue 1.4.1, but I’m still having the same problem.)

Look at Safari and Firefox, the two most popular browsers after IE. What do they have in common? Both deliver reliable browsing experiences with great rendering accuracy, great standards compliance, and a minimal amount of fluff.

[...]

Rather than make a great rendering engine first and slowly add new browser features on top of that, the IE team seems to have spent a disproportionate amount of time and effort on new functionality. What’s worse, those features add a kind of visual noise that makes IE8 feel like an incoherent mashup of buttons, menu items, and icons. If it had an automotive equivalent, it’d probably be “The Homer” from the Simpsons:

That is a perfect analogy for what IE7 feels like to me. (Haven’t used the IE8 Beta yet.) Actually, it pretty much works for Windows generally, too.