Any political party with a history has legendary heroes. For the Republican party, one of these is President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the 34th President of the United States of America. Last week, his daughter Susan Eisenhower wrote an article for The National Interest online, on why she is voting for Barack Obama, and declaring her intent to leave the Republican party for good (and register as an Independent).

The story is here: http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=19618

Dear Civilized World,

I want to express my great apology with the comments of our ”elected” leader yesterday during the G8 summit. I would like to inform you that we here in the United States do take pollution very seriously and, at the local and state levels, we are very committed to reducing the amount of pollution that we generate. We were quite offended and surprised by George's remarks at the meeting on Thursday, and we can assure you that he will be dissuaded from such outbursts in the future. The problem is that while George was growing up in the pristine bubble of the Bush dynasty, he never really got to see or experience pollution first-hand, and is currently still confused about what pollution really is. We in the USA apologize again for his insulting jest, and want to express that we find absolutely no humor in being the world's second-biggest polluter (yes, George's account of things are a bit dated, we'll make sure that we assign someone to read such reports for him in the future).

Sincerely,

Coleman Kane (on behalf of the population of the United States of America)

I received my XO from the OLPC Foundation last month. It is a pretty neat little device, and I'm still learning all the little pieces that the bundled applications have to offer. I joined up with their developers network to see about contributing. Recently I actually managed to get the Sugar interface building under FreeBSD. I still need to do some work to get it running, it seems, as the python sugar shell doesn't seem to want to run (it silently exits, with no error code).

I've just put up a gitweb at http://www.cokane.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi. Currently it houses my local FreeBSD changes, and two branches to track HEAD and RELENG_7. It was a snap to set up and now it is quite helpful for providing numerous patches I've had on my site out to others.

If you're in the United States, you probably are aware of the upcoming election cycle. Lawrence Lessig, of Creative Commons and Electronic Frontier Foundation fame, has teamed up with Joe Trippi to found the Change Congress movement. This announcement may be belated to some who've been following the project, who are aware that it has been around for over a month.

For the rest, I'd like to point out that the project has recently picked up a lot and begun opening up some of the community participation systems that were hailed in the beginning. I recommend it for all of us computer science, engineering, and IT types that may tend to stay out of the process…

• Link: http://www.change-congress.org