The saga of now-former congressman Mark Foley has evolved in less than a day from a tawdry scandal confined to a single Florida district into something considerably more consequential.

For those who haven’t been haunting the blogs (Talking Points Memo has been keeping tabs through the night), the deal seems to be this: the Republican House leadership knew last year that Foley had been engaging in salacious IM sessions and emails with underage House pages. The Republican House leadership did not investigate. The Republican House leadership did not, apparently, do anything.

The fact that takes this sorry tale of individual misbehavior and political fumbles and elevates it to a grander level of political melodrama is this: Foley wasn’t just your average conservative congressman; he was one of the leaders of the GOP’s “Let’s protect our young ‘uns from those pervs on the Net” brigade. As tomorrow’s Washington Post explains, “Foley chaired the House caucus on missing and exploited children and was credited with writing the sexual-predator provisions of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which Bush signed in July.”

That’s not just appallingly hypocritical — it’s “sick sick sick sick sick,” to quote one of the pages at the receiving end of Foley’s attentions. While he was authoring laws aimed at (as the White House’s press release on the law puts it) “Making It Harder For Sex Predators To Reach Our Children On The Internet,” he was trading tips on masturbation techniques with teenage House pages. Nice.

The historical record is full of puritanical hypocrites who publicly campaign against some carnal sin while privately indulging it. It’s an archetype, dating back at least as far as Shakespeare’s Angelo — the substitute ruler in “Measure for Measure” who brings the death penalty to Vienna’s fornicators, only to fall bad for a near-nun when she comes to plead for her brother’s life. Angelo’s fall is swift; he’s transformed overnight from puritan scourge to lascivious blackmailer. But at least he starts out with a clean slate.

From what we can tell, Foley seems to have the “Measure for Measure” sequence backwards: first he indulged in sordid behavior, then he toughened the laws against said behavior. That’s not just outrageous, it’s stupid — and could result in a cruel sort of justice, if the penalties of the Adam Walsh law end up falling on Foley himself.

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg was most recently warning Democrats that if they let themselves get too worked up into an anti-war lather through their support of Ned Lamont they will repeat the divisions of 1968 and exile themselves to the political wilderness. But now he’s criticizing Democrats for not talking enough about what to do in Iraq: “The situation is hopeless. The best that our leading foreign-policy minds have been able to come up with is a grim choice among forms of failure and defeat. In a country of optimists, no politician wants to deliver that message.”

Excuse me, but isn’t that pretty much the message Ned Lamont offered in response to Joe Lieberman’s mindless “stay the course”-itude? Back when Lamont said it, Weisberg slapped him for being a “callow” “novice” heading up an antiwar movement that would destroy the party. Now Weisberg’s complaining that Democrats are too chicken to admit the disturbing truth.

If Slate’s editor isn’t careful, he will find his self-contradictions escalating to a height of Escher-like complexity previously attained only by David Brooks.

(On the other hand, I give Slate much credit for publishing Tim Wu’s ode to the high art of Chinese dumplings, which reminded me to go out for dim sum more.)

Print is in trouble these days; everyone’s saying it, most recently Michael Kinsley in Time, so there must be something to it. Kinsley’s piece is a discourse on how some news organizations will survive and prosper in the transition from print to online and others won’t.

Given this context there’s an amusing gaffe in the piece as it’s presented on the Time Web site. At one point in his argument, Kinsley writes, “There is room between the New York Times and myleftarmpit.com for new forms.” I assumed “Myleftarmpit.com” was just some phrase Kinsley invented as a generic put-down for a personal Web site, but there it was on Time.com, highlighted as a link. Gee, maybe it’s real! Some obscure site Kinsley wants us to see?

I clicked on it. Oops — file not found. There is no myleftarmpit.com. But some dumb process in Time’s content-management software recognized the domain name and automatically turned it into a link.

Additional, inadvertent lesson from Kinsley’s piece: When news organizations transition from print to online, they need to pay attention to the links they post. Links aren’t technical window-dressing; they are as or more important than the words around them. They need to be edited, too.

In a column today aimed at defending corporate boardrooms from additional regulation in the wake of an outrageous scandal, The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins — who never met a business story he couldn’t twist to suit his own ideology — declares that “The H-P snafu is devoid of larger meaning.”

“Larger meaning” is always, ultimately, in the eye of the beholder. Was H-P’s spying on journalists and its own board members simply a matter of poor judgment, loose ethics and a betrayal of the “H-P Way” (the original Don’t Be Evil imperative)? Maybe. But It doesn’t take a private detective firm to see that there’s a likely connection between H-P’s shame and a broader trend in U.S. corridors of power. Information is power; information is increasingly unresponsive to command; leaders — from the board room to the White House — are fighting harder, and dirtier, to try to bring it back to heel.

As access to once-inside information becomes increasingly difficult to block, institutions have a simple choice: they can accept that board members are going to talk to the press (in H-P’s case, the leaker was saying positive things!), employees are going to blog, and news and information is going to flow no matter what, so they might as well embrace transparency; or they can resort to ever more desperate ploys (cf. also: Apple) to repair cracks in informational dams and hound people who are trying to build conversational routes around those barriers.

That’s a large enough meaning for me.

During the years I spent researching Dreaming in Code, I accumulated a veritable mountain of reading material on the topic of software development, the history of programming, project management and so on. (I even read much, though certainly not all, of it!) There is, plainly, a core set of books, documents and texts that trace the evolution of this subject; I also gathered some unusual obscurities and overlooked offshoots.

Only a small fraction of this material made its way into Dreaming in Code itself, which is a narrative tale of the ups and downs of one project, set in the context of the longer history of the field. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to share my discoveries, spark some interesting discussion and contribute a lasting resource to the Web based on the work I’ve already done and the reading I continue to do.

Here’s my plan: Every week I’m going to announce a topic — usually, a text or document, in many cases easily accessible online; a week later, I’ll post some thoughts, notes and ideas about the topic, and open the floor in comments for you to throw your two cents in. If all goes well, together we’ll build a handy annotated reading list for curious developers and interested outsiders — and maybe have some fun along the way.

I’m calling this impromptu, informal reading group Code Reads — mostly because we’re reading about code and coding, and also because I like the idea that the phrase induces the slightest hesitation in the reader’s mind (How do you pronounce it — like “code reeds” or “code reds”?), and I’m mischievously pleased to invoke that kind of ambiguity in a conversation about a field that abhors ambiguity.

So: Join me for Code Reads. Here, every Monday.

I’m planning to kick things off next week with some observations about Frederick Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month — the book that, for me and I think many other students of this subject, really started it all. You’re invited. You don’t have to be a programmer (I’m not one, myself, though I’ve played at being one in previous phases of my life). You just have to be interested in the question that I ask in Dreaming in Code: Why is good software still so hard to make?

Joel Spolsky says that most programmers don’t read much at all: “The majority of developers don’t read books about software development, they don’t read Web sites about software development, they don’t even read Slashdot.”

He might be right. Then again, in my work I’ve encountered many, many developers who are fanatically curious about everything under the sun, emphatically including the history and nature of their own field. I’m thinking some of them might enjoy having this conversation with one another, and with the rest of us.

• If, like me, you spent some significant portion of your childhood in the back of a car dreaming up parts of speech to complete Mad Libs, you may find this site, and the book it’s based on, irresistible. Even if you didn’t, it’s worth a look. MadLiberals takes the classic fill-in-the-blanks game and updates it for the Bush era. The Web site offers a few interactive “MadLiberator” pages; an old-fashioned book is also available.

  (Full disclosure: My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, also served as the agent for MadLiberals, and he wants people to know that a substantial chunk of the proceeds will go straight to various charities and nonprofits.) And here, for the heck of it, are some more, more traditional, amusing Mad Libs.

• Derek Powazek and Heather Champ have been publishing a cool little photo magazine called JPG for some time. Now they’ve expanded the project into a Web community intended to feed the magazine with contributions. (More on their blog.) Derek is a veteran Web designer and instigator of Web communities; Heather created the Mirror Project way back when. So it’s no surprise they’ve put a lot of thought and care into their project. The photos are pretty great, too.

My old laptop, a trusty Thinkpad X30, began falling apart recently — literally, the plastic case developed cracks in the corners and pieces started to fall off. I don’t blame IBM: This machine got a lot of use during the years when I was working on my book — even fell off the table once or twice. It did good service. But I’m not going to trust my work to a computer that is shedding its protective casing like space shuttle tiles. So it was time to buy a new laptop.

I’ve been using ultracompact Thinkpads since 1998 or so and the days of the model 560. These computers have never failed me — never had a hard drive crash or other awful malfunction — despite years of abuse. (Mac folks, I love your operating system, but I don’t love its laptop hardware, so until there’s a Mac laptop that’s as lightweight and reliable as a Thinkpad, and that has a trackpoint-style pointer, it’s just not going to happen for me. Sorry.)

In ordering a new Thinkpad X60s, I wondered whether anything would have changed under the new Lenovo management. The good news, I’m happy to say, is that this Thinkpad continues to feel solid and behave well. The keyboard is if anything a little better than the X30’s (except I absolutely abhor the insertion of the “Windows” key and that funny other key on the right between “alt” and “ctrl” — what does it do, simulate the right-click? who needs it? why crowd the other keys? my fingers liked “alt” and “ctrl” right where they were, thank you!). It’s fascinating to put the new screen next to the old laptop’s LCD and see how 3-4 years of constant use have dimmed the display — something one doesn’t realize without this direct side-by-side comparison.

Thumbs down to Lenovo only for not offering a simple port replicator for the X60s — they make you spring for the fancier dock. Other than that, I’m pretty happy. And no, there was no way I’d wait to buy a new computer in order to graduate to Windows Vista. My philosophy is, never buy a 1.0 product. These ultracompact Thinkpads are so good because IBM has years of experience making them. Similarly, Windows XP (once it’s been upgraded and patched ad nauseam) has had most of its flaws beaten out of it in the years since its debut. Anyone who goes with Vista at launch has to be ready for a boatload of snags and bugs.

One eye-opening sidelight on globalization: the Lenovo web site sent me a UPS tracking number once my order shipped. When I plugged it in at UPS, I could follow my package’s progress all the way from Shanghai to the US. Not much more than a decade ago we were arguing about whether, you know, it was OK for advanced US computer technology to be made available to China. Now, we track the packages of advanced US-designed, China-manufactured computer technology from China’s ports to our doorsteps.

Anytime you move from computer to computer there is the hassle of migrating data (not too bad in the era of voluminous external drives — and migrating that way automatically leaves you with a convenient backup copy). The bigger hassle these days is installing your apps — assuming you haven’t gone completely over to the web-based model, which I certainly haven’t. Thankfully, Ecco Pro still installs nicely, from disk or download. Some of my other stalwart apps have gone free (like Opera) or free/ad-supported/paid (like Eudora), so it’s just a matter of download time plus digging up an old key. (If you have an OS problem, though, you have to deal with the horror of Microsoft activation — today Dave Winer reports one egregious example.)

But with the software installation comes the patching, and that is something of a nightmare. In the case of Windows XP, I dutifully installed a mountain of security patches, but declined the installation of the “Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool” (I’ve protected myself extremely well from malicious software without it). Once I turned down the current month’s edition of this tool, the auto-update wanted to install each previous monthly version, going back to its inception a couple of years ago. There was no way to defeat this that I could figure out. other than laboriously saying “no thanks” to AutoUpdate each time it turned the calendar back a month.

Then there was the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Once installed, it decided there were three critical patches I needed. But each one demanded that I install it, then reboot, separately. WTF? Three reboots for some lousy updates to a piece of software for reading a proprietary document format that I only use when people make me?

Adobe is full of smart engineers. Can’t they roll these things up, or at least set them up so the reboot only triggers once, after all the downloaded updates have installed? And gee, wouldn’t it be nice if they actually told us what these updates did, so we could decide for ourselves whether they actually matter?

Once again, we are asked to do things for the convenience of our software tools. The ostensible servant calls the shots.

Congratulations to Jay Rosen, who today announced a $100,000 grant from Reuters to underwrite hiring a full-time editor at NewAssignment.net, Jay’s nascent experiment in networked “smart-mob”-style journalism (which I earlier discussed here).

That’s a significant sum from an old-school media outfit that is putting its cash where its talk is. (Full disclosure: Rosen asked me this summer to join an informal advisory board for his undertaking, which I’ve been happy to do.)

In August I noted how regularly the Bush administration has relied on formulations like “No one could have anticipated…” and “No one expected…” to explain its missteps. They’re at it again, this time with regard to the dustup between Bush’s demand for the right to torture and the senators in his own party who think that unilaterally carving out exceptions to the Geneva Conventions might be a bad idea.

Here’s what some anonymous administration official told the New York Times’ David Sanger about the controversy:

“I don’t think anyone anticipated the avalanche of opinion that would be assembled on the other side of what seemed like a pretty abstruse legal issue,” one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to discuss the issue with a reporter.

No one anticipated it, nope. Abstruse legal issue. John McCain’s position on the matter? Big surprise. Disagreement over abandoning a central tenet of the 150-year-old foundational agreement on wartime ethics? Who’da thunk?

Programming pioneer Edsger Dijkstra once said, “Teaching BASIC should be a criminal offense.” (At least it’s attributed to him — he had a lot of snarky things to say about a lot of other computer languages, so at least it’s in character.)

David Brin disagrees — in fact, Brin is appalled that BASIC, which used to be pre-installed on every personal computer available for purchase, is now a rarity. His article recounting his and his school-age son’s search for a simple BASIC tool is in Salon today.

Brin likes to draw — and rile up — a crowd, as he did years ago in arguing the case that “Star Trek” is philosophically superior to “Star Wars.” And he’s succeeded again.

What I’m finding most interesting in the 150+ letters his article has already generated, whether they share Brin’s views or disagree, is the sheer passion on the part of the programmers responding. I guess the topic combines programmers’ near-religious intensity on the topic of languages with the deep-seated connection all creators have to the tools of their youth.