Politics & Controversy

Pieces of Intelligence : The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld

From Amazon’s Description: “Until now, the poetry of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been hidden, ’embedded’ within comments made at press briefings and in interviews. His preferred medium is the spoken word, and his audience has been limited to hard-bitten reporters and hard-core watchers of C-SPAN.”

The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns,

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don’t know we don’t know.

– Feb 2, 2002, Dept. of Defense news briefing

and another

I was briefed on that story before I came down.

I have not gone over it.

It’s interesting.

Let me try to put it in context,

And then I’ll see if I can answer it.

I have no idea what it’s about

Yes, these really are quotes from our defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Also interesting: important information about the discovery of weapons of mass destruction.

A graph from Orgnet plots book purchasing patterns by politics.There’s not much middle ground there. “These political books are preaching to the converted. The extreme book titles on both sides reveal a focus on hate, instead of debate. In a year of presidential election, is this the new arms race?”

Could it be that our book readers are key opinion leaders in their communities? An opinion leader is someone whose influence spreads much further than their immediate circle of friends & family. A current business book, The Influentials, by Ed Keller and Jon Berry, reports that reading “is [an influential’s] leading hobby”.

Meanwhile, Fundrace has a fancy map showing campaign contributions. It’s no surprise that cities are centers of Democratic funding and Middle America funds the Republicans, but look at the details.

Far too often the mainstream press lets politicians get away with revising or misrepresenting their previous positions. Far too often the press is complicit in their lies. Not this time.

Hopefully Quoticus will develop into a very useful historical truth machine to prevent revisionism. Hopefully.

Who would have figured old Dr. Seuss was so political? Rick Minear at UCSD has collected a number of the good doctor’s works as chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM. “Because of the fame of his children’s books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist,” writes Minear.

Thing is, I think I like his politics. Whether he was a doctor or not, I don’t know. But his real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991.

Matt Miller’s NPR commentary about the Bush budget includes the following details:

• A deficit of 521 billion means borrowing almost 1 out of 4 dollars in the budget.
• It includes 300 billion in tax cuts that go mostly to the rich, but ignores the 25 trillion dollar shortfall in social security and medicare that will start to come due in five years.
• Bush plans to send an addendum to the budget to cover the growing costs of the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan after the November elections.
• Finally, bush plans to blame this spending on congress instead admitting that the real problem is the huge tax cuts that have shorted government revenue from 19% of GDP to 16% almost overnight. Meanwhile, government spending is actually down to 20% of GDP from the 21% it was through the 1980s.

What’s the lesson here? We’re borrowing more to get fewer government services (like no healthcare), while Bush mortgages our future to grandstand on taxes. To make things easy, Miller wants us to remember the following mathematical facts: 20 < 21 and 16 < 19.

Here’s a graph to get you thinking about politics: job growth per president. Who knows if the numbers are real, but it jives with my memory of the past 20 years.

This dark and slightly objectionable cartoon of life features a good soundtrack and really cool styling.

Finally, everybody likes Latin translations of old rap songs. Right? “Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.”

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean carried the polls in Warren this primary night. The numbers for the rest of the state are still being counted, but what’s more impressive to me is the number of voters who went to the polls and the number of registered republicans who wrote in Democrats on their ballots. Twenty three out of 77 Republican ballots cast in this very conservative northern New Hampshire town had Democrats written in for President. Even better, a an overwhelming number of independent voters registered and voted Democrat at the polls.

It’s a pleasure to read the many pages of Molotov Cocktail for the Soul.

I don’t know who gets the worse end of this stick, but it’s really sad that chemists can’t tell the difference between banned nerve agents and agricultural pesticides.

For discussion:

WORLD HISTORY 101 MID-TERM EXAM

This test consists of one (1) multiple-choice question (so you better get it right!)

Here’s a list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed since the end of World War II, compiled by historian William Blum:

China: 1945-46

Korea: 1950-53

China: 1950-53

Guatemala: 1954

Indonesia: 1958

Cuba: 1959-60

Guatemala: 1960

Congo: 1964

Peru: 1965

Laos: 1964-73

Vietnam: 1961-73

Cambodia: 1969-70

Guatemala: 1967-69

Grenada: 1983

Libya: 1986

El Salvador: 1980s

Nicaragua: 1980s

Panama: 1989

Iraq: 1991-99

Sudan: 1998

Afghanistan: 1998

Yugoslavia: 1999

QUESTION: In how many of these instances did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result? Choose one of the following:

(a) 0

(b) zero

(c) none

One source attributes this quiz to Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Whatever the source, it’s certainly making the rounds on the web.

In the way emails thread their way from one person to another I came across the text of a speech about antics in the US Justice Department.

It was titled “An Open Letter to John Ashcroft” and came with this preface:

The following is a letter read by Claire Braz-Valentine, author at this year’s In Celebration of the Muse, Cabrillo College. It is worth knowing that the author is a woman of 60+ years, conservatively dressed and obviously quite talented.

I encourage everybody to read it here: An Open Letter to John Ashcroft.

It’s not real, but it may be more accurate.

Watch the State of the Union speech here.

Thanks to my sister for pointing me to this.

[UPDATE]: The link above may be down, the speech is mirrored here.

The news of the day is government secrecy. NPR’s All Things Considered ran two stories about the matter today. One story about general secrecy, and another story about Admiral Poindexter (formerly of the Iran-Contra scandal). Previously, NPR ran a capsule biography about Henry Kissinger. Of note is the discussion about Kissinger’s disbelief in open government. That story was followed by analysis by Daniel Schorr which may suggest why Kissinger was chosen to head up the independent panel to investigate the attacks of September 11th, then another story about his resignation from that panel.

Liane Hansen of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday interviewed Dr. Mitch Earleywine about his recent book, Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence this weekend. Earleywine has the credentials to look at this seriously and be taken seriously. But he probably won’t be.

There’s no shortage of books on this subject, and the Drug War marches on. But as long as we’re slinging books, let me throw Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire at you. Pollan knows plants, and in his book he explains how four of them — the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato — evolved to become as important and involved with our lives as they are.