DoD News: Secretary Rumsfeld’s Speech at the National Press Club

Saddam Hussein (sic), if he’s alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught.

Now here I was thinking that Saddam had been captured by US forces in a “spider hole” of a bunker some months back and was currently in custody awaiting trial. But what do I know, I’m just some chump who watches the TV news? Donald Rumsfeld, on the other hand, why, he’s the Secretary of Defense. A guy like that, he probably knows a few things that we don’t.

Or does he? The rest of the interview shows that Rumsfeld repeatedly confused Saddam Hussein with Bin Ladin. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the guy was on the verge of a breakdown. Knowing better though, I’ve got to wonder if isn’t deliberate.

About the only thing this administration has going for it right now is that most Americans think that there is a link between Iraq and 9/11. Funny that Rumsfeld, who has always struck me as very smooth and deliberate, would make so many of these mistakes just about the time the Kerry campaign finally starts calling out Bush and Cheeny for repeatedly linking Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in their public statements.

via Slapnose.com

Today on Scripting news, Dave Winer has two posts that are very interesting if taken together.

The first gives his impression of the current state of the relationship (for want of a better word) between bloggers and the mainstream media in the wake of a 60 Minutes story on Bush’s record in the National Guard where supposedly new documents were brought to light that a huge range of bloggers have subsequently called into question with substantive critiques of the legitimacy of the documents.

The second notes that the update time on his site still reflects his long stay on the east coast and wonders whether he should update it to reflect pacific time now that he’s taken an apartment in Seattle for a few months. Taken on its own, it seems a trivial question.

I wonder though, if Dave was conscious of the connection between the two issues, the tension between old consolidated media and new, distributed media on one hand, and the time zone he chooses to file his stories.

The old consolidated media has a bi-coastal bias, with a particular focus on NYC and DC on the east coast, and LA on the west. To some, there is something sinister about this bias, and not without reason, but the underlying causes are rather mundane. It is natural for people, even professional journalists, to have some bias towards issues close to home and because the media has consolidated in NYC and LA due to a variety of forces, and in DC because its the center of all three branches of government, home for most of the media is confined to a few cities on the two coasts.

When it comes to national news though, that bias leans east. The countries unoficial “paper of record” the New York Times, is on the east coast, the TV news organizations are headquartered in NYC. Even NPR, the mainstream alternative news source comes out of DC.

Bloggers aren’t subject to the same dynamics that caused centralization in those old east coast cities, and so their is the opportunity for blogging to bring a broader perspective.

So, my answer Dave’s question. He should update his blog to show that he is “filing” his posts from the west coast and when he’s pickign what city to make an extended visit to next, he might want to consider looking for a way to file from the mountain or central time zones. Salt Lake City, perhaps? Maybe St Louis, or New Orleans? All have interesting historical significance in the building of the contry. St Louis served as the gateway for the settlers that ended up flowing into the west. SLC developed as an important provisioning point for those many settlers as they headed further west to California, Oregon and Washington, and as they spread throughout the arrid inland of the western reach of the country. New Orleans is interesting for being one of our oldest cities which grew from a different cultural tradition from the protestant northeast.

I’ve just downloaded and installed Grouper, the first P2P app I know of in a category i’m going to dub F2F.

What makes grouper an F2F app is that its intended to let small groups (like friends or families, hence the F) share files in a peer to peer fashion.

I’m waiting for my brother to install it so I can see how easy it is to use and how well it works.

I’m certainly enthusiastic about the category. I’ve been looking for an app with similar functionality without much luck.

The closest I’ve come is Groove. Groove looks pretty cool, but its targeted at business users and priced to match. They do have a pared down file-sharing edition for $69 which would do the job, but even at that price, it seems a little much to expect friends and family to spend.

There is an open source project called Mnet that can do similar things, but I haven’t tried it out yet. (I seem to recall finding related software when I found Mnet, but I’m now at a loss for what it was.)

Back to grouper though. I can already tell it’s not going to work for me. It’s built on .Net, which suggests its going to stay windows-only for quite some time. Too many of the people I’d like to create a private file-sharing network with are Macintosh only.

Interestingly, this may actually throttle Grouper’s early growth, desipite the fact that an overwhelming majority of users are on Windows. The reasons are summarized by a guy recently hired as an advisor to Grouper. The upshot is, Mac’s have long had disporportionate share among “influencers” and creative types, which is part of the reason there are so many Macs in movies and is probably why the laptop featured in the header graphic on Groove’s site is a Mac, even though Groove doesn’t run on macs. There are a variety of reasons for this, one of them being that Apple has deliberately targeted these people.
In any case, people are less likely to write enthusiastically about things they can’t experience for themselves, so, if it doesn’t work on Mac, you can kiss a lot of free press goodbye (or so the theory goes).

The other thing about Grouper is that it doesn’t let you download MP3s. You can only stream them. This is going to hinder sharing songs with my brother.

Looks like my brother got the invite and downloaded the app without hassle, I see he’s streaming one of my audio files.

More impressions as I use the app.

iPieters Blog – Home of iPodder for Windows
Continuing on the iPod theme…

iPodder is a small application which will help you automatically yank audio files mentioned or enclosed in RSS feeds and jam them onto your iPod.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I like the idea.

Its been over two and a half years since since Bush branded Iran, Iraq and North Korea as “The Axis of Evil,” in his 2002 state of the union speech.

Now’s as good a time as any to see how Bush has done on that front. Iraq has been liberated from Saddam’s clutches at great cost and to uncertain outcome.

The one thing that is certain, at this point, is that invading Iraq has limited the US’s wiggle room. Our military resources are taxed. We had to pull significant resources out of Afghanistan before the job was done there, and its quite obvious that we are going to have trouble committing troops to any new fronts that open in the region or elsewhere in the world.

Invading Iraq as we did has also strained relations with our traditional allies and the broader international community, to the point that it is both difficult for their politicians to support the US and easy for them to score points at home by thwarting the US, even as they undermine their countries own broader interests.

Which brings us to the rest of the Axis of Evil. News that a large explosion in North Korea was a nuke test may have been a false alarm, but there are still indications that they may be close to testing a nuke; Iran may (or may not) be sending men, materiel & money to attack US forces in Iraq at the same time the their own nuclear program advances. Effective responses to these threats are constrained by our military situation and the diplomatic hurdles when coordinating with the rest of the international community.

All this has the stink of failure. The current state of affairs in North Korea and Iran might at first glance seem to provide justification for naming them as preeminent threats, but placing them in the same category as Iraq, and then invading Iraq gave both countries great incentive to speed up their weapons programs.

Even if Bush’s bellicose rhetoric and actions aren’t responsible for making North Korea and Iran that much more dangerous, the fact that they are more dangerous today than they were when he named them is a clear failure on his part. Unlike 9/11, he can’t claim to have been ignorant of the danger from North Korea and Iran, having done so much to call it out in the first place.

Similarly, Bush is responsible for the fallout from invading Iraq in the manner he chose. He’s responsible for the fact that our military is overstretched. He’s responsible for the fact that the country is too violent and unstable for international peacekeepers to engage. He’s responsible for the fact that the goodwill towards the US after 9/11 has been not merely squandered but reversed.

Bush has (again) failed to successfully address an issue that he himself identified and prioritized.