putative.com

Newsmap

If you use Google News at all, try using this live, dynamic "treemap visualization" instead. It's pretty stunning to just get a brutal, visually rich weighting of what people are reading about. (Or, rather, writing about--as near as I can tell, emphasis is weighted by the number of "related articles," same as on Google News.)

If you think this is as cool as I do, you'll probably also like flipping through the different country tabs. And if you have a giant screen, try "Select All News" for a side-by-side comparison.

"Demonstrators Swarm Around Rove's Home"

Whoa! Protesters from Chicago rock:

Several hundred people stormed the small yard of President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, yesterday afternoon, pounding on his windows, shoving signs at others and challenging Rove to talk to them about a bill that deals with educational opportunities for immigrants.

...

And after about 30 minutes of goading by protesters in English and Spanish, Rove agreed to meet with two members of the coalition on the condition that the rest of the protesters board their buses and leave his street. The group obliged.

Rove opened his garage door and allowed Palacios and Inez Killingsworth to enter. The meeting lasted two minutes and ended with Rove closing the garage door on Palacios while she was still talking.

Palacios said that Rove was "very upset" and was "yelling in our faces" and that Rove told them "he hoped we were proud to make his 14-year-old and 10-year-old cry."

A White House spokesman said one of the children was a neighbor.

Palacios, trembling and in tears herself, said, "He is very offended because we dared to come here. We dared to come here because he dared to ignore us. I'm sorry we disturbed his children, but our children are disturbed every day.

"He also said, 'Don't ever dare to come back,' " Palacios said. "We will, if he continues to ignore us."

And Sean will say, "C'mon, you can't storm somebody's house because you disagree with them." But I'm curious at where one draws the line of propriety. You can't tell me Karl Rove hasn't shown the equivalent disdain to others--not coming up to their homes, maybe, but just generally being a total prick. Does that make storming his house "right"? No, but it makes it pretty fucking cool.

So when's the next presidential press conference?

It's easy to keep forgetting that this president never answers questions. What's up with that? There's a good Salon story this a.m., about how Bush s/b getting the same scrutiny as Kerry right now--if not more? This election being a referendum on *Bush*, after all:

Given how they have peppered Kerry with questions about name-calling, claims of foreign support, Botox, and other minor "issues," isn't it time to bore in on Bush regarding 9/11 and the war in Iraq?

Mr. President: Condoleezza Rice (on "Meet the Press") and Richard Clarke (in his new book) have said that the war in Iraq was part of your response to 9/11. How do you justify going to war against a country that, according to your own intelligence agencies, had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington?

Mr. President: Your own former counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, and others say you used the war in Iraq as a political tool to demonstrate that you were responding to international terrorism and the attack on the United States. Is that true?

Did you, as Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke have charged, come into office with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, whether or not he posed a strategic threat to the United States?

If there were no weapons of mass destruction and no connection with al-Qaida, in what way -- specifically -- did Iraq pose a threat to the United States?

...

Those are just a few ideas. The esteemed national political press corps can surely come up with even better questions. But it's time to reframe the election, to take off the kid gloves, and put some crucial questions to the Republican candidate for president.

And here's the question they ought to be asking right now of the White House: The president hasn't held a press conference in more than three months. When will he have one?

[long pause] "Sometimes you just need new problems."

I heard this from Mark a few nights ago and kept meaning to write it down. It was the sage statement of a mutual friend and ex-Wizards person, when Mark asked him why he quit his job.

Kenneth Grahame, minus poetry

Fuck Malvina Vogel, comin' straight from the underground! I know, of all the things to be horrified over, why choose this? But I think it's society's silent creepers--like global warming or the shifting judiciary--that really freak my shit out. So check out these two excerpts from "Wind in the Willows," from the above Salon article:

I flipped to the moment when Toad first catches his mania for motorcars, the inspiration for my daughter's careening at the park. In the original, Grahame ignites Toad's dream thus:

"'Glorious, stirring sight!' murmured Toad, never offering to move. 'The poetry of motion! The REAL way to travel! The ONLY way to travel! Here to-day -- in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped -- always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!'"

Toad, in the hands of Malvina G. Vogel, starts out with a similar exclamation but then alters course:

"'... Wonderful, glorious sight!' he murmured dreamily. ... That's the REAL way to travel, the ONLY way to travel! Here today, gone tomorrow! And to think I never KNEW! I never even DREAMT! Oh, what clouds of dust I'll kick up along the road! Oh what horrid little wagons I'll fling into ditches!'"

Give me back my poop-poop!

Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes

Hopefully you've read about this already, but Richard Clarke's book sounds just withering:

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

Again, you have to wonder, will any of this stick? But maybe it's enough to chip away bit by bit at the loyalties of intelligent people on the right--maybe by election day, Bush won't be able to point to a single thing he's done right. Heidi and I had coffee with my mom yesterday, and she said that Brent (her husband, and a way-right-leaning Libertarian) was probably going to vote for Kerry. And apparently Brent's 89-year-old mother, a staunch Republican out in the hinterlands of Michigan, said she "just can't imagine voting for Bush again." I'm all for some Republican ideals--hey, I voted for Bush Sr.!--but what has this guy *not* fucked up?

Anyway. Hey, look: GOPunks! ("Punk has been hijacked by an extreme left-wing element....")

Who donates how much from where to which party

I keep forgetting to post this: The Money Map. The national map is neat, but the really crazy thing is that you can go in and see who's made contributions in your *neighborhood*! Howdy, Chris Fidler, Director at Airborne-DHL! Way to donate $2K to George W. And look: RealNetwork's own Rob Glaser loves him his John Edwards, right to the $2K limit. And there's little old Rob Stumpfa, retail manager at Gregg's Cycle, throwing $31 to Dean. Word to your mom, Rob. You rock. (But where am I? I've donated to three candidates and counting!)

There's all sorts of great info on the site if you root around. Like is it any surprise that Al Sharpton is a Four Seasons man, while Kucinich sticks with Holiday Inn?

Rumsfeld stammers on Meet the Press

This is really only fun to watch because Rumsfeld always manages to act like such a dick: a recent clip of Rumsfeld, posted by MoveOn.org, as Congress prepares to pass a bill to congratulate the president on "making the world safer." They're passing congratulatory bills? Do they really have time for that? Don't they have bigger priorities? That's like when Afghanistan joined the Coalition of the Willing.

The Word Spy

Fun word site (thanks, Mr. JPD). E.g.,

pomosexual (poh.moh.SEK.shoo.ul) n. A person who shuns labels such as heterosexual and homosexual that define individuals by their sexual preferences. Also: PoMoSexual. --adj. --pomosexuality n.

Check out the most popular words.

Poor Spain, poor everybody

There's been no shortage of condemnation of the Spanish electorate, but it should be pointed out that the Spanish public agreed with Al Qaeda on the subject of Spain's involvement in Iraq *before* the bombings.

So what, now they're supposed to change their opinion, just to prove that "terrorism doesn't work"? Fuck that. This just in: Terrorism *does* work. Terrorism has led to my economy being ruined, my civil liberties being restricted, and my rightly scared country to be hoodwinked by a tough-talking, opportunistic asshole who's stealing our money while waving the flag. The Spanish people wanted their troops out of Iraq before the Madrid bombings: To save you from reading the above pdf, as of last October, people in Spain (one of our putative *allies*) thought that military intervention in Iraq wasn't justified 79% to 15%. Even after their troops were on the ground there, they didn't want them there 55% to 41%.

When will this get through to people: 1) We desperately need to fight terrorism, 2) invading Iraq was not fighting terrorism, 3) Bush's record on fighting terrorism has been a failure. I'm sure a lot of people in Spain wish that we had been kicking all the Al Qaeda ass that we've been claiming we've been kicking for the last two years. When we went code fucking-whatever last time, I wish I could say it was an ironic pleasure to hear Bush Administration officials warning about the dangers of Al Qaeda while saying they had gotten Al Qaeda "licked" in the same breath. But it wasn't, because I know they've been ignoring Al Qaeda ever since the Iraq invasion got going (witness the recent big push to go after Bin Laden--hey, great fucking plan, assholes!).

If other Coalition electorates want to be saved the intellectual hand-wringing that Spain's enduring now, oust your governments *before* you're attacked by the terrorists and install ones that will actually go fight the terrorists. Hey, that sounds like a great idea....