Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: We Never Said Iraq Had Nuclear Weapons and We’ll Just Keep Interrogating People Until We Find The WMD

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Rumsfeld: We Never Said Iraq Had Nuclear Weapons and We’ll Just Keep Interrogating People Until We Find The WMD (Small – 6 Mb)
Tim Russert:
“Syria. Iran. North Korea. All harbor terrorists. We were told that Iraq was unique because they possessed Weapons Of Mass Destruction. What if that has proven not to be true?”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“It hasn’t proven not to be true. We’ve seen an interim report by David Kay, and uh it was a thoughtful report. There are some 1,300 Americans there working on the Weapons of Mass Destruction effort. He came back with an interim report that reported on the things he found thus far. It did not prove that there were (he stops) He did not come in a say “here are the weapons of mass destruction” nor did he come in and disprove the intelligence that we had had and that other countries had had before the war. Seems to me that the sensible thing to do is to let them continue their work and produce their final report and when they do, we’ll know.”
Tim Russert:
“But Mr. Secretary, you will acknowledge that there was an argument made by the Administration that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and could have been well on his way to reconstituting his nuclear program.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Um. Hmmm.”
Tim Russert:
“There doesn’t appear to be significant amounts of evidence to document that presentation that was made by the administration.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“This administration and the last administration and several other countries all agreed that they had chemical and biological weapons and that they had programs relating to nuclear weapons that they were reconstituting. Not that they had nuclear weapons. No one said that. It was believed then (stops) We know they did have them because they used chemical weapons against their own people. So it’s not like it was a surprise that those programs existed.”
“Furthermore, the debate in the United Nations wasn’t about whether or not Sadaam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. The debate in the United Nations was about whether or not he was willing to declare what he had and everyone agreed that that declaration was a fraudalent declaration. Even those that voted against the resolution agreed with that. So it seems to me that the thing to do is to wait, let the Iraq survey group, David Kay and his team, continue their work. You’re not going to find things by accident in a country the size of California. The only way you’re going to find them is by capturing people who know about them and interrogate them and find out what they think they know as to where these weapons are and what the programs were.”

Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: How The Casualties Are Worth Winning This War

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Rumsfeld: The Casualties Are Worth Winning This War (Small – 3 Mb)
Tim Russert:
“So far, we have lost 377 Americans in Iraq. 2,130 have been wounded or injured.
How would you explain to the American people this morning that it is worth that price for the war in Iraq.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Tim, the uh, battle we’re engaged in. The global war on terrorism. Is an important one. It is a different one than we’ve been in previously. Although terrorism’s not new. But the nature of terrorism is that its purpose is to terrorize. Its purpose is to alter people’s behavior. And to the extent free people end up behaving in a way that is different from the way free people behave, they’ve lost. And therefore, the only thing to do is do what the President has announced he’s doing, and that is to take the battle, the war on terrorism to the terrorists. Where they are. And that’s what we’re doing. We can win this war. We will win this war. And the President has every intention of staying after the terrorists and the countries that harbor terrorists until we have won this war.”

Meatrix Cartoon Explains How Factory Farming Affects Your Health

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I’d never even heard of “factory farming” until a few months ago, when a friend of mine who I meet for lunch a lot insisted on only eating at certain restaurants that serve organically-grown meat. It was horrific thinking about the stuff he was telling me, and I wanted to know more.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of scary stories about the FDA approving cloned animals for public consumption. It seems to me that there’s no way for the FDA to be sure of anything with regard to even the short term effects of humans eating cloned animals, much less the long term effects that, theoretically, would have to be explored in depth before such meat was allowed in to the open market.
So anyway, that’s why I’m starting a “Farming and Health” category. This shit’s getting pretty frightening, and enough is enough. I don’t know what we can really do about it yet, but I do feel that I have to help get the word out somehow.
Then, this morning, another friend sent me this wonderful animation that explains the factory farming situation in great detail. It’s funny as hell too.

The Meatrix
There’s a bunch of good information at the end about what you can do to help fight this stuff. More articles on this soon (and the relationship between factory farming and the cloning stuff).

Donald Rumsfeld On Meet The Press – Complete Video and Photos

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Highlights separated by subject on the way.
Somehow I had managed to forget to start a “Bye Bye Rummy” category. I’ll still have to go back and recategorize things properly for it.

Rummy On Meet The Press – Part 1 of 3 (Small – 23 MB)

Rummy On Meet The Press – Part 2 of 3 (Small – 23 MB)

Rummy On Meet The Press – Part 3 of 3 (Small – 23 MB)

Rummy On Meet The Press – Complete (Small – 68 MB)









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Donald Rumsfeld On Meet The Press – Link to Complete Directory

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program.
I’ll be blogging this proper-like later in the day, but I gotta go to tai chi and band practice so it’s gotta wait till later.
However, for those of you that have been waiting for this, and don’t need my charming commentary to get what you need out of it, here’s the directory where everything’s already uploaded:

Rummy On Meet The Press
See you later today. Lots of goodies in the kitty…

Come To My December 13 Showcase At Noe Valley Ministry

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I’m just finalizing the line-up for my show at Noe Valley Ministry on Saturday, December 13!

Map to Noe Valley Ministry
I’ve decided to fly down my drummer/producer (Simon Grant) and bass player (Jeff Norwood) from Seattle so I’ll have a full band for the show.
I’m also going to have Paul de Benedictis playing some original piano music and Singer/Songwriter Alex Walsh playing a set.
Hope to see you there!

Salon: The Same Old File Format Trouble With The New ‘Legal’ Online Music Services

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Andrew Leonard makes some relevant statements about what’s wrong with all the different “legal” music services developing, and how, by not embracing the universal MP3 format that made Napster so damn great, they all kind of suck.

Musical snares
Is Apple’s iTunes service nirvana for music fans — or just the start of a file-format nightmare that will drive us all nuts?
By Andrew Leonard for Salon.

The quality of my life has improved. But iTunes for Windows is not perfect, and my music consumer utopia is still an unrealized dream. Despite its vaunted half a million songs, I want plenty of albums and acts that are not yet available. I am greedy. I want everything. Let me buy it now. I’m also not crazy about the iTunes library organizing software. But what alarms me the most is the flip side of Apple’s success — a looming battle over file formats that, at least in the short term, is going to force consumers to make hard choices.
Because iTunes won’t play my Windows Media music files. And the Windows Media Player won’t play songs purchased from the iTunes store.
That’s not the future I want to pay for. In the 21st century era of late capitalism, the consumer is supposed to be king — my every desire is supposed to be reflected by marketplace offerings. Instead, the market is ordering me to get Steve Jobs’ smirking grin tattooed on my butt, and while that may be an improvement on being branded with a Microsoft iron, I’d still rather keep my skin as it started, unblemished.
Right now, there are several options for compressing music files into sizes where it becomes feasible to download them online. Tunes purchased from the iTunes Music Store come in the AAC format. Tunes bought from most other commercial services have aligned themselves with Microsoft’s WMA format. Then there’s the original MP3 standard, which is aligned with no single company, and there’s even a free software alternative called Ogg Vorbis.
This is not the place to engage in a detailed discussion of the relative merits of the different formats. Suffice it to say that about a year ago I committed an egregious error. When I finally purchased my first computer with a CD burner, I was so excited about being able to make my own CD mixes that I unthinkingly went ahead and used the Windows Media Player to rip all my favorite CDs to my hard drive. The Windows Media Player allows users to encode their songs only in the WMA format, which (like iTunes’ AAC format) comes with various digital rights management capabilities built in.
Now I have all this music that iTunes won’t play, and a bunch of songs purchased from iTunes that the Media Player won’t play. So, at the moment, I am prevented from burning a CD that has songs from both libraries. There are converters available that will transform WMA files into AACs and eventually there will no doubt be converters that perform the reverse service, but the process is a hassle that may end up downgrading the overall sound quality. I would have been far better off if I had ripped all my CDs to MP3s to begin with, because iTunes and the iPod will play MP3s. (And even, better, the iTunes software will allow me to rip my CDs into MP3s.)
I should have known better, because now I’m sitting exactly where Microsoft wants me, facing a significant “switching cost” if I want to adopt iTunes as my music-management software of choice. It takes time to rip CDs — and I have a lot of ’em…
I have a friend who has about 30,000 songs on a hard drive. There’s nothing to stop me from hooking his computer to mine with a USB cable and slurping all that music at once. Sure it’s illegal, and I’m not going to do it, but the RIAA would never know if I did, unless I did something stupid and put that server online for everybody on the Net to grab.
All over the world, even as Hollywood tries to push copy-protection legislation and sue individual file traders, music lovers are accumulating larger and larger collections of songs on their hard drives. Eventually, we’ll be able to go to our local flea market, and the guy who right now is selling freshly burned copies of Eminem is going to be selling us DVDs with 4.8 gigabytes of music, also for a few bucks. Even worse, the swap meets will soon be featuring swappable drives that will contain everything the Beatles ever recorded, or all the pop music from the ’60s, or the entire Warner Bros. catalog. Cheap.
I don’t know how the record companies are going to stop it. I do know that if one day I’m staring at hundreds of gigabytes of music files on my own computer that I paid for that aren’t playable on the newest piece of hardware or best available piece of music software, I’m going to be sorely tempted to head down to the flea market. And even if I refrain, that doesn’t mean everybody else will.
Wouldn’t it just be better to give me what I want, right now? Please don’t make the consumer angry! Or he’ll bite.

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