Posted on 10/14/2003 6:08:44 AM PDT by BigWaveBetty
It must be Donald Rumsfeld's turn to be whipping boy this month with talk of his rollercoaster ride taking a downward turn and in-fighting is losing Iraq and could cost Rumsfeld his job. Bullbleep I say!
I for one think America should be eternally grateful that Donald Rumsfeld is our Secretary of Defense. He works incredibly hard for us at a time when most Americans his age are enjoying retirement.
Donald H. Rumsfeld was sworn in as the 21st Secretary of Defense on January 20, 2001. Before assuming his present post, the former Navy pilot had also served as the 13th Secretary of Defense, White House Chief of Staff, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, U.S. Congressman and chief executive officer of two Fortune 500 companies.
Secretary Rumsfeld is responsible for directing the actions of the Defense Department in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The war is being waged against a backdrop of major change within the Department of Defense. The department has developed a new defense strategy and replaced the old model for sizing forces with a newer approach more relevant to the 21st century. Secretary Rumsfeld proposed and the President approved a significant reorganization of the worldwide command structure, known as the Unified Command Plan, that resulted in the establishment of the U.S. Northern Command and the U.S. Strategic Command, the latter charged with the responsibilities formerly held by the Strategic and Space Commands which were disestablished.
The Department also has refocused its space capabilities and fashioned a new concept of strategic deterrence that increases security while reducing strategic nuclear weapons. To help strengthen the deterrent, the missile defense research and testing program has been reorganized and revitalized, free of the restraints of the ABM treaty.
Mr. Rumsfeld attended Princeton University on academic and NROTC scholarships (A.B., 1954) and served in the U.S. Navy (1954-57) as an aviator and flight instructor. In 1957, he transferred to the Ready Reserve and continued his Naval service in flying and administrative assignments as a drilling reservist until 1975. He transferred to the Standby Reserve when he became Secretary of Defense in 1975 and to the Retired Reserve with the rank of Captain in 1989.
In 1957, he came to Washington, DC to serve as Administrative Assistant to a Congressman. After a stint with an investment banking firm, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois in 1962, at the age of 30, and was re-elected in 1964, 1966, and 1968.
Mr. Rumsfeld resigned from Congress in 1969 during his fourth term to join the President's Cabinet. From 1969 to 1970, he served as Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity and Assistant to the President. From 1971 to 1972, he was Counsellor to the President and Director of the Economic Stabilization Program. In 1973, he left Washington, DC, to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, Belgium (1973-1974).
In August 1974, he was called back to Washington, DC, to serve as Chairman of the transition to the Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. He then became Chief of Staff of the White House and a member of the President's Cabinet (1974-1975). He served as the 13th U.S. Secretary of Defense, the youngest in the country's history (1975-1977).
From 1977 to 1985 he served as Chief Executive Officer, President, and then Chairman of G.D. Searle & Co., a worldwide pharmaceutical company. The successful turnaround there earned him awards as the Outstanding Chief Executive Officer in the Pharmaceutical Industry from the Wall Street Transcript (1980) and Financial World (1981). From 1985 to 1990 he was in private business.
Mr. Rumsfeld served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Instrument Corporation from 1990 to 1993. General Instrument Corporation was a leader in broadband transmission, distribution, and access control technologies. Until being sworn in as the 21st Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld served as Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, Inc., a pharmaceutical company.
Before returning for his second tour as Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld chaired the bipartisan U.S. Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, in 1998, and the U.S. Commission to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization, in 2000.
During his business career, Mr. Rumsfeld continued his public service in a variety of Federal posts, including:
Member of the President's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control (1982 - 1986);
Special Presidential Envoy on the Law of the Sea Treaty (1982 - 1983);
Senior Advisor to the President's Panel on Strategic Systems (1983 - 1984);
Member of the U.S. Joint Advisory Commission on U.S./Japan Relations (1983 - 1984);
Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East (1983 - 1984);
Member of the National Commission on Public Service (1987 - 1990);
Member of the National Economic Commission (1988 - 1989);
Member of the Board of Visitors of the National Defense University (1988 - 1992);
Member of the Commission on U.S./Japan Relations (1989 - 1991); and
Member of the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission (1999 - 2000).
While in the private sector, Mr. Rumsfeld's civic activities included service as a member of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the boards of trustees of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the National Park Foundation, and as Chairman of the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships, Inc.
In 1977, Mr. Rumsfeld was awarded the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
----End Transmission.........
Was She Covert? Apparently Not.
The Valerie Plame kerfuffle seems to be fuffling out. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times offers "a few pertinent facts" about her career:
First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons.
Second, as Mrs. Wilson rose in the agency, she was already in transition away from undercover work to management, and to liaison roles with other intelligence agencies. So this year, even before she was outed, she was moving away from "noc"--which means non-official cover, like pretending to be a business executive. After passing as an energy analyst for Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company, she was switching to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having "C.I.A." stamped on her forehead.
Third, Mrs. Wilson's intelligence connections became known a bit in Washington as she rose in the C.I.A. and moved to State Department cover, but her job remained a closely held secret. Even her classmates in the C.I.A.'s career training program mostly knew her only as Valerie P. That way, if one spook defected, the damage would be limited.
Now, let's go back to the beginning of this kerfuffle. The Nation's David Corn claimed on July 16 that the identification of Plame as a CIA "operative" in Bob Novak's column two days earlier was a "potential violation" of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, under which, in Corn's words, "it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent."
Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, an employee of an intelligence service is a "covert agent" only if he has worked overseas within the past five years. Thus if Kristof is right, there is no violation here. Where did Corn get the idea that Plame was a covert agent? From her husband, Joseph Wilson, it would appear:
Without acknowledging whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."
This Joe Wilson is a clever one, isn't he? He didn't actually say his wife was a covert agent, so he can't quite be accused of lying. But if Kristof's account of Plame's career is accurate, Wilson misled Corn (as well as others who followed his lead, including Kristof's colleague Paul Krugman) by making a hypothetical statement based on a premise he knew to be false, which gave journalists hostile to the Bush administration all they needed to make an accusation of criminal wrongdoing.
It's easy to dismiss this as mere ideological prejudice, which it no doubt is. But Schell's statement that better-educated people tend to be more liberal is subject to empirical testing. Here are the findings of the Edison Media Research California exit poll on the recall, broken down by education level (the second column shows the percentage of the total sample that each subgroup makes up):
|
%
|
Yes
|
No
|
|
| Did not complete high school |
3%
|
--
|
--
|
| High school grad |
13%
|
61%
|
39%
|
| Some college/associate degree |
32%
|
59%
|
41%
|
| College grad |
28%
|
57%
|
43%
|
| Postgraduate study |
23%
|
45%
|
55%
|
And here are the findings for the vote on Davis's replacement (CB is Democrat Cruz Bustamante; AS is Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger; TM is Republican Tom McClintock; PC is Green Peter Camejo):
|
%
|
CB
|
AS
|
TM
|
PC
|
|
| Did not complete high school |
3%
|
--
|
--
|
--
|
--
|
| High school grad |
13%
|
33%
|
50%
|
12%
|
2%
|
| Some college/associate degree |
33%
|
30%
|
48%
|
14%
|
4%
|
| College grad |
28%
|
32%
|
49%
|
13%
|
3%
|
| Postgraduate study |
23%
|
44%
|
38%
|
10%
|
5%
|
Looking at these figures, we see small differences among high school and college grads, among whom more education seems to correlate slightly with less support for the recall; 62% of each of the three groups voted Republican and 34% or 35% either Democrat or Green. The real outliers are those who've done postgraduate study, who actually opposed the recall and a plurality of whom (49%) voted Democrat or Green (vs. 48% GOP).
There appears to be another outlying group, too: high school dropouts. Because they made up such a small part of the sample, the pollsters were not able to generate definitive numbers. They do, however, give combined percentages for those whose education level is "high school or less": 58% to 42% in favor of the recall, 58% Republican, 38% Democrat or Green.
Based on these numbers, we've derived the following figures for high school dropouts: Against the recall, 55% to 45% (the same proportions as postgrads), and on the replacement ballot 51% Democrat or Green, 41% Republican. Take these numbers with a grain of salt; they aren't statistically reliable. But they are suggestive.
The Democratic "base," it seems, can be found at the extreme edges of the bell curve, consisting of a small number of uneducated voters and a large number of overeducated ones. The educated elite, as we suggested last week, clearly dominates the party. One lesson of the California election, though, is that it's possible to be highly intelligent and educated without being all that smart. If you add together all the Orville Schell types in the California Democratic Party, we bet they have a collective IQ of over a million. But the best idea they could come up with is to tell people to vote for Gray Davis?
Meanwhile, Fox News Channel reports on a new poll of Americans' beliefs about the supernatural. The partisan breakdown is interesting:
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they believe in God (by eight percentage points), in heaven (by 10 points), in hell (by 15 points), and considerably more likely to believe in the devil (by 17 points). Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they believe in reincarnation (by 14 percentage points), in astrology (by 14 points), in ghosts (by eight points) and UFOs (by five points).
Seems to us Gore & Co. are missing an opportunity to throw the Sci-Fi Channel into the mix.
Look out!! It's the big sweaty gay monster with no eyebrows!!
None I know are worthy of you, my dear.
Sir, are you implying it takes a lot of money to cover my flaws?
Kucinich said he, unlike Bush, had an exit strategy. The Congressman from Ohio explained how "the U.N. would take charge of all of Iraq's oil reserves, without privatization, and the U.N. would handle all the contracts." Said Kucinich: "No more sweetheart deals for Halliburton. No more war profiteering." source
Oh my, he just offers a little something for everyone (that is, everyone who's as whacked-out as he):
He said he would return to bilateral trade by revoking United States participation in Nafta and the World Trade Organization, repeal the antiterrorism legislation called the USA Patriot Act, create a universal health care system, establish universal prekindergarten schooling and create a cabinet-level Department of Peace that would bring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s principles of nonviolence into government. ...
The Cleveland event had a tailored multicultural appeal, starting out with prayers from a rabbi, an imam and a Baptist preacher. [I'd like a word or two with the Baptist] The speakers were racially diverse, and Mr. Kucinich took a moment to acknowledge the American Indian communities on Columbus Day.
He also called for a study into whether reparations should be paid for slavery, noting that he has co-sponsored legislation to this effect with Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan. And he spoke on behalf of amnesty and legalization for illegal immigrants. NY Times
Sometimes it's hard to decide who's the nuttiest of the Dem candidates, Braun or Denny.
No wonder the Democrats are depressed and angry. With that stable of candidates, I'd go stark raving mad.
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