By now, you’ve probably seen the “Yes We Can” video, but I found it inspiring and wanted to post it here anyway. Enjoy!

And if you thought that one was inspiring, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet:

TIME Washington bureau correspondent Michael Scherer reminds us what’s wrong with American politics today:

Here’s one thing you need to know about John McCain. He’s always been the coolest kid in school. He was the brat who racked up demerits at the Naval Academy. He was the hot dog pilot who went back to the skies weeks after almost dying in a fire on the U.S.S. Forrestal. His first wife was a model. His second wife was a rich girl, 17 years his junior. He kept himself together during years of North Vietnamese torture and solitary confinement. When he sits in the back of his campaign bus, we reporters gather like kids in the cafeteria huddling around the star quarterback. We ask him tough questions, and we try to make him slip up, but almost inevitably we come around to admiring him. He wants the challenge. He likes the give and take. He is, to put it simply, cooler than us.

It’s hard to tell if he’s serious or not. Either this is a brilliantly insightful parody of a major problem with American mass media today, or a particuarly egregious example of that problem. Analysis of the process by which we choose the leader of the free world shouldn’t be reduced to the level of high school social politics.

And yet, that’s exactly what we see in the media. John McCain seems to be the chosen one, and enjoys favorable media coverage even though voters seem largely indifferent to him.

And while we were all at the pep rally, oil futures hit $100 a barrel, we developed a huge trade deficit, and another year has gone by in Iraq claiming the lives of almost a thousand American soldiers and over twenty thousand Iraqi civilians.

Remember, many Americans voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because he was the candidate they most wanted to have a beer with. Al Gore was seen as too stuffy and a know-it-all. Are we really ready to make the same mistake again?

Today, the Nobel Prize winners are invited to the White House, which means that George W. Bush and Al Gore will meet face to face. Imagine that they have a private moment together.

What do they say? What should they say? What would you like to imagine that they say?

Feel free to answer as a one-liner, or to write a short dialogue.

From the American Research Group:

November 13, 2007 – Impeachment

A total of 64% of American voters say that President George W. Bush has abused his powers as president. Of the 64%, 14% (9% of all voters) say the abuses are not serious enough to warrant impeachment, 33% (21% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses, but he should not be impeached, and 53% (34% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses and Mr. Bush should be impeached and removed from office.

The respondents didn’t specify whether they were specifically referring to the administration’s policy on torture. They didn’t say if they were talking about how they cherry-picked intelligence to justify a wrong-headed war, or how they compromised national security by outing a covert CIA operative, merely as retribution for her husband calling them on their lies. The respondents may not have been specifically responding to warrantless wiretapping and secret military tribunals. They may have simply been thinking of how the administration handed over all government regulation to the industries being regulated. The data doesn’t say. All they were asked was if President Bush abused his power, and 64% said he did. The data also doesn’t show what the other 36% were thinking.

When you look at the data, though, something else is striking.

I’m surprised, though I guess I shouldn’t be, that so few people gave Response 2. Imagine a graph of this data. Usually a distribution like this would slope up, slope down, or rise in the middle like a bell curve. That this data set has such a sharp dip in the middle is a testament to just how polarizing this president has been. 64% of Republicans feel that President Bush has not abused his powers as president at all, while 50% of Democrats feel he should be impeached for it.

Also, more than one-fifth of respondents in general felt that his abuses had risen to the level of an impeachable offense, but that he shouldn’t be impeached. Isn’t that being soft on crime? Or perhaps we just remember the last time an opposition Congress impeached a sitting president, and are unwilling to go through all of that again, even if it’s warranted this time.

Because for 36% of the population, warrants are sooooo 20th century.

Ro has a thought-provoking post about the relationship between learning something and knowing it. Before I address that question, it might be worth taking a moment to consider what it means to know something.

What do we mean when we say we know something? For the individual, it might be the same as saying we unequivocally believe it. But is that enough? If Iago believes his wife has been unfaithful, and he has no evidence to support his belief, does that count as knowledge? Probably not.

Socrates argued that a belief must be justified to be considered knowledge. Othello might say that he knows his wife Desdemona has been faithful, because he has reason to believe in her love and trustworthiness. His belief is justified. But that doesn’t necessarily make it true, and so that probably doesn’t count as knowledge either. Knowledge must be both true and justified.

When we say someone else knows something, that might mean that they believe it and we believe it too. If Iago uses manufactured evidence to manipulate Othello into believing that Desdemona has been having an affair with Cassio, Othello can say that he knows that Desdemona has been unfaithful, because his belief is justified by evidence that has been presented to him. But we would not say that Othello knows it. He still believes it, but we do not.

Which brings us to the Gettier problem. Imagine that while Othello is being manipulated by Iago, Desdemona has been secretly having an affair with the Duke. Othello makes the statement that he knows Desdemona has been unfaithful. Does he know it? This time, his belief is both true and justified. And yet Gettier would not count this as knowledge, because Othello’s belief, while true and justified, is based on false evidence. He has no knowledge of the actual affair. Robert Nozick would point out that if the statement weren’t true, Othello would still believe it.

Now let’s go back and look at the question originally posed by Ro, which has to do with the relationship between knowledge and learning. If I say I learned something, that means I know it, which means I believe it. If I say you learned something, that means you believe it and I believe it. For example, President Bush got into a bit of trouble for including the following in the 2003 State of the Union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

By citing the British government, Bush’s speechwriters sought to insulate the administration from claims they already knew were false. But by using the word “learned” they implied the word “knew” which means that Bush was essentially saying that he also believed that the statement was true. It was later discovered that the statement was not true, and that the Bush administration was aware it was not true at the time the speech was written. Saying “The British government has learned” did not provide the out they were hoping it would.

Ro’s other question was whether knowing something implies that one has learned it. A strict empiricist might say yes, but even John Locke allowed for some a priori knowledge gained through reason alone. The classic example is from René Descartes: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Is this knowledge? Was it learned?

Finally, I can also attest that it is possible to have learned something and not know it. I demonstrate this condition several times every day.

In a “Pic Tac Toe” puzzle, there are nine pictures in a three-by-three grid, like Tic-Tac-Toe. In each row, column, and diagonal, there is a common theme that unites the three pictures. The challenge is to find the eight themes.

You can click on each image to see a larger version:

NOTE: Pictures 4 and 6 carry a watermark from iStockphoto. This is not part of the puzzle.

Please post whatever you come up with in the comments section.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Correct themes provided by Neel Mehta (1) and Annalisa (6). See comments for all answers.

I know this blog has been overly focused on politics lately, but I’m really bothered and I need to vent yet again.

I’m not bothered that the President failed to disclose a serious medical condition to the American people for a year. If that was the worst thing he did as President, he’d be Jed Bartlet.

I’m not bothered when right-wing commentators call for another 9/11 to “save America” from spirited debate over policy issues and return to a more unified time when everyone was crazed with fear and ready to do whatever the President wanted. Fear is what these people do best.

I’m not bothered by a member of the current administration’s Civil Rights Commission pondering a return to Korematsu. It’s not like he was advocating it, after all.

I’m not bothered that the Secretary of Education would rather read Harry Potter than Shakespeare. Shakespeare can be difficult, and I’ve heard good things about the Harry Potter books. Even the Shakespeare Teacher likes to relax with some lighter fare every now and then.

No, gentle readers, the Republicans aren’t bothering me so much anymore. I think by now we all pretty much know what to expect from them.

It’s the Democrats who totally caved on warrantless wiretapping that are bothering me:

Buckling in the face of familiar scare tactics – and looking to go on vacation – Congress caved on domestic surveillance this past weekend. It handed the White House temporary authority to monitor, without warrants, Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail.

Which brings me to Al Gore. In my opinion, Al Gore is the only person in the country who 1) gets it, and 2) has a strong chance of winning the Presidency.

Because of this, he has a moral obligation to run. He has laid out the most serious challenges facing us today and we have listened. But he may be the only person who can be the change he wants to see in the world. He can’t honestly think that giving a Keynote presentation on climate change can compare to actually being the President. So what’s going on? Is he biding his time, allowing all of us to beg him to run, rather than entering the race now and becoming a target? Or is honestly not planning to run?

I’m bothered by the current state of politics in this country. I’m bothered by the abusive Republicans and the enabling Democrats. And you know what? So is he. So I’ll wrap up this post by linking to rundammit.com, because I’m sick and tired of being bothered by this sorry excuse for a government we have failing to run this country.

It’s time, Al. Step up.

I caught the Republican debate this morning.  Bush and Cheney were praised for keeping us safe for the last six years.

Actually, for the past six years, an average of over 500 Americans have died each year on American soil in 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Think about it.

The problem here – well, in addition to all of O’Reilly’s usual problems – is that he seems unaware, or pretends to be unaware, of the difference between an online community forum like Daily Kos and traditional corporate-owned pre-Internet media. Inviting users to participate in an interactive, Web 2.0 medium doesn’t make you automatically agree with everything they post to your site. If it did, there would be very little reason to do it.

O’Reilly even seems unaware of the comments left by people on his own site. Again, it’s possible that he just chooses not to be aware or he pretends not to be aware. But given O’Reilly’s demographic and the hate he peddles, it’s not hard to imagine that O’Reilly has more than a few viewers who would be willing to express views in a public forum that even O’Reilly wouldn’t want to be associated with.

I don’t consider comments on the O’Reilly site as coming from O’Reilly himself. It’s inappropriate for O’Reilly to use the comments on blogs or the postings of Kos diarists to compare progressive blogs to the Nazis and KKK.

The rebuttal to this lunacy was, of course, put best by Stephen Colbert:

Exactly. The Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were both notorious for allowing people to express unpopular views in an open and free forum.

And that basically sums it up. If O’Reilly wants to make the argument that people who instigate hate are responsible for all of the comments and opinions of their followers, he’s free to do so. But then, we’ll all need to have a word with O’Reilly himself.