Dave Gilson

Senior Editor

San Francisco native, word wrangler, data cruncher, chart drawer, pun maker. Recent areas of interest: campaign finance, income inequality, prison riots.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @daudig

Dave Gilson has worked at Mother Jones since 2003. Previously, he worked for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Northern California bureau of the New York Times.

History Don't Know Much About Bush

—By Dave Gilson

| Fri Nov. 3, 2006 9:45 AM PST

The decider rides again. From George W. Bush's "interview" with Sean Hannity a couple days ago:

I enjoy making decisions. You know, there's something exciting about reading and studying history and realize you're making history with it. And one of the lessons, by the way, about when you read history is that, after your presidency, you know, it's going to take a while for the historians to fully understand the decisions you made, if you're making big decisions, and so therefore you don't worry about history.

I like to say there's a portrait of George Washington in the Oval Office. I often look at him. I've read three history books about him. And if they're still analyzing the No. 1 guy's presidency, old No. 43 needs to not worry about it.

In short, Bush seems to hope that his legacy will rest on a solid foundation of inscrutability. Take that, eggheads!

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Free Nuke Plans, Courtesy of the U.S. Gov't - Again

—By Dave Gilson

| Fri Nov. 3, 2006 9:29 AM PST

Today's New York Times reports that the federal government stuck plans for a nuclear weapon up on the Internet, free for the taking (until yesterday). The "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal" was set up at the behest of Congressional Republicans smarting from the failure to find WMD's in Iraq; the website, which contained 55,000 boxes of Saddam-era documents, was meant to be a post-facto freelance intelligence-gathering free-for-all. The Weekly Standard and conservative bloggers were big fans of this idea. But the cache also included what experts are calling a "basic guide to building an atom bomb." Oops. (Not that the amateur WMD-hunters are buying it: Jveritas, an Arabic-speaking blogger who has translated many documents, claims the prospect of, say, Iran using the nuclear plans is "a laughable idea.")

This is not the first time that Iraqi nuclear plans have been shared online by the U.S. government. As Kurt Pitzer reported in the September/October 2005 issue of Mother Jones, spin got the better of security when the military picked up Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the mastermind behind Saddam's nuclear centrifuge program in 2003:

On June 26, the CIA posted a press release about Obeidi's cache -- the most valuable WMD evidence the U.S. has yet obtained in Iraq -- on its official website. It also put up digital photos of the components and even one of the key centrifuge diagrams. The pictures, which [former U.N. weapons inspector David] Albright says could be "incredibly useful" to any regime trying to start a covert nuclear program, were online for almost a week -- long enough to be downloaded and made freely available on the Internet -- before the agency took them down. Literally buried for 12 years, some of Saddam's hoard of nuclear knowledge got out because of the U.S. government, not in spite of it.

Read the rest of the story here.

The Price of Bringing Them Home

—By Dave Gilson

| Thu Nov. 2, 2006 3:34 PM PST

Just a quick follow-up to the previous posting on the skyrocketing American casualties in Iraq. The Air Force is requesting $50 billion in emergency funding—that's an amount nearly half of its normal budget. The branch has been stretched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there's another reason it needs more cash:

Another source familiar with the Air Force plans said the extra funds would help pay to transport growing numbers of U.S. soldiers being killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Don't Call It Civil War - OK, How About Chaos?

—By Dave Gilson

| Wed Nov. 1, 2006 9:14 AM PST

Just about everything you need to know about the horrendous state of Iraq is captured in this PowerPoint slide, obtained by the New York Times. Here it is in a nutshell:

What bunch of freedom-hating doom-and-gloomers put this assessment out? None other than the U.S. Central Command.

What's in a Name?

The appalling appellations of babies, brands, and backronyms. See sources here.

—By Elizabeth Gettelman and Dave Gilson

| November/December 2006 Issue

THE NUMBER OF companies "re-branding" themselves has risen 15% since 2005.

AMONG 150 FICTITIOUS company names invented by a British satirical website in 2002, Ualeo, Ovisovis, and Bivium have since become the names of real companies.

ACCORDING TO a recent survey in Ad Week, consumers consider names starting with "B," "C," and "S" to be "traditional" while those starting with "Q," "V," "X," and "Z" are thought to be "innovative."

IN 2002, the holding company Axa changed its name to Xignux, because it "wanted to conserve the equity it held in the letter X."

[Read the full article]