Link Banana

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has news that’s galling and/or obvious. Bill Clinton got more media coverage last week than any Republican candidate or John Edwards.

Obama edged Hillary Clinton by the narrowest of margins. But her surrogate and husband—whose aggressive attacks on Obama and increasingly conspicuous role have been manna for political pundits—was the third-most prominent newsmaker in the race for President last week, January 21 through 27. That period began two days after the Nevada caucuses and ended the day after the Democrats’ South Carolina primary.

(via The Page)

As that rather straight-forward title indicates, the piece from More Intelligent Life is by turns profane and risque. That said it’s also fascinating.

This list, where he names names but gives no details, Keynes organized year-by-year. He was scrupulously honest, too, even in times of sexual famine. For three years running—1903 to 1905—he records no sexual partners; ‘nil,’ he admitted. As he became older, though, the number of his partners increased dramatically, so that for 1911 he lists eight partners (although half of these are probably one-time pick-ups), for 1915 he lists seven, and for 1913 (his highest score) he lists nine different partners. One or two men are repeaters: DG (Duncan Grant), for example, runs throughout.

The other sex diary is more puzzling and, in a way, more informative. An economist to the core, Keynes organized the second sex diary also year-by-year, but this time in quarterly increments.

Unfortunately for us, however, this second sex diary is in code. And as far as I know, no one yet has been prurient enough to crack it.

(via kottke)

As we eagerly anticipate President Bush’s final State of the Union (right?), Jacob Weisberg takes an interesting look at whatever happened to “compassionate conservatism.”

To this day, Mr. Bush’s compassionate conservatism has never vanished completely. Some of Mr. Bush’s signature programs, like his initiative to provide AIDS drugs to Africans, have had meaningful effects. But others haven’t lived up to their rhetorical promise. What about that special training for defense lawyers in capital cases (pledged in his 2005 State of the Union address)? The initiative to encourage mentoring for at-risk children (2006)? The grants to extend health insurance coverage (2007)? Such gestures tended to linger in the air only as long as it took Mr. Bush to make them.

In last week’s Newsweek column — I’m rather out-of-date where offline reading is concerned — Fareed Zakaria argues that all the presidential candidates, both Republicans and Democrats, are having the wrong discussion about Iraq. He also offer a way forward:

The most intelligent strategy for the United States now is a combined political and military one. If we are to engage in peacekeeping, the operation needs to be internationally recognized, sanctioned and supported—as it was in Bosnia. We should call an international conference on Iraq and get the support of other countries—crucially Iraq’s neighbors—for this new mission. There should then be a joint international push to get the Iraqis to make the kinds of political deals that will turn the ceasefires into lasting peace. Over the next year if the violence continues to decline, countries like India, Poland and South Africa could be persuaded to relieve American troops. With sustained and focused efforts, over time, American forces could draw down substantially. The mission could then become what it was always billed as, a genuinely international effort to assist the Iraqi people in founding a new nation.

TV Guide’s strike data’s been updated, and there seems to be little that’s any good left. It looks like the only scripted shows I watch that still have reserves are Scrubs and The New Adventure of Old Christine — which is coming back next Monday.

(via TV Squad)

There are two ways — actually more, but these two are the most interesting — to read Howard Kurtz’s column about Obama and the media. It’s either a fawning look at a campaign that doesn’t spin the media or an indictment of a media so enchanted that they don’t need to be spun. Either way you read it, Mr. Kurtz offers an interesting portrait.

The Clinton camp, says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, “is hyperbolic about it. What we don’t do is spend six hours a day trying to persuade you guys that red is green or up is down… . Their own spin was ‘We are the biggest, baddest street gang on the block.’

“We can’t be pacifists and cede the battlefield,” Axelrod says, but “what’s powering this campaign is a rejection of tactical politics.”

“That’s the best spin I’ve heard all day,” replies Clinton communications chief Howard Wolfson, inviting Axelrod to “send over some leather jackets.” “My sense is the Obama campaign spends eight hours a day spinning.” Clinton, for her part, abandoned her inaccessible approach after losing Iowa, scheduling far more time each day for interviews and press conferences. “She felt it was the best way to talk to the American people,” Wolfson says.

Paul Krugman wants to bring the rapidly inflating post-partisanship balloon that’s carrying Obama upward in for closer examination. And whether he’s being a realist or a killjoy, he’s got some interesting things to say.

First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).

The point is that while there are valid reasons one might support Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton, the desire to avoid unpleasantness isn’t one of them.

I’d struggle to see this as anything but a good thing:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel promised the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Sunday that Israel would no longer disrupt the supply of food, medicine and necessary energy into the Gaza Strip and intended to prevent a “humanitarian disaster” there.

Joel Johnson takes a novel approach to celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lego: he lists the nine Lego sets he’s wanted most during his life. It’s fun read, and a reminder of when I too yearned for Lego sets more than any other toys.

I admit, I’m morbidly fascinated by the life that has been taken on by the psuedo-intellectual name calling of Jonah Goldberg and his latest book Liberal Fascism. The latest one to address it is Slate’s Timothy Noah.

Modern liberalism, he argues, is linked to Nazism because both contain a cult of the organic (Hitler was a vegetarian) and both embrace sexual freedom (Himmler ordered his men “to father as many children as possible without marrying” in order to achieve the Aryan ideal). Eventually, Goldberg backs himself into asserting, in effect, that any government that does more than prevent abortions and provide for the common defense is inherently fascist. Granted, he gives a wide berth to the common defense. In a token criticism of President George W. Bush, Goldberg cites as evidence of fascist influence not the de facto suspension of habeas corpus and refusal to follow the Geneva Conventions, which go unmentioned, but rather Bush’s extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs.

Making a case similar to Mr. Brilliant’s, The Economist argues that the situation in the world’s better than most think, and still improving.

Indeed, for a great many people the way things are is pretty rotten: Burmese monks, for instance, or the Luo in Kenya. Life is not too bright for investors at the moment, either. But is the broader proposition true? Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? We argue that it is not.

To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise.

This is slightly more academic than most stuff I post, but it’s also rather interesting. Tony Judt reconsiders the history of the Shoah — that’s the Holocaust to most — on the western psyche and people in general.

Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke —the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality— or “banalization”—that we face today.

I finally got around to making this site’s feed (it’s this post’s title link) work a little better. I’ve configured it so that you don’t have to click through to this site to visit the pages I’m linking to. They’re now in your feed reader right under the title — right now the link has the clever text of “Title Link.”(see below). This doesn’t work exactly as I’d like, but it works significantly better than it did, which is certainly a good thing. I also have to thank Justin Tadlock for providing the impetus for finally making this work.

EDIT: I’ve changed it so that the title link has the same text as the title (though it obviously links to a different place). Though this still isn’t quite what I want, it’s the same result as one gets with Tumblr, which makes it at least a little more acceptable to me.

Nicolas Kristof, who came back from book leave just as Tom Friedman went on it, has an interesting counterpoint to Mr. Friedman’s Generation Q (of which I was no fan):

In the ’60s, perhaps the most remarkable Americans were the civil rights workers and antiwar protesters who started movements that transformed the country. In the 1980s, the most fascinating people were entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who started companies and ended up revolutionizing the way we use technology.

Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs “The Power of Unreasonable People.”

The Economist does an admirable job highlighting the complicated issues of bankers’ bonuses. Many bloggers (and others) have taken issue with the big bonuses that departing CEOs are getting even as their banks are floundering.

The system is not perfect, of course. A debate about how compensation policies might encourage bankers to think more about the long term and the overall health of the business is welcome. Greater use of stock options is one possibility: banks that fared worst in the subprime saga, such as Merrill, UBS and Citigroup, have all been forced to increase the equity component of compensation packages. But options have their own flaws, as examples in other industries readily show; and in any case the chances of an industry-wide overhaul of compensation practices (the only way that meaningful change will happen) are slim. The bloggers will be raging for a while yet.

If they’re right — and we can only hope they are — this is great.

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn’t interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

“It’s not five years away, it’s not 10 years away. It’s affordable, and it’s now,” said Wes Bolsen, the company’s vice president of business development.

Unfortunately, the idea’s at least a year away from producing meaningful quantities.

There’s little doubt that the Democratic fight has gotten ugly over the last few weeks. Slate’s John Dickerson has some advice that could probably help Mr. Obama a great deal.

Obama could change the tone by talking about policy ideas, but his biggest, boldest idea is that he’s going to change the tone of the debate. So, whatever alchemy he was going to employ when he became president to solve Washington’s most intractable problems, he should probably employ now to help himself. I’m not setting the bar too high for him. This is the bar he has set for himself.

So, how does Obama do this? As the paradigm-shifter, only he knows. But the answer doesn’t lie in a sharp comment to a reporter or some perfect rejoinder at the next debate, on Jan. 31. He needs a media moment to wrap his response to all of the Clinton claims about him (particularly the fair and reasonable ones) into his bigger campaign themes.

For a similar piece that’s more angry — or honest if you prefer — about the Clintons, try Bob Herbert’s editorial from this morning.

Though I’ve known of this for a while — being a resident of the state — I finally decided that if it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s good enough for Link Banana. The Representative, Douglas Bruce, has been censured by his colleagues. I also like the Times history of western lawmakers.

The situation harks back to a day when Western statehouses were halls of brawling, boozing and ill repute. Some legislatures, like that of neighboring New Mexico, have not entirely shed that reputation. But though political divisions can be bitter here, modern-day Colorado lawmakers have mostly remained civil toward one another.

Parag Khanna has an interesting piece in the forthcoming New York Times Magazine about America’s declining influence in the world. Though I think he does overreach — seeming to favor unrealistic certainty (which sometimes becomes outright alarmism) over necessary nuance — his broad narrative rings true.

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

If you lack the patience to read the whole thing, I’d recommend his policy priorities as the most interesting bit.

It’s almost as clever as it is scary.

Savvy criminals are using some of the country’s most credible logos, including FedEx, Wal-Mart, DirecTV and the U.S. Border Patrol, to create fake trucks to smuggle drugs, money and illegal aliens across the border, according to a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

(via kottke)