Link Banana

Aside from hiring Kal Penn, President Obama recently reached an agreement with the Russians about arm limitation. I found Slate’s explanation of the logic behind the agreed target sobering.

U.S. military planners dream up a variety of hypothetical conflicts with other nuclear powers and determine how many warheads would be required to destroy all the most important targets in each scenario.

It’s that time of year.

• One sentence commencement speeches. (Scroll up to see the speech Frank Warren gave at St. Mary’s.) (via Neatorama)
• Obama’s ASU commencement, the best I’ve encountered this year. (Parts 2 & 3; Text)
• Perhaps stealing a theme from the President, Timothy Noah thinks commencement speakers are generally too accomplished.

Ross Douthat, who to little derision or attention has started having his column published in the New York Times, has a good summary of Obama’s apparent plan for “winning” America’s culture war:

Engage on abortion, punt on gay rights.

And just to say, if the first two weeks are any indication, Douthat’s going to be a great compliment to Brooks. The two most conservative columnists at the paper are very probably the best.

Perhaps it’s just because my opinions on embryos are so close to his, but William Saletan seems to me the most serious liberal writing about these difficult issues. His piece on the way to treat the President’s recent decision to overturn the embryonic stem cell ban is good. This part especially:

The danger of seeing the stem-cell war as a contest between science and ideology is that you bury these dilemmas. You forget the moral problem. You start lying to yourself and others about what you’re doing. You invent euphemisms like pre-embryo, pre-conception, and clonote. Your ethical lines begin to slide.

There is also a follow-up here.

Few would claim that President Obama’s recently released budget is less honest than those of his predessor. But only the ignorant would maintain it’s completely forthright. John Dickerson points out the major lies that it still tells.

“Those adjustments create much larger baseline deficit projections, making it easier to claim that the budget is an improvement over current policy,” says Susan Tanaka, a longtime budget expert working for the Peterson Foundation. As a political matter, if an administration can show that it’s making progress shrinking the deficit, it gains political capital in the fight for resources because it can claim the moral high ground for making tough decisions and being a good steward of public funds.

June Thomas informs us that current literature suggest it’s a Secret Service agent.

Also: Tim, noting the sidebar links to a woman fascinated by Obama’s Secret Service detail and a short note about the  broader idea of “protection porn,” sees the genre as an allegory for all romantic relationships.

David Brooks worries, in a troubling coherent piece, that the incoming President may have already bitten off more than he’ll be able to successfully manage. The conclusion sent chills down my spine:

By this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one.

Interestingly, Paul Krugman’s piece (also from Friday’s paper) argues that the incoming administration needs to do even more.

Even if soon-to-be-president Obama wants to close the prison at the naval base, he’s got a nearly Hereculean set of problems ahead of him. Just one example:

Where should the remaining detainees be held? The new administration will presumably have to hold the remaining suspected terrorists in facilities in the United States. But where? They will likely end up in a prison on a military base, since it would be unsafe to hold them in normal prison populations. But few states will want to house Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his friends. And members of Congress will give NIMBY-ism a whole new meaning when it comes to keeping them out of their districts.

I, like most of Clay Shirkey’s students, hadn’t seen this video from the election season. His explanation of it’s power is interesting:

Dear Mr. Obama was a trifecta. For the base, a muscular but polite attack on the very issue that brought Obama into the spotlight. For the undecided, the emotional charge is much likelier to sway them than argumentation. And for the Dems — nothing. The video might as well not have existed for all it was seen in Democratic circles. Since the video’s sole speaker can’t be criticized without making the criticizer look churlish at best, almost no Dems forwarded it, linked to it, talked about it.

(via Chris Bodenner)

The Economist provides a handy charts with the odd on where President Obama will visit first. Britain’s way ahead, if you’re too lazy to click.

Truly living up to it’s name, Strange Maps offers the stunning overlay of those areas that were the greatest cotton producers in 1860 — and thus had the largest slave populations — and those areas most strongly for the election of Barack Obama. Proof that if nothing else, history lives on.

Also, I’d love to hear some theories about that high-producer on Tennessee’s southern border that’s now solidly red. Is that a city? — my geography of the South is pretty bad.

My two favorite errata to have resulted from last Tuesday:

• This headline.
• and this photo.

Bob Greene asks voters to say something nice about the man they’re not voting for in the presidential election. (This would have made a good video.)

(via Waxy)

This shouldn’t shock anyone, but Slate’s staff is overwhelmingly pro-Obama. Bob Barr is getting as many votes from them as John McCain. And four times more people can’t vote as are voting for either of those two.

I’d love to see more publications try this out. I’d like to know the score at Time or The Economist.

Though I dislike having to repeatedly click to see the series, Jason Kottke’s right that this is a rather good set of photos of Barack Obama.

Robert Frank points to new evidence he was right all along:

According to a new survey by Prince & Associates, voters worth $1 million to $10 million are favoring Sen. John McCain, while voters worth $30 million or more are favoring Sen. Barack Obama. …

The reason? Taxes.

(via Ideas)

David Brooks seems to have captured the essence of Barack Obama’s stage presence and what good or bad it might tell us about his presidency.

That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan.

This was not evident back in the “fierce urgency of now” days, but it is now. And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

Of course, it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island. New presidents are often amazed by how much they are disobeyed, by how often passive-aggressiveness frustrates their plans.

Elizabeth Dickenson has her list of campaign cliches she could do without. #1 is an ax I’ve been grinding myself.

1)  Wall Street to Main Street. I know the financial crisis affects me and that bashing bankers wins you applause. What I’d rather hear? A solid explanation of how the bailout will work (or won’t), how it will be paid for, and how it will affect government spending in the next administration.

An interesting bit of cocktail chatter, if nothing else:

Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president, has filed a lawsuit in Texas demanding Senators John McCain and Barack Obama be removed from the ballot after they missed the official filing deadline.

“The seriousness of this issue is self-evident,” the lawsuit states. “The hubris of the major parties has risen to such a level that they do not believe that the election laws of the State of Texas apply to them.”

(via Slashdot)

Two semi-scientific surveys point to the facts that:

• Democratic presidents have been historically better for the economy than Republicans.
• A survey of 500 economists by Scott Adams (he of Dilbert fame) shows them more likely to favor Obama’s economic policies, nearly 2-to-1. (via /., Tyler Cowen comments)

Feel free to read as much and as little bias into these items as you wish.