Link Banana

If, like me, you’ve always wondered what technological wizardry allows for The Daily Show’s impressive ability to amass clips of political and media foibles, the answer is: very little. An explanation from a former researcher:

It’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era. Some Philips boxes, some Sonys. And because there’s a limited number of remote codes, when a staffer operates one, he has to hold the remote directly against that box’s IR receiver so that the beam doesn’t hit any of the other boxes (i.e., so he’s not inadvertently controlling multiple boxes at once). No joke!

(via Boing Boing)

After an appearance on The A Daily Show made him look silly to more people than will probably ever read his book, Liberal Fascism, Mr. Goldberg strikes back in a Los Angeles Times column.

Largely left on the cutting-room floor were some important points that might have made my book seem a bit more nuanced. When he railed about conservatives and gay marriage, I pointed out that in my book, I’m sympathetic to it. When he took shots at Republicans, I noted that I criticize the likes of President Bush and Pat Buchanan for being “right-wing progressives.”

I’m not sure I like mentioning The A Daily Show twice in one day (here’s the first instance), but this is too good to pass up. Jonah Goldberg, who has a new book called Liberal Fascism, was on last night and unjustly or not looked like an utter fool.

John Nagl, one of military’s most well-known members among civilians (he was on The Daily Show, for example), is leaving the service. Slate’s Fred Kaplan offers an interesting reason for the Army’s brain drain:

The prolonged and repeated tours in Iraq were among the reasons for the trend. This is not the case for Nagl. But he represents another problem that the all-volunteer military is facing—the growing influence of the modern soldier’s family. It’s not that more soldiers have families than was once the case; in fact, the numbers are about the same as they were 30 years ago. But it is the case that more men in the military are married to professional women. In the past, many, if not most, officers married women who had grown up in military families. (Gen. Petraeus married the daughter of West Point’s superintendent.) They knew what the gig was when they took it—the endless rotations, the life of never settling down in one place, of a career officer. Now, many officers’ wives (or, in the case of female officers, their husbands) have their own careers; they don’t want to spend years in Fort Riley, Kan., then a few years more in Fort Hood, Texas. And at some point in the trade-off between private and professional lives, the officer gives in to his or her spouse, takes a stable job, buys a house, and gets out of the service.