Friday, July 31, 2009
Books / Politics / News Sound Smart, Read These: Good News, Bad News, and Getting Passed by China
Posted by Mark Asch on Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 4:12 PM
This week's state-of-healthcare-reform piece comes from The Economist.
So China has a $1.5 trillion stake in the federal government. How did we get here, and where are we going?
Plus, a few looks at China's nascent, impressive commitment to wind power. Man, central planning.
Something that people have recently started to pay attention to: the Obama administration has been even more blatant than the Bush administration about assigning ambassadorships to people whose main qualification is that they raised a shit-ton of money for the Obama campaign. ("Obama may appoint more career diplomats in the future", Chris Beam wrote in late May. And, of course, he may not.)
That said, as President, Obama is deeply engaged in creating, and coordinating, foreign policy and diplomatic strategy on all fronts.
For what it's worth, Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds and the rest of Mossad could have captured Josef Mengele in the early 60s, if they had really wanted to. This is an interesting look at how, and why, an intelligence program sets and resets is priorities (and a reminder of how Mossad is like the CIA only scary-good at their jobs).
Booker winner John Banville, aka thriller writer Benjamin Black, makes a Freudian slip that reveals anew the divisions between literary and genre ficiton.
New Fiction: "Li Ling", by Atsushi Nakajima, from the most recent issue of A Public Space, Brooklyn's best lit mag.
Old clip: Roger Angell, Frank Deford and George Will talk about the McGwire-Sosa home run chase on Charlie Rose, during a more innocent time.
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