New tradition here, since I often do short notes on articles I find in Reader (recent updates at right), I figured once a week I would highlight some of the key posts of the week in the blog.

Without further ado, some of the best notes of the week:

Rise of the Sea Turtles | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com

Rise of The Sea Turtles

Photos: Tony Law / Redux for Newsweek

The Expat Life: Novelist Zhao Chuan (left) says the Internet makes it easier for Overseas Chinese to avoid Western influences. Film teacher Shu Haolun (right) thinks some nationalism is simple homesickness.

Race Card - What Race Card?

I have been stewing over this issue for several months and I have finally put the proper words to the thoughts I have been accumulating. My central thought is that there is no race card in this campaign because Senator Obama does not fall into one of the categories of racial antagonisms in this country. Simply put, he is neither White nor Black; his father is Kenyan and his mother is American. Therefore, by definition, Barack Obama is not African-American; rather, he is an American citizen that has an African person as a father.

Negative ads: They really do work (Mark J. Penn/The Politico)

Mark J. Penn / The Politico:
Negative ads: They really do work  —  Clever negative advertising works.  That is reality.  —  The tactic meets with media and pundit disapproval and spawns accusations of negativity, but the reality is that a clever negative ad can be devastatingly effective.

Welcome to the start of a new segment on the blog I’m going to call Unhelpful Words.

The idea? There are words that have infiltrated our political discourse that are entirely unhelpful in a policy-based context. They provide no substance, context, or otherwise about the political figure the word refers to. At best, one might say the word refers to a “feeling” or an “impression” people have of the person, but if I wanted to hear about feelings I’d go watch Dr. Phil, not the Situation Room.

So, in that light, today’s word is: arugula. Wikipedia makes no mention of the context of the word, only noting that in the US it is considered as “belonging to a niche market.” While not explicitly political, much of the political use of the word can be derived from the niche concept, where it’s used to try an indicate elitism and out-of-touch-ness with common people.

Thus, the purpose of this word in political discourse is to create a sense of separateness between the politician at hand and the people. It has absolutely nothing to do with policy, nothing to do with beliefs held by the figure, and nothing to do with anything that would actually impact the lives of voters in the future.

In the way that some issues are considered “wedge issues,” you might consider arugula a “wedge word,” designed to offer no increased understanding between people. As such, I have to deem the word aruluga an entirely unhelpful word for political discourse.

Bill Moyers had a column out recently about the decline of the fourth estate. His column goes on to express concerns over media consolidation and support network neutrality. In my opinion, he should have focused more on the big picture evolution of the fourth estate.

I think most people would agree that the operation of a “press” is vital for a good republic. However, I think Moyers (and others) have gotten a very fixed picture of what “the press” looks like into their heads. Newspapers, television news, magazines, and maybe a few of the more reputable blogs seem to count, and should be preserved for the good of the nation at great cost.

However, I would be interested in taking a more abstract look at the fourth estate. What do we think the founders meant by a “press?” What process were they trying to protect? Surely they weren’t in the business of protecting any specific industry… to my knowledge “the press” as we understand it today didn’t exist in any syndicated fashion back then. So what were they after? At present, I think it was primarily enumerated to ensure that free speech applied to the written word as well as its spoken counterpart. Since that freedom isn’t really at stake, I think people are more concerned about another function the fourth estate has taken on, the watchdog of government and society.

Like many among my generation, I think that the Internet can replace this function of the present press. It has already had cannibalizing effects on newspapers, broken stories ahead of cable news, and provided deeper analysis of a single story than any nightly broadcast could hope to cover. In many ways, it has beaten news as we know it at its own game. However, viewed as the new fourth estate, the Internet isn’t without its drawbacks, including a surplus of ditto-heads, irrational and hateful commentors, and unverified rumors that can spread like wildfire.

Despite these drawbacks, I believe the Internet can become the new fourth estate, so long as we implement some new institutions to help it along. I’ll detail my ideas for these institutions in coming posts, but if you think I’m already off track feel free to let me know in the comments.

1. Perspective
2. Context
3. Proof

• Scientifically verifiable
• Generally agreed upon without argument
• Very narrow in scope
• Viewpoint-neutral

As a technical update, I’ve been toying around with what combination of tools would work best with how I want to express myself. If you’re interested in keeping up, my FriendFeed page catches everything from Amazon wish list changes to blog posts to tweets.

My current plan, subject to daily revision, is to keep the brief comments on articles in the blogosphere on my Google Reader page, where I can easily comment and read in the same place. Bigger articles, with more research and thought, should end up here.There may be a little twittering in there, but that’s yet to be determined.

Anyone else found a good combination of web services that fits their needs?

So I came across this NPR piece today on “E-Politics.” For the most part, I like it. I do think that the Internet will change the political landscape, and I also think we need a better deployment for broadband across the US (though how to do that is up for debate). However, I came across this quote from Arianna Huffington towards the end of the piece:

“The pursuit of truth, no matter what, without any kind of flavor — that has always been the heart of good journalism,” said Huffington, whose Huffington Post site has become a destination for political junkies. “And we proved that when we posted a story, which was reported by one of our citizen journalists, Mayhill Fowler, during a fundraiser in San Francisco, which turned out to be Obama’s ‘bitter gate’ as it is now known.”

As I read it over, I had to ask myself a couple of things.

First, is it really plausible to pursue truth without any flavor? I’m of the camp that thinks we all bring our own perspectives and experiences to any situation, leading to differences in how we view any given event. I know journalism’s aim in the past has been to report truth without bias, but I’m just not sure that’s possible. Besides, if we aggregate a number of different viewpoints together and find their commonalities, we may get more than we would have by aiming for some flavorless version of truth.

Second, the “bitter gate” story was good journalism? In what way? What “truth” did that story uncover? The most I could see that came out of it was that pundits speculated for a few weeks on whether Obama was elitist, or hated religion, or hated guns, or all three. At the end of the day, that story hasn’t brought us any closer to anything I would call truth.

In my view, the most important thing journalists should be looking for in a campaign is clues to how the presidential candidates would govern. That’s a tough job, sure. It’s a lot easier to lean back and comment on that surface value character traits and how this “will affect voters perceptions of the candidate.” It’s easier to go on and on about which candidate is more “electable” rather than how each candidate’s approach would concretely affect the country.

In my view, when this happens frequently enough, people begin projecting future outcomes anyway, but based only on these character stories. This would be fine if it wasn’t so inaccurate and completely unnecessary provided journalists ask for and report on the right things.

I think we need to clarify what kind of truth we should be getting from the news, because if bitter gate is the standard we’re aspiring to, then political debate in this country is not going in a good direction.

So I ran into a poll on the politics section of Facebook today.

Aside from the obvious lack of an “other” category, I have a more basic problem wiht this poll. Why is ABC (who runs the politics section of Facebook) pushing people into believing that deep down they’re really single issue voters? In my opinion, reality is more complicated than any single issue. I would hope that when voters go to the polls they have that complexity in mind, rather than only focusing on their pet topic.

In a democracy that thrives on diversity and complexity like ours, the last thing we need is polls reassuring us that deep down, we don’t really need to think beyond one issue.

I’ve got a problem with “flip flopping.” Not with politicians changing their minds, but rather with the practice of labeling anyone who changes their position on something a flip flopper. It’s gotten to the point where politicians are afraid to take a stand on anything for fear of being accused of a different stance later. And when later does come, they usually lie and make up some bad excuse about having never said it or having simply been mistaken rather than talk about reasons and trade offs that weighed in light of present circumstances led them to different conclusions.

Quite frankly, I want a politician who has the ability to think, reason, assess, and change his or her mind through time. I think that’s a valuable skill. Why do we have to brand the leaders that we elect for periods of time in some unchangeable fashion? It’s considered a big scoop in the news: “Oh he says this now, but what he really believed five years ago was a 180. Let’s go to the video…”

Which view is real?

This post prompted my thoughts on this topic. The post criticizes Obama for a 180 on the DC gun ban. I couldn’t see the video he linked to because YouTube pulled it down too fast, but I’m betting Obama, doing the typical politician thing these days, denied ever having said the law was Constitutional, and the video likely pointed out that he had.

This case makes me especially angry, because the Constitutionality of the law in question had yet to be decided. Was it not enough for Obama to simply give his opinion on the Constitutionality of the ban before and note afterword that we cede these decisions to the Supreme Court which saw the issue differently? Do we really need to expect issue perfection at all times from our politicians and lambast them if they ever see that things change?

Something’s been nagging at me lately. I’m wondering how we can ever hold a president up to the standards (or even just statements) that they make during a campaign.

Perhaps it’s unfortunate, but George W. Bush has been the first president I’ve been politically conscious for. This isn’t unfortunate for any specific policy, but because he did such a complete reversal on the positions he ran on in 2000. He ran on a platform of no nation building and less interference in the rest of the world whereas today we’re more out there than ever. He wanted to lift all boats with a different tax plan, but has stuck with it regardless of the increasing inequality in American incomes.

Using those ideas as examples of the larger point, how do we trust how a president will govern by the campaign he or she runs? If the administration can do a complete 180 with the only recourse being a Daily Show segment (embed below), then what else can normal people do to ensure presidents will keep their word? Leave some ideas in the comments.