Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Will Bush pardon himself pre-emptively on his last day of office?
Monday is finally the last day ever of George Bush's presidency, and there's a nasty rumor floating around about it: that he will take the opportunity to issue a blanket pardon for both himself and his entire cabinet, for any laws it might be discovered in the future they broke during the course of his administration. You know -- torture, illegal wiretapping, racially-based deliberate withholding of aid to the American South after Hurricane Katrina, basically all the stuff that is just now starting to trickle out about what exactly was going on behind closed doors at the White House in the 2000s, a trickle that is sure to become a flood in 2009 as those people finally leave power and cannot exact retribution against the whistle-blowers. Technically a US President can indeed pardon themselves from ever getting prosecuted for crimes they committed as President; just that no President in history has ever even considered doing such a thing. What will happen Monday? We'll see.

Scandal! RNC candidate linked to not-insanely-radical political group!
Only the Republican Party in the 2000s, I'm telling you....Turns out that Michael Steele, a top-tier candidate for the head of the RNC (elections in just another week or two) has suddenly had his candidacy threatened over a surprise scandal -- turns out he's linked to the Republican Leadership Council, a conservative group that's not quite conservative enough for the mostly radical conservatives currently trying to take over the party. "They've taken meetings with Planned Parenthood! They're committed to destroying family values! How can we possibly elect this man as head of the RNC?!" Yeah, Republicans, you keep right on espousing that kind of attitude; the longer you do, the longer you'll never be a serious threat to the profoundly growing Democratic Party, and the sooner we'll finally move into what historians call the seventh "party system" of American politics (i.e. essentially another one-party "Age of Common Sense" era, much like the second system between 1812 and 1860).

Does global economic meltdown finally disprove Ayn Rand once and for all?
The (liberal-biased) History News Network pens a nice op/ed today, based on a new academic paper in France that's been getting a lot of attention: both it and this essay argue that the recent economic meltdown has finally once and for all disproved Modernist philosopher Ayn Rand's theory of Objectivism, as manifested in such perennial undergrad favorites as "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." And it's not just the idea of capitalism as a global cure-all that's been disproved either, they argue; the more important detail is Rand's belief that capitalists will regulate their own ethics and morality under a free-market system, self-motivated to do so since their companies will fall apart otherwise. As we've now seen with the worldwide disaster known as subprime loans, this belief Rand had is simply not true, or so argues HNN; in an unregulated free-market system, these companies will simply keep committing greater and greater crimes until there's just nothing left. Interesting.

Even more amazing stats about the Library of Congress' first year at Flickr
Last week I mentioned that the Library of Congress has released a report regarding its first year of posting public-domain photos at Flickr's new experiment "The Commons;" and now their official blog has a lot more stats about how well it went. 4,600 photos posted; ten million views of them; 80 percent of them listed as a "favorite" among Flickr members; with 4,550 of them (or over 90 percent) now with community-added information about their subjects that didn't exist before; and most amazingly, now with 67,000 legitimate information "tags" added, and with less than 25 of them having to be removed for being inappropriate, defeating pretty much the loudest argument this project's critics had, that the pages would be overrun with spam and curse words. Fascinating results, and I think proof of just what a huge success the Flickr Commons has so far been.

Terry Gilliam to try making disastrous "Don Quixote" again
One of the most fascinating pieces of arts news I heard all week: Famed director Terry Gilliam has decided to take a crack again at his fabled disaster "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," which he tried making last decade but was famously shut down just five days into shooting for all kinds of nightmarish reasons, all of it caught for the award-winning documentary "Lost in La Mancha." Even more fascinating, Gilliam has announced that the film will be even better this time than originally planned, and that the premature disaster (and thus chance to mature as an artist) was the best thing that could've ever happened for the movie. Hmm!

Matthew Weiner finally works out details of 'Mad Men' contract
Short but good news from Hollywood: Matthew Weiner, creator of the brilliant "Mad Men," has finally worked out the details of his new contract with producer Lionsgate, essentially guaranteeing his involvement with the show for at least another two years. Well, hooray for that.

'Obama Army' officially announced
So what to do with those thirteen million email addresses Obama collected during the campaign, and the millions of liberal volunteers committed to his vision? Why, start a "grass-roots lobby" with them, of course, being run through the DNC and officially called "Organizing for America." And Obama's making no bones either about this being essentially a private ideological army; in fact, he himself admits that the main purpose of the group is to take the various initiatives he'll be proposing in his presidency, then to go out and "sell" them to their neighbors, their school board, their local city council, their local chamber of commerce, etc. It's INCREDIBLY smart of Obama to do this; it essentially allows him to gain broad national support for his agenda from the bottom up, not top-down like is usual with Washingtonian culture (i.e. do a backroom favor for a senator, so that he'll support your agenda), thus allowing him to avoid even more the cronyism that is rampant there.

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