I’m surprised that this story isn’t getting a little more play today. Huffington Post linked to it, but that’s about it. Nothing on Kevin Drum or on DailyKos. Yet.

I think it’s going to be big — here’s the nut stuff. The “two men” are Bill Clinton and Frank Giustra, a well-heeled mining executive who’s become buddies with the former president since he began donating to the Clinton Global Initiative:

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

As usual, TalkingPointsMemo is the exception. They’ve got a long piece on the NYTimes story and on another one from ABC News that I didn’t even know about. (Honestly, why do I bother reading any political blog other than TPM?)

I can’t see how the Clinton campaign isn’t going to be hurt by stuff like this. As has been said over and over by various pundits watching this race: lots of people remember the 1990s with fondness. But not too many people have much love for the rolling scandals, side-deals and over-wrought prevarication we had to listen to as part of having Bill Clinton as president. My prediction is that he’s going to turn out to be more and more of a liability as Hillary’s campaign moves on.

(Via We Make Money Not Art)

Taryn Simon makes pictures of the mundane things that turn out to be — or to represent — things that are damn important. The pictures in her new work An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar are like a catalog of the weird stuff you always new existed somewhere, but had never actually seen. In the first few documented on her website, you see a cryogenic freezing device, an inbred white tiger, a group of radioactive bars in storage, a Braille edition of Playboy, and the US Customs contraband room at JFK airport in New York City, which seems to be filled almost entirely with cheerfully decomposing fruit. The one after that is the legendary room where the Feds actually grow pot in Oxford Mississippi. I’ve included those two below.

I took this at the National Zoo a couple weeks ago. None of the voices you hear talking is me, and the light quality is a little off because of the fact that it’s indoors and there’s a pane of glass between me and the panda, but you can see nevertheless why people go nuts for these things.

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ObamaObamaObamaObamaObamaObama!

Pretty happy about tonight’s results in South Carolina…

I sure hope this can carry into Florida and that we’re not seeing just a “last gasp” as some would have it. The BlogFather illustrates the big problem with that for OB:

Everyone would bet that the Obama campaign has already made up its mind, and will ignore Florida, like he did Michigan. I don’t really see how that’s a winning strategy for Obama. Florida is different, first, because Obama is on the ballot in Florida, and second, because its Florida. Obama has won SC by a 20 percent plus blowout, but Clinton will be able to reverse that claim in FL. And what matters more, FL or SC? In the first big state to have a primary, a week ahead of Feb 5th, Clinton will be seen as victor over Obama.

The idea that he could skip Florida is a stretch, and I think Jerome’s right — given Clinton’s lead down there, I don’t see how he could keep away from the state, even if it’s supposed to be out of play. Clinton wins the thing and it’s a big news story, even if the vagaries of the DNC made Florida verboten to Democrats

From today’s NYTimes:

“We’re angry and they’re angry,” said John Maina, a stocky butcher, whose weapon of choice on Saturday was a 3-foot-long table leg with exposed screws.

This is the reality across much of Kenya, and it seems to be nothing short of ethnic cleansing. Mobs in Eldoret, Kisumu, Kakamega, Burnt Forest and countless other areas, including some of the biggest slums in Nairobi, have driven out people from opposing ethnic groups. Many neighborhoods that used to be mixed are now ethnically homogeneous.

Shudder…