It has everything you could ever want in a federal criminal fraud trial. It has oodles of money. It has international intrigue. It has lavish spending. It has innocent victims. It has a prosecutor talking to jurors about the defendants’ “naked greed.” It has a tie to our nation’s soldiers and the gear they wear. And it has, in the person of David H. Brooks, a villain perfectly suited for the modern media era’s court of public opinion.

It’s the year’s most entertaining trial you’ve probably never heard of. Why is that? Well, first, the showdown is taking place in the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn, and not in lower Manhattan, where the more famous federal courthouse is situated. Second, the Haitian tragedy has pulled resources away from coverage of domestic news. And, third, the story is a victim of the inexplicable cognitive dissonance which prompts news executives to cover some great stories and ignore others.

President Obama's statement to Diane Sawyer that he'd rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-termer is ricocheting all across the Internet this morning. It may be striking to hear it come directly from the president's lips, but it's worth nothing that, back in August, Congressman Leonard Boswell (Democrat, Iowa) told a town-hall gathering in his home state that Obama had said something to the exact same effect:

The president (said), 'I'm not going to kick the can down the road.' And he said that and I said, 'Well, that's something I'm kind of used to from southern Iowa, you know. I know about kicking the can down the road.' And he said, 'No, if it makes me a one-term president, I'm going to, we're going to take it on because the country is in need of us taking this on.' I respected that very much."

So, if Boswell is to believed, it's not exactly a new sentiment coming from the president.

Practically from the beginning of Internet time, the Guardian in London has been, among newspapers, the most aggressive and innovative adapter of the new medium. This is partly because it saw the possibility of playing on a much bigger stage than simply the UK—and, indeed, it has transformed itself, via the Internet, from a provincial, left-oriented paper into an international news brand.

Then, too, because of its unique structure—it’s backed by a trust whose other businesses are devoted to supporting the Guardian’s journalism—it seemed much more willing to experiment with the new medium. It saw early on that this was as much about journalism—and how the practice would change—as it was about business or technology.

Yesterday, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor, weighed in with a considered response to the Murdoch-led and New York Times to-follow paywall initiatives. Rusbridger’s point was twofold:

The Guardian stands to benefit, hugely so, from any move on the part of the Times to close itself behind a paywall—becoming the default online left-leaning quality paper.

• Suicide bombers set off three coordinated blasts minutes apart near three Baghdad hotels popular among Westerners and foreign journalists. Thirty-six have been killed and 71 left wounded, with the toll sure to rise. (New York Times, NPR, Washington Post)

• In an effort to open talks with the Taliban, a United Nations official has asked the Afghan government to consent to removing some top Taliban leaders from the U.N.’s list of terrorists. (New York Times)

• The Pakistani military will not mount an offensive in the North Waziristan region—where many Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives are believed to be in hiding—for at least six months. The lack of Pakistani troops in the region could hinder Obama’s efforts, and potentially lead to more C.I.A. drone strikes. (Washington Post)

• In a visit to India and Pakistan last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressed regrets to the Pakistani government for drastically cutting military ties to the capital in Islamabad at the end of the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. (Washington Post, LA Times)

On Saturday I heard through an entirely credible source in the London financial community that there was a rumor—“a strong rumor”—that Rupert Murdoch might be selling two of his newspapers in London, the Times and the Sunday Times.

Without much hesitation (actually none at all) I tweeted the rumor.

I knew that there were a variety of circumstances that could make this plausible. For one, there’s great disquiet within News Corp. about the Murdoch-imposed plan to erect paywalls around the papers—even on the part of Murdoch’s relatives. For another, while the Times has always been a money loser, those losses have been made up (and then some) by the highly profitable Sunday Times—which went seriously into the red this past year. In addition, Murdoch’s son, James, who runs the London operation, has made no secret of the fact that newspapers are not his interest—he’s a television guy. Plus there is an obvious buyer on the scene: Russian mogul Alexander Lebedev, who recently bought London’s Evening Standard, is actively shopping for other papers. And, not least of all, News Corp.’s worldwide business position is as weak as it’s been since it almost went bankrupt in the early ‘90s—retrenchment would be a logical step.

And yet, I knew, too, that Murdoch is almost incapable of selling a paper, and that he has flatly shunned every offer he’s gotten in the 30 years he’s owned the Times and Sunday Times.

So here was a bit of perhaps no-more-than-fanciful scuttlebutt that I let fly—that, courtesy of Twitter, and a cacophony of re-tweets, I essentially published.

Cold and raining in Leeds, England. The recent decision by the Supreme Court to give personhood to corporations did not surprise me. Perhaps it is my cynicism or just plain repetition, but it always seems that the worst decision gets made in my country. More soldiers into Afghanistan, bank bailouts, and now corporations being able to unleash torrents of funds into the political field. A corporation, an entity that only rates its success by profit, can now potentially shape elections and drown out the voice of the people.

By humanizing corporations, you in turn dehumanize real people. To give a pulse to a thing like Halliburton is science fiction. That a corporation now has human rights, constitutional protections as well as corporate protections, makes them superhuman and accountable to no one.

A makeshift refugee camp across from the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, January 18, 2010. By Chris Hondros/Getty Images.

The latest updates on the crisis in Haiti.

News from the Ground
• To accommodate the large number of newly homeless people, Haitian officials and the U.N. are constructing sprawling tent cities in and near Port-au-Prince, with provisions for clean water, food, and health care. The tents could end up attracting hundreds of thousands of displaced people, with the intention that they'll soon be hired to help construct more permanent housing. [The New York Times]

• Essential supplies have begun to arrive in Haiti, but distribution bottlenecks are preventing them from reaching people in need. In the Port-au-Prince airport, shipments of medicine and baby formula have been unloaded from planes but remain on the tarmac. [CNN]

• On top of everything else, earthquake survivors are facing escalating prices for food, candles, and other necessities, which have been marked up by as much as 60 percent. [The New York Times]

Blogger Charles Johnson’s decision to leave the conservative movement has created an epic online ruckus.

With many among the left having lately been bogged down in a wonkish debate over health care in general and the question of best-versus-possible in particular, it’s easy to forget that the somewhat more fundamental conflict among conservatives regarding the future of the movement is still ongoing, with many of the goings-on in question going on online. Among the most telling of the battles within the larger civil war—if such martial terminology is appropriate for describing something conducted largely from swivel chairs, which I suppose it is not—is the one being fought between Charles Johnson of the blog Little Green Footballs on the one hand and dozens of conservative bloggers on the other. Somehow, I managed to get myself involved in all of this despite having no real connection to the conservative movement other than enjoying a couple of Ted Nugent songs, or rather just one of them.

Until recently, Charles Johnson was among the most celebrated of right-wing bloggers, with his particular brand of opposition to Islamic radicalism and certain excesses of the left seeming to have filled a niche in the early days of the political blogosphere. That a largely unknown individual quickly gained a massive readership by the direct means of the Internet served as a clear indicator of things to come; in 2004, when Johnson took a leading role in questioning the veracity of CBS’s 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, it became similarly obvious that traditional news outlets were losing their collective mass-media monopoly.

Yesterday’s announcement that liberal radio network Air America is folding was surprising not so much for its content as for its timing. Sure, most observers knew that it was destined to fail, but few expected it to happen so soon. When I interviewed the network’s top brass for a VF.com story last March, they were optimistic about their prospects and had just begun to embark on a hiring spree, signing such big-name (or at least medium-sized-name) talent as Ron Reagan, Montel Williams, and Ana Marie Cox. I thought the management trio (chairman and lead investor Charlie Kireker, C.E.O. Bennett Zier, and head of programming Bill Hess) would keep at it a little longer before deciding to throw in the towel—after all, they had only been on the job for a year and a half.

The factors that contributed to Air America’s demise are almost too many to enumerate, but most were readily apparent last year, and I brought them up with the network’s bosses. To read the article, “What Ever Happened to Air America?,” please click here.

After all these years of trying to solve the most obvious problem in politics—that money creates terrible inequities—it’s back to square one: Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling effectively means American corporations are free to spend as much money as they wanna spend to elect whomever they want. Which, honestly, makes some amount of sense. Campaign finance restrictions were always a little artificial—free speech, but not if you can buy it.

Still, the problem is absolute: The rich, with their enhanced free speech capabilities, can buy elections, creating a powerful democratic contradiction.

But I have the solution. It’s been obvious since the earliest days of television. In fact, the problem with the electoral system isn’t money, it’s television.

The overwhelming share of campaign money is spent on TV media time. Therefore, if you eliminate the cost of that media, the problem of disproportionate free speech is solved.

Actually, this is so obvious that for it not to have been the central point of this debate suggests that nobody really ever wanted to truly level the playing field. And that people in the media business, strongly influencing this discussion, were understandably having none of it.

Displaced people erect tents in a soccer stadium in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. By Frederic Dupoux/Getty Images.

The latest updates on the crisis in Haiti.

News from the Ground
• Rescuers saved a five-year-old boy who had been trapped for eight days after his home collapsed around him. [CNN]

• With many bodies being carted away to dumps and many still stuck under debris, reports suggest that an accurate death count may never be determined. [MSNBC]

• The primary concern on the ground has shifted to disease and untreated injuries, which, combined with poor living conditions, could add up to a public-health crisis. [The New York Times]

Because corporations and unions don’t already have enough influence over government affairs, the United States Supreme Court Thursday decided to unclog the money pipeline just a little bit more. In a ruling that further limits already paltry campaign-finance laws, Justice Anthony Kennedy and his four conservative colleagues on the Court finally achieved what the right has long sought; new legal precedent which states that money in political campaigns is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment which cannot even in reasonable circumstances be outlawed by statute.

“Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” reads the Court’s official summary of the argument endorsed by the majority. Here’s what dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens thinks about that concept: “In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office.”

There’s the sex vibe, the exhibitionism and preening, the weird family stuff, the phony authenticity, and the euphoric sense of his own arrival.

With both Scott Brown and Sarah Palin, there’s a come-hither thing, a swagger, an invitation. I’m not sure I’ve ever quite seen this in politics before. Even the Kennedys were always more publicly reticent. But with both Brown and Palin their eyes don’t seem to stop, they’re both looking everybody up and down. They’re teasing, offering. And connecting, apparently.

For Palin there was the beauty queen turn, and for Brown the Cosmo centerfold. This little biographical quirk of his, which seems somehow to be regarded as charming or boyish, is…pretty damn unusual. But it seems so brazen and kooky and, at least at this distance, ironic, that nobody appears to know what to make of it. Indeed, it seems gay, but on the other hand, it’s in Cosmo (the Cosmo voter is probably an untapped and underserved demographic), so it’s unclear whose chain is being pulled.

And then there’s him offering his daughters, which is, I suppose, some retro father’s-burden sort of joke—but not a joke. And then American Idol. Brown’s daughter, Ayla (where do they get these names?) is in the Bristol Palin position, somehow part and parcel of a greater family media ambition. I’m groping for an explanation here of what seems like a new phenomenon, the nexus of family values and publicity skills.

And the truck—obviously pure Palin.

Haitian people fight for food distributed by the U.N. in the center of Port-au-Prince, January 20. By Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images.

The latest news from the crisis in Haiti.

News from the Ground
• There’s just no relief for Haiti. Early this morning, a strong 6.1 aftershock rattled Port-au-Prince. To put this in perspective, Los Angeles’s devastating Northridge earthquake in 1994 was a 6.7, so today’s aftershock counts as a massive tremor on its own. [NYT]

• Not only is the Port-au-Prince airport gridlocked—there’s only one functioning runway—but gridlock is also slowing down the drive from the Dominican capital of Santo Domino to the Haitian capital. The 200-mile trip now takes as long as 18 hours, making the average speed a tedious 11 m.p.h. [CNN]

• Facing fuel shortages that could seriously undermine the recovery effort, the United Nations is planning to transfer 38,000 liters of diesel per day from the Dominican Republic. [Al Jazeera]

I almost don’t have the heart to write this, but I can’t help noticing a striking and appalling similarity between the New York Jets and the Democratic Party—perennial losers both, despite frequent sparks of promise, whose most memorable talent is finding creative ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For instance, if someone had told me a year ago today, as we were celebrating Barack Obama’s inauguration, that the president’s signature first-year effort, health care reform, would be on life support 365 days later because Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat had been won by a right-wing former Cosmo model, I would have said that’s as probable as a team hiring and then losing the best coach in football in less than 24 hours, or losing a key game on a fake spike, or... Jets fans with better memories than mine can, I’m sure, come up with dozens more aptly ludicrous examples. Ludicrous: like taking power after the other party has spent the previous eight years running the country into a ditch and a year later finding yourself in disarray and retreat while the party of demonstrated failure regains the upper hand. Or winning the popular vote in a disputed presidential election but then somehow ceding both the tactical and moral high ground. Or, after years in the wilderness, finally electing a popular, effective president who squanders nearly his entire second term for a couple of blowjobs.

Same Old Jets. Same Old Dems.