Wednesday Wish-I-Had-a-Snow-Day Links

* The Virginia House of Delegates is tackling the real issues.

The House of Delegates is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a bill that would protect Virginians from attempts by employers or insurance companies to implant microchips in their bodies against their will.

The link goes on to explain how this is also protection from the Anti-Christ. It’s a two-fer.

* Somewhere, a research assistant is getting chewed out: Bernard-Henri Lévy was caught quoting a fictional philosopher in his recent book on Kant.

* ‘They are unembarrassed’: Rachel Maddow on GOP legislators who slam the stimulus in one breath and take credit for its spending the next. It’s an amazing segment; her list of hypocritical cash-and-trash Republicans seems to go on forever.

* Sherrod Brown should be on TV more. (Thanks, Kinohi!) There’s more on the Becker vote here, here, and here; this seems to have gotten people pretty riled up. Related: Obama should get angry more.

* North Carolina wants to change its history curriculum so that high school U.S. history starts in 1877. They’d miss the Civil War and slavery, but at least they’d still get to cover the Wilmington Race Riots of 1898, the only successful coup d’etat in U.S. history.

* 12 Successful SF Authors Who’ve Written Racy Fanfic. The winner? Joanna Russ of The Female Man fame.

* Gay advocacy groups cut off New Jersey Democrats.

* Being bored and having a low IQ can kill you.

* Daily Kos joins the Fire Tim Kaine caucus.

* Is American fiction dead? Is global literature? Is The Catcher in the Rye really unfilmable?

* How Palin can win the 2012 GOP primary.

* And while you may have forgotten about Peak Oil, Peak Oil has not forgotten about you.

And the Rest

* Happy 90th to Isaac Asimov. One of the greats.

* Multimillionaire visits hospital, declares American health system works just great.

* ‘How to Train the Aging Brain.’

* The world will not end in 2012. 2011.

* Notice again how far down the slippery slope we have gone. Krauthammer’s first position was that torture should be restricted solely to ticking time bomb cases in which we knew that a terror suspect could prevent an imminent detonation of a WMD. His position a few years later is that torture should be the first resort for any terror suspect who could tell us anything about future plots. Those of us who warned that torture, once admitted into the mainstream, will metastasize beyond anyone’s control now have the example of Charles Krauthammer’s arguments to back us up. More here.

* Get your sneak peak of 2020 here and here. Via i09.

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Monday

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Monday.

* Žižek has an op-ed in the New York Times on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. It’s pretty good.

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization…

* Standards for Grading the Life of an Adjunct Composition Professor.

* Our university in the news! Duke Criticized Over Sex Toy Study.

* Two good posts from Josh Marshall consider whether 2010 or 2012 is the next flashpoint for health care reform.

* And who supports marriage equality? The real question is, what’s going to happen to me when I turn thirty next week?

Late Night Shouldn’t-Have-Taken-That-Nap Links, Round 2

A second round of late night shouldn’t-have-taken-that-nap links.

* Why GM failed; link roundup from Kottke.

* A.O. Scott vlogs the awesomeness of Rushmore. Via TRA. It’s vlogtastic.

* Mrs. Santorum is a very lucky woman.

* The headline reads, “Secret US Nuke Site List Accidentally Published Online by US Gov.” Whoops!

* Handicapping the 2012 Republican field at Open Left.

* The median number of tweets by a Twitter user is one. This and other Twitter bubble factoids via MetaFilter.

* J.D. Salinger sues to block the publication of the unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel. I feel torn here between my liberal attitude towards copyright and my sense that said sequel can only be an abomination.

* “It’s remarkable, what we’re unable to do as a country”: Wire creator David Simon on BBC Radio 4, via Edge of the American West.

* Monkey astronauts.

Saturday!

Saturday!

* I knew we were in a Seldon crisis: Obama eying “New Foundation” as his answer to the New Deal.

* If you can’t beat ’em: GOP moderate and feared 2012 rival Jon Huntsman joins Obama administration as ambassador to China.

* There’s been a lot of talk on the blogotubes about recent polls showing a national shift towards pro-life positions. It’s possible there’s been some sort of catalyzing event or demographic shift I’m unaware of that accounts for this, but it seems to me most likely that this reflects an important rhetorical shift that has recently been embraced by the GOP. Consider that the nation’s most prominent pro-life politician, Sarah Palin, routinely describes “life” as a morally admirable “choice” made by her and others. I suspect this new rhetoric of choice is significantly muddying the waters in these polls, encouraging people who might not choose abortion for themselves to think that’s what being “pro-life” is. Of course, that any choice is or should be involved at all is incompatible with what the term “pro-life” has historically meant.

Monday Morning

Monday morning.

* Following up on this post from Sunday: Rahm Emanuel says there will be no Bush-era prosecutions. OpenLeft wants to know whether Eric Holder is “a Gonzales-like lackey” in light of his apparent willingness to allow political judgments to influence DoJ policy.

* And speaking of political judgments influencing DoJ policy, this Rep. Harman story is pretty unbelievable, even for the Bush administration.

There are a lot of hairy details on this one. But the gist is that an NSA wiretap recorded Harman in a conversation with a “suspected Israeli agent” in which Harman allegedly agreed to use her influence with the DOJ to get them to drop the AIPAC spy case in exchange for help lobbying then-Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi to make Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee — a position she ended up not getting.

…

The story suggests that the tapes show Harman crossed the line. And the gears were in motion to open a full blown investigation. But then Alberto Gonzales intervened and shutdown the whole thing.

Why? Here’s where it gets into the realm of bad novel writing: because Gonzales (and the White House) needed Harman to go to bat for them on the warrantless wiretaping story that the New York Times was then on the brink of publishing.

Find me one honest Congressperson.

* The Hollywood Reporter says the chances of a Dollhouse renewal are 50/50. That’s actually a lot better than I thought.

* Tuna projected to be wiped out by 2012.

* Maps from the recession.

Again, Four More

Again, four more.

* My working assumption has been that the GOP’s biggest names—Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, god-help-us Sarah Palin—would sit out 2012 to take on the winner of the open Democratic field in 2016. (I’ve actually thought for a while that 2012’s Bob Dole would be Newt Gingrich; someone who’ll lose handily but won’t get creamed.) But that assumption may have been wrong; Bobby Jindal’s bizarre grandstanding over federally funded unemployment benefits in a time of deep economic crisis suggests he may try for 2012 after all. Like Steve, though, I don’t quite grok the strategy; prolonging misery and screwing up the economic recovery of his home state helps him how, exactly?

* Climate questions for Barack Obama.

Q. You favor a strong push to develop the technology needed to capture and sequester carbon from coal-fired power plants. Many argue that the surest way to bring this technology to market is to impose a nationwide moratorium on the construction of new coal-fired plants that don’t capture and store their carbon emissions. Would you support such a moratorium?

* Wil Wheaton has seen Watchmen.

* Unless DVR usage is significant, I would not get too used to Dollhouse.

Okay, One More

Okay, one more: “Yes, We Will,” a comic about Barack Obama, 2012, and the Singularity.

Obama 2.0

Watch out, world: here comes Obama 2.0. Via Kevin Drum.

Science-Religion-Politics Sunday

Science-religion-politics Sunday!

* The Vatican has officially forgiven the late John Lennon for a off-the-cuff joke he made forty-two years ago. Let no one doubt the magnanimity of the Catholic Church.

* The “broken windows” theory has apparently been experimentally verified. Giuliani ’12? Via MeFi.

* Science confirms the Livia Soprano Theory of the Universe: it’s all just a big nothing. Also via MeFi.

* Science confirms that religion strongly correlates with unhappy lives.

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

* Science confirms that America miraculously became “a center-right nation” the day after Barack Obama won the presidency.

* The Cato Institute confirms “Blocking Obama’s health plan is key to the GOP’s survival.” Not because it won’t work, of course, but because it’ll work so well as to discredit their kneejerk anti-governmentism forever. More at DKos.

* Who will pray to Bush for clemency? And how many corrupt presidencies do we need in a row before we abolish the damn pardon power?

* Finally, prepare yourself to go deep inside the ant hivemind.

Instapolls

It’s been said before, but Kos is absolutely right: these instapolls have been a tremendously important bulwark against the neverending bullshit of the pundit class. They’ve been so devastating, in fact, to the fine art of pro-Republican spin—an art which went a long way towards giving us eight years of Bush—that I genuinely wonder whether we’ll see them again in 2012. I sure hope we do.

Scene from the 2012 Republican Primary

The Stump time travels to a scene from the 2012 Republican primary:

Gov. Palin: We are going to change America, change it from higher taxes, higher crime, and a quagmire in Afghanistan.

Fmr. Gov. Romney: I know how to make change. I’m running on 20 years of a record of change of commitment to America and conservatism, Gov. Palin is running on the strength of a speech from four years ago. Are we going to have change with results, or change with a teleprompter? We know what that has gotten us.

That’s pretty much right, except my gut tells me it may be 2016.

[Undisclosed Location]quinox

Today is the [Undisclosed Location]quinox, which means we’re halfway through the term. I could do this all summer. I’m not completely exhausted at all.

Clearing the decks this morning:

* What do the Dutch know that we don’t? Thousands of people in the Netherlands are preparing for the 2012 apocalypse.

* A judge has ruled that, legally speaking, Duke football completely sucks.

* Nothing makes me feel more curmudgeonly than agreeing with Christopher Hitchens about anything, but my god—you’d think Tim Russert had been president before he became the pope. And that’s before this stuff about miracles started.

* On the virtues of taking it slow as a novelist. Finally, my laziness patience has been vindicated!

* And good news from the world of science: the Large Hadron Collider probably won’t destroy the earth.