Assorted Late Night Links That Have (Almost) Nothing to Do with Massachusetts

* Conventional wisdom already says Obama is now president of Haiti. At least these people waited a whole week before unilaterally declaring Haiti a U.S. colony.

* Mediocre director contracted to ruin Spider-Man franchise. More here.

* Fox News, in a desperate bid for my attention, openly advocated on behalf of Scott Brown today. But even this behavior pales in comparison to O’Reilly’s bizarre nostalgia last Friday for those halcyon days when it was okay to make fun of Arabs.

* FiveThirtyEight on the branding of Scott Brown. What they predict, of course, has already happened.

* Why Massachusetts doesn’t matter. An hour or so ago I tweeted: “Bright side of Coakley loss: Democrats will finally have to face the fact that nothing good will ever get through the Senate.” It sounds like Biden at least has already figured this out.

* Timo at Bitter Laughter has carefully crafted a post perfectly calibrated to pull me in. The Duck Tales reference just seals it.

* U.S. military rifle scopes have Bible verses inscribed on them. Oddly, this is not a joke.

* But Obama’s not looking backwards: “FBI broke law for years in phone record searches.”

* Absurdity watch: New Orleans prosecutors are charging prostitutes as sex offenders. Via MeFi.

* Passport photos of famous artists. Also via MeFi.

* And the NBC late-night feud has been digitally recreated by Taiwanese newspaper Apple Daily. I think this should clear everything up.

Thursday Night Links

* Avatar sequel hints. Everything that was cut from Avatar. Vatican says Avatar is no masterpiece.

* James Cameron’s Spider-Man.

* io9 teases me with the possibility that Wes Anderson could direct the Spider-Man reboot but says it will actually be (500) Days of Summer‘s Marc Webb. /Film says this rumor is already outdated and today’s favorite is the even-less-well known Nimrod Antal.

* Christopher Nolan talks Inception.

* Obama has officially bought the world an extra minute.

* Details emerging about the new David Simon show, Treme.

* Denmark, the awesomest economy.

* ‘System Failure’: Obama’s first year.

* Here comes the bank tax.

* Here comes the climate bill.

* Haven’t blogged about health care in a while, but the Democrats apparently struck a deal with labor today over the excise tax. The White House is also pushing a new exchanges agreement as a nose-in-the-tent that might partially compensate for the loss of the public option and the Medicare buy-in: “Over time, the exchanges will open to more and more people.”

The 11

Reverse Shot’s 11 Offenses of 2009. (500) Days of Summer and District 9 both make appearances. Via Dan H.

Even if we buy this conceit (derived from The Outer Limits’ episode “The Architects of Fear”), Blomkamp’s usage of brutal, menacing Nigerian gang bangers as secondary villains—gun-runners who antagonize both the country’s “Prawn” population and bumbling Afrikaner pencil pusher turned alien mutant Wikus van der Mewe (Sharto Copley)—suggests he’s not above the propagation of stereotypes. And it would be easier to take Wikus’s symbolically loaded transformation into the Other (which begins when he’s accidentally sprayed by some bug fluid during a ghetto raid) seriously if it wasn’t ultimately a pretense for his being able to operate the aliens’ biochemical weaponry—a development that allows District 9 to abandon its thin veneer of social commentary (and erratically deployed faux-documentary textures) to become the live-action Halo shoot-em-up its creator wanted to make all along.