Wednesday Morning!

* Man tragically unable to remember saying Barack Obama would make a great president says Hillary Clinton will make a great president. Meanwhile, the rest of us are reduced to talking about Obama’s secret achievements.

* Faculty on Strike at UIC.

* Solitary Confinement May Dramatically Alter Brain Shape In Just Days, Neuroscientist Says.

* Last Night on Jeopardy No One Wanted to Answer Qs About Black History.

* Noose Found Around The Neck Of Statue Honoring Civil Rights Icon At Ole Miss.

* On Teaching While Black.

* What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?

* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings in 2014.

* Here are the hoops a college football team has to jump through to be allowed to form a union.

* 84-Year Old Nun Sentenced To Prison For Weapons Plant Break-In.

* Academic freedom with violence.

* Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? The dream remains alive.

* Whistle-blower fired from Hanford nuclear site.

“We do not agree with her assertions that she suffered retaliation or was otherwise treated unfairly,” URS said, adding Busche was fired for reasons unrelated to the safety concerns. “Ms. Busche’s allegations will not withstand scrutiny.”
…
Busche is the second Hanford whistle-blower to be fired by URS in recent months. Walter Tamosaitis, who also raised safety concerns about the plant, was fired in October after 44 years of employment.

* A new China Miéville short story collection, scheduled for November 2014.

* A world of horrors: There is no such thing as a child prostitute.

* In the same way that certain styles of dance simulate sex, the Winter Olympics simulates scraping one’s February-chapped nostrils against the surface of a Kleenex whose aloe content is useless and reaching out for the warm escape of death. It’s an art of failed suicide attempts.

* A preliminary sketch of the data reveals, of course, that by 2050 films will be reviewing us.

* “First, why would we even think about letting it go through?”

* “This whole thing is totally and completely bonkers.”

* Grace Kerr sometimes jokes with her family that “Amanda was not that great. Zach is awesome.” What she means is that her son is finally happy, and is helping others.

* Diseased and unsound meat: Hot Pockets®!

* In Act Of Protest, Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed At Miami Museum.

* News You Can Use: Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo.

* A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste.

* The Ice Caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

* Candy Crush: Addictive Game, Incredible Business, Horrible Investment.

* How the north ended up on top of the map.

* Inside Kappa Beta Phi, the Wall Street Fraternity.

* And our long national nightmare is over: Obama apologizes for disparaging art historians.

Links without Context or Content

* Pawlenty on the 2012 GOP field: We’re all liars without conscience or remorse.

* DATELINE 2050: Atheist Muslim Fundamentalists run the country! Oh, if only we’d listened!

* Finally a reason to go back to Daily Kos: Tom Tomorrow has just become their cartoon editor.

* Halfway there: Foreign nationals who are married to U.S. citizens of the same sex may apply for spousal green cards and other benefits, immigration authorities announced Monday, but it remains to be seen whether the government will issue them.

* At McSweeney’s: Rubber stamps I wish I had for grading freshman composition papers.

* At the Chronicle of Higher Education: 6 Easy–and Not So Easy–Pieces of Advice for Grad Students. Kids, it’s all it takes.

* And watch out, man-children: Peter Jackson is looking to girlify The Hobbit.

Tuesday Night!

* I got a retweet from the Great Orange Satan over this nonsense. I also wasted the better part of yesterday arguing about how stupid this is in the MeFi thread.

* Speaking of arguments, don’t miss the epic Wikileaks thread. Nothing will ever be the same.

* Incorrect: President Barack Obama told GOP leaders behind closed doors Tuesday that he had failed to reach across party lines enough during his first two years in office, a senior administration official told CNN.

* Once in a century droughts every five years.

* Law and the Multiverse: Superheroes, Supervillains, and the Law.

* This week in great newspaper corrections (Davis Simon edition.)

* And I’ve already promised this image from the ruins of Detroit to Lisa for the cover of her first book. Sorry, everybody else.

Playing Catchup

* Signs of the apocalypse: Judd Apatow Brewing Up New Pee Wee Herman Movie.

* I confess I’ve been fascinated by the revelation that the Research 2000 polling agency has apparently committed fraud against Daily Kos. There’s loads of additional coverage on this at Nate Silver’s site.

* Did global warming start 150,000 years ago?

* This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence.

* The 24 Types of Libertarians.

* And because Ben Nelson is a terrible human being, 1.2 million Americans will lose unemployment benefits this Saturday.

Dollhouse as Metafiction

Devilstower tries to marshall the mighty power of Daily Kos in defense of Dollhouse‘s sagging ratings.

The Sarah Palin Chronicles

More and more evidence mounts that the McCain camp didn’t actually vet Palin at all. They didn’t read a single article in the Wasilla newspaper, and they didn’t talk to Walt Monegan, the man at the center of her still open abuse of power ethics investigation—nor, apparently, did they talk to anyone else. They’ve been pushing as one of her few notable accomplishments her opposition to the “Bridge to Nowhere,” which has turned out to be, well, bullshit. Nearly recalled as mayor, she left the small town of Wasilla over $20 million dollars in debt. That’s after she tried to censor the town library and fire long-time town employees without cause for “not fully supporting her efforts to govern.”

Oh, and her husband works for BP, one of the largest employers in Alaska, which is not in any way a conflict of interest.

And those are just the highlights. Given all this, I get a sinking feeling when I see how much attention the already ubiquitous, totally moronic baby smear is getting. Even Andrew Sullivan is pushing it now, though he’s careful to hedge his bets. That’s just not a basket in which I want to put Barack’s eggs; it’s the raw irresponsibility of John McCain’s cynical and poorly thought-out VP pick—a roll of the dice from a chronic gambler—that we should be talking about, not whether a seventeen-year-old girl does or doesn’t have a “baby bump” in a given photo.

The Juno/Juneau parody poster on Gawker made me laugh, but that’s the only upside here. I don’t think we’d want anything to do with the baby thing even if by some impossible chance it all turns out to be true.

John McCain says he made this decision because he looked into Putin’s Palin’s eyes the one time they met and saw a soul mate. The only thing we should be saying about Palin is that this is not the way to make the most important decision of your candidacy. The Palin pick is stone-cold proof that John McCain has neither the judgment nor the temperament to be president.

So leave her kids alone. Keep your heads on straight, netroots.

Obama News!

I have just a few Obama remainders from the last few days.

* First up, another edition of Veepwatch!, this one making a pretty strong claim for an Obama/Edwards ticket. I’m almost convinced—but the reality is that no one in an age of late-night comics is going to take the VP slot twice. The always-a-bridesmaid jokes write themselves, and as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail sagely reminds us in the comments to the Washington Montly post, Hunter S. Thompson was right when he said Americans hate voting for losers.

I really think we can believe Edwards when he says he doesn’t want the job.

* VeepWatch! Jr.: The New York Review of Books reviews Jim Webb’s A Time to Fight. Since I wrote about The Virginia Strategem earlier in the week I’ve been reminded that Virginia’s Lt. Governor is a Republican, which all but takes Kaine out of the running and raises Webb’s stock considerably, despite the unfortunate two-Senators aspect. Does anyone out there know what would happen if Webb steps down from the Senate to run for vice president? Does Kaine appoint, or is there a special election?

* Daschle for Secretary of Health and Human Services? The Shadow Cabinet grows…

* Speaking of kos, he’s already made his first major self-inflicted wound of the general election season. Nearly made it 48 hours. Well done.

* Bob Dylan gushes over Barack Obama. So does George Lucas.

* Al Giordano at The Field gushes over the way Obama has already taken control of things at the DNC.

* And at TNR, the view from Africa.

‘But why didn’t he win?’

kos explains it all: “But why didn’t he win?” Of the reasons kos cites, demographics and machine politics are the two biggies, followed fairly distantly by rhetorical constraints, then the rest…

If this is anyone but the guy from TPM Election Center I stole the link from, you’re stealing my bit

When is kos (9:24 pm) going to stop riding my coattails (6:26 pm)? I love this link so much, all is forgiven. This is Hillary Clinton to the editoral board of the Salmon Press newspaper group just last month:

“But no president can do it alone. She must break recent tradition, cast cronyism aside and fill her cabinet with the best people, not only the best Democrats, but the best Republicans as well.. We’re confident she will do that. Her list of favorite presidents – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan – demonstrates how she thinks. As expected, Bill Clinton was also included on the aforementioned list.”

Makes the outrage of Obama’s statements earlier today seem just a little phony, doesn’t it?

Obamablogging: Endorsements, Michigan, Race

Noting the huge number of high-profile endorsements Obama has been getting recently—today was Missouri senator Claire McCaskill—Josh Marshall seconds my own optimistic sense that the endorsement cascade is big, under-appreciated, and a sign of good news to come:

The key is timing. You don’t hit a big time politician like Hillary Clinton when she’s down unless you’re really against her and you’re fairly confident she’s not getting back up. After winning in New Hampshire, albeit narrowly and after the clobbering in Iowa, there’s been a sense that Clinton may be back on track to consolidating her frontrunner status and perhaps following a modified version of the standard script in which the anointed frontrunner gets a scare in the early states before mopping up the competition as the race goes national. But these four clearly don’t want that to happen. In fact, they’re sticking their necks pretty far out to help make it not happen. And their endorsements, coming right now, tell me they have some confidence it won’t.

A new poll shows a possible surge for “uncomitted” in Michigan, proving once and for all that Michiganers have the good sense not to listen to kos.

I have to admit I’ve been compulsively checking the blogs all weekend for updates on the recent return of race-baiting from high-profile Clinton supporters. The Clinton camp is playing a pretty dangerous game here, and there’s some reason to think they may have gone too far with it—“I’m not a racist” is pretty off-message—but if they can successfully convince white America that Obama is “the black candidate” this exceptionally nasty strategy could actually pay off for them. (Unfortunately, Obama’s people may be doing all they can to help the Clintons out, if the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein is right about this. The right strategy is to say absolutely nothing about race; Obama should just give one of his characteristically inspiring speeches about unity and let the race-baiting condemn itself.)

But even if Clinton does get the nomination, I really don’t see how she can possibly hope to ever bring the party back together post-nomination if she continues much further down this road. Maybe it’s already too late. I’ve never been a fan of the triangulation electoral strategy, but at least it makes some sense: get to 49.5% in the general and you’re in for four years, regardless of how you got there. When you’re going scorched-earth against your own base to try and get to 49.5% in the primary, though—especially when you’ve got the sort of national negatives that Hillary Clinton does—it’s got to be time to rethink what you’re doing.

Friday Night Politics Links: Kos, Endorsements, Fraud

* This whole “Democrats for Mitt” idea is probably kos’s single stupidest self-inflicted wound since the whole mercenaries debacle. Given that his plan won’t work, it’s irrelevant—and even if it somehow does work, how does this idiotic game benefit any Democrat anywhere? That’s assuming it doesn’t completely blow up in the Left’s face by accidentally propelling Guy Smiley to the White House. In any event, this sort of nonsense invites, legitimately I think, cries of “dirty tricks” from the right, which is something we have no reason to invite. Kos should either promote the “Vote Uncommitted” movement on the grounds that Clinton should not be rewarded by her failure to remove her name from the Michigan ballot, or else do nothing at all.

* Arizona governor Janet Napolitano has endorsed Obama, a significant endorsement not only regionally but also because of the way it plays into the gender dynamics that are now characterizing the Democratic race.

Meanwhile, bestsellers Anne Rice and Michael Chabon have each chosen a favorite, Clinton and Obama respectively. Call me when Lethem weighs in.

* And of course there’s Kucinich’s decision to pursue a recount in New Hampshire. For what it’s worth, as someone who believes that both the 2000 and 2004 elections were influenced and perhaps stolen outright through manipulation of the apparatus of voting—cleansing of the voter rolls, selective closing of precincts, suspicious last-minute swings always redounding to Republican benefit, see RFK Jr. for more—I can perhaps regain some of my “sensible centrist” cred by saying I’m not at all impressed by the claims New Hampshire was stolen. For one, the exit polls I saw bandied about before the results began being reported already indicated that a blowout was not in progress; obviously the telephone polling missed a late surge in Clinton support probably generated in equal parts by sympathy for the beating she was getting in the press and by a belief that Obama couldn’t lose. Likewise, the difference in results between hand-counted precincts and machine-counted precincts, despite the many shouts of Diebold!, is almost certainly a function of the demographics of those areas, not prima facie proof of malfeasance. In short, there’s almost no comparison to 2004, where the exit polls were consistently wrong well outside the margin of error, and the irregularities were both more local and more pronounced.

The assertion of fraud whenever the results don’t go our way only serves to discredit valid claims about electoral fraud and suspicious results.

Still, if I’m wrong and it turns out Kucinich is somehow onto something, I’ll be the first one to admit it.