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Joss says Dr. Horrible 2 could film as early as this summer.

Wednesday Night Links

* Net Neutrality hit a wall yesterday with a court decision ruling that the FCC can’t regulate broadband Internet in this way. More on what happens next from Boing Boing, MetaFilter, and Daily Kos.

* Obama has slightly tweaked national nuclear weapons policy. This is, of course, high treason.

* The Mississippi no-lesbians-at-prom debacle gets more atrocious every day.

* U.S. downgraded from “free” to “mostly free.” I’m assuming these categories work the way they do in The Princess Bride.

* Dr. Horrible as 8-bit video game.

* Just when we thought we were out: Another new Harry Potter book in ten years or so?

* Timewaster of the night: Tiny Castle.

* Josh Marshall: I’m curious whether under international law a diplomat can be expelled from a host country simply for being a raging c@#k.

* And your attention please: Slavery officially no longer relevant.

Select Links While I’m Away (Part 2)

* You know your discipline is in crisis when a 28% drop in job listings in a single year is good news.

* Bullying in higher ed.

* If you want to know why your bracket’s already busted (Georgetown!), my friends at The March to Indy is the source.

* Democrats giddy with CBO score. More Americans getting behind health care reform. Democratic Health Care Skeptics Fall Into Line For Reform. Lynch: Obama Told Me He Might Try To Get Public Option Next Year. Reid: I’ll Try Again For A Public Option This Year.

* What’s not debatable is that this process highlighted — and worsened — the virtually complete powerlessness of the Left and progressives generally in Washington. If you were in Washington negotiating a bill, would you take seriously the threats of progressive House members in the future that they will withhold support for a Party-endorsed bill if their demands for improvements are not met? Of course not. No rational person would. More here.

* Will the Supreme Court strike down health care reform? Probably not.

Jon Chait, however, points to another reason to worry: “nobody who recalls Bush v. Gore could completely rule out five Republican justices deciding on a wildly activist ruling on a high-stakes political fight.” This is true insofar as it proves that it wouldn’t be fear of being logically inconsistent that makes it unlikely that Scalia and Kennedy would stay their hand.There is a big difference, though. Bush v. Gore was decided from a position of great political strength: the only two legislative bodies in a position to do anything about the ruling strongly supported the Court’s actions. In this case, however, the White House and very possibly at least one house of Congress will be controlled by people who would be infuriated by an adverse decision, and unlike with an election, Congress would still be in a position to retaliate if it returned to unified Democratic control. It would be shocking if the Supreme Court were to announce a major doctrinal innovation in those circumstances.

* Teabaggers still don’t know what they’re so angry about.

* What’s happening with cap and trade?

* Kuwait says peak oil by 2014.

* No one could have predicted that randomly taking FlashForward off the air for six months would go badly. I recall kind of liking the last aired episode, but haven’t really missed this show at all, and won’t be watching.

* Action Comics #1 to reclaim its top spot as most expensive comic book next week.

* How will Warner Brothers make money after Harry Potter’s over? A DC Comics superhero blockbuster every summer.

* If Dr. Horrible 2 is feature-length, I hope they do bring Penny back. I really don’t see a film working without her.

* The ten most important gay moments in comic book history.

* Zombie apocalypse survival flowchart.

* And the Iraq War is seven today. They grow up so fast…

Monday Night

Monday night.

* Nathan Fillion says Dr. Horrible 2 is moving ahead.

* The History News Network has your first JFK post of the season.

What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking. “I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled. He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.'” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”

Of course, opinions on LBJ differ.

* And speaking of the Kennedy assassination: how great was last night’s Mad Men? Knowing they would eventually have to do an assassination episode, I worried they wouldn’t find the right approach—but I think they pretty much nailed it. I like too that it came an episode early; like most people I was thinking it would be next week. Pandagon and Ta-Nehisi Coates have their usual Mad Men posts up, if you’re interested; I usually read the Television without Pity forums too.

* Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC): Everywhere I go in my district, people tell me they are frightened. … I share that fear, and I believe they should be fearful. And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

* And Steve Benen has your chart of the day: filibusters since the 1960s. That last spike is since Democrats recovered control of Congress in 2007.

Whedonmania

Interesting news from the Whedonverse: …Whedon is shopping a digital studio proposal around Hollywood, including to the major studios, looking to raise investment in the $5 million range, according to sources. The unnamed Whedon studio will apparently look to produce four original web series a year, two of which will be directed by Whedon himself. One of those two will be the above mentioned Dr. Horrible sequel. Keeping my fingers crossed for Capt. Reynolds’s Shoot-Along Facebook Feed.

Attention: TV Is Dead

Attention: TV is dead.

Geekfight

Geekfight: Whedon vs. Abrams. It’s true, Abrams has had the better year.

Joss Whedon Update

One episode into Dollhouse and Joss Whedon is declaring he’s done with TV forever.

Last One for a While

Last one for awhile.

* The UFO-themed art of Esther Pearl Wilson. Via io9.

* Bruce Sterling on geo-engineering: We are (lousy) climate engineers, so we might as well get good at it.

* Three years undercover with identity thieves.

* Critical Studies in Television: Essays on Dr. Horrible. Via Whedonesque.

* Neuroscience on how we read. Via Boing Boing.

* And the National Science Foundation is not quite as Utopian as Kim Stanley Robinson led me to believe.

‘The Remnants’

The best thing I’ve done all morning is watch post-apocalyptic web comedy ‘The Remnants’ starring Ze Frank, Justine Bateman, and Veronica Mars’s dad. It’s really too bad this one wasn’t able to take off the way Dr. Horrible did—it’s a cultural tragedy.

Here’s a review with some background, and here’s the script.

The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

Miscellany

Malcolm Gladwell gets a smackdown from The Morning News. Whedon says more Dr. Horrible on the way. What happens when a space elevator breaks. How exactly it was you came to fall in love with the majesty of colors. 3-D representations of 2-D video games. Scenes from Gaza. Bush White House precisely as dickish as originally thought.

Unknown Secrets of Dr. Horrible

Legions of Joss Whedon fanboys and -girls received their Dr. Horrible DVDs for Christmas last week. In addition to a surprisingly good musical commentary track that among other things sings the praises of classic Internet game Ninja Rope, the DVDs are loaded with hidden easter eggs to unlock. Instructions are here and here…

Potpourri and Remainders

Potpourri and remainders.

* Is Dollhouse doomed? 7 Trouble Signs. Yes, it is doomed, and not just because of the Friday Night Death Slot—it’s a comparatively weak premise that’s already been messed with by the network and which requires Eliza Dushku to be a much better actress than she is. Despite attempts to put a brave face on, it’s evident that Joss has a disaster on his hands:

2. Work stoppage. Production was actually halted. Twice. Once for script issues on the fourth episode, and once for the sixth and seventh. Whedon said in a blog, “To get a sense of how completely turned around I was during this process, you should know there was a scene with Eliza and the astonishing Ashley Johnson that I wrote and shot completely differently three different times, with different characters in different places (actually I wrote it closer to eight times), and none of it will ever see air.” Really? The creator of the show had to reshoot something three times, and it still didn’t work?

Don’t get too attached to Dollhouse. Bring on Dr. Horrible: The Series.

* Nate Silver previews the 2010 Senate race and concludes “Even if momentum has swung somewhat against the Democrats by 2010, they remain in a strong position to gain seats in the Senate.”

* Unexpectedly, applications to grad school are down, despite the economic downturn.

On Friday, David G. Payne, associate vice president of ETS for college and graduate programs, said that the “current hypothesis” is that the credit crunch is discouraging some people from considering graduate school, especially if they think they will not receive substantial financial support from the programs they might consider.

It also seems likely that more and more students are seeing themselves as simply maxed out when it comes to student debt, regardless of the larger credit crunch.

* Ten ways Canada is not more progressive than the U.S. #2 seems particularly important at the moment.

2. The Monarchy: Related to #1, the head of state in Canada is still technically the Queen of England. While this is generally just a curiousity for Americans to good naturedly rib Canadians about, this past week it made a huge difference. The Queen’s representative, the Governor General of Canada, made the decision that allowed Prime Minister Harper to hang on to power when the left (and nearly two-thirds of Canadian voters picked someone to the left of Harper in the October 2008 election) finally found a way to get together and form a coalition.

* And, via MeFi, the 40 greatest lost icons In pop culture history. Does Letterman still use “Buttafouco” as an all-purpose punch line?

Potpourri

Potpourri!

* MetaFilter has a post on gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold elective office in the U.S. and subject of a new Sean Penn biopic, assassinated twenty-seven years ago this week.

* Also via MeFi: the Star-Tribune has an online database of 600 challenged ballots in the Franken-Coleman race. The vote totals on the main page don’t look especially good for Franken’s chances, nor does the early word from elections guru Nate Silver:

The vast majority of challenges on both sides are frivolous, often utterly so. Perhaps 1 in 10 challenges — maybe slightly more than that — actually required a judgment call of some kind.

For what it’s worth, Silver’s projections now slightly favor Coleman, though “projecting” anything at all strikes me as a significant overreach on Silver’s part on garbage-in-garbage-out grounds. Until we know something real about the character of challenged ballots vis-a-vis nonchallenged ballots, there’s just no way of projecting what the final vote total will look like.

* In twelve-country poll, 43% see climate crisis as bigger problem than economy. Technological civilization is the chain-smoker who has also broken his leg: they’re both big problems, one’s just slightly more immediate at the moment.

* Bush is still president, but local leaders are getting the message: the mayor of Los Angeles has proposed a major solar initiative. Good on Villaraigosa, but the depth of our civilization’s chain-smoking becomes evident when you read the fine print:

This massive solar proposal is nested in a larger commitment to reduce Los Angeles’ greenhouse gas emissions by 35% below 1990 levels by 2030.

35% below 1990 is a fairly decent number for a single initiative, but 2030’s a long way off—the bad stuff is already starting to happen right now.

* The Dr. Horrible DVD is available for pre-order and coming out before Christmas. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t link to Buffy! Movie! News!, but come one, there’s absolutely no way.

Culture Links

My unhealthy obsession with the presidential race has been crowding out the literature and pop culture blogging I normally do. Here’s a linkdump to try and correct that balance:

* The Washington Post visits the Manhattan of Mad Men, c. 1962.

* How to land a 747.

* Don DeLillo (fake) blogs politics at the Onion, while the incredible José Saramago—whose excellent Blindess is both the best book I’ve read in months and a new motion picture out this Friday despite the fact that it is quite literally unfilmable—(real) blogs in Portuguese and Spanish. Via MeFi and Alex Greenberg.

* Salon looks at David Foster Wallace’s sad last days, while Boston.com has a map of Infinite Jest.

* Survive the Outbreak: a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure zombie movie. Via MeFi. More zombie fun here.

* Grave sites of famous science fiction authors.

* Concept art from the upcoming Green Lantern movie. More at MeFi.

* Michael Moore’s latest movie, Slacker Uprising, is available for free online. “This film, really isn’t for anybody other than the choir,” said Moore. “But that’s because I believe the choir needs a song to sing every now and then.” So the film’s not very good, is that it? Via MeFi.

* The Evil League of Evil is hiring.

* Stephen Colbert is about to team up with Spider-Man.

* And Neanderthals loved sushi. Who doesn’t?