Wednesday!

* A bounce house flew away with three children inside. Unreal.

* Also unreal: Homeless Football Player Can’t Receive Fans’ Aid Due To Criminal Cartel’s Insane, Abusive Rules. Here are the salaries the administrative staff of Boise State athletics will be making while their unpaid employee is homeless.

* Think of the NCAA as a cheering squad, that gets all up into your personal life. Former Oklahoma center Gabe Ikard is a courtside fixture at Thunder games with his girlfriend. He stated in a radio interview with WWLS’ the Morning Animals that Oklahoma’s Compliance Dept. made his girlfriend sign an affidavit their relationship was legitimate and was not a ruse to provide extra benefits to an Oklahoma football player. Ikard was one of the players embroiled in “Pastagate,” where Oklahoma self-reported a secondary violation and ordered him to pay $3.83 to charity for excessive pasta consumption.

* I didn’t realize until I spoke to Rebecca Schuman about her Amherst-banning-frats piece how misguided it was. Without explicit exceptions for emergencies and assault-reporting this kind of blanket ban is obviously unworkable, and almost certainly not Title IX compliant.

*  Hey, fellow educators! It’s your cousin, Gerry. You know that consolation you’ve been taking that at least your life’s work is meaningful? Well, listen to this!

* Vigilante feminism at Columbia.

* The Washington Post assigns five reporters to chase down a lie Karl Rove just made up on the spot.

* Sandy Hook ‘Truther’ Tells Victim’s Mother Her Daughter Never Existed.

* Arguing that school closures in cities across the country disproportionately affect African American students, community activists filed three federal civil rights complaints Tuesday challenging closures in Newark, New Orleans and Chicago and called on the Obama administration to halt similar efforts elsewhere.

* Boosting school funding 20 percent erased the graduation gap between rich and poor students.

* Cell Phone Video Shows Police Choking, Kicking 6th Graders.

* Fox greenlights “last man on Earth” premise it must know will get canceled immediately. They must know.

* io9: The Strange, Post-Soviet Architecture of Astana, Kazakhstan.

* Game of Mushrooms.

* “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end. I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed for even an instant. If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.“

* “You mention in your book that Snowden’s moral universe was first informed by video games.”

* Today in academic journals: Board Game Studies.

* Spurious Correlations. The truth is out there!

* Back to the top of the order: How artificial intelligence is about to disrupt higher education.

* And the Pope gets deep into my wheelhouse, says the Church would baptize aliens.

Speaking during the homily at his daily morning Mass at the Casa Santa Marta inside Vatican City where he lives on Monday, he told his mostly clerical audience that they should keep an open mind to anyone—or anything—seeking God. “If—for example—tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here… Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them… And one says, ‘But I want to be baptized!’ What would happen?” he asked parishioners. “When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, ‘No, Lord, it is not prudent! No, let’s do it this way…’”

Wednesday Night Links

* Obama Makes It Clear He Isn’t Willing To Fight for Action on Climate Change. Boy, I’m really looking forward to liberals holding Obama’s feet to the fire on climate now that he won the election! Poll results show “the dramatic impact 2012′s extreme weather has had across party lines, with half of Republicans, 73 percent of independents and 82 percent of Democrats saying they’re worried about the growing cost and risks of extreme weather disasters fueled by climate change.” How Would We Implement A Carbon Tax? (Almost) Everything You Need To Know. Doing The Climate Math: Action Obama Can Take Now. Germany Has Built Clean Energy Economy U.S. Rejected in 80s.

* Horrible: A miscarrying woman has died in Ireland after being denied a medically necessary abortion.

* Normally differential tuition proposals are based on the different costs of running different programs (if your major is more expensive to run you should pay more etc) or, when there is some sort of relationship to future earnings that those entering more lucrative fields can afford more (part of the rationale for higher professional school fees). But the Florida Task Force operates on the opposite assumption: that costs of programs should not matter and that those who allegedly have worse job options should pay more for their programs than those who will move into fields that make them immediately employable. Or to put it more bluntly, that philosophy students should pay more for their education than STEM students because there are more jobs available in STEM fields than jobs as philosophers. Of course, as Elizabeth Propp Berman recently pointed out this job driven logic doesn’t even make economic sense: economic opportunities for most STEM fields are not higher than for many humanities or liberal arts fields, and the sorts of skills provided in the humanities and social sciences are in great demand in the economy.

* Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform privatization.

* But the kids are all right. A majority of Americans support sanity on immigration policy, too.

* Doug Henwood is unimpressed with Rolling Jubilee.

* Wisconsin GOPers back bill to arrest officials who implement Obamacare. It was your party’s own idea, you lunatics.

* The VCE exam body has been left red faced after a doctored artwork depicting a huge robot helping socialist revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution was accidentally included in this year’s year 12 history exam taken by 5700 students. Teach the controversy!

* The no-stars New York Observer restaurant review everyone’s talking about.

* Gerrymandering was probably less of a factor in the election than systematic underrepresentation of urban populations more generally. But it’s still ridiculous.

* Someone just lit $10,000 on fire for no reason.

* Even the absolutely minimal filing requirements for PACs was too much for Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal nails it, as always.

* And this time for real: Local News Crew Confirms Denver Man’s UFO Claims While Attempting to Debunk Them.

Friday!

* First, the big news: Casey Affleck has admitted I’m Still Here is a hoax. Shock! Terror!

* Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will hold “competing” rallies on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to restore sanity and keep fear alive respectively. I think this is a good idea and I’m glad they’re doing it, but it’s frustrating to once again see legitimate criticism of Bush equated with totally insane criticism of Obama in the name of “balance” and “moderation.”

* Our long national nightmare is finally over: Karl Rove has surrendered to Christine O’Donnell.

* Science has proved Facebook causes flu and little kids have been mocking us this whole time.

* Understanding the Tea Party, from Glenn Greenwald. A good pullquote: Given all that, I’d really like to hear what it is about Christine O’Donnell, or Sharron Angle, or any of these other candidates that sets them apart from decades of radical right-wing elected officials who came before them?  They seem far more similar to me than different.  When was this idealized era of GOP Adult Reasonableness?

* The first Earth-like planet orbiting another star will be announced in May next year, if the discovery of extrasolar planets continues at its present rate, say researchers Samuel Arbesman from Harvard Medical School in Boston and Gregory Laughlin at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

* The U.S. poverty rate is at its highest level since 1994. Matt Yglesias:

Melissa Boteach, my colleague who focuses on poverty issues, points out that congress has the opportunity to act before things get even worse:

In just two weeks a job-creation engine known as the TANF Emergency Fund will expire, forcing states to begin shutting down successful partnerships with the private sector that have already created nearly a quarter-million jobs for low-income families. Congress must act before September 30 to extend the TANF Emergency Fund for another year and allow this innovative jobs program to continue.

Unfortunately, congress is typically more interested in the tax burden of millionaires than in the welfare of the poor and near-poor.

* Self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing, the Baby Boom generation at last has the chance to step out of the so-called Greatest Generation’s historical shadow. Boomers may not have the opportunity to save the world, as their predecessors did, but they can still redeem themselves by saving the American economy from the fiscal mess that they, and their fathers and mothers, are leaving behind. Via the latest MetaFilter post on the ongoing Third-Worldization of America.

* Making puppets with Jim Henson. Also via MetaFilter.

* And All-Star Superman will be made into animated movie. I don’t know why it hasn’t been green-lit for the next live-action Superman yet. Jon Hamm could kill it.

Three for Wednesday

* Mega Brands, owner of the hated Mega Bloks, has won a trademark battle against the good people of LEGO.

* Karl Rove, RINO.

* And every freshman composition essay ever: Since The Beginning Of Time, Mankind Has Discussed What It Did On Summer Vacation.

Republicans in Disarray

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together! Karl Rove and Sean Hannity arguing! Mass hysteria!

Saturday Night Fever

* Fredrick Pohl has been blogging about his friendship with the young Isaac Asimov: 1 2 3 4 5. Via io9.

* Not only are young people stealing all our jobs, they’re criminals! Wake up, sheeple!

* David Neiwert links to Justine Sharrock’s Mother Jones piece about the Oath Keepers, a right-wing fringe movement focused on recruiting disaffected personnel in the military and law enforcement. It’s not good.

* Well, that’s unexpected: Texas Judge Rules Death Penalty Unconstitutional.

* Gawker salutes the time Karl Rove got beat up by a little girl.

* Judging from my treatment on Twitter I’m apparently the second-to-last person in America to remember Morgan Freeman was on The Electric Company. Only my old friend @drbluman is less informed…

NJ-Gov Part Deux

I really won’t be doing a lot of NJ-GOV blogging, but in light of my earlier post on the This American Life episode I find it interesting that Jon Corzine may have caught a break today in unsealed U.S. Attorney scandal emails that link Chris Christie to the Bush White House and Karl Rove.