Weekend Links

* Annals of so totally completely missing the point: “Hunger Games’ producers working on ‘potential theme park opportunities.”

* The Public Option for Higher Education.

* Instructed at 4 p.m. Thursday to cut $55,000 — or 20 classes — by 5 p.m.

* How to Write a Lifeboater Manifesto.

* ‘You Can Sleep Here All Night’: Video Games and Labor.

* Socialize Social Media! A Manifesto.

* Postal Service Insolvent Since 2006 Law Requiring It to Be Insolvent. Better privatize it!

* Humanities degrees at Marquette remain steady despite national statistics.

* Colorized historical photos. Secluded Cultures on the Brink of Extinction. Michael Galinsky’s Retro Photos of 1980s Shopping Malls Are, Like, Totally Rad.

* Senate passes ENDA 64-32, now the House will completely ignore it. Obama Backs $10 Minimum Wage Secure in the Knowledge It Will Never Be Passed.

* The Chris Christie Hegemony. I Can’t Believe Terry McAuliffe Is Going to Be Governor of Virginia. Here comes 2016.

* No, Crime Is Not Going to Start Soaring Under Bill de Blasio.

* Terrible Columnist Richard Cohen Shocked To Learn That Slavery Was Really, Really Bad.

* “A Very Dangerous Boy”: the ten-year-old boy who killed his neo-Nazi father.

* Secret ‘Bay Bridge Troll’ Guarded the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge for 24 Years.

* Advanced Readings in D&D.

* The eleven nations of North America.

* School Named For Former KKK Leader Reconsiders Its Legacy. Christ, Florida, why the rush? Let’s be sure we really think this thing through.

* Declaring a war on warrior culture in the wake of the Miami Dolphins bullying scandal. “The NFL’s Bully Problem”: Sports Columnist Dave Zirin Connects Violence in Sports to Rape Culture. Tony Dorsett Has CTE. More Living Football Players Show Signs Of CTE. Why It Matters That Tony Dorsett Is Showing Signs Of CTE. Why a Denver Broncos player suddenly walked away from the NFL and more than $1M.

* You can tell the human body was poorly designed by evolution. I mean, who puts sanitation next to recreation?

* Happens all the time: Super typhoon Haiyan just broke all scientific intensity scales.

* Since 1890 every Wisconsin officer who took a life was cleared of any wrongdoing. Every single one.

* Black students scored lower this year in every category of the nation’s benchmark reading and math test, which also showed that for all the dynamism in Wisconsin’s education scene, student achievement remains stagnant.

* Sweden formalizes the Bechdel Test.

* Pablo Neruda: Not Poisoned.

* The new normal: Black woman shot in head seeking help in white neighborhood.

* This Is How Much Money Twitter Owes You.

* And at last some good news: That Saul Goodman Breaking Bad spinoff may be both prequel and sequel.

Tuesday Night

* SCOTUS remembers (for once) that “corporate personhood” doesn’t mean corporations are literally people.

* Since 2009, Mr. Heicklen has stood [at 500 Pearl Street in Manhattan] and at courthouse entrances elsewhere and handed out pamphlets encouraging jurors to ignore the law if they disagree with it, and to render verdicts based on conscience. That concept, called jury nullification, is highly controversial, and courts are hostile to it. But federal prosecutors have now taken the unusual step of having Mr. Heicklen indicted on a charge that his distributing of such pamphlets at the courthouse entrance violates a law against jury tampering. Via MetaFilter.

* Obama Puts Single Payer and Public Option Back on the Table (at the state level, anyway).

* Wisconsin Republicans introduce Idiot Protection Act to ban prank calls.

* And, just for fun, Goodnight Dune.

6 Mistakes That Cost Democrats Dearly?

Via @zunguzungu, here’s the list from Paul Jay of the Real News Network:

6. Not investigating Bush and Cheney for criminal actions while in office.
5. Bailing out bankers and not the banking system.
4. Not using the GM/Chrysler bailout as an opportunity to build a green economy.
3. Not defending the public option for health care reform.
2. Not bringing a promised new mindset to US foreign policy.
1. Allowing Republicans to rebrand themselves as populist behind the skirts of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

As I mentioned in the strikes and gutters post I tend to think that most of these didn’t “cost” Democrats dearly in the sense that they could have won the midterms if they’d done all six. The primal mistake is still #0: the too-small stimulus.

That said I wish they’d done all of these, because they were the right things to do and because the tiny window 2009-2010 was the best chance we’ll have for a good while. #6 diminishes the country and arguably makes Obama a party to Bush’s crimes; #5 and #4 were huge missed opportunities that will cost the country dearly in the long run; #3 was a big mistake in its own right as well as part of the larger health-care-reform supermistake that offset most concrete improvements in the health care system to 2014 and beyond; #1 would probably have helped us in some important races at the margins of the wave (though the centrality of Palin and the Tea Party definitely saved us elsewhere).

Only #2 seems truly irrelevant to the midterms. People don’t care that the U.S. has spent the last few decades waging a endless series of little wars and open-ended occupations; they seem to like it that way. The most terrible thing about contemporary U.S. politics is that Broder’s atrocious plan to win re-election by starting a war with Iran would actually work.

Change *You* Can Believe In

If you’ve been looking for a way to relive all the joys of the health debate, look no further than the sea of blog posts surrounding Daschle’s admission that the public option was always just a chip to be bargained away. Of course, this isn’t exactly news.

Stonehenge! Where the Demons Dwell!

* Rachel Maddow on fifty years of race-baiting from the right. See also Tim Wise:

The pattern is familiar. In every generation whites have hyped fears of black anger, black bigotry and the supposed desire of African Americans to exact revenge on whites. From fears about slave rebellions, to claims that integration would lead black children to knife white children in the hallways and rape white girls, to paranoia about Obama’s secret plan for “white slavery,” the cult of white victimhood has long had its charter members. Sadly, nowadays the cult has the attention of the media and a white public already anxious about changing demographics, the presence of a black president and economic insecurity. Unless the targets of their race-baiting (including the President) show the courage to push back and expose them for the venal fear-pimps they are, their methods will only get more extreme, their lies more bold, and their ability to inflict lasting damage on the nation more definitive.

* Shirley Sherrod says she might sue Andrew Breitbart, who is still lying about the entire mess. I don’t know if she has a case, but I hope she does and I hope she wins.

* Debunking the moon landing debunkers the Darryl Cunningham way.

* Lost Kafka writings have resurfaced, but the legal bureaucracy (legendarily immune to irony) is preventing their publication. There really ought to be some word for things like this.

* Sorry, local independent bookshops: Amazon has a new Amazon Student program that includes a free Amazon Prime membership for a full year.

* A “Woodhenge” has been discovered in Ohio. A wooden monument has also been uncovered near the real Stonehenge, which we visited just today. It’s clear that the aliens who ruled over prehistoric Earth loved wood. But why? Why?

* The headline reads, “Stone age dildo unearthed in Sweden.”

* Could the public option return?

* According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008. Climategate! Al Gore! It snowed one time in Washington, D.C.!

* And UNC has pledged to end all coal use by 2020. Sounds like a good start.

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…

Saturday Night

* The House vote on the Senate bill should be this week, with the final reconciliation markup beginning on Monday. I consider myself fascinated by the self-executing legislative trick the Democrats may use to “consider the Senate bill passed” without actually having to take a vote on it.

* More on SAFRA, the student loan reform package that may get passed alongside health care.

* Here’s Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow on the campaign to convince people, contrary to the facts, that everyone killed the public option.

* More from Chris Hayes, whose “The Breakdown” podcast is now a weekly listen, in Time: In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment…

* Howell Raines: One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration—a campaign without precedent in our modern political history? More on this at Crooks & Liars.

* And “a debacle for public education”: Steve Benen has your full report on history education, Texas-style.

* McCarthyism: History lessons must tell students that Joe McCarthy’s suspicions were later “confirmed.”

All right, that’s it, I give up.

Friday Night Links

* The Devil is living in the Vatican, says the Pope’s chief exorcist.

* Texas state School Board unpersons Thomas Jefferson.

* Can soccer ever fix tie-breaking?

* Google’s bike maps “‘filled with potentially fatal flaws.'”

* The public option is dead again. Glenn Greenwald, as we might expect, is pissed. I’m really not sure what the argument for caution is supposed to be here, as the public option remains at least ten points more popular than the rest of the bill. Why not pass it through reconciliation while we’re doing everything else? What bad thing will happen if we do?

* Adding student loan reform to the health care bill, on the other hand, is probably both good policy and good politics.

* Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein give reason to hope November might not be the Democratic bloodbath we’re all expecting.

* And here comes A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas?

Thurs. 2

* The median wealth for single black women aged 36 to 49 is $5. The comparable number for single white women ages 36-49 is $42,600. For single white men 36-49, it’s near $70,000. For married or cohabitating white women (18-64), it’s $167,500…

* What liberal media? Sex scandals only matter when they involve Democrats.

* What liberal media? For some inscrutable reason people are still taking ACORN fraud James O’Keefe seriously.

* A reminder that suburbia doesn’t “just happen.” It’s not the market; it’s deliberate policy. We can change it.

* As every progressive blog has reported today—I’m assuming it was marching orders from Comrade Klein—support for health care reform is going back up.

* And another good sign: Bernie Sanders: I’m Prepared To Introduce Public Option Amendment.

Thursday Night Links

* I hadn’t heard Barry Hannah died. I never met him, but he was very much at the center of the Southern U.S. MFA scene. How sad.

* Students are striking in California again today, as anyone who is Facebook friends with my friend PJ knows very well. Good luck folks.

* Should soccer ban the paradinha?

* Actually existing media bias: As if by magic, reconciliation is suddenly “controversial.”

* Apocalypse soon: Arctic seabed methane stores destabilizing, venting. Climate Progress agrees it’s time to panic.

* A link somewhere took me back to Ze Frank’s Young Me / Now Me today, and it’s still one of the most compelling sites on the Internet.

* Obama made his health care pitch to House progressives today, apparently pledging to return to the public option in the future. Raul Grijalva, who’d previously pledged to vote against the bill from the left, said he found the pitch “pretty compelling”—which is a very good sign.

* Currently watching: Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, about a research assistant on the Manhattan Project who went on to become the sound engineer and producer behind some of the best musicians of the 20th century. It’s great stuff.

Closing! All! My! Tabs!

* Al Gore is coming to Duke this April.

* Arbitrarily defined political, social, and religious positionalities correlate with a measurement that doesn’t mean anything to prove people like me are smarter than everybody else. Science!

* For the doctors in the audience: A transit map of the human body.

* John Roberts, radical. Via MeFi.

For the past few years, I’ve been giving Roberts the benefit of the doubt, hoping that he meant it when he talked about the importance of putting the bipartisan legitimacy of the Court above his own ideological agenda. But, while Roberts talked persuasively about conciliation, it now appears that he is unwilling to cede an inch to liberals in the most polarizing cases. If Roberts continues this approach, the Supreme Court may find itself on a collision course with the Obama administration–precipitating the first full-throttle confrontation between an economically progressive president and a narrow majority of conservative judicial activists since the New Deal.

* This note shows that the aggregate fiscal expenditure stimulus in the United States, properly adjusted for the declining fiscal expenditure of the fifty states, was close to zero in 2009. While the Federal government stimulus prevented a net decline in aggregate fiscal expenditure, it did not stimulate the aggregate expenditure above its predicted mean. In other words, the federal stimulus primarily covered shortfalls in state budgets; it wasn’t new spending.

* Congratulations, Senate Republicans, on another historic benchmark.

* Another day, another set of outrageous lies from Fox News.

* Another academic career ruined by Facebook?

* Health care, they say, by Easter. Thirty-six Senators now support the reinserting the public option through reconciliation; here’s how they can bring it to a vote. Meanwhile, in the House, Pelosi only needs 216 votes. It’s still being reported that the House will act first.

* Steve Benen has a list of the additional Republican ideas that Obama now wants in the health care bill. I’m certain they now hate these ideas too. Quick, call a summit!

* On Nicole Kidman’s pre-existing conditions.

* When Sartre wrote for Hollywood.

* What Smith and [Stanley] Fish are doing is asking a stupid question — where are the Orders of the Cosmic Dictator? — and failing to note that there seems to be no evidence of a cosmic dictator, and his orders are merely pretenses put up by institutionalized frauds. And then they run about in circles, flailing their arms and screaming at the people who point out that there are no orders.

* How to resign from the Catholic Church.

* Lost landscapes of Detroit.

* A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things.

* Globalization, as seen through your taco.

* Rejoice: marriage equality in DC tomorrow.

* And please, leave Indy alone.

Monday Night Links

* On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure. (Via R. Vu.)

* Science proves naps are great.

* Science proves 3-D movies hurt your brain.

* Should we clone Neanderthals? OBVIOUSLY. (Please don’t.)

* Time to renew my campaign to steal Duke’s copy of Action Comics #1. I just need to find ten to twelve other guys to help me do the job.

* Science proves economic growth no longer possible for rich countries.

* Mapping the mind of Tommy Westphall.

* BREAKING: Newsweek editors are surprisingly unprofessional in their private emails to each other.

* The public option is really popular! But you can never have it.

* Five Republican Senators put country over party. That list includes Scott Brown, socialist stooge.

* The Republican Party’s obituary has been written before, but demographics simply aren’t on their side.

* Turkish temple predates agricultural civilization. (Via Kottke.) There’s no doubt this thing was built by aliens:

Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities.

Wake up, sheeple!

* And some friends of mine have work forthcoming in Drawing Is a Way of Thinking: The Comics of Chris Ware, available now for pre-order from Amazon. Check it out.

Friday Friday Night Night

* Fox News: Don’t send your kids to college because they could catch the libralz. But if you do at least they won’t be as dumb as 30% of Texans.

* One Million Ways to Die.

* Stories to watch: activists may actually manage to bring the public option back from the death. Reid himself signaled he’s open to the idea today. Ezra Klein explains the politics at work:

No one I’ve spoken to — even when they support the public option — thinks that its reemergence is good news for health-care reform. It won’t be present in the package that the White House will unveil Monday. Everyone seems to be hoping this bubble will be short-lived.

But it might not be. The media is talking about it, liberals are organizing around it, none of the major actors feels politically capable of playing executioner, and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson don’t have the power to do the job on their own. As of now, the strategy only has 20 or so supporters, and it’ll need at least another 20 or 25 to really be viable. But if it gets there, White House and Senate leadership are going to have some hard calls to make.

Ezra also says that as long as we’re playing make-believe it should be the Medicare buy-in we bring back.

* Rachel bestows unto Meet the Press another Maddow Bump. Will she do the same when she improbably shares a bill with me on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio this Sunday?

* I can’t help it: I love to see Wil Wheaton and William Shatner get work.

* Breaking: rich people are rich, pay no taxes.

* Iain M. Banks, Please Destroy The Culture! Via io9.

* Flowchart of the day: Does Tiger Woods owe you an apology?

* And Gynomite dramatically underestimates my level of interest in the penny’s new design. Coming Monday, my new blog, bringbacktheoldpenny.blogspot.com…

Bully Pulpit

(alternative headline: Someone at the White House Finally Gets a Clue)

The Obama White House will present a reconciliation-ready plan for health care reform on Monday.

Also note that this represents something of an ultimatum to congressional Republicans: Dems are moving forward on this. The president is inviting GOP leaders to present their ideas and arguments, and has promised to consider them in good faith, but by crafting his own proposal, Obama is also making clear that their permission to govern is not a prerequisite. He’s open to incorporating Republican measures, but he’s not open to letting Republicans kill reform.

In other words, the message to the GOP is simple: you’ll get a chance to contribute, but we’re moving on with or without you.

As discussed last night, there’s absolutely no reason Obama’s version shouldn’t include a public option, though I’d be very pleasantly surprised if one got past Rahm and the other cowering centrists. There’s just no reason to hold back: it’s good policy, it’s an instant legacy with huge capacity for expansion towards single-payer, the public wants it, and the votes are there. Just do it.

Still Fighting

OpenLeft, bless its idealistic heart, is reading an awful lot into a throwaway statement from Kathleen Sebelius on The Rachel Maddow Show:

MADDOW: “The private insurance company writ large hasn’t done a great job. That’s why we want a public option to compete with them. These 18 Democratic senators want to bring that back into the fold. If that happened, would the administration fight for it?”

SEBELIUS: “Well, I think if it’s…Certainly. If it’s part of the decision of the Senate leadership to move forward, absolutely.”

I don’t know that she was really endorsing the idea, much less throwing any weight behind it; her statement could just as easily be taken as a disavowal. Still, if the public option does come back at the 11th hour, the antagonistic stance of OpenLeft and similar places in the progressive blogosphere towards Congressional Dems and even the Obama White House will have had a lot to do with it. Tonight they get no complaints from me.