More links.

* New trailers for Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Road.

* The EPA has announced new guidelines to regulate greenhouse gases.

* The oldest living things in the world. (via)

* Richard Kahlenberg argues at Washington Monthly towards class-based affirmative action.

* Common Roman Polanski Defenses, Refuted.

Politics Wednesday!

* Ben Smith at Politco dreams the dream: Franken '16?

* More good news: God's told Joe the Plumber not to run for office.

* But bad news: Glenn Beck guest Michael Scheuer says America's only hope is a massive terrorist attack. Don't miss Beck nodding sagely towards the end. Adam Serwer says it well:

But understand, this is not unpatriotic. You can wish all manner of horrors on this country, but as long as these horrors might serve a specific political agenda, you're not being unpatriotic. Unpatriotic is a public health-care plan. Unpatriotic is a judge modifying sub-prime mortgage loans to keep a roof over someone's head. Unpatriotic is phosphate-free detergent. Patriotic is wishing for a terrorist attack on the United States.

Patriotism is dead, long live patriotism.

* TPM and Washington Monthly tackle the EPA SUPPRESSION!!!!! "scandal" that's been making the rounds; turns out a hobbyist working on non-climate matters for the agency decided a memo no one asked him to write prepared in his spare time should be published alongside recommendations produced by actual experts in the field. Fox News, naturally, agrees. Inhofe (R-Jupiter) has gone further, demanding Monday a criminal investigation.

* Also in climate news: Thomas Friedman says Waxman-Markey is very, very bad and we should support it. For what it's worth Kevin Drum agrees.

Other stuff.

* Jaimee has a piece in the Indy Green Guide this week comparing dueling energy initiatives in the North Carolina State Legislature.

* Begging as labor: Alex Greenberg thinks it over.

* Science fiction's most evil corporations.

* Hope for Dollhouse? 'Prison Break return disappoints,' scoring 75% of Dollhouse's regular audience in the Friday night death slot.

* Making Samuel Beckett.

* The Brick Testament has reached The Book of Revelations.

* "Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism," by Terry Eagleton. Via MeFi.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

*Think Progress says "Obama’s Immunity For CIA Agents Still Leaves Prosecutions Of Senior Bushies On The Table." People need to accept that Obama's going to let us down on this. He told us he would. He will.

* Your taxes at work. See also.

* A major EPA ruling this week declared carbon dioxide a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. More analysis at the Oil Drum.

* Imagine finding yourself aboard a burning ocean liner. An increasing number of people are trying to put it out -- and they stand a good chance, if they can get access to the fire axes and hoses. Unfortunately, some rich old fat guys are sitting in deck chairs blocking the equipment, enjoying drinks and appetizers, and every time the other passengers try to get them to move, the rich old fat guys say they don't really believe in the fire, and even if it does exist, it probably can't be put out so we should just trust in the new lifeboat being built. And, sure enough, there on the deck is a guy is a brilliant, somewhat unworldly professor, busily sketching a design for a new lifeboat as the smoke billows in larger and larger clouds.

That's a pretty fair analogy for the situation in which we find ourselves, and for the role geoengineering is playing in the climate debate.

* The Wire series bible.

I'm seeing a marked uptick in lefty griping in my feeds, often with some variation on the phrase "washing my hands of the Democratic Party." I'd say this sort of proclamation was unfair, but I guess its time has come; Obama has been president, after all, for two whole months and yet puppies still die.

Confidential to my fellow travelers: What I wrote about pragmatism during the primaries (1, 2) still holds. I don't like the way the financial crisis is being handled either, but unless you foresee wholesale Constitutional reforms before 2012 you're going to have either a Democratic or Republican president. You have to pick one, and there's only one who will ever even listen to people like us. The happy feeling you get from not voting for a Democrat is worth exactly nothing.

Elections have consequences. To take just one example that passed across my newsreader yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency has now blocked mountaintop-removal coal-mining. That happened because the far-too-centrist, corporatist, hopelessly compromised Democratic Party is now in power. And not just in power, but more unabashedly progressive than it's been for forty years. Drag the country to the left with one hand, hold your nose with the other, but we're stuck with the Democrats if we ever want to get anything accomplished. You don't have to like it—but if you want to be a politically relevant actor in America you have to come to terms with it.

I would have thought the example of the last eight years would have proved this point well enough. Have our memories gotten so short?

Friday night links while I wait for Jaimee to get home so I can watch some science fiction and turn my brain off.

* George Will is in the news this week for his latest stunningly dishonest column on climate change, which the Washington Post has perversely decided to stand behind. The statement from the paper's ombudsman is here.

* The EPA under the Obama administration will finally be able to take carbon seriously.

* Secure website authentification questions.

* Howard Machtinger looks back at his participation in the Weather Underground to acknowledge the group's failures. Via MeFi and Matt Yglesias.

While “New Morning” signaled the WU’s commitment to taking greater care after the accident to target property and not people, it did not acknowledge the WU’s own responsibility for the politics of the Townhouse collective.

WU leaders––then and since––failed to reckon candidly and directly with what it meant, politically and humanly, that core members of the organization had planned to use fragmentation bombs to kill attendees at a dance.

* The complete Pac-Man dossier: everything there is to know about the game, from ghost logic to how to play the kill screen. Via MeFi.

* Hard to believe we've all outlived Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I haven't watched the show in years, but it was formative to my sense of "funny" as a teenager. Here's Colbert saying goodbye the only way he knows how.

* Wither Burris? It doesn't look good for the man nobody wanted to be Senator anyway.

HuffPoGreen has extensive coverage of the Tennessee coal ash disaster, including first-hand reports and before-and-after photos, while Crooks and Liars links to long-term health effects of the sludge.

Smoke and Mirrors: How Bush Subverted the EPA. Via MeFi.

The Environmental Appeals Board effectively killed the expansion of the coal industry yesterday in a landmark ruling requiring the "best-available control technology" for CO2 emissions. I'm on my way out the door, but this is big and very welcome news. More commentary at Climate Progress, Think Progress, Daily Kos, and HuffPo.

Random midday politics links.

* From kottke I find out NASA is fifty years old today.

* The Environmental Protection Agency is warning its pollution enforcement officials not to talk directly to congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press. Just another day in George Bush's America, 174 more days to go.

* And the presidential race is still close here in North Carolina:

The new numbers from Public Policy Polling (D): McCain 47%, Obama 44%, and Barr 3%, with a ±3.4% margin of error. Four weeks ago, it was McCain 45%, Obama 41%, and Barr 5%.

Friday morning enviropessimism!

* Another day, another record price for oil: $147.

* Antarctic ice sheet 'hanging by a thread.'

* The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the value of an American life has dropped nearly $1 million to $6.9 million. Lest you think this merely a theoretical decrease, the number actually has real consequences in environmental policy, and of course the new devaluation won't be good for anyone but Big Pollution:

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

* Luckily our president takes these important issues very seriously.

* And of course there's good news, too: pollution may be slowing global warming. We're saved!