My credentials as a left blogger will apparently be revoked if I don't link to this clip from last night's Daily Show.

Jon Stewart, national treasure.

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Man, I hope you all watched The Daily Show tonight. I've never seen Stewart go after anyone like he went after Cramer. Video tomorrow, but real-time commentary on Twitter tonight.

UPDATE: Video now at dailyshow.com. Jon Stewart remains one of the only people in mass culture who holds elites accountable to reason, ethics, logic, or the truth. The man is a national treasure.

Random linkfest.

* Coup in Canada! Somehow the Liberals and New Democrats finally managed to pull their heads out of their asses and kick Harper out.

* You had me at Planet of the Apes. Just don't screw it up this time. More at CHUD.

* Matt Yglesias: If you’re not following Shaq’s Twitter feed you’re not really living in the contemporary world. He’s moved us all the way to Web 4.0.

* Flight of the Conchords Season 2 is coming.

* Jon Stewart speaks truth to power MSNBC.

* Life with perfect memory.

Waiting for the liveblogging to begin, a few links.

* Sixty-one Nobel laureates have jointly endorsed Obama.

* So have donuts and bacon.

* Slate predicts McCain's next ten Hail Marys, while the L.A. Times takes on the potential downside of his "Great Man" strategy:

But as many Great Men come to learn, there is a colossal downside built into running a campaign on outsized personal virtue. The line between stoic, honorable service and showy moral vanity is oftentimes difficult to maintain.

And when a candidate confuses his own political ambitions with the fortunes of his country, that's when Great Men turn into self- parodies.

*Spencer Ackerman has the world's best wrap-up of the Great Campaign Suspension Stunt of '08.

Let's recap. McCain kinda-but-doesn't-really suspend his campaign to make himself the indispensable man in the bailout agreement. He gets to Washington as an object of ridicule and the deal falls apart -- something that at least some people, admittedly Democrats, attribute to McCain's transparent stunt. Then, despite Harry Reid saying he's going to keep the Senate in session until there's a deal, McCain abruptly announces he's... going back to campaigning (not that he stopped!) and will attend the debates.

* Entertainment Weekly interviews Stewart and Colbert.

* Far-right-wing columnist Kathleen Parker argues that Palin needs to step down in, of all places, the National Review (!).

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

This backs up new claims that the McCain campaign is deeply panicked over her utter lack of ability.

* And Kevin Drum and Brad DeLong are doing their best to walk the blogosphere back from the brink on the bailout.

To get get a $500B macroeconomic gain in production and employment, Paulson wants to take on a position with an expected value of -$100B. But the true value of that position could be anywhere between +$200B and -$400B. Looks like a good bet to me.

Quick links for Monday morning.

* Dream tenure locations Portland and San Francisco top this year's list of most sustainable cities.

* Did I just say "tenure"? Dean Dad has predictions for higher education in the current financial crisis that don't look good.

5. More of the 'replace retired full-timers with adjuncts and hope for the best' approach to hiring. In the very short term, the cost savings from adjuncting-out the classes that had been taught by a high-seniority full-timer are significant. The damage to the institution is (usually) somewhat abstract at first, and hard to quantify, but the savings are concrete and easy to quantify. When the bulkhead is broken and water is rushing in, the quick fix holds real appeal. If last week's IHE article was right, and the pace of full-timers retiring will slow as the returns on their pensions slip into negative territory, then the pressure to adjunct-out the few who actually do retire will be all the greater. Expect an already unforgiving job market in the evergreen disciplines to get that much worse, at least until the dust settles.

* Is the financial crisis more dire than the climate crisis? $700B+ if you can guess the right answer.

* Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert sneak their way around the Emmy politics ban.

* And the This Week panel hates John McCain.

MoveOn has been largely silenced by Obama's decision to financially cut off the 527s, but they're found a way to make themselves useful: getting AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, who was nearly hired as a senior adviser to McCain in October 2006, fired.

In other media criticism news, it has once again fallen to Jon Stewart to tell reporters how to do their jobs.

Is Jon Stewart the most trusted man in America? The New York Times reports. Discussion at MeFi.

P.S., Daily Show fans: John Oliver has a DVD of his stand-up out this week.

Jon Stewart nicely explains the foolishness of media outrage! over the New Yorker cover on last night's Daily Show.



More on the nature of satire from John Oliver et al. and The Stephen Colbert Show.

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, "You know, we don't get many kangaroos here." Barack Obama replies, "At these prices, I'm not surprised. That's why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil."

Andy Borowitz has the list of official, campaign-approved Barack Obama jokes in the wake of the now-infamous New Yorker cover flap, undoubtedly the silliest Outrage! of the election yet. Reasonable people can disagree about the success of the cover as satire—personally I think it works, and I think the ensuing shitstorm is pretty strong evidence of that—but whether it's a "good" satire or not the meaning is absolutely clear, inoffensive, and pro-Obama: it's the morons who believe this crap and the media figures who cynically peddle it who are being mocked, not the Obamas.

I'm even not sure who these mythical people are supposed to be who are with it enough to have heard of the New Yorker in the first place yet still clueless enough to take the cover at face value.

However, it must be said that Jon Stewart gets this wrong:

When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”

Comedy Rule #1: Don't blame the audience when your jokes fall flat; get better jokes. His writers, much more than Colbert's, have clearly been struggling when it comes to Obama; just about the only successful Obama joke they've run is this one: "I wonder when he'll break our hearts."