Still waiting.

* It's not exactly Douchiest College honors, but Duke is #14 on the Times's ranking of top 200 universities worldwide.

* Bitter Laughter reports by way of Nate Silver that public option opt-out may be a compromise that can actually get through the Senate—and Steve Benen agrees it's not a bad thing.

* Also in health care: Olbermann's hour-long "Special Comment" from last night, which wasn't nearly as unbearable as I imagined it would be when I heard it was coming.

* A second NJ-GOV poll—albeit one taken before Fatgate—shows Corzine up, this time by three.

* Lots of talk today about this New York Times genealogy of Michelle Obama, focused on an enslaved ancestor who was raped by her owner.

* Pee before you fly. It's funny how low-cost, outside-the-box carbon solutions—like Stephen Chu's suggestion that we paint our roofs white—are never taken seriously. It's like our society has a death wish.

* The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal.

Friday!

* Can't-miss upcoming events at Duke: a Sun Ra talk and accompanying art exhibit.

* Glenn Beck, art critic. Olbermann critiques the critic.

* This morning John Hodgman accidentally tweeted his cell phone number to all 82,000 of his Twiter followers.

* Ten sci-fi ways to change the climate.

* Turns out the White House drafting its own health-care reform bill. Steve Benen speculates as to what might be in it.

* Krugman on the causes of the Great Recession. Discussion at MetaFilter.

* MetaFilter also has your police brutality outrage of the day.

Early morning Wednesday.

* We finally saw Up! tonight. All I can say is if the first ten minutes don't break your heart you have no soul.

* Blackwater founder Erik Prince has apparently been implicated in a huge swath of crimes by a former employee and a Marine working with the company, ranging from tax evasion and money laundering to weapons smuggling to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence to crimes of war and even to the murder of federal informants. (See MetaFilter for more.) My now-incredibly-timely review of Master of War is getting bumped up accordingly and will probably be online (updated) at Independent Weekly in a day or so. This is all pretty shocking, even by Blackwater standards.

* In not-completely-frakked-up news, Bill Clinton did a good thing today, a win for just about everybody but infamous douchebag of liberty John Bolton.



* More on the Olbermann/O'Reilly saga from Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, and David Sirota. While I appreciate that he finds himself in a tough spot here, Olbermann is not doing himself any favors with his behavior; making one type of statement on-the-air and another off makes it very clear what is going on, and makes him look like a fool.

* The 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies. Outraged to see Galaxy Quest only squeaking by at #95. And 12 Monkeys quietly buried in the 80s? Nonsense.

* "In Which I Ruin Rashomon For Everyone, Forever."

* And your short pictorial history of robots.

MMLD #3.

* Oil! More here and here.

* We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks' holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year or so longer, and we'd trust each other more.

* Continued tough week for MSNBC as the Richard Wolffe scandal piles on the Fox détente scandal. Of course, the roots of corporate media corruption go much deeper than just this pair of incidents. UPDATE: For what it's worth, Olbermann emphatically denied the rumors on his show tonight during his Worst Persons segment, another proud entry in the "not KO's proudest moment" file. UPDATE 2: Olbermann posted a Daily Kos diary on both subjects today as well.

* Duke's Cathy Davidson is profiled at Inside Higher Ed for her plan to schematize student grades.

*PKD rocks Bookslut and the San Francisco Gate.

* And Terry Pratchett, suffering from Alzheimer's, is fighting for his right to die.

Saturday morning linkdump 2: politics edition.

* The Vonnegut-flavored image at right is graffiti fresh from the streets of Burlington, Vermont.

* Vegetarianism, as every school child knows, is evil. I had an upstairs neighbor once who really believed this—he used to tell me all the time how vegetarians were on the fast track to full-on Nazism. Weird guy.

* Birther update: even OpinionJournal's odious "Best of the Web" column says the birthers are nuts. In the L.A. Times, Bill Maher says birtherism is no joke. But you and I know birtherism exists only in the feverish lies of Chris Matthews and Markos Moulitsas.

* Glenn Greenwald has a must-read post on corporate interference at MSNBC and Fox News.

In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEO's agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp...

* Democrats facing big off-year electoral losses in New Jersey and Virginia?

* In the days leading up to Obama's decision to run, Axelrod prepared a private strategy memo -- dated Nov. 28, 2006 -- that has never been published before. He wrote that an outgoing president nearly always defines the next election and argued that people almost never seek a replica -- certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush. In 2008, people were going to be looking for a replacement, someone who represented different qualities. In Axelrod's opinion, Obama's profile fit this historical moment far better than did Hillary Rodham Clinton's. If he was right, Obama could spark a political movement and prevail against sizable odds. He also counseled Obama against waiting for a future opportunity to run for president. "History is replete with potential candidates for the presidency who waited too long rather than examples of people who ran too soon. . . . You will never be hotter than you are right now."

* A new study demonstrating that organic food is no healthier than regularly produced food seems to entirely miss the point of organics.

Friday morning and one week down!

* David Sedaris delivers a pizza.

* Stephen Colbert rightly demands that he be named worst person in the world. I certainly hope a Special Comment™ is forthcoming on this travesty.

* Confidential to climate change deniers: A headline that reads "Global Warming: Scientists' Best Predictions May Be Wrong" doesn't necessarily help your argument. See also. (Via Atrios.)

Thursday Night Links 2.

* Nate Silver crunches some more numbers, this time on the environmental indifference point.



* Neoconservatives against American soccer. More from Matt Yglesias.

* When will the MSM force Obama to take responsibility for what he did to Mark Sanford's marriage?

* On a more serious note, Larval Subjects has a nice rant on a subject I touched on earlier, namely the ugliness of the media's silly obsession with the details of Mark Sanford's love life and in particular Olbermann's insufferable behavior on his show last night.

* AmericaBlog has an idea for some political hardball: bring the DOMA repeal up for a vote this week.

* Neo-Whorfianism: How does language shape the way we think? Via MeFi.

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

Bad advice from Alec Baldwin (via Kottke, who gets this wrong too):

Now is a wonderful opportunity to show the country what Democrats/liberals/progressives/unaligned learned from the Clinton era. Whatever personal problems that public officials deal with privately, leave them alone. This could happen to anyone, in any state, regardless of party. Why make the voters of South Carolina suffer while Sanford is skewered? If he wants to resign, so be it. If not, let him deal with it in private.

Kottke goes on to criticize Huffington Post and TPM for diving so wholeheartedly into the mud on this. And he's right—sex scandals are non-stories and should be treated as such. (Olbermann's glee, for instance, was actively painful to watch last night.) But that doesn't mean the Sanford story isn't important or that the man shouldn't resign. Though the media seems strangely uninterested in this fact, Sanford skipped town (skipped the whole country!) for a week without telling anyone where he was going, and in fact actively misled his staff about his whereabouts. There are powers that only governors can exercise; it's wildly irresponsible for him to pull a stunt like this no matter what's going on in his personal life, and if that's the level of judgment he exercises when dealing with the state's business he obviously needs to resign. Governing a state is serious business, and a serious responsibility; Sanford blew it off, and so he needs to resign or else be impeached. That's the only aspect of this story that's newsworthy and the only one we should be talking about, no matter how salacious the details or egregious the apparent hypocrisy.

UPDATE: But don't take my word for it; even "Chainsaw" Charles Krauthammer says Sanford has to go.

Olbermann's special comment on Prop 8. KO's characteristic melodrama aside, I have to agree with him: it boggles my mind that this is an argument we are having as a nation, that there is anyone, anywhere, who could actually oppose marriage equality. I can't begin to understand it. I suppose I'm impatient—GLBT issues have made tremendous progress even since the 1990s, and in a few years this will all be (almost) over—but this is really a struggle I just wish we could skip to the end of.

At one point I was hopeful that Prop 8 would be the first big victory for our side. I'm still upset it wasn't. Keith is, in the end, right: this vote is horrible.

Olbermann: 'This is man-on-the-moon.'



Atrios has another referent.

Too bad no one watches MSNBC: Joe Biden is doing some great post-debate analysis on Olbermann.

UPDATE: Here's the video. Say what else you might about him, this is something Biden does very well.

Something's a little off at MSNBC: after last night's Keith Olbermann Special Comment rant about the Republicans' exploitation of 9/11, it seems a little strange to hear from Gawker that the network is currently playing its footage from 9/11/01 in real time. What's the old saying? You can't put lipstick on that pig. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

I generally like KO, but the Special Comment segment should simply be taken out behind the barn thrown under the bus retired. The novelty, and thus the power, is gone, and all that's left is a deeply overused ratings stunt they now start advertising two days in advance. Last night was the worst, I think: the rant turned in the end to John McCain's non-existent secret plan to capture Osama bin Laden, all but accusing McCain of treason for failing to share this plan with the rest of us. But the point, of course, is exactly the opposite. It's not that McCain "knows how" to capture Osama bin Laden because he "knows wars" and "knows how to win them"—the point, sir, the point is that John McCain's tough talk is plainly empty on its face, and therefore worthy only to be mocked.

Good night and good luck.

Arrested Development: The Movie: it's real, per Jason Bateman on KO:



The pessimist in me worries that this will only ruin the world's most perfect TV show, but I'm willing to take that chance. Via MeFi.

Here's the faux Special Comment they reference in the interview, which I'd missed at the time:

Olbermann had a "Special Comment" tonight on Clinton's assassination gaffe:



For what it's worth I think Olbermann's outrage is pretty well-founded. I'm obviously no fan of the Clintons, but it's bad enough to continue her quixotic campaign secretly hoping that something horrible happens to Obama so she gets to be the nominee after all—far worse to actually say it and remove all doubt. This was a Freudian slip, not an incitement to violence, and it certainly wasn't anything she ever intended to say—but it unnecessarily invokes the grim specter of assassination that many Obama supporters have felt haunted by since Iowa. As she is the person who currently stands to most directly gain from such a disaster, her bringing it up seems, at best, unseemly. At best.

This may blow over, or she may have to soon end her campaign over this. We'll have to wait and see what the media does with it over the weekend. Her non-apology apology certainly didn't help.

In other primary news, The Field reports a surge of California superdelegates shifting to Obama—note this happened before the gaffe—as well as the tantalizing possibility that I may soon be forced to take back all the nasty things I've said about John Edwards.

And kos has the polling that suggests John McCain's viability as a candidate against Obama may have been significantly overrated.

While we're waiting for the polls to close, here's Keith Olbermann with a helpful primer on which states count and which don't.



In other useful K.O. videos, Chuck Todd explains why the race is effectively over tonight, while Kal Penn explains how it was that Harold and Kumar came to Guantánamo. The hometown heroes get their names deservedly dropped.

This is not a campaign strategy.
This is a suicide pact.

Crooks and Liars has video of the Keith Olbermann "Special Comment" on Ferraro and Hillary Clinton's quixotic, scorched-earth quest for the Democratic nomination, which certainly has the Internets buzzing tonight.