62% of Republicans say the government should stay out of Medicare.

Midday Monday. Another apology for so many linkdumps is in order, but I'm afraid I don't have time to write it at the moment.

* What does it take to really disappear? Wired investigates faking your own death.

* Tarantino's top-twenty films since he started directing.

* Criterion Collection top-tens from Jonathan Lethem, Steve Buscemi, Robin Wood, and Richard Linklater.

* Usian Bolt sets a new 100m world record. Via MeFi, which immediately accused him of juicing.

* The House Next Door's review of District 9—which incidentally comes to many of the same conclusions as mine—includes a neat look at the six-minute short from Neill Blomkamp that preceded it, Alive in Joburg.

* More bad press for New Jersey's Chris Christie originating from his time on the Morris County Board. Discussion at TPM and MyDD.

* And Steve Benen bemoans 44 years of human slavery under Medicare.

Monday night!

* On the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, Kotte catches Moon Fever (and there's only no cure). The Nation celebrates the Gil-Scott Heron way.

* 21 artists who changed mainstream comics (for better or worse).

17. Chris Ware
Though he’s philosophically more in line with the alt-comics community, Chris Ware draws so much media attention, and his books sell so well, that his work is arguably more mainstream than any current superhero title. Ware’s innovations in comic-page design—which include temporal shifts conveyed by complex diagrams and frames within frames—were inspired by Art Spiegelman’s ’70s experiments and by Richard McGuire’s seminal Raw story “Here.” But Ware marries his fetish for design with a singularly sardonic voice and a God’s-eye perspective on his characters, creating an overall tone that’s like a turn-of-the-century circus poster crossed with the post-war angst of literary lions like John Updike and Richard Yates. Ware’s influence is mostly seen among the younger alternative crowd and contemporary commercial artists, but his use of staccato pacing and visual repetition has popped up in a number of superhero comics over the past decade as well.

* Is Harry Potter no longer a ticket straight to Hell?

* Steve Benen remembers the day Medicare enslaved us all.

* Aliens in vintage postcards.

Is McCain trying to lose? What other answer can there be to the latest terrible, self-defeating spin on his abominable health care plan? He's actually talking about cutting the Medicare budget. Per Kevin Drum, here's how he got here:

1. We're going to eliminate the tax deduction of healthcare insurance and replace it with a $5,000 tax credit for families.

2. Oops, that means a lot of families will end up paying more in taxes. Can't have that. So what we're really going to do is eliminate the income tax deduction, but not the payroll tax deduction. All better now.

3. Oops again. The new plan saves middle class families from a tax increase, but by doing so it blows a huge hole in the budget. $1.3 trillion over ten years, to be exact.

4. What do do? Cut Medicare! Hooray!

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias have more on this. The latest round of pro-Obama swing state polls don't even take this into effect yet, and they still show Obama leading in Colorado, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and, yes, Florida—what will those polls look like once the slashing-Medicare issue hits the airwaves?

What is his team thinking? FiveThirtyEight is even arguing that Georgia's still in play.

"It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free."

When did Ronald Reagan say this bold, stirring words, quoted by Sarah Palin at the close of the debate yesterday? As Jonathan Chait remembers, he was talking about the terrible extinction of freedom that would result—has resulted!—from the enactment of Medicare. (Via Steve Benen.)

Why didn't we listen? Oh, for the days when men and women were free!