Due to various academic commitments, this blog has been very Blogspot Nights lately. I'm not happy about it but it may not change soon—once my comics class is over I have a few weeks off before work at [Undisclosed Location] starts up again.

Let's struggle onward together.

* Daily Kos has a compilation of the obsessive hate directed from Bill O'Reilly towards Dr. George Tiller for the crime of practicing medicine. O'Reilly's response tonight on the air was essentially that Tiller had it coming.

* Birthers overrun government transparency program.

* Petraeus says the U.S. violated the Geneva Conventions, while General Ricardo Sanchez calls for a Truth Commission. More from Attackerman.

* Barack Obama has declared June LGBT Pride Month. Hey, how great! It's like he's almost actually taking action! Call me when you're repealed DADT.

* Oprah and pseudoscience. Via Kevin Drum.

* The accusation that Sonia Sotomayor has—as The New York Times uncritically put it—a "race-based approach to the law" is turning out to be one of the most reality-detached arguments to make it into the mainstream since Saddam’s mushroom clouds. All the relevant evidence—all of it—proves how false that accusation is.

* Franken and Coleman went to the Minnesota Supreme Court today, and Coleman got smacked.

* And atheist children will kill you for candy.

At the big Oprah/Michelle Obama rally today in California, Maria Shriver unexpectedly showed up to endorse Obama. kos gets a little breathless about it:

Update: Keep in mind, this is now top-of-the-fold news in every California newspaper tomorrow, it will lead every newscast. And it should push into Tuesday as the governor is forced to answer questions about it.

Well played, Obama campaign. Well played.

Update II: Shriver just said that she decided this morning to speak. It wasn't planned. So maybe it wasn't well played by the Obama campaign. Maybe they just got damn lucky.

UPDATE: Joan Baez, too, randomly, in a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

After a few weeks of Hillary-Clinton-is-inevitable primary hopelessness, I'm starting to feel really good again about Obama's chances of overtaking her. I think the Oprah thing is huge, bigger than even either Ezra Klein or Ana Marie Cox acknowledge: not merely because it's a massive amount of free, positive PR or because Oprah Winfrey has the potential to bring new voters to the polls for Obama, but also insofar as her endorsement helps give women who might otherwise feel duty-bound to vote Clinton for reasons of gender solidarity "permission" to vote for Obama instead. (The Dec. 3 results from the Pew Research Group on this page would suggest that gender solidarity is an important component in Hillary's still-commanding lead in early primary states.)

Meanwhile, I really like what I see in this focus group comparing Obama and Clinton:

Obama, they worried, can't win the nomination; voters aren't ready for an African-American president (a point expressed most directly by the two black women participants), and he may not be sufficiently experienced.

A couple of victories in Iowa and New Hampshire would cure most of those problems.

The concerns about Clinton, 60, a New York senator, are that she is devious, calculating and, fairly or not, a divisive figure in American politics.

Those are a lot tougher to overcome.

It was revealing, too, when Hart pushed them to envision these senators as leaders of the country or, as he put it, their ``boss.'' Obama, they say, would be inspirational, motivating, charismatic and compassionate. After praising Clinton's experience and intelligence, they say she would be demanding, difficult, maybe even a little scary.

'How Oprah Ruined the Marathon," at Salon. First literature, now the marathon—is there anything the woman can't destroy?

"My book deal ruined my life!" Dude, I'll take it off your hands for you. Free of charge.

SFSignal links to an interview with Firefly's Summer Glau, now a big bad Terminator on TV's incredibly ill-conceived The Sarah Connor Chronicles. They've also got yet another Flickr set of classic sci-fi book covers.

Remeber the Cormac-McCarthy-on-Oprah post from Tuesday? Now you can live the magic yourself—MetaFilter explains how. (I saw in the thread that the next Oprah's Book Club choice is Middlesex. Really? That book is awful, even by Oprah's Book Club standards.)

Greenland loves global warming. So I guess that's where we're all moving, then.

Black Garterbelt, the successor blog to Rake's Progress, has amazingly in-depth coverage of Cormac McCarthy's appearance on Oprah, for your reading pleasure:

In most any other context, I'd be all for ridiculing this:

This book really affected me. It actually made me cry in yoga class even 2 days after reading it.

Spoken from the belly of the Oprah Consciousness, however, it strikes me as oddly meaningful. The (upper-middle class) bathos reads as honesty; it's an embarrassing statement to make, but we'd all surely embarrass ourselves similarly if we let go and truly tapped into the kind of pure, pants-wetting Hobbsian undercurrent that courses beneath The Road (and the rest of McCarthy).

At the very least, exposing the readership to The Road, where bad things happen to the helpless good, serves to combat the pervasive odiousness of The Secret.

If you haven't yet, you really need to read it, Oprah's-Book-Club sticker aside.