Tuesday afternoon!

* The conspiracy goes deeper than we ever suspected: the state of Hawaii claims to have a copy of Obama's original birth certificate.

* Behold Christoph Niemann's Periodic Table of Metaphors. More inside scuttlebutt from the illustration world at his site. Via Drawn!

* North Carolina in the news: everyone is talking about the terror arrest here last night.

* The Tennessee Valley Authority failed for more than 20 years to heed warnings that might have prevented a massive coal ash spill in Tennessee, then allowed its lawyers to stifle a $3 million study into the disaster's cause to limit its legal liability, an inspector general's report said Tuesday.

* DFW on footnotes.

More catchup, First 48 Hours of the Obama Administration Edition.

* Obama signed a few executive orders today, including one ordering a reevaluation of interrogation procedures and another ordering the closure of Guantánamo Bay within the year. Glenn Greenwald is pretty happy about it, as are Steve Benen, Ezra Klein, and Spencer Ackerman, who writes:

For all the talk about Obama not governing as a progressive, take a look at his first not-even-48 hours in office. He's suspended the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, a first step toward shuttering the entire detention complex. He's assembled his military commanders to discuss troop withdrawals from Iraq. He's issued a far-reaching order on transparency in his administration that mandates, among other things, a two-year ban on any ex-lobbyists working on issues they lobbied for. And now he's shutting down the CIA's off-the-books detention complexes in the war on terrorism.

* Obama has 62% approval in Texas and 60% in Tennessee.

* And the Senate has passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Yes we can?

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.

Last week's Tennessee coal disaster is already said to be three times worse than originally thought.

Millions of yards of ashy sludge broke through a dike at TVA's Kingston coal-fired plant Monday, covering hundreds of acres, knocking one home off its foundation and putting environmentalists on edge about toxic chemicals that may be seeping into the ground and flowing downriver. Comment at Gristmill and Open Left, which calls this "an environmental 9/11." (via Vu)