Remember remember the fifth of November.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Michele Bachmann has her party primed and ready to go; how are you celebrating?

* Ezra Klein, with an assist from the CBO, tackles the Republican health care "plan."

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It's already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It's already made its compromises with reality. It's already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It's one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It's another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren't even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn't perfect, but in comparison, it's looking astonishingly good.

* Will New Hampshire become the first state to break the streak on marriage equality? Allow me to repeat myself: I'm pessimistic but hopeful; minority civil rights shouldn't be subject to popular vote.

* But I think what makes [Inglourious Basterds] Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* How polluted is China?

* Will anti-intellectual habits and authoritarian administrative practices kill Wikipedia?

Three quick late-night links:

* At McSweeney's, the neurotic pick-up artist.

* We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture. The veterans of the Nazi interrogations at Fox Hunt reminisce.

* Via Bookninja, an interview with noted pornographer and genius cartoonist Alan Moore. Given what I posted earlier today it made me happy to see that he had some thoughts of his own about reification:

'Well, this is something that was very conscious,' Moore says. 'It was before Watchmen even, it was when I was writing V for Vendetta [about a freedom fighter who dresses as Guy Fawkes and pits himself against a British dictatorship] and I suddenly realised that unless I was very careful, I was going to end up with a glorious romantic anarchist against a bunch of cartoon Nazis who would all have monocles and University of Heidelberg duelling scars and things like that. I thought that actually the thing about fascism is that these people, the Nazis who were manning the concentration camps, they were butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, somebody's dad, they were street sweepers, they were just completely ordinary people, they didn't arrive from Mars; and so I went out of my way to try and give even the unpleasant characters some sort of internal coherence so that you can understand why they're doing these things.'

This has a lot to do with why the comic version of V for Vendetta is so very good and the film version is more or less just a movie.