Tuesday night.

* First on the Threatdown: coyotes!

* Winooski, Vermont: Great Domed City of the North.

* "How Health Care Reform Won."

* Is Metroid Prime the Citizen Kane of video games? Hard to pick Metroid Prime over, say, Ocarina of Time, just in the GameCube category alone.

* CNN, always three weeks behind the story, asks whether Obama has lost his mojo in the very moment it becomes apparent that his polls numbers are again rising.

* Also in poll news: contrary to Nate Silver's recent NJ-GOV analysis it does seem clear that Corzine is moving sharply upward in the polls.



* "Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience."

* And Life celebrates dumb inventions of the 1950s and '60s.

I have it on good authority that my friend Traxus was totally making fun of someone else in this post on blogging styles. That said, some unhappy Monday links.

* As you've probably already heard, Michael Jackson's death has now been ruled a homicide. Let the feeding frenzy resume.

* Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. named a veteran federal prosecutor on Monday to examine abuse of prisoners held by the Central Intelligence Agency, after the Justice Department released a long-secret report showing interrogators choked a prisoner repeatedly and threatened to kill another detainee’s children. A good day for America (and for the rule of law). Hopefully this is the beginning and not the end.

* NJ-Gov: Christie's lead has all but disappeared in the face of weeks of bad press. More from TPM.

* Elsewhere in New Jersey news UPDATE: from 1970: Foster parents denied right to adopt because the father is an atheist.

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes' right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes' "high moral and ethical standards," he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience." Despite Eleanor Katherine's tender years, he continued, "the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being."

People who love to tell New Atheists to sit down and shut up, take note.

* 'How to Kill a City': from an episode of Mad Men yesterday to the pages of the New York Times today. Via @mrtalbot.

* The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition.

* 12 Greenest Colleges and Universities, at Sustainablog. Vermont once again takes high honors.

* 'Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox.' (Via Ze.) This is actually an important plot point (with some nice twists) in a novel I've touted a few times here, Accelerando.

* And Fimoculous has your Curb Your Enthusiasm preview.

Congratulations, Vermonters! You have the nation's healthiest habits.

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.

Tuesday night linkdumps can't/won't stop.

* The Vermont legislature overruled the governor and legalized gay marriage in the state. Vermont had been the first state to approve civil unions; now it is the first state to introduce gay marriage via the legislature. Way to go Vermonters.

* Obama is very popular. Republicans are not. More gloating at Washington Monthly, Matt Yglesias, and MyDD.

* Franken continues to win and yet somehow continues not to take office. Odd how that works.

* How not to photograph.

Hooray for Friday, hooray for everything.

* The Daily Show nicely nailed the hypocrisy inherent to the Republican position on the stimulus debate last night.

* Scandal at 1600: it turns out the practice of disrespecting the Oval Office by not wearing a jacket inside it—heroically revealed by former chief of staff Andrew Card just this week—goes back decades.

* They've remixed the audiobook versions of Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The real scandal is that it took this long for someone to think to do it.

* Remixing the inaugural poem.

* Syllabus for another class on The Wire.

* West Antarctic ice sheet collapse even more catastrophic for U.S. coasts. Icemelt Could Shift Earth's Rotation, Moving Water Northward. Antarctic warming is robust. Everything is fine.

* And will Vermont towns finally get their chance to arrest Cheney? Oh, please yes.

Still so many tabs.

* Gmail has a new 'offline' feature. I'm about to give it a whirl.

* Vermont: the least religious state. If only it weren't so cold...

* Lesbian separatist communities are dying out.

* A Republican who gets it: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – one of the country’s highest-ranking Republicans – will warn his party leadership later this afternoon that the GOP is rapidly turning into a regional party that can’t compete with Democrats at the national level.

* Having become a recent acolyte of This American Life, I can now say taht Kasper Hauser's TAL parodies are fairly well-executed.

* The alternative comics apocalypse has begun.

All is quiet on New Year's Day.

* As the Bush administration blessedly draws to a close, it's important to remember the casualties of the War of Terror, people like Alberto Gonzales. (via)

* More people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers. More importantly:

The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently.

That's good, good news.

* Howard Dean, Vermonter of the Year. Maybe next year, Ben and Jerry.

* Batman casting rumors you can believe in: Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin.

* It's the future, and Microsoft still sucks.

* Top 10 space stories of 2008. A different 10.

* Top 10 cryptozoology stories of 2008.

* James Howard Kunstler's predictions for 2009. Prediction: Pain. Via MetaFilter.

* Thank god for philosophy grad students, the only graduate demographic upon Lit students can look down.

Jaimee and I are in Vermont this weekend visiting family, so posting will be light. I'm secretly the special guest on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio this Sunday from 4-6 pm (listen to the livestream here), but other than that my Internetting will largely depend on my ability to leech WiFi from my mother's neighbors.

To the Vermonters, I may always be a flatlander, but Bernie's still my senator.

A few predictions for Mini-Super Tuesday and after.

1) Obama will take Vermont handily and Texas comparatively narrowly. He'll lose Ohio by about the same margin as he won Texas, maybe a little more, and he'll lose Rhode Island by a little less than his margin of victory in Vermont.

2) Having beautifully managed the expectations game, again, Clinton will successfully spin this functional tie into a big victory. The long-awaited Obama media backlash will begin in earnest: Why can't Obama seal the deal?

2a) As usual, nobody will remember that she was ahead by huge margins in all these states just a few weeks ago; or that everybody, including her own campaign, has said she needs to win both states by big margins to even have a chance at the nomination; or that with these sorts of slim margins there's really no way for her to ever catch up in the delegate count.

3) Pennsylvania will be declared by acclimation to be the final really final Judgment Day.

3a) Accordingly, the now-expected chorus that Clinton drop out won't actually materialize. Gore in particular will remain silent. Edwards may misread Mini-Super Tuesday as "the turning of the tide" for Hillary and decide to endorse her, thereby destroying his last shred of credibility for all time. Richardson may finally endorse Obama now that it can't actually do Obama any good, but I think he'll probably continue to be a chicken.

4) The race will finally come to an end on April 22nd after Obama wins Pennsylvania, most likely by double digits.

Hot on the heels of a successful bid to secure the dirty hippie vote, Barack Obama seals the deal today with an endorsement from Vermont warhorse Senator Patrick Leahy.

UPDATE: Text from the endorsement here.

"We need a president who can reintroduce America to the world, and reintroduce America to ourselves," Leahy said, later adding, "Barack Obama represents the America we once were and want to be again."

Leahy likened his support of Obama to the 1968 presidential campaign, when as a young prosecutor he endorsed Robert Kennedy over Hubert Humphrey. "He was bringing us a sense of hope, bringing us together," Leahy said. "I know those are intangibles, but it encouraged me to go against the establishment in my own state, and go with Bobby Kennedy."