Monday night.

* Nathan Fillion says Dr. Horrible 2 is moving ahead.

* The History News Network has your first JFK post of the season.

What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking. "I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed," McHugh recalled. He claimed that LBJ was crying, "They're going to get us all. It's a plot. It's a plot. It's going to get us all.'" According to the General, Johnson "was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing."

Of course, opinions on LBJ differ.

* And speaking of the Kennedy assassination: how great was last night's Mad Men? Knowing they would eventually have to do an assassination episode, I worried they wouldn't find the right approach—but I think they pretty much nailed it. I like too that it came an episode early; like most people I was thinking it would be next week. Pandagon and Ta-Nehisi Coates have their usual Mad Men posts up, if you're interested; I usually read the Television without Pity forums too.

* Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC): Everywhere I go in my district, people tell me they are frightened. … I share that fear, and I believe they should be fearful. And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

* And Steve Benen has your chart of the day: filibusters since the 1960s. That last spike is since Democrats recovered control of Congress in 2007.

More Monday links! More!

* Jacob directs my attention to the Spider-Man lizard. As Jacob says, you won't be disappointed.

* Amanda Marcotte says last night's explosive office hijinx on Mad Men were a quiet reference to the Kennedy assassination. I think she may be right.

* Japan's real-life Dollhouse.

* The mother of all Infinite Jest ending theories. (Thanks, kate!)

* Last words of the executed in Texas. Found poetry.

Cathy, you know I never meant to hurt you.
All my life I have been locked up.
I am tired.
I’m ready, Warden.

Three links for this Wednesday.

* "A consensus has developed during IPY that the Greenland ice sheet will disappear." This and other terrible news on climate change from Newsweek's science editor Sharon Begley.

* California is facing a severe prison crisis, which the disastrous "three strikes" law will only make worse.

* Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President's Secret Service.

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning inside the lobby of his Wichita church.

When people like me bemoan the rise of eliminationist rhetoric in political discourse, it's not just elected officials but also people like George Tiller we are hoping to protect from attack or assassination. As Amanda Marcotte discusses at length, Tiller was providing medical treatment to women under very difficult circumstances. That was his crime. Undertaking difficult service on behalf of those who needed it was enough to mark this private citizen for demonization, lies, hate, and now death. What else would you call this, if not terrorism?

UPDATE: The suspected assassin has been arrested.

I have a ton of tabs open representing the blogging I intended to do this week but never did. Let us begin with the ongoing implosion of the Republican Party.

* Secession! It's everyone's favorite new fantasy. Polls show a quarter of Texans like Gov. Crazy's crazy idea, though said governor is now backpeddling. And if Texas does secede, some people are saying this time we should just let them go.

It would be the world's thirteenth largest economy -- bigger than South Korea, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia. But its worth would crater precipitously, after NAFTA rejected it and the United States slapped it with an embargo that would make Cuba look like a free-trade zone. Indeed, Texas would quick become the next North Korea, relying on foreign aid due to its insistence on relying on itself.

* In less hilarious eliminationist wingnuttery, an Illinois state senator has repeatedly suggested that "Illinois residents 'are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes' as much as Gov. Pat Quinn is proposing." This talk never should have started back during the election, and really needs to stop.

* The ante's likely been upped for forthcoming Republican antics because the teabagging parties were such a bust while Obama's popularity remains consistently high, no matter what sort of shit they fling at the wall.

* How to become the Republican candidate for vice president. It's easier than you think!

A.B. Culvahouse, a powerful Washington lawyer and former counsel to President Reagan, told an audience of Republican lawyers that for McCain, selecting a vice president came down to three questions: Why do you want to be vice president? Are you prepared to use nuclear weapons? And the CIA has identified Osama bin Laden, but if you take the shot there will be multiple civilian casualties. Do you take the shot?

It was forty-five years ago today.

The last word on the eliminationist rhetoric of the failed McCain/Palin ticket: Sarah Palin's attacks on Barack Obama's patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president, Secret Service agents revealed during the final weeks of the campaign.

During the primaries Hillary Clinton was pilloried (and I think rightly so) for a speech that seemed to suggest that part of the justification for her long candidacy was the possibility of an Obama assassination. But the fires that McCain/Palin are now stoking are a thousand times hotter and more dangerous. It is profoundly irresponsible for a presidential campaign, in the heat of an intense campaign, with frazzled and demoralized supporters bracing for a big loss, to use eliminationist rhetoric that provokes screams of "Kill him!" and "Terrorist!" from its audience. And it is, certainly, particularly disgusting in this instance, as the specter of assassination has haunted the Obama candidacy since its inception. For McCain/Palin to embark down this road, at this time, in this way, is a deep and fundamental betrayal of the democractic compact that keeps this country functional, a deliberate and calculated rhetoric of hate that in the best-case scenario won't even help them win and in the worst could result in the unthinkable.

"Country first" used to mean something. This isn't it.

Colorado U.S. attorney Troy Eid, a Bush appointee, chose not to charge three meth addicts with high-powered rifles and a self-confessed plan with conspiracy to assassinate Barack Obama, against the suggestion of the FBI.

When police searched the hotel rooms and cars the men were using, they confiscated meth, needles, laptops, cell phones, a black mask, books indicating check fraud and forgery, bags of new clothes, tactical pants and bar coupons.

Based on the evidence, FBI special agent Robert Sawyer believed there was probable cause to charge the men with conspiracy to kill Senator Obama. However, US Attorney Troy Eid last week said there is insufficient evidence to indicate a true threat, plot or conspiracy against the senator.

The men were charged with various weapons and/or drug charges.

No true threat?

9Wants to Know has learned three men in Denver discussed assassinating U.S. Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Denver by sneaking into one of his events and shooting him with a gun hidden inside of a camera.

...

Johnson, Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell all thought that Obama had a suite in the third floor of the Hyatt hotel, where they were staying. In fact, Obama was staying in another Denver hotel.

The men were doing methamphetamine inside the hotel with two women on Aug. 23 discussing the plot to kill Obama, according to federal records.

Adolf said, "It would not matter if he killed Senator Obama because police would simply add a murder charge to his pending charges," according to the records.

There were seven outstanding warrants for Adolf's arrest.

The underage woman told law enforcement that Adolf also talked about using "a high-powered rifle 22-250 from a high vantage point" to shoot Obama during his acceptance speech at INVESCO Field at Mile High.

Photos from the RFK funeral train, June 8, 1968.

Olbermann had a "Special Comment" tonight on Clinton's assassination gaffe:



For what it's worth I think Olbermann's outrage is pretty well-founded. I'm obviously no fan of the Clintons, but it's bad enough to continue her quixotic campaign secretly hoping that something horrible happens to Obama so she gets to be the nominee after all—far worse to actually say it and remove all doubt. This was a Freudian slip, not an incitement to violence, and it certainly wasn't anything she ever intended to say—but it unnecessarily invokes the grim specter of assassination that many Obama supporters have felt haunted by since Iowa. As she is the person who currently stands to most directly gain from such a disaster, her bringing it up seems, at best, unseemly. At best.

This may blow over, or she may have to soon end her campaign over this. We'll have to wait and see what the media does with it over the weekend. Her non-apology apology certainly didn't help.

In other primary news, The Field reports a surge of California superdelegates shifting to Obama—note this happened before the gaffe—as well as the tantalizing possibility that I may soon be forced to take back all the nasty things I've said about John Edwards.

And kos has the polling that suggests John McCain's viability as a candidate against Obama may have been significantly overrated.

A new study from Harvard's Ben Olken argues that political assassinations tend to lead to democratization in autocracies but have "found no substantial 'effect following assassinations—or assassination attempts—on democratic leaders.'"

The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that “suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed.” Olken’s research on assassination suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of the murder of Archduke Ferdinand.

In “Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth since World War II,” Olken and Jones explored whether “individual political leaders make a difference in economic growth.” This is tricky business for the researcher because, as Olken explains, a country’s economic situa­tion can affect the election of a leader: when the economic outlook is good, for instance, presi­dents are more likely to be reelected. So Olken and Jones looked at 57 leaders who died in office from accidents or natural causes and “found big changes in growth when autocratic leaders die in office—both positive and negative,” but no sub­stantial change when democratic leaders died in office. “The results suggest,” they write, “that individual leaders can play crucial roles in shap­ing the growth of nations,” provided they are ruling with minimal or nonexistent checks and balances to their power (think Augusto Pinochet or Robert Mugabe).

This and other results in a profile of Olken this month's The American.

With March 4 looking more and more like it could be the definite win for Obama—he's now leading in Texas, per SurveyUSA, and a Rasmussen Ohio poll shows the race there tightening—it looks like a good time for the last of the great primary linkdumps for 2008.

* First up, naturally, is Frank Rich's "The Audacity of Hopelessness," perhaps the definitive pre-post-mortem of What Went Wrong for the once-inevitable candidate. From "Shame on you, Barack Obama" to outright mockery to this nonsense, all indications are that the so-called "moment" from last week's speech did not indicate Clinton's willingness to go out on a high note. Today the New York Times reports an internecine "'kitchen sink' fusillade" against the Democrats' presumptive nominee. I can't wait.

* Matt Yglesias says it never occurred to him that Obama could be assassinated until other people (I'm guilty) started talking about it. I like Matt Yglesias, but to me this indicates a shocking and almost incomprehensible lack of historical memory about the conditions that shaped the country into which we were both born. When I see a story about the Secret Service relaxing security at Obama events, a chill goes down my spine.

* Also via Matt Y., John B. Judis has a good and much-linked piece connecting Obama to a long tradition of American politicians promising us that we can start over.

* 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack, from Internet icon and Stanford prof Lawrence Lessig. I've gotten this in my email a few times and I wanted to put it up before it no longer mattered.

* And yes, I mean that, I think it's over next week, barring a fumble on Obama's part of Giuliani (Clintonesque?) proportions. Of course I said it was all over but the shouting after Super Tuesday, a prediction that I think has mostly been borne out. Chris Dodd has seen the writing on the wall. Even Marc Ambinder, who has been shilling for Clinton without any sense of self-respect for the last few months, has come around. Watch the debate tonight—I'll be liveblogging as usual, if only to see which version of Clinton shows up tonight—but I think Obama closes the gap in both Texas (which I think he'll win) and Ohio (not sure if he'll win, but it'll be close enough that he might as well have), which means he wins it next Tuesday.

I'm going to try and watch the Democratic candidate debate tonight—I've avoided these things so far, because they're almost always unwatchable, but there comes a time when you can no longer run—so if anything interesting happens I'll be around to blog about it. In the meantime, though I have a few more primary links for those of you who aren't totally sick of this topic yet:

* The new ARG poll, previously favorable to Clinton, now shows Obama clobbering her 38% to 26%.

* Inevitable "Worst Person in the World" Bill O'Reilly got accosted by the Secret Service today after making a scene at an Obama rally. If the party alignment were switched he probably would have been arrested, but for now I'm content just to see the guy continuing to make a complete ass out of himself.

* Pictures from an Obama rally this morning show the huge numbers of people who are turning out to see him speak. I believe this particular rally had over 2,500 people attend—they packed two gyms. Marc Ambinder, though apparently a Clinton supporter, has a nice post that recognizes the sheer magnitude of what is going on here, and what it means for the Clinton campaign going forward.

* This cartoon comparing the greatness of two Illinois politicians with limited "national experience" is very cute, but even it returns us inevitably to the current paroxysm of fear gripping many in both the African-American community and the progressive left, before and after Iowa, my endlessly pessimistic self included: What if the worst happens, again? I don't fear violence after either an Obama victory or loss, as some on the right already claim to; all I fear is that at some point in the days and months and (hopefully) years ahead the country will once again be made to suffer its best and brightest hope being snatched away. I've felt this fear intensely since immediately following the news of Obama's Iowa victory, and I suspect I'll keep feeling it on some level or another until Jan. 20, 2017. I admire the hell out of the man just for risking that alone; talk about the audacity of hope.

Friend-of-a-friend Huma Yusef has a nice reflective piece on coming of age in the Benazir Bhutto era in the Boston Globe today.

The only news this morning is the assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, an opposition leader who in 1988 was the first woman elected as head of state in a modern Islamic nation and who had returned to Pakistan after an eight-year exile only a few weeks ago. MetaFilter has an ongoing thread; I find there and Wikipedia are still the best places to go for up-to-the-minute information on breaking news like this.

The Zapruder film so dominates the way we imagine the Kennedy assassination that it becomes almost impossible to think outside its terms. Max Holland and Joanna Rush try, and come up with a possibility no one has thought much about since 1964: What if the film does not depict an assassination about to commence, but one that had already started?