One exam down links.

* Soundtrack for The Cloud Photographers, the Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson never made. I love this.

* Show us your birth certificate, Joe. Put the ID back in BIDEN.

* All your High Holy days belong to Glenn Beck.

* If Environmentalists Made Star Wars. This is early promotion for END:CIV, the film that asks: "If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?"

* Also in environmental news: the Yes Men distributed a fake version of the New York Post that actually had factual information inside of it today.

* Doing it wrong: Immigrants’ advocates have been complaining for months now that the Obama administration is cracking down hard on illegal immigration while doing nothing to help legalize their situations and create a workable immigration system.

* “This fellow is a man in his thirties,” he said, “a research physicist with us out here. As far as I can tell, he’s perfectly normal in every way except for a lot of crazy ideas about living part of the time in another world–on another planet. Washington sent him out to do a key job, and until a few weeks ago he was going great guns. But lately he’s out of contact with the work so much and for so long that something’s got to he done about it.” Isn't this the plot of Adam Strange? (via MeFi and Boing Boing).

* And from the Onion: 'George W. Bush Chuckles To Self Upon Thinking About How He Was President Of The United States For Almost A Decade.'

Wow, things got away from me today. Here's your massive Monday linkdump #1.

* As every other blog on the Internet has already told you, Slate now allows you to Choose Your Own Apocalypse. Also at Slate: four futures.

* Another story you've probably seen all over today: "College Grad Sues College Because She Can't Find a Job." Watch your back, Duke.

* Birthers are funny.

* I had been led to believe that redheads' resistance to anesthesia was the result of superpowers, but now I discover it comes from their superweakness.

* This week in corporate logos: why Coke is better that Pepsi.

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.

Friday afternoon linkblogging!

* 28% of Republicans claim to believe Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and another 30% "aren't sure." Results for the South are even worse. So it's official: our national discourse is completely broken.

* Entertainment Weekly asks: Was 1984 the greatest year in movies ever? I've always been partial to 1999: Rushmore, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Magnolia...

* Vanity Fair has your sketchbook history of the drug war.

* Steampunk monkey nation.

* Jericho may be returning once again as a TV movie to wrap up loose plot points. My recollection of the finale was that there weren't very many loose plot points left, but your memory may vary.

* Chris Hedges: "The Rise of Gonzo Porn Is the Latest Sign of America's Cultural Apocalypse."

* And Scientific American explores the quiet end of the Neanderthals.

The results are in: Everybody hates birthers.

Mr. Dobbs' first began reporting on Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories on the night of Wednesday, July 15. In the roughly two weeks since then, from July 15 through July 28, Mr. Dobbs' 7 p.m. show on CNN has averaged 653,000 total viewers and 157,000 in the 25-54 demo.

By contrast, during the first two weeks of the month (July 1 to July 14) Mr. Dobbs averaged 771,000 total viewers and 218,000 in the 25-54 demo. In other words, Mr. Dobbs' audience has decreased 15 percent in total viewers and 27 percent in the demo since the start of the controversy.

A rare bit of good news for Barack Obama as the GOP party establishment—always known to play things fair and down the middle—declares the birther story debunked. Even Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter think birthers suck.

But worry not, fellows—turns out this was all the liberal media's fault.

Wednesday afternoon links 1!

* More bad news for Barack Obama as Stephen Colbert signs on to the birther movement.

* Meanwhile, Jon Stewart fights for our shared glorious homeland in a new Daily Show segment, "Hey, C'Mon That's Not ... Why Would You ...Whoa!"

* Kottke on flarf.

* New Line, fresh from screwing over Peter Jackson, is still trying to screw Tolkien's heirs. More at School Library Journal.

* The Big Picture presents: lightning!

* And Offworld has your post-apocalyptic Disneyland.

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.

Jon Stewart, national treasure, considers the birthers.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Born Identity
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

UPDATE: It's no wonder he's the most trusted newsman in America.

Still more links.

* Shepard Smith: Fox News's email has become "more and more frightening." I've asked before, but why is this man still on Fox?

* Rush Limbaugh picked the wrong day to make a birther joke.

* Jeremiah Wright picked the wrong day to say something incredibly moronic about "them Jews."

* There is no right day to propose a Full House remake. Stamos! Via Occasional Fish.

* Fear the Emanuel hegemony.

* Fear the myth of perpetual copyright.

* 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive. In terms of understanding the human psyche, the academy is still decades behind the advertising industry.

* 'Supervolcano may be brewing beneath Mount St Helens.' Yikes. (And get me Bobby Jindal on the phone.) Via MeFi.

* Guantánamo's Uighurs have been sent to Palau. More from Yglesias, Attackerman, Greenwald, and the Plank.

* Linda Holmes criticizes Pixar for going to the princess well for its first female lead.

* The Sopranos and postmodern irony.

Yet formally self-conscious and deliberately ambiguous though it tended to be, "The Sopranos" was by no means so completely decentered in its “overall moral or thematic attitude” as all that. On the contrary, it seems to me to have been very definitely grounded what might be called (for want of any better phrase) a deeply pessimistic Freudian moral sensibility.

Via Kotsko.

A 88-year-old gunman— by reports a white supremacist and birther—opened fire earlier today at the Holocaust Museum. (Early reports that no one was killed have become inaccurate; a security guard has now died. TPM has running updates.) The suspect was arrested twenty-eight years ago for attempting to perform a citizen's arrest of the Federal Reserve Board. His writings have been widely circulating on the Internet.

In light of today's shooting and the George Tiller assassination, both Steve Benen and Matt Yglesias remember the Homeland Security report from earlier this year that caused so much manufactured controversy, which had warned against the threat of precisely this sort of violence from political extremists.

Sunday, Sunday.

* The New Yorker has fiction from the late great David Foster Wallace as well as discussion of his unfinished final novel. (There's also a profile of Rahmbo.) Discussion at MeFi.

* Even more six-word science fiction. More at MetaFilter.

* The twenty-first century: an FAQ from Charlie Stross.

* Hypothesis: Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work. If there's no activists, it doesn't work well. (via)

* Maybe Dollhouse shouldn't have been as series: io9 clues into the central problem facing American television production, open-ended perpetual serialization. Discussion at Whedonesque.

* Sebelius to HHS.

* The formula that killed Wall Street. Some talk at MetaFilter.

* Anime Peanuts. More along these lines at MeFi.

* Reverse-plot movies. Reverse-plot games.

* Aside from their nihilism and incompetence, the biggest problem facing Republicans is that their mythology has become too difficult for the average person to follow. It’s like a comic book “universe” where the writers have been straining to maintain continuity for decades — all the ever-more-fine-grained details are really satisfying for the hardcore fans, but intimidating for potential new readers, who are left asking, “Trickle-what? Chappaquid-who? What’s that about Obama’s birth certificate? Obama’s European now? I thought he was a Muslim! Darn it, I’ll never catch up!”

I suggest, therefore, that the Republicans use their current time of wandering in the wilderness to do their own version of Crisis on Infinite Earths. They wouldn’t have to ditch their favorite heroes, of course — we could also be treated to limited series like Rush Limbaugh: Year One, Newt Gingrich: Year One, etc. They can reboot all the plotlines, free the beloved characters of the chains of continuity, and then do it again, and yet again — until finally they find success in some genre other than politics, much as comic book superheroes have moved on to the movies. GOP: Year One.

* See also: the GOP's voice and intellectual force, Rush Limbaugh.

* Forget Switzerland: Is Ireland the next Iceland? Don't forget your recession tourism.

* Slowly but surely, here comes marijuana decriminalization/legalization. Don't forget your revenue stream.

* Imprisoned fifteen-year-old beaten by police officer. On tape.

* And put aside that old question of "justifying" the humanities: the real problem is that for much of the past decade, the culture isn't listening to what the humanities have to teach.

I have an unpleasantly busy day today, and the open tabs are already building up. Here's a few links just to relieve the tension.

* Lieberman saved the stimulus? I guess the people who said we should be nice to him despite everything he's done may have had a point.

* Four Tennessee state representatives, all Republicans, have signed up to be plaintiffs in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama, aimed at forcing him to prove he is a United States citizen by coughing up his birth certificate. Good lord. How many times do we have to do this one?

* George Will v. climate science. Spoiler alert: Science wins. More (including charts!) from Nate Silver. I did a post like this over the weekend, if you missed it.

* Relatedly, from Marginal Revolution: What if all the smart people are in one party?

* Do not attempt to eat the world's hottest peper. That's just common sense. (Via Neil.)

One of Ezra Klein's readers has too much fun with the craziest yet of the wingnut Obama Birth Certificate conspiracy theories: that Obama is really and secretly the son of (get this) Malcolm X.

Want proof? Here's your evidence.



Case closed.

I'm pretty sure the 'nuts got the idea for this from this post on Blind Item claiming that Usher is secretly the illegitimate son of Ben Vereen.

I read Gawker too, wingnuts.