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.'

Superman, socialist. As the link notes, he's an illegal immigrant, too.

More!

* Summer book reviews from both me and Jaimee in the Independent.

* As ubiquitous as pollution has become in the industrialized West, it remains largely invisible. That is not the case elsewhere in the world.

* Mitt Romney is a tool. A huge tool.

* "ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens." Via MeFi.

* Everyone is reading Infinite Jest this summer. Are you? I really didn't like it the first time through, but DFW died and made me sad, so maybe I'll give it another shot.

* And, as always, morality is impossible without God.

A few midday links.

* There's a new viral site for Watchmen with links to background ephemera created for the film. I'm getting excited for this one despite myself. Via Candleblog.

* Bookninja considers Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, with links to other negative reviews at the Guardian, L.A. Times, the Times of London, and Seattle's Post-Intelligencer. I thought it was okay, if not quite up to its moment, and in any event there were parts of it I quite liked to hear said:

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

I'm sure it reminded more than one Springsteenphile of his song "American Land."

The McNicholas, the Posalski's, the Smiths, Zerillis, too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
Come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothin in their bellies but the fire down below

They died building the railroads worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago they're still dyin now
The hands that built the country were always trying to keep down

* It turns out Dirk Benedict is sort of totally crazy.

There was a time, I know I was there, when men were men, women were women and sometimes a cigar was just a good smoke. But 40 years of feminism have taken their toll. The war against masculinity has been won. Everything has turned into its opposite, so that what was once flirting and smoking is now sexual harassment and criminal. And everyone is more lonely and miserable as a result.

Uh..... huh.

* China censors parts Of Obama's speech. What's more, they did it in a weirdly self-conscious, self-aware way:

At one point, Obama said earlier generations "faced down communism and fascism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions." He later addressed "those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent—know that you are on the wrong side of history."

The Chinese translation of the speech, credited to the Web site of the official China Daily newspaper, was missing the word "communism" in the first sentence. The paragraph with the sentence on dissent had been removed entirely.

A little too on the nose.

* And the first press release from the Obama administration has been released.

At 8:35 AM, the President arrived in the Oval Office and spent 10 minutes alone in the office. He read the note left to him by President Bush that was in an envelope marked “To: #44, From: #43”. At 8:45 AM, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel came in to discuss the schedule of today’s events. The First Lady came into the Oval Office at 9:10 AM. We will release a picture shortly.

Oh, to get one's hands on that note.

HBO's next great series, Americatown, takes place a few decades in the future, when a rapidly collapsing America has caused waves of U.S. immigration overseas. Via Kottke.

A few more while I'm feeling fiery.

* Speaking of our entrenched class of professional morons, there's been a lot of good commentary today on the strikingly poor job Brokaw did interviewing Gore last Sunday. Just for starters, here's Grist and OpenLeft.

* For some reason, The Nation now has a sex column. The subject of this and presumably every edition: How hot does Barack Obama make you?

Pretty hot, I guess.

* Inside Homeland Security Hell: Nine-Months-Pregnant Edition. More at Daily Kos.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.

Like a lot of people I noticed how Clinton stumbled a bit in the immigration question at the last debate:

8:40: Here comes immigration. The question is oddly phrased—How would you address unemployment, low wages for African-Americans related to immigrant labor—but Obama gets a good round of applause by rightly rejecting the terms as scapegoating. Clinton responds that some amount of scapegoating is appropriate before going to once again repeat the points Barack had just made.

but I'm not sure anyone in the blogosphere or the punditocracy really appreciated at the time how significant that stumble seems to have been. Along with her very bad answer on Iraq, it seems to have become one of the more politically important moments of the otherwise relaxed debate. I'm not as certain that this moment was as decisive in the La Opinión (L.A.'s largest Spanish-language newspaper) endorsement as one of Matt Yglesias's commenters, but it may well have been.

The real reason for this post, though, is for your dose of Saturday morning Obama porn, an unofficial viral campaign video linked by that same commenter. Exceedingly strange, it's his South Carolina victory speech set to music, with appearances from celebrities like Scarlett Johansson, Cousin Ashley, the deaf actress from Weeds and Jericho, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I imagine something like this could be quite popular with the young people; I'm given to understand they like both music and celebrities.

Riverside, N.J.: A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.

So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.

Via this MeFi thread about nativism in Virginia.