By popular demand, Politics Thursday.

* Health care madness: Olympia Snowe says she won't vote for cloture if there's a public option in the bill, while Ben Nelson says he'll support an opt-out. (By my calculations this once again makes Joe Lieberman the Most Important Person in the country.) It seems clear we'll get some sort of health care reform, but its specific content is still really unpredictable. Fingers crossed.

* Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Daggetmentum has topped 20%, with Jon Corzine now slightly leading Chris Christie as a consequence.

* Nate Silver crunches the numbers on the marriage equality referendum in Maine and concludes it all comes down to turnout.

* When You Marry: a 1962 handbook.

* Ryan's Facebook feed had this link to a random manifesto generator. I now feel ready for any particular revolution that comes along.

* T. Boone Pickens explains why the U.S. is "entitled" to Iraqi oil. Could anyone have doubted it?

* And an increasing number of Americans want to legalize it.

Wednesday night quadruple threat.

* Maybe my favorite science story ever: A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the [Large Hadron Collider] before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. I love this story so much I don't care that they're only half-serious.

* Why Are Insurers Exempt From Antitrust Laws? Ezra Klein investigates in light of Harry Reid's statements on the Senate floor today.

* Wes responds to his FMF critics. (Via Eli Glasner)

* One thing that's being lost in all this discussion of the Saudi proposal that oil-producing nations be compensated for declines in oil demand is, as Jaimee reported for the Indy not that long ago, energy companies in the U.S. want the same thing.

'Read This If You Believe in Peak Oil,' Freakonomics says. I'm so glad to discover that oil is an infinitely renewable resource that will never run out. Surprised, but glad.

A few links, and yes even more Palin.

* Great moments in disappointed Google searchers: I hope the person who was looking for "megan fox with her ass up in the air" someday finds what they need.

* World's most obscure video game easter egg, revealed.

* Editing Infinite Jest. I think I've linked to a version of this essay before, but I can't find it if I have.

* This story has everything! Operation Midnight Climax is a new web series about how the CIA used prostitutes to test LSD on unsuspecting American citizens.

* The price of oil over 25 years. And the roller coaster's just begun. Via Matt Yglesias.

* And Sarah Palin is giving every indication that she somehow intends to run for office again. Assuming that's really what's going on, and it's not something else, as I understand it the plan goes something like this:

* Quit the only relevant elected experience she's ever had halfway through her first term. (After planning to quit "for months" and having run for vice president after just a year on the job.)

* Raise a lot of money for GOP 2010 candidates and give a lot of speeches. Hope those candidates win and become important establishment allies for her. Hope too that while she's doing this no one remembers how she flamed out halfway through the only real elected experience she's ever had.

* Run for president in 2012. Hope Romney and Huckabee never mention the fact that that she flamed out halfway through the only real elected experience she's ever had. Hope that Obama and the media never mention it either.

* Profit!

Like TPM and MyDD, I strongly contend this is ludicrous. In particular, this from Josh Marshall is entirely correct and bears repeating:

To a degree it goes without saying. But it's worth reviewing just how deeply preposterous Palin's argument yesterday really was when she claimed that she refused to exploit the people of Alaska by serving out her full term.

When you run for governor, as for president, you run for a four year term. You commit, at least implicitly, to serving four years, though many people end up not doing that for various reasons. There's nothing in the implied contract about running for reelection. Indeed it's arguable that the public would be better served by a governor focusing for four years on running the state rather than laying the groundwork for their reelection.

In any case, Gov. Palin, who's served only a little more than half her first term (remember, she was elected in 2006), announces she won't run for reelection. And having decided that she won't run for a second term, she concludes that it would be exploiting the people of Alaska to agree to serve out the remainder of the term they elected her to serve back in 2006. This is apparently because she'll be a lame duck. And, she claims, lame ducks never get anything done and just spend a lot of money going on taxpayer funded junkets. So better to walk away from her job and pass it off to the Lt. Governor who no one hired to do the job at all.

We actually have states, like Virginia, in which governors are term-limited to just one (consecutive) term. Applying Palin's logic to Virginia, anyone elected to the governorship in Virginia should immediately resign because they can't be reelected. Applying this theory to the presidency, second-term presidents should resign in favor of their vice-presidents, again immediately upon their reelection. It makes absolutely no sense and bears no relation whatsoever to the world in which we actually live. And yet I am somehow certain that for the next three-and-a-half years we will be told over and over again how suddenly and inexplicably resigning your high office without warning because you've decided you don't plan to run for reelection is simply the most natural thing in the world. It's mavericky! You betcha.

* Okay, one more Palin one-liner, this one via William Gibson.

That crucial GOP demographic: "Despite the misstep, Palin enjoys an ability to connect with voters that cannot be taught." --AP

Once again Glenn Beck raises the questions the liberals in the MSM won't: Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s if not to drill for oil?

Tuesday!

* Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in jail on Monday. I think what I enjoy most about this is the absurd dialogue, oddly ubiquitous, over whether the punishment is "too lenient" or "too harsh"—as if, that is, it were a sentence one might possibly serve out and not more years than any human being (much less any 71-year-old human being) has ever lived. They might as well have sentenced him to a million jillion years.

* Uranium on the Moon! We need to secure it before the Russians Chinese Martians Islamofascists get their hands on it; clearly we have no choice left but to blow up the Moon.

* The World Clock will depress you in any number of ways. Only 14,766 days of oil left; forty years, less than a third of Madoff's prison sentence. (via @charliejane)

* Obama spoke today to the controversies over gay rights that are rapidly disillusioning so many of his supporters. Via LawDork, who seems reasonably pleased with the speech, if at the same time anxious for real action to be taken.

* 'Iraqis jubilantly celebrate U.S. troop withdrawal': U.S. forces handed over formal control of Iraq’s major cities today ... “a defining step toward ending the U.S. combat role in the country.”

* Twitter Politics: With the Iranian election, we've seen a privately owned technology becoming a vital part of the infrastructure supporting political activity. That's a problem.

* Debating the public option: Will it just turn into a giveaway to the private insurers? Do you really have to ask?

* It seems like only yesterday that Obama was being accused of orchestrating the coup in Honduras. Now he's a communist for opposing it.

* And Ezra Klein has your chilling vision of things to come.

It's summertime, so it's time for another oil panic. If only our polity were capable of thinking further ahead than five minutes...

I saw gas for a $1.99 tonight. Never thought I would again...

The report starts off with a blunt warning: "Man is setting in motion a series of events that seem certain to cause a significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately." It adds, "Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing."

The date on that report? 1979.

Your Sunday night apocalypse is the surrealism of Fred Einaudi. Some of the art's (pleasantly) disturbing and some of it's not safe for work. Via io9.

Drill, bebé, drill: Turns out Cuba may have a lot more oil than anyone thought.

Don't let anyone tell you offshore drilling is safe, or that it has no costs.

At least 500,000 gallons of oil — nearly 12,000 barrels — spilled into the ocean and tidal wetlands along the Texas and Louisiana coasts after Hurricane Ike ripped up oil platforms, and ruptured tanks and pipelines, according to an Associated Press investigation.

That's about 5% of the oil spilled due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

With the public ratification of its new constitution last week, Ecuador has for the first time anywhere in history granted inalienable rights to nature. The new constitution also includes strict egalitarian provisions about food production, water access, and protection for indigenous peoples and uncontacted tribes.

As the Guardian link makes clear, this unprecedented act stems in part from Ecuador's custodianship of the Galápagos Islands and in part from its long history of abuse at the hands of multinational corporations:

The origins of this apparent legal tidal shift lie in Ecuador's growing disillusionment with foreign multinationals. The country, which contains every South American ecosystem within its borders, which include the Galapagos Islands, has had disastrous collisions with multi-national companies. Many, from banana companies to natural gas extractors, have exploited its natural resources and left little but pollution and poverty in their wake.

Now it is in the grip of a bitter lawsuit against US oil giant Chevron, formerly Texaco, over its alleged dumping of billions of gallons of crude oil and toxic waste waters into the Amazonian jungle over two decades.

It is described as the Amazonian Chernobyl, and 30,000 local people claim that up to 18m tonnes of oil was dumped into unlined pits over two decades, in defiance of international guidelines, and contaminating groundwater over an area of some 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres) and leading to a plethora of serious health problems for anyone living in the area. Chevron has denied the allegations. In April, a court-appointed expert announced in a report that, should Chevron lose, it would have to pay up to $16bn (£8.9bn) in damages.

Chevron, which claims its responsibilities were absolved in 1992 when it handed over its operations in Ecuador to the state-owned extraction company, Petroecuador, immediately set about discrediting the report. A verdict on the case is still thought to be a long way off, and Ecuador's government could face US trade sanctions for its refusal to "kill" the case.

It remains somewhat unclear what this law will mean in practice, especially in the context of a country whose economy is so heavily dependent on petroleum extraction. However things shake out, though, this should be a fascinating test case for protection of the environment outside the failed paradigms of property rights on the one hand and "securitization" on the other.

Here's the full text of the relevant articles, including an intriguing bit of commentary that suggests a codified right to civil disobedience in defense of the environment: “Public organisms” in Article 1 means the courts and government agencies, i.e., the people of Ecuador would be able to take action to enforce nature rights if the government did not do so.

There's still more at MeFi. This has received almost no press in the States, but it's an amazing and very important development, definitely worth keeping your eyes on.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)

My bank nearly failed and just got bought by Citigroup, my region of the country is out of gasoline and likely to remain so for another two weeks, and despite dramatically heightened public awareness of the climate crisis carbon release still increased by 3% last year, pointing towards a potential global temperature rise of more than 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Happy Monday.

Reports of successful political jujitsu were deeply exaggerated: 'Democrats To Relent On Offshore Drilling Ban.' Idiots.

It's looking more and more like a compromise on off-shore drilling, which Climate Progress has been saying all along is a great idea for the environmental left: like getting something for nothing. Better, even, as the Congressional moratorium on off-shore drilling is apparently due to expire at the end of this month, which means that the entire coast would potentially become open to drilling if Congress just does nothing at all.

Now, this is an aspect of the debate I had no idea about, and it would suggest that the Republicans have dramatically overplayed their hand—if their goal really were to get coastal drilling rights, they could have quietly sabotaged the process from the back benches and had it all. But the off-shore drilling canard has never been about anything but a search for a wedge issue.

Remarkably, it seems that even the true believers have clued into this reality as well: two posts at National Review today fume over the right's getting rolled by "anti-energy gansters."

In general the off-shore drilling debate has been a pitch-perfect demonstration of the extent to which the public sphere is broken in America: it's a heated, screeching shouting match over a policy that would, at best, lower oil prices a few cents over a decade from now, all predicated on fundamental deception surrounding the actual costs involved. But it looks to me like the compromise is worth signing onto as a stopgap measure to prevent an even worse outcome, all pending a real energy policy under President Obama next year.

(via Alex)

The very structure of American politics imposes its own constraints. For all the clout that presidents have accrued since World War II, their prerogatives remain limited. A President McCain will almost certainly face a Congress controlled by a Democratic and therefore obstreperous majority. A President Obama, even if his own party runs the Senate and House, won't enjoy all that much more latitude, especially when it comes to three areas in which the dead hand of the past weighs most heavily: defense policy, energy policy and the Arab-Israeli peace process. The military-industrial complex will inhibit efforts to curb the Pentagon's penchant for waste. Detroit and Big Oil will conspire to prolong the age of gas guzzling. And the Israel lobby will oppose attempts to chart a new course in the Middle East. If the past provides any indication, advocates of the status quo will mount a tenacious defense.

Ret. Col. Andrew Bacevich, last seen in these parts talking with Bill Moyers about the relationship between consumerism and American imperialism, had some tough words in a Los Angeles Times op-ed two weeks ago: "The next president will disappoint you."

The surrealism of Mark Bryan. Fantastic. Via Posthuman Blues.

"But I'm putting it on the credit card." Via Climate Progress.

Here come the oil wars.