The Obama administration has rejected South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's bid to waste $700 million in stimulus spending on debt repayment, as derided previously.

Again, four more.

* My working assumption has been that the GOP's biggest names—Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, god-help-us Sarah Palin—would sit out 2012 to take on the winner of the open Democratic field in 2016. (I've actually thought for a while that 2012's Bob Dole would be Newt Gingrich; someone who'll lose handily but won't get creamed.) But that assumption may have been wrong; Bobby Jindal's bizarre grandstanding over federally funded unemployment benefits in a time of deep economic crisis suggests he may try for 2012 after all. Like Steve, though, I don't quite grok the strategy; prolonging misery and screwing up the economic recovery of his home state helps him how, exactly?

* Climate questions for Barack Obama.

Q. You favor a strong push to develop the technology needed to capture and sequester carbon from coal-fired power plants. Many argue that the surest way to bring this technology to market is to impose a nationwide moratorium on the construction of new coal-fired plants that don’t capture and store their carbon emissions. Would you support such a moratorium?

* Wil Wheaton has seen Watchmen.

* Unless DVR usage is significant, I would not get too used to Dollhouse.

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.)

V-Day links.

* I feel stimulated, and I bet you do too. Here's Arlen Specter with your partisan post-mortem.

"When I came back to the cloak room after coming to the agreement a week ago today," said Specter, "one of my colleagues said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' My Republican colleague said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' I said, 'Are you going to vote with me?' And he said, 'No, I might have a primary.' And I said, 'Well, you know very well I'm going to have a primary.'" [...]

"I think there are a lot of people in the Republican caucus who are glad to see this action taken without their fingerprints, without their participation," he said.

Your modern Republican party.

* The headline reads, "Large Banks Are on the Brink of Insolvency." You heard it from Brad Miller first.

* Heath Ledger fans want the Joker retired in honor of Ledger's turn in the makeup.

"When Michael Jordan retired, they withdrew the number 23 jersey as an honor. It’s the same thing with Heath.”

Yes, it's exactly the same.

* Space debris. Via Cynical-C.

* Images from Watchmen. Clock's at 11:59...



* Paul Auster, science fiction writer.

* Joss Whedon, cultural humanist.

* And Henry David Thoreau, vegetarian.

Vegetarian ideas figured prominently in 19th-century intellectual circles. Though practicing vegetarians remained outside the mainstream, as they do today, vegetarianism itself was intriguing, its arguments compelling. Thoreau, for instance, was not a strict vegetarian, but he did believe that the vegetarian diet was “the destiny of the human race.” Not because animals were cute and fuzzy and therefore ought to be saved from brutality, but because they were dirty and difficult and expensive. “The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness,” he wrote in Walden, “and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.” You can stand around in the forest, waiting to spear, skin, and roast a bunny for your next meal, but…why?

Let's close some tabs.

* Stanley Fish says academic freedom is dangerous. I'm beginning to think Stanley Fish is dangerous.

* Forced arbitration is one of our most unrecogized societal injustices. And the courts are complicit.

After nearly three years of harassment, abuse and long hours for little or no pay, Dantz finally decided that she’d had enough. She filed suit against her employer—and the court kicked her to the curb. Even though Dantz refused to sign the binding arbitration agreement, the court said that merely by continuing to work for Applebees, she was bound by its terms. Debbie Dantz’ employer illegally abused her for almost three years, and Dantz was powerless to hold it accountable.

What a horrifying story. Via MeFi.

* Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where Saved By The Bell, Rather Than Law And Order, Became The Dominant Television Franchise For A Generation.

* The Singularity is a myth. Pharyngula explains.

* Catholicism is a myth. Cynical-C explains.

* America loves Obama and hates the GOP.

* It looks like the stimulus package (tee hee) passes today. That's because we're all socialists now.

Obama on the stimulus (part 2). Give 'em hell, Barry. Via MetaFilter's omnibus post on the stimulus and the random cuts needed to sate "bipartisan" egos. (You really let a lot of people down, Claire.)

Great achievements in American socialism. Via MeFi and Edge of the American West.

My days of childishly giggles over the term "stimulus package" may soon be over: a deal has apparently been reached that can pass the Senate. Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight has some valuable first-month lessons for Obama, the most important of which is that bipartisanship is bunk.

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.

Obama: Sucky like a fox?

Misc.

* NYC's maple-syrup smell mystery resolved! It was New Jersey. (Really!)

* The AP lacks a basic understanding of fair use. More at MeFi.

* Raccoons have invaded the White House. Sadly the Secret Service has only trained for nighttime raccoon assault.

* How Obama is screwing up the stimulus: failure to counteract zombie Republican lies. More on this from Steve Benen.

* Also on the Obama-screwing-up front: he's publishing op-eds in dead-tree media. Nobody reads newspapers anymore, gramps!

* Though they do, apparently, read alt-weeklies.

* Also: Judd Gregg still sucks.

* Climate Progress now has one-stop anti-nuclear shopping.

* The nonprofit industrial complex.

* How various songs react to Ze Frank's voice-activated drawing applications.

* And via Kottke: Who wouldn't want to take a class entitled "What's So Great about The Wire?"?

More.

* The headline reads: "UFO over Germany official." Via Posthuman Blues.

* More important, a different headline reads: "Arrested Development Movie finally a go?" Sadly, the article is mostly about Jeffrey Tambor threatening violence against Michael Cera, not about news of any actual deal.

* The stimulus bill gives a boost to the credit power of small colleges, probably good news for a lot of folks (not least of all budding academics, if only incidentally).

* As is pretty well-known, Republicans in the House managed to vote unanimously against economic recovery because they are unbelievably massive tools. Luckily, nearly everybody has finally figured this out, except of course a handful of red states and of course telvision news producers, who still give Republicans twice as much coverage despite their having almost no power or relevance.

More on the Republican Party's massive-tool nature as events warrant.

* While we're on the subject of Republicans, Steve Benen has a pair of good posts, one about the one line Republicans can't cross—disagreeing with Rush Limbaugh—and the other a reminder for 2012 about the legitimacy of widespread claims of "voter fraud". I don't even want to get into the whole stupid thing about Obama's tie.

I know I said I was going to cut back on link dumps, but in my defense I have been busy. I'm likely remain fairly busy (and therefore link dumping) until I get back from the inauguration, at which time I'll be able to devote more time and energy to blogging. In theory, anyway.

Anyway, the link dump.

* Bastard Tetris: the version of Tetris that does openly what all the others just do secretly. (Thanks Jacob!)

* Things to say during sex.

* Another call for a Bush administration truth and reconciliation commission. Via Yglesias, who has more on the subject, as does Steve Benen.

* Big ups to Will Wheaton, who Twittered yesterday: Best thing I've heard all day: "We're in the final 100 hours of the Bush administration."

* Douglas Wolk has Watchmen for dummies.

* The stimulus package needs more trains. More from Yglesias.

* What's in the stimulus for higher education? I could use a second yacht.

* Republicans continue to have trouble with the fact that 24 is not based on a true story.

* Name your child "Adolf Hitler" and you're labeled a prat, and that's the game.

* How many AAAAAs in KHAAAAAAAN? In honor of the late great Ricardo Montelban, Boing Boing reports. Via Bill.

* Is the world a giant hologram?

* And they're going to make a movie out of Jericho. (Failed-)TV-show-to-movie is officially the latest trend—things used to run the other way.