Politics Wednesday!

* Ben Smith at Politco dreams the dream: Franken '16?

* More good news: God's told Joe the Plumber not to run for office.

* But bad news: Glenn Beck guest Michael Scheuer says America's only hope is a massive terrorist attack. Don't miss Beck nodding sagely towards the end. Adam Serwer says it well:

But understand, this is not unpatriotic. You can wish all manner of horrors on this country, but as long as these horrors might serve a specific political agenda, you're not being unpatriotic. Unpatriotic is a public health-care plan. Unpatriotic is a judge modifying sub-prime mortgage loans to keep a roof over someone's head. Unpatriotic is phosphate-free detergent. Patriotic is wishing for a terrorist attack on the United States.

Patriotism is dead, long live patriotism.

* TPM and Washington Monthly tackle the EPA SUPPRESSION!!!!! "scandal" that's been making the rounds; turns out a hobbyist working on non-climate matters for the agency decided a memo no one asked him to write prepared in his spare time should be published alongside recommendations produced by actual experts in the field. Fox News, naturally, agrees. Inhofe (R-Jupiter) has gone further, demanding Monday a criminal investigation.

* Also in climate news: Thomas Friedman says Waxman-Markey is very, very bad and we should support it. For what it's worth Kevin Drum agrees.

Monday!

* The trailer for the SF-infused Paul-Giamatti-as-Paul-Giamatti comedy Cold Souls causes io9 to ask whether "Charlie Kaufman" is officially a genre yet.

* Kari in the comments directs us to a defense of Holden Caulfield against the spurious assertions of irrelevance I blogged about yesterday.

* Bruce Schneier: SF Writers Aren't a Useful Aspect of National Defense—a followup to an article I posted last month. Via Boing Boing.

* Also not useful: classifying "protests" as "low-level terrorism activity."

* The Art of the Title Sequence considers the end of Wall-E. Via Kottke.

* What's wrong with the American essay? I'm not sure anything is, but certainly not this:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

“The next best thing to a good sermon is a bad sermon,” said Montaigne’s follower and admirer, the first American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a good sermon we hear our own “discarded thoughts brought back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment,” in the words of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” In a bad sermon we formulate those thoughts ourselves—through the practice of creative disagreement. If an author tells us “love is nothing but jealousy” and we disagree, it is far more likely we will come up with our own theory of love than if we hear a simple autobiographical account of the author’s life. It is hard to argue with someone’s childhood memory—and probably inadvisable. It is with ideas that we can argue, with ideas that we can engage. And this is what the essayist ought to offer: ideas.

It doesn't seem to me at all that American letters suffers from a lack of hypotheses confused for certainties.

* And Shia Labeouf may live to ruin Y: The Last Man after all.

Late night shouldn't-have-taken-that-nap links.

* Stephen Colbert to guest-edit Newsweek. That's just weird.

* Yesterday marked the first night in my life where I had any real desire to see The Tonight Show; the Daily Beast has a few highlights. For my part I thought Conan did pretty good, despite some jackass fans who demonstrated that adoration and heckling meet again someplace on the other side. Someday I may even watch the Tonight Show again.

* But you don't have to take my word for it: Conan's got the coveted Obama endorsement now, too.

* Anthony Stewart Head is still teasing a Ripper spinoff.

* 'No Lifeguard on Duty': empty and abandoned motel pools.

* 75% of Americans now convinced terrorists have superpowers. Advantage: idiocracy.

* Production design for Pixar's Up.

* And ethanol still sucks.

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.

It's becoming more and more apparent that conservatives simply take as fact anything that is broadcast on any Fox Network. First 24, now Prison Break.

Despite all that, we never tire of the specter of the Big, Bad, Villainous, Omnipotent Muslim Terrorist. They're back, and now they're going to wreak havoc on the Homeland -- devastate our communities -- even as they're imprisoned in super-max prison facilities. How utterly irrational is that fear? For one thing, it's empirically disproven. Anyone with the most minimal amount of rationality would look at the fact that we have already convicted numerous alleged high-level Al Qaeda Terrorists in our civilian court system (something we're now being told can't be done) -- including the cast of villains known as the Blind Shiekh a.k.a. Mastermind of the First World Trade Center Attack, the Shoe Bomber, the Dirty Bomber, the American Taliban, the 20th Hijacker, and many more -- and are imprisoning them right now in American prisons located in various communities.

We've been doing that for two decades. What are all the bad and scary things that have happened as a result? The answer is: "nothing." Take note, Chris Cillizza and friends: while it's true that "not a single prisoner has escaped from Gitmo since it was created," it's also true that no Muslim Terrorists have escaped from American prisons and our SuperMax prison "has had no escapes or serious attempts to escape." Actually, the only person to even make an escape attempt from a SuperMax is Green Arrow, who hasn't succeeded despite the help of Joker and Lex Luthor.

Seriously, that Green Arrow movie sounds pretty good. But how's he going to get hold of a bow while he's in prison, much less his trick arrows?

Meanwhile, Attackerman checks in from the Marvel Universe, where the picture is much more bleak.

I was going to follow up that Kal Penn post with a more substantive post, but I decided to take a nap instead. Advantage: Canavan!

* The U.S. dollar as Ponzi scheme. Via Alex Greenberg. See also: The Investment Delusion and Money and the Crisis of Civilization.

* Paging Superman: Barack Obama calls for a world without nuclear weapons. More at Attackerman.

* Things more likely to kill you than terrorist attacks.

* Two visits to the Mets' new Citi Field. I still miss Shea.

The RAND Corporation has a new report out proving (once again) the dirty hippies were right all along: you don't end terrorism through military action, you end terrorism through politics and police action.

In other words, Kerry was right about this one, too.

This was the first systematic look at how terrorist groups end. The authors compiled and analyzed a data set of all terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006, drawn from a terrorism-incident database that RAND and the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism jointly oversee. The authors used that data to identify the primary reason for the end of groups and to statistically analyze how economic conditions, regime type, size, ideology, and group goals affected their survival. They then conducted comparative case studies of specific terrorist groups to understand how they ended.

Of the 648 groups that were active at some point between 1968 and 2006, a total of 268 ended during that period. Another 136 groups splintered, and 244 remained active. As depicted in the figure, the authors found that most ended for one of two reasons: They were penetrated and eliminated by local police and intelligence agencies (40 percent), or they reached a peaceful political accommodation with their government (43 percent). Most terrorist groups that ended because of politics sought narrow policy goals. The narrower the goals, the more likely the group was to achieve them through political accommodation — and thus the more likely the government and terrorists were to reach a negotiated settlement.

In 10 percent of cases, terrorist groups ended because they achieved victory. Military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of cases. The authors found that militaries tended to be most effective when used against terrorist groups engaged in insurgencies in which the groups were large, well armed, and well organized. But against most terrorist groups, military force was usually too blunt an instrument.

The analysis also found that

* religiously motivated terrorist groups took longer to eliminate than other groups but rarely achieved their objectives; no religiously motivated group achieved victory during the period studied.
* size significantly determined a group's fate. Groups exceeding 10,000 members were victorious more than 25 percent of the time, while victory was rare for groups below 1,000 members.
* terrorist groups from upper-income countries are much more likely to be left-wing or nationalist and much less likely to be motivated by religion.

I've been all over the automated killer robot issue this week, and I'm sorry to report that the news has only gotten worse.

"The trouble is that we can't really put the genie back in the bottle. Once the new weapons are out there, they will be fairly easy to copy," Sharkey will tell a one-day conference organised by Britain's Royal United Services Institute on Wednesday.

"How long is it going to be before the terrorists get in on the act? With the current prices of robot construction falling dramatically and the availability of ready-made components for the amateur market, it wouldn't require a lot of skill to make autonomous robot weapons."

Nuclear proliferation is still very, very scary, as Joseph Cirincione explains in the most recent The New York Review of Books:

Jonathan Schell's The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger picks up where Rhodes leaves off, examining the essential question: What are nuclear weapons for? Invented to counter Germany, dropped on Japan, deployed against the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, Schell writes, lost any conceivable rational purpose after the end of the cold war. What nation, what threat now justifies thousands of them? Or any? After the cold war, Schell writes,

The number of nuclear weapons continued to drop, but the essential features of the mutual annihilation machine remained intact. The question of why the former Cold War rivals wanted nuclear weapons was forgotten, and their arsenals drifted into a kind of policy-free zone. Unsustained by Cold War rationales but not yet assigned any new ones, they seemed to exist for their own sakes, leaving a strong feeling that in the new era, missions would be sought for nuclear weapons rather than the other way around.

Why is this dangerous system persisting? Schell believes that the policies of the current administration are largely to blame:

The distance of Bush's policies from previous American non-proliferation policy is hard to overstate. Every previous American president in the nuclear age had relied on peaceful means to stop proliferation.... Preventive war had on occasion been proposed by presidential advisers but was always rejected.... President Bush's demotion of diplomacy and treaties across the board was as clear as his elevation of force. In decision after decision, his administration tore at the web of arms control treaties that had grown up over four decades.

Schell argues convincingly that plans by the Bush administration for new nuclear weapons and for new uses for these weapons—such as bunker-busting deep penetration bombs— swung nuclear policy sharply away from deterrence and in the direction of nuclear use. "The mission of nuclear weapons is no longer to produce stalemate with a peer," Schell writes; "it is to fight and win wars against nations with little or no ability to respond." As if to demonstrate Schell's point, four of the Republican presidential candidates discussed using nuclear weapons against Iran in a CNN debate on June 5, 2007.

Republicans, of course, are pretty scary too.