I've decided to radically alter every aspect of my life from diet to exercise to procrastinative laziness, beginning today. Let's start with some blogging.

* I'm with Alex Greenberg: why were judges ever allowed to rule on cases concerning major campaign contributors? For that matter, why are jurisdictions still electing their judges? It's nuts.

* Also on the legal front: I'm beginning to suspect that "judicial activism" is just an empty buzzword designed to discredit court decisions the right-wing doesn't like.

* Almost seventy percent of Americans support allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military. What the hell is Obama waiting for?

* George Dvorsky on the top ten existential movies of all time. (Thanks, Bill!) It's a good list, but when your top ten list of existentialist film is missing The Seventh Seal it's time to consider whether limiting yourself to English-language film was a wise choice.

* Blogging wasteland: According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled. (Thanks, Steve!)

* Kids today have it easy; in my day, we had send professors corrupted files we'd made ourselves. And what happened to pretending to forget to attach the document? Too low-tech for you?

* 'Manufactured Controversy': A new report by Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition of groups opposed to David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" and similar measures, argues that the entire movement is built on false premises and is designed to attack higher education.

* Enjoyed this from Boing Boing: lecture from Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky on evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality, arguing by analogy to sickle cell that schizophrenia is the hypertrophic result of genes that in isolation reward their holder with feverous religious certainty. I've become increasingly skeptical of attempts to map every feature of human existence onto genomic evolutionary pressure—and Sapolsky's lecture is much more speculative than empirical—but it's an interesting notion.

Super Happy Insomnia Linkdump.

* Here come your Simpsons stamps.

* Thomas Lennon says The State DVD is finally coming out this July. Meanwhile, State alums Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter have a new show and a new blog.

* Only 53% of Americans think capitalism is better than socialism. What happens when we cross 50%? Does it mean over-educated literary theory PhDs suddenly get to be in charge? I certainly hope it means that.

* The dark side of Dubai. Ugly, ugly stuff.

* On the neuropsychology of zombies. Via Pharyngula.

* A good post I forgot to link to a few days ago from FiveThirtyEight.com: Nate Silver predicts when various states will legalize gay marriage. My expectation is that a federal court ruling will make gay marriage a nationwide reality via the full faith and credit clause long before Mississippi—a state sweltering with the heat of injustice—gets its chance in 2024.

* And Part 4 of Matt Zoller Seitz's Wes Anderson documentary is up. This part's on J.D. Salinger.

Missed another day this week. We apologize for the inconvenience.

* Major gay-rights victory in Iowa (!) today as the state's Supreme Court unanimously rules in favor of marriage equality. Some commentary from Daily Kos, Matt Yglesias, and Washington Monthly. It'll be interesting to see how this affects presidential politics in 2012—given Iowa's importance in the primary process Republican candidates may feel significant pressure to move to the left on this issue. Iowa is now the third state where gay marriage (as opposed to some version of civil union) is legal, joining Massachusetts and Connecticut.

* Wild new technology demoed at TED. It's a projector that turns basically any surface into a touchscreen, including your own body.

* National Catholic Reporter has a report out this week demonstrating the decades-old origins of the Catholic Church's priest scandal. My sense is that this continues to badly hurt the reputation of Catholicism, though perhaps I just run with a bad crowd. Via Cogitamus.

* Because Bush's DOJ bungled the prosecution of Ted Stevens, the Alaska GOP wants a do-over election. That sounds reasonable. That's usually how these things are handled, right?

* Also on the Sarah Palin beat the poetry of Sarah Palin and the poetry of Glenn Beck. Via MetaFilter.

"Challenge to a Cynic"

You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there's absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.

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.

The legal challenge to Proposition 8 rests on the distinction between a "revision" and an "amendment."

"In passing Prop 8, the people of California basically put an asterisk next to the equal protection clause in the constitution," said William Araiza, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Now, he said, "it fundamentally comes down to whether the court considers this a major change or not a major change."

Specifically, opponents of Proposition 8 argue that this kind of change is a "revision," not an "amendment." The distinction is important, legal experts say, because revisions require two-thirds approval in the legislature and then a popular vote. Amendments can be approved by popular vote only.

If, as opponents say, the court finds that Proposition 8 qualifies as a revision, then the proposition would be found unconstitutional because its proponents would have, in effect, skipped the required legislative step. If the court strikes down the initiative on these grounds, it is not certain the lawmakers would take up the issue again.

If the court sides with Proposition 8 proponents and allows the amendment, the recourse for gay rights activists would be to put the matter to voters again through their own initiative or take the matter to federal court -- something most activists are not ready to do, given the current composition of the Supreme Court.

Forty state legislators have signed a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of this argument that the proposition be voided. Via MyDD.

Meanwhile, slight credit where it is slightly due: the Governator speaks out against Prop 8 only one week too late.

"It's unfortunate, obviously, but it's not the end," Schwarzenegger said in an interview on CNN this morning. "I think that we will again maybe undo that, if the court is willing to do that, and then move forward from there and again lead in that area."...

Today, Schwarzenegger urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. "I learned that you should never ever give up.... They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done."

And in fairness to Michele's earlier call of "bullshit" it must be admitted that I don't think Obama's said anything about Prop 8 at all.

Glenn Greenwald says Obama and the new Democratic Congress should repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. I'm actually a little more optimistic on this front than other people I know, but that's not to say I'm optimistic. I think Obama is a remarkable politician and certain to be a better president than any we've seen, but in the end he remains a politician and the cost/benefit analysis still cuts against us*. Those of us who believe in marriage equality—and more importantly those people whose basic happiness and quality of life depend on it—are likely to spend some time under the bus, "waiting for the second term," especially after this week's tragic spectacle of California of all places rejecting equality.

I have significantly more faith in the courts doing the right thing on marriage—sadly creating a Roe v. Wade for the 21st century in the process—than the national Democrats taking a stand for basic civil rights. Prove me wrong, guys.

--
* precisely because the national Democrats refuse to show leadership on GLBT issues

Despite my busy schedule, it's been a bit of a slow news day anyway.

* The ATF busted up a mostly aspirational skinhead plot to kill Barack Obama, which included a much more logistically likely subplot to attack a predominantly African-American high school in Tennessee.

* Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has been found guilty on all counts.

* Another day, another bogus Republican vote suppression list thrown out. Today it's Georgia.

* Chuck Todd just told me on the TV that 1/2 the total 2004 turnout in North Carolina has already voted this year.

* The Field notes that Obama has cleared the 50% threshold in states totaling 286 electoral votes.

* And today's moronic right-wing lie: deliberately misquoting an eight-year-old radio interview to give the impression that Comrade Obama supports court-ordered wealth redistribution. (He doesn't. In fact, echoing the right's own talking points, what he actually says in the interview is that sort of social change should not be pursued in the courts.) On this Ambinder makes an interesting point: Republicans have managed to take an election that was clearly a referendum on Bush and turned it into a referendum on the last thirty years of their failed politics. Quite an accomplishment.