Late night.

* What is the jobless rate for people like you? Post-racial America is awesome. (via)

* Salman Rushdie totally doesn't know his kryptonite.

* DC caught mishandling its recycling. (via)

D.C. law requires recycling at all city buildings, though the law appears to stop at the threshold of all alleys. There, behind businesses and apartment complexes all across the city, this sloppy ritual goes down with striking regularity: In a blur of asses and elbows, workers throw stuff from green containers, black containers, and blue containers in the same truck, creating a jumble of trash and recycling that can never be de-mingled.

* Behind The Men Who State at Goats. (via)

* Alan, who looks much younger than his 72 years, speaks in a meandering monotone, while Sylvia makes tea. "Sylvia is going to put arsenic in our tea." It's an ongoing joke, and one that gets to the nub of their problem. The cryonicists are not dying quickly enough, so the opportunity to hone their skills is limited. (via)

Glenn Greenwald brings us more on the rumors that Eric Holder will appoint a special prosecutor for the Bush administration, with varying and conflicting reports about the possible scope and scale of the investigation.

Newsweek: Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. "You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation's laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort," Holder says. "But the reality of being A.G. is that I'm also part of the president's team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values."

These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell Newsweek that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."

There's some discussion of this claim and what it means at MetaFilter and Greenwald, as well as reports tonight that Cheney ordered the CIA to lie to Congress.

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

Iran politics, American politics.

* NYU's Joshua Tucker: 'Don’t Expect This Week’s Protests To Lead To Revolution In Iran.'

* Suspect positionalities watch: Marc Ambinder says we should "follow the developments in Iran like a CIA analyst." I'm not sure that's quite the posture I'd recommending adopting—especially as it takes a stunningly doe-eyed view of the CIA—but the hermeneutic of general skepticism Ambinder advocates seems wise.

* Nate Silver analyzes that pre-election poll that's getting increasing attention today.

If you take that 30 percent swing vote and add it to Ahmadinejad's 33 percent base, he could have won the election with 63 percent of the vote, as he ostensibly did on Friday. If you take it and add it to Mousavi's column, Ahmadinejad would have gone down to a solid defeat.

The point that few commentators are realizing—Al Giordano is an exception—is that this story really isn't about the way that the votes were counted. It's about whether Iran is capable at this point of having an election in which the democratic will of its electorate is properly reflected. If Ahmadinejad hired a bunch of thugs to hold every Iranian at gunpoint while they were casting their ballots, it would not have been difficult for him to get 63 percent of the vote—indeed, he'd probably have wound up with very close to 100 percent. This would be an election—and there would be no need at all to tamper with the results. But it wouldn't be an expression of democracy. We need to separate out those two concepts. Ahmadinejad, as far as we know, did not go so far as to hold anyone at gunpoint. But the tentacles of fear in Iran run deep.

* Still more from Iran: details on the protester shot in Azadi Square today and big pictures from the Big Picture.

* Obama, political capital, and climate change: Matt Yglesias makes a good point.

The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. If he wants to let cold-blooded murderers out of prison, it’s completely clear that nobody can stop him. But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.

* And your attention please: Sonia Sotomayor is no longer a racist.

Politics on the mind.

* Is impeachment still off the table, Madame Speaker? Rob Suskind reports that "the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein." Via MeFi.

* You wouldn't like him when he's angry: Barack pushes back hard on the energy issue, and it makes me happy. And that's not the only thing he's pushing back on:

They're very good at negative campaigning. They're not so good at governing.

* Al Giordano plays veepstakes, but won't make a bet.

* Al Franken's latest schtick: drawing a map of the United States from memory. He's pretty good—for a celebrity.

* Raising Arizona and the H.I. McDunnough theory of John McCain.

Well, I'm showing up late today. Sorry about that.

* Scientists have taught monkeys how to control robotic arms with their thoughts. We are so screwed. Via Alex Greenberg, Matt Yglesias, and MetaFilter.

* 24: Season Two: The Musical. From the people who brought you Silence of the Lambs: The Musical. The first song at least made me laugh.

* National Geographic on "the real crystal skulls."

* Scott McClellan has his come to Jesus moment. More at The Nation. MetaFilter debates whether we should care.

* Via Tim, MoveOn is giving away free anti-McCain bumper stickers He's also got a telling link on a redacted CIA document on interrogation techniques that's been nearly entirely blacked out.

New Yorker roundup: Today I put aside an hour or so and caught up on the New Yorkers I hadn't been reading the last few weeks—which means I've now got a bunch of good articles to link to.

* Dept. of Entomology: Where have all the bees gone?
* Annals of Technology: A brief history of email Spam.
* The article everybody and their mother linked to, the look inside the CIA's "black sites."
* Shouts & Murmurs: Aesop In The City.
* The Lost Poems of Joe DiMaggio.

Enjoy.

Conspiracy theory of the night: The CIA origins of the National Enquirer.