Monday night.

* Nathan Fillion says Dr. Horrible 2 is moving ahead.

* The History News Network has your first JFK post of the season.

What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking. "I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed," McHugh recalled. He claimed that LBJ was crying, "They're going to get us all. It's a plot. It's a plot. It's going to get us all.'" According to the General, Johnson "was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing."

Of course, opinions on LBJ differ.

* And speaking of the Kennedy assassination: how great was last night's Mad Men? Knowing they would eventually have to do an assassination episode, I worried they wouldn't find the right approach—but I think they pretty much nailed it. I like too that it came an episode early; like most people I was thinking it would be next week. Pandagon and Ta-Nehisi Coates have their usual Mad Men posts up, if you're interested; I usually read the Television without Pity forums too.

* Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC): Everywhere I go in my district, people tell me they are frightened. … I share that fear, and I believe they should be fearful. And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

* And Steve Benen has your chart of the day: filibusters since the 1960s. That last spike is since Democrats recovered control of Congress in 2007.

More Monday links! More!

* Jacob directs my attention to the Spider-Man lizard. As Jacob says, you won't be disappointed.

* Amanda Marcotte says last night's explosive office hijinx on Mad Men were a quiet reference to the Kennedy assassination. I think she may be right.

* Japan's real-life Dollhouse.

* The mother of all Infinite Jest ending theories. (Thanks, kate!)

* Last words of the executed in Texas. Found poetry.

Cathy, you know I never meant to hurt you.
All my life I have been locked up.
I am tired.
I’m ready, Warden.

Saturday morning links!

* RIP, Walter Cronkite.

* Fox is apparently trying to screw the Futurama voice cast, though there are some hints that this may just be an ill-conceived publicity stunt. For what it's worth Variety seems to think it's legit. Why does Fox hate nerds?

* I think it would be great to have a Kindle, but Amazon keeps making it harder and harder for me to buy one. Yesterday they unpublished two books by George Orwell without warning, deleting the books from the Kindles of those who bought it.

* On teaching Infinite Jest.

* And Pat Buchanan, it must be said, is a terrible human being.

Other stuff.

* William Jelani Cobb: 'Obama absent on gay rights.' Yes he is.

We long ago overdosed on comparisons of Obama and previous presidents, but it's hard to miss the way his administration had begun to echo that of John F. Kennedy. And not in a good way.

During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy ran as a forward-looking Democrat who understood the necessity of civil rights. He promised an executive order banning housing discrimination. Gestures like his phone call to a pregnant Coretta Scott King while her husband languished in an Albany jail and Robert Kennedy's judicial arm-twisting to secure his release endeared the young candidate to millions of African-Americans.

But once in office, Kennedy made civil rights a low priority. By 1962, Martin Luther King was openly critical of Kennedy and bitterly observed that the movement activists had become "pawns in a white man's game." It is worth recalling that the 1963 March on Washington was organized not only to ensure passage of a civil rights bill, but also to ensure that Kennedy would not cave to Southern Democrats on the issue.

Via Kinohi.

* Exactly what we don't want: "VP doesn't rule out his own presidential aspirations on Meet the Press Sunday."

* Can You Afford to Be an Adjunct? Don’t consider using adjuncting as a “back door” into a specific department. You are the academic equivalent of a fry cook. You will not be moved into district manager very easily. Perhaps your department grows their own. Ask. How many tenured, tenure-track profs started out as an adjunct? Take your answer as policy. Adjuncts are seldom promoted. You may, especially in smaller or community colleges, be able to enter by attrition, but this happens rarely and should be considered along the lines of winning the lottery. Think very carefully of your overall plan, especially if you have a family or dependents.

* The Ghostbusters' risky business model.

* Marvel's big Captain America news surprises exactly no one.

* Three-frame movies. Via MeFi.

Saturday!

* The first of the last three Pushing Daisies is on tonight. Bryan Fuller's not satisfied, and not done with the story yet.

* Alien prequel on the way.

* More on the sci-fi future that failed from CNN.

* Related: Star Trek as religion.

* Scenes from trailers that aren't in the finished film. I suspect I would have liked Terminator Salvation a lot more if the "This isn't the future my mother warned me about" scenes had been retained.

* Wondermark has a good riff take on Terminator-style action franchises: 1, 2, 3.

* Tales of the New Frontier: a web comic set in a mythical alt-history Kennedy administration.

* 'Jesus Killed Mohammed': Christian dominionism and the U.S. military.

* Brace yourselves for Toy Story 3.

* Weekend games: Heavy Weapons, Panic Breakout, Fail-Safe, and Redstar Fall Pro.

* And this just in: Delaware still sucks.

The implosion of the Republican Party continues apace: CNN is reporting that Arlen Specter is switching to the Democratic Party. Crazy! Never thought the little guy would do it.

UPDATE: Lots of "Holy Shits!" being dropped in Left Blogistan today over this—glad I went with "smokes" instead. Also, it occurs to me that now Neil and Srinivas have to vote for Arlen Specter. Tough luck, fellas.

UPDATE: But let's not lose our heads.

The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case. Three bullets, one assassin. But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible. One, the eight-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing by the grassy knoll. Two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was knicked by a fragment, standing near the triple underpass. The time frame, five point six seconds, determined by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague's cheek had to come from the three shots fired from the sixth floor depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connelly. But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Specter, one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We've come to know it as the "Magic Bullet Theory." This single-bullet explanation is the foundation of the Warren Commission's claim of a lone assassin. Once you conclude the magic bullet could not create all seven of those wounds, you'd have to conclude that there was a fourth shot and a second rifle. And if there was a second rifleman, then by definition, there had to be a conspiracy.

Fun: 137 uncomfortable plot summaries. Some highlights:

ALIENS: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.
BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Teenage serial killer destroys town in fit of semi-religious fervor.
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement.
SERENITY: Men fight for possession of scantily clad mentally ill teenage girl.
GROUNDHOG DAY: Misanthropic creep exploits space/time anomaly to stalk coworker.
HARRY POTTER: Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right.
JFK: Family man wastes life for nothing in crusade against homosexuals.
JUNO: Teen fails to get abortion, ruins lives.
JURASSIC PARK: Theme park’s grand opening pushed back.
KILL BILL: Irresponsible mother wants custody of her child.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
RAMBO III: The United States provides arms, equipment and training to the terrorists behind 9/11.
RED DAWN: Despite shock-and-awe tactics, a superior occupying force is no match for a tenacious sect of terrorist insurgents.
STAR TREK: Over-sexed officer routinely places crew in danger.
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE - Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
SUPERMAN RETURNS: Illegal immigrant is deadbeat dad.
TERMINATOR: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.

Via MeFi.

Nate Silver, who luckily for us has decided to keep blogging through electoral off-years, considers Obama's popularity and relative political capital against his predecessors'. The short version: Obama is remarkably popular, by most measures the most popular new president since Kennedy and heads above Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan.

The trend lines below represent the trajectory before Obama, which demonstrates the extent to which his high popularity (green) and low disapproval (red) buck historical trends.

Of course, if we're talking about superheroes and presidential politics, we can't leave out Watchmen.



Or Reagan in Dark Knight Returns.



Or Luthor.



Or JFK.



Or Superman himself, in the classic and criminally underrated Red Son.



A few more here and here...

It was forty-five years ago today.

When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon.

Here's the full text of the Al Gore "Moonshot" speech from earlier today.

That's why I'm proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It's not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

Between this and the similar T. Boone Pickens ad campaign I must confess to a little bit of eco-optimism lately. Maybe we won't just drill ourselves into oblivion; maybe we'll actually try to solve these problems while we still can.

There's more commentary around the blogs, including Climate Progress, Huffington Post, and a nice annotated version of the speech at Dot Earth.

This is a generational moment. A moment when we decide our own path and our collective fate. I'm asking you - each of you - to join me and build this future. Please join the WE campaign at wecansolveit.org. We need you. And we need you now. We're committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership.

On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy's challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.

I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket's engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.

We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.

As everyone with a TV already knows, at long last Edwards has endorsed Obama, the latest signal that the Democratic primary is over. I don't have much else to say about this, except to say that it's a moment I've been expecting a long, long, long, while. I'm glad Edwards finally got off the pot, though if this wasn't a deliberate post-W.V. strategy I'm amazed it took him this long to finally do it, and I have to say I've lost almost all of the respect I once had for Edwards in the meantime.

Still, there's a definitely Kennedy vibe from the pictures in this MyDD thread, and I must admit, it fills me with something a little bit like hope...







I guess what I'm saying is, give him Attorney General, I won't stand in the way.

With March 4 looking more and more like it could be the definite win for Obama—he's now leading in Texas, per SurveyUSA, and a Rasmussen Ohio poll shows the race there tightening—it looks like a good time for the last of the great primary linkdumps for 2008.

* First up, naturally, is Frank Rich's "The Audacity of Hopelessness," perhaps the definitive pre-post-mortem of What Went Wrong for the once-inevitable candidate. From "Shame on you, Barack Obama" to outright mockery to this nonsense, all indications are that the so-called "moment" from last week's speech did not indicate Clinton's willingness to go out on a high note. Today the New York Times reports an internecine "'kitchen sink' fusillade" against the Democrats' presumptive nominee. I can't wait.

* Matt Yglesias says it never occurred to him that Obama could be assassinated until other people (I'm guilty) started talking about it. I like Matt Yglesias, but to me this indicates a shocking and almost incomprehensible lack of historical memory about the conditions that shaped the country into which we were both born. When I see a story about the Secret Service relaxing security at Obama events, a chill goes down my spine.

* Also via Matt Y., John B. Judis has a good and much-linked piece connecting Obama to a long tradition of American politicians promising us that we can start over.

* 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack, from Internet icon and Stanford prof Lawrence Lessig. I've gotten this in my email a few times and I wanted to put it up before it no longer mattered.

* And yes, I mean that, I think it's over next week, barring a fumble on Obama's part of Giuliani (Clintonesque?) proportions. Of course I said it was all over but the shouting after Super Tuesday, a prediction that I think has mostly been borne out. Chris Dodd has seen the writing on the wall. Even Marc Ambinder, who has been shilling for Clinton without any sense of self-respect for the last few months, has come around. Watch the debate tonight—I'll be liveblogging as usual, if only to see which version of Clinton shows up tonight—but I think Obama closes the gap in both Texas (which I think he'll win) and Ohio (not sure if he'll win, but it'll be close enough that he might as well have), which means he wins it next Tuesday.

I've been blogging for a few years now, and over that time I've linked to Philip K. Dick related material a whole lot of times. Here, in honor of reading Dr. Bloodmoney this week, are just a few PKD highlights, all to the glory of the man Fredric Jameson once called "the Shakespeare of science fiction":

* "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In some ways this is the definitive PKD essay, and it's the one referenced somewhat famously at the end of Waking Life. [+/-]

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

* Another great essay at Grey Lodge Occult Review: "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others."

We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis: from past to present to future. The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it. The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet. That an orthogonal or right-angle time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes place -- processes occuring sideways in reality, so to speak -- this is almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? What clues -- if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory -- should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all, in any sense, to any degree?

* R. Crumb's comic, "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick."

* The first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple.

* Philip K. Dick and drugs.

* Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut. [+/-]

Interviewer: What did you think of Vonnegut’s attitude towards his characters (in Breakfast of Champions)?

PKD: Disgusting and an abomination. I think that that book is an incredible drying up of the liquid sap of life in the veins of a person like a dead tree…that’s what I think. I also love Kurt Vonnegut.

* Philip K. Dick and the Kennedy Assassination. (Warning: spoilers for the last book we're going to read this semester, also a Dick novel, Dr. Futurity.)

* Profiles of Philip K. Dick from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the Times. Interviews with Philip K. Dick. Lethem on Philip K. Dick. Again. Stanislaw Lem on PKD.

* Jameson on Dr. Bloodmoney.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)

A whole lot of people got off the bench in the last few days and endorsed Obama: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The San Francisco Chronicle. The big one today is of course Caroline Kennedy's in The New York Times, which is getting almost as much play as Obama's thrashing of the Clintons in South Carolina last night:

'A President Like My Father'

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

Last night this seemed like the closest we were going to get to Ted Kennedy saying "This man is the second coming of my two murdered brothers"—except I just heard George Stephanopoulos on The Week say that Ted Kennedy is going to endorse Obama after all, and Obama non-deny it, based on Mark Halprin's report here.

Still, the question remains: Where is Al Gore? My gut instinct—based almost entirely on wishful thinking and my worshipful respect for the post-2000 Al—is that he will endorse Obama in the last news cycle before February 5. But I have no idea.

E. Howard Hunt's deathbed JFK confession. Here's a longer treatment from Rolling Stone. How in the world did I miss this when it was big news back in April? Insanely long papers aside, you'd think I would have noticed something like this. (Via my dad.)

HBO's apparently planning a Lee Harvey Oswald miniseries, but they're using the wrong source material. It's Libra or it's nothing.

Incidentally, here is DeLillo on J.F.K.:

KStA: How did you like Oliver Stone's movie?
D.D.: I thought it was like Disneyland for paranoids.

A better question would have been about how he liked having so much of his novel poached by Stone.