Other links.

* Inevitable endpoint of historical trends: Administrators in the Undergraduate Studies (US) office [at UC Davis] have asked if freshmen seminar instructors would voluntarily opt out of their quarterly stipend for teaching the one-to-two-unit courses for freshmen.

* The Italian magazine Wired has your map of the future.

* Bootleg DVD covers.

* Dick Armey: "The largest empirical problem we have in health care today is too many people are too overinsured." Of course! That's the problem.

* Someone really didn't think this one through.

* How American politics works, part 1: [The Boxer] bill will be a dead letter. Already there’s an undercurrent of anxiety in Washington that a bill can never pass as long as it’s associated with an unpopular lady senator who runs one of the body’s most liberal committees. The Senate isn’t like the House. There is no party discipline among Democrats; in fact, Democratic senators are fond of explicitly disclaiming party discipline. It’s a chamber full of large, jostling egos and not a little old-boy sexism. They’re not about to let a combative liberal woman run the show.

* How American politics works, part 2: What not to spend your empire's money on.

* Who is running for president in 2012? Only the new mayor of Manchester, N.H., knows for sure. Matt Yglesias has your chart showing no Republican can win in 2012, while Hendrik Hertzberg has something you can't get in your fancy East Coast universities: his gut.

* And Pandagon considers Betty Draper.

Thursday again! How does this keep happening?

* Today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. MetaFilter remembers.

* Planetary #27 finally on its way. October.

* New Hampshire officially passes marriage equality. It looked for a while like nitpicking from the governor's office might actually kill this; very glad it didn't.

* Country first: Lindsey Graham admits he puts the Republican Party before the good of the nation.

* In the wake of Dr. George Tiller's assassination, a frequent Fox News guest has put photos and addresses for the last two late-term abortion providers in the country on the Web.

* Obama speaks in Cairo.

* E.J. Dionne on the corporate media's continued rightward slant. More from Steve Benen.

* The recession: a global view. It's important to remember how good America actually has it—and that the current level of hardship in the States is, relatively speaking, not even all that bad.

* Here comes heath care. Donkeylicious says Team Edwards has something to crow about here. Maybe, but the health-care justification for Edwards's (and later Hillary Clinton's) candidacy long past viability was always weak—the plan you campaign on is never the plan that gets passed.

* And sad news: Bill, killed. Early reports declare David Carradine a suicide.

Thursday night catchup all-politics edition.

* Cheney Cheney cheney cheney Cheney. Time to begin that long slide into the ashbin of history, Dick.

* Rush, rush. You, too.

* SCOTUS spec.

* Gay marriage passes New York Assembly, facing "uphill battle" in state Senate.

* Gay marriage about to be legal in New Hampshire.

* Taking a first step towards a world without nuclear weapons.

* Redefining "useless": Senate Democrats.

* Not your father's Boy Scouts. I cannot recognize this organization at all. Knot-tying isn't good enough anymore? Via The Spine.

Random.

* Call us "brights": Evidence is reviewed pointing to a negative relationship between intelligence and religious belief in the United States and Europe. It is shown that intelligence measured as psychometric g is negatively related to religious belief.

* The New Hampshire legislature has passed gay marriage. Live free or die!

* Teaser images from the "lost," DVD-only 13th episode of Dollhouse. This looks really, really good.

* Watchmen watch: costumed vigilantes in Cincinnati.

* "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tells lawmakers it has no power to stop a Salt Lake City firm from taking tons of waste from Italy, processing it in Tennessee, then disposing of it in Utah." Well, who the hell does have the authority?

Al Giordano reminds us that one year ago today Barack Obama got his ass handed to him in New Hampshire.

The pressure was now on Obama. How could he possibly retake the initiative after the New Hampshire primary shocker? That same January 8 night, he took the stage in Nashua:



And with three words - "yes, we can," introduced for the first time as a call and response line in his speeches - Obama parlayed his defeat into a victory. In temperament, with confidence and calm - and with the assist of a raucous crowd that was determined not to let the setback get it down - he kept himself in the game.

I remember that speech well, and I bet you do too: it was a much-needed call back to arms on what had seemed, at the time, to be a devastatingly and perhaps determinatively bad night. "Maybe I'm doomed to always back the wrong horse," I wrote in the post introducing the speech. "But maybe not."

In a week and a half, he'll be president.

A Democrat has won Dixville Notch for the first time since 1968.

The town, home to around 75 residents, began voting at the stroke of midnight. The final tally was 15 votes for Sen. Barack Obama and six votes for Sen. John McCain.

Obama is weighing broadening a map that already appears big and red into four more states. A top adviser, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, said Obama is considering expanding his active campaign back into North Dakota and Georgia, from which he’d shifted resources, and into the Appalachian heartland of West Virginia and Kentucky.

But if that makes you happy, Obama's got just two words for you: New Hampshire.

The polls haven't closed in New Hampshire yet, but that hasn't stopped nearly everyone from writing Clinton's obituary. Here are Patrick Ruffini and Jerome Armstrong with alternative takes on how she might recover and go on to take the nomination. Ruffini envisions a strong Clinton showing in Nevada followed by a surprise win in the Florida non-primary, while Armstrong believes that symbolic Clinton victories in the Michigan non-primary and then in Florida will be touted as "wins" leading into Super Duper Tuesday. I'm pretty skeptical. I think for once the mass media's insane hatred of the Clintons is on the side of the good and the just, and that the talking heads will fall over themselves to point out that Michigan and Florida mean nothing. And she isn't at all likely to win Nevada; in fact, if Clinton really is down to only $15-20 million of her original warchest it seems more probable that her campaign will simply abandon Nevada and South Carolina altogether, as is already being suggested. Super Duper Tuesday, originally planned by the national party to be her coronation, is now her last hope, and it's a pretty feeble one—the likely strong showing from Obama there puts the nomination out of reach.

Larry David is stumping for Obama in New Hampshire. A longish excerpt:

Throughout the event Larry was... well, Larry. Completely himself and utterly hilarious. At one point he noticed a student scratching himself and asked, "What are you doing itching your balls at an Obama event?"

Another student asked him what he thought Obama's chances were. He answered with his signature "Pre-tty, pre-tty good," leading to a raucous outburst.

"I'm undecided between Obama and Hillary," one young woman said. "Aren't you tired of the old?" he replied. "Don't you want to put on some clean clothes? Voting for Hillary would be like doing Frasier again on TV. Don't you want something fresh, new and creative?"

"I mean, haven't we had enough with Bushes and Clintons and Bushes?" he continued. "The country needs a shower, a good, long, hot shower. That's what Obama is, a hot shower. So fresh you can smell him. Delicious."

Another student asked him when he first met Obama. "I met him in Martha's Vineyard," he replied, "in the summer of '04. I liked him from the first moment, even though he's a skinny man...not presidential in a bathing suit. And I decided to support him when I first heard him speak at the Democratic Convention." [Editor's note: Me, too. —GC]

When asked which Republican he would vote for, if he had to vote Republican, Larry replied: "Candidates who do not believe in evolution are not my cup of tea."

When a young woman said that she was trying to decide whether to vote for Obama or John McCain, Larry took a beat, and pursed his lips. "Let's see," he said, "one was against the war in Iraq from the beginning, and one wants to keep the troops there for another hundred years. I can see your dilemma."

...

"What about Giuliani?" asked another student. "He did a good job for you in the low-fat yogurt Seinfeld episode." "Yes, he did," Larry responded, "but he's a lunatic."

Thanks to Jaimee for making my day with this.

It's a brisk 56° in New Hampshire today, only adding to what will surely be record turnout for the Democratic primary. There are even reports that polling stations are already running out of ballots. None of this is good news for the old guard—and strong reports that the powerful Nevada culinary union will endorse Barack tomorrow are just another nail in the coffin. Stay tuned.

As if you needed any other reason: Matt Yglesias reports that Barack Obama's favorite TV show is The Wire.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's recent electoral troubles in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and around the nation have prompted her, perhaps unadvisedly, to go negative against Martin Luther King.

Via The House Next Door, my hometown paper has a short feature this week on the top-ten Sopranos episodes. Shankar and I were playing this game over Google Chat not long ago, so I can contribute my own list, roughly in order of preference—though since not everyone loves this show as much as I do, I'll hide it behind a [+/-].

1. "Long-Term Parking" (Season 5): The one where Adriana gets, you know. Almost certainly my favorite episode of the show.

2. "Funhouse" (Season 2): The Big Pussy episode from the end of season 2. The other strong contender for best episode ever.

3. "Pine Barrens" (Season 3): An obvious classic.

4. "The Happy Wanderer" (Season 2): The episode with Tony's high-school friend the degenerate gambler, who ultimately loses his sporting goods store. Surely the best guest-star in the show's history.

5. "College" (Season 1): The one where Meadow and Tony go to New Hampshire. Just a great episode.

6. "Stage 5" (Season 6b): The Johnny Sack episode. I'm tempted to pick others from the final nine, too—"Sopranos Home Moves" (first episode of the final nine), "The Blue Comet" (last week's episode), and "The Second Coming" (the episode from two weeks ago)—but they're still too fresh. In any event it's been a really fantastic season.

7. "Whitecaps" (Season 4 finale): Carmela throws Tony out. I love the ending of this one.

8 & 9. "Join the Club" and "Mayham" (Season 6a): Cheating a bit because these two episodes really can't be separated. The Tony's-in-a-coma arc from the first part of season six is one of the highlights of the show and (depending on how things go tomorrow) arguably where Chase should have left it.

10. "Employee of the Month" (Season 3): The episode where Dr. Melfi is attacked in her office's parking garage. I really struggled with this, as it's not an arc I'm especially fond of—but it's an unforgettable episode with a killer closing scene. It's got to make the list.

Sometimes there's good news: New Hampshire has approved civil unions.