While Obama and the Democrats busy themselves with non-issues like health care reform and climate change, former Gov. Sarah Palin continues to do the people's work on the issues that really matter.

Noting that there had been a lot of “change” of late, Palin recalled a recent conversation with a friend about how the phrase “In God We Trust” had been moved to the edge of the new coins.

“Who calls a shot like that?” she demanded. “Who makes a decision like that?”

She added: “It’s a disturbing trend.”

Extremely disturbing. Palin '12! (And '16, and '20, and '24...)! Via the essential Steve Benen, our debunker of the unthinkable:

In our reality, however, Sarah Palin doesn't have the foggiest idea what she's talking about. In 2005, a Republican Congress commissioned a new dollar coin, which was approved by a Republican president. In the proposed design, "In God We Trust" was moved to the edge of the coin.

The religious right flipped out, and a year ago, the Democratic Congress approved a Brownback/Byrd measure to move the phrase back onto the front of the dollar coin.

In America, crazy is a preexisting condition.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

Recently added to my must-read list: One Article Per Day, which is exactly what it sounds like. Recent one-per topics include the golden age of conspiracy, Cuba and American empire, higher education as the next bubble, pornography as the next tobacco, Chomsky on the torture memos and historical amnesia, the self-inflicted recession of the Reagan Democrats, and global collectivist society online. Like everything else, it's on Twitter.

Thursday night links.

* Is the rumored Buffy reboot just a ploy to get Sarah Michelle Gellar on board?

* This brief history of Star Trek reboots makes a persuasive case for the centrality of the "reboot" in the logic of SF franchise.

* Manga collector faces 15 years for comics collection. More at MeFi.

* Hulu has a desktop client.

* Alan Moore's "Future Shocks" goes digital. These are all good, get to iTunes immediately.

* Today's bizarre outrage of the day is a Fox-News-backed conspiracy theory that Obama is selectively closing Republican-owned Chrysler dealerships. Nate Silver and Kevin Drum debunk.

* Also at FiveThirtyEight: Operation Gringo: Can the Republicans Sacrifice the Hispanic Vote and Win the White House?

One of Ezra Klein's readers has too much fun with the craziest yet of the wingnut Obama Birth Certificate conspiracy theories: that Obama is really and secretly the son of (get this) Malcolm X.

Want proof? Here's your evidence.



Case closed.

I'm pretty sure the 'nuts got the idea for this from this post on Blind Item claiming that Usher is secretly the illegitimate son of Ben Vereen.

I read Gawker too, wingnuts.

More politics.

* Obama gave a press conference today, too, coming down hard on the Paulson version of the bailout. An anti-bailout consensus seems to have gelled among both elites (more, more) and the general population, with even GOP foot soldiers refusing to fall in line. (Maybe platforms do mean something after all.) Which is not to say the bailout won't happen—I think it will, if only because the Democrats never met an issue they couldn't sell out on. But it won't be the Paulson version of the bailout, at least and it won't happen at all unless John McCain agrees to sign on and not use Obama's willingness to put country first against him.

* More bailout: Kevin Drum has the single best chart I've seen, while Pandagon points out what I'd suspected all along: poor people and minorities did this to us.

* Schumer, like a lot of people, wants to know what's the rush.

* Kossacks want to know how long this has been in the works.

* Colorado wants to vote for Obama by a huge margin, with strong evidence that the Palin pick backfired there.

* McCain's being forced to defend Indiana.

* Alex Greenberg has your conspiracy theory fodder for the day.

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

* The latest smoking gun on Troopergate is actually fairly damning.

Here's why this is all so damaging to the governor. It's one thing to try to get a trooper fired because you believe he is a danger to the public. But using your considerable power as governor to block the benefits of a former family member you have a long-running dispute with moves this scandal into a new realm.

* And my former candidate for president Howard Dean gave a press conference today, too.

Michelle Obama finished speaking not too long ago. She's been called Barack's secret weapon, and she clearly is—that was one of the better-delivered political speeches I've ever seen, especially given the difficult dual contexts of rehabilitating Michelle's public image and winning over still-suspicious Hillary voters. She was quite literally perfect.

I was almost too nervous to watch the Ted Kennedy tribute and speech; contrary to the way I saw it described on television, it seemed to me that Kennedy was extremely frail and liable to collapse at any moment.

But perhaps the most serious news tonight is the revelation of an apparent assassination plot: at first it seemed to be merely two meth addicts with rifles, but now "at least" four people are under arrest...

* Cracked has 7 insane conspiracies that actually happened.

* MetaFilter has a fun post on irrationalities in the stock market like the January effect, the weekend effect, and the Halloween indicator.

* Via Boing Boing, Scientific American tackles the science of orgasm.

But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.

Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”

We here at Gerry Canavan Industries are watching this research with great interest, as our G Spotter™ and CliMax 3000™ products have not yet caught on in the way we might have hoped.

* I forgot to link to Waxy's great compilation of obsessive fanboy supercuts, including such gems as every "What?" ever uttered on Lost, every "Dude" and F-bomb in The Big Lebowski, and every murder from the Sopranos. Below: Sen. Clay Davis.

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.

The anecdote out of science fiction’s history that almost everyone has heard of is the tale of how Cleve Cartmill, a competent writer of middling abilities, published a story describing the workings of the atomic bomb in a 1944 issue of John Campbell’s magazine Astounding Science Fiction, fourteen months before the first successful atomic explosion at the Alamogordo testing grounds, thus causing a Federal security agency to investigate both Cartmill and Campbell to see if there had been a leak of top-secret military information. Here's Part II. Via Boing Boing.

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.)

My dad is in town for a few days, so posting will probably be light even for a weekend. But there are a few interesting things going on today on the blogotubes:

* Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems. Please adjust your slogans and conspiracy theories accordingly. Via MeFi.

* Time to send a 'knowledge ark' to the Moon? I have a better idea. Also via.

* Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale?, by the appropriately named Michael J. Disney.

* Lenin's Tomb looks at 2007 and 1929. With charts! For what it's worth, I think this overstates the case pretty significantly, but only because I place collapse a little further in the future.

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

New testing on the type of ammunition used in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy raises questions about whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, according to a study by researchers at Texas A&M University. Via MeFi.

See also: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?