Thursday night links!

* I saw Zombieland tonight and was impressed with how well America kept its Big Cameo secret. (I won't spoil things either.) The movie itself is pretty fun, if less funny than it thinks and a little cartoonish at times. I find in general that I prefer my zombie movies to be psychologically realistic and thematically bleak, with roughly two-thirds of the film devoted to the building of systematic fortifications and the last third devoted to the spectacular destruction of said fortifications.

* This is a great blog and Imma let you finish, but MetaFilter has the best Balloon Boy thread of all time. Don't miss what could be the exciting start of Phase 2: "You guys said we did it for the show."

* Why Your Idea to Save Journalism Won't Work.

* Nice to see Mad Men getting some press in the Atlantic, but couldn't they have found someone who actually gets the show?

Mad Men’s most egregious stumble—though seemingly a small one—involves Betty Draper’s college career, and it is generally emblematic of this extraordinarily accomplished show’s greatest weaknesses, and specifically emblematic of its confused approach to this poorly defined character. Betty, the show establishes, was in a sorority. So far, okay. Pretty, with a little-girl voice and a childlike, almost lobotomized affect; humorless; bland but at times creepily calculating (as when she seeks solace by manipulating her vulnerable friend into an affair); obsessed with appearances and therefore lacking in inner resources; a consistently cold and frequently vindictive mother; a daddy’s girl—Betty is written, and clumsily performed by model-turned-actress January Jones, as a clichéd shallow sorority sister. (Just as Don’s self-invented identity is Gatsby-like, so Betty, his wife, is a jejune ornament like Daisy, though without the voice full of money.) But she’s also a character deeply wronged by her serial-philanderer husband, and she’s hazily presented as a stultified victim of soulless postwar suburban ennui (now there’s a cliché). So, perhaps to bestow gravitas on her, or at least some upper-classiness, the show establishes that she went to Bryn Mawr. But of course Bryn Mawr has never had sororities. By far the brainiest of the Seven Sisters—cussed, straight-backed, high-minded, and feminist (its students, so the wags said, preferred the Ph.D. to the Mrs.)—Bryn Mawr was probably the least likely college that Betty Draper, given to such non-U genteelisms as “passed away,” would have attended. So much for satiric exactitude.

As I complained in the MeFi thread, Betty's problem isn't that she's bland, humorless, or stupid but that she hates her life.

* Chicago and the Great Flood of 1992.

* How the Freaknomics authors blew a chapter on climate change in the book's new sequel, Superfreakonomics.

* “The original Gauntlet was released with no ending. The hundred or so levels were randomised and looped for as long as play lasted. Atari saw Gauntlet as a process, a game that was played for its own sake and not to reach completion. The adventurers continue forever until their life drains out, their quest ultimately hopeless.”

Republicans are now demanding that the health care bill be subject to the dreaded superfilibuster, suggesting that they think they're going to lose their fight to scuttle it. Meanwhile, TPM and FiveThirtyEight take separate looks at the reconciliation process that could be used to pass the public option and financing aspects of the bill, while Joe Klein throws in the towel on journamalistic "objectivity" in the face of the GOP's descent into total batshit crazitude.

Thursday!

* The First Rule of J-School Is You Don't Talk About J-School Debt.

* Nowhere in Manhattan. Hard to believe it is Manhattan. Via MeFi.

* Nnedi Okorafor has a nice guest post at Nebula on Africa and science fiction.

* The CEO of Whole Foods doesn't want us to have health care. OpenLeft doesn't want us to shop at Whole Foods anymore. Everyone at MetaFilter is mad at everyone.

* Top 10 Superhero Comics 2000-2009. I've read more of these than I would have expected, and can plug a bunch: All-Star Superman, Monster Society of Evil, New Frontier, Omega the Unknown, and Planetary are all worth reading in their own ways, as are some of the sillier Big Two offerings (I'll admit to being fond of Booster Gold). Y: The Last Man is good, too, but of course it doesn't really count. Via NeilAlien.

* Language and time. I found this interesting.

David Hauser and colleagues first showed that people with an angrier temperament are more likely to think of themselves as moving through time, than to think of time as moving towards them. You can test this on yourself by considering which day of the week a meeting has changed to, if it was originally planned for Wednesday but has been moved forward two days. If you think it's now changed to Friday, then you're someone who thinks of themselves as moving through time, whilst if you think the meeting is now on Monday, then you're more passive, and you think about time passing you by.

I'm a Monday person for sure. I see can see why Ezra thinks it would be Friday, but it seems very unnatural to me to spatialize the week that way.

* And you can now tweet @Gliese581d.

Monday tidbits.

* Early polls out of the Senate race in Pennsylvania, post Specter-shuffle.

* An end to the Boston Globe? (UPDATE: No?)

* Bibles and scripts from your favorite TV shows: 1, 2. (Via Zack.)

* Condition your child the Darrow way. (Via Neil.)

Three top blogs—Climate Progress, Glenn Greenwald, and Duke's own American Stranger—separately highlight some inadvertently telling passages in the Newsweek profile on Paul Krugman.

By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking.

In American politics the establishment press is the problem, not the solution, which should mitigate all the late gnashing of teeth over "the death of newspapers." For a lot of reasons, blogs are not the ideal format for public discourse, but they'll have to do; the establishment press has blown the mission beyond all repair. Blogs are all we have left.

The EFF has updated its legal guide for bloggers. Via Boing Boing.

When can I borrow someone's images for my blog post?

Images are subject to the same copyright and fair use laws as written materials, so here too you'll want to think about the fair use factors that might apply. Is the image used in a transformative way? Are you taking only what's necessary to convey your point? A thumbnail (reduced-size) image, or a portion of a larger image is more likely to be fair use than taking an entire full-size image. If you want to go beyond fair use, look for Creative Commons licensed images.

I break this guideline all the time. I blog from the outskirts of the law.

Still still more more.

* Marc Bousquet says the appointment of Wilma Liebman as chair of the NLRB is a good sign for advocates of grad student unionization. One of the most striking things about meeting grad students from other schools at conferences is always the recognition of just how good we actually have it at Duke—our situation is pretty far from perfect, but a lot of people at other institutions really do have it much worse.

To admit graduate students in the humanities with no or almost no funding isn't just insane, it's cruel.

* Iceland to appoint first openly gay woman as prime minister. The gynocracy (lesbocracy?) is finally here.

* Matt Yglesias, who of course now blogs for a nonprofit, says nonprofits are the future of journalism.

* Science fiction book covers that channel pure id.

* Create your own original Star Trek story: a flowchart.

* What? A Blade Runner sequel? Has the whole world gone crazy?

* While we're on the subject: some articles about Blade Runner. Via MeFi.

* The words of David Foster Wallace.

The reality is: I quickly realized Rudy was a maniac. "Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter," at GQ.

Politics Monday.

* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann's now desperately trying to backpeddle.

* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.

* West Virginia electronic voting machines don't work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.

* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?

* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn't working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.

* Or, you know, don't: John McCain doesn't really seem to mind losing. A lot of "moderate" conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.

* It turns out McCain's also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.

* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.

* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.

* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.

* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates' health, McCain's in particular.

* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its "Building the New Energy Economy" theme.

* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.

Evening links.

* Rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship Watch: McCain/Palin loses David Frum and Christopher Hitchens.

* Meet the man behind the Obama smears: Andy Martin.

* The pollster for the campaign that beat Bradley says there's no such thing as a Bradley Effect. Let's hope not.

* Milan Kundera's past may have caught up with him.

* And I'm have this awesome quote about the media bookmarked for weeks, a great reminder of who they really work for:

The following remarks were apparently made by John Swinton in 1880, then the preeminent New York journalist, probably one night in during that same year. Swinton was the guest of honour at a banquet given him by the leaders of his craft. Someone who knew neither the press nor Swinton offered a toast to the independent press. Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying:

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

"There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

"We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

(Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.)

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Another scene from the McCain/Palin lynch mob.

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

More David Simon blogging: YouTube has video of The Wire creator with an address on journalists and the public square at USC Law.

Matt Yglesias has a great post deconstructing the badness of a particularly egregious headline from the Washington Post, "Climate Is Risky Issue for Democrats." This is what we mean when we say the media is broken.

The leading candidates for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination have all responded to this public, diplomatic, and elite concern with fairly similar policies grounded in the scientific consensus that sharp reduction in US carbon emissions are necessary, and in the economics consensus that the most efficient way to achieve those reductions is by putting a price on carbon emissions -- either in the form of a tax, or in the form of an auction of tradeable emissions permits. The Republican Party, meanwhile, remains mired in half-measures that don't address the full of extent of the problem and don't even accomplish what they do accomplish in an efficient manner. And those are the good Republicans! Others, like the President of the United States of America and several of the leading contenders to replace him remain mired in denial about the extent or nature of the problem, and are so in hock to special interests in the coal and oil industries that they're unable to acknowledge that failing to adopt mandatory emission curbs will have some dramatic deleterious consequences.

The Washington Post's headline writers, under the time honored principled Everything is Bad News for Democrats, naturally decides to sum that situation up as "Climate is Risky Issue for Democrats". The article itself, I might add, is much better, with reporter Juliet Eilprin downplaying the horse race angle in favor of saying something about the policies at hand, quoting pollster Stan Greenberg's observation that "It's a huge issue. I've been stunned by this" before turning to the Dems-are-doomed theory, and quoting Newt Gingrich's view that "a candidate who's anti-environment and denies global warming gets killed in the suburbs."

In praise of Walter Lippmann, at Salon.

"For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism," Lippmann wrote....

"Everywhere today," Lippmann wrote in Liberty and the News, "men are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise."

Lippmann had witnessed firsthand how the "manufacture of consent" had deranged democracy. But he did not hold those in government solely responsible. He also described how the press corps was carried away on the wave of patriotism and became self-censors, enforcers, and sheer propagandists. Their careerism, cynicism, and error made them destroyers of "liberty of opinion" and agents of intolerance, who subverted the American constitutional system of self-government. Even the great newspaper owners, he wrote, "believe that edification is more important than veracity. They believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other considerations must yield. That is their pride. And yet what is this but one more among myriad examples of the doctrine that the end justifies the means? A more insidiously misleading rule of conduct was, I believe, never devised among men."