More infodump.

* Tentherism goes even more mainstream.
* Republicans vs. America's changing demographics.
* There's another excerpt from Žižek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce online, this time at the London Review of Books.
* Why I Am Not A Catholic: "Catholic Church Says It Will Stop Charity Work If D.C. Passes Gay Marriage Law." Steve Benen isn't above quoting the Book of Matthew over this.
* In Obama's America, people wear hats on their feet, hamburgers eat people, and criminals are tried in courts of law. I should note that Glenn Greenwald says this isn't quite the big step forward it appears to be.
* What happened after Kelo vs. City of New London?
* Fantastic Mr. Fox reviews. Oh, to live in New York.

Via Steve Benen, I see that Paul Krugman's column today addresses a particular concern of this blog over the last few months, the long-term consequences of a GOP "taken over by the people it used to exploit":

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

That a radicalized GOP will degrade to permanent minority status but still retain enough power to obstruct constructive legislation is certainly a concern. But the bigger concern, as I've written a few times before, is that eventually the Democrats will have bad luck and the logic of the two party system will propel the Palinized Republicans back into power—at which time the lunatics really will be in charge of the asylum.

Lots of saved links today. Here's the first batch.

* V is a hit. But is Obama an evil lizard for outer space? Acephalous reports.

* Michael Bérubé talks this year's terrible academic job market.

* North Carolina mayoral races in Charlotte and Chapel Hill are getting some national attention.

* Congratulations, Atlanta, America's most toxic city.

* What do kids call LEGO pieces? Via Kottke.

* Legal outrage of the day: The Supreme Court has indeed said that prosecutors are immune from suit for anything they do at trial. But in this case, Harrington and McGhee maintain that before anyone being charged, prosecutors gathered evidence alongside police, interviewed witnesses and knew the testimony they were assembling was false.

The prosecutors counter that there is "no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." Stephen Sanders, the lawyer for the prosecutors, will tell the Supreme Court on Wednesday that there is no way to separate evidence gathered before trial from the trial itself. Even if a prosecutor files charges against a person knowing that there is no evidence of his guilt, says Sanders, "that's an absolutely immunized activity." These innocent men were in jail for twenty-five years; naturally, the Obama administration is backing the corrupt, lying prosecutors who put them there.

The Senate embodies no rational philosophy of governance, and has a completely irrational electoral system. There is no representational philosophy that would legitimate apportioning the most powerful legislators in the country according to arbitrary and widely disparate numbers of voters, representing arbitrary tracts of land that owe their boundaries to the whims of land granters centuries ago. The fact that there are two senators each from North Dakota, Delaware, Texas and California is flat-out insane. The Senate was a compromise solution intended to accomplish certain goals in 1789. Those goals have long become irrelevant, and the unintended consequences have overwhelmed the institution.

The Economist climbs aboard the Diminish-the-Senate Express. (via Srinivas)

This is why we can't have nice things: I've been thinking a lot recently about how the undemocratic composition of the Senate creates a major hurdle for progressive legislation in the U.S., and I was curious how this works in practice. The chart below takes the 2008 population estimates for all 50 states from the U.S. Census and checks the populations represented by the Democratic and Republican caucuses against their actual representation in the U.S. Senate. (Click to enlarge.)



As you can see, the distortion created by having two Senators from every state regardless of its population means that Democrats should have 4.2 more Senators than they currently do, and Republicans 4.2 fewer. (Since you can't have two-tenths of a Senator, the number is really five. But call it four.) This is to say that in a properly representative Senate, even if you kept the filibuster—itself an anti-democratic Senate institution—with 64 senators in the chamber Democrats would be able to pass their agenda easily.

But it gets worse.



The six problem senators on health care, the six most likely to support a Republican filibuster—Mark Pryor, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, and Joe Lieberman—together represent only 3.59% of the total population of the country, which means that in a properly representative Senate the Democrats could lose all six votes and still beat a filibuster.

In short, it's the distorted apportioning of the Senate itself that is progressives' largest legislative problem. Article 5 of the Constitution makes it almost impossible to eliminate the Senate outright, but (as I wrote the other week) depowering and discrediting the legislative roadblock called the Senate should be at the top of the long-term political agenda for progressives. In the meantime, these population distortions will continue to dominate all political outcomes, and continue to thwart all progressive change.

Wednesday!

* I have a review in the Indy this week of Lucas Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Keywords: copyright Constitution Buffy pornography Superstar Mystery Science Theater 3000.

* Cases for and against Buffy without Joss.

* Sarah Connor creator: I won't be back.

* Some days I think Marvel just doesn't get women. Via MeFi.

* theauteurs.com: Streaming video of Criterion Collection films. (via Vu)

* And the year of Senatorial madness shows no sign of ending: Joe Sestak intends to unseat Arlen and Burris's scumbaggery is caught on tape.

Super Happy Insomnia Linkdump.

* Here come your Simpsons stamps.

* Thomas Lennon says The State DVD is finally coming out this July. Meanwhile, State alums Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter have a new show and a new blog.

* Only 53% of Americans think capitalism is better than socialism. What happens when we cross 50%? Does it mean over-educated literary theory PhDs suddenly get to be in charge? I certainly hope it means that.

* The dark side of Dubai. Ugly, ugly stuff.

* On the neuropsychology of zombies. Via Pharyngula.

* A good post I forgot to link to a few days ago from FiveThirtyEight.com: Nate Silver predicts when various states will legalize gay marriage. My expectation is that a federal court ruling will make gay marriage a nationwide reality via the full faith and credit clause long before Mississippi—a state sweltering with the heat of injustice—gets its chance in 2024.

* And Part 4 of Matt Zoller Seitz's Wes Anderson documentary is up. This part's on J.D. Salinger.

Don't talk to the cops: Prof. James Duane of the Regent University School of Law and Officer George Bruch of the Virginia Beach Police Department explain why you shouldn't ever talk to the cops about a crime under any circumstances without your lawyer present.





(I know, I know, it's Pat Robertson's law school, but he's right anyway.)

And here's a nice Miranda flashback from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

...a detective does his job in the only possible way. He follows the requirements of the law to the letter -- or close enough so as not to jeopardize his case. Just as carefully, he ignores that law's spirit and intent. He becomes a salesman, a huckster as thieving and silver-tongued as any man who ever moved used cars or aluminum siding -- more so, in fact, when you consider that he's selling long prison terms to customers who have no genuine need for the product.

The New York Times has dueling op-eds on the FISA issue: the editorial board is unhappy with Obama, while Morton Halprin (who was spied on by Nixon) believes the FISA compromise is the best legislation we can hope for at this time.

I've already written about this (in both blogspot and Daily Kos flavors), but I have one or two things to add. First, on the merits of the FISA compromise, I think the bill itself is pretty awful, but telecom immunity isn't the awful part. I can't imagine the government making any other policy choice if it ever wants a private company to comply with its requests ever again. The problem here was and always has been Bush administration illegality, not telecom compliance—so the netroots are directing their fire in entirely the wrong direction. This TPM reader gets it right:

Before we all torpedo the best candidate we have had in 30+ years over this FISA thing, be aware of the two facts: (1) there is a long-established government contractor immunity doctrine in American law & what the telecoms did after 9-11 in obeying government demands for compliance is right in stride with that doctrine, and (2) in any event, the federal government is likely required to indemnify the telcos for any judgment or settlement they'd have to pay. Is this really the make-or-break litmus-test the netroots is clamoring for? No way. Is this just another example of liberals eating their own? You betcha.

As I was writing at the tail end of an Yglesias comment thread last night, the grandstanding you're seeing on the lefty blogs over telecom immunity seems to me to be misdirected anger over the dawning recognition that Bush and his cronies really are going to get away with everything scot free. Well, they are. Pelosi took impeachment off the table—wrongly, I think, though I understand the political calculus involved—and it's extremely unlikely there will be any substantive investigation of Bush following Obama's election. There never has been. We'll "turn the page." "For the good of the country," a criminal Republican administration will once again walk, and the really sad fact is the exact same bunch of thugs will probably pop back up yet another decade down the line to do it all again.

We lost the fight to hold Bush accountable when Pelosi took impeachment off the table. I'm sorry that's true, but that's reality, no matter what happens with FISA and telecom immunity or what anybody says on the Internet.

What's actually at stake now is the character of the *next* eight years, eight absolutely crucial years in a very precarious moment not only for this nation but for the entire world—and with regard to that struggle Obama is doing the right thing by taking the FISA issue off the table. He's being pragmatic. We need to be pragmatic too.