Nothing says “Hope you enjoyed the first good episode of FlashForward” like a four-month hiatus.

In light of their recent popular referendum banning minarets, and the president of the (mainstream) Christian Democratic People’s Party of Switzerland now calling for a separate ban on Muslim and Jewish cemeteries, I’m thinking of bringing my much-loved bit about Switzerland being the root of all evil out of retirement.

Of course, The Daily Show already beat me to it.

UPDATE: Paul Campos and Nate Silver are already hard at work spinning this out.

Following up on yesterday’s post, the World Cup groups have now been announced. The U.S. drew Group C: England, USA, Algeria, Slovenia.

The World Cup draw 2010 could have been much worse, as the U.S. and England will meet right off the bat, and will then be favored against Slovenia and Algeria. The path for the United States won’t be extremely easy, since they are capable of going far, like in 2002, or tanking completely, like in 1998. But for the moment, they got what they wanted—though they could meet Germany from Group D in the next round, if they aren’t careful.

Group G is apparently this year’s group of death. I missed it yesterday, but Nate Silver crunched some numbers on the various possibilities. More here, and I’m sure more still coming soon.

* Good job numbers suggest the recession could be bottoming out. Of course, you can’t please everyone.

* BREAKING: Ben Bernanke is kind of a douche.

* Ted Kennedy may be gone, but John Kerry still won’t support the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound.

* In a new piece in Vanity Fair, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater/Xe, turns out to have been CIA. Via MeFi. What’s next for this real-life Bond villain?

For the time being, however, Prince contends that his plans are far more modest. “I’m going to teach high school,” he says, straight-faced. “History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

* New Jersey to pave million-year-old dinosaur footprints to put up parking lot. Okay, actually condos.

* Can humans reproduce in zero gravity?

This finding casts into doubt the science fictional notion that human beings can survive in zero gravity or in the microgravity environment of large asteroids.

* Could a super-advanced civilization live inside the acretion disk, the super-dense area around the black hole at the center of a galaxy?

* The headline reads, “Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex.”

Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to city hotels warning summit guests not to patronize Danish sex workers during the upcoming conference. Now, the prostitutes have struck back, offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the warnings.

* Sarah Palin goes birther.

The other thing that struck me about her interview was her contention that she didn’t go after Obama enough during the election, and namely, that avoiding the birther thing was a mistake. I suppose she could have gone completely off the deep end during the campaign, and certainly it seems she wanted to but was held back by McCain, but good god, who in their right mind thinks she wasn’t enough on the attack? She accused Obama, through implication, of being a terrorist. She did so in a way that maximized the anti-Muslim insinuation, even though neither Barack Obama nor Bill Ayers (who is the excuse for this rumor-mongering) is Muslim, making the whole thing not only racist but incoherent. She went out of her way to imply that anyone who was not white or lived in a city was not a Real American. She red-baited Obama. She did everything but tell jokes about his mom. Her entire campaign strategy was to attack Obama. I fail to see how she could have done more, honestly. There aren’t enough hours in the day.

* And science proves Rousseau was right: God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.

Starting off, I thought this insightful post from Matt Yglesias puts the central paradox in centrist/incrementalist approaches to health care reform very well:

The reason is that the way insurance companies make money is to segment the population based on risk. And the way centrist, moderate, or otherwise incrementalist approaches to reforming U.S. health care work is they attempt to regulate away insurance companies’ ability to do risk-segmentation effectively. But once you accept the premise that you don’t want insurance companies doing all this risk analysis, there’s basically nothing else for them to do. That’s just what an insurance company is.

Naturally I use that term “centrist” here quite advisedly, taking Shankar D’s point from the comments that it can sometimes obscure more than it reveals. But here again I think the term is meaningful and useful: “centrism” designates an approach to health care reform that leaves the current dominant coverage mechanism (for-profit insurance companies) basically intact and unchanged, in contrast to liberal or progressive approaches like (in order of radicality) co-operatives, public options, and single-payer, which are transformative in nature.

Ezra Klein takes up a more Shankarian style of analysis when he writes of the progressive blogosophere inappropriately making a fetish of the public option:

It might have been a necessary thing from an activism point of view, but convincing liberals that this bill was worthless in the absence of the public option was a terrible decision, wrong on the merits and unfair to the base. The achievement of this bill is $900 billion to help people purchase health-care coverage, a new market that begins to equalize the conditions of the unemployed and the employed, and a regulatory structure in which this country can build, for the first time, a universal health-care system. Thousands and thousands of lives will be saved by this bill. Bankruptcies will be averted. Rescission letters won’t be sent. Parents won’t have to fret because they can’t take their child, or themselves, to the emergency room. This bill will, without doubt, do more good than any single piece of legislation passed during my (admittedly brief) lifetime. If it passes, the party that fought for it for decades deserves to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Fair enough.

But this is also the same Ezra Klein who wrote, only a few days ago, that “This bill, when it’s finished, is not going to be very good. But it’s going to be a lot better than what we have, and almost more importantly, a lot easier to improve in the future.” And it is this argument—the expansionist argument—that I think remains the clearest justification for full-throated progressive support of this significantly imperfect bill. Obamacare is a base hit, not a home run. Recognizing it as such isn’t, and shouldn’t be confused with, rejecting it altogether.

A commenter at MetaFilter who works on cap-and-trade legislation argues that I’m wrong about cap and trade. Here’s a memo from Pew Climate they cite to make their case.

Cost certainty v. environmental certainty. By setting a cap and issuing a corresponding number of allowances, a cap-and-trade system achieves a set environmental goal, but the cost of reaching that goal is determined by market forces. In contrast, a tax provides certainty about the costs of compliance, but the resulting reductions in GHG emissions are not predetermined and would result from market forces….

This review of cap and trade and taxes suggests that many of the longstanding myths about these approaches fail to recognize advances in design options aimed at addressing earlier concerns. While a tax regime sounds simpler in theory, history suggests that special provisions would be added, for example, to avoid adversely impacting specific regions, to exempt feedstocks and to mitigate competitiveness concerns. While a cap-and-trade regime doesn’t directly provide price certainty, recent proposals include temporal flexibility (e.g., banking, borrowing, and multi-year compliance periods) as well as floor prices and offset provisions that would dampen price volatility. In the end, history suggests that it is unlikely that a tax would result in a simpler system. The greater flexibility for firms and greater certainty that environmental objectives will be met appear to be the greatest strengths of a cap-and-trade policy.

UPDATE: And from the comments, a response to the Story of Cap and Trade video I posted earlier.

* Why Dollhouse failed: an interview with Joss Whedon.

“The problems that the show encountered weren’t standalone versus mythology [episodes],” Whedon said. “Basically, the show didn’t really get off the ground because the network pretty much wanted to back away from the concept five minutes after they bought it. And then ultimately, the show itself is also kind of odd and difficult to market. I actually think they did a good job, but it’s just not a slam-dunk concept.”

(via here and here)

* Continuity: a game that combines all the fun of low-res platforming with those sliding box puzzles we had when we were kids.

* Good news from places I have lived: Cleveland has passed a transgender protection law, while NJ may vote on marriage equality next week. “Democratic officials previously said they would not put the legislation to a vote unless they had the support needed to pass it.” So it’s as good as done.

* And close enough: Hundreds of New Yorkers rally in Times Square for marriage equality.

* Bad news from places I have lived: MTV’s The Shore premieres tonight.

* Next year, residents of Denver will get to vote on whether or not the city should set up a seven-member commission for the study of UFOs and extraterrestrial sightings.

* The headline reads, “Hungry polar bears resorting to cannibalism.” (Thanks Leah. But Canada is still on notice.)

* Of course, as we all know, polar bears are just early adopters.

* Actually existing media bias: The Dallas Morning News has saved journalism by ordering its section editors to report directly to its advertising staff. Via MeFi.

* A University of Montreal study on the effects of watching pornography ran into trouble when it couldn’t find any men who didn’t watch porn. Also spotted at Pharyngula. But won’t somebody think of the children?

* Amanda Marcotte: You’ll notice that entire categories of women are being redefined as so disgusting that any man who touches them should be ashamed. First it was over 40 (cougar), then over 30 (puma), and now over 25 (cheetah), and soon it will be anyone over the age of legal consent. And those below it? Illegal. Exactly zero women will be acceptable for fucking.

* Nate Silver continues his quixotic efforts to handicap the 2012 GOP field.

* And hairy chests are back. I have come prepared.

Informative viral video from Annie Leonard arguing against cap and trade. Via MeFi.

UPDATE: From the comments, a response.

Only a few months left before this blog drops everything to focus exclusively on the World Cup. The groups will be announced tomorrow; the New York Times’s soccer blog has some details, and Lawyers, Guns, and Money has some additional analysis and explanation:

The logic is the “best” eight sides are kept apart in the group stage, and no two teams from the same confederation will meet in the group stage (thus making my dream match of South v North Korea highly unlikely) except for Europe — there will be five groups with two European teams.

There’s also some interesting talk about best/worst case scenarios for the U.S. The headline reads “USA the Big Losers in World Cup Seeding Arrangement”:

The USA have not done well out of the geographical seeding arrangement. They are in Pot 2 along with the weakest sides in the tournament, whom they can now not have in their group. So there is no chance of drawing New Zealand or North Korea for Bob Bradley’s side, despite the USA’s high world seeding. They are, if anything, even bigger losers out of this morning’s announcement, than those looked over to accommodate England. Instead the USA will draw one seeded side, one other European side and a third from the Pot containing African and South American sides.

19% of the American public says torture is “often” justified. 35% says only sometimes. Via @mattyglesias.