Mickey Kaus has long wondered if Twitter protects celebrities by not allowing people to append negative Tweets to their feed. I’ve been puzzled by the same question, but I’ve never spent enough time on Twitter to have a sense one way or another.

Well now we have a data point: Frankie Muniz being Twitter-heckled by a fan. (And then bragging about having banked $40M by age 19.)

Muniz may be the only guy in the world able to make Shia LaBeouf look good.

I don’t entirely disagree with Peter Beinart’s thesis–that President Obama is more likely than not to win re-election. (I would not go anywhere so far as Beinart does, though, in saying that the odds of Obama’s re-election is anything like a “lock.”)

But in the specifics, Beinart trots out a couple facts which aren’t as helpful to his case as they seem. He says that in the last 75 years only 3 presidents have been defeated. True enough. But for a little more context, consider that since FDR took office only 11 sitting presidents have run for reelection. Three of them lost and one of them (Johnson) was forced out of the race before he ran. (That is, if you treat Johnson’s first full term as his first term; this may not entirely fair.) Either way, 3-of-11 or 4-of-11 aren’t impossible-to-1 odds.

Beinart then says that of the three sitting presidents to lose, they all faced “serious” primary challenges. I think he’s overstating the seriousness of Pat Buchanan’s insurgent campaign. I don’t think anyone ever believed that Buchanan had a chance to win the nomination–not even Buchanan himself.

The other curious point Beinart makes is this:

I doubt Obama will move as sharply to the centerover the next two years as did Clinton, but he can do so to neutralize key weaknesses if he wants, because there is zero prospect that he’ll be seriously challenged in the primaries. No challenger would have any chance of stealing the black vote, of course, and even among white lefties, for all their grumbling, Obama has no national rival.

It’s interesting to me that Beinart asserts so casually that “no challenger would have any chance of stealing the black vote.” He’s correct, of course. But shouldn’t that fact be troubling?

Galley Friend Mike Russell has been participating in a series of movie commentaries with Portland radio’s Cort and Fatboy. Last month they screened Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The commentary is well worth listening to, even without the movie in front of you.

Russell brings up a series of alternate readings of the movie which are highly entertaining. One is that the main triumvirate of Ferris, Cameron, and Sloan are a high school version of Star Trek’s id-ego-superego threesome: Kirk, Bones, Spock.

Another possibility: That Ferris is a creation of Cameron’s psyche, Fight Club style.

But my favorite of Russell’s propositions is that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off can actually be read as a kind of thriller, where a responsible, reasonable Cameron is lead through a series of harrowing adventures by a sociopathic “buddy” and his femme fatale girlfriend. As Russell explains, to a certain kind of super-straight-laced adolescent–you know the type, always worried about pleasing authority and staying inside the lines–this was a perfectly reasonable view of the film.

It kind of hits me where I live.

Remember the old New Yorker cover about how NYers view the world?

Galley Friend A.W. sends along this fantastic map of the online world. Blow it up big and check out the little details. Who knew that Joystiq was so close to Hot Air?

Newsweek reports on how Android is taking over the mobile world while the mobile world is taking over EVERYTHING! Some choice excerpts:

The mobile revolution may be the biggest wave ever to hit the world of computing. Just as mainframes gave way to minicomputers, which in turn gave way to personal computers, the PC now is being displaced by smart phones and tablets.

Hmmm. Smart phones are bigger than the microchip? Bigger than the networked computer? Bigger than web browser? Bigger than . . . nevermind. If something is happening now, it must be the biggest. Thing. EVER! Last in, first out, baby.

So what happens when most of the residents of planet Earth carry a device that gives them instant access to pretty much all of the world’s information? The implications–for politics, for education, for global economics–are dizzying. In theory, the mobile revolution could enable citizens to demand greater openness and accountability from their governments.

Yup, before you know it, people will be using their smart phones to pay for Starbucks! And not just requesting, but demanding, more transparency from their governments.

The struggle between Google and Apple today looks a lot like the battle between Apple and Microsoft in the PC era. Back then, Apple leapt out to an early lead with the Macintosh, whose revolutionary operating system ran only on Apple machines. But Microsoft came up with a version of Windows that could compete with the Mac. Because Microsoft licensed its software to all of the world’s computer makers, it eventually controlled 90 percent of the market.

I read in some book that there was actually a computer market even before Windows. Something called DOS or whatnot. A great American inventor by the name of Thomas Edison realized that by giving the ancient rune “C:\” to the Great Computing Tribes he could create a near monopoly which was even taking shape as early as 1984!

Sigh.

Android may or not be a great OS. It may or may not eventually deliver some actual profit to Google. (Because unlike MS-DOS, I don’t believe that Google gets any cut back from the hardware makers. I could be wrong.) But Android isn’t designed to make money for Google. It is, as Steve Jobs rightly understood from the start, designed to kill the iPhone–which would have the consequence of crippling Apple as a corporate rival.

Galley Friend Matt Labash went among the medical marijuana types. And it’s awesome.

So that’s what Chris Nolan is giving us next: a Nolan designed, Goyer scripted, Snyder directed Superman reboot with General Zod as the foil. Temp title: The Man of Steel.

I want to be excited. Really, I do. But I’m just not there. There’s a reason Superman has never (that’s right, never) been great on the big screen: He’s a drama killer. The character is too omnipotent, his powers are, as a visual matter, not particularly interesting to the eye. The interesting aspects of Superman are all interior: How can a man this powerful really be such a boy scout? How does he handle those few people around him who do not recognize him as a deity? (Meaning, his relationships with Batman and Wonder Woman.) And finally: How does the world around him change because of his presence?

There are great Superman moments in comics, but for me, he’s most dramatically powerful when he isn’t the main character. Three examples:

* The very first Jeff Loeb Superman-Batman, which opens with Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent nearly meeting as young boys when Wayne and Alfred are driving through Kanasas. Superman is confronted by a limitation here when he realizes that there is nothing he could have done, even at that early age, to save Bruce’s soul.

* The confrontation between Wonder Woman and Superman in (I think) Korea in DarwynCooke’s New Frontier. Superman finds an AWOL Wonder Woman who has led a group of native women to slaughter the Communist fighters who were keeping them captive. She’s in the process of turning them into mini-Amazons and Superman is horrified. Wonder Woman dismissively calls him “spaceman” and tells Kal to go home, that his moral code has no value in war.

* In Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis, Superman (and Batman) loom over the entire series, despite the fact that they rarely appear on the page. Instead, it’s Superman’s very existence which shapes the actions of the other characters, with one hero or another often threatening to “go tell Clark” about what’s going on.

The common theme here is that Superman’s most powerful dramatic conflicts have nothing to do with physical action. Which is why he’s such a tough character to do well on the big screen.

From Tubbylover:

Listen up little girls. This is what making up stories about doing anal will do to your face.