All the face of the world is changed . .

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

* How many times do you think the phrase “and let the chips fall where they may” was used on JournoList over the last 48 hours?

* The Olympics. The Copenhagen climate summit. Corzine. Deeds. Coakley. That President Obama is one heck of a persuader. A master politician, even! Good thing he keeps his enormous persuasive powers bottled up and doesn’t toss them around willy-nilly.

* Martha Coakley must be thinking to herself, Two years ago Al Franken wins while running as a hot-headed, leftist jerk against a serious Republican incumbent in a battleground state and the White House says this is my fault? Hey, D-Axe, I got two words for you: Suck it.

* How long until we’re confronted with the terrible racism of the American people again? I mean, it was nice that it went away for a little while, but clearly, it’s back. (It’s not just the Mass. voters’ rejection of Obama’s health care plan–look at poor Harold Ford.)

* Let Obama be Obama? There’s nothing in the president’s background to suggest that he’s going to change course, politically. Like George W. Bush, he’s one of those fellows who always seems to luck into success. Like Bush, someone was always standing nearby waiting to give Obama a gold star and pass him along up the ladder. And I suspect that, like Bush, he unshakeably believes that one way or another things will work out just fine for him, because they always have in the past.

And they just might. After all, they worked out fine for Bush. Sure, President Bush shipwrecked his party, but he didn’t pay any personal consequences for his failures. Other people picked up that check. Obama might be able to pull off the same feat.

* If Republicans would like to deny him a second term, however, one piece of advice: Do not win Congress in November!

This shouldn’t be hard. As bad as things are for the Donks, Republicans probably have too much ground to make up in either chamber. But you never know. If, in late October, it looks like they might take the House (or even the Senate), some candidate should fall on his sword and claim a crippling addiction to crush videos or something, leaving the GOP just shy of a majority.

Update: This talk about Scott Brown running for president is ridiculous. Sure, he’s been a state senator and now he’s a U.S. Senator, but what kind of resumé is that? He hasn’t even written one autobiography!

Update II: Boy, that was fast.

Ever think to yourself, “Man, if only MMA had tag teams . . . That would be sweet . . .”

P.S.: Fast forward to the 8:00 mark to see the all-in, two-on-two overtime session.

Someone keeps stealing his money.

Remember when Andrew Sullivan was crowing about being “the most popular one-man political blog site in the world”?

Well, it turns out that he doesn’t run a one-man blog. He has a staff–and not only do they help administer it, but they post under Sullivan’s name.

Also, he probably isn’t the most popular political one-man blog site in the world.

Elsewhere I have a short post on Iceland’s latest very bad problem, which is mostly a link to a Martin Wolf essay over in the FT.

All of which is an excuse to point to this worthwhile TNR profile of Wolf from last September.

Stumbled across the game Braid the other day, available for Mac or PC (and on consoles), and with a very generous free demo you can download.

Imagine if Super Mario Bros. had been designed by Stephen Hawking and Claude Monet.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqtSKkyJgFM&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Wow.

I don’t have a dog in this fight–I’ve never seriously watched late-night TV and I don’t find any of the characters who populate it particularly funny. The entire enterprise seems like more of an infomercial for the celebrity-industrial complex than actual entertainment.

That said, I’m a little surprised by roundly-recorded shock and objection to the way Conan O’Brien is being treated. This isn’t to say that he isn’t being treated shabbily–he is. But how did everyone think this movie was going to end? Conan wanted to replace Jay Leno, who was doing the #1 rated show in his slot and who wasn’t ready to be replaced. Jeff Zucker and NBCU worked out a plan that would move Conan into that slot and keep Leno from moving to another network by putting his show into primetime five nights a week.

This was, at the time, an incredibly risky move. And so, if you’re Conan and it’s 2008 and you see that Leno has a clause in his contract where he gets paid $80M if his show fails and NBC decides to cancel it, and you only get $60M if you get canned, you’d have to be blind not to realize that there are only two likely outcomes. (1) Leno’s show succeeds and everyone lives happily ever after. (2) Leno’s show fails, he moves back to 11:30 and you’re the odd-man out. That’s the price you pay for moving in on Leno before he’s ready to walk.

From the moment NBC announced that Leno’s prime-time experiment was over it was pretty obvious that the endgame here involved getting Conan out. Every move NBC has made seems designed to simply reduce the payout they’ll be sending his way. They’ve created a scenario which he’s unlikely to accept (a 12:05 start-time), but in such a manner as to force him to be the one to breach his contract. Conan’s own statement seems designed to lay the predicate for alleging that NBC is the one breaching their contract–he’s alleging that The Tonight Show after midnight is not The Tonight Show. This is a legal, not a semantic, argument.

The only real questions are: (1) How much will NBC pay Conan? (2) How long will Conan be required to stay off the air?

Galley Friend M.G. notes that Scott Ritter has been caught soliciting sex from a minor on the internet for the second time!

Let me let you in on a little secret: Only 50% of the “14-year-old girls” online looking for sex with 45-year-old guys are police officers. That’s the good news. The bad news (for Ritter & Co.) is that the other 50% are FBI agents.

Galley Friend Tucker Carlson has launched The Daily Caller. May it last longer than Talk and Culture11 combined.

Big selling points so far: TDC is providing platforms for two of my heroes: A video from the supremely talented Billy Cerveny and a regular advice column from Matt Labash.

Can’t go wrong with either one.