I missed this in the midst of election anxiety on Tuesday, but the Supreme Court just refused to take a case charging that cable bundling is in violation of federal anti-trust laws. As Deadline reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court today refused to hear the appeal of a class action lawsuit filed by cable and satellite subscribers who argued that channel bundling violated antitrust laws. The subs had asked the court to require programmers and distributors to offer single channels for purchase, rather than sell them only in prepackaged tiers. In March, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit filed against NBCUniversal, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others, saying the plaintiffs had not stated a plausible claim.

In a sense, this is a reaffirmation of something we’ve discussed here quite a bit: bundling and the cable business model as currently constituted are inseparable, and many, many millions of people are willing to accept the model as is, even if they don’t love it. Getting around this without killing enormous amounts of programming (something, again, as I’ve said before, that I would be okay with!) is going to take an enormous amount of innovation, and a lot of time, and in the end, individual channels in the bundle will probably cost more than we sense they ought to. In a way, I wonder if the first goal for the cord-cutting or a la carte movements ought to be targeting the provision of internet, cable, and phone services by the same company. Those kinds of bundles are convenient from a customer service perspective. But in terms of preserving the free flow of content, unrestricted by companies who have an interest in slowing down web-based alternatives to cable, that’s a bad incentive structure for the companies themselves, and poses risks for consumers who want real content choices in the future.

This is maybe the most delightful thing I have ever seen in my entire life: Pat Robertson discovering that some ladies like erotica through the world-conquering phenomenon that is Fifty Shades of Grey:

First, there’s the way that he asks his co-host, “You’re a sweet Christian girl. Lady. Do you see anything in porn that attracts you at all?” I imagine his intention is to provide her an opportunity to reaffirm her chastity, to come across as a little shocked and maybe even innocent. But it comes across as awfully prurient.

And that position of shock and presumption of innocence and purity is actually more revealing than the idea that “A third of the millions of Americans who watch porn are women.” If Robertson is shocked that E.L. James “the author, kind of a little house-wifey type, who doesn’t look like a glamor queen…this woman is kind of like a housewife in some little town” thinks about sex, he must be almost wholly unacquainted with the prospect of female desire. If you can’t reckon with the idea that women crave, enjoy, and think about how to make sex better, it actually makes sense that you’d have a hard time understanding why contraceptive coverage is important to women, or why it’s important to us to have final decision-making authority over our own bodies. Doesn’t make that befuddlement admirable. But it does help make sense of at least a segment of the tide of weird that’s enveloped us over the last year. It would be nice if Robertson, a late convert to the idea that marijuana should be legal and regulated, could get up to speed on this kind of thing in his old age as well.

Fresh off its pink campaign to bring awareness to breast cancer, the National Football League is now embarking on another uniform-related campaign to highlight and pay tribute to America’s military members ahead of Veterans Day. Last week, NFL players wore camouflage-pattered ribbon stickers on their helmets and coaches wore ribbons attached to their shirts.

Washington Redskins coach Mike Shanahan, as Uni-Watch’s Paul Lukas noticed, didn’t wear the ribbon on his sweatshirt last week, but the team is paying tribute to the military by draping its official web site in camouflage, as this screen shot shows:

Paying tribute to the U.S. military is an easy decision for most of the NFL’s franchises, but for Washington, the decision would seem to be much more complicated. Native Americans have served in every major American war, and according to the U.S. Navy there are at least 190,000 Native American military veterans. But native tribes also spent decades fighting against the United States and were very nearly eradicated by the same military to which the NFL and subsequently the Washington Redskins are now paying tribute.

The Redskins, of course, haven’t acknowledged the long, complicated history the team’s namesake has with that military, much as they have refused to acknowledge much of the controversy (which now includes a lawsuit brought by Native Americans) surrounding the use of an offensive name and offensive imagery. Washington’s football franchise paying tribute to the U.S. military wouldn’t be controversial whatsoever if the team realized or acknowledged such facts. That the team doesn’t understand that moves like this will invite further controversy, though, seems yet another indication that neither the franchise nor the league understand that use of the name “Redskins” and the accompanying imagery don’t just represent a team name and a logo, but a people who have a deep-rooted and complicated history with our country.

The bridge is yours.

-A superhero registration form.

-When should TV characters kiss?

-Twilight fanfic-to-mainstream publishing is practically its own industry now.

-Almost ludicrously excited for The Americans:

Joe Biden’s 2016 campaign for President is getting a bump, at least among television-watching good-government nerds, next week. As the New York Times reports, he’s making a surprise appearance on Parks and Recreation:

With the race won, a guest appearance by Mr. Biden on the NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation,” filmed way back in July, can finally be revealed. Everything about the scene, which the executive producer of the show, Michael Schur, labeled a “scenelet,” had been under strict secrecy. The show was warned that if any word leaked out before the election, some provision might have to be made to give the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Representative Paul Ryan, a similar cameo.

“It was all very byzantine and complicated,” Mr. Schur said. “There seem to be all kinds of specific rules, which I never fully understood. But we decided to err on the side of caution.”

Parks and Recreation got something of an early jump on the Biden-mania sweeping the memo-o-sphere. “What is your ideal man?” Leslie Knope’s best friend Ann asked her back in the show’s second season. “He has the brains of George Clooney in the body of Joe Biden,” Leslie responded promptly. But the show is hardly alone in its love for Biden. One of the things that will be delightfully odd to watch about a Biden run for president is that he’ll be one of the first candidates who is heavily defined by pop culture jokes before he officially throws his hat in the ring.

That process may have begun in 1991, when Kevin Nealon played him on Saturday Night Live during a cold open about Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings:

The riff on Biden as somewhat oversexed and socially inappropriate became the foundation of The Onion’s portrayal of the Vice President as a Trans-Am-washing, Summer-of-’87-remembering, Dave and Busters evictee. The image of Biden as a bro is all over Gifs of him with animated sunglasses descending on his face or fistbumping actor Kal Penn. It’s a raunchier ideal than the man himself, of course–Biden is famously devoted to his family–but it’s appealingly winking, and it’s schtick that makes his gaffes look minor. What’s sticking your foot in your mouth in comparison to asking Clarence Thomas for sex advice or hightailing it to Mexico for a while?

Biden’s done more family-friendly fare, too–he made a cameo on the third season of kids’ geography game show Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego to tell host Greg Lee that: “I just wanted to let you know that I proposed a Congressional resolution naming you ‘The Best Detective of the Year’…But some people were more comfortable with ‘Best Detective of the Month’…And a few preferred ‘Best Detective of the Work Week.’ Then someone suggested ‘best’ is an awfully strong word, so we decided to name you ‘The Somewhat-Notable Detective of the Next 12 Minutes.’ Congratulations, Greg.”

Biden may have a reputation for being something of a goof. But his laid-back response to his media portrayals–there’s some suggestion that he’s aware of and enjoys The Onion articles–and his willingness to do television is smart. The combination of a hunger for indication of candidates’ true selves, the ease with which memes, a la the Tumblr Texts From Hillary, can be blown up quickly, and the rise of political humor as a form of commentary as significant as serious news, future candidates for president are going to have to be comfortable skipping deftly from policy talk to self-satire. Biden may find himself challenged by a younger generation in 2016, but when it comes to handling political comedy, he’s an old hand.

By Aaron Swartz

In Wreck-It Ralph, the new CG film from Disney Animation, the eponymous Ralph (John C. Reilly) is the villain of an old 8-bit arcade game named “Fix-It Felix” (loosely inspired by Donkey Kong). In the game, Ralph destroys an elegant new apartment building while Felix runs around with a golden hammer to magically repair the damage. But as in Toy Story, when the kids aren’t around the characters have their own private lives. Tired of always having to be the bad guy, Ralph goes off to find a hero’s medal and prove to all his fellow characters that he’s just as good as Felix.

There are some interesting political subtexts that fill in the film. For one thing, Felix is always referred to as Fix-It Felix, Jr., even though is father doesn’t appear and this detail is totally irrelevant to the plot (and somewhat of a mouthful to say). I can only imagine that it’s there to really, uh, hammer home the film’s class analysis: even within the narrative of the game, Felix isn’t heroic because of any particular character traits or skills, but simply because he managed to inherit a magic hammer from his father.

But the most striking for me was the film’s (extremely subtle) eminent domain subplot. Why, after all, is Ralph so hellbent on destroying this new apartment building? Well, the game’s theme song provides the answer:

Wreck-It Ralph is a giant of a man
Nine feet tall with really big hands
Living in a stump on his very own land
Until his world went crazy

He was minding his own business
On the day they came
They showed a piece of paper
Saying “eminent domain”

They built an apartment building
Saying progress was to blame
But he got mad
And he turned bad
Brick by brick he’s gonna take his land back!

The story is eerily like 2005′s celebrated Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London. In that case, the city of New London decided to seize Susette Kelo’s house and give the land to developers who wanted to build a fancy new apartment building to house Pfizer employees. Susette soon became a cause celebre for liberals and libertarians who were outraged by the notion of the government using its sovereign power of eminent domain (typically reserved for cases of extreme public importance) to line the pockets of private developers and big pharmaceutical companies. In the end, Pfizer closed its New London factory and skipped town before the Kelo development ever ended up getting built.

And closer to my home, as Malcolm Gladwell has argued, developer Bruce Ratner persuaded New York City to give him some extremely valuable land in Brooklyn for a new apartment complex by promising to build a stadium there to house the New Jersey Nets. The stadium, now called Barclays Center, opened the other month and the Brooklyn Nets just got to play their first game there. In the film, the working-class Ralph doesn’t succeed in tearing down the apartment building and getting his land back, but his strike action does lead to significantly improved working conditions for himself and his fellow video game characters. My sense is that the people displaced by Ratner have been nowhere near as lucky.

Conor Friedersdorf has a sharply observed take on rigorous journalism as a competitive advantage in this election cycle:

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a “Grand Jihad” against America. Seriously?

Obviously, as someone who works for an organization with a clearly-stated perspective on what kinds of policies make for a stronger country, I have a dog and a paycheck behind the fight that says it’s possible to have both a worldview and a rigorous approach to facts. But even given that, it’s always amazing to me that people choose to believe it’s better, not just for their pageviews, but for their causes, to be dishonest or to waste time on conspiracy theories or straight-up dishonesty. If you lie, you can get caught, and sometimes, sued. If you chase ghosts, you risk being thought ridiculous both by people whose opinions you disdain and those whose approval you might like to court. If you devote bandwidth to nothing stories, you waste time that could be more profitably spent researching and reporting real scandals, and developing sources of actual value. If you mislead your readers to inflame their passions, you divert them from issues that they could profitably mobilize around. If you skew possible outcomes, you risk exposing your audience to shattering disappointments and confusion. No matter how well you firewall yourself, you will eventually be exposed on some level. Orly Taitz and company can believe all they want that the president is not an American citizen. But they cannot deny that he is occupying the White House and performing the office of president.

If your only goals are to juice traffic, I understand this kind of approach on a rational level, even though it’s vile. But if your goals are ideological, doing these things makes no damn sense.