But I am also scared today. Over the past couple days John Avalon at the Daily Beast has circulated two posts that chill me to the bone.

One cites a Harris Poll which showed 57% of Republicans think Obama is a Muslim, 45% think he is ineligible to be president, 38% think he behaves like Hitler, and 24% (one quarter of Republicans) think Obama may be the Antichrist. The Antichrist? A “mainstream” party, a gem of our democracy, is becoming a home to delusion and paranoia. This can’t be good.

The other describes some of the militia movement targeting Democrats after the healthcare vote. Avalon notes that the breaking of windows at congressional offices around the country…

…follows the online exhortations of militia leader Mike Vanderboegh of Pinson, Alabama – who wrote on his blog “Sipsy Street Irregulars” this past Friday: “if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.” The parallels, intentional or not, to the Nazis’ heinous 1938 kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass,” so-named for the 7,000 storefront windows that were smashed, are hard to ignore.

I just returned from Vienna this week. The horrors of kistallnacht are still remembered there. And even though we “won” the war against Hitler, there are still very few Jews left in Austria. Once violence starts, even winning is losing.

As Vanderboegh’s home page warns “All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war.”

Really? Is that how far political discourse has descended? I hope there are some in the GOP who rescue their party from this lunatic fringe. Some who will stand up for the value of civil government, rather than civil war. Some who will return to constructive debate rather than obstruction and fanning flames. We need a civil opposition for democracy to work, we cannot become a one-party state.

Update via the Washington Post:

Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. He has private health insurance through his wife, who works for a company that sells forklift products.

How’s that for hypocrisy?

Please suspend our sustaining membership of MPR.

We are not willing to support an organization that is hindering as important a civic project as the Central Corridor rail line. We have been uncomfortable with your position for years because the Central Corridor plans were well known long before MPR renovated its space. As far as we are concerned, it is wholly MPR’s responsibility that it built studios as close to a known future rail line as it did. You should not be suing the state, but rather asking funders like us to up our contributions a bit to help you make necessary remediations.

Now that you have decided to sue the Central Corridor project we can no longer in good conscience support MPR. Maybe once this suit is over we will consider rejoining, we will see what the consequences of your action are. If this in any way leads to the demise or diminishment of the Central Corridor project, though, then you have lost us as member for good.

51 is a majority! And we have way more than 51 votes in the Senate. Let the Republicans talk for days on end if they want to block legislation. We should be making law! We have the votes. If someone wants to filibuster, make them get up and do the deed.

So I say, 51 is a majority, use it or lose it. If we stay timid, we will get what we deserve come November. Democrats have to be ready to make sausage, to compromise, but we must also get things done.

I’ve set up a little shop at CafePress with the message: 51 is a majority, use it or lose it.

Pick something up there if you agree. Pass it along. Tweet, blog, talk to your friends, call your Congresspeople, and call your Senators or Senator-wanna-bees. Make sure they know you expect courage and progress.

After this past year of wrangling back and forth, I find myself urging my representative to hold their nose and vote for the Senate bill. And not only vote, but lobby her on-the-fence colleagues HARD to do the same. Yes, I hate what the Senate did, I can’t stand, especially, the abortion provisions, the Nevada deal, and much more of the mess they made. But we have worked too hard and fought too many special interests to let this moment pass by. Democrats have everything they need to turn ashes into victory here. As bad as the Senate bill is, it is not “toxic.” That notion is poison being fed to the Hill from the right. It is, in fact, antidote. Passing a bill, even the Senate bill, is the only way to wake up the public to what has been good in this fight all along. Once it is a done deal, we can wake people up to all the positive things that are in the bill (yes, even in the Senate bill). Democrats gain nothing by letting the moment pass, all the real toxins, the negative thumping of the right wing, remains our baggage if we cave in now. The only way to refute lies is with demonstration, and we can only demonstrate with action, and the only path of action left is the Senate bill.

I know you are not in a position to carry the water on this. But you are all I’ve got. You can call your representative now, during most important week of the year that was and the year to come, and ask them where they stand. This will define Democrats. Governing is not about getting everything you want, it is about compromise. Can the Democrats govern? We have majorities in House and Senate and we have the White House. There is nobody else to blame. Can we govern? Can we compromise? Can we make sausage? Now we find out. Today. This week.

(Not sure who to call? Check with OpenCongress.)

One tradition of the caucus is that if there are more people in your caucus who want to be delegates to the next level of party convention than you have delegate slots available, the walking subcaucus process (a kind of proportional representation) will be used to determine who gets elected as delegates. In theory the walking subcaucus is a pretty easy process, each person just walks over to the group that best represents their point of view. If that group ends up big enough to elect one or more delegates, they do so within the group. It is a fun way to get to know your neighbors.

In practice, the simple math involved can be a bear. It is well described on page 4 of the 2010-2011 Official Call put out by the DFL, but even that clear description does not make it easy. I decided to write a web-based calculator to help with the math, and after I dug into the problem I realized that even the training we had been giving convenors was incomplete in some minor, but notable, ways. In fact, I’d never been given a complete picture myself!

This is all a long way of getting around to the point, my Minnesota DFL Subcaucus Calculator is now available. I still consider it beta, because it is only a few days old and I hope some early testers shake out some problems. I have had a couple people from the statewide DFL dig into it and report a raft of problems to me which I’ve fixed, but please don’t blame the DFL if the calculator still makes mistakes. Just let me know.

In particular, I’ve tried to make this a tool that can be used from an iPhone or other mobile device. I was particularly pleased to find ways to make the calculator iPhone aware (though it could be prettier) and even able to use the numeric keypad by default for certain text fields. The small joys of programming!

Anyway, if you are a Minnesota DFLer, take a look!

The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.

…

Network wealth is the contribution made by your social connections to your well-being. This could be measured by your number of connections, or by your centrality in different networks. A simple way to think about this is the number of people who will share food with you. Embodied wealth is a combination of what you know and how strong you are. It measures factors like hunting prowess and grip strength. Bowles asserts that we’re moving from a history where network and embodied wealth mattered more that material wealth – we briefly (for about eight thousand years) moved into a world of embodied wealth, and now we’re moving back.

…

It might be time to look back to the Pleistocene.

I’ll have to look for the archived presentation when it appears, the topic sounds dense and I’d love to give it a careful listen. I think it may open up my thinking about copyright issues and fair use, though. We have to come to some sensible place with regard to “intellectual property” and I’m not sure how to get there. I hope Sam may help.

The rules seem, on the whole, reasonable to me. Granted, I’ve never reviewed something I’m paid for or received for free, so I’m not the “target” of these changes.

The one troubling objection I’ve seen made is that the new rules may hold the manufacturers or publishers liable in some way for false statements made by bloggers. In other words, the rules may treat blog posts and tweets as traditional advertising subject, in some way, to “false advertising” claims. As one blogger laments:

Like I want publishers breathing down my neck while I try to write fair and honest reviews. We’ve already turned away publishers who wanted to have oversight over our reviews. And frankly, I feel like I should be giving instruction to publishers on labeling issues.

This would, indeed, be a problem. I hope the FTC does not equate an ARC to the kind of payment and responsibility an advertiser assumes for an ad that they place. But on the whole I am glad to see the FTC thinking about the future of marketing and the consumer protections we need in place to be able to judge the information we get via the web.

The Design Director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas, has collaborated with artists and designers to create Designing Obama, a chronicle of the art from the historic campaign. Get the inside story on how design was used by the campaign, and scope out the pieces, created unofficially, by grassroots supporters.