The charts of the day, from Ezra Klein, shows why 2010 is unlikely to be another 1994.

Infinite linkdump Thursday, just politics.

* The Mark Sanford story grows stranger by the day, with 19 South Carolina politicians now on the record calling for his resignation. (TPM reports that Senators DeMint and Graham have gone to Sanford to prevail on him to resign.) Today he backed off a pledge to release his travel records, which suggests more trouble may be brewing for him.

* Who could have imagined that Exxon-Mobil would lie about its continued support for climate-change "skepticism" advocacy groups?

* Highlights from the first day of the Al Franken Century.

* Democrats can now "hijack elections at their whim": just another responsible, measured, and most of all empirically provable claim from RNC chairman Michael Steele, truly our country's finest elder statesman.

* But it's not all craziness: Michele Bachmann is facing criticism from the GOP for her weird lies about the Census.

* What caused the financial crisis? Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (via MeFi) points to bubble economies nutured and created by giant investment firms, pointing the finger especially at Goldman Sachs. An Oklahoma lawmaker says it was "abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery." I report, you decide.

* Malthusianism and world history: a chart from Conor Clarke.



It's clear these growth trends can continue forever.





* Ezra Klein has a new Washington Post column on the politics of food.

What can we expect from the Democrats now that Al Franken is their 60th Senator? Ezra Klein points out that 60 is a big number, one not achieved by either party since 1974. Open Left thinks this is a boost to the public option in health care. Grist looks ahead to climate change and the Senate version of ACES. The Nation talks filibusters.

It falls to Donkeylicious to remind us that there are still a lot of bad Democrats, including two who have thus far disappointed me, Kay Hagan and Claire McCaskill.

Monday politics!

* Žižek's recent lectures on "Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture" are now online as MP3s. Some video here.

* How much will Waxman-Markey actually cost? Only about $175 per household. But does it really matter how much it "costs" when the alternative is worldwide disaster? The real problem with Waxman-Markey is that it costs too little, because it doesn't do nearly enough. (Or much of anything.) See the Breakthrough Institute's analysis for more. (UPDATE: Wound up doing another post about this up the page.)

* Emboldened by polls that show public backing for a government health insurance plan, Democrats are moving to make it a politically defining issue in the debate over the future of medical care. (Via Benen.) I've never seen the Democrats "emboldened." I wonder what it's like.

* Meanwhile, Krugman points Cassandra-like to our sudden but inevitable betrayal by "centrists" in the Democratic caucus.

Sunday night links.

* I can't bring myself to watch the murder of Neda Soltani on YouTube, but a lot of other people have. It's remarkable how quickly her face has become that of the protests in Iran.

* The New York Times has an article exposing abusive practices in the freelance textbook market in New York, with my good friend and old co-blogger PClem providing some of the ugly details.

* Polls show widespread public support for a public health care option. Will this remind Democrats in Congress that they swept the last two elections?

* Buffy vs Twilight.

* Infinite Summer begins tonight. Kottke kicks things off.

Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.

* Swine flu in NC! PANIC!

* Another article on Homeland Security's use of science fiction writers for brainstorming.

* Test your knowledge of literature with the Amazon Statistically Improbable Phrase Quiz. Via MeFi.

* New Yankee Stadium homerun theories.

* 'The Making of Rushmore.'

* Two from Steve Benen: on the improbable discovery of Democrats at Liberty University and a roundup of recent misogynistic attacks on Nancy Pelosi.

* And our friend Tim Morton has a new video on YouTube: The Mesh.

I would be heartened by these sinking Harry Reid poll numbers—perhaps finally the Democrats can get a real Majority Leader—if I had any confidence that the Dems wouldn't go and put someone like Ben Nelson in charge. This is a no-brainer, folks: the Senate majority leader should be a dyed-in-the-wool, take-no-prisoners liberal from an incredibly safe seat in New England, not twist-in-the-wind compromisers from swing states with skin-of-your-teeth electoral margins. Mind-blowing, I know. You don't see Republicans giving Snowe, Collins, or Specter positions in the leadership.

...Oh God. They're going to make Specter Majority Leader, aren't they.

John Edwards's presidential staffers are apparently now pretending they would have sabotaged his doomed candidacy if it ever seemed like he might win. Of course they would have! Kudos to George Stephanopoulos for pretending to buy this story.

I'm seeing a marked uptick in lefty griping in my feeds, often with some variation on the phrase "washing my hands of the Democratic Party." I'd say this sort of proclamation was unfair, but I guess its time has come; Obama has been president, after all, for two whole months and yet puppies still die.

Confidential to my fellow travelers: What I wrote about pragmatism during the primaries (1, 2) still holds. I don't like the way the financial crisis is being handled either, but unless you foresee wholesale Constitutional reforms before 2012 you're going to have either a Democratic or Republican president. You have to pick one, and there's only one who will ever even listen to people like us. The happy feeling you get from not voting for a Democrat is worth exactly nothing.

Elections have consequences. To take just one example that passed across my newsreader yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency has now blocked mountaintop-removal coal-mining. That happened because the far-too-centrist, corporatist, hopelessly compromised Democratic Party is now in power. And not just in power, but more unabashedly progressive than it's been for forty years. Drag the country to the left with one hand, hold your nose with the other, but we're stuck with the Democrats if we ever want to get anything accomplished. You don't have to like it—but if you want to be a politically relevant actor in America you have to come to terms with it.

I would have thought the example of the last eight years would have proved this point well enough. Have our memories gotten so short?

Paul Rosenberg lays out what a center-left nation looks like.

"Burris likely to be seated," says the Page. Here, I suspect, is why: with Franken likely tied up in lawsuits for a while they need Burris to get an extra ten committee slots. However it shakes out, you've got to admire Harry Reid's continued anti-Midas touch; the man can turn anything into a lose-lose situation.

UPDATE: Reid is out in front to prolong the agony. He says there's actually no deal yet and forcefully adds "I have not yet begun to be humiliated." Well done, sir.

I think it's safe to say the "Dean the Baptist" meme has taken root. Here's Ari Berman in The Nation:

Indiana is a good example. When Dan Parker became chair of the state party in November 2004, his first order was to slash his staff in half after Democrats lost the governor's mansion. Indiana, like so many states, had been written off by the national party--the last Democratic presidential contender to carry it was Lyndon Johnson. But Dean gave Parker the money to hire three field organizers and a full-time communications director, the first the state had ever had. (When Dean came in, thirty states had no such important position.) In 2006 that staff worked on three competitive Congressional races long before the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) arrived. The party picked up all three seats that year and elected a record number of Democratic mayors in 2007. By the time the Democratic primary rolled around this past May, Hoosier Dems had been revitalized, and Obama--to the surprise of many--invested heavily in the state, visiting forty-nine times. On November 4 Obama won Indiana--a state John Kerry lost by twenty points--by 26,000 votes. "We're a poster child for the fifty-state strategy," Parker says.

If Indiana was ignored by the national party, then a place like Alaska--5,000 miles from Washington--didn't exist. Dean was roundly mocked, including in a New York Times Magazine profile, for visiting and investing in the Last Frontier. "The idea that you're going to put money in a place like Alaska seemed insane," Dean says, "because you could take the same amount of money and maybe win a House seat in California with it. That was the thinking here. The problem is, that's a totally short-term strategy." The DNC's investment increased the size of the Alaska party staff from one to four. More important, "it made Alaskans proud to be Democrats again," says state chair Patti Higgins. When opportunity struck, as Dean predicted, Democrats were ready. "It doesn't look so dumb now that Ted Stevens got indicted [in July] and today we have a Democratic senator from Alaska," Dean says. "But without a voter list and a party that knows what it's doing and is well trained and staffers that are up there for four years, we don't win that seat, plain and simple." Not only did former Anchorage mayor Mark Begich knock off Stevens; Democrats ran their strongest challenge yet to Alaska's lone Congressman, Don Young, who's held the seat for thirty-five years, and polls showed Obama leading in the state before John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate. Now the party is focused on ousting Palin from the governor's mansion in 2010. When I spoke to Higgins, she was heading to a press conference to denounce Palin, who was campaigning in Georgia that day, as "AWOL from Alaska."

More from Matt Yglesias. That fifty dollars I gave Dean for America? I don't regret it.

Nobel economics prize winner Paul Krugman said Sunday that the beleaguered U.S. auto industry will likely disappear. Now, I'm no Nobel Prize winner, but this seems very unlikely to me, about as unlikely as it does to Paul Rosenberg.

The list of Senators whose terms expire in 2010 shows a strong playing field for Democrats to try and build on their gains in 2006 and 2008. Three in a row?

No Democratic incumbent has been voted out of the Senate in the last two cycles, the first time this has been accomplished since the direct election of senators was established in 1908. MyDD asks the obvious question: can the Dems three-peat? The prognosis is good, as only Nevada's Harry Reid seems especially vulnerable and his state just went blue.

Meanwhile, Salon has tough talk for the GOP.

The painful truth for conservatives is that the dogs aren't eating their dog food -- and every national trend indicates that they will never eat it again. Which means the GOP faces a wrenching choice: remain true to its increasingly irrelevant and rejected ideology and fade into political insignificance, or remake itself as essentially a more moderate version of the Democratic Party.

...

In the coming years we will witness a war between conservatism's pragmatists and its true believers. If the pragmatists win, America will have finally arrived at the era of broad political consensus that pundits erroneously forecast after Lyndon Johnson's demolition of Barry Goldwater in 1964. If the true believers win, we may witness a Palin candidacy in 2012 -- and a likely electoral landslide that will bury the GOP so deeply it may never dig out.

Howard Dean is stepping down as chairman of the DNC in triumph. Steve Benen says perennial gerrycanavan.blogspot.com favorite Claire McCaskill likely to take up the job. Sam Stein:

Regardless of who takes over, the next chair will inherit an organization far different from the one that existed four years ago. Under Dean's tenure, the DNC implemented the hotly-debated 50-state-strategy, a program designed to rebuild the party into a continental force, one in which Democrats drained the resources of Republicans while simultaneously building up younger talent. Obama's incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and others were critical, believing that the policy wasted valuable resources on impossible races and needlessly forfeited otherwise winnable seats during the 2006 congressional elections. Successes in 2008, however, have largely quieted those critiques.

Indeed, four years later, it seems, Dean's vision is poised to become party orthodoxy. Dean told a Democratic operative that he is hoping to extract promises from all potential replacement candidates to preserve the 50-state-strategy. Other insiders, meanwhile, say that the next DNC chair, regardless of who it is, will build upon the model because of its tangible success.

North Carolina in the news! Gun sales up across the state.

Many were stocking up on things such as assault rifles, high-capacity magazines and handguns that they think would be the most likely targets of new laws, though practically everything related to shooting has been selling more quickly.

"It's been an absolute madhouse," said Trey Pugh, a manager at Jim's Pawn Shop in Fayetteville, which is selling 15 to 20 AR-15 assault rifles a day. "I'm getting guys come in and say I always wanted that gun, and give me that one too and that one and, oh, I need a gun safe, too."

Distributors are running out of assault rifles, he said, and prices are rising.

I've long felt that gun control is a losing issue for Democrats, and that the party needs to come to terms with the Second Amendment in order to make gains in the South and West—and in fact this is precisely what seems to be happening in Obama's rhetoric of "sensible" legislation tailored for local situations—but I have to admit that news of gun-lovers snapping up assault rifles in the wake of electoral defeat does give me a little bit of pause.

The Blueing of America: Pharyngula has your images of the day, the county-by-county election results and the same map rescaled to reflect population. America's getting bluer, which can also be seen in Kevin Drum's comparison of pro-Democratic voting records in 2004 and 2008:

# Income $200,000 or more (+34)
# First-time voters (+33)
# No high school (+27)
# Latinos (+27)
# 18-29 year olds (+25)
# Under $15,000 (+21)
# Full-time workers (+19)
# Urban (+19)
# Non-gun owners (+18)
# Non-religious (+16)
# Parents with children under 18 (+16)

These numbers look good for the future, and the youth numbers are especially important for the reasons I discussed yesterday.

The turnout numbers are getting more and more interesting—it turns out this was a record year for Democratic turnout, not turnout overall. A lot of Republicans just stayed home.

Washington Monthly's Steve Benen links to the latest of the Howard Dean retrospectives.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean said at the National Press Club that President-elect Barack Obama “was right in 2004, when he said there are no red states and no blue states; there are only American states, and we all share the same values."

“You cannot be a national party if you are willing to write off entire parts of our country,” Dean stated. “Based on that pretty straightforward idea, we changed the way our party ran campaigns and reached out to voters.”

In a memo, the DNC touted Dean’s strategy, which was often maligned at its inception.

Like a lot of people my age, Dean was both the first candidate I ever gave money to ($50) and the first Democrat I ever really believed in. While I see more clearly now than then that he probably couldn't have beat Bush in '04—though I remember some pretty good arguments with Shankar on this point—in terms of both organizational strategy and campaign aesthetics he helped pave the way for the Obama movement. And while the fifty-state stategy he instituted as chairman of the DNC was certainly lucky in our choice of nominee—though we likely still would have won with Hillary, it would have been on a much more traditional playing field—it's fundamentally the right strategy, the winning strategy, as the increasingly regional Republicans are about to learn the hard way.

Starting my "things President Obama has done to piss me off" list early:

Already the capital is buzzing with discussion about who would fill top positions. Obama advisers mention Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, as a possible White House chief of staff, and Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury secretary. To demonstrate bipartisanship, advisers said Mr. Obama might ask two members of President Bush’s cabinet to stay, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Daschle's okay, I guess, except for being one of the more incompetent Democratic Congressional leaders in decades—but asking Gates to stay? Why ask any of Bush's people to stay, much less SecDef, which along other things only plays into the stereotype that Democrats are weak on national defense?

Hopefully this is just a random trial balloon and not actually being considered...