Saturday night's all right for blogging.

* How we kill geniuses. Via MetaFilter.

* Eleanor Clift loses one of her uncountably many demerits in agitating for Howard Dean to HHS.

* The unsustainability of sustainable energy.

* It looks like Michael Steele was the perfect person to head up the Republican party—a week on the job and he's already embroiled in a corruption scandal.

* Yes we can. Yes we did, now leave us alone.

* The University of Ottawa's Denis Rancourt has been suspended from teaching and is facing possible dismissal for promising all students an A+ on the first day of class. I think it was the + that did it—if he'd just promised them As it would have been business as usual... (via Pharyngula)

* Science fiction as religion. Via io9.

Everybody is trying to figure out how to slide Howard Dean into HHS without Rahm Emmanuel noticing. Here's Tom Harkin.

Tom Daschle has withdrawn his name for HHS secretary. Too bad, but probably necessary—he was definitely becoming a distraction. I don't have any particular fondness for Daschle, so this doesn't strike me as an especially huge loss.

Paging Howard Dean?

All is quiet on New Year's Day.

* As the Bush administration blessedly draws to a close, it's important to remember the casualties of the War of Terror, people like Alberto Gonzales. (via)

* More people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers. More importantly:

The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently.

That's good, good news.

* Howard Dean, Vermonter of the Year. Maybe next year, Ben and Jerry.

* Batman casting rumors you can believe in: Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin.

* It's the future, and Microsoft still sucks.

* Top 10 space stories of 2008. A different 10.

* Top 10 cryptozoology stories of 2008.

* James Howard Kunstler's predictions for 2009. Prediction: Pain. Via MetaFilter.

* Thank god for philosophy grad students, the only graduate demographic upon Lit students can look down.

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.

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.

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.

Besides Howard Dean, the other "John the Baptist" figure for this landslide progressive victory is John Kerry, whose selection of Barack Obama as the DNC keynote speaker in 2004 catapulted him to national prominence. Now rumors are swirling that Kerry is "actively seeking" an appointment as Secretary of State.

How strange it is to contemplate an administration that isn't manned by moral monsters.

As warned, it's a busy kind of week. Here's what I'm reading about:

* Obama returns again to North Carolina tomorrow morning in Raleigh.

* The N&O looks at North Carolina's answer to the butterfly ballot, the straight ticket vote that doesn't vote straight ticket. This is a very foolish way to design a ballot, but it has a long history in North Carolina, and it's fairly well-marked both on the ballot and in the polling place. I'm hopeful this won't be determinative of the outcome here.

* Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

* A PEW Research poll puts Obama up an improbable sixteen points nationally, up 19 among those who have already voted. The RNC has taken to the airwaves in a bid to retain Montana. In Ohio, 22% of the population has already voted, favoring Obama 56%-39%. McCain is only up three points in Arizona. In short, things are looking good.

* Another article looks back to Howard Dean as one of the forces (both before and after "The Scream") who made Barack Obama's candidacy (and, one hopes, landslide victory) possible.

* And another classic for the Palin files: forget "diva," a top McCain adviser says Palin is a "whack job." More at Washington Monthly, which makes the key point: "To blame Palin is to blame McCain. If the campaign is her fault, then the campaign is his fault."

Sunday politics.

* Conservative stalwart David Frum throws in the towel on John McCain.

In these last days before the vote, Republicans need to face some strategic realities. Our resources are limited, and our message is failing. We cannot fight on all fronts. We are cannibalizing races that we must win and probably can win in order to help a national campaign that is almost certainly lost. In these final 10 days, our goal should be: senators first.

* Kos wonders who, if anyone, will be the Howard Dean of the right.

* The Field posits that Chicago is the ideal location from which to launch a presidential campaign.

Surrounding Senator Obama's state of Illinois and its 21 Electoral Votes are three states won by George W. Bush four years ago: Indiana and Missouri (each with 11 EVs), and Iowa (7 EVs). The McCain-Palin ticket has made multiple visits to those and other surrounding states that it claimed would be in play: Michigan (17), Wisconsin (10) and Minnesota (10), where the Republicans held their national convention last month.

Chicago may just be the best city in the country to base your presidential campaign - in terms of the Electoral College - if you count with a cadre of well-trained organizers and volunteers ready to travel a short ways to register voters, knock on doors and help get out the vote in the neighboring swing states: Add 39 contiguous Electoral Votes in play and another 27 in battleground states close enough for day trips, and the region holds a whopping electoral prize of 87 EVs. That's more than the 73 on the West Coast or the 74 in Greater NY (with PA, NJ and CT).

* And Sir Charles of Cogitamus alongside the New York Times's "Week in Review" explores the "disastrous demographic bets" the Republican Party has made, bringing us to the point where even an eventual Whig-like implosion does not seem outside the realm of possibility...