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.

Watch out, world: here comes Obama 2.0. Via Kevin Drum.

As a community organizer in Chicago in the '80s, Obama had been influenced by the teachings of Saul Alinsky, a radical with a realist bent who once wrote, "Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people." Obama knew he had a knack for finding non-threatening ways to make people accept change—to begin with, his own skin color. As Jarrett recalled, Obama insisted that he wanted to run a grass-roots campaign because he had seen it work as a community organizer, and he wanted to try to take the model and go national.

Part one of Newsweek's exhaustive "How He Did It" is now up.

As a side note, I noticed while tagging this post my old "we need a revolution in this country" tag; as the above excerpt indicates, in a very real sense, we just had one.

The annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in Des Moines on Nov. 10 was a crucial beauty pageant before the real contest, the caucuses on Jan. 3. Obama's Iowa organization made sure to pack the hall and drown out the supporters of all the other candidates. Because the candidates were not allowed to use teleprompters, Obama spent hours memorizing the words and perfecting his delivery. The speech was a good one, ripping George W. Bush and taking down Hillary (a little more subtly), and it built into a crescendo as Obama told the story of how, on a miserable morning when he faced a small, bored crowd in Greenwood, S.C., a single black woman in the audience had revived his flagging spirit by getting the crowd to chant, responsively, "Fired up!" "Ready to go!" Slipping from an easy, bemused tone to a near shout, Obama egged on the overflow crowd at the J-J dinner. "So I've got one thing to ask you. Are you FIRED UP? Are you READY TO GO? FIRED UP! READY TO GO!" The Washington Post's David Broder, the Yoda of political reporters, was watching and understood that Obama had found the Force. The speech became Obama's standard stump speech, and in the weeks ahead it never failed him. Broder described the effect of Obama's thumping windup: "And then, as the shouting became almost too loud to hear, he adds the five words that capsulize the whole message and sends the voters scrambling back into their winter coats and streaming out the door: 'Let's go change the world.' And he sounds as if he means it. In every audience I have seen," Broder reported on Dec. 23, a week and a half before the Iowa caucuses, "there is a jolt of pure electrical energy at those closing words. Tears stain some cheeks—and some people look a little thunderstruck."

Just a few more politics links. Sorry if this isn't your thing—I get caught up in this stuff.

* Chris at Cynical-C links to a clip of Chris Matthews demolishing Republican congressman Adam Putnam on the Palin selection. I saw him do this yesterday—and like a lot of things I see Matthews do lately it makes me think he really does want that Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

* He's also got news that Palin has never actually issued an order to the Alaskan National Guard. georgia10 has the rest of your real vetting round-up.

* Via Srinivas, Dan Froomkin says what so few outside the blogosphere will admit:

One of the problems with modern political journalism is that when something manifestly absurd takes place, as long as there are people willing to argue both sides, our top reporters feel obliged to treat it as deserving of serious debate.

Case in point: John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

* And David Plouffe has a nice rejoinder to the "community organizer, ha ha" stuff:

Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.

And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.