There's always an election somewhere in America, and since this is an even-numbered year, there will always be a few hundred thousand of them.

The time is ripe to jump on the advanced organizing platforms available through Wired For Change -- and through package deals, Democratic candidates for Senate, House, and state legislatures can all get set up on Salsa in moments for next to nothing.

But it's time to think strategy, too. 2008 is so 13 months ago! The indefatigable Colin Delany of epolitics.com shares this video of his discussion with one of our former fellow-travelers about the lessons local candidates can and can't draw from the Obama campaign's model.

Topical free ebook downloads from Colin:

• Learning from Obama: Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond
• How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010

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Health Care for America Now rode the news cycle with this Salsa action page on this weekend's House health care vote.

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The smart politics blog FiveThirtyEight has up an election-day interview with Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee executive director Michael Sargent.

As the conversation turns to technology, Sargeant calls out DLCCWeb, the innovative "website in a box" service for state legislative candidates built in Salsa just for the DLCC by Wired for Change.

538: Are you tinkering with any new technological tools or tactics in the field campaign and for voter contacting generally, and if so what?

Sargeant: It's an interesting question. We've all been taking a look from the last election on at a variety of things regarding microtargeting, and making sure we're also doing more polling and just being more aggressive as well at the doors doing GOTV.

One of the things we're very proud of is our DLCCweb program, which we're making available on our website for legislative candidates around the country using this. We have around 350 to 400 candidates around the country using this and they were in full force last election cycle in 2008.

538: So you are using it beyond these races in 2010 and beyond?

Sargeant: We first used it in the '08 races, again this year, and the program is just growing by leaps and bounds.

Pretty sweet. As the 2010 election cycle heats up in the month ahead, hundreds or thousands of Democratic legislative candidates will be rolling out professional campaign sites (not stuff like this) integrating online fundraising, unlimited blast e-mailing, events management, and an online database to track campaigns' supporters, volunteers, and donors, all for a couple bucks a day.

Be the first in your district to have it.

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Never have so many waited so eagerly for the past tense.

Screenshot of George W. Bush's Wikipedia page, 11:58 a.m. Eastern time, January 20, 2009.

Screenshot of George W. Bush's Wikipedia page, 12:01 p.m. Eastern time, January 20, 2009.

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"Such was the fate of the son of Marcus, and so easy was it to destroy a hated tyrant, who, by the artificial powers of government, had oppressed during thirteen years so many millions of subjects, each of whom was equal to his master in personal strength and personal abilities." -Edward Gibbon on the death of Commodus

On a day of such relief to see the callow scion strangled in his bath retire to his Dallas mansion, it's easy to get carried away, but this passage would much exaggerate the credit due so many millions of subjects and with it the grandeur of George W. Bush.

Not my country? Nobody who remembers the dark pleasure of those post-September 11 days -- the voluptuous joy of unsheathing the sword without qualm or restraint, the relief of casting off tiresome pieties and giving rein -- can say that without reservation.

George W. Bush was not our Commodus. He was our Smerdyakov.

"You stood before me last time and understood it all, and you understand it now."
"All I understand is that you are mad."
"Aren't you tired of it? Here we are face to face; what's the use of going on keeping up a farce to each other? Are you still trying to throw it all on me, to my face? You murdered him; you are the real murderer, I was only your instrument, your faithful servant, and it was following your words I did it."
"Did it? Why, did you murder him?" Ivan turned cold.
Something seemed to give way in his brain, and he shuddered all over with a cold shiver. Then Smerdyakov himself looked at him wonderingly; probably the genuineness of Ivan's horror struck him.
"You don't mean to say you really did not know?" he faltered mistrustfully, looking with a forced smile into his eyes. Ivan still gazed at him, and seemed unable to speak.

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Like most of the blogoverse, I've consented to the unsatisfying and barely compensated practice of selling myself to Google Adsense on my hobby blog, which I should add is pointedly non-partisan. I hardly monitor religiously the stuff Google pitches my paltry readership, but you get the occasional one that makes you scratch your head and flip back to the entry to figure out how it made the match. Other times, there's less mystery than an episode of Columbo. Like when you post about an execution in Iran, and you get ...

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Our friends at Politics and Technology ran a "punditology challenge" asking readers to pick the winners of all the January presidential primaries, Republican and Democratic alike. The winners are here, (gosh, an A-list political blogger wins ... but it wasn't all favorites this weekend). So, here's the bullet point for that wisdom-of-the-crowds slide you need to update with fresh data:

Our collective picks scored 117 points - and were better than 96.2% of the individual punditologists.

Out of 563 entrants, "collective picks" would have tied for 20th. We saw much the same thing (in a smaller sample) for last year's Oscar pool. (Dear readers, should we reprise this?)

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