It is generally accepted around these parts (Northern California) that the Democratic Party is a circular firing-squad, lacking any internal discipline in the face of the lock-step unity of the Republicans. Internal party discipline is certainly something that the Republicans talk about more openly, and their long stretches as the minority party in the federal legislature has lead to a number of impressive filibusters and procedural maneuvers requiring few or no hold-outs. The relatively recent rise of the right-wing echo chamber on talk radio and other media lend additional credibility to this perception. Even their primary process for nominating a presidential candidate ensures an early knock-out by way of winner-take-all contests rather than the slow bleeding of proportional representation.

Social Action, a tool produced by the University of Maryland, was recently used to show that this may be all perception. Taking the voting records for all US senators during 2007 and feeding these data into a social-network visualizer, you get a bit of a different story. Last year the Democratic and Independent senators voted very similarly to each other. On the other side of the aisle, four Republican senators (Collins, Smith, Snowe, and Specter) broke ranks repeatedly, dragging them out into the center of an otherwise-sharply-divided network. McCain and Brownback, both Republicans, had too few votes on record during the sample period to be meaningfully represented.

Hat tip to Visual Complexity for posting this where I’d run into it.

The Olympic torch is going to pass through San Francisco this week, and all manner of protests have been planned. Some have already been implemented. The locus of these protests has been, largely, China’s relations with Sudan in light of the situation in Darfur and their actions in Tibet suppressing the local population.

As a resident of Sonoma County, I’ve long been subjected to bumper sticker rhetoric showing the iconic red, gold, and blue Tibetan suburst with the words “FREE TIBET” emblazoned below. People ranging from west-county hippies to Beastie Boy Adam Yount express great concern that the unique cultural heritage and traditions of the Tibetan people are being systematically eradicated by the totalitarian government in Beijing.

I’ve got news for you: The uniquie cultural heritage and traditions of all the Chinese people have been under the same process for the past 49 years. Millions died in Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. Nothing about the Tibetans makes them more important than hundreds of millions of their neighbors who are every bit as entitled to religious freedom, self-determination, and all the various civil liberties we consider basic human rights. Screw Tibet. Free China.