The FDL community has voted to award five occupations with a command post tent from Occupy Supply for their outstanding community activism. Three others will receive computers, while 12 runners up will get gift certificates to the OccupySupply store. Dan Choi will help deliver the tents. Check out the winners!

Julian Assange should be assassinated, or designated an enemy combatant, according to leading political figures around the world. And this rhetorical fervor has been matched by action. Interpol popped up all of a sudden and issued a global arrest warrant for Assange on a Swedish rape charge that was put together after the last leak, taken down, and then revived for this leak. And now, Amazon has decided to stop hosting Wikileaks.

Yet another example, similar to the head-stomping by a Rand Paul supporter, of how violence has crept into this election season. This time, law enforcement did the honors.

Just as the choice groups sat on their hands for the Nelson amendment in the health care bill, just like the Sierra Club remains mute in the wake of an oil spill the size of Delaware, there will be nothing more than progressive window-dressing in opposition to cutting Social Security benefits this time around. Any of these groups utter so much as a whimper in response to Durbin’s very alarming statement yesterday? Nada. Zip. Zero.

The idea that the right is more “authoritarian” and top-down than the left is absurd. Conservatives successfully organized to keep Harriet Miers off the bench for having an insufficient record, they kicked Arlen Specter and Charlie Crist out, and they’re getting ready to expel Bob Bennett — very much against the will of the party. The GOP had to get on board or lose the support of their base. Meanwhile, Democratic leadership still celebrates Joe Lieberman every day, rubbing our noses in it for ever having had the audacity to challenge him in the first place.

American democracy is a better mousetrap. Unfortunately, it was born in the Age of the Rat.

Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s new book re-examines the recent course of American politics. They tell us about how authoritarian politics – especially on the right – have helped give rise to increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats. This is an important contribution to debate among political scientists about polarization, but deserves a much wider readership. If they are right – and the differences between authoritarians and non-authoritarians are the key factor driving polarized politics – then many of the received wisdoms of the punditocracy are flat out wrong. Right wing columnists like Michael Gerson and Clive Crook, who deplore the increasing extremism of American politics and especially of the left, are missing out on the ways in which right wing politics are increasingly based around authoritarianism and intolerance.

Friendship challenges inequality. It’s time friendship was rescued from private life and returned to the public sphere. We can then become what the authoritarians are afraid of.

Today’s Republican Party is defined by its belief in natural hierarchy and the inequality of people. It disguises its contempt for democracy so well that many who vote for GOP candidates are unaware of the party’s deep authoritarian, anti-democratic motives. It’s time America understood.