Photo: Conservapedia

Minnesota’s only U.S. Senator, Amy Klobuchar, is one of 14 “Senate Democrats from States with Republican Governors” that the Web site Conservapedia lists at an entry under that heading. Noting first that the U.S. Constitution gives governors the authority to name replacements when Senate seats become vacant, the Conservapedia text goes on to envision “a commanding majority in the Senate” for Republicans “if these Senators were unable to complete their terms.” That makes Conservapedia’s entry a veritable wiki hit list, writes Wonkette.

UPDATE: Conservapedia has since removed the post, calling it vandalism; you can see a screen grab here. 

The headline at Wonkette is (typically, though in this case perhaps justifiably) deranged: “Conservative Wiki Offers Helpful List of Senate Democrats To Assassinate, So Republican Governors Can Appoint GOP Replacements.”

As for Conservapedia, here is the view from its nemesis, Wikipedia:

Andrew Shlafley (Photo:Wikipedia)

Conservapedia is an English-language wiki-based web encyclopedia project written from a young earth creationist, Americentric, right-wing and Conservative Christian point of view. It was started in 2006 by lawyer and history teacher Andy Schlafly, son of conservative activist and Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly. He stated that he founded the project because he felt that the open web encyclopedia Wikipedia had a liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American bias.

Is the hit list real? Spoofers have been known to infiltrate Conservapedia, though Schlafley told Wired that phony entries are quickly disappeared.

In an earlier post today, Wonkette — itself termed “proudly idiotic” in New Yorker critic David Denby’s new book, “Snark” — describes as “kind of a weird thing to say“ former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s pronouncement that he would have lost more resoundingly to any DFL candidate other than Al Franken. ”Wow, them’s fightin’ words,” Wonkette continues, “sure to buck up his most despairing supporters! Henry V could not have put it better.”

To compare the two heroes for yourself, watch Coleman’s video plea for cash, then go see “Henry V” at the Guthrie Theater through Feb. 1. Some performances are sold out, but rush seats might become available; ticket-holder no-shows are more likely thanks to our latest visit by an arctic air mass.

Blowing off “Almanac” last Friday and going to the Guthrie Theater instead seemed like a good way to put an end to an exhausting Election Day/Week/Month/Year and exorcise the ghosts of a long campaign season. We got rush tickets to the penultimate performance of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” ready to be transported to working-class Brooklyn, purely for the escapism, with no exit poll demographics in mind.

At first, it seemed to be working. I let pass without mention a trivial thought: that 1956, the year Miller wrote the play, was the same year that voter turnout in Minnesota voters last topped 80 percent, a hoped-for but not-quite-achieved figure on Tuesday. When the play started, I didn’t notice that Eddie, the boorish central character who used to be likable, sometimes wandered the stage like a second-debate John McCain.

But then came the climactic moment at the end (spoiler alert!) when Eddie phones the authorities from a pay phone to report that Marco and Rodolfo, his wife’s cousins from Italy, are working in the United States illegally. As immigration officers drag away Marco, the older cousin who has been sending his longshoreman’s wages back home to feed his family, he spits in Eddie’s face, pointing and shouting for all the neighbors to hear: “That one! I accuse that one! That one!”

Suddenly, rushing back unbidden and unwelcome, came visions of McCain applying the same apparent epithet to Barack Obama in that second presidential debate. Arthur Miller’s artifice dropped away, and it was as if McCain’s about-face on immigration policy and his subsequent loss of the Latino vote had just played out before us, amid a revival of McCarthyesque furor. It was time to go home and check the the gap in the Franken-Coleman U.S. Senate race, which had shrunk by another 17 votes, to 221, in the short time we’d spent with Eddie and Marco, a half century ago in Brooklyn.