Borrowing a page from Facebook, Andrew Odewahn put together a fun charting of the United State Senate's social graph going back to the 102nd Congress in 1991. "Friendship" here really means voting record affinity. Members are shown to share a connection if they voting together more than 65% percent of the time, and their proximity to one another is based on the level of agreement above and beyond that level. As Odewahn notes, one of the more interesting aspects is the clusters that develop within Republican and Democratic caucuses.

(A plug: Odewahn used GovTrack's scraped data to build his chart -- data that will be much easier to get now that the Senate has adopted XML for votes.)

Neat stuff. You know what I'd also love to see? Any actual social graph of the Senate showing who's attending whose weekend BBQ, playing squash together, and the like. As we've seen, who sits next to each other on Amtrak can be predictive of the very future of the Senate.

If you stop by our part of the Internet often, you'll know that here on techPres we've been interestedly tracking what would become of the energy, momentum, and -- perhaps most importantly -- the networks of people that drove the historic Obama presidential campaign. Recently, President Obama himself and senior campaign officials provided part of the answer by announcing the creation of Organizing for America, a "grassroots" organization that would continue to seek the change that powered the campaign.

But you can't help but notice something happening -- or rather, not happening -- this week. As Obama faces a major legislative battle over a multibillion dollar package intended to stimulate the struggling economy, his allies are not OFAers but congressional and business leaders. Those grassroots supporters haven't been called on to help craft or pass a bill that will likely shape America's economic future for decades to come. The message coming from Washington is a distinct, "No worries, we'll take care of this." Why is that?

The full fury of the progressive netroots has turned on Minnesota Republican congressman Michelle Bachmann -- and it might put her House seat in jeopardy; The National Political Do Not Contact Registry's Shaun Dakin has picked up on the Twitter Vote Report idea and proposed using Twitter to track the automated campaign calls that have been in the news of late; The news today is that the Obama campaign raked in $150 million last month. That's a ton of money, and it frees Obama to compete in parts of the country where the math heretofore didn't make sense for a Democrat; and a good deal more.