With the publication of American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, we now have a pretty good idea on whom to blame the nation’s problems.

The 997 page book casts itself as:

“…the first comprehensive reference volume to cover what is surely the most influential political and intellectual movement of the last half century. More than fifteen years in the making-and more than half a million words in length-this informative and entertaining encyclopedia contains substantive entries of up to two thousand words on those persons, events, organizations, and concepts of major importance to postwar American conservatism.”

Unfortunately, it is not as comprehensive as it’s publisher claims. Some of the most notorious pounders of conservative pap were egregiously omitted. Nowhere in this massive tome will you find the conservative stylings of Ann Coulter, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, Bill O’Reilly or Karl Rove. At the same time that they disassociate with these rightist stalwarts, they embrace the likes of John Birch, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. They honor James Dobson but spurn Billy Graham. They include Charles Colson but not G. Gordon Liddy or Ollie North. And Jeanne Kirkpatrick makes the cut but not Henry Kissinger.

It’s hard to tell what their standards for inclusion are, but maybe that’s the point. When preparing a compendium of individuals with such uniformly low standards for the welfare of society and Constitutional rule, at some point you just have to throw your hands up and decide that it’s done. There are plenty of candidates for future volumes.

The Drum Major Institute, a non-partisan, progressive think tank, has launched a Google AdWords campaign that takes advantage of the search engine’s ad results to educate voters.

Here’s how it works: Do a search for your congressman and check the list of “Sponsored Links” to the right. You’ll find your congressman with a letter grade representing his/her DMI score.

Here’s a few examples:

• Berman Earns An “A”
• Herseth Earns A “C”
• Feingold Earns An “A”
• Santorum Earns An “F”

The DMI gets points for originality. This campaign alerts net users to DMI’s congressional scoring whenever anyone does a search for a member and provides a link to more details of the member’s scorecard. This makes it easy to learn about the voting record of your representative whether you were looking for it or not.

Will this campaign produce a more informed electorate? Probably not. But it does inspire one to imagine other ways to exploit new media for the public good.