The San Francisco Chronicle's reporting a federal grand jury indictment of a man who threatened to kill the President and his family in an email.  Details sparse

Mark Blumenthal tackles a subject long near and dear to my heart - there is no overwhelming support for the public option because most don't even know what it is.
Drives me nuts each time I hear "the people demand a public option"

Regular readers may recall my lament that despite the many, many times pollsters have asked Americans to react to descriptions of the so-called "public option" in health care reform, very few have attempted to probe the depth of Americans' knowledge about the proposal.

The point of debate is often whether Americans "want" a public option. These arguments sometimes get expressed in the context of representative democracy. "65% of Americans are begging Congress for an inclusive public option," wrote one Daily Kos diarist a few weeks ago, yet "our Representatives in the Senate are REFUSING to give The People what they overwhelmingly want." Poll questions like the one cited by the diarist typically measure how Americans react to a brief description of the Public Option concept. Those are helpful, but if Americans are really "begging" for a public option, we might also want to measure how many know what the public option is before hearing the pollster's description.

Unless I've missed it, the only effort to tackle this question was an opt-in internet panel survey sponsored by AARP (an organization that has not taken a formal position on the public option) and conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. They found that only 37% of their adult sample could correctly identify the Public Option from a list of three possible choices. As Nate Silver pointed out, if the respondents had picked randomly, a third (33%) would have chosen correctly.

Don't get me wrong. I favor a public option of some kind. But supporters are only fooling themselves with such talk.

Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up for a Democratic Central Committee fundraiser at the Fairmont Hotel in SF. What an idiot.  Imagine Nancy Pelosi wandering into a CPAC bash

The rest is history. Willie Brown reports:

Arnold Schwarzenegger at Democrat Fundraiser 

By now, I'm sure you've all seen or heard about the cell phone video of our state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano yelling out for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to "kiss my gay ass."

And as usual when something this bad happens, everyone is pointing the finger at me.

Yes, I was the emcee at the Democratic Central Committee event. And yes, I did invite Arnold to say a few words.

But the truth is, the first I knew about Arnold's presence was when committee Chairman Aaron Peskin leaned over and said, "Hey, your buddy is coming in through the door."

"You gotta be kidding me," I said. "What would the governor be doing here?"

Beats me, Peskin said, but you should introduce him.

I did, and with that, Ammiano became the Democrats' version of Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson, leading the chorus of boos before he and his buddies walked out.

To be honest, by that point you couldn't tell who was walking in, who was walking out or much else, because people had been drinking since 5 in the afternoon.

After the dinner I went to the bar and I got a tap on the shoulder.

It was Arnold, insisting that I join him. He was completely unfazed by what had happened. The only reference he made was to ask me jokingly, "Hey, what are you doing with all those crazies?"

"Picking up stuff for my column," I replied.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/11/BAFF1A39BI.DTL#ixzz0TduMvCNK