Go Al!

I’ll sure be glad when this is over. I will would also settle for a 1 fer 2. That beats 0 fer any day.

Preview is mah fren

will would

so Mark Ritchie is to be pardoned as a Holder of votes…

(oops, wrong story)

Wouldn’t it have been awesome if Franken’s opponent had been named Stein?

Heh!

Ha! (By the way: Holder is rather lucky in his enemies; at least one of them is a Grade-A nutjob.)

Oh, man, that would have been no end of fun. Especially with this crew.

I wonder if Michelle Bachmann ever worked on her staff.

time for an intervention by that guy who *invented* the internet. you know: e-Gore.

I like how she claims she was only investigated because she is Republican. It reminds me of Rush saying if he’d been just an average Joe, the law would have turned a blind eye to his 80,000 tabs of Oxycontin.

Pooh’s donkey friend?

this guy.

That’s lazy Eye-Gore.

When will this election end?

I think we’re goin’ crazy
her left eye is lazy
she looks so Israeli
nicotine and gravy

Hopefully in time for the midterms.

Got a good beat, easy to dance to. Of course, I don’t know much about dancin’, that’s why I got this song.

nooooooo! banging head on keyboard.

Aloha, PW! Great news indeed! 87 lawsuits could be quite expen$ive…! ;-)

Frank!!

Drain their War chest! That way Coleman can never run again!

Now you know we have this hidden desire to be hauled off by the little men in white coats.

Yup!

Ah, Michele. Because Katherine Harris just wasn’t crazy enough.

OMG. It costs $31 billion/year just to maintain U.S. nukes. If we drop the number of the to 1000, enough to blow up the world many times over, we’d save $26 billion/year.

If we can defeat Coleman and get him out of the Senate, the world would be a better place. No matter what happens with the recount, I am sure this will end up in the courts.

hah!

backatcha.

That $26 billion would fund nearly 3 months of Iraq-upation. Our government appears to have a consistent theme, which is insanity.

707! Btw, what’s up with this…?

Ros-Lehtinen hangs up on Obama. Twice.

Why was Obama calling her…?

My own guess? Probably by Christmas, if everything goes right (i.e., if Coleman doesn’t sue). The last half-dozen counties started their recounts today and they’re being pushed to finish up by Friday. When that’s done, the canvassing board starts to review the big pile of challenged ballots racked up over the last week. Most of the challenges were frivolous, so they shouldn’t take too long.

Thanks for the serious answer. Keeping my fingers & toes crossed but not too optimistic.

Keepin’ it reel.

He’s probably courtesy calling everyone in the upcoming Congress.

And PW, thanks for keeping us in the loop on the machinations of the recount.

I don’t think so, for the simple reason that Coleman’s people have been yammering all along — and the TradMed’s been dutifully reporting — that Franken’s team is just chock-full of Evil Lawyers Just Waiting To Foul Up The Election By Suing, yet thanks to Ritchie’s moves, Franken’s team has no reason to see — and Coleman, who already has had his initial efforts to stop the count laughed out of court, really doesn’t want to try for the trifecta.

It’s the military, of course, that insists on keeping U.S. nuke arsenal so high. Even though they can’t keep track of them, flying them hither & thither without a by-your-leave.

Learn from this guy

lol. that reminds me of a song we used to sing in, i think, 6th grade. something like: they’re coming to take me away. haha hehe hoho. to the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time!

The one thing that would make this drag on would be legal action. So far, the Coleman camp’s two big efforts at legal action have been laughed out of court, and the one thing that they really want to do — which is to keep the rejected absentee ballots from being revisited and counted if they are countable — is going to be very, very tough for them to stop. They’ll howl like banshees and do all they can to undermine the public perception of the recount, but that’s about all that they can do.

I suppose there have probably been a lot of screw-ups in the past that we didn’t hear about but handling of the nukes seems to have gotten really slipshod in recent years. Of course, the fact that they exist anywhere is utter madness. Wish there was a way to put that genie back in the bottle.

Excellent, as always !

Just to give ya a better idea of that -

An ASROC (Anti-submarine rocket) launcher on a destroyer has 4 banks of 2 launch tubes, total of 8 rockets, each capable of carrying a nuclear warhead with a 2.5KT (kilo ton) yield. Security 24 hours 365 days. Constant preventive maintenance on launcher and both conventional and nuclear components with accompanying paperwork. I don’t know the total number of ASROC ships but there are a bunch. Further, there are Terrier and Talos capable units out there. Same story. Then there are the subs with theirs.

PW !

Any idea how soon this will be over ?

Every Destroyer has an ASROC…

I grew up in Minnesota. I care about the Vikings too. But I love Franken, saw him at the Democracyfest in San Diego. He’s really what we need in the Senate. Being funny ain’t a crime…

peanuts. haven’t we already spent more 6 trillion since 1940?

CT!

But that would make sense. Can’t have any of that.

You mean this one?

The history of the U.S. nuke program is nicely covered in House of War by James Carroll, which is a great book on oh so many fronts. Not so nice, the history. I’ve mentioned this before, maybe even earlier today, but U.S. policy after Hiroshima & before the USSR nuke test, was preventive nuke attack against USSR. Thankfully that was one policy that was never executed.

WRT nukes elsewhere, after I read Nuclear Terrorism—The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, by Graham Allison in 04, I figured out that there was only one W in WMD and it is nukes. It I’d been W, I’d finish the Nunn-Lugar program PDQ. It is one of the criteria I’ll use to judge Obama.

Thanks. I’d forgotten that U.S. nukes are constantly floating around the globe, and of course would need heavy duty maintainance.

Nope. 945 class doesn’t and only Fram I and Fram II WWII class cans do, if there are still any in service.

Howdy, Ma’am! I missed your bedrock values and witty repartee…! *g*

I was seriously jonesing there for a bit! ;-)

to the funny farm!

Glad to see yer up and runnin’.

A ‘22-vote’ lead is astonishingly close to the fivethirtyeight.com estimate of a 27 vote Franken victory. Well, it’s only astonishingly close if you insist on continuing to be astonished by the accuracy of fivethirtyeight.com It’s almost as if he uses MATH or something…

Tom was a pretty slick dancer. Hard to believe he had trouble getting dates… “g”

any in service…
Heh, just like the Zumwalt’s…! ;-)

i’ve been saying that obama should ask lugar to be in his administration for that sole purpose. that’s my idea of bipartisanship.

btw, i don’t think that cost figure includes this kind of thing

Heaven forbid that a political analyst should actually do, ya know, analysis.

I’m with you on implementing the Nunn-Lugar plan. It must drive them crazy to have analyzed the problem in depth, proposed solutions, then waited… while nothing is done.

My question is, will MN announce an official result before the lawsuits start?

Thanks for the link. Nope. The figures came from Joe Cirincione on Rachel, and were direct costs only.

I agree that Richie’s move was smart, but in fact it is quite in line with the decision of the Canvas Board. They turned down Franken’s request for an immediate review of the ballots, but left themselves an opening to deal with it later by scheduling a December 12th meeting to discuss the issue, and asked the Secretary of State’s office to provide them with more detailed information.

So what Richie has done is quite in line with that — he asked the counties to sort the rejected absentee ballots into five piles, The first four piles being the rejection criteria in Minnesota Statutes — and the fifth pile being things not specifically covered by statute as reasons for rejecting absentee ballots.

It could well be that many counties will, in the process of sorting, realize that some of their fifth pile were wrongly excluded, and do as Itasca is already doing, correcting improper exclusions by opening and counting the ballots. I suspect the canvas board eventually will want to see common proceedure across counties.

But there is another assumption in Minnesota Law, and that is equal protection. I think we can assume that some of the flaws in the 5th pile which are not described in statute, were not recognized as flaw in the first place in some counties — and ballots of that nature were put into the ballot pool and counted on election day. Given the legal weight given to equal protection — it strikes me that the Canvas Board can’t really decide that some counties can exclude for a particular flaw — while other counties can count the same or very similar ballots.

In the end, the Legislature needs to revisit this during session, largely because in recent years they have liberalized “absentee and early voting” — in the past one needed to claim disability or that you would not be in the county on election day — but in recent years they have relaxed that required claim. The result is thousands of “early voters” unknowingly putting their vote at risk due to a flaw on their outer envelope not caught by a clerk. If we are going to do mass “early voting” we need to eliminate that risk. Early voters need to be treated equally with those who vote at the polls on election day, and clear rules need to be in place for any “at the polls” changes in address, etc.

My guess is that counties will sort, and then decide to count a good many of the ballots in the fifth pile before the close of the recount on Friday. I think they will want that 5th pile as small as possible, with ballots in the other four piles clearly covered by statute. If Coleman objects, it will be Coleman of the 87 injunctions.

not downloading for me. i’ll have to try later. thanks!

Putting on tinfoil hat to say that it makes you think that the U.S. [who, W, MIC, insert your favorite militarist here] wants loose nukes to have an enemy out there.

I’m sure PW has a better answer but by feeling is that we’ll have a certified result within 7-10 days and lawsuits filed within minutes afterwards.

Musta had something to do with calling all the ladies Delilah !

When I was with NucWeaps in San Diego our office became the fair haired boys with the brass in the NucWeaps section at CNO. We flew up to DC regularly for conferences. ADM Zumwalt was in the habit of attending, sideburns an’ all. Loved gettin’ those Z-Grams. From god’s print shop to our hands.

It’s probably giving them too much credit to suggest there is a thought process behind their madness. Securing loose nukes would be proactive, our government only reacts to disasters that have already occurred.

He’s slowed down a lot but he’s still pretty cool.

If they react to disasters that already occurred, instead of making them worse like W.

I figured out why they only take precautions against whatever had already happened (which is exactly what any decent terrorist would not do again). It is because as bureaucrats or pols, they’d get fired (well, sometimes) if the same disaster happened again, but for a new one, well, who coulda thunk. Job saved.

As my parentheticals indicate, though, W proved you could save your job by doing everything wrong at every turn. Obama’s smart enough to have learned that lesson.

new thread: Treasury: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rules

I think Bush’s eroding poll numbers suggest that relying entirely on spin yields diminishing returns. Obama will have to produce something people perceive as being of tangible benefit to get reelected… UNLESS the Republicans run a completely feeble candidate in ‘12, like the Dems did in ‘04.

Isn’t that one of the ‘across the aisle’ pieces of legislation Obama helped to get passed (or an update of it) with Lugar right after he got elected to the Senate? I know it was something to do with loose nukes in Russia and other places. (I’m being lazy tonight…thanks)