Obama, referring to the "narrow window" of time when he had 60 votes in the Senate: "after Franken finally got seated and Arlen had flipped, but before Scott Brown won in Massachusetts."

Arlen had flipped.

Al Franken responds.

A bhtv commenter notices something:

I talk with Byron York about Tiger Woods, Dr. Laura, Michelle Obama, Steven Slater, Al Franken, the Prop 8 same-sex marriage decision, and the Ground Zero mosque..

This one's called "The Luckiest Diavlog on the Face of the Earth" for reasons that become apparent near then end. Also, somewhere in there the tornado sirens (in my town) go off.



ADDED: If you need a non-Flash format, go here and pick MP3/MP4.

Senator ACORN.

"Franken won by 312 votes. ACORN claimed to have registered 48,000 new Minnesota voters. If just 1% were ineligible but cast ballots, or had ballots cast for them illegally, and survived the recount process ... that's 480 votes, almost certainly overwhelmingly cast for Franken. ..."

"Watch These Terrible People Yapping At Each Other."

A Wonkette headline that I tried to read out loud and said: "Watch These Terrible People Lapping At Each Other." Ah, remember the original Wonkette? Everything was sexy somehow. Now... I don't read it enough to know what the point is, other than to make everything sound funny, though in this case the headline has nothing to do with what is supposed to be so hilarious: Al Sharpton is really skinny now.

Rush Limbaugh is skinny now too. He looks like this:



Ironically, Al Franken is quite fat.

Isn't it sweet that Rush posed in front of a picture of his kitty cat's bowl? Does Al Franken have a cat? Google image search suggests no:

Franken...

... wins.

"We all remember Bush v. Gore."

Coleman's quest.

"Nearly every 'fix' has gone for Mr. Franken, in some cases under strange circumstances."

Do you think the Democratic Party is stealing the Minnesota senatorial election for Al Franken? Whether it is or not, if he winds up winning now, it's going to look like he did.

Here's a hypothetical, which we'll call Hypothetical A:

1. The Party knows the votes are not there and intends to steal an election during the recount.

2. As the recount progresses, the public strongly suspects the election is being stolen.

3. The Party realizes that if the candidate wins, the public will think the election was stolen.

Question: Should the Party abandon the plan to steal the election?

My first thought was: Yes, because it will hurt the Party's reputation and leave the "elected" official under a cloud. But then I thought:

Consider Hypothetical B: There is no plan to steal the election, there is a recount, and the truth is there are enough votes that the Party's candidate has won. Of course, the Party would go through with the recount, and the candidate would accept his position, and the Party and the candidate would deal with the accusations and damage to their reputation as well as they could.

Now, if we accept that Hypothetical B is true, what does that say about Hypothetical A? The 2 scenarios look the same to the general public. The evil election stealers of Hypothetical A should continue and act just like the unfairly maligned characters in Hypothetical B.

AND: A poll:

Should the Democratic Party make Al Franken win, whether the votes are there or not?
	Yes, because they can and any criticism can be weathered.
	Yes, for some other reason.
	No, because it will hurt them politically, in the short or long term.
	No, because it would be wrong.
pollcode.com free polls

Did Al Franken win?

We still don't know. The erstwhile funnyman faces a recount. And it doesn't look like he'll be smiling that enormous Joker-smile in the end. 99% of the precincts are counted, and Coleman has a 800 vote edge.

"Every time someone tries to hold Norm Coleman accountable, he runs to court to try to weasel his way out of it."

Al Franken does not like being sued for defamation. Who does? I hate to see political mud-slinging turned into lawsuits, even if there are plenty of people who will make the argument that if something were really a lie -- e.g., the "Swift Boat" attacks on John Kerry -- the candidate would have sued.

I thought conservatives loathed tort suits... not to suggest that it's fine for liberals to drag political battles into the courtroom.

***

By the way, "Senator Franken"... won't that be weird? If it happens. Not really weirder than Sonny Bono in Congress. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California. Ah, I guess nothing about blurring the showbiz/politics line can be weird anymore. It's utterly banal.

***

Did you know Sonny Bono's epitaph is "And The Beat Goes On"?

Al Franken helped write last night's opening "SNL" skit, bashing McCain.

Quite good!

IN THE COMMENTS: Fen said:

"Hi. I'm NBC and I approved this ad."

"They were not a broadcasting concern to begin with. ... They went into business to affect elections."

Gloats Rush Limbaugh, as Air America files for bankruptcy. The implication is that his show is "a broadcasting concern," but you've got to wonder: How is his show less about affecting elections than "Air America"?

I like the idea that listeners can tell what the radio guy is up to. We're sensitive to the voice. We can tell when what the speaker wants is to tell you to get in line politically. (I feel the same way about blogging.)

I'm not a big listener of either Limbaugh or Al Franken, but, driving in my car, I've spent some time with both of them.

I think Limbaugh clearly and constantly is trying to get you to agree with his opinions, but he's got a joy in the moment that captures the listener. You know, I am the same age as Limbaugh -- we were actually born on the same day -- and I get the distinct sense that he was influenced by the two great, great radio guys that I listened to every day back in the 60s: Jean Shepherd and Cousin Brucie. These were not political broadcasters as all, just extremely entertaining radio voices.

Al Franken, being a comedian, ought to bring entertainment value to his radio show, but I never got the feeling that he was into the moment, that he had a sense of what it means to be a voice on the radio. He always sounds exasperated, like he's dragged himself to the studio and it's a tough job but somebody's got to do it. Why, oh, why, don't people get it yet? How many times do I have to tell you...

"More wicked than your average blogger"?

A squib about Al Franken's new book in the NYT Book Review:

"The Truth (With Jokes)," by Al Franken, [is] a gloomier, more astringent book than his "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)," which came out in 2003. Franken's new one has dark circles under its eyes. "The Truth (With Jokes)" went to press before Katrina and the indictment of Lewis Libby, so it already feels mildly dated; and regular readers of political blogs, which have multiplied exponentially since Franken's last book, may feel a lot of the material here (on John Kerry and his "Swift Boat" attackers, Abu Ghraib, Fox News) has already been hashed to death. But Franken is more wicked than your average blogger.

"More wicked than your average blogger"? What kind of a standard is that? Isn't the average blogger a rather amiable person, telling stories about the kids, the job, hobbies, sports, and TV? Or does "blogger," as used in the NYT, not actually refer to the tens of millions of bloggers on the planet, but to the set of American political bloggers? That might establish some standard of wickedness so that being more wicked than average would mean something, seeing as there are some real bastards at the front end of that bell curve.

But how wicked is Al Franken? The example the Times offered up as proof wasn't pithy enough for me to want to keep in the block quote. The NYT is really trying to sell us on a book that snarks on the current news in a world where most of the writers who satirize current politics react within minutes after news hits the web. Even later the same day, the story seems stale. If you've waited a day to crack your joke, you're better off finding the next thing to snark about. How can you possibly compete on the long time line of a book?

There are at least two good reason for books like this to exist, however.

1. You go to the bookstore. You see the bookcover. You feel: this expresses something. You buy it and voila: this expresses something about me.

2. Look at the damned calendar. It's a Christmas present! For that political friend or family member of yours. Oh, Josh will like this. He's a political junkie.

Audible Althouse, #15.

Here's the new episode. I went over an hour this time. Just a tad though. Topics discussed: what your car says about you, guy cars and chick cars, Jimi Hendrix singing "All Along the Watchtower," Edie Brickell singing "What I Am," dreary women in the news (Valerie Plame, Cindy Sheehan, Harriet Miers), impressive women dead and alive (Rosa Parks and Condoleezza Rice), great and not so great films (especially "Nashville"), Steve Colbert, Al Franken, Howard Stern, three rather bad artists, and the importance of having a high energy Monday. Key digressions: insect repellent (and the "they don't bite, they don't even light" commercial) and the whole issue of whether "life is but a joke."

Don't forget: Audible Althouse has been nominated for a BOB! That ought to make you listen to the podcast with new ears.




Vote for Audible Althouse!

And, once again, let me thank the wonderful John Althouse Cohen and Brit Rice for recording the incredibly cool theme music!

ADDED: Bad link fixed. Sorry.

Simulblogging Al Franken on "The Daily Show."

Wow, has he fattened up. "The President seems to be yelling at a lot of people right now," according to The Daily News, Franken says. Now, he's trying to describe his book, "Resurrection of Hope," which apparently contains a description of the future, which includes his becoming a senator (from Minnesota) in 2008. Something about impeaching Bush, then Cheney having seven heart attacks in one day gets a big laugh from the audience. The Democrats "need bold leadership." National health care. Republicans are the worst spenders -- applause -- it's in the book. End of interview. There was absolutely nothing funny said by Franken (or Jon Stewart). There was only one real laugh from the audience -- which was obviously ready to laugh -- and that was just over the hoary old idea of Cheney having heart attacks. Verdict: less amusing than Lou Dobbs on "The Colbert Report" last night.

UPDATE: Stewart was bizarrely inert. When he held up the book in the classic interview-ending gesture, I couldn't believe it was over. That was it? I think Stewart cut it short. But why? Because Franken was unfunny? That can't be it. Normally, Stewart would inject the funny to help out a dull guest. Can it be that Stewart dislikes Franken and deliberately let him flop and then cut the segment short?

On the radio.

For some reason, driving from Cleveland to Ithaca today, I felt like listening to talk radio, and I just kept switching back and forth between America Right and Air America -- occasionally mixing in The Power.

America Right was, understandably, fixated on the Newsweek story, but there was very little about it on Air America. Disturbingly, the only attempt at humor I heard from Al Franken in the hour or so I spent with him today was a joke that Donald Rumsfeld had ordered that a Bible and a Talmud be flushed down the toilet, along with an Encyclopedia Britannica "for the reality-based" people.

Franken's show was nearly humor free -- entirely humor free if you don't count bad jokes. It was grim indeed. Some of the things he said were truly awful. Within the space of perhaps half an hour, he said that George Bush could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if he had "paid attention" -- it's in the 9/11 report! -- and that Iraq would be better off if Saddam were still in power -- not merely that on balance, the improvement of having him out is not worth the cost, but that the Iraqis were better off with Saddam.

Painful. Just painful.

"Earnest tomes."

Here's a review of Alan Wolfe's "Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It." The reviewer Gary Rosen reacts to that title with the same ennui I get from it:

When liberal rabble-rousers get fed up with Republican duplicity and Democratic fecklessness, they write books full of invective and rude humor, with titles like ''Stupid White Men'' and ''Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them).'' When liberal intellectuals feel the same impulse, they lash out with paradigms and sprawling historical analogies, in earnest tomes with titles like, well, ''Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It.'' Neither sort of book is especially edifying, but at least Michael Moore and Al Franken deliver an occasional laugh.