eh_notsomuch

The Minnesota Supreme Court will not hear Norm Coleman's appeal of the Senate election result until June.

June?! Are you serious????

How can they let this drag on two more months? My God, Bush v. Gore didn't go on this long!

Meanwhile, poor Senator Amy Klobuchar soldiers on as the only senator representing her state. Basically as she explained to Rachel Maddow a while back, she and her staff are doing the work of two senators. There's a reason each state gets two, people.

Give it up already, FFS.

This is, quite honestly, the first semi-sane thing I have seen written at Red State in several years:

We Lost Because We Suck: There’s no conspiracy, really.
So, we have this great big circular firing squad going about whether to purge moderates, or socons, or fiscons, or libertarians, or Methodists, whatever. No, Virginia, there isn’t a smoke filled room somewhere where a bunch of Ivy League, Wall Street, K Street elitists conspired to deprive the Republican Party of a victory in the last two elections. We lost because nobody in their right mind would trust us to run a government. That we did as well as we did is a tribute to the fact that they don’t trust the Democrats much either.

***
In seven years we demonstrated to the American people that we really didn’t mean what we’d said for all those years; we weren’t against spending, we were against Democrat spending. We weren’t against big government, we just wanted it big in the places we like. The people caught us in the lie and held us responsible for it.

WASHINGTON - Convicted Sen. Ted Stevens lost his re-election bid to Democrat Mark Begich after the last large batch of votes was counted Tuesday.

The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 3,724 votes after Tuesday's count.

That's an insurmountable lead with only about 2,500 overseas ballots left to be counted.

...I traveled again to Levittown on Election Day to see how people would vote and how they would respond to what looked like an imminent Obama victory. The contrast from the spring — and, in fact, this new vision of Levittown compared with what I had known in my childhood — was almost breathtaking.

“Obama,” said the ironworker, when I asked how he’d be voting.

“Obama,” said the plumber.

“Obama,” said the chef.

And on and on. Military moms. Vietnam veterans. Abortion opponents. College students and retirees. Bank tellers, pipe fitters, officer workers, machinists, meat cutters, boilermakers and carpenters....

The Concern Trolls are roaming free in the Village these days: John King, Laura Ingraham, Charles Krauthammer, Tom Brokaw, Karl Rove, Ruth Marcus … I don't know how many talking heads I've heard claim that "America is still a center-right country" in the past few days, but if it were a drinking game, I'd have alcohol poisoning.

I guess I'm confused. I keep hearing from a lot of conservatives that McCain lost because he wasn't conservative enough -- that is, he was essentially a center-right candidate. And I think that's the consensus about where he sat on the political spectrum.

So if America is a "center-right country," then why didn't they elect the center-right candidate?

It's all bullshit, of course. As a CAF/Media Matters study found last year: "Media perceptions and past Republican electoral successes notwithstanding, Americans are progressive across a wide range of controversial issues, and they're growing more progressive all the time." In fact, as CAF's Robert Borosage points out, "Voters didn't just elect Democrats, they elected progressives." This is a liberal mandate.

Over at Ethicurean, there's an extensive post exploring what the newly elected American president might do differently about food, farms, and related systems of energy and technology in the United States:

According to Speech Wars, between April and October, John McCain uttered the word “agriculture” only twice, and “nutrition” just once. Barack Obama did slightly better, referring to “agriculture” twelve times and “nutrition” four times. He gave farms a passing mention in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. But let’s face it: for the most part, food was a quiet issue, sacrificed to our discussions about race and religion, gender and sexism, oil and bailouts.

Meanwhile, food prices continued to rise. Our nation continued to lose farms daily. We continued to spend billions of dollars treating lifestyle diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Rural towns continued to wither. Fertilizer runoff continued to damage our drinking water.
There’s no way around it: the Obama administration will need to address food issues head-on....

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

NEW YORK, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- Police were called to a New York polling place Tuesday after film actor Tim Robbins allegedly got into a verbal confrontation with an election worker, TMZ said.

Robbins apparently became upset when the people working at the polling place at which he has cast his ballots for years said his name wasn't on the register, the entertainment news Web site said.

The star of "City of Ember," "Mystic River," "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Bull Durham," who is a vocal Democrat, reportedly was instructed to complete a provisional ballot, but he said he didn't want to do that, leading to an argument with a poll worker.

TMZ said Robbins accused the poll worker of attempting to intimidate him so he wouldn't vote. He then went downtown to the New York City Board of Elections to get proof he was registered to vote.

No criminal charges were filed in the incident.