The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a frequently-updated count of the recount vote. As I write this, with 7% of the votes recounted, Franken has pulled into a lead of 570 votes.

Of course, anything can still happen. But I'm happily surprised to have seen this happen.

Driving to a meeting earlier this morning, I tuned into my favorite morning drive time show, Rhode Island’s own NPR station WRNI.\It is their regular fund drive season and before the normal banter about who has donated the station played a clip from their underwriters.Included in the clip was an announcement from the Department of Homeland Security.The voice over was explaining to listeners how DHS supports NPR and that companies can contact DHS to being using the E-Verify system at their workplace to target illegal immigrants. Apart from the racism of used behind the implementation of the law and the big brotherish quality of having EVERY person have to get approval from the federal government before they can get a job, THE PROGRAM JUST DOESN”T WORK.The error rate is staggering. Naturally I was upset to here our local NPR affiliate broadcasting this trash that is more the style of Bugsy over on the other side of the dial.So I called up the station to voice my concerns.The folks there were great. Apparently there have been a number of complaints (see, its not just me) and the station masters themselves had put in a complaint to the national NPR. Apparently there are underwriters at the national level that local affiliates have to take, no matter what. Workers at the station forwarded me emails proving that they had indeed made the request to have the ads pulled from the local market But they also gave me the link to the NPR ombudsman so that any readers here that are fans of WRNI who want to keep the right-wing hate talk off our airwaves can send the right message. If you want to send a message to WRNI about this issue, contact them HERE.  Also, you can join the FACEBOOK group to send your message HERE. Ask your friends to sign up.

I was listening to Newsweek's Jonathan Alter being interviewed on Public Radio as I drove home from teaching today and the argument he was making was that Obama should not have to give up his Blackberry as the security mavens around him are demanding. Indeed, Alter gave lots of good reasons why Obama should stay plugged in.

In this day and age when corporate users and those developing highly secret government projects are using their Blackberries, the President should have at least the same access to personal communication. There are plenty of means to encrypt everything and Obama is an intelligent user. It was his use of the Blackberry that helped him get through this very tough election... and the Republicans didn't break his security... But I'll bet they tried!

cross posted on DKos:

There is an interesting diary on the rec list right now, posing the question, "what should be the future of DKos?" I think their take is interesting, and I support it, but I also wanted to suggest a different variety of change - specifically, what if DKos and the netroots in general were to link up with like-minded communities, and create a different arm of the website devoted to political organization?

In Brief:
-use DKos as a hub for a political organization in parallel with Obama's, including fundraising, targeted advertising, targeting crappy democrats in primaries, voter outreach and registration, policy creation
-hire the people laid off by the abandonment of the 50 state strategy, to coordinate a national grassroots power base (they know how to do this, and they are not even that expensive!!)
-have a public discussion about which Democrats we are going to scalp (STENY HOYER PLS)
-build a decentralized grassroots political organization which answers to the grassroots and pursues goals decided upon by the grassroots.

In other words: BUILD PROGRESSIVE MUSCLE. More below.

I think that the unnamed "Democrat" who claimed that we have no pull on the hill because we have no scalps in our pocket hit the nail on the head. Tragically, this is how the idiots on the hill think, and because we (I would hope) are not quite as brain-dead, we assume that grassroots organization and enthusiasm for the party, coupled with demonstrably good ideas would be enough to convince our "representatives" (I prefer to think of them as leeches). Not so. Solution?

Well, lets take a page from Obama's book. After all, he went up against those same people, and although he is now doing a balancing act which I believe is misguided, he DID beat them, and he did it by organizing. Given that DKos and related communities (OpenLeft, Thinkprogress, Mydd) are among the most politically engaged in the country, it seems like it shouldn't be all that difficult to turn these fundamentally news-based sites into hubs for a larger, **grassroots controlled** political power base, that acts on the interests of the grassroots.

We have 2 years to put this together, if we so choose, and I think it would be EASY. The 50 state people are looking for work, their work is not that expensive, and we are quite capable of raising the necessary amounts of money. Furthermore, we could have a public discussion about which 2-3 shitty democrats we want to defeat in a primary in the Senate and in the House (2-3 in EACH, and I think Steny Hoyer is a lock for target #1).

Also, a little bit of bloodletting on an off year would be mostly harmless, as it would not damage us in a presidential election. We have a wave of political engagement post-Obama, and all we have to do is channel it. Experienced hands are available and out of work, and the fundraising capacity is there. Why can't we do this? I see no reason.

by Lindsay Beyerstein, MediaWire blogger.

Because if it bleeds, it leads... Sarah van Schagen rates the environmental impact of feminine hygiene products for Grist.

In all seriousness, this has been a very exciting week in healthcare news. The Bush administration is racing to take away as many reproductive rights as it can before leaving office. The Democrats in Congress are taking the lead on healthcare reform by writing up their own proposal before president Obama takes the Oath of Office.

Last week, Sen. Max Baucus unveiled a detailed proposal to provide health insurance for all Americans. Brian Cook has a roundup of reactions.

Just picked this up on HuffPo:

A Minnesota judge has granted a request by Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken for the release of information on voters whose absentee ballots were rejected.

While this applies only to Ramsey County (home of St. Paul, the capitol), it's the second largest county, and a symbolic victory after the Sec. of State refused to count the rejected ballots until the court told them otherwise (dammit Mark Ritchie, you're supposed to be a corrupt partisan Democrat, throw me a bone here :P )

McCain officially has won Missouri, so all the electoral votes are duly assigned to the two candidates for president.  McCain led Obama by 4,355 votes, and even though there are still 3,159 provisional ballots to canvass, there is no way that Obama can overcome McCain's lead in the Show Me State.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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