Al Franken is supposed to be a comedian, but making a joke of the democratic process really isn't all that funny.
The ridiculousness of the Minnesota Senatorial election between Al Franken and Norm Coleman has reached its height, and the Wall Street Journal has been doing an excellent job of chronicling the details of how a close election can be stolen.…
Article comments
— go to most recent comments26 - Clavos
you do know that was the joke, right?
Of course I do, zing. But, IMO kaufman didn't pull it off, he just sounded...well...dumb -- not funny.
27 - Cindy D
i loved andy...
28 - Matthew T. Sussman
"(Isn't it odd how all the prominent politicians who used to be actors in supposedly left-wing Hollywood seem to be Republicans?)"
How could you forget Sonny Bono, other than with years of repression?
29 - Jet
You guys are comparing Groucho in the movies to Groucho in "You bet your life".
There's no real comparison.
By the way, good job of completely obscuring the point I was making about if Ronnie could do it, than Franken could too.
Not to mention completely ignoring 15.
You know, sometimes I wonder why I bother here anymore.
I almost miss JOM
30 - Dave Nalle
There's no evidence of double votes,
Except for the hundreds more votes than there were voters and the fact that there were duplicate ballots and they were counted. Oh, and the fact that a Supreme Court Justice on the Canvassing Board acknowledges that there were double votes. No, aside from that there's no evidence at all.
and if you had a clue, the machines wouldn't count the original ballots, so they used copied ballots to count them. So how could a machine that wouldn't read the ballot somehow read it?
If you had a clue you'd know that the recounts in Minnesota are being done by HAND, not by machine, which is why this type of fraud is possible.
Dave
31 - Jet
Dave, provisional ballots aren't counted as votes at the time of tabulation, only if the tally is close, then they are counted...
so of course there's going to be a difference.
32 - Dave Nalle
If the WSJ is doing such a great job reporting, why have you linked to an opinion piece, whose author's name I can't find on the page, rather than a news article?
Because it's the best and most comprehensive article on the subject and because the WSJ has been providing ongoing coverage of the problems in Minnesota, so it is informed by all of that. The same info is available in lots of short news stories from local papers and TV stations, but none of them gather as much info together in one place as the WSJ article.
Dave
33 - Dave Nalle
Jet. These aren't provisional ballots. Where did you get that idea? These are duplicate ballots.
A provisional ballot is filed if the voting status of the voter is unclear. It is the only ballot he gets.
A duplicate ballot is created if a voters ballot won't scan properly. Once that is done they keep both the original and the duplicate, but are supposed to count only one. The problem here is that poll workers didn't mark the duplicates as duplicates so that when they did the hand count they counted both.
Dave
34 - bliffle
Maybe you can get the supreme court to intervene?
35 - Baritone
I'm happy to just let Dave be outraged. He wears it so well.
As to the more important issue: that of who are good and bad comedians, Clav, I agree with you on most counts excepting Groucho, Maher, and Lewis. Jerry Lewis??? I thought only the French were tuned into his, uh, brilliance. Maher's comedy is very calculated, and he has a rather huge ego, but, he does make some good and often funny observations.
In his prime I thought Robin Williams was perhaps the most outrageously funny comedian ever. He's not so sharp now as he once was, but I did love his "golf" routine he did a few years ago on an HBO special. If you haven't seen it, check it out on YouTube.
I rather like Lewis Black. He's not brilliant, but he makes funny observations. He is definitely partisan.
Who are we forgetting? Jerry Seinfeld! Again, at his best he was very funny. He appeared on Letterman recently, and he seems to have lost his edge. His TV show was great, pretty much throughout. I think most people either loved it or hated it.
Shelley Berman. I loved Shelley Berman's recordings back in the 60s. He's still around and working. I don't think he does anymore stand up, but he had a recurring role as a judge on "Boston Legal."
Funniest woman? I'd have to say Whoopie. She is funny in her stand up performances. I sometimes like Kathy Griffin, but she becomes annoying after a while. I especially don't like her on the New Years Eve shows on CNN with Anderson Cooper. She was for the most part, obnoxious.
Who else we got?
Oh, and RR was perhaps not awful, but he was never very good - not even average.
B
36 - Cindy D
I vote for Whoopie, B. She's my favorite.
37 - Matthew T. Sussman
"Funniest woman?"
That's easy. Kathleen Madigan.
38 - handyguy
When Dave writes a story about election fraud, the Democrats are always the villains and the Republicans are always as pure as the driven Minnesota snow. Amusing, but ludicrously inaccurate.
Dr. D has the most sensible take on this particular election -- it's just too close to call accurately. But the same was true in Florida in 2000, and the ultimate answer will be the same, with the parties reversed: the process has run its course, a winner has been certified. Suck it up and stop whining.
And definitely lose the bad habit of calling other people crooks reflexively, if they are Democratic politicians who have won a closely contested election. It's a lie, and it gets both sides exactly nowhere.
39 - Clavos
And definitely lose the bad habit of calling other people crooks reflexively, if they are Democratic politicians who have won a closely contested election. It's a lie, and it gets both sides exactly nowhere.
And besides, they're ALL crooks...
40 - Brunelleschi
Funniest of all time- Steve Martin, "Let's Get Small."
:)
Second funniest, Dave N fired up over politicians doing what they do best... (OK, maybe not second funniest,,)
41 - bliffle
Joan Rivers. She was on NPR this morning and she's as wry as ever. She said her daughter cried when she told daughter she wasn't adopted. "It could break a mothers heart".
42 - Baritone
Agree with Steve Martin.
Not so much into Ms. Rivers.
B
43 - Cindy D
Steve Martin! Yes! My favorite.
44 - zingzing
i was getting along really well this woman, and she invited me back to her apartment.
that woman had the best pussy ever.
what? oh, you people! you're so... get your mind out of the gutter. every time, it's sex, sex, sex. i was talking about her cat! her cat!
gosh.
...
that cat was the best fuck i ever had.
--steve martin, and it's better when he does it, of course.
45 - Clavos
I like cats.
They taste like chicken...
ta-dum
46 - Savo
Sounds like 2000, when Bush stole the elections while the time it's taking them to count the votes looks more like Zimbabwe's last cooked elections in March 2008.
47 - Brunelleschi
Savo- Exactly.
If a presidential election can get stolen like it was in 2000 and history decides to ignore it, I don't even want to hear it about Minnesota!
It seems that in every election, more and more irregularities are coming out. Elections are not perfect and never have been.
48 - Brunelleschi
Cindy- I met the sweetie I took to the high school prom because I had memorized Martin's "Cruel Shoes" routine and I repeated it at a party and it made her laugh.. :)
"Anna knew she had to have a new pair of shoes today...."
49 - Cindy D
Blood (gack).
"I like them." She crawled out of the store.
50 - Brunelleschi
This one is a bit long, but funny and a true story-
When "Let's Get Small" came out, we were so smitten with it that sound bites got worked into the language at work!
I was a mechanic at a motorcycle shop. Our product line included a lot of little 2-stroke scooters that burned oil in the gas and their huge, quiet exhausts would gum up so much they would hardly run. When one of these came in, the mechanic's would smile and say "Let's Get Small!!"
Then one of us would take off the pipe, grab the shop welding torch, and go out back on the porch and start a fire in the pipe. This would create a huge cloud sometimes and you could get a good fire going as well. It was fun. The customers would walk around back and see this giant supercharged Hookah and say "what are you doing?"
"I'm gettin small, man!"
This totally made customers happy since it fixed their problem.
The fix even made in on the work orders. "R&R Pipe. Get Small...$.."
51 - Cindy D
lol. That is very cool :-)
I've got a solution to every problem. Overpopulation?
That's easy. Death penalty for parking violations.
52 - Cindy D
My two favorites though:
He wanted her to sing from her diaphragm.
That could take years to learn how to do.
and,
Those French. They have a different word for everything!
53 - Baritone
Martin on Farrah Fawcett:
"Boy oh boy, I am so mad at Farrah Fawcett-Majors. She is so conceited. She has never called me once And after the hours I've spent holding up her poster with one hand! Geez!"
B
54 - Dave Nalle
If a presidential election can get stolen like it was in 2000 and history decides to ignore it, I don't even want to hear it about Minnesota!
Except that the election in 2000 didn't get stolen. It took the state legislature and the Supreme Court, but the vote of the people was protected.
Dave
55 - Cindy D
(wonders how Dave works with his wacky mailbox and whether all my corrections will have to be public)
wrong date, Saturday was january 10th I have 9th,
56 - Baritone
Dave and his revisionist history.
B
57 - Dave Nalle
Cindy, I don't have any recent email from you. Do you have a new article?
As for 'revisionist' history - if the facts don't agree with the popular version of history then sometimes it's a good idea to revise.
Dave
58 - Cindy D
Dave,
I can't e-mail you cuz your e-mail rejects it.
Yes, news article.
I pended it.
59 - Cindy D
Revisionist history? (looks around to see who you are talking to)
correction on the date in the 1st to last para of the article. I wrote:
Saturday, January 9
but,
Saturday was January 10.
60 - Cindy D
Oh it was B. i c
61 - Cindy D
Dave,
Holy crow. I just looked at idjitwars. I went to James Randi's Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas about, oh, 4-5? years ago.
Met Penn and Teller. Teller= nice. Penn = dickhead.
62 - Al Barger
Just a quick second here to point out the Big Lie that is repeatedly espoused here among other places as it has been for years, now used to justify Franken et al clearly and really inarguably absolutely trying to steal an election.
No, George Bush did NOT at all in any way "steal" the 2000 election. He got more votes than Gore in Florida, therefore he won. There was no skullduggery, no double counting ballots. The dreaded Republican secretary of state Harris did nothing to put a thumb on the scale. She just recorded the votes as reported to her by the mostly Democrat dominated local county machinery, and certified the election results.
The pretty much inarguably true story was that Gore's people tried every trick in the book to steal the election, despite not quite having enough votes to do it. That the other guy beat you in a very close election does not necessarily mean that he cheated.
Whereas, Franken didn't get quite as many votes as Coleman, so Ritchie and his other criminal cronies just made some up, several times and ways as necessary to get the job done. And don't forget the 133 votes that he decided to count that they can't actually physically produce - on the claim that they supposedly had them election night. They're around here somewhere, honest.
The crap that Ritchie and his co-horts have done sure looks like something in the range of election tampering. There's not much way of reasonably interpreting these shenanigans as a good faith counting of ballots.
63 - Cannonshop
Hey, it worked in Washington State, why shouldn't it work in Minnesota?
64 - Brunelleschi
Al-
Incorrect. Journalist Greg Palast has more than enough proof that the Bushies had a computer company purge voter rolls. It wasn't double-counting.
When people got to the polling place-surprise-their name had been taken off. Who was targeted? Basically black neighborhoods, the last place you would find college republicans playing basketball.
65 - Brunelleschi
Dave-
Your choice of words in the two examples reveals the bias you try and hide (badly).
If you are trying to be an objective commentator, you don't say "stolen" in the case of Minnesota and then use rhetoric like "the vote of the people was protected" in the case of Florida.
That makes it sound like you are looking for a job writing copy for the GOP website. (Or Iraqi Information Minister)
66 - Al Barger
Brunelleschi- Purging voter rolls of apparently bad data is not cheating. Trying to STOP voter fraud is NOT trying to steal an election, but just to keep it honest.
Now, getting into the weeds with that stuff, you can say that inevitably some handful of people got struck from the voter roles inappropriately. I remember hearing reports of a few people there at the time who had their names struck from the roles mistakenly because they had the same names as ineligible felons.
But that's not trying to cheat, that's going to be the inevitable error in any system involving millions of people. And even those whose names had been struck had rights to challenge this, cast provisional ballots and such.
But the main point was that the Republicans wanted to purge voter roles of ineligible felons and ex-felons. So your best argument there is that the Republicans "stole" the election by using due diligence to assure than ineligible felons didn't get to vote.
Would you like to argue that Bush "stole" the election by keeping a couple thousand ineligible Florida inmates from voting?
67 - Dave Nalle
If you are trying to be an objective commentator, you don't say "stolen" in the case of Minnesota and then use rhetoric like "the vote of the people was protected" in the case of Florida.
Do you see the header on this piece? It says "opinion" so it isn't supposed to necessarily be objective. I can't speak for you, but I get pissed off and very unobjective when I see our elections being stolen. Similarly it pisses me off when so many people believe a blatant lie about the Florida election in 2000.
Dave
68 - Jet
In your opinion Dave... only in your opinion
69 - Dr Dreadful
Ach...
Florida 2000 was a tie and should have been run off without Nader. Minnesota Senate 2008 is a tie and should be run off without Barkley.
Whatever you do, you're going to end up with a Senator at least half the voters didn't want. Under the circumstances, I don't think it makes much difference who it is.
70 - Jet
Doc, it does when the Senate is going to be instrumental in getting the Obama economic fixes we need badly without Republican "just because they can" interferene.
...in my opinion
71 - Brunelleschi
Dave-Your bias is so corny it really is PR level.
Al-At least you try harder.
Both of you are saying one election was just fine, the other isn't-for political preference reasons.
It's obvious elections are not perfect and never have been.
72 - bliffle
One can hardly blame the dems for being partisan about the Franken/Coleman election when the reps were so ultra partisan in 2000. Gore won the majority of national votes and may well have won Florida if the Florida process had been allowed to run its course. But SCOTUS stepped in and interrupted the FL process with a very partisan looking decision, using a couple of lame excuses, like protecting GWBs equal rights under the 14th, and expediting the result to spare the POTUS embarrassment, neither of which hold up well. This SCOTUS has never been a fan of the 14th anyhow (too dangerous to large institutions) and they waited an awful long time to expedite. But they did have 7 of 9 supremes in their debt.
And the most aggressive partisans in 2000 were the team of lawyers assembled by James Baker. When the reps finally called him he executed with his usual astuteness.
I have no idea what's going on in the MN election and nothing I've read here has enlightened me.
73 - Baritone
Bush stole the election in Florida. (Period) It is also likely that he stole it in Ohio in both 2000 and 2004. Republican supporters cannot fathom and could never admit that their kin would be party to any election skullduggery. Republican political operatives have proven to be as adept at election fraud and political dirty tricks as the worst in history. Many took their cues from the Nixon machine and have honed their craft ever since.
The machinations of the Karl Rove led Republican election thugs succeeded in disenfranchising thousands of voters in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere in 2000 and 2004. They attempted the same crap last November to no avail because they could not muster enough steam to overcome the Obama juggernaut because the majority of voters were fed up with Republican lies and ineptitude.
The Republicans should have lost in 2000 and 2004. They prevailed only because they won the cheating wars.
B
74 - Dan(Miller)
Not only that, but Grossly Wicked Bush is well known to associate with thespians -- some of whom have been observed stealing the limelight -- and demented elderly parachutists. The man has no shame!
Dan(Miller)
75 - Dave Nalle
There's something called "evidence", Baritone. And it just isn't there and what there is doesn't support your repetition of the popular delusion.
Dave