Car trouble

First gear: I own a 2001 Toyota Avalon, designed in California, built in Kentucky. Over 100,000 miles and runs like new. Is it an American car? Darned if I know—define your terms!

Second gear: A good comment at Megan McArdle's place:

GM and Ford (at least) do make cars that are cutting edge in their categories and that the public wants to buy. There called trucks and SUVs. If GM and Ford were allowed to make what they want and are good at--these, and anything else the believe they can profitably make--everything would be fine. Problem is, they can't just make what they want and are good at. CAFE standards require that they make so many small cars every year. And the truth is, neither GM nor Ford (nor Chyrsler, for that matter) can profitably make small cars in UAW factories.

Every failure falls from this. The bad reputation for quality and poor resale value, for example, result from the fact that the small cars are sold almost entirely on price. The number of small cars GM and Ford they must sell is driven by the number of big cars they can sell and their required corporate average fuel efficiency, which is what CAFE stands for. Thus, the companies lower the price through price cuts, rebates and low interest rates until the requisite number sells. Quality is sacrificed because it doesn't much matter to price-only buyers and reduces the loss on each car sold. For the same reason, the companies push fleet sales, even though those kill their cars resale value.

A couple years ago, all the government needed to do to save Ford and GM was eliminate CAFE. Now more immediate measures need to be taken. But these won't work as long as GM and Ford are required to build small cars in UAW factories.

Third gear: Do you remember when New York City had ten daily newspapers? Let me list them: Wall Street Journal, Daily News, Times, Post, Herald-Tribune, Journal-American, World-Telegram and Sun, Mirror, Star-Journal, and Long Island Press. And the Brooklyn Eagle, from time to time, would make eleven. What happened? Labor trouble. The Mirror went down in '63, after a strike; in '66, the Herald-Tribune, Journal-American, and World-Telegram and Sun tried to merge following a strike, becoming the World-Journal-Tribune, which did not last. "The Star Journal closed its doors in 1968 due to a strike by its workers who demanded higher wages and other benefits. In 1977, the Long Island Press was closed down due to the sad fact that while it became more expensive to put out the paper, less money was coming in, as well as labor troubles."

What's the common element in the newspaper stories? Labor trouble. Union leadership would rather kill the companies that employed their members than back down on their demands.

We are seeing this kind of short-sightedness again from the UAW leadership. Chapter 11 is the way for GM to go, if they can. Ford does not need help. [Inline update: In spite of union workers who are barely working (via).] Chrysler is owned by an investment firm that can redirect money into the auto company, but would not mind getting something from the government, if there is something to be got.

Mickey Kaus has been all over this lately.

To sum it up, too briefly and glibly: Our auto makers have been trying to please three masters, the union, the government, and their customers, in about that order. That's too many masters. It's no wonder they are in trouble.

Update: More on unions that kill their industries, at Chicago Boyz: Killing Cities: Indiana versus Texas. Steel, this time.

Franken is now leading in Minnesota Senate recount

Numbers from the Star-Tribune.

Those Minnesotans have the heck of a sense of humor.

Suggestion for DVD makers

I wonder if it would be possible to put out DVD's and CD's in a package similar to the 3.5" floppy disk, so that the surface of the disk would be exposed only when the disk was inserted in the player, and even then only a small portion of it. Of course everyone would need new players.

But I'm getting tired of rental DVD's with surface flaws that obviously were caused by careless handling of the disk. You get partway through a movie, and then are left hanging. At least with VCR tapes, you could tell pretty easily if the tape was broken before putting it in the player.

This digital information storage is great stuff, but I wonder how much of the godzillabytes that are being stored in one form or another will last even a fraction as long as those clay tablets from Sumer.

Browner appointment is "an arrow aimed at the heart of the American economy"

That line's from Bird Dog, at Maggie's Farm. And it's memorable. I can't get it out of my own head, anyway. Mr. Obama appears to have drunk all of the Al Gore-ian environmental Kool-Aid. The Bird Dog links to a WSJ article: "Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters."

Moonbattery has this charming picture:


Glenn Reynolds links to John Tierney at the NY Times, who asks, "Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday."

The reports appear to have panned out, and colleagues at Woods Hole and Harvard, and some other people in Massachusetts, are excited.

Ron Bailey says that "In his salad days, Holdren was a paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club.… Near the beginning of his career, Holdren introduced with his colleague, perennial population alarmist Paul Ehrlich, the concept of the I=PAT equation. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity's impact on the natural world. In the past Holdren has adhered to the common ecologist's disdain for insights from economics in helping solve environmental problems." [Typo in Ehrlich's name corrected by me.]

More Holdren at Solve Climate. And Luboš Motl isn't being coy: "John Holdren is the ultimate example of the pseudointellectual impurities that have recently flooded universities and academies throughout the Western world."

So Browner and Holdren are Deep Greens. Will they be having policy meetings with Paul Watson to determine the optimum method for bringing the world population down to a "sustainable" level, maybe one billion or so? That's a lot of Soylent Green.

In the meantime, the world is growing colder. Are we are getting closer to Fallen Angels all the time? Let's have enormous, expensive, economy-killing programs to stop the Earth from warming, when in fact the Earth is cooling.

Maybe we need to throw another log on the fire, as our ancestors did long ago. (via, via)

Here previously: Energy is the sine qua non of civilization, or even merely taking out the trash.

Update, Dec 24: a follow-up from Tierney: "My post on John P. Holdren’s appointment as presidential science advisor prompted complaints that I was making too much of Dr. Holdren’s loss of a bet to the economist Julian Simon about the price of some metals. But that bet wasn’t just about metals. It was about a fundamental view of how adaptable and innovative humans are, and whether a rich modern society is “sustainable.” Dr. Holdren and his collaborator, Paul Ehrlich, were the pessimists."

Update: Original source of the picture.

A new use for limericks

Thanks to Barbara Wallraff at The Atlantic for the pointer to the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form, or OEDILF.

"Can you use it in a sentence?"
"How about in a limerick?"

Which has nothing to do with a lime rickey.

I think if I just had the skill for it
And somehow could muster the will for it
I'd rhyme "global warming"
With something alarming
And find room in the O-E-D-ILF for it.

I enjoy occasional blogging
But regular posting's just slogging.
So I'll post on a day
When I've something to say
Or have some idea that I'm flogging.

I'll give this a "poetry" tag simply to avoid having to deal with different tags for poetry, verse, light verse, and doggerel.

Update: I see from the year-end roundup at Making Light that the OEDILF was mentioned there back in July, occasioning a comment thread rich in varied versification: am-phi-brach (n) + am-phi-brach (n) + i-amb (n).

Gleanings

A trojan that mimics Windows activation. (via) And another one: "It's not clear how the initial infection gets to your computer. But once there, it puts hooks into Firefox to allow the spyware to watch and report on access to banking-type web sites. When such a site is accessed, the spyware grabs your login credentials and sends them off to the evil hacker. And that can't be good."

What makes Idiocracy an unlikely outcome: Balls and brains, at the Economist. (via)

"You kids take it easy with that kissing, now!" "Did you say something, Dad?"
Chinese girl gets 'kiss of deaf': A young Chinese woman was left partially deaf following a passionate kiss from her boyfriend. The story says that she will recover, so a little humor is not completely out of place. All the jokes are at Althouse.

50 worst cars of all time. Up to the present, I think, is what they mean, but it's TIME magazine, so maybe it's the 50 worst cars that have appeared in the magazine, or something else, careful about facts TIME is not, and the writing is highly subjective and personal (are those the same thing?), so "worst in what way," it could be anything, and indeed it's many things, to go with many cars. Worth it for the Horsey Horseless alone. (via)

A real Christmas tree is better for the environment than an artificial one. Via Planet Gore.

One of those blogs that's mostly links, you never know what you'll find there: The Message Digest. A few such links that appealed to me: the bacon and cheese roll. Looks delicious, but you would want to have a defibrillator handy. The Phrontistery, where "you will find the International House of Logorrhea (an online dictionary of obscure and rare words), the Compendium of Lost Words (a compilation of ultra-rare forgotten words), and many other glossaries, word lists, essays, and other language and etymology resources." Oddstrument.com, all about, yes, odd musical instruments, or as the author says, "fantastic instruments and sounds from around the world." Christmas Carol Music dot org: free sheet music for Christmas carols, in SATB and lead sheet styles, and quite a bit more, including MIDIs.

Should I be reading Cracked more often?

Or, What, more tentacles?

Back in the days when magazines were actually printed on paper, I remember Cracked was a lame imitation of Mad (the real thing, accept no fershlugginer substitutes). Now, on the Web, come articles like this one: 7 Terrible Early Versions of Great Movies. (Not for kids! Rated R for unnecessary bad language.)

Hollywood is full of screenwriters moaning about how the studio ruined their original vision. But what we never hear about is the opposite side of the tale, where some truly horrific piece of writing gets turned into an awesome film.

In fact, it turns out some of your favorite movies started out as truly awful screenplays that somebody had the good taste to rewrite before the cameras started rolling.

Which movies? Oh, let's see, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Alien … here's the original Alien concept, if you believe it:


Not sure I see the problem. Squamous, rugose, possibly, um, eldritch? Might be more Lovecraftian than stf-nal, yet a fair number of Lovecraft's stories were sf, strictly defined. I like the way the two lower-most tentacles fold into Don Martin-style hinged feet.

I saw this at Ace of Spades. Maybe I'll just keep reading Ace, and let him notify me when there's something good at Cracked.

Another one for the squid fanciers

I know you're out there.


This thing is a Magnapinna. ("Big wing" in Latin.) It was photographed by a remotely-operated sub, a mile and a half below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. National Geographic has video, and more photos. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Concerned about "The Mentalist"

I started watching this because I liked the concept, and became a fan because I liked the concept and Simon Baker, whom I remembered from his earlier TV stint as "The Guardian." Probably the thing I find most appealing about the show is Patrick's hard-ass materialism. As a former phony psychic, he can say "There are no real psychics" and mean it, with a not-at-all-concealed undertone of contempt for the fakes who take money from gullible people who wish that they could communicate with the dead. It was only a few years ago that someone who was only one letter away from running for President was doing this on cable TV. Oh dear, he is still doing it.

So I felt a certain trepidation, a trembling in the Force, as it were, when in episode 7 ("Seeing Red"), a "psychic" presumed to give Patrick a message from his murdered wife, about their murdered child:

What I fear is that Baker's character, Patrick Jane, will "grow," in the way that conservatives "grow in office." I fear that he, having begun as a faker, and having repented of his fakery, will now come to see that the phenomena that he had been faking could actually be real.

I don't want to see this version of Patrick Jane as Houdini the fraud-buster turn into yet another "Touched by an Angel." There's more than enough psychic, spiritual, supernatural silliness in popular entertainment. I'm a science-fiction and fantasy reader from away back, and I love playing with unlikely ideas. As you can tell from my subhead, I enjoy "Buffy the Vampire Slayer;" but that does not mean that I am looking out for vampires, and carrying a stake all the time. I'm also a Sherlock Holmes fan, and Jane is as close to Holmes as I've seen in pop culture for quite a while: the character who is more observant than the rest of us, who can spot the things we don't notice and draw (usually) correct conclusions from subtle clues.

Please, Hollywood; there are angels and psychic phenomena all over TV and the movies, Ghost Whisperers and ghost this and that all over the damn place. Let's keep this one series grounded in material reality. It's just more thoughtful fun without the dei ex machinis showing up to send the plot sideways into woo-woo land.

IF there is more depth to the writing than we usually see in TV-land, AND I am just being affected by my own cynicism about television writing in general, THEN maybe I have misinterpreted this bit. I hope so.

Related: "Patrick Jane, flip-flopper?" Political ad satire.

Laughing just to keep from crying

The Ace of Spades has the report right here. And a lot of comments. Here's the video. Your neighbors and mine, and, you know, they vote. That is, they voted! Oh dear oh my.

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." Thanks, Winston Churchill. We could be doing a lot worse. We really could. And might yet.

Cheer up, now, didn't you see in the last post that there's going to be less grumbling around here. Like it or not.

Update: followup on the video at Power Line.

The old salt

There's been altogether too much grumbling around here, and not nearly enough levity. To try to make up for that, here's a joke that came in the email from Gerry:

The Old Salt


There was a ragged, old, retired Submarine Chief who shuffled into a waterfront bar. Stinking of whisky and cigarettes, his hands shook as he took the "Piano Player Wanted" sign from the window and handed it to the bartender. "I'd like to apply for the job," he said.

The barkeep wasn't too sure about this doubtful looking old Squid, but it had been quite a while since he had a piano player and business was falling off. So, the barkeep decided to give him a try.

The old Chief staggered his way over to the piano while several patrons snickered. By the time he was into his third bar of music, every voice was silenced.

What followed was a rhapsody of sound and music, unlike anyone had heard in the bar before. When he finished there wasn't a dry eye in the place.

The bartender took the old Chief a beer and asked him the name of the song he had just played. "It's called 'Drop your Skivvies, Baby, We're Gonna Rock Tonight'," said the old Chief after he took a long pull from the beer.

The bartender and the crowd winced, but the piano player went on with a knee-slapping, hand-clapping bit of ragtime that had the place jumping.

After he finished the Chief acknowledged the applause and told the crowd the song was called, "Big Boobs Make My Anchor Chain Run Out." He then excused himself as he lurched to the head.

When he came out the bartender went over to him and said, "Look Chief, the job is yours, but do you know your fly is open and your pecker is hanging out?"

"Know it?" the old Chief replied, "Hell, I wrote it!"

I think I know that Chief. Or someone a lot like him.

Warming hilarity continues

So the Russians slipped the September numbers into the October slot, and warmingists were so pleased to see an extra-toasty October that they did not notice until after some time had passed and pronouncements of even more nearly impending doom had been made.

Tom Maguire has a roundup from several sources, with a comment thread that goes on for quite a while: The Hunt For A Red-Hot October.

U-verse post updated

So go there, if that's what you are looking for. I'm thinking I'll keep it all in one post, for ease of reference. For now, anyway.

Some fresh air

A tropical sunrise.

Just to ventilate the place a bit. It was getting stuffy in here.

Even more stale Ayers

On "Good Morning America." Althouse "live-blogs" the first part of the video, and seems to exhibit some buyer's remorse. Hot Air has both segments; did Althouse miss the second part?

It's a book promo! He's promoting his book. And it's a reprint edition at that, of the old book, Fugitive Days. He's trading on his celebrity as an associate of Obama to sell a new edition of his old book about his time as an active terrorist! Wow. What nerve. Or sheer obliviousness, more likely. The man has lived all his life on his father's fortune, while hating his father and his father's/his own whole social class. What a case study he would be for a "talking cure" psychoanalyst! Oh Doctor Freud?

The new book coming is the one with John Brown on the cover, Race Course Against White Supremacy. Whatever that means. Probably something like "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." But with a little extra bit of racial piquancy, a bit of warm spice to offset the insipid white ingredients. The thing about useful idiots is that they don't realize that they will be among the first to face the firing squads when the revolution really comes.

Oh, my. This election just won't be over for a while.

Do I have to have an Ayers tag? I guess so. Dammit.

Confused scientists don't know which way to spin

The headline: Earth would be heading to a freeze without CO2 emissions

The subhead:

Scheduled shifts in Earth's orbit should plunge the planet into an enduring Ice Age thousands of years from now but the event will probably be averted because of man-made greenhouse gases, scientists said Wednesday.

The first line:

They cautioned, though, that this news is not an argument in favour of global warming, which is driving imminent and potentially far-reaching damage to the climate system.

From the middle:

According to the model, published in the British journal Nature by Crowley and physicist William Hyde of Toronto University, Canada, the next "bifurcation" would normally be due between 10,000 and 100,000 years from now.

The chill would induce a long, stable period of glaciation in the mid-latitudes, smothering Europe, Asia and North America to about 45-50 degrees latitude with a thick sheet of ice.

Love those computer climate models. A little further along:

Crowley cautioned those who would seize on the new study to say "'carbon dioxide is now good, it prevents us from walking the plank into this deep glaciation'."

"We don't want to give people that impression," he said. "(...) You can't use this argument to justify [man-made] global warming."

Certainly not. Grants might be in jeopardy!

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, who mentions Fallen Angels.

Update: Followup at the NY Times's Dot Earth blog, with comments from the potentially dangerous James Hansen and others. It's all about the models. Carl Wunsch of MIT says some things about models that could be taken either way, though I doubt that's how he meant it:

If I make a four-box model of the world economy, and predict the US stock market level 500 years from now, who would pay any attention? Climate is far more complicated than the world economy, yet supposedly reputable journals are publishing papers that superficially look like science, but which are the sort of thing scientists will speculate about late at night over a few beers. It doesn’t deserve the light of day except as the somewhat interesting mathematical behavior of a grossly over-simplified set of differential equations. Why should anyone take it seriously? The wider credibility of the science is ultimately undermined by such exercises.

Just what the skeptics have been saying all along! Thanks, Dr. Wunsch.

Debunking a Palin smear

Is this the truth under the smear? So "she thought Africa was a country" was a hoax from the beginning.

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?

I do not anticipate much if anything in the way of apologies from the lefties who seized on this and made much of it.

Second Holy Land Foundation trial ...

… drawing near its close.

My first post on the first HLF trial was Islamic fifth column, back in September 2007. The "lawfare" label brings up all of them. Keep current here.

Update Nov 24: Guilty on all counts.

Veterans Honor rose

If I get another rose bush, it's going to be one of these.

Thanks to Althouse commenter Bissage.

Forty-five inches in Deadwood

Too much of this here global warming going on. It's vital that we shut down all industry now. For the children! Except, you know, the ones in those cars, buried in the snow, out on the highway.

Blizzard pummels South Dakota, stranding motorists

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — As snowfall neared 4 feet in the Black Hills and winds gusting higher than 50 mph continued to howl, state officials had a simple message for anyone thinking of trying to drive in western South Dakota's blizzard: Don't.

And they stressed that the storm, which stranded an unknown numbers of motorists and knocked out power to thousands, would keep causing problems as it moves eastward Friday.

"This is a dangerous storm," Gov. Mike Rounds told reporters in a telephone conference call Thursday evening. "Western South Dakota is basically under a no-travel advisory."

Officials closed a long stretch of Interstate 90, where dozens of vehicles were trapped. Some motorists have been stranded for more than 24 hours, Rounds said, noting that search teams can't get to them because of zero visibility.

"We cannot see a thing in many areas where we're out actually searching for people," said Tom Dravland, state Public Safety secretary, adding that the top speed for some rescue crews was as little as a half-mile per hour.

Solar power, that's what's needed here.

All right, enough snark, seriously now: Since Obama's soon to be in power, and his base is in the cities and on the coasts, will it look like a sensible move to the new administration simply to abandon the interior? For the Deep Greens like Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd, that's a goal. Sort of like "charity begins at home." Population reduction can begin in places where people need power from coal to keep from freezing to death. Knock out the coal, and the project is begun.

Dems coming after 401(k) accounts

Next session, they'll have a bigger majority.

House Dems Contemplating the Elimination of 401(K) Tax Breaks

Congratulations, President-elect Obama

H.L. Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

Perry de Havilland is optimistic. Commenters, not so much (via). Me, I look forward to four years of no complaining from Democrats. (Yeah, right.) Oh, yes, and an upbeat press that sees only the silver linings.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Updates, added as I see them:

JRM, at Patterico's, has an open letter with a few suggestions for Obama: Good Luck to the President-Elect.

Steven Den Beste says it's not the end of the world: "the US is too large and too strong to destroy in just 4 years. Or even in 8. We survived 6 years of Nixon. We survived 4 years of Carter.… One other good thing: no one will be spinning grand conspiracy theories about this administration's Vice President being an evil, conniving genius who is the true power behind the throne." There's more.

Neo-Neocon has some post-election reflections, which give rise to a (mostly) thoughtful comment thread.

Mencius Moldbug is less sanguine: "Basically, dear Americans, this disqualifies you from voting ever again. You've been pwned. You're out." If you click through to his post, be sure to click again on his link to IvyGate, where his question, did Obama actually attend classes at Columbia, is mocked, but not answered.

Peter Hitchens says, among other things, that "the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World." (via Ghost of a Flea.)

Dave Barry thinks that "we, as a nation, need to drink more martinis." Hear, hear!

"Why isn’t Detroit a Paradise?"

Asks Shannon Love at ChicagoBoyz. The answer: Obama type policies and union rule. I have not had many if any links here on Obama's policy on card check, the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama has promised to sign on sight. This would, along with some other things, eliminate the election part of the process when employees of a company are deciding whether to unionize or not.

Via Glenn Reynolds.

"So long, Bill of Rights"

Glenn Richter has a wrap-up column in Sunday's Meriden, Conn. Record-Journal that hits a lot of the Obama low points. An excerpt:

So long, Bill of Rights

Well, it's almost over now. On Tuesday, we're going to pick a new president, and I think I know who he is. He's smart, he's sophisticated, he's young, he's eloquent. And - most important of all - he's cool.

Oh, and he doesn't believe in the Bill of Rights. Other than that, he's just terrific.

He said it himself, calmly and clearly, on Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ-FM on Sept. 6, 2001. He faulted the Earl Warren Supreme Court (which many consider radical) for not being radical enough, in that it "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution."

Not "violate," not "nullify," but "break free."

And what "essential constraints" are those? The only ones in there: the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights - you know, the hard-won protections against tyranny that, for 200-plus years, have stood between us and the miserable fates of countless other nations, from France in 1789 to Russia in 1917 to China in 1949 to Zimbabwe today. The law that tells government what it cannot do to us is what he wants to flush down the toilet.

So we're going to turn this whole country upside down - because Barack Obama is cool.

Did somebody say "personality cult"?

And soon he'll be in a position to do all the breaking free he wants, when he appoints oodles of new federal judges and probably several Supreme Court justices as well, with a bulletproof majority in the Senate to get them confirmed.

Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? Ha! His comrade Nancy Pelosi is already planning to take care of those little problems with the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," which is designed to rein in the only segment of the mass media her party doesn't already have in its pocket: talk radio. (Controlling the blogosphere will be harder, but where there's a will, there's a way.)

The right to bear arms? Don't worry: "Commonsense regulation" will take care of that one.

There's more.

Stolen elections

Althouse had a post on this the other day. The post was brief, but the comment thread ran on for a while, and included a nice round-up on the subject by Michael McNeil, who has a highly interesting blog of his own, Impearls. I was especially pleased by his post on the Antikythera Mechanism, which combines techno-archaeology with sf.

Update: another Althouse post on election-stealing, this one about the Norm Coleman - Al Franken race for US Senate in Minnesota. It's happening before your eyes! CNN has numbers.

Update to the update: Coleman vs. Franken is in recount. CNN's numbers are not the ones you want any more; current numbers are coming from the Star-Tribune.

There's another squeaker in Irving, Texas. "The fight for Texas House District 105 isn't over. As expected, Democratic challenger Bob Romano said Tuesday afternoon that he plans to seek a recount in his bid for the seat that covers most of Irving. He trailed three-term Republican incumbent Linda Harper-Brown by only 20 votes after all provisional and overseas votes were accepted Monday."

And another close one in Alaska, and another in Georgia. After watching the Washington state governor's race last time, all of this feels like more of the same: ballots turning up in the trunks of cars, in offices here and there, and they are always votes for the Democrat candidate. I have no kind feelings for Sen. Stevens of Alaska. If he's re-elected, he'll have to resign tout de suite. But I would like to see an honest count.

And see below, Questions about Obama's fundraising.

Updates: Stevens has lost; the Georgia race will go to a run-off.