Link to LIVE video feed of the recount process (^)

Franken up by 220+ thus far.

Ha. +1

If Norm loses, it will be because of his glow in the dark teeth.

Good god, Coleman's breakdown would be EPIC

EvilElecBlanket: Good god, Coleman's breakdown would be EPIC

And I certainly hope it's televised. The asshat needs to be publically humiliated.

Why won't Franken just admit he lost already! Democrats are such sore losers!

/mocking all the Republicans whining about the recount for the last month

If Franken gets in it is because he stole the election. This is bullsh*t

Franken +261


Thanks, Onanist.

This is good - they're showing the vote and the ballot being voted on. Can't get much more transparent than that.

Whatever the result, is today the day? If they finish the count today is it all over?

milesl: If Franken gets in it is because he stole the election. This is bullsh*t

Jeff has some advise for you.

Coleman should cheer up. He can make millions by reenacting the cage match debate he had with George Galloway in the senate a couple of years ago. Although a lot of his take will have to go to replaced soiled underwear.


Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.

I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."




whereupon Coleman took a 20 minute recess, ran out of the room, evacuated his watery bowels and didn't return to the hearing

TheOther: advise

Farkin' antihistamines. I even thought about it and still picked the wrong word.

Here's to Al Franken Decade, Part II!

See? If you kick & scream enough people will let you have your way.

BobtheFascist: See? If you kick & scream enough people will let you have your way.

i know, franken's all like "wah wah wah, you should count all the votes. boo hoo hoo, in such a close race we should make sure everyone's voice is heard. uhoh i just made a doody in my pants."

God I hate Franken. But I hate Coleman more.

/voted Barkley

BobtheFascist: See? If you kick & scream enough people will let you have your way.

I can't believe that whiny elitists insists on all the votes being counted. Once again, Hollywood Libs are completely out of touch with real working people

BobtheFascist: See? If you kick & scream enough people will let you have your wayactually count the ballots, democracy is not raped.

FIFY

BobtheFascist: See? If you kick & scream enough people will let you have your way.

And how exactly is a mandatory recount a temper tantrum?

/perhaps Rep. Bachmann will comfort you

Jacobin: Coleman should cheer up. He can make millions by reenacting the cage match debate he had with George Galloway in the senate a couple of years ago. Although a lot of his take will have to go to replaced soiled underwear

Wow, I had never seen that before. That was very nice. I'm sure it sounded like even more like the asswhipping of a naughty schoolboy when it was delivered with a Brit accent.

OK, I find it funny now that Coleman is getting burned on all these challenged ballots that were pretty obvious votes for Franken...

Cyberluddite: Wow, I had never seen that before. That was very nice. I'm sure it sounded like even more like the asswhipping of a naughty schoolboy when it was delivered with a Brit accent.

He's got a thick Scottish brogue. Quite delightful to listen to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3VHAco8y18&feature=related

So somebody help me out, was the Norm Coleman plan basically this?

Step 1: Challenge 1500 votes in territory highly favourable to your opponent, removing them from the final tally.

Step 2: Claim your 200-vote lead is a clear win and insist that no recount or examination of challenged ballots is necessary.

Step 3: Hope like hell nobody examines your challenged votes.

BOTH of these candidates employed a team of lawyers and consultants to devise any and all schemes to win.

If Franken wins, the worst thing it says about him is that he assembled a more competent and clever team.

You fkn "Franken's stealing the election" pansies need to STFU.

Or keep being whiny pussies, whatever. No skin off my back, I suppose.

When you lose your seat first to a professional wrestler, took it back only because he decided not to run for re-election, only to lose it the second time to a comedia, may be it's a farking sign that you're kinda incompetent.

nothing like democrats stealing an election......

bloobeary: He's got a thick Scottish brogue. Quite delightful to listen to.

He is, however, an arse (he was my MP for a while)

Did another Democrat operative show up with some "magically" found ballots that weren't previously counted?

Go figure...can't win the battle of ideas so cheat. It's the democrat way.

submitter: he's not retarded

Maybe not, but the citizens of Minnesota are.

Masso: When you lose your seat first to a professional wrestler, took it back only because he decided not to run for re-election, only to lose it the second time to a comedia, may be it's a farking sign that you're kinda incompetent.

He lost his first statewide election for governor to Ventura.

He won his first (and, so far, only) term to the US Senate because Paul Wellstone died and was replaced on the ballot by Walter Mondale.

Lionel Mandrake: BOTH of these candidates employed a team of lawyers and consultants to devise any and all schemes to win.

If Franken wins, the worst thing it says about him is that he assembled a more competent and clever team.

You fkn "Franken's stealing the election" pansies need to STFU.

Or keep being whiny pussies, whatever. No skin off my back, I suppose.

That "team" would be the entire Dem party.
This is the seat that makes the Senate filibuster proof.
And the idiot GOP let Coleman run again.

Just saves us the $ to prosecute Coleman for the past few years.

MilesTeg: Did another Democrat operative show up with some "magically" found ballots that weren't previously counted?

Go figure...can't win the battle of ideas so cheat. It's the democrat way.

Aw, you're cute.

Minnesota Democrats make Chicago Democrats look like angels.

FormlessOne: EvilElecBlanket: Good god, Coleman's breakdown would be EPIC

And I certainly hope it's televised. The asshat needs to be publically humiliated.



/ not really related
// just can't stop myself from posting it

cameroncrazy1984: MilesTeg: Did another Democrat operative show up with some "magically" found ballots that weren't previously counted?

Go figure...can't win the battle of ideas so cheat. It's the democrat way.

Aw, you're cute.

No, he's a dishonest idiot.

At this point I just enjoy watching conservatives lose.

MilesTeg: Did another Democrat operative show up with some "magically" found ballots that weren't previously counted?

Go figure...can't win the battle of ideas so cheat. It's the democrat way.

Mostly about 3,000 votes some judge decided not to count initially.
GOP simly failed to steal this one correctly.
Got out-stole by the Dems.
What a country!

snocone: Got out-stole by the Dems.

Yeah, counting every vote that was cast. Such stealing that is going on!

PacManDreaming: submitter: he's not retarded

Maybe not, but the citizens of Minnesota are.

Given their elections, their whoremongering football players, and lutefisk, it's high time that Minnesota joins Florida with their own FARK tag.

Lawnchair: FormlessOne: EvilElecBlanket: Good god, Coleman's breakdown would be EPIC

And I certainly hope it's televised. The asshat needs to be publically humiliated.



/ not really related
// just can't stop myself from posting it

More pics!
Anybody got a still of the campaign ad shot at Coleman's house?
In his nice new kitchen.
The one he did not pay for.

milesl: If Franken gets in it is because he stole the election. This is bullsh*t

Try stomping your feet and holding your breath.

PacManDreaming: submitter: he's not retarded

Maybe not, but the citizens of Minnesota are.

You're pretty special yourself.

cameroncrazy1984: snocone: Got out-stole by the Dems.

Yeah, counting every vote that was cast. Such stealing that is going on!

Yeah and whether they were cast before or after the election is of no concern to Democrats apparently.

Oh look! Another 100 ballots for Franken that I just found in the trunk of my car!

GOSLING'S BIG BOOK O' POLITICAL ADVICE, TIP #92:

Never argue that your vote doesn't matter. First off, you can always increase your impact by convincing others to vote your way. Secondly, usually the people who say this don't pay attention to downballot races where that one vote is going to have a hell of a lot more impact. And third... sometimes the race ends up as a long, drawn-out recount. You don't want to be the guy whose vote for 'Lizard People' is held up in the media as the shining example of why the future of the nation hinges on the votes of idiots.

cameroncrazy1984: snocone: Got out-stole by the Dems.

Yeah, counting every vote that was cast. Such stealing that is going on!

Easy there, big fella.
We are same side.
I think.
I know we share same enemies.

Obama acquires the ability to cast superpowers in 3.. 2..

PacManDreaming: Maybe not, but the citizens of Minnesota are.

Only in that it's even a close race. Franken may be a mediocre choice, but Coleman is the epitome of a sleazy, arrogant, and self-serving politician.

cameroncrazy1984: Yeah, counting every vote that was cast. Such stealing that is going on!

Well, you know how it is. Elections are far too important to leave in the hands of the unwashed masses. If too many people vote for the wrong candidate, the results might lend an air of illegitimacy to the designated victor.

Can't have that now, can we?

Lawnchair: // just can't stop myself from posting it

That Santorum family shot will never get old. It's like a revival of "The Sound Of Music", if produced by John Waters.

Brubold: Oh look! Another 100 ballots for Franken that I just found in the trunk of my car!

So apparently you're okay with ballots disappearing, as long as they don't reappear.

Whoever wins, we lose.

/obligatory