...is a little closer to resolution. But still maybe a lawsuit away. Details from AP:

The state Canvassing Board was posed to certify the results of the recount in Minnesota's grueling Senate election in Al Franken's favor — but that doesn't mean the race is definitely over.

The board was to meet Monday and was expected to declare which candidate received the most overall votes from nearly 3 million ballots cast. The latest numbers showed Franken, a Democrat, with a 225-vote lead over Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

But after the announcement, there will be a seven-day waiting period before an election certificate is completed. If any lawsuits are filed during that waiting period, certification is conditional until the issue is settled in court.

Coleman, who led Franken on election night, hasn't ruled out a lawsuit challenging the results, claiming there were irregularities that gave Franken an unfair advantage.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer....said Sunday that Franken had won the election.

"While there are still possible legal issues that will run their course, there is no longer any doubt who will be the next Senator from Minnesota," Schumer said. "With the Senate set to begin meeting on Tuesday to address the important issues facing the nation, it is crucial that Minnesota's seat not remain empty, and I hope this process will resolve itself as soon as possible."

Republicans, meanwhile, unsurprisingly are being procedurally scruplous and saying the seat should remain empty until all legal questions are resolved.

I did not once make any "Al Franken Decade" jokes. At least not in this decade.

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit overturned Oklahoma's ban on signature gathering by nonresidents for ballot initiative campaigns. Four circuits have now held that such laws violate the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. "The 10th Circuit correctly affirmed the fundamental right of Americans to travel from state to state to advocate for political change and protected the free and open political debate that is essential to American politics," says William Maurer, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case. The court rejected the state's argument that banning signature gatherers from other states was a reasonable safeguard against fraud.

The text of the decision is here (PDF).

Following on to Michael Moynihan and Damon Root's blogging yesterday on some left-wing Obama regrets, Daniel Larison at American Conservative, spinning off of Glenn Greenwald's commentary on progressive laments about the mainstream nature of Obama's appointments, offers some reasons why non-centrist voters will inevitably live to be disappointed by supporting centrist candidates:

At every stage, the “impractical” purist hears that he should not withhold his support from the marginally preferable candidate under any circumstances. He is urged to be realistic, and so he and those like him do not insist that the candidate make strong commitments on policy positions that are deemed by someone to be out of the mainstream. The candidate pays some minimal lip service to the purist’s “values,” and this is supposed to count for something. In the name of pragmatism, the purist decides that he has to support the candidate, because the candidate represents the best chance of advancing his views, but even before the election is held the purist has already given so much away in the name of pragmatism and realism that he and those like him have no leverage at all. Having yielded and given away their support in exchange for nothing more than lip service, the purists are scarcely in a much better position than before. They can take satisfaction in being on the winning side, but for the most part this means that they will bear the burden if the public turns against the candidate after he is elected and otherwise they will scarcely get much of anything. The purists-turned-pragmatists will receive the blame for enabling the administration in whatever it does, but they will receive no credit or acknowledgement that their support was important enough to merit meaningful concessions to their concens. Having refused in the first place to exact a price for their support, they have made their support worthless and ensured that they will have no influence.

This applies to libertarian support of most Republican candidates as well.

As Brian Doherty noted not so many days—oy, it feels like years!—when it comes to electoral politics, small "l" and big "l" libertarians know disappointment like Charlie Brown knows kite-eating trees.

Yet as those of us who belong to that dwindling tribe of Mohicans who believe in choice not coercion, free minds and free markets, open borders, drug legalization, buyouts not bailouts, and more look to 2012, let's keep in mind two great hopes for a fun, invigorating, and informational presidential race.

I humbly submit that Duke University political science professor Michael Munger, who ran a strong bid as an Libertarian Party candidate for governor in North Carolina, set his eyes toward an even bigger and remote target in 2012, that stationary Death Star known as the White House. Here's a clip of Munger in action:

reason's Dave Weigel talked with Munger here.

And here's another ticket well worth considering, that of LP activist Angela Keaton and blogger Michelle Shingal:

Full disclosure: Keaton is married to Brian Doherty. Shinghal promises "a chicken in every pot" to everyone who follows this simple plan.

Munger and Keaton/Shinghal would doubtlessly run fun, media-savvy campaigns that would delight and edify the masses.

And as long as we're talking about revolution at the ballot box, let's not forget Matt Welch and Dan Haye's mad mood poem for the Ron Paul Revolution (long time passing):

The black dots represent cotton production in the 1860s—each dot is 2,000 bushels. The blue counties went for Obama in 2008.

One of the commenters on the excellent Strange Maps site, whence this map came, notes that the history of this slice of land goes back even further:

These areas are still used predominantly for agriculture, and they actually have a name: the “black belt,” which refers both to the region’s rich, loamy soils and to its demographics.

So, in addition to seeing this swoosh-shaped pattern in political maps and in maps of 1860 cotton production, you’ll also note it in soil maps and in geological maps of shorelines in the Cretaceous Period.

Election 2008, which shattered the ultimate barrier by bringing an African-American to the White House, also turned out to be the Year of the Woman Who Failed. First, Hillary Clinton (D-NY) had the Democratic presidential nomination almost within her grasp only to have it snatched away. From the ashes of her campaign rose Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate—and now, some are blaming her for McCain's defeat. But was her candidacy, in spite of it all, a step forward for women?

When Palin first emerged on the national scene, I thought—despite strongly disagreeing with her views on abortion and many other issues—that she could do a great job of advancing a conservative or individualist feminism that should be a vital part of our discourse  on women's issues. Unlike many other conservative female politicians, Palin unabashedly called herself a feminist. Instead of echoing traditionalist pieties about the special nature of women, she matter-of-factly told Katie Couric, "I'm very, very thankful that I've been brought up in a family where gender hasn't been an issue" and expressed the conviction that "women...today have every opportunity that a man has to succeed, and to try to do it all, anyway." This is a philosophy that vast numbers of Americans can relate to—a cheerful can-do feminism far more practical and appealing than perpetual victimhood.

Palin's rise enraged many liberal and left-wing feminists. At HuffingtonPost.com, novelist Jane Smiley branded her "a woman who reinforces patriarchal power rather than challenges it." (The notion that "patriarchal power" exists in the United States in 2008 is only slightly less delusional than the belief, erroneously attributed to Palin, that God created the dinosaurs 5000 years ago.)   

The backlash was not just about abortion. Pro-choice conservative women, from Margaret Thatcher to Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, have met with similar hostility from "movement" feminists, who regard support for free markets or military strength as heresies and extensive social programs as an article of faith. Some of Palin's critics, such as Katherine Marsh in The New Republic, faulted her for sending the message that women can and should do it all on their own without help from the government.

That's precisely why Palin could have been good for feminism.  In the 1993 book Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century, feminist writer Naomi Wolf argued that feminism had to discard "litmus tests" which exclude too many women. Wolf wrote that the beliefs of conservative and Republican women who embrace "self-determination, ownership of business, and individualism" should be "respected as a right-wing version of feminism." She even suggested that the "no litmus tests" principle should extend to abortion rights.

It is doubtful that Wolf would apply any of this to Palin, whom she denounced as a tool of Karl Rove's sinister cabal. But that doesn't make what Wolf wrote any less true. 

And for a while, Palin did seem like the very model of the modern right-wing feminist. She was not, as some of her detractors sneered, a man-pleasing "Stepford Wife" but a powerful, take-charge woman who was raising five children—not on her own, but in partnership with her husband. That, too, would have made her a great role model.  The biggest feminist issue in America today is the career-family balance, a women's issue that cannot be addressed without getting men more involved. It would be genuinely inspirational to see that the "mommy track" can be a road to the White House—and to see a stay-at-home dad as Second Dude.

Unfortunately, Palin's feminist star was dimmed by a few things, especially the mounting evidence that she was less than qualified for the spot. (Her supporters derided such concerns as "elitism.")  The shielding of Palin from the media, and the McCain campaign's request for a less challenging format for her debate with Joseph Biden, would have been embarrassing for any candidate - but especially for the first woman on the Republican ticket. Palin went from Xena, Warrior Princess to damsel in distress, and her candidacy began to smack a particularly pernicious form of faux feminism: gender-based promotion of the less competent.

Palin's cultural divisiveness made her unsympathetic as well.  While her populist fans accused her detractors of snobbery and class hatred, class warfare against "the elites" drove her candidacy from the start. If there was a central idea to her campaign, it was the superior virtue of the small towns and rural areas that she dubbed "real America" and "the pro-American parts of the country." While rejecting the feminist brand of victimhood, Palin became a standard-bearer for its right-wing equivalent: cultural conservative grievance.

Will Palin redeem herself in 2012 as a candidate with a less polarizing and more substantive message? Perhaps. In the meantime, the good news is that no one regards her failures as failures of women. The bad news is that conservative feminism is still waiting for its spokeswoman. To succeed, feminism needs to learn to connect with a wide spectrum of women and men.

But perhaps the most important thing female politicians can do for feminism is to show us what women can be and what they can do. And in that sense, the Palin's candidacy was only a half-step forward.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at reason magazine. A shorter version of this column previously appeared in Newsday.

....with a prediction of four dark years of economic troubles bringing down the Mighty Obama, derived from our historical expeience with the early '90s recession.

From their money and politics blogger James Pethokoukis:

The "O" in "Obama" may stand for "One Term." For starters, there's a strong chance that when voters head to the polls on Nov. 2, 2010, they likely will still think the economy is awful......

Here's the political and economic math: Let's assume the current downturn turns out to be as painful as the 1990-91 recession. It's an apt comparison..... an imploding real estate bubble, a construction bust, a banking crisis, and a credit crunch. Sound familiar? The nation's gross domestic product fell 3.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 1990 and 2.0 percent in the first quarter of 1991. But even after the economy started expanding again, the unemployment rate kept rising until it hit 7.8 percent in June of 1992 vs. a low of 5.2 percent in June 1990. Recall that in January of 1992, President Bush, running for reelection, told New Hampshire voters that the economy was in "free fall" even though the economy was later shown to have grown at a robust 4.2 percent during the first quarter of that year.

See, it takes a while for people to really perceive that an economy has turned around, especially if unemployment is high. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election on the economy ("it's the economy, stupid") even though GDP had been growing for six full quarters. According to Gallup, 88 percent of Americans thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" in October 1992 with some 60 percent saying the economy was "getting worse." Two years later, it was the Democrats turn to feel the brunt of widespread economic anxiety as the Republicans captured both the House and the Senate. Even though the economy had then been growing for 14 straight quarters and the unemployment rate was down to 5.8 percent, 72 percent of Americans still thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" and 66 percent though the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

That's right. 3 1/2 years after the 1990-91 recession ended, the economy was still weighing negatively on voters and hurting the incumbent political party. Is it so hard to imagine, then, that three or four years from now voters will also be unhappy about the state of the economy and blame the party in power, the Obamacrats?

David Boaz at Cato's blog notes the Onion's Tom Joadesque elegy to the Ron Paul movement, and begins composing, in that great folk tradition of appropriation, lyrics to the tune of the old lefty anthem "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill" to honor the libertarian congressman. Note to all perpetually angry Paul fans: I quote because I care. I assume someone will soon record themselves actually performing these lyrics and have it up on YouTube.

I dreamed I saw Ron Paul last night,
Still running on TV.
Says I “But Ron, you lost ‘em all”
“I’ll never quit” said he,
“I’ll never quit” said he.

“The Money Power beat you, Ron,
they beat you, Ron” says I.
“Takes more than Fox to beat ideas,”
Says Ron “I didn’t quit”
Says Ron “I didn’t quit.”

“In South Carolina, Ron,” says I,
“You stood up to the war.
Then Rudy knocked you back again.”
Says Ron, “But I was right.”
Says Ron, “But I was right.”

From Baghdad back to Main Street,
In every funeral hall
Where grieving moms inter their sons,
it’s there you find Ron Paul,
it’s there you find Ron Paul!

And taking on the Fed Reserve
and smiling with his eyes,
Says Ron, “The bailout cannot work,
It’s time to privatize.
It’s time to privatize.”

From Texas up to Washington,
in every lecture hall,
Where working men defend their gold,
it’s there you find Ron Paul,
it’s there you find Ron Paul!

I dreamed I saw Ron Paul last night,
Still running on TV.
Says I “But Ron, you lost ‘em all.”
“I’ll never quit” says he,
“I’ll never quit” says he.

It was clear within the first few days of her nomination as vice president that can-do Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was a peculiarly divisive political figure. But who knew she would become a one-woman Republican civil war?

Here's George Will, in a Sunday Washington Post column that I shall decorate with a few reason hyperlinks:

Some of the Republicans' afflictions are self-inflicted. Some conservatives who are gluttons for punishment are getting a head start on ensuring a 2012 drubbing by prescribing peculiar medication for a misdiagnosed illness. They are monomaniacal about media bias, which is real but rarely decisive, and unhinged by their anger about the loathing of Sarah Palin by similarly deranged liberals. These conservatives, confusing pugnacity with a political philosophy, are hot to anoint Palin, an emblem of rural and small-town sensibilities, as the party's presumptive 2012 nominee.

These conservatives preen as especially respectful of regular -- or as Palin says, "real" -- Americans, whose tribune Palin purports to be. But note the argument that the manipulation of Americans by "the mainstream media" explains the fact that the more Palin campaigned, the less Americans thought of her qualifications. This argument portrays Americans as a bovine herd -- or as inert clay in the hands of wily media, which only Palin's conservative celebrators can decipher and resist.

These conservatives, smitten by a vice presidential choice based on chromosomes, seem eager to compete on the Democrats' terrain of identity politics, entering the "diversity" sweepstakes they have hitherto rightly deplored.

Meanwhile over at RedState and Michelle Malkin's blog, there is, well, Operation Leper.

An intriguing subplot in all of this has been the role of certain magazines of opinion, and what that might say about a conservative moment that once embraced a distinct style of intellectualism. Here's Mark Lilla writing about "Populist Chic" in the Wall Street Journal:

John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead. [...]

Over the [last] 25 years there [has grown] up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

I am not now and will never be a Republican (nor any other kind of political tribesman), but I have an active interest in seeing the two dominant political parties in this country embrace the maximum amount of freedom. Which, these days, isn't very maximum at all. What's particularly curious to me about this whole "We need new ideas to connect with those Sam's Club voters we never hang out with" meme is that I've seen very little enthusiasm for adopting a policy that has real juice out there in the grassroots of both parties–opposition to the ill-planned, panic-brokered, $2 trillion-and-counting bailout. The effects of which will be with us long after we remember the cruise-ship habits of star-struck opinion journalists.

So sayeth Dick Armey, former Gingrich revolutionary and House majority leader from 1995-02. Armey, who now heads up Freedom Works, has uncharitable things to say about the last eight years of Republicanism:

I don't know if Armey is right about the political calculus of it all, but I do know that if Republicans react to Tuesday's drubbing by embracing less individual freedom in the form enhanced cultural conservatism, they are flirting with the possibility of going extinct. Ask newspapers, for one, how that whole, don't-attract-customers-under-30 thing has worked out for them.

Some Dick Armey hits from the reason archives: Before the 2006 elections he explained why Republicans deserved to lose. A few weeks before that, he kicked social cons square in the be-hind. In 1997, he was interviewed by contributing editor Caroyln Lochhead. And earlier this year he was on reason tv, talking about immigration:

Strangely un-snarky, charming and apt while still funny, farewell to the Ron Paul Movement from this week's Onion:

After piling the last of his Campaign for Liberty signs in the back of a beat-up Ford truck Thursday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) once again abandoned his candidacy for president and rode on out toward the low western sun, but not before vowing to come back to Washington "when [the country] is ready." "When the river swirls and the wind blows, and when uncontrollable inflation forces us to revert to the gold standard, and the Federal Reserve bank is exposed as the unconstitutional, neofascist cabal it really is, you'll see me coming over that hill," said Paul, leaving a dusty cowboy hat and a stack of "no" votes on his seat in the House of Representatives. "But don't you fret, America. If you ever feel like your government is getting too big or too intrusive, just give a little whistle, and there I'll be. I'll be there quicker'n you can spit." Although no one has seen or heard from the Texas congressman since Thursday, sources report the Ron Paul for President campaign has gained an additional $2.3 million in contributions since his disappearance.

My reason cover feature from the midst of the Ron Paul movement, back in February.

With last night's historic election of Barack Obama as America's 44th president, we take a look back at reason's recent writing on the senator from Illinois.


Is There Any Hope For This Man? Assessments of Barack Obama from planet reason. By Katherine Mangu-Ward, Virginia Postrel, Brink Lindsey, Richard Epstein, Bruce Bartlett, Jonathan Rauch, and Deirdre McCloskey.

Obama's Destructive Crime Policy: The senator sounds some encouraging notes, then endorses a failed, familiar policy—more federalization of crime. By Radley Balko.

Obama's Toothless Second Amendment: The senator defends the right to whatever arms the government decides to allow. By Jacob Sullum.

Obama's Wars: Liberal interventionism makes a comeback. By David Weigel.

Obama Kids Sing for Change:The Pyongyang Remix

Partisan Politics and the Science-Industrial Complex: Measuring the Democratic and Republican Party platforms on science and technology policy. By Ronald Bailey.

Yes We Can Pander: Obama's Overlooked Cuba Speech. By Michael C. Moynihan.

Obama's Economic Mythology: Is the middle class really in decline? By Steve Chapman.

Supreme Anxiety: Do the Supreme Court strategies of Obama, Clinton, and McCain offer any reason to cheer? By Damon W. Root.

Beyond the Fairness Doctrine: Barack Obama says he wouldn't reintroduce the Federal Communications Commission's most notorious speech-squashing regulation. But there are more mundane reasons to fear the next FCC. By Jesse Walker.

Green Herring: Obama tries to hide the cost of his global warming solution. By Jacob Sullum.

Change We Can Believe In? A few questions for Barack Obama. By Radley Balko.

Purpose-Driven Pandering: McCain and Obama's self-serving answers at the Saddleback Forum. By Damon W. Root.

The Brave Young Things: What happens to political art if Obama wins? By Michael C. Moynihan.

Obama's Job Fetish: Beware any politician who promises to create new jobs. By Jacob Sullum.

Click here for more articles. And click here for Hit & Run posts.

Click below to watch Universal Preschool: A silver bullet for education reform or a waste of money?, a reason.tv documentary on a program for which Candidate Obama stumped heavily.

My policy disagreements with Obama aside, last night was of course a historic chapter in America's long and sordid history of race relations.  Unfortunately, another civil rights issue—gay marriage—went down to sweeping defeat.

I don't think the government should be in the business of giving its blessing to committed relationships of any kind.  But to confer preferred tax and right of contract status on straight marriages but not gay ones simply isn't consistent with the principle of equality under the law.

Sadly, that concept seems to be less clear to black Americans than it does to other races, even as the country today celebrates the symbolic achievement of electing America's first black president.

In California, the Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage actually failed among white voters, 51-49.  It was the 70 percent support from black voters that put the measure over the top.

Florida's ban would have passed among white voters 60-40.  But it passed among blacks 71-29.

The exit polling data isn't yet ccomplete in Arizona, but that state's ban passed with 56 percent of the vote, but with 55 percent from white and Latino voters.  So it seems likely that blacks were more enthusiastic about banning gay marriage than other ethnicities in that state, too.

Kind of a sad irony if in helping achieve one civil rights milestone, last night's historical black turnout also helped perpetuate state-sanctioned discrimination against gay couples who wish to marry.

(*Headline explanation here.)