There is no chain of command.  The title of "Commander in Chief" that the president bears does not mean either that he is some sort of generalissimo, or that the rest of us, or even officers of any of our governments can only act under his orders, or are his subordinates in any sense.

Practically speaking, even insofar as military and emergency response personnel do work for the president or some governor, usually under considerably less than military discipline, they do not need specific direction from this person before they can act to respond to an emergency.  We won our first and by far our most difficult war, the Revolutionary War, without any chief executive of any kind at any sort of helm.  We could manage as well, in war or natural disaster, if every governor and the president were to all to run off to Argentina simultaneously and permanently.

Of course there is a tendency to pretend that we are all soldiers in some sort of permanently armed camp instead of free citizens of a democratic republic, that the president is our Commander-in-Chief who must receive our unquestioned obediance lest we all be killed in our beds by al Qaeda, fire, or flood.  But I thought that our side was against that tendency.  Let's not use this profoundly erroneous view of the form and function of government just to score some cheap points off the other side.  The governor wasn't AWOL because civilians can't go AWOL -- period, end of story.
 

News items just before the election mentioned that Mousavi's camp was complaining that the MOI had forbidden their party's monitors from observing at the polls.  Has such monitoring been a standard practice in recent Iranian elections, or was this some new arrangement that the MOI reneged on?  Or were these reports simply reflecting the fact that Iran has never had partisan observers allowed, anymore than it has allowed foreign observers, but that the Mousavi camp was trying to shame the govt in the Western press by dramatizing the govt refusal of their demand for what would have been a totally new practice?

Allowing partisan observers of the voting and tallying is an important safeguard of an election's fairness, because it limits vote-rigging to the small margins the election officials can get away with if witnesses are present.  It is probably a much stronger safeguard than foreign observers, since I would imagine that the local opposition parties could get volunteer observers into many more polling places than even the best-funded foreign efforts.

I wonder what other safeguards the Iranians do or don't practice.  One fundamental way to keep the reported vote tallies honest, is to also release pollbook data, how many people from the pollbook of registered voters showed up to vote and had their names crossed off.  Of perhaps even greater importance is releasing the list of people who had their names crossed off.  This is how you prevent election officials from voting on behalf of the dead, or people who were in Kansas on election day when they supposedly voted in Bam.  Even if you don't have observers making sure that the way the people who actually voted is tallied correctly, just having the list of voters made public would keep, say, a precinct in Lurestan from being reported 90% for the govt candidate, when you can get 70% of the people who voted in that precinct to sign affidavits that they voted for the opposition.

I think it's awfully shortsighted to complain that the number of Republcans supporting the stimulus bill was zero after the persuasion campaign.  Had there been no campaign to make nice with them, the number of Republicans supporting the bill, this x, would have to have been less than zero.  X would have equalled a negative number.  That might not sound so bad, but what if this negative number had been accosted on the Mall and forced to have its square root taken?  Then we would have had imaginary numbers on Capitol Hill, and I think this great nation is just not ready for that.

Right-wing policies didn't just fail to encourage savings, they decoupled savings from any useful investment in the economy by deregulating the markets.  As a result, I'm not sure you should consider higher savings a necessarily good thing, since money poured into secondary stock markets, much less nth order derivatives, doesn't just fail to capitalize growth, it actually fosters economic weapons of mass desruction as it pyramids itself into exploding bubbles.

What we need is truly confiscatory taxation on earnings (from all sources) beyond what is at all likely to be used for consumption.  Then we need to collect back taxes by actually confiscating the estates of the wealthy, I mean what little is left after the bubbles have burst and destroyed most of their accumulated ill-gotten gains.

I'ld be satisfied if I simply avoided going to Hell in 2009.  Anything else would be cherries on top.

He may have had other reasons for the appointment, but the third and fourth possibilities listed, a Senate investigation and court cases arising form the appointment, are more likely to have provided the decisive reason for Blagojevich's action.  The more this whole matter is investigated, litigated and generally aired in other forums, the greater likelihood that evidence the prosecutor could otherwise use to convict Blagojevich will end up excluded, or witnesses will be rendered uncooperative because they have already been given immunity by these other forums.  It's how many of the guilty in Iran-Contra got off.

I'm not sure such a thing exists.  If they want anonymity, they do a voice vote.  But I believe even a minority can force a recorded vote.  I can't imagine the Reps allowing a voice vote to deny Coleman "his" seat.  They will want to howl with outrage over the Dems stealing a seat, no matter what the facts of the matter, and will not give up the opportunity to get Dems on the record.

Maybe you're thinking of votes within the caucus, which I just found out with this Lieberman committee chairman controversy, can be secret.  I think it's pathetic, even for the caucus, that these tribunes of the people would be able to conceal their votes.  But I don't think, yet, that we've gotten to secret ballots on actual Senate votes.  Give it a few years.

I don't disagree with you.  Recognizing the limits of accuracy in counting is not the same as the nihilistic idea that, since you can never be totally accurate, no sense even trying to get a more accurate count than the initial count.  With better standards, and enough time to be more careful (In VA, the initial count has to be on a judge's desk by noon the day after Election Day.  Yikes!), of course you can do better.  And, as long as we're stuck with the " a one-vote win is a win" standard, we have to make every effort to meet that standard.

My point is that we should work to change the law, so that the next time such a freakishly close result happens, we won't have to spend so much effort working at an impossible standard, only to see the final result be the moral equivalent of a coin flip.  The new standard should be that the election gives us a result outside of the empirically tested limits, or the election is declared to have no winner, and a new election is set.  Sooner or later, the voters will get off their can, and vote for somebody by a discernible majority, one that you don't need an electron microscope to locate.

Well, you hand count playing cards too, and I don't trust my tally with even 52 of them.  Yes, there are all sorts of ways, mechanical and organizational, to extend the reliability of a count.  But adding machines and other people to split the work of counting, just adds another layer of possible mistakes, as you eventually have to add together the results from many hands, or machines.

I've had the benefit of actually participating in the voting process at polling places, and then at the official tally after Election Day, in my jurisdiction, and it proves what they say about sausage.  If you like to eat sausage, you probably don't want to be in the kitchen when they are making sausage.  If you want to believe that elections involving 2.9 million votes can have a winner determined down to the "win by one vote" standard, you should probably avoid the actual voting, vote counting, and tallying process.  It's not that, in my jurisdiction at least, the voting officials are at all dishonest, stupid or lazy.  It's just that no one can count 2.9 million of anything and produce results you can count on down to a one vote difference.

Some misunderstanding

The Senate is the final judge of all elections to the Senate, as the House is to elections to the House, and both together are to presidential elections.  This is in the Constitution, Art I, sec 5, and Art II, sec 1.

There is no special provision for ties to be decided by the Senate.  MN law would have to have the determination for how MN decides ties.  But after MN law has its say, and, if MN takes too long after 1/03/09 to complete its process of deciding who their state law says won this race, then the Senate, as the final step, accepts or rejects the MN decision, or substitutes its own.  This happens, formally, with all Senate elections.  But it usually is just a formality, and the Senate accepts the result reported by the state.

Where I think the confusion may have arisen, is in what I said about this going to a Senate vote only if it's really close.  That's a practical point, in that the loser wouldn't challenge, all the way to the Senate, a clear result, as certified by MN.  But a result of less than one hundred out of the 2.9 million votes cast, both will not have made its way through the MN courts by 1/03/09, or even anytime soon thereafter; and will rest on such shaky grounds that the Senate would even consider not accepting the result of the MN state electoral process.  My point is that only a really close result will be practically challengable in the Senate, not that the Senate can only decide really close results, or that it doesn't, formally, act as the final decider in every Senate election, by accepting the state result.  Sorry if I didn't express that clearly.

GFORD,

I don't know of any jurisdiction that does what you ask about, hold a run-off election to resolve elections just because the result is very close.  Some places will do a coin toss to resolve an exact tie.  Exact ties aside, my understanding is that every jurisdiction in these United States goes with the theory that an exact count is both possible and meaningful, that a winner, if even by only one vote, can always be determined.

Of course this theory is nonsense, which I imagine you recognize, thus your question.  Common sense, if not the Law, recognizes that you can't get any process, industrial, scientific, electoral, or otherwise, so precise and accurate that it's results are meaningful down past a certain tolerance.  Mass-produced sausage is allowed to have some extremely small percentage of content by weight be rat droppings because no one, no matter how scrupulous, can, categorically and without fail, keep rats away from sausage fixings under mass production conditions.  The MN vote registering, tallying and counting process has some knowable tolerance for error, some level below which it's results cannot reliably, to whatever level of confidence you wish to specify, distinguish who got more votes in an election.  The process could be tested empirically, both periodically and every time the process changes, to arrive at this knowable tolerance level.  As you would express the tolerance for rat droppings in sausage in parts per million (ppm), you would express this tolerance of the MN electoral process in vpm.  If a MN election was close to within that vpm, you would declare that election inconclusive and hold another.

We don't know the vpm, at a reasonable confidence level, down to which the MN electoral process can be trusted to produce meaningful results, because they dind't do the empirical testing beforehand.  But pretty clearly, the process is not capable of producing a reasonably clear answer if the vote counts differ by less than a hundred out of the 2.9 million cast.  If you're like me, you don't trust yourself to be able to count 52 cards so reliably and reproducably that you rely on a simple count to be sure you have a full deck, as opposed to turning the cards over and sorting them by suit and value.  No doubt, the MN electoral process can reliably do better at counting votes than my abysmal 20,000 cpm (cards per million) tolerance level, but it surely can't discern a winner down to 35 vpm with any confidence.

If we want our electoral process to be playing with a full deck when it decides who won an election, we need to abandon  the unattainable standard of "a win by one vote is a win", and admit that the process does not have an infinite ability to tally and count accurately down to the nano-level.

I think it's pretty clear that this race isn't going to be settled by the recount process, or even by the legal contest that will follow in the courts.  It's going to be too close, so close that the losing side will not give up until it goes to the 111th Senate for the final decision.

Everything that both sides are doing now is geared to success in that final forum.  Of course Coleman desperately wants to be ahead in the total at the stage just before it goes to the Electoral Board for adjudication of the challenged votes.  This will be the last vote total that can be attributed, however strained the attribution, to purely the electorate's will, before the Electoral Board and the courts get to it.  

Coleman has to have something to hang his hat on to get the 9 or 10 Democratic Senators he will need to vote his way.  The 111th Senate will convene at either a 59-40 split, or a 58-41, depending on how GA goes.  We can probably take it for granted that all of the Republicans will vote for Coleman.  The final tally will be so close, that, whichever way it goes, Coleman having been ahead before the recount is sufficient cover for lock-step Republican support, given that their caucus is inclined anyway to lock-step and rubber-stamping whatever is good for their party.  Bringing over Dems is the tricky part.  Our caucus is not so given to lock-step support for our side, so it is doable, under the right conditions.  Franken will, at a minimum, have to be ahead after the Electoral Board adjudicates the challenged ballots, or at some point in the subsequent legal contest, before he would even try to bring it to the Senate, because he'll lose under any other circumstances.  But even if he is ahead, it won't be by enough to put this past Coleman's ability to work some of his Dem colleagues to cross party lines in what is supposed to be a technical, non-partisan judgment.  

Coleman has to have a fig leaf for the Dems who might be inclined to prefer a known quantity, even of of the other party, to Franken, whom some will see as a loose cannon.  Coleman may already owe them favors that they will never be able to collect on if he loses, and he certainly will owe them new favors if they are the difference to his winning.  It's not as if he'll have to work against a strong partisan interest in whether the junior Senator from MN is a Dem or a Rep.  Dem control of the Senate is not close to being threatened, however this race is decided, and only fairly liberal Dems will see Franken as significantly more likely to vote their way on issues they care about than Coleman, since he is what passes for a moderate in their party.  It's true that a Martin win in GA would make the MN race decisive for the Dems reaching 60, and that would push things a bit Franken's way.  But Dems are so diffident about the lock-step thing, that, if that's the scenario, Martin has won, and it's 59-40 going in to the vote on MN, that there will be some countervailing impulse to vote Coleman just to show that we're not grasping for power.  God forbid that people elected to lead the country should be too eager to, you know, lead the country.

Please don't refer to canvassing as "fake polling".  The point of canvassing is decidedly not to predict the outcome, it's to identify voters who will vote our way (and maybe do some persuasion if the voter seems amenable), so that identified supporters of our side can ge gotten to the polls on election day.  Reputable canvassers announce up front who they are, that they work for one party or candidate or another.  They do not actively pretend to be taking a poll.  And if the voter seems confused on that point, a reputable canvasser supplies corrective information.

Isn't it great?

I have no idea whether it makes most tactical sense for them to try to amputate their presidential candidate, or try to carry on with him and hope the gangrene doesn't spread proximally.  That the question even seems slightly relevant is a pretty good indicator that anything they do will be wrong.

Let their side conduct the circular firing squad for once.

People make all sorts of excuses to travel to Omaha for the fabulous retaurants and the scinitillating theater, bar and gambling scenes.  Of course Palin can't afford to be too frank about that, given the evangelical vote she's counting on, but you can be sure that the reason she's going to Omaha is the irresistable siren song of its night life.

Next up -- an eco-tourism jaunt to Cleveland explained away as a visit to relatives.  Yeah, right!  Wink, wink...