Up in Minnesota, the state-required recount process is continuing, with over 80% of the votes left to be counted or recounted, and already Norm Coleman’s margin of lead is shrinking. The margin is now down to 172 (it had been 215), and that’s only after a conservative area of the state was recounted, so Al Franken’s campaign is hopeful.

If Franken is declared the ultimate winner, that would bring Democrats hold of seats to 59, one short of having a fillibuster-proof majority, if one counts Joe Lieberman as a Democrat.

The only other state besides MN which does not yet have an official declared winner is Georgia, where a state-required run-off election is being held after neither the Democrat Jim Martin, nor the Republican incumbent, Saxby Chambliss, got 50% of the vote. Chambliss did however lead Martin in the November 4th election by a few percentage points, so Martin faces an uphill battle, which will be decided on December 2nd when the runoff is held.

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Ayers, now a college professor and respected local education advocate, apparently received a large volume of death threats every time his name was mentioned by the McCain campaign, he told party attendees.

Those at the gathering apparently wore buttons that read “I pal around with Bill Ayers.”

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I get a kick out of that.

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The local buzz here in Chicago is that there will be pressure on Blago to appoint another African American to the seat since with Obama leaving the Senate, it will otherwise go back to being an almost all white body (there are three Hispanic senators and two Asian-American senators, but no other African Americans in the upper chamber). Several names have been mentioned as possible candidates, including Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, Rep Jesse Jackson Jr and State Sen Kwame Raoul (the latter of which was actually appointed to Obama’s state senate seat in 2004 after he left for the US senate; I also interviewed him recently for a documentary I’m working on).

Additionally, word has it that Blagojevich may be making his decision based on who he thinks will work the hardest to help him get re-elected in 2010. As he’s consistently ranked the least popular governor in the country (and is even more unpopular than George W Bush here), that’s quite a tall order.

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Many of us who have been reporting for years on the declining demand for the daily miracle — in newsprint anyway — were both pleased and a bit perplexed to see Wednesday’s mad rush for Barack Obama editions.
[…]
Of course, watching the New York Times print 50,000 more copies, and the Chicago Tribune 200,000 and USA Today 380,000, one couldn’t help think that some kind of saving grace had reached the ever-declining print circulation world. I mean, when was the last time a major daily like The Washington Post put out a print extra? Some 600,000 copies worth, at that?
[…]
Part of the draw also had to be the great Page One designs that many of the Wednesday editions had. The Chicago Sun-Times stood out for its elegant portrait of Obama with the small “Mr. President” headline, while others used large type and moving photos to bring home the historic and poignant elements of this moment.

Of course, this one-day extravaganza for print copies that provided a nice bump for many newspapers — involving their revenue and egos — will not last. Many of the same people who stood in line or grabbed for copies of The Washington Post, New York Times and even the Detroit Free Press, do not subscribe to those papers and likely will not pick up another printed paper ever again.

Guilty as charged. I’m one of those who scrambled to get copies of papers I won’t ever to subscribe to. Thanks to a friend to whom I now owe a big favor, I managed to get ahold of both the local November 5th editions of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times (which are now being sold on Ebay for several times their newsstand price).

It was pretty interesting though to see people here in Chicago and elsewhere scramble to get ahold of newspapers that in many cases still had wet ink, as publishers rushed out multiple extra printings. When was the last time you saw that?

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The crowd begins to gather along Wabash behind the Hilton Chicago.

Another small crowd begins to form along East 8th street.

The media was camped out on the north-western corner of Wabash and East 8th.

Biden’s motorcade takes off south down Wabash. Biden was in a white car, but I’m not sure if this is the one he was in or not. There were several of these white sedans carrying his entourage.

You can faintly see a Secret Service agent in one of Biden’s motorcade’s SUVs holding a gun in this picture.

Just before Obama steps out, Secret Service agents gather outside the Hilton’s South West service entrance. Another uses binoculars to scope out nearby buildings for snipers.

Obama steps out, wearing a blue tie, waving to the crowd, which had broken out into a spontaneous chant of “Yes we did! Yes we did!”

Another terrible blurry photo of Obama waving as he steps behind a Secret Service SUV.

The crowd surges past the police line to get a better look at the black SUV he’s in as it drives away.

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