Pop that really nice bottle of champagne you've been saving folks, because the Seattle P-I is reporting that Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history, has lost his re-election bid. To add injury to insult, his ouster came on his 85th birthday. Just think of it as a birthday present for the rest of us, Ted.......

The first update today on Alaska's ballot count: Now it's Begich by 2,374 votes. That's a 0.77% difference between Begich and Stevens, which would not trigger an automatic recount. Keep checking for updates here.......

Approximately 24,000 Alaska ballots from the 2008 election will be counted today, and then we should know if Uncle Tubes/convicted felon Ted Stevens has officially lost his Senate seat. (The only ballots remaining after today will be those votes received from overseas, which, if postmarked by midnight on November 4th, will be accepted until Wednesday.) As it currently stands, Dem challenger Mark Begich is up by 1,022 votes, a difference of 0.35%. If the votes......

As we mentioned yesterday, for the first time in the Alaska Senate race, Democratic challenger Mark Begich took the lead over tubesy felon Ted Stevens by just three em-effing votes. Well, as of late last night, Begich's lead had grown to 814 votes, which is comparatively huge. And things just might get better; Sean Quinn of everybody's favorite number-crunching website notes, "As we've pointed out and has been pointed out elsewhere, the remaining votes come......

A week after the election, Alaska's still hard at work counting their absentee ballots. Prior to today, incumbent US Senator/old coot/convicted felon Ted Stevens' lead over Dem challenger Mark Begich had been 3,257 votes. This morning, the state started to tally its approximately 90,000 votes that remain to be counted, and the gap whittled down to 971 votes--until just now, when, after elections officials had sorted through 43,000 of those ballots, it was announced that......

The most senior (and it's said most powerful) Republican in the U.S. Senate, Ted Stevens was indicted by a federal grand jury for not mentioning the $250,000 in labor and materials he received from a construction company. Veco Corp. actually lifted Stevens' house in the air while a new first floor was built, and no money changed hands. They also threw in a Viking grill. If you have had any remodeling done lately, you know......

The Senate was asked to support the troops this morning via a defence spending bill that included money for soldiers in Iraq, Katrina aid and, of course, drilling for oil in the Alaskan wildlife refuge. Attaching ANWR drilling to a defence spending bill that must get passed was the brainchild of Senator Stevens of Alaska who has been trying to dig up the refuge for twenty years, a move that Senator John McCain called,......

Last month, you remember, there was all this hoopla over the notion of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, thanks to its inclusion in a budget bill. Thanks in large part to public response, and to 20 Republicans who were able to suss out what "wildlife refuge" means, that provision failed. Now, at the 11th hour (and 57th minute) Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska has reinserted the provision into a defense bill......

The monorail is eviscerated in the local election. Boo! But then the Arctic Wildlife National Refuge appears to be granted another reprieve. Yeah! And then a senator starts making noise about more tankers in the Sound again. Boo! What the hell. How about a streak one way or the other to give us a little continuity? Actually, the increased tanker traffic was brought up recently in response to the possiblity that ANWR oil would become......