Will Marco Rubio turn out to be the GOP’s Barack Obama? Carlos Watson of MSNBC seems to think so, and Rubio could not have asked for a better introduction to a national audience.
California
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles is expected to announce he will run for governor of California any minute now. He will soon be on CNN’s “Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. Be sure to watch it.
Connecticut
Entrenched Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) is getting help from his longtime friend, Sen. Ted Kennedy. The new ad Kennedy cut should help with Dodd’s poor standing back home.
Dodd has been speaking on Kennedy’s behalf as the healthcare debate has moved forward in Washington, and the two politicians have been good friends since they entered the Senate together as young men over 30 years ago.
Iran
Last week we speculated the likelihood that Iran’s recent elections were fraudulent. At the time we couldn’t find any definitive evidence either way. Now there are new studies out that find certain election results to be more than a little fishy.
The first comes from upcoming NYU political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco who find that the frequencies of certain digits at various polling places in Iran are extremely unlikely to be accurate. Overall, they say that the way Ahmadinejad won only has a one-in-two-hundred chance of being legitimate.
The second study comes from the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University in the UK. The most glaring problem they notice is that two entire provinces reported turnouts of over 100% - and they were both Ahmadinejad-supportive.
They also found that…
“In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.”
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com wonders if these new concessions by the Ayatollah's government about voting irregularities are the first sign that Ahmadinejad could get thrown under the bus.
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