As world awaits order in senate trial, sideshows and catcalls continue

As both sides in the Norm Coleman-Al Franken U.S. Senate dispute await the election-contest court’s climactic ruling that could come at any time (like maybe today … please?), here’s a quick review of what else has been going on: partisan sideshows, another newspaper editorial, and a call for the media to call it like it is — Coleman lost. Video and more after the jump.

Both the Republican Party of Minnesota and the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party held press conferences yesterday (see videos below) and steered supporters online to give money, sign petitions, and, in the DFL’s case, watch this video at its new GiveItUpNorm.com Web site:

The Crookston Daily Times joined the Star Tribune, the Grand Forks Herald and the Albert Lea Tribune by wading into the fray with an early end-of-trial editorial, titled “Coleman just wants to win, that’s all“:

Coleman is a politician, so his goal is to win. Politicians seek elected office, after all, so if you’re not elected, you’ve failed a basic requirement of the job. He didn’t want a bunch of votes counted, but now he does. Surprised? Lest we forget, Coleman used to be a Democrat, and then he switched parties. Hey, it happens.

So let Coleman appeal. Let the politician desperately trying to remain in office leave no stone unturned in his effort to win. For politicians, winning isn’t just everything, after all, it’s the only thing.

Pioneer Press reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger, last seen jawing with Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg after a testy Tuesday courthouse press conference, has since backed up her rhetoric in an article today and a Political Animal blog post yesterday. She refutes Ginsberg’s (and Coleman’s) contention that the Republican would win if only more absentee ballots were opened from GOP-leaning precincts:

But, according to a Pioneer Press analysis of the absentee ballots that have been counted during the recount and the contest, the logic that there is Coleman gold in the ballots from GOP areas fails. Of the 1,284 absentee ballots that have been counted since Election Day, Coleman underperformed compared to the political tilt of the cities and counties from which the ballots came.

Media Matters’ call for the media to at long last call out Coleman as a sore loser (as they did much earlier with Al Gore in the shorter-lived 2000 presidential recount) doesn’t go far enough for Ernest Canning, an attorney writing with Brad Friedman at BradBlog. For Franken, they say, “It’s not a ‘lead’, it’s a ‘win,’” and reporters and commentators should stop saying Coleman is trailing in votes and start saying he lost:

But to go one further than (Media Matters’ Eric) Boehlert, we’d ask not why the media fail to describe Coleman as a “sore loser”, but rather, why it is that — particularly since Tuesday’s final count of any remaining, lawfully cast, previously uncounted absentee ballots — the media fail to describe Coleman as the loser at all, much less a sore one.

Here are videos of the DFL and Republican state party press conferences, from The UpTake: