The crux of the complaint (pdf), which blogger Brian Falldin says was sent to the Office of Congressional Ethics by registered mail today, is that Bachmann’s email benefitted NADA, a political organization that has donated to her campaigns. House franking privileges don’t extend to aiding political groups in official communications, the complaint charges, asking for an investigation and, if warranted, referral of the case to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct for possible sanctions.

The bloggers who filed the complaint include Falldin and Dusty Trice, who have worked on campaigns for Democratic candidates, and Aaron Landry, who blogs for the left-leaning MNPublius.

In a sign that the term “blogger” may be losing derogatory connotations it holds in political circles — as seen in the recent state legislative session – the trio’s press release brashly begins, “Minnesota bloggers Dusty Trice, Brian Falldin, and Aaron Landry filed an ethics complaint ….”

“When you win an election by 312 votes, there’s not a lot of effort that goes to waste,” Al Franken told Minneapolis Democrats Saturday. “We ran a very efficient campaign.” Franken nominated R.T. Rybak for endorsement for a third term as mayor at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s city convention.

Outside of his own race for U.S. Senate, Franken has the magic touch, apparently: Rybak’s endorsement by the party, though a foregone conclusion this time around, is actually his first. Here is a minute-long video clip (via wr3n) of Franken’s remarks:

A lot of people here have been asking me, “What do I call you?” And the answer to that is: Al. There is only one person in the state who will have to call me senator and that, of course, is [his wife] Franni. I want to thank you all. You know, when you win an election by 312 votes, there’s not a lot of effort that goes to waste. We ran a very efficient campaign. And I want to thank each and every one of you who made our victory possible, and just let you know that I can’t wait to get to Washington and start working on behalf of all of [you? unintelligible].

Franken spoke as a delegate from Ward 7, Precint 9, and received a standing ovation more rousing than the crowd’s response to Rybak. That’s according to Aaron Landry, who also reported via Twitter:

Mayor: Rybak received 75 percent of delegates’ votes on the first ballot.

Park Board at-large (three seats): Mary Merrill Anderson, Tom Nordyke and John Erwin won endorsements by acclamation. (Anderson and Nordyke are one-term incumbents; Erwin previously served as a single term as at-large commissioner from 2002–06.)

Park Board, District Five: No endorsement for Jason Stone, Martin Demgen or Steve Barland to replace incumbent Carol Kummer — amid “chaos.”

Board of Estimate and Taxation: Carol Becker, an incumbent, got the only endorsement for two seats that voters will fill in the fall.

More results:

Park Board, District Two: No endorsement in contest between incumbent Jon Olson and Natalie Collins. (At lloydletta, you can see videos of candidate statements, questions-and-answers and balloting; Eva Young’s commentary here.)

Park Board, District Four: Newcomer Anita Tabb, the only candidate, won endorsement to replace Tracy Nordstrom, who is retiring as commissioner after one term.

Park Board, District Six: Challenger Brad Bourn beat out incumbent Bob Fine. (Via tweets by Downtown Journal’s Cristof Traudes)

Park Board, District One: Liz Wielinski won endorsement with 72 percent of the vote over Michael Rainville, for a seat being vacated by longtime city official Walt Dziedzic.

Park Board, District Three: One-term incumbent Scott Vreeland gained  endorsement again. (Via Steve Brandt, Star Tribune.)

• Ex-KSTP-er seeks GOP chair:

• Minnesota’s best political blogs: The Fix, Chris Cillizza’s Washington Post blog, published its annual best-state-based political blogs list, and Minnesota gets some heavy representation: Eight sites — more than any other state — made the cut, including The UpTake, Centrisity, Minnesota Democrats Exposed and True North. (While MnIndy and MinnPost got several nominations, I’m guessing we’ve both transcended the “blog” category?)

• Aaron Landry tweets a milestone: According to Compete.com, a site that tracks web traffic, MinnPost has surpassed City Pages in monthly unique traffic. (Caveat: In following MnIndy’s traffic on Compete, it seems the site accurately represents traffic trends, but underestimates traffic numbers.)

• Roger Ebert v. Squeaky O’Reilly: Bill O’Reilly’s “Hall of Shame” is out, and on the list of “Media Outlets that Traffic in Defamation” are the New Yorker, the St. Petersburg Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, among others. In a letter to O’Reilly yesterday, film critic Roger Ebert posits that the Fox News talker’s ire has to do with the Sun-Times cutting Billo’s column, an act that drew far fewer complaints than when the paper stopped running Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip about Nancy and Sluggo, according to Ebert’s editor. Ebert, who prefers conservative writer Charles Krauthammer to O’Reilly’s “knee-jerk frothings,” ends with a tale:

Bill, I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?

That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!

“Minnesotans and folks across the country are fed up with Al Franken’s efforts to disenfranchise thousands of Minnesota voters, and the overwhelming response we received to making this information public is proof positive of that fact,” he says.

But not so fast, says Aaron Landry, an MN Publius blogger (and Franken fan) who works as IT Manager at a St. Paul design firm by day. He commented at MDE that there’s “no way that the amount of traffic they got was the cause of the website being down.”

Then he did some digging. His conclusion: “This stunt is a completely fabricated lie.“

Two of the four points Landry makes in his post:

2. Their website has been configured to point at the IP address “1.1.1.1,” which goes nowhere. This isn’t a mistake. They also set the “time to live” on that for only 600 seconds, which means when they choose to switch it back, most servers should only take 10 minutes to refresh. It’s an intentional move so they can manage their timing of the switchover. Most records like this have a much longer time to live. In short, they have configured their website to intentionally point at nothing. This does not happen by mistake and it is clear what they are doing.

[...]

4. As the Coleman for Senate website is being pointed at 1.1.1.1, which goes nowhere, they have no way of tracking how many “hits” they are getting. They had to have made up the “thousands of hits” number because it is technically impossible to track traffic they aren’t receiving.

I left messages on the office voicemail and cellphone of Coleman’s press officer, Luke Friedrich, and called and e-mailed his backup, Tom Erickson. Should they reply, I’ll post what they have to say. I’m also getting in touch with IT experts who can weigh in on Landry’s claim.

Update: Tony Webster, a Minneapolis web developer, explained to me that the IP address the Coleman campaign used prior to today’s “crash” (208.42.168.197) is responsive. Translation: “If the site was truly down, that IP wouldn’t be responsive. If it wasn’t, their story might have validity. In fact, I can see their last blog post today. The title is ‘Senate Trial: Every ballot has a story.’ If the site was down, I wouldn’t see that at all.”

He says he can also see that the campaign has a Google Analytics account.

“If they wanted to be transparent, they could release those logs and graphs,” he said. “Since it’s a third-party source, they can’t modify the data. If they changed that DNS [to 1.1.1.1] to mitigate a problem, you should see it.”

Update: I called Tim Barsness listed as the technical contact for the site. The provided phone number rang to Coleman’s campaign office; while Barsness was not available, the unidentified man who answered the phone would say little, except to inform me that the problem was being worked on as we spoke — and to correct me: “The crash happened yesterday.” That assertion sets off a red flag for Tony Webster: If that’s true, why does he see two entries dated today? He took a screen grab of how the Coleman site’s HTML displays on-screen, taken directly from the site’s server:

[click to enlarge]

Still no response to my multiple messages left with Coleman representatives at 2 pm this afternoon.

Related: ‘Crashgate’ reveals unprotected donor database on Coleman’s site

Beaten by the clock? Sandy Keith ad could cost Coleman $$$.

Yesterday Aaron Landry at MnPublius noticed that Norm Coleman’s latest campaign ad, a testimonial from former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Sandy Keith, violates a law that requires a four-second authorization tag at the end of campaign commercials. Break it and you’re supposed to forfeit your statutory entitlement to the deeply discounted rates that politicians customarily pay for advertising. He also reports that the Franken campaign is calling up stations that aired the Keith spot to tell them of their potential windfall.

By Landry’s estimate, enforcement of the law in Coleman’s case could burn up about $1 million in Coleman campaign funds. Glenn Thrush of Politico picks up the story today, but adds this caveat: “The law has never been seriously enforced – and the decision on the rate charge has often been left up to the discretion of individual stations. In 2006, then Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum made a similar mistake, but the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission declined to force stations to hike.”

The ad is below.

Norm Coleman: “Sandy Keith” (:30)