election contest

The Federal Election Commission didn’t tell Al Franken what he wanted to hear about setting up his own fund to cover election-contest legal costs. Franken’s legal rhetoric about “no end in sight” didn’t hurt his case, a commissioner tells MnIndy, but the specter of future recounts did.

“We will be seated,” Al Franken told a gathering of young Democrats in Minnesota today. “And by ‘we,’ I mean me.”

Joe Friedberg, the star attorney who gave the closing arguments for Norm Coleman last week in Minnesota’s Senate trial, predicts his client won’t prevail in the election contest without appealing to the state Supreme Court.

The last day of the Minnesota Senate trial played out like the closing minutes of a Final Two basketball game. With the courtroom’s wooden bleachers packed with fans and reporters, Al Franken and Norm Coleman each gave the ball to the man on their legal team who they figured had the best shot making closing arguments.

It’s apparently hard for reporters to find an ordinary voter to comment on the extraordinary struggle over Minnesota’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. The latest example: The Associated Press cited one person — who didn’t vote for either Al Franken or Norm Coleman — in its story Monday about Minnesotans being “tired” of the Senate battle. [...]

Where do national Republican leaders, who are helping bankroll Norm Coleman’s election contest fight, see Minnesota’s Senate saga going? “We’re in completely,” National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) tells The Politico. “We’ll support Norm to the bitter end.”

File this under “It Can’t Hurt to Ask”: Al Franken’s lawyers plan to request Friday that judges dismiss Norm Coleman’s lawsuit contesting the Minnesota U.S. Senate election recount that put Franken up by 225 votes.

Former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman said the judges hearing his contest of Minnesota’s statewide recount are “going to have to reflect on” whether a do-over election is needed. Meanwhile, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele accused Al Franken of “stealing Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat,” and Franken’s lawyers began to make their case in court, with witnesses whose signature mismatches were straight out of a Sherlock Holmes story.

“Set aside the election.”
Those four words appear as the “most appropriate remedy,” in a letter that Norm Coleman’s lawyer, James Langdon, sent to the judges Monday in the former Minnesota senator’s election contest trial. The letter cites eight cases from other states in which courts found “the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin between the candidates.”

The Minnesota-bred Coen Brothers made a mock clean-coal ad for the Reality Coalition (via raw story):

Like Al Franken, Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. People say, wow, something in the water? Actually, yeah: coal pollution.