SaveWCAL asserts that St. Olaf College’s $10.5 million sale of the former WCAL-FM wasn’t legal. The argument: For more than 80 years, the station was a charitable trust, meaning the college needed approval from its listener-members and a court to close such a deal. 

Northfield’s dirty laundry got aired this way in the WSJ: 

“St. Olaf has looted the assets they were charged with protecting,” St. Olaf alumna Ruth Sylte, the president of SaveWCAL, says. “Donors everywhere should be worried.”

Steven Blodgett, a St. Olaf administrator, says opponents are “harassing the college” with their court fight. “Everybody wants to just move on,” he says.

Like Coleman, SaveWCAL filed a notice of appeal at the beginning of the week. Unlike Coleman, the group took the next step today, filing its actual appeal brief at the state Court of Appeals. St. Olaf and MPR have 30 days to file their responses.

It’s a red-tape-cutting position that seems better suited to R.T. than other possible Obama jobs floated recently for the mayor, who has striven to streamline city government through a 311 service, among other things, and whose support for Obama’s presidential run slightly predated the Big Bang.

Transcript excerpts and more after the jump.

Rybak appeared on MPR’s “Midmorning” program, along with Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, and was soon gushing over the idea of a White House office of urban policy, which he said was partly his:

I worked with them on helping to develop this. … Here’s what they’re doing, and I think it’s incredibly smart — is to recognize that when you try to move something out of Washington and get a result, for those of us who are paying taxes, you need to figure out a way to take all the arms of the government and bring them together. … I have to do multiple stops within the federal bureaucracy. I’ve been at this for a number of years and I’m only now just beginning to get it. Wouldn’t it be great, and won’t it be great, to be able to pick up the phone and have that one person in the White House who can say to people who are trying to solve these issues at the local level. I’m going to pull all these elements together. … Different departments, this person’s the point person.

At the end of the mayors’ segment, host Kerri Miller tried to connect the dots between her guests and the urban policy czar job. Franklin was fairly convincing in denying interest in it, at least until after her current term expires in 13 months. Then Franklin hung up the phone, and attention turned back to Rybak.

MPR: So you were one of the earliest backers of Barack Obama among the cities’ mayors. Are you interested in the job?

RT: Right now I have a great new job. It’s called being a mayor in Barack Obama’s America. And I can’t even believe how excited I am to be able to talk about this work right now. I’m going to be focused on that for a while.

MPR: I don’t think that’s answering the question. Are you interested? I mean, if they called –

RT: I’ve gotta tell you that anybody who asks anything yes-or-no about the Obama administration right now, they’ve put a massive gag order on anybody, whether you’re up or not, is to just stay out of that kind of conversation. I don’t want to get involved in that because I’ve got my hands full.

MPR: So if they called, you’d take the call …

RT: These are things that we’ll deal with way down the line if they ever happen, but I’m working in Minneapolis …

MPR: Maybe you’d rather be governor instead?

RT: I’ve told people that I have to make a decision in this next year about whether to run for mayor or governor and I’ll sometime have to make that. But right now I’ve got the job I wanted all my life, with the president I worked incredibly hard for for three years, and you know, I’m throwing confetti all around — in between pension meetings.

David Lillehaug

“The odds are that something went wrong with respect to counting.”

That’s what Democrat Al Franken’s campaign counsel, David Lillehaug, said this morning about the prospect of a pending statewide recount in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate election in Minnesota. ”We want to make sure that each ballot that was cast is counted appropriately,” he said.

Lillehaug called the 0.03 percentage point margin separating Franken from Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman “just a hair” and “unprecedented” in Minnesota history. A 1962 recount in the race for governor had a wider margin and far smaller number of votes, he said on Minnesota Public Radio.

Those comments came after Coleman spoke publicly for the first time since Election Night, when he told supporters at the state Republican Party gathering that the emerging results presaged a nail-biter (video). At a morning-after press conference, Coleman said he is “humbled and grateful for the victory that the voters gave us last night.” He acknowledged the possibility of a recount “because of my margin of victory,” but added, “It is up to [Franken] whether [a recount is worth] the tax dollars it will take to conduct.”

Coleman seemed to make reference to the bitterly fought campaign as he offered an Abraham Lincoln quote from the Civil War and urged that “we proceed in a Minnesota manner” in which any recount would be, in his words, “a respectful review.” Expressing doubt that a recount would change the result giving him a slim victory, Coleman added, “I commend my former opponents” — referring to Franken and Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley.

MPR has audio for both Coleman’s and Lillehaug’s comments today at its Polinaut blog.

Meanwhile, Bachmann’s ad attacking Democratic challenger El Tinklenberg gets panned by Minnesota Public Radio’s Tim Pugmire who says, the “Facts don’t support Bachmann ad claims.”

“One of the latest twists in the too-close-to-call 6th District Congressional contest is Rep. Michele Bachmann’s accusations that El Tinklenberg broke the law when he was state transportation commissioner. Bachmann uses a TV commercial and a new web site to repeat the allegations. But there’s no indication Tinklenberg broke any laws.”

That ad after the jump.

Photo: MPR

Supporters of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann rallied on a dead-end street outside Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) studios in St. Paul today, where the embattled member of Congress debated Democrat El Tinklenberg for 30 minutes (archived MnIndy liveblog here, archived MPR audio here). At his News Cut blog, MPR’s Bob Collins shows and tells scenes of political theater he judges unrivalled since the days of Gov. Jesse Ventura. The sign-wavers were there for Bachmann to meet and greet before the TV news crews, and a Bible-reading circle convened in MPR’s lobby — “presumably to protect Our Lady of HUAC from getting all contaminated by those evil secular humanist public radio people,” as one Daily Kos commenter put it.

SurveyUSA found nearly identical results in a poll released last night. The survey, commissioned by KSTP (Channel 5) gauged Tinklenberg’s support at 47 percent and Bachmann’s at 44 percent. SurveyUSA tapped 700 registered voters and the poll had a +/- 4.0 margin of error

Both narrow leads for the Democrat are statistically insignificant. But the polls confirm the widespread assumption that Bachmann’s recent “anti-American” gaffe, coupled with Tinklenberg’s dramatic uptick in fundraising, has fundamentally altered the race. Just a week ago the incumbent was widely assumed to be cruising to re-election.

Perhaps tellingly the “In the News” feature on Bachmann’s web site, which trumpets an 11-point polling lead for the Republican, has not been updated since prior to her Hardball blowup.