The Uptake

It was 18 degrees below zero in the Twin Cities on Thursday as people left their homes for school or work on the coldest morning in five years. Gov. Tim Pawlenty will give his State of the State address at noon to whoever manages to drag his or her frozen butt into the House Chamber at [...]

Minnesota’s statewide election recount in the U.S. Senate contest between Democrat Al Franken and outgoing Republican Sen. Norm Coleman enters a critical final phase today, as 953 absentee ballots envelopes that were never counted in the first place — by mistake, election officials say — are opened and the votes they contain counted. You can [...]

The Washington, D.C.–based Center for Public Integrity salutes MnIndy’s parent nonprofit, the Center for Independent Media, and the Minneapolis-based citizen videoblogging outlet The UpTake in its “Top 10 Website of 2008″ list today. Citing media “from projects to blogs to websites that help keep our country transparent,” the investigative journalism organization named the entire six-site CIM network, but specifically applauded our sister site in Michigan.

After state GOP chair Ron Carey aped party blogger Michael Brodkorb’s terminology for The UpTake as a “partisan, liberal” blog, the citizen journalism outfit issued a press release correcting an error Carey made — and thanked him for tuning into the same video feeds of Minnesota recount proceedings that media outlets like Fox News and [...]

The UpTake, lauded yesterday by the Columbia Journalism Review for the “multimedia powerhouse” they’ve been providing during the recount, will stream live video of today’s Minnesota Supreme Court hearing. The court will address a request by Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign for a temporary restraining order to stop local election officials from counting improperly rejected absentee [...]

Al Franken may have written for and performed on “Saturday Night Live!” but his campaign has apparently pulled the plug on allowing live video from its now-daily press conferences about Minnesota’s statewide recount. For the last two days, the independent media outlet The Uptake has made video of the press events available on the Web [...]

The Al Franken for Senate campaign is asking Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie to instruct all counties to redouble their efforts to find missing ballots. “There are votes in Minnesota that aren’t even being accounted for, much less being counted,” spokesman Andy Barr told reporters at a press conference at Franken headquarters in St. Paul this afternoon.

Video and more after the jump.

This afternoon, videographer Chuck Olsen of The UpTake held a “press event” (pictured above) in response to another refusal by Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign to allow an UpTake reporter into a public campaign event. This is the third time this fall Coleman’s campaign has barred entry to an official event without explanation.

In a video released today by the UpTake, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie outlined allegations of voter intimidation by Minnesota Majority. Ritchie revealed during a press conference on Wednesday that someone working for Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis was phoning voters and posing as a representative of the Secretary of State’s office. We wrote about the group’s tactics last week, exposing how their attempts at questioning the integrity of Minnesota’s voter rolls was, according to Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, one of the ways the conservative organization was trying to suppress votes in Democrat-leaning counties.

Learn more about the lawsuit here, and watch the video by the UpTake of the press conference and Minnesota Majority’s ties to former SoS Mary Kiffmeyer after the jump.

UPDATED  Ana Marie Cox heard “Arab terrorist.” Josh Marshall is reserving judgment now hears only “Arab.” And The Uptake offers a post-game interview with the speaker herself. But one way to judge whether the woman at the Oct. 10 rally in Lakeville, Minn., told Sen. John McCain that Sen. Barack Obama is (merely) “an Arab” or (alternatively) “an Arab terrorist” [...]