The WSJ editorial page has consistently proven itself rich soil for baseless critiques of Minnesota’s election and recount process. But your television set still provides the best, terrarium-like conditions in which words may flourish independently of their meanings, as Media Matters demonstrates in its take on Fox News coverage of Tuesday’s Norm Coleman-Al Franken denouement.

[Via Election Law Blog]

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.

In backing Republican Coleman’s constitutional arguments, the WSJ recycles its earlier warning about Minnesota being another Florida (a la 2000’s Bush v. Gore recount fiasco) and tosses in more geographic name-calling for good measure:

And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt. Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota.

The Bemidji Pioneer likewise leans Coleman’s way (the paper endorsed him in 1998, 2002 and 2008) but is ready with strong medicine for the former senator about accepting Democrat Al Franken’s election:

Sen. Coleman’s appeals were necessary and a legal part of the process. But at some point, incessant appeals serve no more than to obstruct the process than to guarantee justice. … The public perception at this point appears not to be one of letting Sen. Coleman fully seek redress of his legal grievances, but rather one of obstructing the Democrat-controlled Senate to prevent it from reaching that magic number of 60 votes. … To continue to obstruct doesn’t bode well for Minnesota, nor for Sen. Coleman’s career, should he continue in politics. It’s time to come home, Norm.

Interestingly, the Pioneer sees the process breaking against both men:

At this point, we seriously doubt the credibility of either Sen. Coleman or Mr. Franken to have a productive Senate tenure for the remaining 5½ years — which could become less should Sen. Coleman continue to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could decide not to hear the case until it convenes in October after a summer break.

The word “credibility” is suddenly popping up in the Coleman-Franken fracas just as the tips of tulips are breaking through the chilly Minnesota soil. Coleman himself used it while holding court with the Star Tribune editorial board:

No matter who wins, one side is going to pound the other side and question the credibility of the winner. If I win, I’ll be shot at by those who say, “Is he legitimate?”

Coleman’s comment, posted and published over the weekend, is in tune with this statement from the same session, released by the Strib last week: “We will never know who won.”

According to the tally kept at MinnPost’s Braublog, newspaper editorials now stand at — you guessed it — a tie, for and against Coleman’s imminent appeal to the state Supreme Court. That’s not counting such out-of-state interlopers as the WSJ, the New York Times, the Las Vegas Sun and the Jamestown (S.D.) Sun.

Rush Limbaugh then upped the hyperbole by opining that Franken and the Democrats are somehow stealing the election. “We did not elect Al Franken,” he rumbled. “He stole the race. They are stealing the race up there blind in front of everybody’s nose.”

But the award for most delusional attack on the integrity of Minnesota’s recount process undoubtedly goes to Dick Morris and Eileen McGann. Writing at Newsmax, the duo forgo facts in favor of the intemperate use of exclamation points. “Watching Al Franken and the Democrats steal this election, vote by vote, is a horrific sight that makes a mockery of the electoral process, the fundamental element in our democracy,” they write. The column helpfully includes two links for enraged readers to make a donation to the Republican National Lawyers Association to help fund Coleman’s legal battles.

Joe Conason has a nice rundown of the madness over at Salon. He ends his column with some salient advice for those accusing Franken of magically rigging the recount results. “If they know of any evidence that would show he has stolen votes or violated any election statute, let them report it to the state law enforcement authorities,” Conason writes. “And if they don’t, perhaps they will at last have the decency to shut up.”

Those edits — which may seem slightly suspect but don’t egregiously defang Cleary’s missive — are more defensible than the St. Paul Pioneer Press’ failure to apply a red pencil to the laughably flawed WSJ column, which ran in full and intact on the PiPress’ own editorial page yesterday.

Joining Cleary’s complaint in today’s WSJ is another Minnesotan’s letter pointing out that the 470-vote swing certified in the recount results amounts to less than two-tenths of one percent of the votes cast:

I challenge you to find any state in this nation that could perform a recount with this kind of statistical result. I think you protest too much, and in the process insult the great state of Minnesota.

With those fixes made and one no-longer-timely sentence dispatched, the Pioneer Press set about breathing clean Minnesota air into a wheezy editorial from Wall Street for the (dubious) benefit of local readers, many of whom will see the column for what it is — tainted and undeserving.

Now the WSJ editorial writers have apparently decided that the local officials overseeing the recount are model civil servants. Their ability to conduct a fair, efficient process, however, is being threatened by the legal shenanigans of the Franken campaign. The WSJ accuses his campaign of attempting to ’steal’ the election by asking the five-member statewide canvassing board to examine absentee ballots that were rejected by local election officials.

Put aside that these ballots have already been ruled on by trained election judges. Put aside, too, the invasion of voter privacy. The real problem of allowing Mr. Franken to conduct his own voter discovery operation is that this is changing the rules after the election has been held. The gambit introduces subjective judgment and political pressure into a voting process that is supposed to be immune to both.

Perhaps I’m confused, but why would examining absentee ballots that have been rejected be any more inherently subjective or prone to political pressure than scrutinizing ballots cast on election day?