Across the Great Divide

It's Not About Norm, He Says.

I say this humbly, I don't spend 30 seconds worrying about my political future.
— Norm Coleman

Sort of like anyone who has no political future.

Coleman says:

There are thousands whose votes haven't been counted, and this is the one path to make that happen.

But is Coleman truly interested in solving a problem he didn't perceive until it became apparent a lawsuit was his only hope of having political future?

Let me remind you of his legal stance back when he held a lead before the recount. His lawyer said at the time:

[Minnesotans should be] fearful of the Franken Campaign’s efforts to force rejected and spoiled ballots into a recount for the first time ever in the 150 year history of our state.

Coleman was alarmed at the prospect Franken might unleash and army of lawyers "using the courts, instead of the ballot box, to determine the outcome of a recount."

Now there's been a recount, an election commission finding and judicial ruling (with prejudice!) against his claims.  And he will go forward with that well-rehearsed sorrowful look as he continues his own effort to force rejected ballots into a recount.

But remember, he's doing it for us.

What's the Opposite of a Mandate?

I've resisted writing about the Senate recount because it has been the most over-reported and over-analyzed unfinished story in Minnesota for the last month and then some. And that will probably continue to be so, on into the new year.

Now that it looks like the margin of "victory" could come down to only about 50 votes out of more than 2.9 million cast in the race, I thought I'd provide my two cents.

Here's a visualization of that difference Download pdf. Every time I tried to load the file into this post, things started to go haywire — as they often do with large numbers. The pdf will allow you to zoom in as you search.

Each dot represents 50 votes cast, there's one red dot that stands for the margin between Coleman and Franken. (It's a little larger than one dot, if you discount the Barkley votes from the total.)

[In assembling the graphic, I did a trial count of a random number of dots I'd pasted together.  The total count — 17, 136 — was eerily similar to the percentage of votes I was calculating — 50 out of 2,918,885 or 0.00001713. In the old days, this would have been enough to make me run right out and sacrifice a goat.]

Happy hunting for the margin of victory!

Tragic Mutual Incomprehension.

[Mike Connell, Karl Rove's chief IT consultant] had recently said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would "throw [him] under the bus." Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to "take the fall."

– Rove's IT Guru Warned of Sabotage Before Fatal Plane Crash; Was Set to Testify

A man is ready to talk about the Ohio 2004 election, the White House email system and his efforts on behalf of Karl Rove. He's been deposed on the Ohio voting fraud case and has told his lawyer and a reporter that he was afraid.

On Friday, he doesn't go under a bus, but his private plane does go down into an Akron neighborhood as he attempts a flight to Washington, DC.

I am not one of those Wellstone plane crash conspiracy theorists, and I don't have any reason to believe there was sabotage here, either. Small planes do tend to crash. But this is going to put quite a crimp into several investigations.

*****
I guess the good thing about Karl Rove and Dick Cheney not being convicted of anything is that the president can't pardon them on his way out the door.  The unitary executive pardoning the crimes of the unitary executive branch would be a fitting close to a disastrous era, though.

*****

Speaking of pardons, now Galileo gets rehabilitated.

The Vatican didn't have a bus to throw him under — that they didn't, even during the Inquisition, is a measure of his moral gravity and celebrity, not to mention that he didn't do stem cell research —  so Galileo just got home detention for his heresy.

In 1992, Pope John Paul declared that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."

Across the Great Divide is a bit catchier than Tragic Mutual Incomprehension, so I think I'll stick with the current name, but I may cop the term.

[The head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture] said Galileo's writings offered a "path" to explore how faith and reason were not incompatible.

You can easily read those writings nearly 400 years later, which, assuming we still have readers around four centuries hence, is unlikely to happen to anything being written today. His work is not, however, available on Kindle.

Fun with Voting.

 

MPR has a nice feature up that allows you to play election judge in the Franken-Coleman Senate recount.
It shows 11 disputed ballots and asks for your ruling. Then you can compare your judgment with others. More than 100,000 had weighed in on some of the ballots.

The Real Reason Coleman's Party is Worried.

This letter to the Star Tribune from a election judge  gets closer to gist of the senate vote recount than all the rehashing of various charges being thrown around in the rest of the paper. [Emphasis mine.]

Kudos to Jeff Davis ("Why is it easier to vote here than it is to register a boat?" Nov. 9) for the luxury to be able to afford and register a boat and to haul it around in his SUV. As a Ramsey County Registration election judge over the past five years, I have seen firsthand the challenges in providing the necessary documents to register to vote.

Lack of even the $18 to change an address on a state ID, or the fact that renters do not receive an electric or water bill, make the voucher system a savior for those who wish to partake in their democratic right.

Economic hardship and unstable residency should not prohibit someone from having his or her equal say in the election process. I am proud to live in a state that works hard to assure the right to vote to all eligible citizens.

BETHANY WHITEHEAD, ST. PAUL

I happen to know a young couple who, through no fault of their own, had three different residences between September 1 and election day. If they had shown up in their new precinct to vote, three days after they moved in, they would have nothing to show they were properly there.

They work three jobs between them. After paying rent and a damage deposit at their new place and moving in, they certainly didn't have the time or the $36 to go change their driver's licenses before the election.

I honestly don't know who they might've voted for, but I can imagine who Jeff Davis, Michael Brodkorb and Fritz Knaak were worried about them voting for.

The voter fraud issue is a smokescreen set up by a party that knows the working poor and the elderly are dangerous because they are likely to vote for candidates who stand up for their interests.

Sadly, the number of these voters is going to grow. If Republicans focused on helping them, maybe they wouldn't have to be so concerned about suppressing their votes.

Knaak, Knaak. Who's There? Underminer.

Dear Fritz Knaak:

You said voters should reject any attempt by the Franken campaign to use the courts to determine the outcome of the Minnesota Senatorial election. I assume this meant you have no plans to file any lawsuits if a recount should find Al Franken won.

In each of these cases, we see an unprecedented and alarming trend that could undermine public confidence in the recount – and replace it with armies of lawyers – deployed across the countryside – using the courts, instead of the ballot box, to determine the outcome of a recount.

But then in the next breath, you say certain ballots once rejected should not be looked at again:

Minnesotans should not just be concerned about this potential – they should be almost fearful of the Franken Campaign’s unprecedented efforts to get across to their private data to influence this recount – and equally fearful of the Franken Campaign’s efforts to force rejected and spoiled ballots into a recount for the first time ever in the 150 year history of our state.

By this reasoning, no ballot once counted should be looked at again, either.

But if the ballot was properly rejected once, why wouldn't it be rejected again under even closer scrutiny? Why worry?

I would hope that the Franken campaign would cease and desist of what I view as harassment and intimidation of voters, and to cease and desist in its efforts to seek state-sanctioned harassment of voters and depriving them of their privacy rights.

I see you've been taking your Palin pills.

Now that you've petrified all the voters about Al Franken's lawyers looking in their underwear drawers, maybe you should explain that they still can't look at the votes. But other voter information is public in Minnesota, provided you pay the $46 fee. In some states, you can even go online and find it for free.

See, it's not so scary, after all.

And one more thing. I know Norm Coleman is trying to come across as a cross-the-aisle kind of guy, but when searching for examples of electoral infamy to brand Franken with, you might try something other than the Republican harassment of voters and stopping of the recount in Florida, 2000.

It's not going to help your case. And if you don't want to "undermine public confidence in the recount," maybe you should just chill.

32 Suspect Ballots for Franken? Nope.

You've probably heard the howls about those 32 absentee ballots for Al Franken that rode around in a car for days. Well, only 18 were for Franken, all absentee ballots get transported in cars, and none spent the night there.

David Brauer has the true story.

Meanwhile, even a conservative paper that endorsed Norm Coleman is getting sick of the sniping.

Who Wins When Good Government Faces Sex and Taxes?

I'm waiting for a recount. No, not on the Franken/Coleman senate contest — on a local race for the Colorado state house.

Incumbent Bernie Buescher, a moderate, Across-the-Great-Divide-style Democrat, is trailing by a few hundred votes first-time candidate Laura Bradford, an anti-tax small businesswoman.

Buescher, who chairs the powerful Joint Budget Committee and was seen as the likely next Speaker of the House, received endorsement from the area's conservative newspaper, won top recognition as a good government legislator, worked well with his conservative senate counterpart from the district, earned an A rating from the NRA, and, as I wrote last election, is "a reasonable, competent guy who goes to Denver and immediately pulls two sides together to do the state's business."

Colorado went for Obama and elected Democrat Mark Udall over a hyper-conservative former Congressman.

So why might Buescher lose to a challenger whose community and government accomplishments amount to a few appointed boards and assisting her "church in raising the  funds necessary for the English Hand Bell choir"?

Bradford came out against tough regulation and taxation on the oil and gas industry, which is responsible for much of the area's current growth, and she has been an activist in the majority Republican party. The local Chamber of Commerce endorsed her, despite Buescher's long record as a local businessman and attorney for small businesses. Cheney, Palin and McCain all worked this town for money and votes, and that may have helped her, too, by energizing the anti-tax conservative base.

Roman Catholic Buescher was the most skillful and measured representative in the House, but to James Dobson's Focus on the Family, he was party to bringing "San Francisco values" to the state and "allowing sexual predators to enter women’s bathrooms to find victims" by voting for a bill that bars Colorado businesses from refusing to serve a customer because of his or her sexual orientation.

Ludicrous, of course, just like the accusations last time that he supported free sex changes for prisoners.

In addition, a 527 ad attacking Bradford on her stance against mandating cancer screenings in health insurance plans backfired, because it implied that Bradford, a cancer survivor, opposed including them as an option.

If Buescher loses, proponents of effective government on either side of the divide across Colorado will lose. But who knows? Maybe the House back benchers will get a nifty bell choir.

UPDATE: Bradford has apparently prevailed. One local Republican source, who called Bradford a lightweight, mainly credits for her success painting Buescher as a tax raiser. He supported the governor's statewide mill levy freeze, which kept school districts from lowering property tax rates.

McCain Makes Desperation Bid for Grand Junction Votes.

And lest you think I'm just out here in the sticks:

As many as 10,000 people are expected to fill a hangar at Grand Junction Regional Airport today as Republican presidential candidate John McCain makes a final push for votes in Colorado.

Making Hay.

After more than a year of candidates offering to sell us gourmet hay, tomorrow we get back to the real deal.

John McCain can stop trying to be the Second Coming of Fred Thompson with a Military Pension and Barack Obama will be revealed as something quite a bit more centrist than a Socialist Black Muslim Mole who plans to drive the middle class even deeper in the hole than George W. managed to do.

Either election result, providing McCain stays alive for four years, would be better than what we have in the White House today. The problem is what we have in the country, and whether either leader will be up to the job of cleaning up a big mess and bringing most of us back together.

Nearly half the country will wake up disappointed on Wednesday. It can't be helped. But what happens next?

Reacting to the rhetorical "I'll move to Canada" if a Republican is elected president, Mitch Berg hypothetically asks liberals: What will you do if John McCain wins?

Of course, Mitch and his readers answer it for us, when they aren't busy saying what they'd do if Obama wins.

Say hello to Campaign 2010, “We Shall Fight Them on The Fields And The Landing Grounds, We Shall Never Surrender” Edition.

My answer, Mitch, is the same one I gave after George W. Bush won a historically contested race and Al Gore said, let's get on with running the country. And the one I gave again after 9/11.

I'd give him a chance.

This may separate me from the left-leaners who go to your comment threads to trade insults with the rest of your readers. But most of us don't want to destroy capitalism, take away all your guns or make your daughters marry their gym coaches. We're hopeful about an Obama presidency, but know the very best we're going to get in the next four years is the regular hay.

Once again, if John McCain were to win, I'd say, okay, that's democracy — let's give him a chance. And if Obama wins, I'm not going to yap, burn cars outside Keegan's or cancel my flight to Canada.

Instead, I'm going to buy a new American flag.