I am rolling of the floor laughing (ROFL). If you didn’t see it, watch the YouTube Video.
(He totally made up for it with the speech, of course.)
You may also note two precious moments earlier in the day:
1) When George Herbert Walker Bush was coming out to the stage and walking between the marine guards, he slapped one of the guards on the ass.
2) When George Bush (our newly formered president)’s image was first shown to the crowd before he came out, the crowd started singing that song … “Hey hey hey, good bye…” (You know the song.)
Oh, and Rick Warren. Gag me.
Oh, from the speech: “We are a nation of bla bla bla and unbelievers.”
Al Franken has, as his his right and duty, filed papers to the court now reviewing Coleman’s suit regarding the Minnesota Senate Race.
Eric Kleefeld has an excellent summary of the paper. You can read the papers here, and read Eric’s summary here. Oh, and if you want a real laugh, you can read Coleman’s suit here.
I’ll give you the bottom line. There are the usual hopeful elements in any such filing, which usually have no effect, such as jurisdictional questions and so on. But there are two key elements based on which I would expect a decision by the court to throw out the case. First, some of Coleman’s propsoed remedies are illegal. Second, the one or two remedies that might not be illegal, if applied uniformly, would net Franken as many votes as Coleman (in relative terms). This inparticular applies to Coleman’s claim that there was double counting in some precincts of a few votes. Coleman wants votes thrown out in Franken-supporting precincts. Franken’s camp says: OK, if you do that, we have a list of red-colored precincts to also throw votes out in.
It would be funny if the courts allowed some of this and Coleman came up even more behind. Almost worth a try.
It is a travesty when the lives of young people doing little more than trying to make a point are tossed aside in order to make the likes of federal prosecutors, FBI agents, state investigators, and the occasional mayor and governor feel like they have larger than average dick. Which is pretty much what happened in Saint Paul in relation to the RNC last year. Shame on them.
Eventually it had to come out in the trials for alleged crimes at the Republican National Convention(RNC) that the so called “anarchists” of the RNC Welcoming Committee were being influenced by provocateurs. Basically the worst that happened at the RNC was broken windows, slashed tires and one dropped sandbag. However, the worst alleged planned incident that was an alleged fire bombing by three people. The stories that are now coming out point to the leader of that group as Brandon Darby, paid by the FBI. Brandon had the strongest political activist background. Brandon was not a person just sitting in a meeting taking notes, he was a person teaching people in martial arts how to fight the police. Brandon was a leader! Informants don’t lead, provocateurs lead. Yet this provocateur is getting off scot-free and even being called a hero by the Powerline Republican blog. Brandon suckered two naive young people into doing acts that will put them in jail for a long time. David McKay and Bradley Crowder, from Austin, Texas are scheduled to go on trial in Minnesota on Jan. 26, and are facing a possible 30 years in jail if convicted on all counts.
…. via his court challenge of the recount that places Al Franken ahead are assessed by Eric Kleefeld:
The complaint ignores the existence of counter-evidence, employs one maneuver when it is self-benefiting and opposes the same maneuver when it goes against them, attacks not just the recount but votes that were counted for Franken all along, and overall throws everything against the wall to see what sticks.
The TV told me to “youtube” the Australian leader Rudd’s Parliamentary statement tearing Howard a new one in regards to his statement about Obama and the American Democrats. So I did, and I thought I’d share it with you. Kinda fun:
Mr Howard later lost the election to Mr. Rudd. Oh, and Obama and the Democrats won in the US. And we all lived happily ever after.
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei are two Iranian physicians who have reportedly been detained in Iran by Iranian authorities. The physicians, who are brothers, were apparently arrested at the end of June, 2008 and their current whereabouts are unknown. Physicians for Human Rights calls on the government of Iran to disclose their whereabouts, provide them access to lawyers and family, and either to charge them with an internationally recognized crime or release them immediately.
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei have played a role in putting the issues of drug use and HIV/AIDS on Iran’s national health care agenda. They have worked closely with government and religious leaders to ensure support for education campaigns on HIV transmission, including those targeting youth, and for HIV and harm reduction programs in prisons.
Since completing their medical training, the brothers have worked in AIDS research in Iran, and along with other clinicians and advocates, helped make the country a leader in prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS. They played a part in the creation of Iran’s HIV/AIDS prison program, one of the best in the region if not the world. The program passes out condoms and syringes in the prisons, one of only a handful of countries globally doing so. The doctors have also shared their knowledge with neighboring countries by holding training workshops for Afghan and Tajik health professionals.
Dr. Arash was scheduled to speak at the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City. A coalition of groups including PHR will be sponsoring an empty chair with his name, to bring attention to the detention of the brothers. Dr. Kamiar, a doctoral candidate at the SUNY Albany School of Public Health, is expected to return to his program in September.
Family, friends, and colleagues from around the world are deeply concerned for the brothers’ well-being. We urge you to take action today to ensure their human rights are protected and they are reconnected with their family.
The long term plan is to keep Franken out of the Senate forever. Not likely to work. The short term plan is to “taint” Franken, so that morons like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan (MSNBC) and Ann Coulter can constantly refer to “Franken” and “Tainted” in the same sentence again and again and again.
Which will not be a big problem, really, because this is an old and tired strategy that no on cares about any more. But it is their strategy.
Now, about the law suit: We have the Republicans hitting all the same exact issues that have been hit before. Of these issues, one was never really closely looked at, so the court may need to look more closely. The others have already been tossed out by prior decisions (by the same court!). Although the Coleman lawyers can technically, legally do this because an “election contest” (the technical term for this ‘suit’) is not an appeal, it is normally not the case that if a court says “no” that you can either a) ask another court at the same level to say yes or b) ask the same court again and again. (There is no new evidence here.) The court will quickly toss out all but one of the material challenges.
What the law suit does do, however, is to place coleman in the clear underdog spot, and this is the first time he has been clearly in that spot for the entire race. Then, from this powerful position as victim, the law suit allows the injection of all of the terms and phrases linked to the Tainting of Franken. This way, there will be a nice, rich rhetorical menu from which to chose over the next few years as Coleman repositions himself and the Republicans work towards retaking he Senate.
Now, I’d like to show you a video (Ana the Blogless brought this to my attention). This is a CNN Video that has the phrase “Not so Fast Franken” across the bottom. and it is a sham interview of Texas Senator John Cornyn, “Chairman” of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Why is this a sham interview? Because the interview is about the Republican’s plan to interfere with seating Franken earlier this week (being discussed in the interview as a future event). The thing is, this is not even a tiny issue. Franken was not going to try to be seated, nor was Coleman or anyone else, because of the automatic delay in issuing of the election certificate for a seven day review period, and everyone, including Senator Cornyn, knows this. In other words, this was a totally senseless premise to a news story, and a totally senseless set of statements by Cornyn. So why was this interview happening at all? For no reason whatsoever? Not likely. The video was part of the development of the Franken as Tainted rhetoric.
In this video, Cornyn demonstrates the taint-language approach, and he also demonstrates another bit of Republican shenanigans. I would like to orient you to both of these before you watch.
Regarding the taint-talk, Cornyn refers (although he does a poor job of it) to most of the phrases that are being injected into the conversation by the Coleman campaign (Double counted ballots; Irregularities; Every vote counts; and so on). We are going to see this language regularized, adapted, and repeated as it is spread through talking point memos. We’re going to see the information misused and gotten wrong by gnomes like Cornyn who have gotten the Taint Franken Talking Points Memo, but do not really understand all of it because they have not been paying attention to the details. In other words, we are going to see yet another example of senseless conversation in Washington and the press surrounding yet another non issue.
The lack of understanding the situation by Cornyn may be related to the other thing I wanted to point out about this video. This is what appears to be a logical flaw or even an out and out hypocrisy demonstrated in what Cornyn says. To get this, you have to know that the Democrats are generally against seating Illinois appointee Burris because they think he is not re-electable, and would prefer a stronger candidate in that position. The Republicans want him seated for the same reasons. The logic behind the Democratic Party action is this: According to Senate Rule Two, for a senator to be seated, there must be a proper election certificate. In the case of Burris, there is no proper election certificate, because both the governor and the state’s Secretary of State must sign the certificate. So the Democrats say they won’t seat him on this basis.
The Republicans, on the other hand, are making the argument that the US Constitution really just says that there must be “executive” action or intent on the part of the state. You only need the governor’s signature on the certificate. This makes what the Democrats are doing, according to the Republicans, unconstitutional. Got that? Keep this in mind as you watch the video. It will make you laugh.
Regarding this argument, then, we have the following (paraphrased from various Republican sources including the video you are about to watch) being said:
“Minnesota Law says you need an election certificate with a signature from the governor and the secretary of state. Therefore you can’t seat Franken”
“Burris is seatable because the US constitution says the Senator needs ‘executive approval’ and that does not include the Secretary of State (who did not sign Burris’ certificate.”
And finally, we hear from Cornyn, regarding the Democratic strategy: “You can’t have it both ways.”
Activists from Texas who call themselves the Austin Informant Working Group have added their voices to the chorus denouncing Brandon Darby, who gave information to the FBI while posing as a protester to infiltrate groups planning demonstrations against last November’s Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul…..
The Wall Street Journal published an editorial yesterday called “Funny Business in Minnesota” which is so full of inaccurate innuendo and fallacious factoids that when I read it I thought I was reading a piece of junk mail from Ann Coulter.
Well, the honorable web site Five Thirty Eight has torn the WSJ a new one with a brutally accurate deconstruction of the editorial. There really is virtually nothing in this editorial that can be salvaged from the bright light of actual truth. Shame on the Wall Street Journal.
They are suing regarding: the missing ballots from Minneapoilis (that won’t go anywhere, already settled); Double counting (that issue was killed off already, it will go no where) and absentee ballots (they have a small chance that this may develop into something).
They state that they will win in state court but have federal level issues to argue as well.
The won’t and the don’t. But it looks like they will continue to press.
We are being told that several Coleman lawyers are not being dispersed around the state to depose, under oath, election officials.
They are opposing several of the decisions made by the canvassing board such as the afore mentioned … missing ballots of Minneapolis.
Ana will be commenting below, I hope, on the missing ballots in Minneapolis.
They are talking about pre-trial phases, they are talking about a thee week period leading up to the trial, they are talking about a couple of months of proceedings.
Now they are threatening the Chief Justice … who was on the canvassing board. They want him off the State Supreme Court for this proceeding.
They are not making veiled threats to force a new recount.
Clearly, they are pulling out all stops and are not going to let this rest. This is the beginning of the Big Mess. The Republicans have decided that they are not going to allow the winner go to Washington no matter what it takes.
Time to start raising money for the Franken team again.
Heath and Deborah Campbell had three children. They named them:
JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell
Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell
Adolf Hitler Campbell
That, right there, would be child abuse. Do you not agree?
The story is making the rounds (h/t: McDuff) because it is little Adolph’s third birthday and the local shop-rite (supermarket) refuses to provide the family with a cake enscribed “Happy Birthday Adolph Hitler.”
This important story was broken by the Minnesota Independent.
The agency that runs the airport refused an apparently serious offer to buy the men’s room stall made famous by Craig’s 2007 conviction for disorderly conduct in a sex-solicitation sting operation by the airport police. The Metropolitan Airport Commission (MAC) spurned the $5,000 offer, which arrived by certified mail, according to MAC spokesperson Patrick Hogan.
As many of you have already heard, the recount process in Minnesota to determine the outcome of the Senatorial race is over, and Al Franken has been certified as winner.
There is now a review period of seven days during which any voter in the state of Minnesota. Including me, Al Franken, whomever, can sue for an Election Challenge. Although both Secretary of State Ritchie and I have expressed the opinion that Norm Coleman, who lost the race, is unlikely to issue such a challenge, the press and even Coleman’s lawyers have suggested that a challenge will in fact be filed by three o’clock tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon.
However, you know the following is true: The best chance Coleman has to turn what he calls Franken’s “Artificial Lead” around is from a set of 650 as yet uncounted rejected absentee ballots. There are two things working against Coleman in regards to these ballots. First, the process is over and they were not counted. Asking for them to be counted is not a matter of bringing in something new. They have already been not-counted by a process determined by the same court to which Coleman would issue the challenge, and some members of that court were also on the canvassing board that certified the election this afternoon. So the chances of a challenge being accepted by this court is easily estimated at zero point zero zero zero. Or less.
Second, in order for Al Franken’s official 225 vote lead to be erased by counting these absentee ballots, there would have to be a very strong bias in these 650 ballots that Coleman wants counted. I calculate that there is about a two to three percent probability that counting these votes would change the outcome in Coleman’s favor. That may seem like a lot, but the chances of having the votes being counted to begin with is about zero.
Coleman really has two choices: Proceed with the challenge and end his political career or don’t proceed and have a chance of continuing in Minnesota politics.
Which, I would guess, would involve his run for governor in two years. As a democrat, of course.
Heath and Deborah Campbell had three children. They named them: