Finally. After months of waiting, wondering, worrying, getting advice from all corners, reading the tea leaves, and generally obsessing over what the future would bring, we find ourselves at a wondrous, joyous resolution. Sometimes it seemed inevitable. At other times, we had doubts we could pull it off, plagued by self doubt and assured ourselves we could only fail.
That’s right, both news stories I’ve been obsessively following for the past several months resolved on the same day. Yesterday afternoon the Twins announced they signed Joe Mauer, and late last night the Democrats sent Health Care Reform to Obama’s desk. Now I can finally get some restful sleep.
The Red Sox of the NFL strike again, managing to get oh so close and once again amaze us with their ability to lose in new and unimagined ways. Our biggest rival’s greatest player ever joins us to be thwarted by a 12 man in the huddle penalty to push us out of field goal range? Wow…didn’t see that one coming.
I’m very sad, natch, but am handling this one in stride, much unlike the disaster of 1999. It’s just who the Vikings are. If they were different, they wouldn’t be the Vikings. It’s just their way…you don’t know what it’s like when we’re alone together.
Besides, since 1999 I lived through the W presidency, and two financial crises (and two respective turns of unemployment), and the health care reform and Haiti disasters of the last two weeks served to provide some immediate perspective as well. So I’m not completely distraught, and I’m not disowning them like I did for a few years after 1999, either. I’m owning them, wearing them like a battle scar, a badge of…not honor…but a badge of something.
The Vikings are like sun spots, managing to lose NFC championships in stunning, painful, head-shaking fashion every 11 years. 1988, dropped pass in the end zone. 1999, the best Vikings team ever lost as the only field goal kicker ever to make every kick in a season missed a relatively easy kick indoors. 2010, well, we’ve covered that. And don’t forget about that one year we needed to beat an awful Arizona team in the last week just to make the playoffs and we let them score a last second touchdown on something like 4th and 25 from midfield. I’ve got money on an excessive celebration penalty in 2021.
Also, I love the Dome. Again, how can you not? It hosts four must-win games in a row with a Monday night match-up between Favre and the Packers stuck right in the middle.
As a final note, I have to note that Talking Points Memo’s TPMDC had the best coverage, and I have to thank that site for keeping me informed. I checked their MN Senate page several times a day over the last five months.
So, you might remember that Al Franken beat Norm Coleman for one of Minnesota’s Senate seats. Thanks to funding from Washington Republicans, Franken still hasn’t been seated due to Coleman’s appeals.
To recap, Coleman was up by a mere 215 votes on election night, triggering an automatic recount. Coleman said that if we were in Franken’s shoes he would concede because “the healing process is so impoatant.” Screw that noise, Franken said. After the recount, during which Coleman tried to keep votes from being counted, Franken was up by 225 and declared the victor.
Then Coleman, despite his earlier rhetoric, appealed. And, naturally, during the court appeal reversed course and tried to get some 4,000+ rejected ballots counted. The court decided that 351 of them had been, indeed, improperly rejected. So they were opened and counted. The results? Franken 198, Coleman 111, Other 42 (there was a strong third-party candidate in this election, as there has been in most statewide elections in Minnesota since Ventura’s success). So now Franken leads by 312. Nice appeal there, Normie.
To those ends, the DNC is asking supporters to post these fliers all over the state. Here’s my part:
Coleman has never done anything good. St. Paul was a miserable, miserable place under his reign as mayor, making its fantastic comebackas a place you would actually want to go only after he left. He lost in the gubenatorial race to Jesse Ventura, then served as Bush’s lap dog in the Senate for years. His accomplishments amount to zilch…how he has risen this far in life is beyond me. Thankfully he won’t be around much longer.
So we’re pretty excited about Al Franken winning the recount of Minnesota’s Senate election by 225 votes. Of course, his asshole opponent Norm Coleman is tying things up in the courts, despite having no chance of winning, only to appease his higher-ups in DC, which is basically all he ever does anyway, so that there’s one less Democratic senator on key votes. Meanwhile, Minnesota goes unrepresented.
Still, we’re excited.
It’s been a couple of weeks, but here’s him gracefully declaring victory via TPM.
Daily Kos is kind enough to remind us that on November 5th when Coleman led by 215 votes (which, you’ll note, is fewer than the 225 he now trails by) he said that he would step aside if he were in Franken’s place and save the taxpayers the cost of a recount because he felt “the healing process [was] so impohtant.”
Of course, now that we’re on the other side of a thorough and transparent recount and he’s behind votes, he wants to deny Minnesota representation in the Senate because, as every blog entry on the subject will tell you, Minnesota law is unique in that they wait until legal challenges have run their course before the Secretary of State can sign the certificate to seat somebody. And all just because his Republican overlords in Washington want one less Democratic vote for the proposals Obama’s got coming down the pipeline. What a mensch.
Fivethirtyeight declares Coleman’s political career over. In my favorite line about the whole thing they reference his loss to Jesse Ventura and the tragic pre-election death of Paul Wellstone (but not Ventura’s histrionics over the memorial service which handed the election to Coleman when Walter Mondale stepped in for Wellstone in the last week) (emphasis mine):
Let’s be frank: Norm Coleman doesn’t have much of a future in electoral politics. Defeated Presidential candidates sometimes have nine lives, but defeated Senatorial candidates rarely do, and in his career running for statewide office, Coleman has lost to a professional wrestler, beaten a dead guy, and then tied a comedian.
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….
Coleman claims that multiple precincts had “more votes than voters,” a potential irregularity if we understand that as being more ballots than people who signed in on the register. But Coleman has another definition: When the votes tallied in the recount were more than were counted on Election Night, with no reference to what was on the voter register. The whole point of a recount is to find votes that the machines failed to pick up at first.
…
Coleman says those Election Night numbers were bad, too, and wants even more votes for Franken thrown out from absentee ballots that he claims should never have been counted, based on errors on the envelopes. But the envelopes were separated from the enclosed ballots months ago, and he can’t prove whom these people voted for. He just wants to throw out Franken votes by fiat.
…
The Coleman complaint wants to force the review and inclusion of 654 absentee ballots that local officials in both blue and red counties say were properly rejected, and which come almost entirely from precincts that Coleman won. They also re-reject the 930 absentee ballots that were counted this past Saturday, which gave Franken a net gain of 176 votes, saying those ballots were wrongly deemed to be legal and erroneously opened.
But remember: Under the terms laid out by the state Supreme Court, the Coleman campaign is on the record saying that this past Saturday’s ballots were legal and should be counted. Now they want a do-over.
To review, these are absentee ballots that had already been deemed by the counties to be invalid — once on Election Night, and then a second time upon the court-ordered re-evaluation of absentees in December. It is not surprising that their minds haven’t been changed the third time around.
This thing is over and Coleman’s stall tactics are only hurting the people of Minnesota, who will eventually be proudly represented by the man seen here via TPM doing a spot on impression of Mick Jagger.
Minnesota then drove to the Falcons 20-yard line, setting up a 38-yard field goal attempt for Anderson, who had not missed a field goal all season. Another successful kick would have all but wrapped up the NFC title for Minnesota, but Anderson’s kick sailed wide left, giving the ball back to Atlanta with 2:07 left and new life. Chandler then led his team down to the Vikings 16-yard line. Following a dropped interception by Minnesota LB Dwayne Rudd, Mathis’ 16-yard touchdown catch tied the game with 49 seconds left and sent it into overtime.
After the first 3 possessions of overtime ended in punts, Chandler, on a bad ankle, led his team 70 yards to set up Andersen’s 38-yard field goal with 3:08 remaining that put Atlanta in the Super Bowl for the first time in team history.
I can stlil hear the deafening silence from my friends and me in my apartment that day. And I can still remember that the front page headline of the Star Tribune on Tuesday was about how bad Monday sucked.
I remember confidently telling my cousin in November, “Who’s going to beat them?” when she asked if I thought they would really make the Super Bowl.
I had broken my thumb breakdancing on New Year’s (seriously), and when they asked me what color to make my cast, I went with purple to celebrate the Vikings’ 15-1 season and imminent Super Bowl victory. Sitting in my apartment that day with that purple cast, I wanted to cut my whole arm off. When I got the cast off in mid-February, there was another man getting his purple cast off, too. I said, “I hope you didn’t make yours purple for the same reason I made mine purple.” He said, “Those assholes….” I concurred.
It was easily, easily, the toughest loss I’ve endured as a sports fan. I still haven’t forgiven them.
And he did keep the Twins in Minnesota after he bought them from Calvin Griffith….
So with that acknowledgment and that amount of passed time, let me just say that, gosh, it is so sad he couldn’t live long enough to see his dream of having his Major League Baseball team contracted realized.
First, I’d like to announce I’m moving back to Minneapolis. Here’s why:
Yeah, that’s right, King Buzzo, lead singer of my fave band, Melvins, was tending bar and selling a limited edition 7″ in my hometown this weekend before doing a show at a bar they play all the time. Oh, and guess where I was? I was in Minneapolis at the office holiday party, unable to break away for the 10 minute drive to the show. Biggest. Cock tease. Ever.
Here is the band’s modification of the Grumpy’s logo.
I want that shirt for Christmas. If I don’t get at least one I’m going to pee in your bed (yes, yours). Unless it’s also my bed, in which case I’ll put a spider in your bed. I can’t figure out how to buy them from the post announcing their existence, but still, peeing your bed.
Now, this all happened only a few months after the band released a 3-CD box set named Melvins vs. Minneapolis featuring ten concerts (the third disc is an MP3 disc) all recorded in the Twin Cities. I found out about it after the 666 copies were sold out and had to get it on eBay (review on the way) as soon as I was treated for the priapism from which I was suffering as a result of the news that there were 666 copies of a box set titled Melvins vs. Minneapolis.
The entire vid, which features the passive-aggressive goat challenging Melvins to karaoke, is hilarious, but if you just can’t bring yourself to give five more minutes to spiritually bonding with MPL today, at least make sure you watch the stretch where the kids rock out while Melvins play from 2:55 to 5:00. There’s more gold in those two minutes than is in Fort Knox.
For all this, I’m granting Melvins their own category. Seriously, guys, I’d like to see your favorite band have a year like that. Suck it, not-Melvins.
