Miss Piggy Lunchbox

It’s time to fix the Senate.  The way you fix a howling male dog.

Republican Senator Richard Shelby has put a blanket hold on EVERY one of Obama’s 70 nominations currently on the Senate calendar for confirmation.  Because he can’t get some pork project for Alabama moved through.  Because, yeah, this is clearly what those rules are set up for.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, CongressDaily (sub. req.) reports. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

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According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track.

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A San Diego State University professor and “Congressional expert” told the paper “he knew of no previous use of a blanket hold” in recent history.

This is exactly the problem with our government.  Each senator has too much power.  You wouldn’t dream of writing up a system of government where you have 101 Presidents, yet that’s essentially what we’ve got, where any single Senator with a bone to pick can bring the government to a screeching halt.

Break up the Senate.  Blow up all of their rules.  Get rid of this individual hold BS, and destroy the filibuster so badly that it never ever comes back.  Hell, get rid of the chamber all together…what a waste of breath those people are.  Except for Franken, my all-time second-favorite senator.  He’s cool…and he holds the same seat as my all-time favorite senator: Paul Wellstone.

And Jesus H.  This is the group that thinks they’re going to design a college football playoff system?  I mean, even beyond being a waste of their time, I can’t even imagine what a playoff system would look like if it were designed by the same a-holes who crafted the Senate rules.  So let’s see, there’s 8 teams, and one-third of those teams changes every two years, and you have to beat six of the other teams in order to win the championship, and if nobody beats six other teams then there is no champion.  And there’s only a championship held every two years because everybody’s scared to play anybody in the year when the new playoff teams will enter so really there’s hardly ever any change in membership.

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.

Of course, Coleman is taking the appeal to the state Supreme Court while 63% of Minnesotans say he should concede and newspapers that endorsed him during the campaign are calling on him to do the same.

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.

Then there’s the frivolity of Coleman’s lawsuit.  TPM analyzes it here…

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.

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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.

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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.

There’s much more and it’s all just as ridiculous.  Here Fivethirtyeight looks a bit deeper at those 654 rejected absentee ballots re-re-counted:

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.

Now that Saxby Chambliss has extended his reign of evil for six more years in Georgia, there’s one last Senate seat to be determined (besides this Illinois debacle and other appointees to newly-vacant seats, like in New York), and to say I am interested in it would be an understatement.  In my home state of Minnesota, comedian Al Franken, a native of St. Louis Park (where I first lived with My Baby and proposed to her), is in a recount with the corrupt incumbent, Bush lapdog, and import from New York Norm “Nice Suits” Coleman.  It’s the temperamental but noble Luke Skywalker against the Evil Empire, to be sure.

The remaining precincts have now finished verifying their counts, and Coleman’s lead has slimmed a touch from about 215 on election day to about 190 now, as reported by the Star Tribune.  However, as fivethirtyeight.com has reported, we still have to go through the process of dealing with all the ballots that were challenged by campaigns, and that number is so high as to render any count at this point pretty much irrelevant.

Furthermore, ballots are challenged for any number of reasons, many quite frivolous.  I recall reading that Coleman challenged one where the voter voted for McCain and Franken.  So, we really don’t know what’s going on

Anyhoo, if you want to take a look at some of the challenged ballots and vote on who each vote should be counted on yourself, check out the thousands of them online at the Star Tribune’s site.  It’s a great way to kill a few minutes or a few hours and a fascinating look inside democracy and one of the closest elections in the nation’s history