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Update: Livestream of the ballot counting here from Star Tribune.

Livestream without commentary from The Uptake.

For all the times that the Coleman team keeps invoking Florida in 2000 as part of their FUD campaign against the credibility of the recount, it’s rather interesting that the people most closely emulating the obstructionist Bushbots of that time and place are the ones acting on Norm Coleman’s behalf.   As with the "Brooks Brothers rioters" of 2000 — most if not all of whom were paid activists and/or Republican congressional staffers and other GOP operatives (including at least one staffer from Tom DeLay’s office) and not the innocent average Floridians they were supposed to be — the objective of the Coleman campaign, for the past six weeks, has been to stop the recount outright, limit the number and kind of votes that can be recounted, and/or to cast copious amounts of doubt and insinuation on a process that, thanks to state laws enacted after another close governor’s race back in the early 1960s, is really rather straightforward.  It’s time-consuming, but straightforward.

So it is that today, the Coleman campaign asked the Minnesota Supreme Court for a temporary restraining order to keep Minnesota’s county boards from counting up the "fifth pile" ballots — that is, those absentee ballots that had been rejected for reasons other than those allowable by state law.   The Supreme Court will hear the case starting at 1:00 pm Central Time on Wednesday.  (And yes, the Associate Justice who signed the order is none other than Alan Page.)  However, Justice Page refused to stop the count, even temporarily, which is a big blow to Norm Coleman.  Hennepin County, Minnesota’s most populous, is still sorting the "fifth pile" ballots, and I won’t be surprised to hear that other counties are still at it, too.  (Fifty of them had already finished as of last Friday.)

The recount is entering the final stretch now.   Most of Coleman’s legal efforts to obstruct the count or to limit what can be counted have been shot down.  He’s now trying a final Hail Mary pass to keep out ballots that he’s got reason to believe will add more to Franken’s totals than to his.   If this fails, expect an all-out Nieman-Marcus Riot smear effort by Coleman’s friends and surrogates in the media; they need to undermine the recount’s validity in order to make the public think that more legal actions on Coleman’s part are perfectly justified.   (Oh, and speaking of Nieman-Marcus: Norm’s ties to his personal clothier, Nasser Kazeminy, are exciting the interest of the FBI, among others.  Coleman may soon be deploying his hordes of lawyers away from the recount and towards keeping him out of prison.)