Nothing much happening today — the withdrawn challenges aren’t officially being allocated until tomorrow (though the preliminary numbers show (h/t Nate Silver)  Franken hanging onto a 48-vote lead over Norm Coleman), the state supreme court won’t rule on the Coleman "duplicate ballots" gambit until tomorrow (though I wouldn’t expect it to get very far), and there’s no word yet on any negotiations on how to count the "fifth pile" ballots (meaning those absentee ballots that were wrongly rejected). But I did want to talk about a few things that I might not have the chance to mention later on:

1) The Coleman campaign was doing a bizarre kind of three-card monte with their ballot challenges, withdrawing and reinstating them, in the hopes of somehow gaining in the recount.  Except that it didn’t work out that way.

2) The StarTribune is still apparently reading from the Coleman campaign’s script with regard to tainting an election (and therefore must use the words "Florida" and "confusion" at every opportunity).  Yesterday’s Strib featured a story that complained that while the Minnesota recount was still going on, the 2000 Florida recount — or what the story refers to as "Florida’s agony" — had ended on December 12.  Of course, Florida’s "agony", or what clued-in and honest humans know as "the democratic process", was artificially cut short by a bogus US Supreme Court decision called Bush v. Gore which forced the state of Florida to stop the recount, despite the Florida Supreme Court’s bending over backwards to craft a decision that would allow the count to continue whilst satisfying Nino Scalia’s demand to avoid usurping the role of the Florida legislature by "legislating from the bench" or "creating new laws".   Meanwhile, here in Minnesota in 2008, far from being chaotic and unclear, the electoral picture is getting ever sharper and clearer, and it shows a new Senator occupying Paul Wellstone’s seat in a few weeks.

3) Per the UpTake’s live blog tonight, the Hennepin County Canvassing Board has called on the Minnesota Supreme Court to boot Norm’s latest Hail-Mary roadblock, the "duplicate ballots" schtick, when it rules on this schtick tomorrow:  

 9:57  Michael McIntee:  Hennepin County Canvassing Board files brief with MN Supreme Court saying Coleman’s duplicate ballot suit should be dismissed:

The Petition is predicated on a factual misunderstanding of the Hennepin County Respondents’ role in the recount for the United States Senate race and the role of county canvassing boards.   The error alleged in the Petition relates to actions which took place only during the recount and, contrary to the factual allegations in the Petition, the HCCB did not certify any recount results or provide any summary statements in the recount to the State Canvassing Board.   Moreover, county canvassing boards have no role in correcting errors alleged to have been made in a statewide recount.   Accordingly, the Petition with respect to the Hennepin County Respondents should be dismissed.

4) Norm Coleman knows full well who’s winning the recount.  And it ain’t him. 

The bottom line:  Despite all the FUD being spread by Norm and his surrogates, it’s been increasingly clear for quite some time now that Al Franken is going to win this thing.  The only question is when Norm Coleman and the RNC are going to get tired of throwing up roadblocks to this eventuality.