Hello, folks! Sorry about the lack of updates for yesterday. The problem is that there was a stunning lack of action, as the Election Contest Court adjourned after only half a day’s work yesterday; the most notable thing was that the Coleman people managed not to screw anything up and may have actually scored a point — though whether that winds up actually helping them in the end is up for debate, especially after the big coup Franken lawyer David Burman rang up in his deposition of a person the Coleman people were planning to call on as a witness for their side.

In a Friday filing with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, the Mormon Church listed almost $190,000 in previously unreported expenses in support of last year’s successful campaign to eliminate marriage equality in California.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown has raised more than three times the money either of his not-yet-declared opponents have for the 2010 California gubernatorial primary, and also had more than three times the amount of cash-on-hand at the end of 2008.

One of the highlights of following The UpTake’s live coverage of Norm Coleman’s contest trial today was coming back to my computer after a break to see people in The UpTake’s liveblog laughing about a mouse.

Day Three of the Coleman contest trial of the Minnesota Senate recount found Team Coleman’s people committing themselves to the 180 they’ve made concerning absentee ballots — so much so, in fact, that Coleman’s case may have been holed near, if not below, the waterline:  The most notable moment came early in the day when [...]

If absentee voting is a right, instead of the privilege that Slippery Norm Coleman’s camp insisted it was early on, then that blows Coleman’s equal-protection claim out of the water, because equal protection would not apply in the case of absentee ballots. Which is, of course, why he’s now arguing that it’s a right.

Been wondering why Norm’s done a 180 on this particular issue? Now you know.

Why did Norm Coleman pick Joe Friedberg to be his head courtroom lawyer? Friedberg’s great at tugging the heartstrings of legally-ignorant jurors, but judges, not jurors, are deciding this case. Then again, this all makes sense if Friedberg’s main goal is not to win the case, but to waste time and put on a show for the folks outside the courtroom — which is pretty much how Coleman’s handled the entire recount process.

The Coleman contest is so bizarre it’d be rejected as a Ben Stiller script. As an UpTake commenter, Josh, said on the liveblog today: “So recap: Day 1 is thrown out, pull out a couple of sympathetic witnesses, pull in a witness that says that his girlfriend forged a signature on the absentee ballot application, and we discover that one of the counties Coleman is using as a base for his argument is a Franken stronghold. Nice.”

Paging Tim Allen! Paging Tim Allen to the Craftsman courtesy phone! Norm Coleman’s in need of some better tools than the ones he’s spent a few million on so far. When all your evidence is tossed because you blatantly futzed with it, you’re very lucky your whole case hasn’t been tossed as well.

Joe Friedberg, Minnesota’s top white-shoe courtroom lawyer, is leading with the “Let me win even though you’re ahead or else we’ll keep holding the entire state and nation hostage with boring and bizarre stuff” strategy. How bizarre? They’d tampered with their submitted evidence so much it had to be thrown out, THAT’s how bizarre.