In my recent tours of the intertubes I’ve seen more discouragement than raging fury. That’s a good sign.

I think that once Franken’s in office two years he’ll be safe. A lot of his opposition came from people who were more familiar with Stuart Smalley than with Franken. (I’m not sure that all of them even knew that Smalley is a fictional character.) With two years in office people will forget that.

The mad dog Republicans think that they lost because Coleman wasn’t conservative enough. I hope they convince the Republican Party of that.

The Republicans grumbled about Mary Landrieu’s close win in 1996, but since she had an ironclad certification at the state level, they couldn’t stop her from being seated. All they could do was embarrass themselves with a bogus “probe” of alleged naughtiness by her — a probe whose prime witness was a guy with a felony record as long as his arm, with a guilty plea to attempted murder to boot.

The Republicans are grumbling about Al Franken’s impending certification by the State of Minnesota as the winner of the 2008 Senatorial election in Minnesota, but once he’s been certified with an ironclad cert — as he will be — there’s nothing they can do about it except whine and try to do another bogus “probe”, which will have even less of a chance now than the one they did against Landrieu had in 1996.