The latest news from the legal-challenge phase of the recount (aka Norm’s Long Goodbye) is that Al Franken’s people tried a little Hail Mary of their own, in the form of a request to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Pawlenty, to sign the election certificate — a request which Pawlenty couldn’t have honored, even if he’d wanted [...]

If you were watching a lot of football during the 1970s, you probably saw the guy in the purple jersey on your TV screen every now and then. And if you were watching a lot of the Minnesota Senate recount via The UpTake over the past couple of months, you probably saw the guy in the black robe and bowtie at least once. Turns out they’re one and the same.

Shades of Ken Starr’s subpoena-happy OIC –  Norm Coleman’s people, trying to win in court what they couldn’t achieve at the voting booths, are starting to toss around frivolous, if not outright punitive, subpoenas:  Patty O’Connor wasn’t surprised when the subpoena arrived Thursday, but the Blue Earth County election director was somewhat taken aback by [...]

Having failed in their mid-campaign attempt to blackmail Prop 8 opponents, Prop 8 supporters have now filed suit to end any disclosure of donations to political campaigns, citing evidence of harassment and menace.

It’s almost kinda sad, watching Norm Coleman commit political suicide on the apparent orders of his Republican minders. Here he is, a guy who switched parties and later cultivated Karl Rove and Dick Cheney so he could skip merrily up the political ladder all the way to the White House, being made to end his political career not with a bang or a whimper, but with the metaphorical tossing of battery acid into the collective faces of Minnesota residents.

Now that Norm’s decided to blow another couple million bucks on his lawyers, the big question is: How far will it go? Will Norm be able to take this all the way to the conservative-controlled US Supreme Court, should the three-judge contest panel not give him the answer the national Republican leadership wants to hear? An FDL commenter, Sara, believes that Norm won’t be able to take this to the Federal level at all.

Harry Reid is. Takes credit for expanding the size of the Democratic Senate caucus from 45 to (likely) 59 in four years.

Choosing not to back her California colleague’s Panetta pique, Senator Barbara Boxer told the SF Chronicle that President-Elect Obama “took the right approach” in choosing an outsider to run the CIA.

Now that the Coleman contest has been made, expect to see Norm’s media surrogates escalate their already intense effort to smear and attack anyone associated with the Minnesota Supreme Court, the Secretary of State’s office, or the pool of judges from which Minnesota Supreme Court justice Alan Page will pick the three-judge panel that will adjudicate Coleman’s contest.

Looked at objectively, Norm Coleman doesn’t have a case to contest the results of the recount. That’s not stopping him from doing so — even though the net effect is to delay Al Franken’s swearing-in a little while longer and to make his well-heeled lawyers, Fritz Knaak and Tony Trimble, even richer than they are already.