Phoenix Woman

The Minnesota Supreme Court has issued its ruling today in RE: Coleman v. Franken. The upshot: Welcome, Senator Franken!

When even somebody like Jell-O Jay Rockefeller can find a spine when it comes to doing the right thing on health care, there’s not much of an excuse for anyone else not to follow his lead. That includes my own congressional representative, Betty McCollum.

The latest rumor going around: The Minnesota Supreme Court will rule this coming Thursday (July 2), it will rule for Franken, and the ruling will direct Tim Pawlenty to sign the election certificate without delay.

The Big E over at Minnesota Progressive Project suspects that our single Senator, Amy Klobuchar, may be more than a little wobbly when it comes to meaningful health care reform. He noted her supremely evasive response when asked about whether she would back a public option in a health-care reform package. Let’s change that, shall we?

There have been persistent rumors locally — rumors referenced by Dan Feidt at Politics in Minnesota — that the Supreme Court will be handing down a ruling in the Coleman appeal sometime today. My own particular source for this allegedly got the information simply by asking a person quite close to the case.

Remember how the three-judge Election Contest Court ruled that because of the egregious frickin’ misconduct committed by his legal team, that Norm was going to be on the hook for at least some of the court costs incurred by his opponent, Al Franken? Well, the bill was finally totaled up yesterday, and the ECC ruled that Coleman must pay Senator-Elect Franken $94,783.15. And counting.

Because their liveblog and video feeds are honeypots for local and other journalists posting Twitter updates, like this one and this one and this one and especially this one.

In the face of what looks to be an imminent slam-dunk win for Senator Al Franken, his soon-to-be colleague John Cornyn (R-Texas) has, um, graciously decided to allow America’s newest Senator to be seated after all. How good of him.

In the wake of Tim Pawlenty’s announcement that he wasn’t running for governor again in 2010 (probably so he can run for president in 2012), the Minneapolis StarTribune put out an article listing the various persons in the Republican Party of Minnesota who were looking at taking his place — and yes, Norm Coleman was mentioned as possibly being one of these people. Here’s my take on the names they mentioned.

When Minnesota’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, announced yesterday that he was not running for re-election, I noticed two things right away: None of the local evening news shows mentioned how he was tanking in most of the polls, and how re-election might have been tricky for him next year; and lots of commenters online, including yours truly, suspected that this gives him carte blanche to screw the state as he rushes to please the Republican primary voters so he can get onto a presidential ticket in 2012.