This isn't much of a surprise after today’s ruling, but the fact that he won’t prolong this any further is certainly welcome news.

From Minnesota Independent…

The former senator called Al Franken this afternoon to congratulate him on his victory nearly eight months after election day. The concession came shortly after the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a ruling naming Franken the winner in the protracted contest.

“I’m really at peace,” Coleman told reporters at a press conference at his St. Paul home. “I’ve had a lot of time to process this election, think about the past and look to the future. So I really have a sense of peace for where things are at.”

Coleman vowed to work with Franken as he becomes Minnesota’s junior senator. He insisted that the fact that Franken will become the 60th Democratic senator — giving President Obama a filibuster-proof majority — played no role in his decision-making process. “Whatever I can do now to be a unifying force that’s what I’m going to do,” he said.

And note that last paragraph…now Obama has a filibuster-proof majority.

But will he use it?

Discuss.

I should come as no surprise that many Democrats pray for Sarah Palin to be the candidate in 2012, but many smart GOPers realize how much damage she could do to the brand.

That’s why we’re seeing pieces like this latest rather lengthy Vanity Fair exposé.

Read the rest over at True/Slant.

Nearly 9 months after the election, there appears to be some light at the end of the tunnel for Minnesota.

From the AP:

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) – The Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered that Democrat Al Franken be certified as the winner of the state’s long-running Senate race.

The high court rejected a legal challenge from Republican Norm Coleman, whose options for regaining the Senate seat are dwindling.

Justices said Franken is entitled to the election certificate he needs to assume office. With Franken and the usual backing of two independents, Democrats will have a big enough majority to overcome Republican filibusters.

However…

Coleman hasn’t ruled out seeking federal court intervention.

Ugh.

Norm…seriously…it’s time to pack it up. It was close, but you lost and every recount has shown that. Not only that, I think nearly every single court decision has gone against you. Minnesota needs a Senator and it’s pretty clear that you won’t be it. Move on already.

More as it develops…

Remember that story yesterday which suggested that high level Edwards staffers knew about his affair and would sabotage the campaign if it looked like he was winning.

Well, via Twitter, former campaign manager Joe Trippi had this to say…

Complete BS — fantasyland – not true.

Here’s the thing…I want to believe Trippi, but what else would you say in this position? “Yeah, I knew, but I hung around to collect a pay check.”

Listen, it’s not that I think he’s lying, but this is the same guy who knew that Howard Dean never wanted his presidential campaign to go as far as it did. And yet they kept soldiering on despite that. Yeah, the times make the man, but if Dean wasn’t ready…they should’ve pulled back.

Either way, those who associated themselves with Edwards are winding up with egg on their faces. Unfortunate, but nobody said politics wasn’t messy.

This is the stuff I love to hear because it means that one person’s bad decisions couldn’t bring down an entire movement.

From ABC:

I’ve talked to a lot of former Edwards staffers about this. Up until December of 2007, most on Edwards’ staff didn’t believe rumors about the affair.

But by late December, early January of last year, several people in his inner circle began to think the rumors were true.

Several of them had gotten together and devised a “doomsday” strategy of sorts.

Basically, if it looked like Edwards was going to win the Democratic Party nomination, they were going to sabotage his campaign, several former Edwards’ staffers have told me.

They said they were Democrats first, and if it looked like Edwards was going to become the nominee, they were going to bring down the campaign.

My only question…why didn’t they just sabotage it from the beginning and leave? Because a mass exodus would have been plenty to stop Edwards cold. Sure, I get that they wanted to collect that paycheck, but they were actively involved in selling a lie.

Something tells me that the reason Edwards staffers hung on is they wanted Obama to win the nomination and if they had cut Edwards off, he wouldn’t have siphoned the votes from Hillary and Obama would have placed second.

What do you think?

“It is near-extinct in many ways in the Northeast, it is extinct in many ways on the West Coast, and it is endangered in the Mountain West, increasingly endangered in the Southwest… and if you look at the state of the party, it is a shrinking entity.”
- Former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt on Repubs

This from a pretty revealing piece in the Wash Post, which uncovered some interesting political tidbits.

On the McCain accepting defeat…

“I was waiting for his bus to crash into a CDC truck carrying bubonic plague to release over Cincinnati and Ohio. It was just one thing after another, you know, and never to our benefit.”

On Couric’s interview of Sarah Palin…

“That is one of the two most consequential interviews that a candidate for national office has given, in a negative way, the other being Roger Mudd’s interview of Ted Kennedy . . . when he couldn’t answer the question of why he wanted to be president.”

On the Bush/Cheney effect…

“The first night of our convention was President Bush and Vice President Cheney. I literally thought by the second night of our convention we could be down 25 points.”

On Lehman Brothers…

When Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall, I knew pretty much straight away the campaign was finished,” Schmidt confessed to an auditorium full of college students. When the number of people who thought the country was on the right track “dropped to 5 percent and the economy collapsed, I knew that was not going to be survivable for us.”

And so it goes…

And of course Coleman will appeal, but it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll be calling the former SNLer Senator Franken in the very near future.

From Star Tribune:

After a trial spanning nearly three months, Norm Coleman’s attempt to reverse Al Franken’s lead in the recount of the U.S. Senate election was soundly rejected today by a three-judge panel that dismissed the Republican’s lawsuit.

The judges swept away Coleman’s argument that the election and its aftermath were fraught with systemic errors that made the results invalid.

“The overwhelming weight of the evidence indicates that the Nov. 4, 2008, election was conducted fairly, impartially and accurately,” the panel said in its unanimous decision.

In rejecting Coleman’s arguments, the panel said the Republican essentially asked it to ignore Minnesota election requirements and adopt a more lenient standard allowing illegal absentee ballots to be counted.

Frankly, I don’t see what other legal rabbits Coleman can pull out of his hat at this point, and even conservatives are starting to call for him to quit. He has little recourse now than to try and get another recount, but the last one put him more in the hole so I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

So yes, it’s time for Coleman to accept defeat and hang it up. Otherwise he’ll kill his chances to challenge Franken in the next election.

More soon…

It just keeps going and going and going and…

However, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. The Minnesota Supreme Court dealt Coleman’s chances a pretty big blow a couple days ago when they said that only a handful of absentee ballots would be reevaluated. And this is shaping up to put the Republican Governor of the state in a bit of an awkward position.

From Politico:

Franken won big Tuesday when a three-judge panel allowed the review of no more than 400 absentee ballots in a race he currently leads by 225 votes. Coleman’s camp says an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court is coming; once that’s done, the dispute lands in Pawlenty’s lap.

If Franken’s ahead at that point, Pawlenty will have a choice: sign the election certificate that will allow Democrats to seat Franken in the Senate or play to the Republicans whose support he’d need in 2012 by withholding the certificate while Coleman challenges the election in the federal court system.

“The Republican Party nationally and in Minnesota is playing not just with fire, but with dynamite,” said Rep. James L. Oberstar, a Democrat and the dean of Minnesota’s congressional delegation. [...]

If Pawlenty and the Republicans push it further, he says, “this thing is going to blow up in their face.”

To his credit, Pawlenty has never said he’ll do anything but go with the court’s decision, but at what point do you call it a day? At what point does Minnesota need a representative in the Senate instead of letting a political opponent drag this thing on endlessly through the courts? I’ve long contended that they should just hold another election and go with those results instead, but that’s not going to happen at this point and allowing Coleman to make appeal after appeal isn’t politically tenable either, is it?

More as it develops…

I do feel bad for the guy, but with the internet providing the means for anybody to easily donate to a campaign, the game changed and McCain’s public finance laws couldn’t change with it.

From Wash Times:

“No Republican in his or her right mind is going to agree to public financing. I mean, that’s dead. That is over. The last candidate for president of the United States from a major party that will take public financing was me,” the Arizona Republican told The Washington Times. [...]

Mr. McCain said last year’s election has forever changed the way presidential elections are run. He said Mr. Obama carried traditional red states such as North Carolina by outspending him, and specified that in battleground Florida, the Democrat outspent him on television and radio advertising by $28 million. [...]

Mr. McCain raised his own money for the primary season but accepted public financing for the general election, constraining himself to about $84 million for the campaign’s last two months. Mr. Obama, by contrast, stayed outside the public system for the primary and general elections, raising a total of $779 million, including $150 million in September.

Still, McCain rightly points out that Obama’s team raised a lot of money from big donors too, but all those donations were within the limits of campaign finance law. So I’m not sure why he even brings it up…

“There’s just an ability to raise so much more money now, and they did it very, very effectively,” he said. “They were able to raise incredible amounts of money. But don’t think it was all small donors; they raised the same percentage of big donors versus small donors as we did, they just did a hell of a lot more of it.”

I don’t have the number here in front of me, but Obama probably raised more money from small donors than McCain raised in total. So to complain about big donors is a case of sour grapes, otherwise…why even bring up the money raised by big donors, when “big” has a cap placed on it?

Moving on…

Under this method, candidates get one Electoral Vote for each Congressional District that they win in a particular state and the candidate who receives the most votes state-wide gets two more Electoral Votes. That’s the system that has been in use in Maine and Nebraska for many years now and it received some attention last year when Barack Obama managed to win one of Nebraska’s Electoral Votes by winning in one Congressional District.

Now, Congressional Quarterly is out with a study that shows what would have happened if every state allocated their Electoral Votes in this manner:

What if the 2008 presidential election had been re-run using a district-based system of awarding electoral votes — used only in two states — instead of the winner-take-all method that every other state uses?

The answer is that Barack Obama still would have beaten John McCain , though the Electoral College tally would have been closer than the actual 365-173 margin of victory.

According to a CQ Politics analysis, Obama would have beaten McCain 301-237 using a district-based system, under which a candidate receives two electoral votes for winning a state and one electoral vote for every congressional district he or she wins. Only Maine and Nebraska allocate electoral votes in this fashion.

The analysis found that Obama won 242 districts and McCain won 193 districts. Obama also posted another 59 electoral votes by carrying 28 states and the District of Columbia, which is entitled to three electoral votes under the 23rd Amendment. McCain would have received another 44 electoral votes as a result of winning 22 states.

Not a major change in the outcome, of course, thanks to Obama’s lead in the popular vote, but it’s one that more accurately reflects how the election turned out nationwide.

And what if we’d done it in 2000 ?

Well here’s how I think it would’ve turned out:

1. Bush won 228 Congressional District, while Al Gore won 207 (Source here), so we start out at Bush 228 Gore 207.
2. Bush also won 30 states (if you include Florida) to Gore’s 20 + D.C., (Source here)which would give Bush an additional 60 Electoral Votes to Gore’s additional 43.

Thus, that would have given Bush a total of 288 Electoral Votes to Gore’s 250. And, if you did give Florida to Gore, assuming no shift in the district allocation, the total would have been Bush 286 Gore 252. There would have been no hanging chads, no Constitutional crisis, no Bush v. Gore.

Sounds like another reason we should consider adopting this nationwide.

Politifact tracked 513 promises Obama made during the primaries, and yesterday took a look at his top 10.

Of the 10 promises, 1 has been fully kept, 1 has been kept via compromise, 5 are in the works and 3 have had no action taken on them.

I’ll have more on those last 3 later, but first a rundown…

1. Create a foreclosure prevention fund for homeowners: Promise Kept.
2. Create a tax credit of $500 for workers: Compromise.
3. Repeal the Bush tax cuts for higher incomes: In The Works.
4. Begin removing combat brigades from Iraq: In The Works.
5. Close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center: In The Works.
6. Create cap and trade system with interim goals to reduce global warming: In The Works.
7. Create 5 million “green” jobs: In The Works.
8. Create a National Health Insurance Exchange: No Action.
9. Create new financial regulations: No Action.
10. Reduce oil consumption by 35 percent by 2030: No Action.

A couple things about this list…

First, to have this many important initiatives “In the Works” this early is impressive. I don’t think any President has been able to put so many pieces of his agenda into motion in such a short span of time.

Second, although no action has been officially taken on health care reform and new financial regulations, they’re definitely on their way.

I’m just saying, not too shabby for two months in.

The Minnesota recount saga still hasn’t ended, but Coleman is already moving on?

Hrmm…

Last session’s senior senator from Minnesota Norm Coleman, still battling Al Franken to be seated in the Senate, has taken a paid job as a consultant to the Republican Jewish Coalition, which harshly attacked Obama last fall, its executive director, Matt Brooks, said.

Coleman will join the group as a “consultant and strategic advisor,” and will also travel the country fundraising on the group’s behalf, Brooks said.

“It’s an opportunity for him to, now that he’s got some down time on his hands, to really help us while this case is being adjudicated,” Brooks said. “He hasn’t given up at all” on retaking the Minnesota seat.

Maybe “he hasn’t given up at all”, but appearances matter and I can’t help but think that when Minnesotans find out that Coleman is moonlighting, they won’t exactly look upon that favorably.

More as it develops…

Way back when Barack Obama was just a regular rock star, only filling high school gymnasiums instead of NFL stadiums, my daughter got to cuddle with him twice.

Nothing scandalous, mind you, Dahlia was a five-month-old baby at the time. But her combined 90 seconds with the future president made her a New York Daily News covergirl, inspired a bit in Jay Leno’s monologue and briefly inflated her importance to the same level as Angelina Jolie’s pregnancy.

In the ultimate baby scrapbook exercise, I chased down nearly every major presidential candidate for saliva-free photo ops during the New Hampshire Primary. Only Obama broke the no-kissing rule and the press photographers went nuts. The resulting photo essay, “The Baby Primary,” inspired worldwide speculation about the candidates’ body language.

Exactly a year after the media madness, I’m frequently asked two questions:

1. Did Dahlia ever get to snuggle up to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin or Vice President Joe Biden?

2. Will Dahlia be attending the Inauguration?

Caribou Barbie only came to NH once and I regrettably could not leave work that day. It would have been hilarious to introduce my baby as Tigger or Trigger or Tugg or Tagg (oops, that’s the name of Mitt Romney’s kid). I did try to meet Biden at a local community college, but his blathering oratory put my girl into an irreversibly cranky mood.

As for the shocked friends and relatives who cannot believe that Dahlia was not invited to Tuesday’s star-studded love-in, here’s a reality check: Barack Obama kisses babies in every city and town in America.

Do they even sell formal gowns at the Baby GAP?

Even though the Obamas’ so-called “Youth Ball” is for 18-year-olds, not 18-month-olds, I do have a lingering feeling that my daughter has been stood up at the prom. Seeking solidarity, I managed to track down political photo-op guru Andy Green, a junior history major at the University of Northern Iowa.

Green pulled off a major coup before the 2008 Iowa Caucuses, posing his Mr. Potato Head toy with Obama, McCain and the rest of the pack. The stoic Biden was the only luminary who refused the honor, explaining that he does “not take pictures with funny hats or funny toys.” But his wife, Jill, happily obliged.

It turns out that Green and his plastic spud, which once had its butt panel removed to satisfy Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service agents, were not invited to Washington either.

Green and I aren’t alone, of course. Scalped tickets to the Inauguration, which were originally distributed free through Congressional Districts, are fetching $500 on Craigslist.

Refusing to shell out that kind of moolah, I figured I had nothing to lose by pretending to play the DC Who-You-Know powergame. I contacted a close friend, who is the son-in-law of Someone Very Important, with hopes of scoring some “extra” tickets. He laughed at me, poking fun at his own lack of clout. Amazingly, his mother-in-law, a.k.a. the influential wife of Someone Very Important, has been turning away her own close friends. (As an aside, he noted that unclaimed 2004 Bush Inauguration tix were as plentiful as Skee-Ball prize tickets).

I now regret trying to play my weak Who-You-Know card. The magic of the New Hampshire Primary was that I had no special connections enabling us to mingle with the next President and the next Secretary of State. It was bad karma to try to force it.

However, I am convinced that Dahlia influenced at least a few votes for Obama during the earliest primaries, when he most desperately needed them. The blogosphere was buzzing with women cooing over his natural baby-handling skills, which are impossible to fake. My own wife, Stacy, fell into this camp. She told CNN that Barack won her vote just by “the way he’s looking at her so lovingly and so warmly.” (To be fair, Stacy also factors the economy, foreign policy and social values into the equation).

But Obama obviously owes my family nothing — except for stuff like defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

And the truth is that Dahlia will probably be much happier staying home on Inauguration Day. She has yet to ask for one of those designer Inaugural handbags or t-shirts by Diane Von Furstenberg or Donna Karan. She’s still far more impressed by Fisher Price.

**

New Donklephant contributor Darren Garnick is a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker obsessed with offbeat pop culture and political insanity.

Coleman is suing to challenge Franken’s lead.

The saga continues…

Republican Norm Coleman’s trial challenging DFLer Al Franken’s lead in the U.S. Senate recount will begin Jan. 26, according to an order issued this afternoon by the three-judge panel that will hear the case.

The order did not map out when specific issues would be argued, nor did it touch on other details surrounding the rare proceeding, including whether cameras will be permitted.

However, it set the time for the hearing on Franken’s motion to dismiss Coleman’s challenge for Wednesday. If that motion fails, another hearing would be held next Friday on any motions made for summary judgment followed by a pre-trial conference.

As I’ve said before, the only way to legitimately get a real winner out of this is to hold another election. I don’t know if there’s any appetite in Minnesota to do this, but whoever does ultimately “win” from this recount will be looked at the same way Bush was in 2000.

Is that really how Franken wants to start out?

Back in November, Sarah Palin unloaded on the blogosphere in one of her first post-election interviews.

And, she’s back at it again:

(CNN) — Sarah Palin fired a new salvo in her war on the media, unloading in a new interview on her home state paper and “bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie.”

The Alaska governor, who has granted a steady stream of interviews since Election Day, also told an Esquire reporter that she wishes she had told McCain campaign advisors she’d be “callin’ some of the shots.”

“Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me….I’ll tell you, yesterday the Anchorage Daily News, they called again to ask — double-, triple-, quadruple-check — who is Trig’s real mom,” she said, in an interview to be published in the magazine’s March issue.

“And I said, Come on, are you kidding me? We’re gonna answer this? Do you not believe me or my doctor? And they said, No, it’s been quite cryptic the way that my son’s birth has been discussed. And I thought, Okay, more indication of continued problems in the world of journalism.”

The only problem is that Palin completely mischaracterizes what it was that the Anchorage Daily News was doing:

In an Anchorage Daily News column published last week, the paper’s editor said the only questions reporters there had asked about Trig’s birth came when the paper undertook a project to debunk conspiracy theories surrounding the event, but that they had abandoned the effort because of a lack of cooperation from the Palin family.

“I don’t believe we have ever published in the newspaper a story, a letter, a column or anything alleging a coverup surrounding your maternity,” wrote the editor in an e-mail sent to Palin and reprinted on the paper’s blog. “In fact, my integrity and the integrity of the newspaper have been repeatedly attacked in national forums for our complicity in the ‘coverup.’

Later, he added: “…So I don’t understand the behavior of the governor’s press office. Did the governor not share my email with the press staff? Did the press staff deliberately ignore what I said in order to have a longer list of press ‘outrages’? Or are they just sloppy with details? I don’t know.”

So, Palin’s effort to play the victim here fails miserably, but then I really think she doesn’t get it when I read stuff like this:

Even hard news sources, credible news sources — the comment about, you can see Russia from Alaska. You can! You can see Russia from Alaska. Something like that — a factual statement that was taken out of context and mocked — what you have to do is let that go.”

What Palin fails to address, of course, is the fact that Alaska’s proximity to Russia, which is a manifest fact, was cited by Palin and by several McCain campaign surrogates (see here, here, and here) as evidence of her foreign policy experience. As we learned soon after this idiotic idea was put forward, though, Palin has absolutely no role in homeland defense despite being Governor of Alaska because, you know, Alaska is a state and national defense is a Federal responsibility.

But back to the blogging thing. Michael Stallings at The Moderate Voice thinks that it’s evidence of Palin’s disdain for anyone who dares to criticize her:

Really, though, she’s not referring to anyone. She’s just attacking bloggers generally. Just like she thinks we all live in our parents’ basements, so does she think that we’re all bored and pathetic (and anonymous?), a bunch of liars. It’s just her way of lashing out at her critics, at anyone who dares question her. (I’m sure she’s fine with the many bloggers on the right who helped make her what she became, who drooled all over her and who long for her to lead them to the promised land of conservative bliss — God, guns, and a whole lotta drilling.) She avoided — or was kept away from — the media during the campaign, but now she’s a media manipulator herself, using various friendly media outlets on the right, as well as more mainstream outlets, to spew her spin and promote her cause, namely, herself.

As long as the media still bother to put a camera and microphone in front of her, enabling her and keeping her in the public eye long past her expiry date, we’ll have to put up with this sort of nonsense. And while we’re talking about lying, it’s Palin herself who’s full of dishonesty, as when she attacks the Anchorage Daily News for probing (and questioning) her maternity, an attack without basis in reality. But, then, so much of what Palin says and does is without basis in reality, and, in her eternal quest for victimhood (they’re all against me!), she’s apparently willing to make any claim, however fraudulent.

And that’s going to continue as long as she continues to find an audience willing to listen. Sadly, I think Sarah Palin is here to stay.

Originally posted at Below The Beltway

This is Steven Greenstreet with American News Project.

Activists claim that money from the Mormon Church was the deciding factor in passing Proposition 8 in California – banning gay marriage. The church claims to have only spent a few thousand dollars on the campaign, but ANP has uncovered evidence that may expose a gaping hole in that claim. Also, the IRS forbids religious organizations from “substantially” lobbying for political legislation. But, since the IRS does not define what “substantial” means, how is anyone to know just how much was too much?

However, Norm Coleman is going to the courts to add even more rejected absentee ballots. Still, to overcome a 225 votes deficit at this point seems extremely unlikely.

Here’s more from the Star Tribune…

DFLer Al Franken held an unofficial lead of 225 votes over Coleman, according to a newspaper tally of the officials’ count of the absentee ballots. Franken had led unofficially by 49 votes going into the day and gained a net 176 votes from the new ballots.

With the recount complete, focus immediately shifted to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which continued to consider a request from the Coleman campaign to alter the process and add more absentee ballots to be reconsidered. But by early evening there was no word from the state’s highest court as to when it would rule or hear arguments. [...]

Under state law, an election certificate formally naming a winner cannot be issued until all legal disputes are resolved.

The lawsuit, called an election contest, is expected to center on the issue of the excluded absentee ballots as well as disputes over ballots the Coleman campaign believes were double counted and a decision to use Election Day machine totals, rather than recount totals, in a Minneapolis precinct where more than 100 ballots went missing.

How bleak are things for Coleman?

Nate Silver explains…

Either way, a number of legal stratagems that might have seemed appealing to the Coleman campaign might now be somewhat mooted. For instance, even if all 130 ballots that the Coleman campaign claimed were double-counted for Franken were removed from his tally (but no ballots at all had been double-counted for Coleman), Franken would maintain a significant advantage. With Franken doing so well among the absentee ballots that were counted today, moreover, any Coleman attempts to get more absentee ballots counted would seem to have a high risk of backfiring.

So I think the best shot Coleman has right now is to try and get a reelection…which seems highly unlikely given the new margin of victory Franken has.

More as it develops…

(Thanks to Jake Dahn for the tip.)

With Al Franken up just 50 votes in the Minnesota recount, congressional Republicans are worried the Democratic controlled Senate might try to seat Franken provisionally. Now, Republican Senator John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has threatened a filibuster if Democrats try to seat Franken before the Minnesota secretary of state and governor certify the election results.

Seating Franken before the election is certified would make him appear the presumptive winner and would make any challenges by Norm Coleman seem like an attempt to overturn the election. In reality, the vote tallies are too close for anyone to make assumptions until the 1000+ improperly rejected absentee ballots are tallied.

But Cornyn won’t likely have to live up to his threat. The new Congress is seated Tuesday and Democrats say they have no intention to seat Franken, even provisionally.

That means we could be weeks or even months away from knowing who will represent Minnesota in the Senate.

Update by Justin:
With the recount technically over, Franken leads by 225 votes.

Sure, I think the year will be defined by the economic collapse and the election, but perhaps it may also be seen as the year we woke up with regards to our banking system and started to reform it in real, honest ways.

Fingers crossed.

What looked completely unlikely just a few weeks ago has turned around for the funnyman as he has won some key decisions in the past week and is now ahead by just 46 votes.

That’s right…46 votes.

From the Star Tribune:

A state Supreme Court ruling Wednesday narrowed the options available for Sen. Norm Coleman to erase a slim lead held by DFLer Al Franken in the Minnesota election dispute, and Coleman’s campaign threatened a court battle that could leave the Senate seat vacant for a month.

The Supreme Court denied a bid by the Coleman campaign to prevent local and state canvassing boards from tallying votes that the incumbent says may have been counted twice. Most of the votes at issue are from DFL strongholds.

The justices said the campaign’s claim of double-counted ballots is better resolved in a court hearing where evidence can be presented, instead of by canvassing boards.

The order allows those disputed ballots to remain in the vote totals, at least for now.

So what options do Coleman have left?

According to FiveThirtyEight, not many…

Although Franken’s lead over Coleman is narrow — 46 votes — the only substantial group of ballots remaining to be counted are rejected absentees. But both campaigns have been operating under the assumption that those absentee ballots are more likely to add to Franken’s margin than subtract from it.

I have to hand it to Franken…he stuck in there and took the appropriate legal routes to swing this back in his favor. And in a race that I think we can all agree was a tie, the guy with the best lawyers wins.

More as it develops…