Franken Wins! (Now what?)

I'd like to see this post of mine that insinuates he's a communist. I re-read every single post in this thread and there is no such insinuation. There is the blatant statement of fact that he is left of the American center, but no claim was made that he's a communist.

~String

 

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That's not true.

Military expenditures, in terms of relevent GDP, are smaller now than they were in Vietnam or for most of the Cold War. The notion that Iraq or the War on Terror are bankrupting the country are Leftist fantasies.

 

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Well, all by itself? Probably not. But how much has the war in Iraq cost? $1.2 trillion? That would be a hefty down payment on the national debt.

And who are we kidding, it's not like the Republicans don't have their share of ridiculous pet projects that cost hundreds of billions.

~String

 

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See Zakaria to calm your fear:

"The United States also spends more on defense research and development than the rest of the world put together. And crucially, it does all this without breaking the bank. U.S. defense expenditure as a percent of GDP is now 4.1 percent, lower than it was for most of the Cold War (under Dwight Eisenhower, it rose to ten percent). As U.S. GDP has grown larger and larger, expenditures that would have been backbreaking have become affordable. The Iraq war may be a tragedy or a noble endeavor, but either way, it will not bankrupt the United States. The price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan together -- $125 billion a year -- represents less than one percent of GDP. The war in Vietnam, by comparison, cost the equivalent of 1.6 percent of U.S. GDP in 1970, a large difference. (Neither of these percentages includes second- or third-order costs of war, which allows for a fair comparison even if one disputes the exact figures.)"

 

Maybe it's just the conspiracy "theorist" in me, but I was somewhat disappointed when he angrily dismissed the accusations leveled against William J. Clinton by the documentary "The Clinton Chronicles". (that was in Lying Liars..) I recommend that to be seen at least once in one's life.

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Let's not forget that the first bailout bill was the love child of Bush, Paulson, and probably Bernanke. Wasn't it Paulson that made the thinly veiled threat of martial law if congress didn't pass the bailout???
http://ronpaulnews.net/2008/11/senator-inhofe-paulson-behind-martial.html
There is a link to an article on Prison Planet underneath the streaming audio.

One may rightly complain about Obama, but Bush was just as much in bed with these criminal f**ks as anyone.

 

I complained about the bailouts under Bush, loudly. But Obama has basically seen that bet and doubled down on it.

 

No he has not. Show me were Obama has spent more money on bailouts than george II.

 

I guess you missed the trillion dollar stimulus package?

 

George II tried to hand out 1.8 trillion to Wall St.

 

Whatever Franken's political outlook, I'm still not clear on how the "I know the race is close but I found a bunch of votes in my trunk and they were all for Al" rule works in the democratic process.

 

Hype: Why must you make everything an either/or? Oh, wait. It's because you're a partisan.

Well, I am not partisan, I don't care to be. I said I was not happy with Bush's bailouts and that what angered me was that Obama essentially doubled down on them. That is a blackjack term. It has nothing to do with actually "doubling" amounts, and I made no claim about who has higher gross numbers. I don't know, don't care. Both men have pursued ruinous policies that helps the elite and does nothing for the average taxpayer. If you zip on over to my stimulus thread, you will see what I am talking about. The economy has done absolutely nothing.

 

countezero: "Why must you make everything an either/or?"

Because either you can substantiate your ideas here, or you cannot. If you consistently cannot, then you become a prime target of opportunity for the partisans.

"Obama essentially doubled down on them. That is a blackjack term. It has nothing to do with actually "doubling" amounts, and I made no claim about who has higher gross numbers."

Doubling Down (source- about.com)

"The economy has done absolutely nothing."

The economy never does absolutely nothing.

 

So you are admitting you are partisan? That's good. Elsewhere, I always try to substantiate my ideas with facts. I can't say the same for you and the material I've seen you peddle.

Oh, yes.

Thank you. I've played blackjack.

And my original claim stands. I did not claim Obama's doubling down meant he had spent more or doubled the amount Bush spent. I made that statement because I believe Obama "doubled-down" in the hopes of winning a greater return. That's all.

Yes. That's what I meant. That's it has done absolutely nothing. Look, I know tone is hard to convey in written words, but the statement behind my statement should be clear enough to avoid these foolish, little jabs of yours, but apparently not. What was that about substantiation? I mean, seriously? Do you have anything substantive to post here?

 

countezero: "So you are admitting you are partisan?"

I'm partisan about some ideas, but not about any faction. I'm glad Al Franken is going to Washington, because I think he's smarter, and expect he will represent more nuanced, less partisan viewpoints than most US politicians do.

"Look, I know tone is hard to convey in written words, but the statement behind my statement should be clear enough to avoid these foolish, little jabs of yours, but apparently not."

Your statement was not subtle. It was ignorant.

"The economy has done absolutely nothing."

The economy has been unusually volatile, and is ever more frequently showing glimmers of recovery.

"What was that about substantiation?"

This is an observation that is as easily substantiated as "it's been raining" and "the sun's trying to peek out". Look out any window (current or recent financial reports) and you will find volatility. Look to forecasts and you will mostly find frustration at volatility, along with an expectation for recovery. If you really do perceive "nothing" you should try and get a clearer view.

 

You should try reading comprehension.

 

I never said you said he a communist only that you allotted the possibility in a standard "maybe, maybe not" stance.

 

Even the votes in Coleman's trunk ....

There's an interesting twist to that bit of rhetoric. John Colapinto explains for The New Yorker:

Election Day returns showed Coleman and Franken virtually tied. "I remember I went to sleep knowing it was just extremely close, and not knowing in the morning when I woke up whether I'd be ahead or behind and by how much," Franken told me. "After a couple of hours of sleep, I heard we were behind by seven hundred votes or something."....

.... Several days later, when the tally was complete, Coleman's lead had shrunk to two hundred and six votes—less than a hundredth of a per cent. By Minnesota law, a margin of less than one-half of one per cent requires a recount ....

.... The recount began on November 19th. Minnesotans vote by filling in a bubble beside the candidate's name on a paper ballot, which is then run through an optical scanning machine. In a recount, Minnesota law requires that every ballot be counted by hand .... The Coleman campaign ran up hundreds of challenges in every precinct, temporarily—and artificially—lowering Franken's totals. But at every recount table Schriock had installed a volunteer to write down the original call by the neutral election judge—"on the assumption that most of the challenges would not stand," she says. That way, the Franken organization was able to keep track of what the actual recount totals might look like. "This was critical," Schriock says. "The most important thing for us was to make sure you got the right information all the time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."

When the first phase of the recount ended, on December 5th, the official totals gave Coleman a lead of almost two hundred votes. However, the Franken campaign's internal count suggested that Franken was ahead by somewhere between thirty-five and fifty votes.

The State Canvassing Board, made up of Ritchie and four judges chosen from across the political spectrum, met to consider the challenged ballots on Tuesday, December 16th. By this time, Franken was feeling hopeful about his prospects for victory. "There is a subset of Democrats who tend to mis-fill out ballots," he told me. "The way you mark the ballot is like an S.A.T.—you fill in the circle. And the subset of people who tend to, like, put a check there instead, or an X, or fill it out wrong, tend to be people who didn't take S.A.T.s, or first-time voters, or people with English as a second language. So it seemed like we had a very good chance of prevailing" ....

.... On December 30th, the Canvassing Board finished adjudicating the challenged ballots, and added the tallies to the earlier vote totals. Franken pulled ahead by forty-nine votes.

The election now hung on a set of absentee ballots that had not been counted on Election Night. Some three hundred thousand absentee ballots had been cast in the general election, considerably more than in previous elections. Of these, twelve thousand had been rejected without being opened by election officials, because they failed to meet one or more of the state's strict criteria: that they be notarized or witnessed by a registered voter, for instance, or that the signatures and addresses on the outer envelope match the voter's absentee-ballot application. The Coleman campaign had initially fought hard to keep all rejected absentee ballots out of the count. Ordinarily, absentee ballots are cast by older voters who cannot get to the polls and by overseas military personnel. Both groups tend to vote Republican. But the Franken people, noting that the Obama campaign's national drive for early voting had spurred record numbers of Democrats to the polls before November 4th, suspected that many Democrats had used absentee voting as a way to cast their ballot ahead of Election Day.

The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the rejected ballots be reviewed, and ordered the candidates and election officials to coöperate in identifying ballots that were improperly rejected ....

.... When the count was over, Franken's lead had grown from forty-nine votes to two hundred and twenty-five. On Monday, the Canvassing Board certified the results ....

.... Minnesota election law, however, grants the loser in a recount a chance to challenge the tally, in a so-called Election Contest: a court trial, with testimony and evidence, before a specially selected three-person panel of Minnesota Supreme Court justices—an expensive and time-consuming procedure ....

.... The Election Contest of Coleman v. Franken began on January 26th, in the Minnesota Judicial Center, in St. Paul. Coleman needed to get more votes. The only place to find them was in the still unopened absentee-ballot envelopes that had been rejected on Election Night, in accordance with Minnesota law. To get some of those opened, the Coleman team needed to persuade the judges to relax the state's legal standards. They settled on a risky strategy to do that: invoking the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the 2000 recount in Florida, in Bush v. Gore ....

.... Coleman's lawyers had discovered that on Election Night, in some Democrat-heavy urban precincts, election officials had opened and counted a number of absentee ballots that did not strictly conform to the rules—ballots whose envelopes had been signed in the wrong place, for example. Coleman's lawyers were now demanding that similar rejected absentee ballots from other counties be opened and counted. His campaign claimed to have discovered some forty-four hundred such rejected absentee ballots—ballots that, Franken's lawyers, and the local press, noted, were drawn largely from rural precincts that tended to vote heavily for Coleman. The judges ultimately permitted the counting of three hundred and fifty-one rejected ballots, which increased Franken's lead by eighty-seven votes.​

The first balloon of new votes for Franken came from ballots the Coleman campaign had challenged during the recount. These were challenged largely because they could be challenged; there was no guarantee that the complaint against them would stick.

Ironically, though, in Coleman v. Franken, not only did the Coleman campaign attempt a bizarre flip on a strange judicial ruling, but they won that maneuver and it backfired. The second balloon of new votes for Franken came from the Coleman campaign's demand to have certain ballots counted.

If the excerpt is long, the article is even longer. During the Minnesota Supreme Court hearing, legal experts watched closely the work of Judge Christopher Dietzen, who was appointed by Republican Governor Pawlenty and had given money to various Republican candidates, including Coleman.

But it was Dietzen who opened up the most persistent line of questioning, zeroing in on the Coleman team's "offer of proof"—a stack of hundreds of photocopied absentee-ballot envelopes. The photocopies purported to show that lax standards for rejection had been used in the cities, strict standards in the rural and suburban precincts—and that the discrepancy was so widespread as to require the remedy of now opening thousands of illegal ballots. But the Coleman team had included ballots from less than half of the state's eighty-seven counties, had provided no voter testimony to explain the circumstances under which they were cast, and no specific testimony from election officials as to why they were accepted or rejected. (In some instances, an absentee ballot might not have been counted because the voter was able to make it to the polls.) Dietzen did not appear impressed, saying, "In my experience, I've never seen an offer of proof like this."​

It seems that throughout the process, Coleman's team just had nothing to work with. They got their way on the Bush v. Gore twist, and it failed them. They had a judge on the Supreme Court that many expected to be sympathetic, but had no substantial evidence to give him. There is some irony to be found in the fact even Coleman's trunk had more votes for Al.

It's a good article, including a breakfast event with Senator Franken, a bit of biography, the transition from comedy to politics, the decision to run, and the drama of the election process. Still, one can't help but feel for the deposed Senator Coleman. Not only has he lost twice to extraordinary candidates (Jesse Ventura beat him in the '98 election), but he lost this one in a most extraordinary fashion. We might not blame him if he wonders, "What does a guy have to do to win an election without his opponent dying eleven days before the polls?" He will, at least, always have St. Paul. He won twice there.
____________________

Notes:

Colapinto, John. "Enter Laughing". The New Yorker. July 20, 2009. NewYorker.com. July 15, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/07/20/090720fa_fact_colapinto

 

You imagine making no such insinuation but when you say "Is he a commie? I don't know." your basically saying he could be a communist.

 

Another way to take it, alluded to by Tiassa's link, is that once again (the common national pattern these days), the ballots mysteriously hidden, vanishing despite machine records of them, or otherwise discovered and counted only by effort and sleuthing, tended to have Democratic votes on them.

In the precinct by precinct hand counts, for example, occasionally the hand count would be off the machine count by one or two votes - on one case in my district four votes - and in the great majority of these mismatches the machine count favored Coleman. In one case I was involved with (ballots from a heavily Republican district) we handcounted a larger precinct three times, the third time with both Party reps, a third team of counters, and a second team of observers looking on, and could not match the machine count (all three hand counts matched). Franken picked up a couple of votes there (he lost that precinct by a large margin).

And how that statistical oddity, a national pattern, fits into the democratic process is indeed an interesting question.

The entire procedure in Minnesota was overseen by a Republican governor with Presidential ambitions and his chosen minions, handled by judges and other public officials of both parties, done quite openly, and completed in time to seat Franken for the normal session. The lawsuits and other legal issues that delayed the seating for so long were financed by national Republican money , flimsily based, and deprived the Senate of a crucial vote for the significant first few months of the Obama administration. How that fits into anyone's idea of good government or protecting the interests of the country as a whole is another interesting question.

Calapinto's sanitized overview omits the nature of the Republican Party efforts during all this.

For example:

The Coleman campaign was not innocent there - after the first few hours of the first day when it became clear how the recount was going to go, they adopted a deliberate strategy of frivolous challenges, in an attempt to gum up the recount and lend weight to legal tactics later by overloading the canvassing board, delay the final verdict as long as possible, and (especially) to bias the final decision in case some dubious category of challenge would be upheld. The Franken campaign started matching their challenges (about half way through the second day, IIRC) but a step behind and hampered by reasonableness (the infamous Minnesota Nice tends to be Democratic in its politics). There was a real question of whether some Pawlenty appointed judge would allow some of the sillier challenges through, and if that happened the sheer number of Coleman challenges would have swung it.

That tactic attracted negative publicity, the escalating nature of the great challenge arms race threatened to make serious problems for the recount, and the Reps agreed to a mutual standdown and an agreed policy on challenges in the later counts - but some of the damage was done, and it might have swung the recount.

There were several issues like that one throughout. Calapinto's account of the judge's ruling on the photocopied absentee ballots fails to mention that the Coleman campaign had erased voter marks from some of them, and written on them, for instance.

Calapinto also gives a pass to the local major media, that not only in that case reported the "official" running total as if it were real without explanation, but consistently reported Republican Party and Pawlenty administration press handout info as if it were the facts of the case. The closest they came to "balance" was the common "he said she said" format, without reference to physical reality.

It was an ugly scene, and it was ugly because Norm Coleman and the national Republican Party made it so. It was not a bipartisan effort at creating ugly. It was redeemed by bipartisan sanity, at the level of the judges and civil servants doing their jobs, and by the fact that Minnesota in its long tradition of reasonably competent government had established procedures for recounts and such.

But no one has to feel bad for Norm Coleman. He hitched his wagon to a manure spreader long ago, and if it gets a little ripe back there he has no one to blame but himself.