The Minnesota Senate Race Is Over — Coleman Has Conceded Defeat To Franken – TPMDC (6/30/09):

In a press conference just now, former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) has conceded defeat to the Democratic comedian Franken in the 2008 Senate race — nearly eight months after Election Day, and six months after the seat went vacant when Coleman’s single term had expired. Coleman said that further litigation would damage the state, and congratulated Sen.-elect Franken on his victory.

Wow. I thought this was going to continue for another few months at least. Congratulations Senator Franken. Still, I’m sure we’ll soon hear Obama and Reid explaining that even 60 votes doesn’t mean anything in the Senate.

The Seersucker Caucus is in grave danger of losing its quorum with Lott, Warner, Stevens and now Coleman gone.

Edited to add: I forgot all about this:

Now, it looks like Norm Coleman will need to raise money for another legal battle. But with the allegations that surfaced yesterday, past donors may be understandably chary about contributing again.

The short version is that, for a brief period in January, the Coleman campaign — displaying an extraordinary level of incompetence — first accidentally parked the full credit card information of donors (including the three-digit security codes that vendors are not even supposed to save in the first place after charging a card) in unencrypted form in a publicly accessible location on their website. Then, in direct contravention of state law, and in clear violation of any notion of ethical behavior, they chose not to inform donors of this security breach once they became aware of it. Their first communication to affected donors came yesterday, after donors who had been alerted by Wikileaks to the security breach started contacting the campaign with questions.

Here is the Wikileaks version of the story:

Wikileaks has released detailed lists of the controversial Republican Senator Norm Coleman’s supporters and donors. Some 51,000 individuals are represented.

Although politically interesting in their own right, the lists, which are part of an enormous 4.3Gb database leak from the Coleman campaign, provide proof to the rumors that sensitive information–including thousands of supporter’s credit card numbers–were put onto the Internet on January 28 as a result of sloppy handling.

Senator Coleman collected detailed information on every supporter and website visitor and retained unencrypted credit card information from donors, including their security codes. Although made aware of the leak in January, Senator Coleman kept the breach secret, failing to inform contributors, in violation of Minnesota Statute 325E.61.

The statute states that organizations that become aware of such a disclosure of sensitive unencrypted personal information must notify the individuals concerned “in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay” and “immediately following discovery.”

The information circulated on the Internet for six weeks before a warning was sent by Wikileaks to those affected, pending its analysis of the material.

Yesterday Wikileaks sent two notifications to Coleman’s supporters as a courtesy prior to releasing a subset of the data.

Today Senator Coleman’s Campaign manager Cullen Sheehan tried to spin the issue, claiming somewhat fantastically that no data had been downloaded, that the culprits would be caught and that all donors should cancel their credit cards. No apology was made for the initial leak or its cover up.

In response Wikileaks has had to bring forward its public announcement. The open government group has released two files, a detailed list of 4,721 on-line donors with the last four digits of their credit cards as proof and a list of some 51,641 supporters. The full database comprises over 30 tables of information, including personal details, full credit card numbers, passwords and “back of card” security numbers.

Wikileaks will release other material from the extensive Coleman database once those affected have time to be informed.

The Coleman campaign’s spin seems patently false, on the face of it. The following facts seem incontrovertible:
1) The full credit card information of donors is actually in the possession of Wikileaks, so obviously this information was downloaded and leaked into the public domain, although the Coleman campaign insists none of this data had been compromised.
2) The Coleman campaign did not contact donors till yesterday to inform them of the breach.

There doesn’t seem to be any way that this can end well for the Coleman campaign. The ill-considered spin they are putting out at this stage is only going to make things worse.

Incidentally, TPMDC has Norm Coleman calling this hacking (not exactly the appropriate word to use if you leave unencrypted data sitting around in full public view), and accusing political opponents of being responsible:

Norm Coleman just delivered a statement outside the Minnesota courtroom, addressing the breach of security on his online donors’ data — and putting the blame squarely on political opponents, who are allegedly attempting to scare Coleman’s supporters out of donating.

However, The Minneapolis Star Tribune says:

His lawyer, Fritz Knaak, said that while crippling Coleman’s fundraising during the election trial was an obvious reason, the campaign had no evidence that political opponents were to blame.

***Update, 6:27 a.m. ***

For anyone who is interested, this January 28, 2009 post by Adria Richards on her ButYou’reAGirl blog seems to be what initially spilled the story onto the internet. This post was cited in the letter that Wikileaks received from their whistleblower, as proof that the “database was exposed by the incompetence of Coleman’s website personnel, making the information public for a period of time”.

The headline Even More Uncounted Ballots In Minnesota? links to a TPM Election Central post about the rejected absentee ballots that have been known and written about for weeks now. (That post has a slightly different, but still indefensible, title: Even More Ballots In Minnesota?)

It is well known that some absentee ballots are believed to have been rejected for no valid reason, just due to administrative error. That’s why the Secretary of State’s office recently directed each county to sort through rejected absentee ballots:

A wrinkle to the U.S. Senate recount was added today when the Secretary of State’s office asked county election officials to sort through an estimated 12,000 rejected absentee ballots.
[...]
Out of an estimated 12,000 absentee ballots that were initially rejected, (Marc Elias, Franken‘s lead attorney) estimated that as many as 1,000 could have been improperly tossed out.

In an e-mail, sent Monday afternoon to officials in all 87 counties, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann asked them to re-examine the ballots and sort them into five piles: Four would contain ballots that were rejected for reasons directly related to state law, while a fifth pile would contain ballots that do “not meet one of these four reasons, or if the reason used to reject the absentee ballot is not based on factual information.”

It is the 171 ballots that ended up in the fifth pile that TPM is pleased to describe as Even More Uncounted Ballots In Minnesota? All the more ironic, because the real story is not that there are more uncounted ballots than we knew about, it is that the number of ballots in the fifth pile is much smaller than expected. (Correction: The 171 ballots in question were only for Minneapolis. A report on December 11 suggests that the total number of fifth pile ballots could reach as high as 2,000.) )

Then there’s Police: Mumbai Attackers Snuck Into India From Nepal. Clicking on the headline takes you to an AP story, which tells us that an “Indian militant based in Nepal who helped Pakistani gunmen cross India’s porous borders to stage attacks is being brought to Mumbai for questioning”. Although it is unclear to police whether he “had any links to the recent Mumbai siege, … he had participated in Lashkar operations against Indian targets before.”

Just to be clear, a police spokesman said that they have no idea if the Mumbai attackers had snuck into India from Nepal. So TPM went with the headline Police: Mumbai Attackers Snuck Into India From Nepal.

AP‘s original headline was Police: Militant group snuck across Indian borders. As in, Lashkar-e-Taiba militants had snuck into India from Nepal in the past. It looks very much like TPM‘s headline writer doesn’t read the stories at all. He reads only the headlines, and he is required to change them around a little from the original. Hard to do that right if you have no idea what the story actually says.

For a while now, it has been obligatory to end any story about the state of the recount by ritually repeating that no matter what the final result is once the recount is officially over and the Minnesota Canvassing Board has finished ruling on contested ballots, that “final result” is virtually certain to be challenged in court, and the election will probably end up being decided by the courts.

But there are some other possibilities too:

For now, Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race is looking to set a record as the closest election in the history of that legislative body. A 355-vote margin in New Hampshire’s election in 1974 is the current record.

That one wound down to a truly memorable finish. After two recounts in New Hampshire and more than six months of deadlock at the U.S. Capitol, the Senate declared New Hampshire’s senate seat vacant on August 8, 1975. That was 276 days after the polls closed. Democratic challenger John Durkin and Republican incumbent Louis Wyman squared off again in a September re-vote.
[...]
That’s not how it is likely to play out in Minnesota, though. How about this for a doomsday scenario?

The state has a vacancy law (204.D28) that deals with precisely such matters, and it has come into play several times. The first was in 1976, when U.S. Senator Walter Mondale was elected Jimmy Carter‘s vice president. Gov. Wendell Anderson resigned and had his successor, Rudy Perpich, appoint him to the vacant seat. The political maneuvering effectively ended Anderson’s political career. The second case was in 2002, when Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash and Gov. Jesse Ventura appointed Dean Barkley to the Senate.

Here’s the relevant part, though: If a recount of this year’s election stretches into January, either the state courts or the U.S. Senate (which is the ultimate arbiter of the election of its members) could declare Minnesota to have a vacant senate seat. That would trigger the state’s vacancy law, which allows the governor to appoint a senator.

The law makes a crucial point here: “An appointee shall hold office until a successor is elected and qualified at a special election or until a successor is elected.” That means that come January 3rd, 2009, if the matter still hasn’t been settled and the election’s victor declared, Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty will be theoretically able to appoint a U.S. Senator (likely a Republican) who will serve at least until Nov. 3, 2009, when another election is held and a winner “qualified.” Which is to say he or she gets a result certified by the state canvassing board and the seven day contest period expires.

According to Ramsey County elections manager Joe Mansky, who long served in the Secretary of State’s office, that would make for a term of office ending Nov. 25, 2009. That would make for a 325 day senate term — presuming Pawlenty doesn’t appoint incumbent Norm Coleman.

And here’s where the real trouble comes. If, say, the Republicans successfully argue to a state judge on January 3 (or shortly after) that the undecided election amounts to a vacancy in the office, they could effectively nullify this week’s election. Minnesota’s vacancy law doesn’t have a look-back provision. Even if the election were subsequently settled, the law doesn’t apply a past election to a vacancy that has already been filled. Filling the vacancy would automatically trigger a do-over in the next November.

Presumably, that would only occur if it looked like Coleman were trailing or in a bad legal position.

And state law wouldn’t stop Al Franken from going to Washington, D.C., telling the secretary of the Senate that he is the real victor and asking the Senate to seat him, without an election certificate. That would presumably spark a debate in the U.S. Senate over whether the seat is vacant and touch off Lord only knows what kind of a political struggle between Washington D.C. and St. Paul.

So this could get a lot more interesting before it’s over.

His Democratic challenger Jim Martin held a rally in Atlanta. No reports of “Vets for Martin” signs, but Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth spoke about Chambliss’ record on veteran’s issues:

In 2004, when I was flying my Blackhawk helicopter north of Baghdad and I got hit with that rocket-propelled grenade that blew up between my legs and took them off — and almost took off my right arm — the only thing that saved me was my buddies and the armor that I was wearing. … In his six years in the United States Senate, Saxby Chambliss has voted against providing armor for our troops. He has been against providing armored vehicles for our troops. And then, when my buddies and I came home, he has been against the G.I. Bill.

That seems to exemplify pretty well how differently Republicans and Democrats do it. Republicans don’t believe in wasting time and energy getting bogged down in the facts. And they seem to have an abiding belief that slogans trump substance.

If you live in the People’s Republic of California, make sure to vote hell no on Prop 8 (and Prop 4) on Tuesday.

“The older you do get, the more rules they gon’ try to get you to follow. You gotta just keep livin’. L-I-V-I-N!”

Dole is in a close re-election race in North Carolina, and recent polls show her trailing Democrat Kay Hagan. So Dole has decided to unleash utter filth in a campaign ad.

Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s latest advertisement suggests her Democratic opponent, Kay Hagan, is a godless heathen.

“A leader of the Godless Americans PAC recently held a secret fundraiser for Kay Hagan,” the 30-second spot says, showing footage of the group’s members talking about their atheist beliefs on cable news.

“Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took godless money,” the ad concludes. “What did Kay Hagan promise in return?”

At the very end of the ad, a voice sounding like Hagan’s says: “There is no God.”

To put that last slimy bit in proper perspective, the “There is no God!” statement is accompanied by a picture of Hagan. The “clear implication is that the voice is Hagan’s”.

The facts:
— The voice saying “there is no God” at the end of the ad is not Hagan’s, but a voice impersonator’s. That alone would make the ad thoroughly despicable even if the charges levied by the ad were otherwise true. But they aren’t. Not by long shot.
— Far from being a godless heathen, Hagan is not just a member but an elder at the First Presbyterian Church in Greensboro. She teaches Sunday school.
— That fundraiser was co-hosted by 40 people. One of them is a representative of the Godless America PAC.

The bottom line would seem to be that Kay Hagan has not exactly sold her soul to the godless. But Liddy Dole? She very much seems to have sold her soul to the devil.

(In case you missed the reference in the title, The Devil in Miss Jones is a pornographic film. I guess I’m suggesting that Liddy Dole’s is an act of political pornography.)

Now, when it’s time to face the voters, suddenly they think they can get away with taking the fifth?

In a contentious segment on “Hardball” tonight, host Chris Matthews accused Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and his conservative allies of “taking off your uniforms,” pretending they’re not Republicans, and running against President Bush. “I’m not going to let anyone get away with that kind of foolery,” Matthews said. He asked Cantor at least five times whether he supported the job Bush is doing — and all five times Cantor refused to answer.

Guys like Cantor seriously think that everyone will magically forget how Republicans in Congress marched in solid lockstep to Bush’s tune? Bush said “Jump!” and they jumped. Bush said “Heel!” and they heeled.

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed five nominees for the Federal Election Commission, breaking a prolonged partisan logjam and allowing the agency to resume functioning.

The nominees were confirmed without dissent after drawn-out talks between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and a last-minute hang-up over a demand from Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a campaign finance crusader, to meet with all five nominees.

Though the FEC staff has been at work, the six-member commission has been inactive because it has not had a quorum to conduct business. The commission is the agency that regulates federal elections and campaign finance matters.

“Our nation’s campaign finance watchdog was off the beat,” Reid said.

The newly confirmed commissioners are Democrats Cynthia L. Bauerly of Minnesota and Steven T. Walther of Nevada, along with Republicans Caroline C. Hunter of Florida, Donald F. McGahn of the District of Columbia and Matthew S. Petersen of Utah.

McConnell called the action “long overdue,” adding that the agency “can now resume its critical role of enforcing election laws and ensuring that this election season is fair and equitable to all who are involved.”
[...]
The commission consists of three Democratic and three Republican appointees. Any commission action requires a four-vote majority, no matter what size the quorum.

Since the beginning of the year, the commission has only had two members: Republican Chairman David Mason and Democrat Ellen Weintraub.

Earlier this month, President Bush decided to withdraw Mason’s nomination, prompting a protest from Reid and from watchdog groups.

Mason has on few occasions voted with Democrats on regulatory matters. Earlier this year, he angered officials in Republican John McCain’s presidential campaign by raising questions about a loan McCain obtained and by informing the campaign that it needed a vote of the commission before withdrawing from the primary’s public financing system. Earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint with the FEC over McCain’s loan and on Tuesday it sued in federal court to compel the FEC to investigate the matter.

McCain has another matter before the commission. He plans to accept $85 million in public money for his general election campaign — a step that requires the approval of the commission. Without an operating FEC, McCain would be unable to collect the money.

Now that there’s a quorum again, the FEC can set about addressing whether McCain has cheerfully broken campaign finance laws by spending more than $56,757,500 during the primary season. Having first opted in to public financing, McCain unilaterally declared that he had opted out, and proceeded to exceed the spending limit. He did this even though FEC chairman David Mason informed him in writing that he is legally locked into the public financing system, and bound by the $56,757,500 limit, until the FEC approves his request to opt out, something the FEC has been unable to do since it lacked a quorum.

The really interesting part is that FEC approval of McCain’s request is hardly automatic. David Mason has already gone on record with the view that McCain’s “too-clever-by-half $4 million bank loan in December” may disqualify him from opting out of public financing for the primaries. If I’m reading the rules right (“Any commission action requires a four-vote majority”), McCain’s opt-out request gets approved only if five of the six commissioners now disagree with Mason, and vote to approve the opt-out. If even two commissioners are swayed by Mason’s argument, John “Campaign Finance Reform” McCain will be found to be in deliberate violation of campaign finance laws, laws he was warned about in writing but chose to violate anyway.

At least that will mean he actually lived up to his “maverick” billing. Unfortunately, he will have done so in true George Bush fashion, by deciding that the laws don’t apply to him.

St. John gave a $100-a-plate luncheon speech in Ottawa on Friday. The fact that U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins, “a former South Carolina lawmaker whom President Bush appointed in 2005″, helped to organize this apparently political event has led to some controversy.

And McCain was still on Canadian soil when the Democratic National Committee announced it was filing a Freedom of Information Act request for State Department records detailing the involvement of Ambassador David Wilkins during the trip.

The issue is whether Wilkins violated the Hatch Act. Under the Act, Wilkin’s efforts to promote the event are clearly illegal if the event was a fund-raiser:

The Hatch Act circumscribes political activity for government employees. According to the American Foreign Service Association Web site, the State Department’s ethics office prohibits fundraising activities for its presidential appointees.

The Web site for the association prints Cable No. 035610, the guidelines from the ethics division of the Department of State Legal Adviser’s Office.

“In particular, you may not sell tickets for or otherwise promote fundraising activites such as political dinners for a partisan candidate or political committee,” the cable says. It adds that the rules are for anyone “on duty,” and that “the legislative history suggests that ambassadors may be considered to be on duty twenty-four hours a day while they are at post.”

The McCain campaign said Wilkins did nothing more than help gather a crowd for a speech by a U.S. official, something that is well within his role as an ambassador.

It would also be illegal in the first place for McCain to hold a fundraiser in Canada, since it is illegal for U.S. candidates to accept donations from foreigners.

So both McCain and Wilkins may be in legal jeopardy (which is not to say that, in the time of Bush, anything will actually happen to therm) unless a) only American citizens attended the $100-a-plate luncheon (which would let McCain off the hook, but not Wilkins), or b) the event really wasn’t a fundraiser for McCain. Not surprisingly, the McCain campaign is opting for the latter explanation:

A McCain spokesman said that while the campaign pays travel costs for the trip, the luncheon, held by the Economic Club of Canada, is not a fundraiser and not a campaign event.

He said the $100-per-person ticket price for the event is to cover the cost of the lunch and will not benefit the campaign.

“It’s not a fundraiser. That’s to pay for their own lunch. That is not for campaign coffers,” Brian Rogers said. “The Ottawa speech is not in our view a campaign-related event. Thus, anything related to that is not political.”

That’s rich: we don’t consider it a campaign-related event, and therefore it is not. The campaign paid the travel cost, but it wasn’t a campaign-related event.

Unfortunately:
1) The luncheon was listed on McCain’s schedule as a “finance event.” That’s the standard terminology the McCain campaign uses for domestic fundraisers. Thus, McCain’s campaign calendar for this week shows a “Fresno, California Finance Event” today and a “Riverside, California Finance Event” tomorrow So that’s like saying: “Yes, we ourselves called it a fundraiser, but guess what, it’s not really a fundraiser.”

2) McCain campaign co-chair Senator Lindsey Graham was involved in planning this non-campaign event. As you might suspect, he doesn’t usually get involved in planning non-campaign foreign trips by McCain (which is what the McCain campaign is now trying to call this trip, even though it was paid for and organized by his campaign and not his Senate office, which is a non-campaign trip would have been handled).

3) The Canadian newspapers who first reported on the luncheon both described it as a fundraiser:

The article in the Edmonton Sun, and an earlier one in the Globe and Mail, says that Wilkins contacted Thomas d’Aquino, the president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, to help set up what they described as a fundraiser before McCain’s visit.

One imagines that “fundraiser” was the term used by Mr. d’Aquino to describe the event.

4) The Globe and Mail described it as a “political speech” well before the event, that is to say well before there was any indication that the nature of the event was going to become a bone of contention.

Sounds like it’s time for a chorus of the new McCain campaign theme song:

He breaks them here,
He breaks them there,
He bloody well breaks them everywhere!