Basically, her critics are starting to pile on, and it comes down to not voting Democratic party primaries more often than not, her refusal to endorse whichever Dem opposes Bloomberg, not making donations to the party at the state level, her unwillingness to disclose financial data, her unwillingness to talk to the press, and the increasing sense that Governor Patterson is completely unimpressed with her tactics regarding him.

Of course, she has finally done an interview, and it’s been pretty widely panned, you know.

In fairness, I think that her statement that, “Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman’s magazine or something?” was justified. The entire bit with the interviewer asking her, “Could you, for the sake of storytelling, could you tell us a little bit about that moment, like, where you were, what you said to him about your decision, how that played out?” was trivial bullsh%$.

That being said, it pissed off the press, because it was not sufficiently deferential.

She increasingly sounds to me like the second coming of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who was the worst political candidate in the history of…well…history.

Well, it appears that as time goes on, we are beginning to see real push-back against Caroline Kennedy’s appointment to the US Senate to replace Hillary Clinton.

Among the concerns:

• That she is too close to Michael Bloomberg, who was a Republican until recently, and might support him running for a 3rd term as mayor.
• Governor Patterson feels that his openness to her presenting his case to him has been turned into a steamroller by her people.
• Moves by Kennedy’s people and Bloomberg’s people to announce a replacement immediately, even though Patterson has clearly stated that he will not announce an appointment until Clinton resigns to become Secretary of State.

Something to realize here is that whoever Patterson appoints, they are likely to face a spirited challenge in the general, and based on what I’ve seen so far, Kennedy is a weak campaigner.

Truth be told, a lot of this comes down to Bloomberg, whose strident support for her is not helping with New York Democrats, and the fact that she’s really not making herself particularly available which has drawn Palin analogies from her opponents.

Fair or not, in a post Palin world, she needs to do an interview to show that she has a real clue.

Two rulings from the Minnesota Supreme Court.

In the first they granted an extension on the consideration of absentee ballots, some of whom had been improperly rejected, along with approving the plan for review, which is that both sides still have to agree on a ballot before it is counted.

It’s not a great plan, you could be sure that Coleman and His Evil Minions^™ would object to anything with a pulse, but their second ruling, denying Coleman’s request to reset votes in about a dozen precincts to election night totals, pretty much means that Franken is very likely to hold onto his 50 some odd vote lead.

It appears that, based on an interview Coleman gave last night, Norm Coleman thinks so too.

The unofficial tally in Franken-Coleman has Franken leading by 48 votes.

The Coleman folks are freaking out, and have alleged double counting of ballots and have petitioned the court to revert to election night totals….Surprise…in all of the slightly more than a dozen precincts they are targeting, this takes votes from Franken…In fact, it takes enough votes to put Coleman in the lead.

Franken’s lawyers are claiming that this would in effect undermine the whole recount, and not just these precincts.

In any case, the Minnesota Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday, but no ruling has yet come down.

In further court news, it appears that there are reports of an agreement on the counting of absentee ballots, though it misses the deadline set by the Minnesota Supreme court, with counting being completed January 6, as opposed to December 30.

Well, at the time that I am typing this, Franken lead over Coleman is in excess of 250.

So, when the votes go against you, what do you do, you go to court, claiming that the votes were counted twice, only the Coleman campaign has a twist: what they are claiming would not only throw out some votes, but would reset the counter on the precincts in question, all of which are Franken precincts, my guess, back to election night tallies.

In the meantime, another of Coleman’s moves, reinstating some challenges that he had previously withdrawn, has netted Franken 3 votes…..Karma, neh?

Sam Brownback will not run for reelection, as he promised 10 years ago, though it looks like he will be running for Kansas Governor.

In Texas, with Kay Baily Hutchison not running for reelection so that she can run for governor, we have a plethora of hats thrown into the ring in Texas, from both sides of the aisle.

OK, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled, and it’s confusing.

The Hill says that the court has ruled with the Coleman campaign, and The New York Times says that the ruling favors the Franken campaign.

Both the stories have the same basic synopsis of the ruling (quoting the Times here):

The court ruled that the Coleman and Franken camps, working with the Minnesota secretary of state and the Canvassing Board, must agree on a standard to decide which absentee ballots should be counted. It was unclear precisely how the inevitable disputes between the campaigns would be resolved.

So, if this means that all 3 (4?) parties for each vote, it sounds like a firm “no count,” but if it means that all of them need to establish a standard to which they agree, then I am unclear how that goes, except that, perhaps it ends up before the court again, because I do not expect the Coleman camp to reasonable.

In either case, the process is supposed to be hammered out by December 31 at 4:00pm CDT, which means that the votes would probably be tabulated on January 2….I think.

A more complete, if less definitive description of what is a confusing ruling is available at the Minnesota Independent.

The sticking point to me is whether they have to agree on process or each ballot. The latter leads to the campaigns attempting to game the votes by objecting to votes in areas unfavorable to them.

The court did have strong words for either campaign being unreasonable, but I do not know to what degree this will mean anything.

In fact, there is a part of me that thinks that the Minnesota Supreme Court kicked the can down the road with its decision, and they expect to deal with challenges in January.

In any case, in terms of the actual vote counting, Franken’s challenges having been supported at about twice the rate of Coleman’s challenges, and the counting of his challenges just started, and the current count from the Strib has Coleman up by 5, but Franken winning by 89 based on the challenge percentages, and that is without any of the absentee votes in question being counted.

In Virginia, bigot US Representative Virgil Goode has conceded after a recount failed to turn around his 745 vote deficit.

In Minnesota, we have the Franken campaign suing Olmsted County some absentee ballots that were accepted, but then accidentally placed in the wrong pile, and so were not counted.

I would have thought that this one would not require the filing of a lawsuit, but I’m naive, I guess.

In any case, it was Norm’s big day in court, and while there were no rulings, it does appear that the Minnesota Supreme Court was unamused with the Coleman campaign.

Part of it hay have had to do with Coleman’s lawyer using the “F-Word” in court….No, not that f-word….I mean that he used the word Florida.

Roger Magnuson wasted no time in bringing up Florida. In fact, the attorney’s first utterance before the Minnesota Supreme Court this afternoon referenced the legal debacle of 2000. Representing Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign, Magnuson argued that the state canvassing board’s actions of December 12, when it recommended that all 87 counties count wrongly rejected absentee ballots, were an “an invitation to go to Florida.”

But before Magnuson could begin to back up this assertion, he was interrupted by a clearly irritated Justice Paul Anderson. “This is not Florida,” he stated. “I’m just not terribly receptive to you telling us this is Florida.”

So it went throughout the one-hour hearing before the Supreme Court today, with the justices repeatedly interrupting and questioning attorneys for both campaigns. The justices seemed more interested in Andersen v. Rolvaag, the 1962 Minnesota Supreme Court case that helped decide the state’s deadlocked gubernatorial race, than Bush v. Gore.

(emphasis mine)

Well, the Star Tribune had a “reader analysis” of images of some of the challenged ballots, and they ran the numbers from that, and concluded that Franken would win.

So, Coleman’s lawsuit against counting ballots continues, and the Minnesota Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments tomorrow but they did not grant an injunction, which indicates that they did not see anything earthshaking in the filings.

In the mean time, TPMElectionCentral has been live blogging the canvassing board, and we have notice that the Coleman campaign is reissuing challenges to ballots that it had previously withdrawn, and that Franken’s challenges, which were reviewed first (it’s going to be a multi-day process at least) seem to be generally be well received by the board, i.e. not considered bogus, and he’s picked up about 43 votes, which is ahead of where Franken’s team was predicting the numbers, and they predicted a 4 vote win.

Again, this is going to be tight in either case.

Well, it appears that Governor Paterson is close to a decision, though he won’t announce until after Hillary is approved as Secretary of State and resigns, and that Caroline Kennedy is now actively seeking the Senate seat.

This would be a disaster, and perhaps the only way the Republicans have a chance of picking of the seat in 2010.

Caroline Kennedy is an intensely private person (or at least as intensely private as you can be if you are a child of JFK), and she is a lousy campaigner, as was shown on those few occasions that she the stump for Obama.

She may not be as bad at campaigning as her cousin Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who gave Republicans the Governor’s mansion for the first time since Spiro Agnew in Maryland, but it’s close.

There is also the entire dynastic issue, which is troubling.

While there are other likely candidates for this seat (Andrew Cuomo) who have clearly got a leg up on the political ladder because of their parentage, Kennedy has never before even taken the ladder out, and it is simply in conflict with what should be American values to hand her a position like this.

Well, the canvassing board has ruled, and both the missing Minneapolis ballots and the wrongfully rejected absentee ballots, which may total in excess of 1500, will be counter.

It’s a big win for the Franken campaign.

Needless to say, Norm Coleman and His Evil Minions^™ are freaking out over this, and they have gone to court to prevent counting the ballots, because they are good Republicans, and a good ‘Phant thinks that counting votes is communist.

In Minnesota, it looks like there were twice as many improperly rejected absentee ballots as previously thought, so in addition to the challenges, we now have something on the order of 2,000 wrongly rejected absentee ballots.

here is the part that I do not get:

The fate of those ballots is hotly contested but unclear.

On Friday, the state canvassing board, made up of four judges and the secretary of state, will decide whether to count the votes on those ballots that election judges mistakenly didn’t count on Election Day.

If they were legal votes, why shouldn’t they be counted?

Is there something in the finer points of MN election laws that I don’t get?