Oh My! More Anti-Obama Billboards In Minnesota!

More anti-Obama billboards have popped up in Minnesota! The billboards say "Had enough Hope and Change?" They feature pictures of the Constitution being shredded and a checklist of Democrats deficit busting spending.





Here is a map of their location via Freedom Boards Across America.

Someone in Minnesota Misses President Bush

This billboard isn't a 'Photoshop.' Someone in Minnesota has paid to have a billboard covered with a photo of former president George W. Bush and the question: "Miss Me Yet?"

NPR reported:

There is a billboard along I-35 near Wyoming, Minn., with a huge photo of former president George W. Bush and this question: "Miss Me Yet?"

Now, the push is on to find out who paid to have it put up.

Wind Turbines Freeze in Minnesota

In a pathetic attempt to implement 'green energy' in Minnesota, wind turbines transplanted from California have not worked since they were installed last fall. They have been paralyzed by the cold weather. Just think of all the 'green jobs' that will be created trying to get them to work in the frigid northern climate.

The Star Tribune reported:

They are wind turbines, erected last fall by 11 metro and outstate cities. The green-energy machines were expected to be spinning before Christmas, but so far their blades have been largely motionless, apparently paralyzed by frigid weather.

Did ACORN Help Franken Steal His Senate Seat?

Many people think Al Franken stole his Senate seat. Franken won by the razor thin margin of 312 votes out of about 3 million cast. ACORN claims to have registered 43,000 new voters in Minnesota. With ACORN's record, it is hard to say how many of those are legitimate. Many of these "newly registered voters" may have voted illegally. Minnesota's laws on proof of voter eligibility are notoriously loose.

From the Minnesota Star-Tribune:

But ACORN does have a special place in its heart for at least one prominent Minnesota politician. Last year, it showered praise on Al Franken, endorsing his run for the U.S. Senate. Franken returned the esteem: "I'm thrilled and honored to receive this endorsement," he gushed in a press release. He added that he was "more motivated than ever to work with ACORN."

...ACORN's registration drives "routinely produce fraudulent registrations," ...

Hat tip Gateway Pundit.

WSJ Practically Accuses Franken of Stealing Election

The Wall Street Journal explains how Al Franken stole the election in the Minnesota Senator's race. We knew this, but it is surprising to see the WSJ actually make the case. Half the residents of Minnesota should be ashamed for sending this joke to Washington.

From WSJ:

The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year's disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don't need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat's strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team's real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman's lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel's findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn't demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn't lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact. (accent is mine)

Republican Norm Coleman continues to fight for fairness

The three-judge panel reviewing the Minnesota Senate race has declared Democrat Al Franken the winner, but Republican Norm Coleman intends to appeal to the state's Supreme Court. Of course Democrats are pressing for him to give up. The main issue is absentee ballots. Early in the recount, Several hundred questionable absentee ballots from Democratic precincts were allowed to be counted. This is where Al Franken got his narrow lead. Later, the three judge panel made a decision about which absentee ballots should be counted. This kept Norm Coleman from being able to use several thousand from precincts he felt would be favorable. The Al Franken absentee ballots would be uncountable under the new rules, but they were allowed to stay in the count anyway. This creates a double standard that is unfair to Coleman. The WSJ is reporting,

Case in point: the panel's dismal handling of absentee ballots. Early in the recount, the Franken team howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. We warned at the time that this was dangerous territory, designed to pressure election officials into accepting rejected ballots after the fact.

Yet instead of shutting this Franken request down, or early on issuing a clear set of rules as to which absentees were valid, the state Supreme Court and the canvassing board oversaw a haphazard process by which some counties submitted new batches to be included in the tally, while other counties did not. The resulting additional 933 ballots were largely responsible for Mr. Franken's narrow lead.

During the contest trial, the Coleman team presented evidence of a further 6,500 absentees that it felt deserved to be included under the process that had produced the prior 933. The three judges then finally defined what constituted a "legal" absentee ballot. Countable ballots, for instance, had to contain the signature of the voter, complete registration information, and proper witness credentials.

But the panel only applied these standards going forward, severely reducing the universe of additional absentees that the Coleman team could hope to have included. In the end, the three judges allowed only about 350 additional absentees to be counted. The panel also did nothing about the hundreds, possibly thousands, of absentees that have already been legally included, yet are now "illegal" according to the panel's own ex-post definition.