{"id":4608,"date":"2009-04-19T06:00:12","date_gmt":"2009-04-19T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4608"},"modified":"2009-04-18T10:26:18","modified_gmt":"2009-04-18T15:26:18","slug":"why-norm-why-not-just-give-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4608","title":{"rendered":"Why Norm? Why not just give up?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;because:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB124000875842430603.html\">Even after the recount and panel-findings<\/a>, the 312-vote margin separating the  two men equals about .01% of the 2.9 million votes cast. Even without any  irregularities, this is as close to a &#8220;tie&#8221; as it gets. And there have been  plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with  evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing  ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were  counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt.  Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>New Jersey? Them&#8217;s fightin&#8217; words.<\/p>\n<p>Minnesota has had enough national embarrassment in the form of&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Mark Dayton<\/p>\n<p>Jesse Ventura<\/p>\n<p>Paul Wellstone<\/p>\n<p>and now&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Al Franken?<\/p>\n<p>(and being compared to New Jersey &#8211; which by the way is actually closer to Franken&#8217;s &#8220;true&#8221; residence than Minnesota)<\/p>\n<p>It has not ceased to amaze how far Minnesotan&#8217;s will go in the interest of having a <em>non-Coleman<\/em> candidate and that Al Franken is the best the opposition could muster.<\/p>\n<p>An empty seat <em>is <\/em>a viable alternative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;because: Even after the recount and panel-findings, the 312-vote margin separating the two men equals about .01% of the 2.9 million votes cast. Even without any irregularities, this is as close to a &#8220;tie&#8221; as it gets. And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}