Pawlenty is correct that the Minnesota Supreme court said that he should wait till the state appeals process is done to sign the election certificate.

What is unfortunate, is thaat he seems to have the appeals process wrong. According to the Politco transcript, he said that the current case is in the district court and then it has to be appealed to the Minnesota Appeals Court and then to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

That is not the process for this case. The current case is being heard by a special 3 judge panel, not a district court. From there it can be appealed straight to the Minnesota Supreme Court. I would expect that process to take less than a month. So my guess is that Franken will be seated by Memorial Day.

Abigail,

The term "druggist" is arcane and about as appropriate to use referring to pharmacists as "damsel" is to a modern woman. Please stop.

That this will be over in 10 days is quite unlikely. The Minnesota Supreme Court will take up this case, and they will give Coleman sometime to present his arguments. That case won't 2 months, but it is not going to be over very soon.

First, off like many in this thread, I will miss your writing and I am no fan of Salon's recent direction. You'll still have my subscription (for now), but I will be here less.

As for a suggest for improving this place, I say fix your reader comments sections. I rarely dive too far into them these days because the organization is so out of date, and the signal to noise ratio is not very good.

I know that comment sections are not particularly cutting edge, but there is a lot that can be done with them to get users to spend more time here.

What I would really like to see would be a really powerful discussion system like slashdot.org has with multiple threads (preferably nest) under single article. This makes it a lot easier to follow different parts of a discussion, and ignore the parts that don't interest you. I would also like to see user moderation of comments, like Slashdot has, so it easier to find interesting comments.

I know that it would be a lot of work to get a powerful comment system like Slashdot's and a system like that may not fit well with Salon's audience. Another option would be more minor tweaks to the current system. For less work you could implement a system like the New York Times has. They allow for sorting by reader recommendations and editor choices. Allowing for reader recommendations would give some mechanism for finding the most interesting comments in a discussion. Especially since currently few Salon articles have any starred comments, reader choices would great.

BTW, Clive Thompson covered a lot of this over at Wired - see the link in my sig below.

Anyway, King good luck pushing this site forward. I want to see it succeed, but I fear you are going have a tough time keeping things going during this lull between elections.

Nothing new here. He has been making hints ever since the recount went against him that he might take it federal. At this point he really has to do that or concede. His case for the Minnesota Supreme Court is very weak.

Yep, Peterson is a blue dog in an agricultural district. It is all about corn-based ethanol.

Patrick,

Another fine column.

Thank you responding to all of the strange comments from last week.

Series 2 and Series 3 TiVos can download Amazon content (see the link in my sig below). Amazon content on TiVo works differently than Netflix content on TiVo, but the point is that there are a lot of TiVo subscribers with access to pay content through the net.

Patrick,

The probable radar depiction from weathergraphics.com appears to be Figure 12 on their paper, not Figure 9.

Great article. It is great fun to have someone who knows what they are writing about pick apart the news.

Heather,

You often used to give some hint near the beginning of a review of how many episodes of a new season that you had seen. Could you please do so again? I put off looking at this review till after seeing the season premier last night because I wanted to avoid spoilers. Now I only got half way through this because I noticed references to things that must be from episode 2 or later.

Are they going to change the voting system as well? Because the current system of voting for one of 5 nominees has likely been responsible for some of the perverse results in previous years.

Though percentages aren't released it is easy to imagine that there have been evenly matched years when the winner has gotten around 30% of the vote. With the new system winners with 15% of the vote would be quite possible.

It is not hard to imagine cases where a movie would be disliked by most voters, but would be loved by some and would come up with enough votes to win. This is definitely a case where some type of preference voting - where voters rank the movies - would be in order.

Of course having 10 nominees will make Oscar pools more interesting.

Ricrico, Aarnold Schwarzenegger is a graduate of University of Wisconsin- Superior's through correspondence classes. Not quite the same as being a UW-Madison grad.

Prairiefire, there are a lot of good Franken profiles out there - not that more wouldn't be nice. Try http://www.minnesotamonthly.com/media/Minnesota-Monthly/July-2008/Starring-Al-Franken-as-Himself/index.php?cparticle=1&siarticle=0#artanc or http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1590138,00.html .