Jay Weiner in MinnPost.com quoting Raleigh Levine, William Mitchell College of Law's (St. Paul, MN) elections expert, "...if the Minnesota Supreme Court should rule in Franken's favor and rule that there wasn't enough evidence to even raise equal protection and due process issues, then, that would 'insulate their decision from U.S. Supreme Court review.'"

Based on the lines of questioning pursued during oral arguments today, it's quite likely this will be the nature of the ruling of the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Reality is, the Coleman team doesn't seem to have been able to come up with evidence to prove anything. No evidence existed to support their claims because what they speculated MIGHT or MUST have happened simply had no basis in reality but was only wishful thinking.

Hopefully, this will all be over soon (experts here in MN expect a ruling in two weeks or less). We can only hold out further hope that such a ruling orders the governor and secretary of state (now that all appeals covered by the MN Constitution have been exhausted) to issue an election certificate.

The secret files will be discovered that lay out how much the oil companies paid (strictly under the table and off the books, of course) to auto company executives and board members to keep building and doing the their VERY best to sell us the big gas guzzlers.

There is no logic nor business acumen in the behavior of the Detroit auto companies over the past 40 years. The only thing that explains what they've done to us is huge amounts of invisible financial pressure to push us in a particular direction (and yes, I do mean to say the American Public are sheeple when it comes to responding to advertising).

The only other explanation is that the entire American automobile industry has represented nothing more than the overcompensating psychologically-dysfunctional behavior of an unbelievably huge collection of auto executives and engineers with non-functioning or undersized reproductive equipment.

Old white men don't have to say, "My experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman." Among conservative white males and their heavily-invested, sycophantic female partnerss, that perspective is part of their unquestioned sense of "reality." For them, the sin of Sotomayor's statement is that it questioned what they assume to be true - that only conservative white men are capable of dispassionate objectivity. Of course they're not capable of any such thing. What they see as "objective reality" is actually a point of view of their own creation which leaves out massive amounts of data and shoehorns everything they're willing to consider into the very small, round hole that represents everything their dysfunctional personalities and limited intellect can comprehend.

Definitely, most decidedly, most completely, absolutely, something to celebrate!

...so totally, so completely, so clearly, that the public will not buy their efforts to sell a B.S. image (for awhile). Besides, the fact is, in order to be a Republican leader such as we now have (both the media mouthpieces and the politicians who kiss their backsides), you have to have gone through experiences while you were growing up that wounded you sufficiently that your psyche locked up the part of your personality that's capable of empathy. Usually this is the result of getting shredded verbally or physically at some time when you reached out for empathy yourself to those from whom you'd gotten it in the past - you know, mommy, daddy, nanny, brothers, sisters, friends.

Once your empathetic part is securely locked up within you (in Carol Pearson's terminology, your "Caregiver,") - something your psyche does automatically to try to prevent it from causing you to suffer such severe emotional pain in the future - any time the world asks empathy of you, you tend to have an overblown, angry reaction.

Often those with this personality trait locked up come to hate those who genuinely deserve empathy because the very existence of those folks tweaks that angry, overblown, uncomfortable reaction in them. Rather than recognize their own dysfunctional reaction (asking "What's wrong with me that I react this way?") they blame those who, through no fault of their own, invoke that reaction, believing their extreme anger to be justified in some way (when it clearly is not).

Of course coupled with this is the reality that the use of sufficient quantities of most mood-altering chemicals (most often alcohol), throws open the doors on the internal cages in which these aspects of our personalities are locked up. Thus you have the macho, completely rugged individualistic male, who with a few beers in him, very sloppily becomes everybody's best buddy and announces to his friends how much he loves them.

If you're partnered with someone having this particular dysfunction, you've probably already discovered they're much better lovers when they're under the influence of a chemical, unless of course, they lost their empathy because they got beaten while throwing a childhood tantrum, in which case, when they use chemicals while close to someone they love as much as they did mommy or daddy, that child locked up mid-tantrum comes charging out and you suddenly have to deal with an unreasoning, totally out of control, child throwing a full-blown tantrum using an adult body... dangerous.

And we hear it every day with Rubaugh's rants on the radio...