From TPM Muckraker:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office is not yet committing to provisionally seating Al Franken, pending the outcome of the expected post-recount election contest litigation in Minnesota, as the date for new Senators to be sworn in gets closer and closer.

The suggestion to provisionally seat the declared winner of the recount -- who at this point is expected to be Franken -- was first made by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar this weekend, in the interest of making sure the state would have full representation while the litigation is pending.

"At this stage, it appears that Franken will be certified the winner by the State Canvassing Board," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Harry Reid, in a statement to Election Central. "We're keeping abreast of the situation and will make a decision with regard to Senate action at the appropriate point in the process."

You can bet your bottom dollar that Harry Reid and the majority in the senate will seat Al Franken and thereby deny Norm Coleman a chance to thwart the democratic process. Norm Coleman's egregious behavior trying to cherry pick absentee ballots in his favor rather than including (all) of the absentee ballots, as Franken suggests, shows just how disrespectful of the democratic process Coleman and his cohorts in crime actually are. They have much too much in common with George "W"orthless Bush. Bush stole the election in the same manner. Excluding valid votes and denying Americans the civil rights that they are mandated.

So will any of the wrongly-rejected absentee ballots in Minnesota, which have been the subject of copious litigation between the Franken and Coleman campaigns, actually get counted? The latest report from the Star Tribune suggests it's going to be a rough time over the next few days, with the Franken camp calling for 1,346 ballots to be counted, while the Coleman team thus far wants to include...136.

The thing to remember here is that the state Supreme Court released a bizarre opinion a week and a half ago, calling for these ballots to opened up and and counted -- but only if both campaigns agreed that an individual envelope was wrongly rejected. So if the Coleman campaign vetoed 1,210 ballots, then only their 136 will be counted -- that is, unless the Franken campaign were to retaliate by withholding consent from those, too, until more votes are added to the pile.

It should be pretty obvious what's going on here: The Coleman campaign is trying to cherry-pick ballots that they believe will be good for them, based on where the ballots are from, and that they think could be favorable enough to undo Al Franken's lead of 47 votes.

Norm Coleman should spend more time with his legal defense team trying out strategies that will help him avoid criminal prosecution for fraud and bribery! The shame that Coleman has bestowed upon the Senate and the citizens of Minnesota is beyond measure...