Lori Sturdevant: Coleman call is a nonstarter

Last update: March 4, 2009 - 7:21 PM

Add Norm Coleman's suggestion that "the court is going to have to reflect" on the possibility of a U.S. Senate election do-over to the many legally fanciful ideas that frustration with the protracted U.S. Senate election contest has inspired.

"This remedy may not be available as it is not explicitly spelled out in statute, and the court has a duty to determine which candidate received the most votes," wrote Sarah Cherry of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

Minnesota statutes are the roadmap that brought this election into the legal thicket in which it has landed. Those statutes allow for protracted legal examination of the election's matters of dispute, and prohibit the issuance of an election certificate until legal appeals are exhausted (though even that apparently straightforward statute is the subject of a court challenge now.) Only the U.S. Senate can call for a new election, and that is neither imminent nor likely.

LORI STURDEVANT

DANCING ON ROCKY'S GRAVE

Pol celebrates newspaper's demise

I've already watched one outstate Minnesota legislator gloat over my newspaper's financial difficulties, so it's not surprising to see a politician elsewhere dance on the grave of the recently deceased Rocky Mountain News.

First-term Colorado Democratic Rep. Jared Polis gleefully told a crowd of bloggers that they deserved credit for the Rocky's demise, thus hastening in some new golden era of journalism.

"I have to say, that when we say, 'Who killed the Rocky Mountain News,' we're all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it's mostly for the better,'' Polis told the "progressive" politics group Netroots Nation. "The media is dead, and long live the new media, which is all of us.''

Polis is the genius who brought us an online greeting card company and an online florist delivering hefty service fees and shrinkwrapped bouquets that you have to put in a vase yourself. But media mogul he's not.

A media-savvy guy and a smart politician simply would not have made these comments -- for so many reasons. The insensitivity, coming one day after the Rocky's death. The number of good-paying jobs at stake in the newspaper industry's survival. And, most important of all, the real risk of losing too many print media watchdogs, the mainstay of investigative journalism. This is not something to celebrate.

Since the smug Rep. Polis thinks newspapers don't matter anymore, I wonder why he bothered to tout on his campaign website endorsements from the Denver Post and the Boulder Daily Camera. And he certainly won't mind this newspaper endorsing and applauding a point made by the Rocky's former publisher and president John Temple. This, Temple said, is "just another example of the poor judgment of Jared Polis.''

JILL BURCUM

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