If the stunt sets a poor example for the state’s growing legions of job-seekers, the video  – which is meant to promote free weekend parking at Gaviidae Common in downtown Minneapolis during the holiday shopping season - actually lives up to its “fun” billing in the mayor’s tweet about it today. Other highlights: Rybak abusing escalator protocol and poking fun at his chequered driving record (news video).

And if the finger-puppet clip does nix R.T.’s chances for a D.C. gig, at least the video gives a taste of what a Bill Hillsman-type Rybak-for-Governor ad might look like. See it after the jump.

(Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie predicts 1,500 challenged ballots, and fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver estimates roughly 1,800. But since every campaign challenger at every recount site represents an independent variable, I think my guess is as good as theirs.)

More complicated math, working with the rate of increase rather than the hard-number jump, suggests the combined total could hit 2,518. That’s if each campaign were to continue to become increasingly picky over the next two days — at the same percentage rate of increase they showed from Day One to Day Two.

For Franken, the day-over-day increase so far is 42 percent, which if repeated on Day Three and Day Four of a projected four-day recount, would lead to a total of 1,233 challenges.

For Coleman, who had a 44 percent increase from Day One to Day Two, the grand total would be 1,285 challenged ballots, if he were to keep increasing his challenged ballots by 44 percent each day. Drilling down, that means he would challenge 373 on Day Three. And on Day Four, Coleman’s daily challenged ballot count would be – hold on to your hat, Nate Silver! – 538.

MPR’s “Challenged Ballots: You be the judge” post has got to be the site’s top traffic generator ever. I’ve seen it linked locally and nationally, on buttoned-up news sites and Comedy Central’s Indecision ‘08. That last one, which references the infamous contested write-in vote for “Lizard People” (destined to be our “Hanging Chad of Aught Eight”), ends with a few salient questions:

Should the county have accepted the Franken vote? Does the voter consider Al Franken equivalent to the Lizard People? Is Lizard People a collective, or just one person like Cat Power? If elected, will the Lizard People rule benignly or will they control us with their forked-tongue tyranny?

Currently MPR is the top hit on a Google search for the term “Lizard People” (followed by “The Best Conspiracy Theories (Lizard-People Are Running the World!“). Whoever these reptilian-Americans are, MPR, Al Franken and Norm Coleman really put them on the map. In fact, according to Google Trends, they weren’t anywhere at all up til now.

Now the WSJ editorial writers have apparently decided that the local officials overseeing the recount are model civil servants. Their ability to conduct a fair, efficient process, however, is being threatened by the legal shenanigans of the Franken campaign. The WSJ accuses his campaign of attempting to ’steal’ the election by asking the five-member statewide canvassing board to examine absentee ballots that were rejected by local election officials.

Put aside that these ballots have already been ruled on by trained election judges. Put aside, too, the invasion of voter privacy. The real problem of allowing Mr. Franken to conduct his own voter discovery operation is that this is changing the rules after the election has been held. The gambit introduces subjective judgment and political pressure into a voting process that is supposed to be immune to both.

Perhaps I’m confused, but why would examining absentee ballots that have been rejected be any more inherently subjective or prone to political pressure than scrutinizing ballots cast on election day?

Star Tribune editorial-page editor Scott Gillespie says Al Franken just might win the race, but a large number of Americans will believe the recount was rigged. Why?

Because the stolen-election drumbeat has started, and it will only get louder as the results of the recount get more national attention. Ignoring Minnesota law, talk-show hosts are already questioning why any ballot that’s not marked properly in the first place should be valid in a recount. Intent is a concept they would rather not grasp.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, bringing her unique view of reality to Fox News on Wednesday night, said Franken “wants to stuff the ballot box with rejected ballots,’’ which “calls into question what the record is and who’s watching the books.’’

Another reason: While Bachmann took to Fox to impugn the recount process, the network’s judicial analyst, Andrew Napolitano, took a potshot at the recount’s top official. Apparently reading off the recently unearthed GOP talking points, he described Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie as “a Democrat and a former communist — former member of the Communist Party,” although he offered no evidence to support the claim. He may have been taking liberties with a line from a year-old Star Tribune story (cited in the GOP’s memo) by Mark Brunswick, who wrote that the “Communist Party USA wrote encouragingly of [Ritchie's] candidacy.”

On a conference call with Sen. Mitch McConnell Thursday morning, Norm Coleman, the man “who brought hockey back” to St. Paul, rallied troops with a puckish metaphor, one that seems to ignore the fact that at this late stage in the game, the final score is largely up to recount officials and the state Canvassing Board (and, let’s not forget, campaign lawyers): “We’re on the ice and its time to put the puck in the net.”

Senators will have to wait a bit longer to see if they’ll get upgraded office digs in Washington, D.C. CQ reports that the biennial process of doling out office space is on hold until results come in for the Coleman/Franken recount and the Dec. 2 runoff in Georgia between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin. Freshmen senators, low in the pecking order, are forced to “camp out in makeshift work spaces longer than usual.”

Another tight race in Minnesota has been settled through recount: State Rep. Al Doty, the incumbent Democrat from Royalton, won a second term over Mike LeMieur by a slim 76 vote margin. Two other state nailbiters are awaiting recount results, according to The St. Cloud Times:

In House District 16A, DFL challenger Gail Kulick Jackson led Rep. Sondra Erickson, R-Princeton, by 89 votes on Nov. 4.

In Senate District 16, DFLer Lisa Fobbe led Republican Alison Krueger by 85 votes before the recount began.

Al Franken (Photo: Aaron Landry) and Norm Coleman (Photo: WDCpix.com)

Two days into Minnesota’s statewide election recount, Al Franken and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman are challenging ballots at a pace that could end up sending more than 1,700 disputed votes to the state’s Canvassing Board to sort out. Each campaign claims the other’s challenges are frivolous, but frivolous or not, they are both making them at a rate that’s increasing rather than slacking off, as some said would happen. The challenged-ballot count remains neck-and-neck: Coleman’s crowd has challenged 374 so far, Franken’s 360.

As the number of challenged ballots grows — it’s at 734 combined as of today, with 42.33 percent of ballots cast Nov. 4 now recounted — the margin between the rival candidates shrinks. Figures from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, which is posting updates every night at 8 p.m., now indicate that Coleman’s lead over Franken has shrunk again and now stands at 129. It’s only a snapshot in a process that hasn’t yet reached the halfway mark, but it’s a snapshot in which the vaunted Coleman “victory” appears to be fading fast.

The picture that’s emerging is of a recounted total that remains a near-tie, with the election hanging on the judgment of the five state Canvassing Board members’ evaluation of the growing stack of challenged ballots.

Tonight’s totals, which don’t include the 734 challenged ballots, have Norm Coleman at 534,687 votes (212 fewer votes than the original count indicated from the same ballots) and Al Franken with 494,930 votes (126 fewer than on the first count of the same ballots). Subtracting those votes lost in the course of the recount so far brings the pre-recount gap of 215 down to a 129 margin that currently favors Coleman.
Note: The Star Tribune has slightly different numbers based on the secretary of state’s figures as well as on reports the Strib gathers from individual counties or recount sites after 8 p.m. With 46 percent of ballots recounted statewide, the Strib puts the gap between Franken and Coleman at 136, with greater numbers of challenged ballots for each: Coleman, 409; Franken, 414.

It’s a red-tape-cutting position that seems better suited to R.T. than other possible Obama jobs floated recently for the mayor, who has striven to streamline city government through a 311 service, among other things, and whose support for Obama’s presidential run slightly predated the Big Bang.

Transcript excerpts and more after the jump.

Rybak appeared on MPR’s “Midmorning” program, along with Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, and was soon gushing over the idea of a White House office of urban policy, which he said was partly his:

I worked with them on helping to develop this. … Here’s what they’re doing, and I think it’s incredibly smart — is to recognize that when you try to move something out of Washington and get a result, for those of us who are paying taxes,  you need to figure out a way to take all the arms of the government and bring them together. … I have to do multiple stops within the federal bureaucracy. I’ve been at this for a number of years and I’m only now just beginning to get it. Wouldn’t it be great, and won’t it be great, to be able to pick up the phone and have that one person in the White House who can say to people who are trying to solve these issues at the local level. I’m going to pull all these elements together. … Different departments, this person’s the point person.

At the end of the mayors’ segment, host Kerri Miller tried to connect the dots between her guests and the urban policy czar job. Franklin was fairly convincing in denying interest in it, at least until after her current term expires in 13 months. Then Franklin hung up the phone, and attention turned back to Rybak.

MPR: So you were one of the earliest backers of Barack Obama among the cities’ mayors. Are you interested in the job?

RT: Right now I have a great new job. It’s called being a mayor in Barack Obama’s America. And I can’t even believe how excited I am to be able to talk about this work right now. I’m going to be focused on that for a while.

MPR: I don’t think that’s answering the question. Are you interested? I mean, if they called –

RT: I’ve gotta tell you that anybody who asks anything yes-or-no about the Obama administration right now, they’ve put a massive gag order on anybody, whether you’re up or not, is to just stay out of that kind of conversation. I don’t want to get involved in that because I’ve got my hands full.

MPR: So if they called, you’d take the call …

RT: These are things that we’ll deal with way down the line if they ever happen, but I’m working in Minneapolis …

MPR: Maybe you’d rather be governor instead?

RT: I’ve told people that I have to make a decision in this next year about whether to run for mayor or governor and I’ll sometime have to make that. But right now I’ve got the job I wanted all my life, with the president I worked incredibly hard for for three years, and you know, I’m throwing confetti all around — in between pension meetings.

“We have reason to be optimistic,” recount attorney Marc Elias told reporters at an afternoon press conference. “We are picking up votes across the state.”

The candidate himself — seldom seen locally since recount gears began turning — shared that view, according to communications director Andy Barr. “Al is cautiously optimistic,” Barr said.

Describing the stacks of ballots recounted by hand Wednesday as a “slightly redder” subset of the 2.9 million ballots cast on Election Day, Elias said the campaign believes Franken closed the gap with incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman by more than the secretary of state’s official count of 43 votes.

Elias also claimed to have seen local examples of the same phenomenon in Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis counties, where Franken gained on Coleman in recounts of areas where the Nov. 4 election results show the Democrat didn’t run as well as in the remaining (yet unrecounted) precincts in those counties.

Elias said he was relying on internal campaign tallies of the recount’s Day One results, including reports from counties whose results came in too late at night to be part of the state’s official count at 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Elias also said that anecdotal evidence received Wednesday about frivolous challenges has emerged as a pattern. “There are clearly a significant number of instances of challenging clear Franken votes,” he said. “We have seen examples of challengers that clearly are not meritorious and will not be upheld by the Canvassing Board.”

Elias granted that some of the frivolous challenges he alleges could be due to first-day jitterson the part of Coleman workers. He also conceded that Franken’s challengers — who on Wednesday demanded that nearly as many ballots be set aside for Canvassing Board review as did the Coleman challengers — may have also been overzealous. “It’s a very good question,” he said. “It’s part of our review.”

Competing with the recount for the campaign’s attention, Elias said, were the newly arriving lists of voters whose absentee ballots had been rejected by county election officials. That flow of info follows a Ramsey County District Court ruling Wednesday ordering Ramsey Countyto provide any such lists to the Franken camp.

Barr said about three dozen counties had so far followed suit. But the data isn’t uniformly presented, Barr said, so the campaign wasn’t sure what it had yet and wouldn’t state what it plans to do with the lists. On Tuesday, the state Canvassing Board promised to consider whether it would conduct its own review of rejected absentee ballots.

Barr expressed satisfaction that the Coleman camp’s claims of victory were being taken with a grain of salt even in GOP circles. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that national Republicans are beginning to realize that Sen. Coleman has not been determined the winner of the race and are becoming concerned,” he said, noting in particular that some Republicans are already suggestions of other lines of work for Coleman, such as the post of Republican National Committee chairman.