The U.S. Supreme Court stunned the nation today with a 5-4 decision holding that Al Franken — until recently the Obama administration’s ambassador to the Vatican — was the official winner of the 2008 Minnesota Senate contest.

The court held that lower courts had erred by refusing to count three decisive absentee ballots for Franken found two years ago jammed in the filter of a Brooklyn Park woman’s vacuum cleaner. “Every vote must count,” proclaimed Chief Justice Al Gore, who read his 936-page decision from the bench.

The court’s decision closes an epic seven-year struggle filled with legal twists and turns unparalleled in our nation’s history.

Coleman appeared to hold a decided advantage in the contest after he won the actual vote count in 2008. But as the dispute dragged on, the events following Election Day proved largely irrelevant — minor skirmishes leading up to the legal, political and public relations battle that was to follow.

After the seventh recount of the vote was completed in September 2009 — settling nothing since both candidates challenged every vote cast — Franken filed simultaneous legal proceedings in state and federal courts, before the European Commission of Human Rights and with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In 2010, Coleman suffered a setback when the Supreme Court issued its first decision on the contest. In what became known as the “Franken’s Fools” decision, the court held that even those absentee ballots that voters forgot to mail must be counted.

No forgotten ballots were ever recovered, but Franken’s crack legal team assembled a group of Harvard psychologists who submitted expert testimony at trial establishing that the average Franken voter was twice as likely as the average Coleman voter to be chronically forgetful about life’s basic tasks. Statisticians extrapolated on this disparity to convince the court that Franken had been unfairly deprived of 147 votes.

In 2011, Coleman staged a comeback with his 23 “Every Coleman Vote Counts” booths at the Minnesota State Fair. The venture’s success proved short-lived, however, when a team of U.N. election observers — composed of Zimbabwean and Iranian monitors and led by former President Jimmy Carter — investigated reports that Coleman operatives were offering a pound of cheese curds for each Coleman absentee ballot found.

The Coleman campaign disavowed knowledge of such practices. Ultimately, though, it voluntarily discontinued the effort after it was revealed that Coleman’s absentee vote tally from the State Fair operation exceeded the adult population of Minnesota.

Coleman’s last big push for votes — the Hail Mary effort that produced this morning’s Supreme Court decision — was his “Working Together to Get Things Done” campaign, introduced in April 2013 as an opportunity for supporters to scour their garages for stray Coleman ballots and finish off their spring cleaning at the same time.

Through the cleanup program, Coleman’s vote total eventually pulled even with Franken’s. The decisive moment came when Coleman neighbor Herb (Buck) Anderson claimed to have found the soiled remnants of three absentee ballots near a mouse hole in the back of his garage. Former FBI investigators on retainer to the Coleman campaign were able to reconstruct the ballots and prove through forensic analysis that the markings in the Coleman ovals were lead-based, while the Franken markings were chemically consistent with mouse droppings.

A one-vote Coleman win seemed assured based on the so-called “Buck ballots,” until Anderson’s wife, Alida, stepped forward with the three Franken ballots that had been jammed in her vacuum cleaner filter. It was these ballots that eventually resulted in today’s Supreme Court decision. The Andersons’ divorce was finalized last year.

Reached for comment in Hollywood on the set of the new reality show he’s jointly producing with 89-year-old Playboy founder Hugh Hefner — tentatively titled “The Viagra Monologues ” — Franken explained that his Senate campaign had been satire all along and referred further inquiries to his accountant.

Coleman, who is living temporarily in an ice-fishing shack he rents from a well-heeled GOP contributor, could not be reached.

The Supreme Court’s decision is, of course, largely symbolic, since the 2008 U.S. Senate seat term expired last year.

We still don’t know how many victims died in the Islamic terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. We do know, however, that certain dangerous illusions about the war on terror died in that bloody rampage.

So writes author Arthur Herman at National Review Online.

One such illusion, he says, is about “who is fighting whom” in that war:

Many put the blame for the attack on years of Indian-Pakistani hostility and tension. In fact, relations between the two countries have never been warmer. This past month, Pakistan’s new president stunned and delighted Indians by publicly renouncing any first use of nuclear weapons. Violence in Kashmir…is on the decline.

Before the Mumbai attacks, politicians were scheduled to start talks on permitting trade across the region’s Line of Control, so that Hindu farmers in Indian Kashmir can sell their wheat or a used tractor to Muslim farmers in Pakistani Kashmir.

That’s precisely the problem, explains Herman. The terrorists’ goal is to stir up hatred and dissension:

The illusion that formal agreements between peoples and governments – whether between India and Pakistan or Israel and the Palestinian Authority – can somehow defuse the terrorist problem was among the first casualties in Mumbai. Terrorists see it the other way around: the relaxation of tensions is a problem requiring bloodshed.

Why? Herman doesn’t mince words:

Islamic terrorists don’t want justice or respect for their beliefs, or restoration of some imaginary homeland. They want violence and death. The duty of every government is to make sure that terrorists get them before they can deal them out.

The second illusion that died in Mumbai is that “democratic nations can somehow opt out of the war on terror,” says Herman. For years, India has acted as if it could, simply by expressing good intentions toward Muslim extremists.

To that end, Indian decision makers have rejected the sort of aggressive counter-terror policies that could help to protect the nation’s people. Herman explains:

The government in New Delhi steadfastly maintains a wall of separation between law-enforcement agencies like the one that used to separate the FBI and CIA before the Patriot Act, and keeps counterterrorist units underfunded and undermanned. It has repeatedly given way to the demands of Islamic radical groups and fundamentalist lobbyists in the name of ‘cultural sensitivity.’ India was the first non-Islamic country to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses back in 1988.

India has no preventive detention laws; no laws to protect the identity of anti-terrorist witnesses; no laws to allow domestic wiretapping without court order. In 2004, the new Congress Party government revoked India’s version of the Patriot Act, even as the Indian media was loudly condemning the U.S. for ‘torture’ at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

In other words, Herman observes, India has been fighting the war on terror the way that many liberals have been urging America to wage it. That’s why more than 4,000 Indians have died in terrorist violence since 2004 — “more than any other nation in the war on terror besides Iraq.”

The Mumbai attacks are a wake-up call for the Indian government, and for the new Obama administration as well.

Large numbers of American high school students have lost their ethical moorings.  A new study of 29,760 students at 100 randomly selected high schools reveals that 30 percent of those questioned stole from a store within the past year and a whopping 64 percent cheated on a test in that same period, according to the Star Tribune.

Adults are wringing their hands, searching for the cause of this ethical meltdown. Many are working overtime at the excuse factory.

I’m talking about folks like Mel Riddle, of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, who pities the poor kids because “the competition is greater, the pressures on kids have increased dramatically.” Or Peter Anderson, a Massachusetts high school principal:

‘This generation is leading incredibly busy lives — involved in athletics, clubs, so many with part-time jobs, and — for seniors — an incredibly demanding and anxiety-producing college search,’ he offered as an explanation.

Imagine these angst-ridden high schoolers, struggling to choose among the University of Minnesota, Iowa State University or St. Olaf College. No wonder they turn to crime!

Anyone heard of the Great Depression?

Then there’s the “everybody’s doing it” shtick. Michael Josephson, president of the Los Angeles-based institute that conducted the study, took this approach. “In a society drenched with cynicism,” he said, “young people can look at it and say ‘Why shouldn’t we? Everyone else does it.’”

Some adults even view today’s teens – who include many thieves and cheaters – as superior to previous generations. Riddle says, “I would take these students over other generations.” Riddle must know something about our forebears that’s escaped the rest of us.

The kids themselves are numb to their failings:

93 percent of the students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, and 77 percent affirmed that ‘when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.’

These may be the study’s most disturbing statistics. Not only are today’s young people stealing and cheating at unprecedented rates, they’re not feeling the pinch of conscience. They lack even a latent ethical architecture that’s disturbed by dishonesty.

Why? I suspect that, from early in these kids’ lives, the adults who surround them have been too busy nattering about “the pressures” on them or “the larger social problems” allegedly to blame for their misbehavior. Left out of the mix—as we see from the explanations of the professionals quoted—was any sense that honesty and other virtues are central to character, and an end in themselves.
   

Your sales director storms into the room and glowers at the trembling sales reps assembled there. He bellows about plummeting profits, blasts the poorest performers and reaches tsunami-level intensity when demanding greater exertions.

After he exits, you and your cohorts count the hairs left on your head. Your boss has some valid points, but was being a jerk when he made them. Should you band together and suggest that he tone it down, ask the human resources department to intervene, or bite your lip and redouble your sales efforts?

There may soon be another option. How about bringing an anti-bullying lawsuit and threatening to take every penny your employer’s got?

Never heard of such lawsuits? Advocates are pushing to create sue-the-jerk legal actions across the country, according to the cover story in this month’s Bench & Bar, the Minnesota State Bar Association’s publication.

This is more than a crackpot, lawyers-full-employment scheme. We know because Minneapolis attorney Sarah Morris, the article’s author, reports that the anti-bullying cause is a full-fledged “movement” with a phalanx of “activists” and its own think tank: the Workplace Bullying Institute.

By enlisting terminology like this — borrowed from the civil rights movement — anti-bullying proponents presumably expect to make us fall reverently silent.

The anti-bullying movement cites worrisome statistics. “Thirty-seven percent of U.S. workers have been bullied on the job, according to a September 2007 survey,” says Morris. Even this hefty number may be conservative. “Other studies have documented higher percentages of affected employees ranging from 59 percent to 90 percent,” she says.

In other words, the scope of the problem is anyone’s guess.

I’d put the real figure at closer to 100 percent. Who hasn’t had at least one arrogant, blowhard boss?

Civil rights lingo and scary statistics are a plus for any new social crusade. But the anti-bullying movement’s real trump in its quest for respectability may be the fact that our elites tend to be Europhiles and that the Continent is apparently falling big-time for anti-bully laws.

The vanguard of enlightened thinking, of course, is France — the home of the 35-hour workweek, where it’s next to impossible to fire an incompetent employee, I’m told.

France’s bully law is so porous you could drive a bus through it. The law “targets repeated acts having the intent or effect of degrading the employee’s working conditions by impairing the employee’s rights and dignity, affecting the employee’s physical or mental health, or compromising the employee’s future career,” according to Morris.

Bosses found guilty of heinous offenses such as “compromising” an employee’s “future career” are subject to a 15,000 euro fine and one year in prison, according to Morris.

And you thought American jails were overcrowded!

On this side of the Atlantic, anti-bullying advocates tend to downplay the problems created by the fact that bullying is often in the eye of the beholder. It’s hard to deny, after all, that one man’s (or woman’s) rousing pep talk is another’s humiliating nightmare.

Not to fear, anti-bullying advocates say. At trial, expert testimony by one or more of our modern sages — physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists — can establish whether a plaintiff has suffered compensable harm.

And that’s supposed to be reassuring?

Is every hard-nosed business owner in America destined to be chased into bankruptcy by bullying plaintiffs, lawyers and psychotherapists?

Not yet. Though anti-workplace bullying legislation has been introduced in at least 12 states in the past five years, none has adopted it, according to Morris.

Morris does not support passage of anti-bullying legislation in Minnesota. Such laws, with their vague definitions, could be unreasonably burdensome and lead to nuisance lawsuits, she said in an interview. “Minnesota courts have demonstrated that they are well-equipped to deal with severe workplace harassment” with the law currently available to them, she said.

But elsewhere, anti-bully proponents are pushing their ace in hole. They are exhorting judges to flex their legal muscles, go over lawmakers’ heads and declare a general workplace harassment cause of action — a Pandora’s box that could overwhelm both courts and businesses.

Will Minnesota judges take the bait?

It’s official. The Interstate 35W bridge fell — not because of what Tim Pawlenty or Carol Molnau did or didn’t do — but because engineers failed to calculate correctly the thickness of gusset plates more than 40 years ago.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s findings, released on Nov. 14, must feel like some vindication to Pawlenty, Molnau and MnDOT’s bridge inspection and maintenance team.

After the collapse, Pawlenty counseled patience. He urged Minnesotans to wait for a thorough investigation before leaping to conclusions about why the bridge fell.

Instead, critics launched a relentless — if often subtly expressed — search for villains to blame for what we now know was a tragic accident.

Sometimes bluntly, sometimes not, critics suggested that Pawlenty’s skinflint tax policies and budgets had set the stage for the I-35W bridge tragedy. The governor’s opponents maintained that he had sacrificed bridge maintenance and safety — and thus the well-being of Minnesotans — in an attempt to adhere to his no new taxes pledge.

Sen. Jim Carlson, DFL-Eagan, vice chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, put it this way after the NTSB issued its report. While Pawlenty “didn’t cause [the bridge] to go down,” he said, the evidence shows that “very few did something to keep it up.” The governor, Carlson added, “really ought to be lowering his head and saying, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Molnau was the target of particularly vicious condemnation. Critics painted her as an incompetent clown who blithely superintended a bridge inspection and maintenance program that was shoddy, irresponsible and done on the cheap.

Even the respected NTSB got a moral dressing-down when its actions displeased DFLers. Some suggested that the NTSB’s leaders might be shielding Pawlenty and so couldn’t be trusted to carry out an impartial investigation. In January, when the agency released its interim findings, Sen. Steve Murphy, DFL-Red Wing, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, told the Pioneer Press that the NTSB’s report was “not worth the paper it’s printed on.”

DFL legislators claimed the moral high ground for their own policy prescriptions. After the bridge fell, they pushed through one of the largest tax increases in state history, which included higher gas taxes and a massive increase in transportation funding. They justified it as a moral imperative.

At the national level, Eighth District Rep. Jim Oberstar took a similarly sanctimonious tone when he called for a “temporary” 5-cent increase in the federal gas tax for a national bridge repair “trust fund.”

“If you’re not prepared to invest another five cents in bridge reconstruction and road reconstruction, then God help you,” proclaimed Oberstar, chairman of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Minnesota DFL chair Brian Melendez also used moral language to denounce Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rep. John Kline after they voted against the massive federal road spending bill that included money to rebuild the I-35W bridge. “This goes beyond ridiculous. It’s callous,” he huffed.

Never mind that Bachmann and Kline favored the I-35W bridge appropriation, but opposed the transportation bill because it was stuffed with wasteful pork-barrel projects.

To their credit, Minnesotans didn’t buy this moral posturing. After the bridge collapse, Pawlenty’s approval rating in opinion polls was the highest it had been since he took office. And despite DFL finger-wagging, a majority of Minnesotans opposed a state gas-tax increase.

What precipitated this search for villains, before any of us had a clue why the bridge had fallen? Clearly, DFLers hoped to reap a political windfall from the tragedy. But something more fundamental was also at work.

Today, we can’t accept that some calamities are accidents, or “acts of God.” We operate within a culture of blame, which holds that if something goes wrong, someone must be responsible.

Our litigious culture encourages this view. It insists that when a bad thing happens, a guilty party must always pay.

Unfortunately, this culture of blame is misguided and destructive. It only whips up ill will, foments distrust and ensures that a disaster’s tragic effects will linger.

The NTSB findings confirm that those who rushed to identify devils in the I-35W bridge disaster acted shamefully. Before we move on, we should publicly acknowledge the great injustices done.