Those of you who don’t follow American political news may not know that the Minnesota Senate race — you know, the one from last fall — is still pending. Norm Coleman is behind in votes, and has been throughout the process, but keeps pressing the appeals and recounts and so on, such that Al Franken (the apparent winner) still hasn’t been seated.

At least one of the factors in operation here is that the longer it takes to seat Franken, the longer the Democratic Party is without their fifty-ninth Senator. Which matters a fair bit on close votes.

Well, somebody came up with an amusing way to give the Republican Party incentive to drop the appeals. To whit: the “Give a Dollar a Day to Make Norm Go Away” campaign.

The idea’s simple: you sign up to auto-donate a dollar a day to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. They cancel your subscription when Norm Coleman concedes. (If you’re worried he’ll drag this out for months, you can also set it to end at a certain date.) So the longer he hangs in there, the more money’s in the PCCC’s warchest, to be spent against Republican opponents.

This just amuses me. It’s kind of a “life -> lemons, you -> lemonade” kind of approach. And it’s just the faintest bit snarky, too, without being really mean-spirited.

I’ll be curious to see if Coleman files his new notice by Friday (the deadline) or not.

Correction: I got one detail confused with another race, so let me amend this to say: Coleman was ahead on election night, but (iirc) the margin was close enough to trigger an automatic recount under Minnesota law. Franken moved into the lead during that process.