Earlier today, Norm Coleman’s legal team proposed that 12,000 absentee ballots be reviewed, said about 6,000 or so might be subject to being included in the U.S. Senate recount and predicted the Franken side would reject the counting of more absentee ballots.

Well, Al Franken’s spokesman Andy Barr has reacted in an email statement to MinnPost. He took us through some absentee-ballot history … which seems like ancient history with the election nearly 11 weeks ago.

"First the Coleman campaign said there were no wrongly rejected absentee ballots,” Barr wrote.  “Then they said there might be a ‘handful.’ Then they went to court to stop any of them from being reviewed and counted.  Then they rejected our proposal to count all the ballots identified by county elections officials as having been wrongly rejected. Then in their election contest, they questioned whether the court should ignore the 950 ballots that had been reviewed and counted by a process they’d agreed to – and substitute 650 ballots they pulled from thin air.”

Noting last week’s addition of local criminal defense lawyer Joe Friedberg to the Coleman legal team, Barr added: "It seems like the shake-up of the Coleman legal team has resulted in even more confusion on their side.  Yesterday, one set of their attorneys proposed to our attorneys that they wanted all 11,000 rejected absentee ballots to be counted, regardless of whether they’d been correctly rejected or not. And today, another set of their attorneys are telling the press that they want all 12,000 rejected absentee ballots to be reviewed by some other process.”

So, what’s the Franken legal team going to do?

"We’re not going to respond to any proposal they make until they figure out what, exactly, their proposal is," Barr said.

On to the courtroom, come Wednesday and pre-trial motions. And expect some legal filings incorporating the Coleman side’s absentee-ballot stance as soon as Tuesday.