Hello? Brunswick? Brodkorb? Berg? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

The aforementioned promoters of the Greatest Non-Scandal of 2007, the heated attempt to prove Mark Ritchie guilty of, of, of something (well, besides beating Crazy Mary Kiffmeyer in the last election), now look like utter dingbats in view of the fact that (as the sane people among us had been predicting) Ritchie’s been exonerated:

The summary of the Legislative Auditor’s findings:

• Secretary of State Mark Ritchie did not misuse state resources when he organized civic education events and collected contact information from the participants. The events were appropriate activities of the Secretary of State’s office, and the contact information fulfilled a public purpose.
• Secretary of State Mark Ritchie did not violate Minnesota law when he provided the contact information to his campaign since the information is “public data” under Minnesota law.
• Secretary of State Mark Ritchie did not fulfill his legal obligation to make a full and timely response to a request for information from the Legislative Auditor.

So Ritchie was slow in responding, but the GOP operative-driven dust-up was without merit, just broken news.

It’s going to be awfully tough for Mitch Berg to accuse State Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles of being a DFL hack, since, as Charlie of Across the Great Divide reminds us, Mitch is already on record with the opposite opinion:

Jim Nobles – the state’s legislative auditor – is known as a person of scrupulous integrity; his office is no partisan hacketeria.

Of course, as The Wege notes, neither DJ Tice nor his fellow wingnuts in the comments section of TBQ in the Strib will really and truly admit that Ritchie’s been exonerated.  (So far, no mention of how Strib reporter Mark Brunswick, in the course of trying to follow the script seemingly written by State GOP Chair Ron Carey on making a scandal out of public data used for unsolicited mailings, himself went and used public data for unsolicited mailings.)  For a much more honest account, see AP writer Brian Bakst’s piece, which is the one many if not most outstate Minnesotans (and non-Strib-readers) will see in their local papers.