SEN. PAUL WELLSTONE has died in a plane crash along with his wife, daughter, and some unnamed campaign workers.

UPDATE: It feels unseemly to be talking about this so soon, but another blogger who’s unable to post because of the Blogger hacking incident sends this link to what he says is the relevant Minnesota statute. I plan to engage in no further discussion of the Minnesota election today.

CORRECTION? Now a couple of people say this is the relevant statute. And now Jason Rylander emails with this one, too.

If I’ve missed anything I’ll update it above, but — even though I realize that it’s inevitable people will be talking about this with the election so close — I really don’t want to write any more about this right now. I’ve always rather liked Wellstone despite disagreeing with him on some issues, and I find his death very sad. The Torch affair was farce: this is tragedy.

Here’s an obituary by a former student.