At this moment there is one precinct in Jefferson and two in Milwaukee missing. Jefferson will go to Prosser, Milwaukee prolly to Kloppenburg. It really is a Hitchcock movie ....

I have a question about the meta of this. Where do you suppose the governors of WI, OH, IN, FL and the other union busting states colluded on this idea? The Rethuglican Governors meetings? Private calls by phone? That special meeting with the Koch brothers here in CA? Whatever, the genesis is something I would dearly love to know and investipgage.

Kasich says he sometimes talks with fellow GOP governors but denies they're part of a coordinated effort to kill unions for public employees. He says he frequently talks to Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, where a similar bill has caused nearly two weeks of protests.

If it seems to you that recent union-busting bills introduced in states with Republican governors and majorities in legislatures are a bit too coordinated for it to be a coincidence, then you’d be right. Recent stories reported by The New York Times and National Public Radio have shone a light on the source of these bills: ALEC, short for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing group made up of state legislators and some of the country’s biggest corporations. According to ALEC’s website, the organization was founded in September 1973, by state legislators, including then Illinois State Rep. Henry Hyde, conservative activist Paul Weyrich, and Lou Barnett, a veteran of then Gov. Ronald Reagan’s 1968 presidential campaign, amongst others.

NPR’s Laura Sullivan explained in her report how it works:



While stressing that Republicans are not the only ones seeking to rein in unions, NYT notes that ALEC quietly spreads these pre-written proposals from state to state, sending e-mails about the latest efforts, as well as suggested legislative language. Michael Hough, director of ALEC’s commerce task force, however, said the aim of these measures was not political, but to reduce labor’s swollen power. “Government budgets have grown and grown because of the cost of employees’ pensions and salaries,” he said. “Now we have to deal with that.”

Koch Front Groups Americans For Prosperity And ALEC Have Taken Over New Hampshire

With Republican super-majorities in the New Hampshire senate and house, the Koch front groups American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Americans for Prosperity (AFP) have carefully orchestrated a campaign to remove the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

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I'm a little disappointed that the election returns in Wisconsin didn't show a wider gap. All those protests, why didn't that carry over to a wider gap in the election?

I guess I always expect too much.

I think incumbency is a big advantage - from the polls that I saw she has made up a huge amount of ground in this race in a very short period of time.

ust a few months ago, three-term State Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, a well-known name in the state having served as Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly before Republican Governor Tommy Thompson appointed him to the high court where he became a part of the 4-3 conservative majority, was headed for re-election in a cakewalk. Judges in David Prosser’s position rarely, if ever, lose elections – they serve until they decide it’s time to retire.

To illustrate the point, consider that Judge Prosser won his last election to the bench by garnering 99.54% of the 550,000 votes cast. That is no typo – Prosser actually won almost every single vote that was cast.

So when Wisconsin held its primary to choose the top two candidates for the requisite general election run-off, it was no surprise that Judge Prosser garnered 55% of the vote. The closest remaining vote getter, Joanne Kloppenburg, an unknown Assistant State Attorney General, managed only 25% of the few votes that were cast.

...

At the moment of this writing, with 100% of the precincts voted, Joanne Kloppenburg appears to have pulled out the victory by just 200 of the 1.5 million votes cast suggesting that a recount is a virtual certainty.

At the moment of this writing, with 100% of the precincts voted, Joanne Kloppenburg appears to have pulled out the victory by just 200 of the 1.5 million votes cast suggesting that a recount is a virtual certainty.

This evidence is reasonably (though not overwhelmingly) convincing: Waukesha County’s turnout rate was too low according to some versions of the model, but it was a modest outlier rather than an extraordinary one. Put differently, if there hadn’t been some concrete reason to suspect that the original figure was off, I don’t know that it would have raised any red flags from a statistical perspective.

Nevertheless, if you want to allege that there’s a conspiracy afoot, the statistical evidence tends to work against you. Waukesha County’s revised turnout figures are pretty normal for Waukesha County, a wealthy, white suburban county that usually votes at high rates, whereas its original figures were at the low end of reasonable expectations, given the way the rest of the state voted.

Also of note is that the number of votes that Ms. Nickolaus says she failed to count in Brookfield, amounting to 11 percent of the county total, is in line with the proportion Brookfield normally represents: the city supplied 11 percent of Waukesha County’s total vote in both the 2008 and 2010 general elections.

If this was a conspiracy, it was one executed with an extraordinarily high degree of cunning and competence. I’m more inclined to think that Ms. Nickolaus, who has drawn complaints for her sloppy management practices in the past, is no savvier than she seems.

Access saves everything you do as you work. I cal ll bull on this.

To me, a non-techie, the fact that these voting machines use Access, an off-the-shelf program with a million hackable entry points (see, I told you I was non-techie), is a complete puzzle.

To me, a non-techie, the fact that these voting machines use Access, an off-the-shelf program with a million hackable entry points (see, I told you I was non-techie), is a complete puzzle.

Another OMG announcement from Walker. He and the AG will not defend the domestic partner registry which allows same sex partners hospital visitation rights. They say it violates the state's constitution which bans gay marriage.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolit ... 96164.html

That is just plain cruel and serves no good purpose whatsoever.

But this week, Gov. Scott Walker (R) made the exact same decision in Wisconsin, and now these conservatives are mum. Walker inherited a case from Gov. Jim Doyle (D) defending a 2009 domestic partnership law from a suit claiming it violated the 2006 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage or “substantially similar” statuses. On Friday, he filed a motion withdrawing from the defense because he believes the registry is unconstitutional. His attorney, Brian Hagedorn, wrote:



Many conservatives also have criticized law firm King & Spalding for backing out of defending DOMA, promulgating the talking point that “everybody deserves a defense.” Apparently, “everybody” does not include Wisconsin same-sex couples, who depend on domestic partnerships for protections like hospital visitation rights.

If Walker is not violating his duties, then neither was Obama. Anybody who criticized the President should follow through in criticizing Walker for the same decision or apologize for their partisan, anti-gay attacks.

MADISON, Wis. -- A Wisconsin judge has struck down a law taking away nearly all collective bargaining rights from most state workers. Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi ruled Thursday that Republican legislators violated Wisconsin's open meetings law during the run up to passage. She says that renders the law void.

The law pushed by Gov. Scott Walker takes away all bargaining rights except over base salary for teachers and other public workers.

The decision is not the end of the legal fight. The state Supreme Court has scheduled arguments for June 6 to determine whether it will take the same case.

Lawmakers could also pass the law again in order to nullify open meeting concerns that led to the judge's ruling Thursday.