Last Call

It's almost fitting that on a weekend that proves the vast majority of Americans are nothing but regurgitating media zombies, that the director of the movie that predicted our FOX-ified news media, Sidney Lumet, (his brilliant and prophetic film "Network" stands as a must watch even today) has passed away at the age of 86.

Sidney Lumet, the American film director known for inspiring top-notch performances from actors in a stream of classic films including "12 Angry Men," "Dog Day Afternoon," "Network" and "Fail-Safe," died on Saturday at age 86, the New York Times said.


His stepdaughter, Leslie Gimbel, said Lumet died of lymphoma at his home inManhattan, the newspaper said.

Lumet was one of the leading film directors of the second half of the 20th century. He was prolific, directing more than 40 movies, and versatile, dabbling in many different film genres. Lumet often shot his movies in his native New York.

Do yourself a favor and watch Network, or Dog Day Afternoon, or especially 12 Angry Men.  Lumet's "what if" stories about our media, our working class, and our legal system are all too true today.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Perspective time.

Tea Party Republicans will now be trying to shut the government down again and again.  We live in an America where this is acceptable and seen as the normal, most likely course of events.

Republicans wish to rule by hostage edicts?  OK.  Then it's our job at every turn to call them on it.  That their vision of America is one where mob rule by the angriest segment of the populace while the rest of us cower is not acceptable in a democracy.  Passive-aggressive simpering is not going to cut it.

Time to find something to fight for, folks.  Time to get it together.  Stakes are a lot higher now, and the serial abusers know they can keep playing the same game.

Unless we stop them.

Good Morning, Yale! Here Is Your Wake-Up Call

(CNN) -- Universities in the United States rarely expel students for sexual assault, according to an investigation by the federal government. And in the 42 years since it began admitting women, Yale University has not been an exception.

Because of the way universities handle sexual misconduct, it is often the victim who drops out of school. In fact, a survey I conducted of female students transferring into Brown University in the early 1990s revealed that one of the top reasons women may transfer colleges is because they've been sexually assaulted on their campus.

What's new here is that Yale received a 26-page Title IX complaint March 31, filed by 16 students and alumni, charging that its campus is a sexually hostile environment. The federal Department of Education has reportedly launched an investigation. One of the incidents the group described that was particularly offensive involved men who were pledging a fraternity; they gathered in a public spot on campus and started chanting, "No means yes, yes means anal."

The Obama administration, which had been working on sexual assault issues for some time, released a report Monday telling colleges and universities that they need to do a better job preventing and investigating sexual violence.

The article goes on to give some excellent insight into the problems on campuses around the country.  There have been problems everywhere, and the answer has been the same, to pretend nothing has happened and this pretty little campus won't let your darling child be unsafe, not even for a moment.  This system has worked out great for everyone but the victims.

There are a lot of common-sense safety measures that could be put into place, and have not.  Why?  Why actually take steps to avoid the discussion of sexual assault when an acknowledgement and preventative steps would go much further in reassuring parents?  The victims lose twice, once when they are attacked and again when they find no justice.  It is impossible to promise this can't or won't happen to a young student.  What is possible is to promise it will be handled properly when it does.  Education, participation and understanding go a long way.  Letting students know what to look out for and how to protect friends is empowering.  Covering up sexual assaults and helping the offenders relocate without a blip on their records is encouraging the act. 

It should not have taken this long for them to see this, or take action.

Let's Define Discrimination, Shall We?

Church to school: You should distribute material and send it home to every single student for us, or it's discrimination.

School to church: Actually, no.  We don't do that for anyone, not even clubs like YMCA or Boys and Girls Club.  We have a perfectly fair compromise by putting out this here community table, where you can leave information and people can pick it up if they choose.

Church: Discrimination, I say!

It's a bad week for churches in the press.  This week's religijerk, the Child Evangelism Fellowship Suncoast Chapter, has recruited help in making a group of Florida elementary schools send home material advertising after school Bible study programs.  The school is balking, and refers to a long-enforced policy in which they do not send material home unless it is for another government agency.  It's a sound policy, and should keep them safe from idiocy like this.

In a letter to district officials, Liberty Counsel lawyer David M. Corry demanded "immediate approval" of the fellowship's fliers in the methods regularly available to nonreligious groups. He also demanded changes to the "unconstitutional district policy" that he said banned wider distribution of the fliers.

"Equal access means equal treatment," Corry wrote. "Discrimination in any form between secular and religious organization messages is unconstitutional."

He's correct in theory.  His mistake is that the school doesn't endorse any activities, so there is no discrimination.  The school is treating them like others of their kind, which is the exact opposite of what he is claiming.

The district rejects similar appeals from such groups as the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Clubs, she said. Instead, schools provide community tables, where organizations may leave pamphlets, brochures and fliers for students and parents to pick up if they wish. Those tables generally are in school offices.

"We are very uniform in the application of that policy," Romagnoli said.
A representative of the Boys and Girls Club of West Pasco confirmed that practice.

Rogers acknowledged that schools have let his group place information in the office. But he'd like to be able to spread the word about the club, which has operated at Richey, Cypress, Connerton and Chasco elementary schools, to more people than those who stop to grab a flier.

It's not discrimination that he "would like" to have more exposure than he can get.  So why get the legal strong arm out?  The school is in the right.  This policy was planned carefully to make sure they could not be accused in any way of endorsing one activity over another, while giving kids access to worthwhile programs they are interested in.  They gave this same privilege to the CEFSC. This group has no right to ask for special rights and then go crazy and try to force it when denied their request. His overreaction is in direct conflict with the facts, which tell an entirely different story.

Going Through The Brownian Motions

Now this is some relatively cool stuff here.

The seemingly random movement of Brownian motion just got a little more classical. Scientists have been able to image the ultrafast motions of a trapped particle, revealing the underlining trajectories causing Brownian motion. This is the first time inertial Brownian motion of a particle in a fluid have been measured.

In 60 BC, the poet Lucretius described the motions of dust in a dark room and speculated on the existence of atoms. In 1827, Robert Brown described the random motions of pollen in water, the motion which now bears his name. It took until 1905 for Einstein to fully describe how Brownian motion arises from instantaneous imbalances in the forces from collisions with water molecules.

At its heart, Brownian motion is still described by classical Newtonian physics, even if we cannot define a classical velocity and can only measure mean square displacement. Einstein said, "It is therefore impossible... to ascertain the root mean square velocity by observation" because the timescales of the instantaneous velocity are vanishingly short. Einstein calculated that the time for a particle to decelerate significantly is about ~100ns, impossibly fast to measure at the time.

But that was then. Now researchers have been able to probe time scales an order of magnitude faster. By holding a micron-sized sphere in a optical trap and measuring the scattered light with a high speed position detector (75MHz), a team was able to measure the motion of the spheres with a resolution of 0.2 angstroms and a temporal resolution of ~10ns. At these resolutions, they were able to track the inertial Brownian motion of the sphere. 

A little more understanding about how the universe works every day.

Shutdown Countdown: The Morning After

Having slept on it, this morning I'm looking at the results of last night's deal and I'm shaking my head.  Yes, Obama and the Democrats came away preventing a shutdown and looked like the adults in the room.  The deal they struck was a bad deal, but it was the only deal available.  Neither side is happy with it.  Billions in social spending were removed from the budget during a faltering economy, meanwhile Tea Party types are screaming for blood, because they wanted a hundred billion in cuts and the elimination of funding for People They Hate.


The problem continues to be two larger, uglier battles ahead.

In waiting until the 11th hour to act as referee, Obama cast himself as the closer, the grown-up in the room who is not interested in flinging mud but instead reaching consensus and middle ground -- and most of all -- averting a government shutdown. And his advisers are counting on that leadership to transcend partisan politics and appeal to the average American fed up with the ways of Washington.

"In the final hours, leaders in both parties reached an agreement that allowed families to get the mortgage they applied for...and hundreds of thousands of people to show up to work Monday and get their paycheck on time, including our military," Obama said.

Yet, if Boehner was the happy warrior, as he told reporters with a smile Friday, Obama was a reluctant one. Throughout the week, Obama groused about his job as "referee" in talks between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, but also has acquiesced to playing the role of disappointed parent, the "grown-up" in the room, as he likes to say.

Earlier this week, he scolded Republicans and Democrats for not being able to play nicely and work things out themselves, and Thursday night he instructed Boehner and Reid to work through the night and get back to him on the morning on any progress.

Obama now gets to take credit for helping to avert a crisis, but the measure funding government for the rest of the year makes deep cuts in some of liberals' most beloved spending programs and exacts $6 billion in cuts than Senate Democrats said they would tolerate only days earlier. The recriminations on those issues will no doubt continue for weeks.

At the same time, Obama's leading role in achieving a compromise would likely win over a large swath of independent voters -- who desperately wanted the partisan bickering in Washington to end and preferred an imperfect deal rather than allow the government to shutdown, according to a recent national opinion survey by the Pew Research Center. 

So, Obama went all pragmatic instead of all cowboy, and a deal was reached.  A shutdown was averted, and Obama does look, well, presidential.  They say a deal that everybody hates is a fair one.

But the stakes in the next few months will have a hell of a lot more zeroes attached to them.  We get to go through all this again heading into the summer.

[UPDATE]  BooMan's take is excellent.

I notice a lot of commenters here are taking the position that the Republicans came out ahead in these negotiations. In a certain basic sense, they did. But most of that was baked in the cake the moment they took over the House by gaining an historic 63 seats. Despite all the angst over the slashing of discretionary spending (this was the biggest one-year cut in history), this battle was over a tiny sliver of the overall budget. The big battles over entitlement spending loom on the horizon, and the Republicans expended a tremendous amount of political capital to get a very small victory. You can count on them to threaten a government shutdown at least two more times this year. First, they'll threaten to default on our debt, and then they'll threaten "no deal" on the 2012 budget. They were wise enough not to close the government on the first and smallest fight, but they'll pay a higher political price every time they hold the government hostage.

We all complain about the Democrats' lack of unity and fighting spirit, but they finished these negotiations completely unified and on message. Yesterday was the best performance by the Democrats that I've seen in years. They blistered the Republicans for wanting to shut down the government to prevent cancer screenings and breast exams, and they did it in a very bold and coordinated way. It showed the power of the presidency when he decides to draw a line and he actually has the undivided support of his party. They were well-prepared for a government shutdown, and that bodes well for later battles.

And that is a very fair argument.  But if we're calling cutting government social spending in a recession and it taking Republicans threatening to shut the government down before the Dems can finally be unified and on message as the "best performance in years" we're in deep and abiding fecal matter.

[UPDATE 2]  To clarify, the argument in Washington is not "How do we strengthen our economy with the government as spender of last resort" but "How much government spending do we feed to the Tea Party wolves to make it through to the 2012 elections."  There's nobody talking about how to pull us out of the hole we're in.  It's only how much the American people are going to have to tighten their belts again to give tax cuts to the people at the top.

We have decisively lost the "spend or cut" argument.  The argument is now how much we will lose.  Obama will be blamed for that loss even as Republicans call for more sacrifice from 95% of Americans in the name of the wealthy at the top.

StupidiNews!

• California police are looking for a suspect in Thursday's synagogue bombing in Santa Monica, saying 61 year old Ron Hirsch is "extremely dangerous".
• Nearly two dozen protesters in Syria were killed on Friday as clashes across the country between security forces and anti-regime demonstrators entered a second month.
• America has raised a glass to "In vino, veritas" and passed France as the world's largest consumer of wine.
• Facebook is in talks to enter the biggest market of them all -- China -- but internet censoring concerns are clouding the deal.
• Tennessee may join Louisiana with a bill allowing school boards and teachers to present "alternatives to the theory of evolution" to students.

Last Call

As I have been predicting, the news at this late hour is that both sides in the shutdown showdown have -- surprise! -- come to a deal in theory and will sign a three day extension costing Dems another $2 billion in cuts while they iron out all the details.

Democrats and Republicans narrowly averted a partial shutdown of the federal government Friday night, agreeing on a budget deal and a short-term funding extension little more than an hour before the clock struck midnight and time ran out. 

The new funding extension, which cuts spending by $2 billion, will last through next Thursday.

"The government will be open for business," President Barack Obama said.

"In the final hours before our government would have been forced to shut down, leaders in both parties reached an agreement that will allow our small businesses to get the loans they need, our families to get the mortgages they applied for, and hundreds of thousands of Americans to show up at work and take home their paychecks on time."

Negotiators capped days of frantic closed-door talks and public recriminations by agreeing on a framework for a package of $38.5 billion in spending cuts covering the rest of the fiscal year, which expires September 30.

Republicans, bolstered by their capture of the House of Representatives in last November's midterm elections, had initially pushed for $61 billion in cuts.

And actually that's a lie.  Republicans in the House Appropriations committee initially pushed for $32 billion in cuts.  That was their opening bid.  They got $38.5 billion...more than their initial offer.

As I have said time and time again, a GOP deal at this point is a 100% win for them.  Take the victory and move on to the debt ceiling battle, where they can bleed unlimited concessions from the Democrats over the next several months.  The Dems may have saved Planned Parenthood funding for now, but as long as the GOP controls the House, they can simply go through all this again, only with the debt ceiling and FY12 fights, they can ask for much higher stakes playing their "bad cop, insane cop" game.  We're already up to the Village cheering Paul Ryan on for destroying Medicare and Medicaid, and disappointed he's not going to do the same to Social Security.

Do you think Obama's going to be able to hold the line, even with our help?  So far the Dems have done nothing but cave on the economic front.

We'll see what the details are next week, but the GOP now knows it can hold the country hostage and get concession after concession from Democrats.

And the concessions they are going to get may end up costing working class Americans nearly everything.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Real people are going to be hurt by this shutdown, folks.

"It's basically like headless chickens, on fire, in a train, also on fire, careening towards a cliff, on fire," wrote one TPM reader who works in the "executive offices of a significant government agency."

The reader said "stress levels this week have been off the chart" and that preparations for shutdown "have almost totally derailed any possibility of doing real business and nobody seems able to talk about anything else anyway."

"Quite honestly the whole thing has been a bit chaotic," one government contractor wrote. "Because of the uncertainty around whether there would actually be a shutdown or what would happen if there was, no one knew what to do other than to just keep doing their jobs."

"It pisses me off because I will be burning my leave/vacation time while the GOP plays games trying to score points with its constituencies," they added.

Another contractor spoke of similar "madness" at their workplace.

"They are just telling everyone to prepare not to be here on Monday. But it's crazy because no one can use government computers or Blackberries to send out communications, so how are people supposed to know?" they wrote.

A contract worker at a federal research agency wrote that none of the contract employees who work in their animal labs have been notified of their "essential" status, leading to concern for the creatures in their care.

"There have also been rumors that only 1/3 of the labor requested by vets and facility managers will be permitted to work, and that only 'essential' tasks will be permitted," they wrote. "I'm trying my best not to be cynical, but it's starting to feel like a lot of animals will be put at risk by this shutdown as well." 

It's gotten so bad for the GOP at this point on the optics that even the Tea Party nutjobs are saying "You know, this makes us look like total douchebags.  Let's not do this.  Instead we'll pick a bigger fight over the debt ceiling and really get the Dems to cave!"

I still expect a deal, folks.  We'll see.

America Still Getting Shopping Mauled

Hey folks, let's not forget the collapsing commercial real estate market along with the residential one.  Vacancies at strip malls and your local galleria are up big in 2011 and as gas and food prices continue to rise this spring and choke what little discretionary income we have left in this country, it's going to get a lot worse for retailers and fast.

Mall vacancies hit their highest level in at least 11 years in the first quarter, new figures from real-estate research company Reis Inc. showed. In the top 80 U.S. markets, the average vacancy rate was 9.1%, up from 8.7%.

The outlook is especially bad for strip malls and other neighborhood shopping centers. Their vacancy rate is expected to top 11.1% later this year, up from 10.9%, Reis predicts. That would be the highest level since 1990.

In 2005, the mall-vacancy rate hit a low of 5.1%. For strip centers the boom-time low vacancy rate was 6.7% that same year.

Combine that with the growing number of grocery store bankruptcies, restaurant chains folding, and the death of the strip mall video store, and you have the recipe for a major disaster.  That's right, folks:  in just six years, retail vacancies have basically doubled, and as millions of square feet of brand new retail space continues to be created, we're reaching a point here where the entire game breaks down.  Remember, retail vacancies now are higher than they were when the recession supposedly "ended" in 2009 and they continue to increase as more supply is added and more retailers go under.

Another wave of restaurant closings is on the way this summer as gas and food inflation hit your favorite watering hole.  Remember Bennigans and Steak & Ale?   Mervyn's and Linens N' Things?  Circuit City?  They were nuked by $4 a gallon gas.  This time around they will be joined by a whole lot more places to eat and to shop as inflation and competition get ugly this summer.

And remember, these retailers and restaurants provide jobs.  Not high-paying ones by any means, but jobs.  Even those are getting swept away in the flood.

No folks, it's going to be a long, hot summer.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Gold continues its march towards $1,500 an ounce, silver has crossed the $40 resistance point, and oil is $111 and rising.  Asariel notes the UN's world food price index was up 2.2% in February.  That was really before the mess in MENA.

Meanwhile on the way into work this morning I'm listening to an interview with Social Security trustee and former Bush econ adviser Chuck Blahous on Sirius/XM POTUS.  Chuckles there basically said the because the President hasn't fully backed the Catfood Commission's report, that the Ryan Unicorn Plan 2012 is the only game in town, and that if Democrats want to have any say in this, they'd better get behind their own plan to cut taxes on the rich and declare war on the middle class, and destroy the poor, or they might forfeit their right to be at the Big Boy's Table.

Oh, and today's shutdown drama continues.  The Dems have offered up more billions in cuts, but the Tea Party is now in control over Orange Julius and is basically going to shut the government down over Planned Parenthood.  Amazingly enough, Amanda Marcotte called this exact scenario six weeks ago over at Alternet.

This time around, anti-choicers have quite the laundry list of Democratic concerns they can hold hostage. On top of defunding Title X, the continuing resolution also zeroes out the funding for health care reform and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as cutting the EPA’s budget by a third. Considering how Democrats gave in to severe restrictions of reproductive rights before to save health-care reform, the obvious play from Republicans here is to secure the cuts to family planning in exchange for funding health care reform, and most importantly, not shutting down the government in the midst of a terrible economy, which would send the already mind-boggling 10 percent unemployment rate up even further. If Republicans use the economy, the government, and health-care reform as blackmail to get rid of Planned Parenthood, it’s not hard to see Democrats accepting the compromise. Especially if you consider how easy it would be for Democrats to convince themselves that expanded insurance coverage would negate the need for Planned Parenthood, though it very likely wouldn’t. But most importantly, it’s hard to hardball an opponent who is practically begging you to do your worst. And there's a long list of Republicans who’ve indicated they welcome this idea of taking the fight to a government shutdown.

It's getting mildly scary out there.  Just saying.

There's Still Something In My Eye

I'm a sucker for a happy ending.  Here's hoping this will put a smile on your face.

David Loomis lost his job last year, and his unemployment benefits were about to expire. But while Beth Loomis was walking their dog Tuesday morning, she found a dollar and thought, "I guess this might be our lucky day," she told CNN affiliate WBNS.

Ohio Lottery officials had invited the couple to come to lottery headquarters to pick up a hat and cup consolation prize from a 2010 drawing.  What they didn't tell the Loomises was that there also was a $150,000 check waiting for them from a lottery ticket David Loomis had bought last year.

This almost makes up for the Wal-Mart story.  Almost.

Signs Of The Apocalypse

For once, I agree with Wal-Mart.  I know, it surprised me too.  If the Cubs win the World Series, our time has come.  I was browsing Fark, and came across this.

CHICAGO — Wal-Mart was within its rights to fire a Joliet store employee who told a lesbian co-worker that she would go to hell because God does not accept gays, and the dismissal was not religious discrimination, a federal appeals court has ruled. 

Tanisha Matthews began working as an overnight stocker at the Joliet Wal-Mart in 1996, according to court documents. In September 2005, during a break in the shift, Matthews took part in a conversation about God and homosexuality. 

Wal-Mart fired Matthews after concluding she had engaged in behavior that violated the company’s Discrimination and Harassment Prevention Policy. The policy, which the court said Matthews was aware of at the time of the incident, prohibits employees from engaging in conduct that could reasonably be interpreted as harassment based on an individual’s status, including sexual orientation, and says they can be fired for such conduct.

I have always been a strong advocate for religious freedom.  I realize that over the years those rights have eroded, and I am always sad to see it happen.  But I despise it when religion is used as a hammer to take away from others, and that's what happened here.  Her comments were inappropriate and completely voluntary.  Religious freedom doesn't override common decency and fair treatment, and it's disappointing when this type of thing happens.  Matthews was not fired for her beliefs, only for choosing to demonstrate them at the expense of another human being.  This happened in 2005, so it was a decision that was long overdue.

I'm 100% on Wal-Mart's side. I'm going to go hug some kittens or something.  I feel so... dirty.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 23

Another major aftershock rocked Japan yesterday, knocking Sony and other chipmakers offline in Northern Japan again as the nation's power grid suffered another wave of rolling blackouts.

The stoppages are the latest blow to manufacturers, who had hoped to quickly restore supply chains after the devastating earthquake and tsunami last month savaged the region and halted distribution.

"It (an earthquake) could happen again and that means you can't really proceed with reconstruction," said Yuuki Sakurai, CEO of Fukoku Capital Management, adding that many firms were hesitant as to how to proceed.

"They have to be very careful. They need thoughtful planning. They need to be doubly, triply solid against the next earthquake. So it will cost a lot and you have to consider whether it is worth rebuilding," he said.

Renesas, the world's largest maker of microcontroller chips and a supplier to the auto industry, said four plants in northern Japan, including two microcontroller factories, had been halted by the power blackout.

A company spokeswoman said it was not clear when manufacturing would resume, although power had been restored to one plant.

Japanese automakers however are eager to get production restarted.  The problem is that as Japanese production continues domestically, over here in the US, that means fewer parts available abroad and more chance of work stoppages.

Oh yes, and Japan is heading back into a major recession as a result of the triple whammy of the quake, the tsunami, and the continuing nuclear crisis.  Have a nice day.

Well Ain't That A Cowinkydink

So Wednesday morning in Wisconsin, JoAnne Kloppenburg had declared victory in a hotly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court race.  She was ahead by 200+ votes, a very narrow total, and under Wisconsin state law, the margin of difference being under half a percentage point, an automatic recall was certain.  With turnout of nearly 1.5 million voters, the margin was microscopic, some .015%.

At stake:  the 4-3 conservative to liberal balance on the State Supreme Court.  Incumbent David Prosser, a conservative, was up for another ten year term.  He was expected to cruise to victory, but then GOP Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting activities began in earnest.  Suddenly the vote became a referendum on Walker and it seemed the voters may have given him the thumbs down.

That was until Thursday afternoon, some 29 hours after the election.  Because 11,000 additional votes were found for David Prosser in Waukesha County.

In a stunning turnaround, the county clerk for Waukesha County, a heavily Republican district in southeast Wisconsin, announced on Thursday evening that she'd failed to count more than 14,000 votes cast in Tuesday's state Supreme Court election. The error, disclosed by a former state GOP lawmaker who's been criticized for her handling of local elections, handed conservative incumbent David Prosser a lead of 7,582 votes, flipping the result of the race after an initial tally put liberal JoAnne Kloppenburg ahead by a mere 204 votes.

The Waukesha clerk, Kathy Nickolaus, a Republican, said in a press conference that the new votes, all of which were cast in the city of Brookfield, were missed because of human error that's "common in this process." Nickolaus apologized for the mistake, saying, "The purpose of the canvas is to catch these kind of mistakes."

An election that drew national attention from observers and political figures, and suddenly not only does the conservative find enough votes to take a commanding lead, but he finds enough votes to take a commanding lead that's more than half a percentage point.

That's right.  No recall.  Prosser's lead is now .51%.  There will be no automatic recall unless JoAnne Kloppenburg pays for it herself.  As things stand right now, Prosser is the clear and uncontested winner unless something else happens in the canvasing, after finding just enough votes to win without triggering a recall.

What an astounding coincidence that is.  Everybody watching the election, the observers, the Associated Press, both parties, everyone involved happened to miss an entire town of 40,000 people and their voting results until more than 24 hours after the election.

It was a computer glitch by the Republican county official.  Just enough of an oversight to give the conservative the lead without a recall, when a recall was assured on Wednesday, in a race that would decide the fate of public unions in the state of Wisconsin and possibly affect the entire country.

You know, comrades," says Stalin, "that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.

Prime example of that maxim happened today, folks.

Prior to the election, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was heavily criticized for her decision to keep the county results on an antiquated personal computer, rather than upgrade to a new data system being utilized statewide. Nickolaus cited security concerns for keeping the data herself — yet when she reported the data, it did not include the City of Brookfield, whose residents cast nearly 14,000 votes.

Yep.  Just an honest mistake, folks.  Nothing to see here.  Please go about your business, Wisconsin...

Oh, and ACORN BLAH BLOOGITY UNION THUGS BLAH BLAH BLOOGITY BLOO.   This was the Right Wing Noise Machine on Wednesday:  a recount will clear up this Democrat voter fraud!

As noted yesterday, Kloppenburg is up only 204 votes based on the AP count (not yet official).  This is a fight worth fighting, particularly given all the anecdotal evidence of Democratic Party shenanigans (I don't call it "fraud" yet), miscalculations, ineligible voters, car trunks filled with ballots yet to be discovered, and all the other tricks in the Democratic Party bag which were pulled out in Minnesota.

We'll fight this until the end!  Justice must be served!  Fraud!  Cheating!  A trunk full of votes will be found!

So when a trunk full of votes were found (just for the incumbent conservative) this is the Right Wing Noise Machine today. 

But this is not a time to gloat.  If Prosser wins, it is not a win for Prosser or for a particular political party.  What is important is that every vote counts and every vote was counted.  This is a victory for the democratic process.

So, no need for a recount.  Every vote was counted.   No fraud here.  Accept Prosser's clear win and move on, whiny Libs.  Unions are dead, blah blah blah, revenge for your cheating in Al Franken's race, no liberal can possibly win an election fairly.  If the conservative does, it's truth and justice and every vote was counted.

Please ignore the Republicans behind the curtain with the Excel spreadsheet and the 14,000 votes on it.

More on this at Brad Blog.