Category: Wisconsin

Well, Of Course: 14-Year-Old Wisconsin Tea Party Speaker Is Home-Schooler

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When I saw this video at Ann Althouse’s blog (hat-tip, Instapundit), I did some quick searching and learned that Tricia Willoughby is a home-schooler and debate champion, one of three daughters of Wisconsin pro-life leaders Bret and Nancy Willoughby:

As the father of six home-schooled kids myself, I’m very proud to see Miss Willoughby’s poise as a public speaker. However, she twice uses “enormity” in an incorrect sense. The word has a negative connotation: “an outrageous, improper, vicious, or immoral act . . . the quality or state of being immoderate, monstrous, or outrageous; especially: great wickedness.” While authorities differ on whether “enormity” can be used to signify large size (“enormousness” is preferred), using the word “enormity” to signify the momentous nature or historical import of an event one wishes to portray as positive (as Miss Willoughby does in reference to the Boston Tea Party) is always wrong.

Let’s hope that Miss Willoughby doesn’t mind this brief vocabulary lesson. Certainly, it is more well-intentioned than the vocabulary lesson offered by a certain Wisconsin union thug:

You can tell he’s a public-school alumnus: His vocabulary seems to be comprised chiefly of monosyllabic words with four letters.

Wound + Salt = ‘Hey, Liberals, How Are You Liking That Wisconsin Result?’

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Yesterday afternoon, when it looked like liberal Joanne Kloppenburg had narrowly defeated Wisconsin state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, I was in abject misery. Now? Baby, I feel fine!

In a political bombshell, the clerk in a Republican stronghold released new vote totals adding a net total of 7,582 new votes in the tight state Supreme Court race to Justice David Prosser, swinging the race significantly in his favor.
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said Thursday that she failed to save in her computer and consequently report 14,315 votes cast in the city of Brookfield, omitting them entirely in an unofficial tally released after Tuesday’s election. The new totals give 10,859 more votes to Prosser from Brookfield and 3,456 more to Kloppenburg, she said. Smaller discrepancies turned up in two other communities as well.

National Review says this is “almost certain victory” for Prosser, and no doubt much bitter lamentation for liberals.

More at Instapundit. Read ’em weep, liberals!

UPDATE: Ace of Spades is totally in the Gloat Zone.

Meanwhile, my friend Jehuda has called to my attention some commenter at Ed Driscoll’s who described my reaction yesterday as “wailing and hand-wringing.” No: Despair is merely realism when the situation objectively sucks. And if Kloppenburg had won this thing, the situation would have sucked quite objectively.

I hate losing. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Show me a “good loser,” and I’ll show you a loser.

So when I’d stayed up until the wee hours Tweeting election results as they were updated, woke up five hours later to see Prosser hanging on to a slender lead, and then in the afternoon seen Kloppenburg declared the winner by 204 votes, I was ready to say, “To hell with Wisconsin.”

Write ’em off. Screw those losers. Might as well be California.

But now? Yeah, that was beautiful. Way to go, Wisconsin GOP: Get the liberals all gloaty for about 24 hours and then break their little hearts.

The objective suck is now on the other foot.

Gone, Wisconsin!

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Joan Kloppenburg has declared victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election — apparently winning by a margin of 204 votes — and thus dies whatever hope there had been for the state’s economic and political future.

Gov. Scott Walker and the newly-elected Republican majority in the legislature had begun the only possible reform that could have saved Wisconsin: The disestablishment of the government employee unions that were strangling the state’s economy. Now, with a cleverly orchestrated campaign, the AFL-CIO has replaced state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser with a pro-union hack to block implementation of the GOP’s reform agenda.

What is interesting to note is that, in November, Walker was elected with 1.13 million votes — 52% of more than 2.1 million votes cast.

Now, barely five months later, his election has been effectively undone by Kloppenburg, who won with a mere 740,090 votes, roughly two-thirds of Walker’s November total.

It appears that nearly 400,000 people who voted for Walker in November simply stayed home on Tuesday. With their state’s future on the line, they were MIA.

Thus ends — gone! gone forever! — all hope of liberating Wisconsin from the job-killing government-union stranglehold.

Good-bye, Wisconsin!

UPDATE: Ace is remarkably stoic about the End of Wisconsin, while The Rhetorican foresees a Greece-like future for the Land O’ Cheese.

Prosser Wins in Wisconsin
UPDATE: Kloppenburg Steals It?

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Yeah, I know that’s not the headline this morning. “Too Close to Call,” they say, but with 99% of precincts reporting and conservative Justice David Prosser leading by 585 votes in the state Supreme Court race, I’m calling it: Prosser wins.

Even if the unions finagle the recount and manage to steal this thing for JoAnne Kloppenburg, the fact is the high-profile election was not — repeat not — a repudiation of Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP majority in the state legislature.

The unions lost. Their claim that their rage-filed protests represented an overwhelming majority of Wisconsin voters? Repudiated.

UPDATE: Two hours later, Kleptoburg’s attempt to steal the election is proceeding as expected: Now she’s “ahead” by 224 votes.

UPDATE II: As of 3 p.m. ET, it appears Kleptoburg has stolen the election by 204 votes. We await the media’s declaration of a landslide triumph for the AFL-CIO.

UPDATE III: It should be noted that the reported totals are unofficial returns, and that communities have until April 15 to submit the official certified results. Then there will be a deadline of April 20 to request a recount.

UPDATE IV: Congratulations, liberals — you just killed Wisconsin.

Is The Wisconsion Union Self-Aware Enough To Grasp That It Is Behaving In The Taliban Fashion?

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by Smitty (h/t Protein Wisdom)

Here in Afghanistan, the various terrorist networks use night letters to intimidate the populace. It seems that word of this approach has reached Wisconsin and somehow been deemed acceptable:

The missive concludes by noting that, “With that we’d ask that you reconsider taking a sign and stance to support public employees in this community. Failure to do so will leave us no choice but do [sic] a public boycott of your business. And sorry, neutral means ‘no’ to those who work for the largest employer in the area and are union members.”

Go, America! I’m so glad to hear that the very policies the US is trying to help discourage in the Hindu Kush are taking root back home. Woo hoo!
So, after unions and entitlements have reduced the Progressive States of America to an Afghanistan-like state, here is the sort of flat toilet you can expect:

Housing may move in the direction of this adobe ruin:

Closer in, with a red brick in the picture for scale:

These walls are great insulation in the winter, and hold the cool in the summer. You can do an awful lot of cheap modifications, too. I image that some sort of sealant, which the Afghans don’t use, would keep down on the overall dirtiness of the approach.
So, if you enjoy having weekends and and we get to the point of an utterly wrecked economy, don’t forget to thank a union!

New Motherf–g Tone: Wisconsin Woman Arrested for Death Threats to Republicans

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Who knew “civility” was a felony in Wisconsin?

A 26-year-old woman was charged Thursday with two felony counts and two misdemeanor counts for allegedly making email threats against Wisconsin lawmakers during the height of the battle over Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill.
Katherine R. Windels of Cross Plains was named in a criminal complaint filed in Dane County Criminal Court.
According to the criminal complaint, Windels allegedly sent an email threat to State Sen. Robert Cowles (R-Green Bay) March 9. Later that evening, she allegedly sent another email to 15 Republican legislators, including Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau).
The subject line of the second email was: “Atten: Death Threat!!!! Bomb!!!” In that email, she purportedly wrote, “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks.”
“I hope you have a good time in hell,” she allegedly wrote in the lengthy email in which she purportedly listed scenarios in which the legislators and their families would die, including bombings and by “putting a nice little bullet in your head.”

The Underground Conservative reports that Windels is — wait for it — a pre-school teacher. Charlie Sykes at Milwaukee talk radio station WTMJ had complained that the district attorney’s office was dragging its feet in investigating death threats against Wisconsin Republicans. (Via Memeorandum.)

In other “civility” news, The Underground Conservative reports on a Milwaukee County employee (and AFSCME activist) who apparently used his work computer to call the blogger a “f–ing a–hole.”

UPDATE: Ann Althouse reports that AFSCME is resorting to protection-racket tactics, demanding that businesses put up pro-union signs.

Organized labor and organized crime: There’s a difference?

UPDATE II: Underground Conservative now has his own Memeorandum thread, with commentary by  Another Black Conservative, American Glob, Pat Dollard, Weasel Zippers, and Sister Toldjah

 PREVIOUSLY:


05Apr: Walker’s Wisconsin Waterloo?

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by Smitty

John Nolte at Big Government updates us on the status of the case of the Union vs. Governor Walker in Wisconsin. It’s an excellent overview, worthy of your full attention. The gist is that if one of the four conservative judges on the court, Prosser, is lost on the 05Apr election, then the court would flip to Lefty, and all semblance of rule of law, common sense, fiscal responsibility, reason, representation of the people, etc., could go straight down the tubes. One wishes one was engaging in hyperbole there.
In the face of such journalistic excellence, there was only one thing this blog could do: dispatch Sissypuss the Blog Kitty for a video exclusive. Here, our gritty, intrepid back-alley correspondent has captured two of the three sitting Lefties on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, discussing their day in their usual seriousness:
This blog is still waiting for an official denial from The Troglopundit* of the rumor that these judges had raided Trog’s personal lingerie collection, NTTAWWT. If he’s too embarrassed to admit the loss of these unmentionables, this blog understands in advance.
We here at ToM are willing to go to extreme lengths to help great bloggers like Trog achieve important milestones like a million pageviews, and we’ll cheerfully toss his dignity under the bus to do it. You’re welcome, Trog.

*I may have invented a new category, the ‘begging-the-question link’ with this one.

Fortunately, It’s Wisconsin …

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. . . so liberals will have plenty of cheese to go with their whine, as the new law limiting the power of government-employee unions is enacted. Note the biased implication of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel headline:

Collective bargaining law published despite restraining order

Yes, despite the judicial majesty of Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi, as if thousands of years of ancient legal precedent enabled a county judge to prevent the enactment of a state law.

Evidently, Republicans haven’t won anything in Wisconsin for so long, Democrats have forgotten what defeat looks like.