If all of the talk of the Impending Government Shutdown -- Ooooo! -- distracted you, you might have missed the developments in Wisconsin, where a State Supreme Court election took on all the significance of an off-year Congressional election.
There, Wisconsin public employee unions, enraged by the duly elected legislature and governor's perfectly legal actions to weaken their collective bargaining stranglehold on Wisconsin government, threw everything they could against a sitting Republican justice to try to elect a Democrat who openly vowed to overturn the legislation.
On Wednesday morning after the election, it looked like their efforts had been successful and the Democrat had won by 200 votes. But then Thursday came,
and, in preparation for the canvass, the Clerk of Waukesha County found that she had omitted 14,000 votes from a Republican stronghold. The 200 vote lead became a 7500 vote deficit, and the union hopes were crushed.
These numbers look more reasonable than those from Tuesday night, as the turnout percentages are much more in line with others. There is every likelihood that they will hold up.
The disaster for the leftists is that Wisconsin still looks like the state that dumped John-McCain-BFF* Russ Feingold for unknown Tea Party businessman Ron Johnson 52-47, that elected Republican Scott Walker over the Dem by 53-47, and that switched the Legislature to Republican hands. With union coffers depleted by this election and soon to be depleted further by the recall elections they have initiated against the Republican legislators, and then without the payroll deduction of government union-member's dues to rebuild those coffers, Wisconsin could be in play for the Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential election, a fact that ought to have Dems quaking in their boots.
Bob LaFollete is tumbling -- not spinning -- in his grave.
Tea Party on!
*Best Friend Forever in the land of thumb typists.
