Trust the FBI! The FBI is the expert authority! Bring in the FBI! FBI!! FBI!!... ... The FBI did it wrong!

So annoying.

They cried out over and over for the FBI. The FBI was called in because it was supposedly neutral and expert and the proper authority. Then, when they didn't like what they got, they immediately flipped to saying the FBI didn't do it right.

I've seen this kind of game play before, and I when I see it, I get out my old Russ Feingold video:



"The game's not over until we win!"

Waking up in a red state.

"This game's not over until we win" — said Russ Feingold in my favorite Russ Feingold clip. I filmed this clip during the anti-Scott Walker Wisconsin protests of 2011:



I posted it again 3 weeks ago, when the conversation was about Donald Trump's failure to say that he will "absolutely accept the result of the election." People jumped all over Trump's hesitation, and now Trump has won, and the Hillary side hesitated to "absolutely accept the result of the election." Hillary Clinton never came out on the stage last night to thank her supporters who'd waited so long and suffered so much. She sent out John Podesta — her partner in email trouble — and he expressed resistance to the outcome that was staring them in the face:

"We can wait a little longer, can't we? They're still counting votes. Every vote should count. Several states are too close to call. So we're not going to have anything more to say tonight."

But by the time Trump came out to deliver his victory oration, Hillary Clinton had called him. So she had conceded. Perhaps she was in no condition to be seen on camera at 2 a.m. It's hard to get put together enough to want to been seen after such a long night — a long night full of so much pain. Did she really owe it to her supporters? Maybe. But she couldn't do it. Not yet. She'll be out at 9:30 ET this morning. [UPDATE: The time got pushed back to 10:30.]

And Russ Feingold lost too. Here he is giving a gracious* concession speech. Ron Johnson, the Republican who ousted him from his Senate seat in 2010, has won reelection. And Johnson even won by a wider margin than Trump won Wisconsin.

On the morning after Election Day in 2010, I wrote a blog post titled "Waking up in a red state." Scott Walker had been elected governor, the state legislature went GOP, and Ron Johnson had upset Russ Feingold. But I was wrong. Wisconsin continued to be called a blue state, because pundits based the color on the presidential vote, and Obama had won Wisconsin in 2008. Obama also won in 2012. Even though Scott Walker won his recall election in 2012 and won the regular election in 2014, Wisconsin was still called a blue state.

But Donald Trump won Wisconsin, and now, I find, for certain, that I am waking up in a red state.
______________________________

* I wrote "gracious" based on hearing this clip: "We as Americans have to do the best we can to heal the pain in this country and get people to come together. I would urge you to be as restrained as you can be as the next steps occur." But on listening to the entire clip, I'm noticing that Feingold doesn't congratulate Ron Johnson. He doesn't say the name Ron Johnson or even refer to his opponent. He only mentions the "outcome" and his own failure "to get the job done."

New Marquette poll has Ron Johnson closing the gap on Russ Feingold.

It's Feingold 45%, Johnson 44%. In early October, it was Feingold 46%, Johnson 44%.

Other public polls of the race in October have shown Feingold leading by between two and 12 points.

But Trump isn't closing the gap on Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin. Marquette has Trump at 40% and Hillary at 46%. I note that the belief that Hillary will win can work as a reason to support Johnson, to balance the federal government and position the Congress as a brake on the President.

On not accepting the results of the election: Let's hear from Russ Feingold: "This game's not over until we win."

That's Russ — who's running for the Senate again here in Wisconsin — haranguing the protesters back in 2011, when the results of the last election were not being accepted. There had been a fair election. No one was saying there had been fraud or improper counting, but the protesters rejected the legitimacy of the outcome, began working on getting a recall election, and — for many weeks — chanted "This is what democracy looks like." That is: Democracy was — instead of accepting the results of the election — resisting conspicuously and vocally.

Now, let's look at what Donald Trump said at last night's debate:

The moderator, Chris Wallace, asked him if he would make a "commitment" that he will "absolutely accept the result of the election."

(I think I would have said: "It depends on what the meaning of 'result' is. If by 'result,' you mean that we have had a chance to look at exactly what happened in all of the states and we can see that the margin of victory is beyond all remaining allegations of fraud, then I will absolutely accept the result. But if you mean that in a close election, where there is suspicion of fraud or mishandling of the ballots, and the other side is calling that the 'result,' and that I should accept that 'result,' no I will not.")

Here's what Trump said:

I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now, I'll look at it at the time. What I've seen, what I’ve seen, is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and so corrupt and the pile on is so amazing. "The New York Times" actually wrote an article about it, but they don't even care. It is so dishonest, and they have poisoned the minds of the voters....

Notice that Trump isn't talking about fraud and miscounting of ballots there. He's complaining that the voters made the wrong decision. We can't be rejecting the outcome of an election on the ground that the voters thought about it the wrong way! Trump has many good complaints about the media, but if distorted media invalidate elections, we can't have a democracy anymore. There will always be dishonesty and efforts to influence — poisoning — and if we can't get on with it anyway, the whole project of democracy is a bust.

Trump does go on to make a second point, the decent point, that there may be fraud:

If you look at your voter rolls, you will see millions of people that are registered to vote. Millions. This isn't coming from me. This is coming from Pew report and other places. Millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn't be registered to vote.

This is the good point, and he needed to extend it and explain why irregularities in voting require him to withhold his acceptance of the purported results until we can see what happened. But he does not say that. He just drops the idea that there are a lot of names on the voting rolls that shouldn't be there, and stumbles forward trying to get to a different subject:

So let me just give you one other thing. I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people. I'll tell you one other thing. She shouldn't be allowed to run. It’s -- She's guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run, and just in that respect I say it's rigged because she should never --

Wallace: But, but --

Trump: Chris. She should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.

Wallace stops him:

Wallace: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you're necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you're not prepared now to commit to that principle?

This is a grand statement by Wallace, and Trump should have shown respect for "that principle," while reminding us of the additional principle that the votes must be legitimate and properly counted and that he will not abandon one principle in preference to the other. Both are treasured, and he will protect both. Well... unless — expecting to lose — he really is laying the groundwork for a post-election political/media career premised on anger and grievance. The first woman President will be the one who gets no honeymoon.

What Trump did say was cutesy and snide:

What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense, okay?

And that's where Hillary Clinton jumped in. She called it "horrifying." She said Trump had a habit of saying things are "rigged" whenever they are not going his way. She listed a bunch of things — such as Trump's saying the federal judge in the Trump University case couldn't be fair — and she ends with the silliest thing — the Emmys were rigged against his TV show.

Trump riffs on that last thing: "Should have gotten it." That's cute and gets a laugh, but he needs to be serious. This is important, and he's going for the opening to be funny. Clinton takes advantage:

Clinton: This is a mind-set. This is how Donald thinks, and it's funny, but it's also really troubling. That is not the way our democracy works. We've been around for 240 years. We've had free and fair elections. We've accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election. You know, President Obama said the other day when you're whining before the game is even finished....

And that's where Chris Wallace calls an end to this segment of the debate. Hillary gets in a few more words. Trump is "denigrating" and "talking down our democracy" and "I, for one, am appalled...."

And Trump has a few more words but they are off topic (about the email controversy), and Wallace steps back in, more firmly, and shuts the door on what will be the biggest story coming out of the debate:

There they go again. The big bad media, poisoning our mind.

The absence of Hillary yard signs.

Photographed today, a few blocks from where I live in Madison, Wisconsin:



Most houses have no yard signs, but where I did see signs — on what was a 4-mile walk through various neighborhoods — they were signs for Russ Feingold (the Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate) or for Marc Pocan (the Democrat running for reelection in our congressional district). There were almost no Hillary signs.

Were there any Trump signs? Of course not. But I did see a Trump sign in Madison yesterday. Somewhere on the East Side — which is the more left-wing side of town, so the sign must infuriate some people. We took an hour-long drive the other day — up around Devils Lake — and we did see Trump signs there, including one sign that said "Trump the Bitch." Imagine putting that in your yard!

"The presidential race and U.S. Senate contest have tightened in Wisconsin..."

"... according to Wednesday's Marquette University Law School Poll."

Aaaaah! Moss might be Maass, the apparent Republican in a possible plot against Russ Feingold.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the story:

An apparent Republican activist tried to join Democrat Russ Feingold’s team this week in what Feingold’s campaign suspects was a plot to dig up dirt on him.

In an interview with Feingold staff on Wednesday, she initially said she wanted to work on issues affecting women’s health care and unions, but clammed up when confronted about whether she had worked for conservatives and tried to infiltrate Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Iowa last year....

The woman signed up to be a volunteer as Allison Moss on Tuesday, but was let go Wednesday after the Feingold campaign asked her if she was actually Allison Maass. Maass is a writer with Campus Reform, a project of the conservative Leadership Institute aimed at exposing liberal bias at universities....

Why change your name only just that much — Maass to Moss? Perhaps it is inherent in the nature of moss, not to change much, which is why very reactionary conservatives are called mossbacks. 

Mossback..seems to have originated in the swamps of North Carolina, where a particular class of the poor whites were said to have lived among the cypress until the moss had grown on their backs.

ADDED: A bit more information at Yahoo News, with references to Project Veritas, (the James O’Keefe operation) and the spokesman's statement: “Regarding the person you named below, Project Veritas will neither provide nor confirm the identity of any of our undercover journalists, real or imagined."

We were just talking about the ethics of undercover journalism the other day — after a Daily Beast writer did a story on gay male athletes at the Olympics. So check out that post if you are wondering how bad it is for journalists to misrepresent themselves to get a story. I don't know if the Feingold incident — if it was indeed a trick of some kind — was an effort at journalism or some kind of political spying or sabotage.

AND: The Feingold campaign ought to be careful about what it is doing to the real Allison Maass. Here's her page at Campus Reform, where you can see her picture and links to articles she's done. She's a real person: "She is a senior at the University of Minnesota studying professional journalism and graphic design and is Editor-in-Chief of the student publication The Minnesota Republic." Her page links to her Twitter feed, which was only set up this month and has no tweets yet.

"If it was just Trump complaining about the 'crooked' system, it would seem like sour grapes from a guy who got out-hustled."

"But The Donald’s allies in the right-wing media, including Drudge and Breitbart, are trying to make Cruz’s wins seem illegitimate in the eyes of the conservative base. If Cruz wins the nomination at a contested convention in Cleveland, he will need these grass-roots activists to rally around him. If regular Drudge readers believe he did not win fair and square, they will be less inclined to do so."

From "The Daily 202: Ted Cruz’s war with Matt Drudge could become a huge problem for his campaign" by James Hohmann in The Washington Post.

IN THE COMMENTS: eric said: "How did Cruz cheat?" And I said:

Who decides what counts as "cheating" and what the consequences of cheating are?

Isn't the answer: The People.

Then I see that Thorley Winston also answered eric's question:

It reminds me of “The Gambler” (the movie based on the Kenny Rogers song) where after the title character wins the game, the villain wants to keep playing until he wins.

Hopefully Cruz remembers to pack his Derringer.

And that reminds me of our favorite Russ Feingold quote — which I video'd during the Wisconsin uprising: "The game's not over until I win. This game's not over until we win."

A new Marquette poll has Cruz way up in Wisconsin at 40%, with Trump at 30% and Kasich at 21%.

The poll was completed before Scott Walker's endorsement of Cruz. (The previous Marquette poll, done last month, had Trump at 30% and Cruz at 19.)

The new poll also showed Walker's job approval up, so if the GOP primary is (as some have said) sort of a referendum on Walker, Cruz ought to do even better.

Also in that poll, Feingold's lead over Ron Johnson is down to 3 points, and — in the state supreme court race — Rebecca Bradley is up 5 points over JoAnne Kloppenburg (despite an effort to portray Bradley, based on her college essays, as a homophobe).

Why I quit watching the debate halfway through and woke up the next morning identifying strongly with Cruel Neutrality.

Do you remember Cruel Neutrality? It's an attitude I noticed in myself and embraced and branded in March 2008:

Who am I supporting in the presidential contest? You shouldn't know, because I don't know. In fact, I'm positioning myself in a delicate state of unknowing, a state I hope to maintain until October if not November. In the meantime, I will spread the attacks around and give credit where credit is due. I think if you look back, you'll see I've done this in the past week. Nothing is more boring than a blogger's endorsement, and I'm not interested in reading any blogger's day to day spin in favor one candidate or another. I would rather take a vow not to vote in November and to keep track of my pro and con posts and go out of my way to keep the tallies even than to turn into a blogger like that.

So I'm taking a vow of neutrality, but it won't be dull beige neutrality. I think partisanship is too tedious to read. This is going to be cruel neutrality.

In 2008, my cruel neutrality was monitored and verified and:

I'd say I've displayed impressive neutrality, being far more likely to stay neutral than to go either positive or negative. But when I did go negative, it was much more likely to be against Obama, and when I did go positive, it was more likely to be about McCain.

Does it surprise you then to realize that I'm almost surely going to vote for Obama -- the chances are about 89% -- and that through the entire period of the vow it has been more likely than not that I would vote for Obama? It shouldn't!

I did go on to vote for Obama. I voted for him before I voted against him (in 2012). Or... it's more accurate to say: I voted against McCain before I voted against Obama. I'm just not that enthusiastic about political candidates. We're in the middle of the 4th election I've blogged, and as ever, I'm drawn to the distanced observer position. I'm one of those voters who get categorized as "undecided" right up until the final weeks, annoying the hell out of some people who can't imagine what more needs to happen to make you decide.

But unless you're a donor — and I never am (not since young Russ Feingold personally pestered me by telephone and I was too polite to use another method to make him stop) — you don't have to nail it down until it's time to vote. Normally, what happens to me is that at some point, in spite of myself, I perceive that the selection has taken place, and it's because one of the candidates has lost me. I go back into my archive and study my own mind to see "How Kerry lost me," "How McCain lost me," and "Why haven't I done a 'lost me' post [in 2012]?" It's nice to have an archive of indecision to mine for the decision.

Last night, I walked out of the debate at about exactly halfway. Part of it was that 9 Central Time felt very late. I'd been up since 3:30 a.m. I am able to pinpoint my bailout time because this morning I'm reading my son's live blog of the debate, and I see the time-stamp on what I know propelled me out of the TV room:

9:30 [Eastern Time] — After Bush criticizes Cruz, Wallace finally lets Cruz respond. But Cruz doesn't have a substantive response — instead, he whines about how many of the questions have asked the candidates to attack him. Wallace retorts: "It is a debate, sir!" Cruz coyly threatens to walk off the stage if there are too many negative questions about him — an allusion to Trump's absence. [Added later: After I point out that Cruz was being facetious, Alex Knepper says, "I thought he was being serious! I guess not. Didn't deliver the line very well." My response: "It's safe to say that if as savvy a political observer as you thought he was being serious, his sarcasm wasn't effective enough to work on prime-time TV a few days before Iowa."] [VIDEO.]

I hated the argumentative overtalking. The moderators try to control, and they really have to. That's the idea of a debate, imposing some format. But it's a thing these days to bust through the rules and pose as the tough guy who's just got to get the truth out. It's irritating as hell. Either submit to the rules or don't. In that context, a joke about rejecting the debate (like Trump) doesn't work. Cruz wouldn't actually walk away, so the rules applied to him. Trump showed how to say I'm not going to submit to the control of these media moderators. Out or in.

But I stayed in. In my chair, watching the debate, for a few more questions, until the immigration part of the show began:

9:59 — Megyn Kelly plays a long clip show of Rubio in about 2009 talking about how phrases like a "path to citizenship" are "code" for "amnesty." Then Kelly suggests he then supported amnesty once he later became a Senator....

Yeah, I know this problem, and I know Rubio will need to twist and contort to answer, but I don't need to see exactly how. Not after I've been up for 18+ hours. It will all be there on the DVR in the morning. I was out. 9 Central. I called it a day.

I woke up clear headed. I really don't like any of the candidates too much, and I also don't hate any of them. I don't like the expressions of hate toward anyone. I have a certain longstanding aversion to Hillary, but I'm also able to accept that she's the most likely next President, and I'm a solid citizen of the Real World. In my youth, I suffered through LBJ and Nixon. It felt like a horror show. I'm old now, and nobody on the current scene is reprehensible in the LBJ/Nixon fashion. Maybe that's the perspective of long experience, but I just don't feel the emotion.

I'm balanced and distanced. I'm interested in observing the day-to-day details and writing about it with whatever edge and humor and insight happens. I'm not lying. I cannot tell you who I'll vote for. We'll see how things look next fall. I don't even know who'll I'll vote for in the primary... or which party's primary I'll vote in. There isn't one candidate I've x'ed out. Not Cruz? Not Trump? Not Bernie? No!

Going back to old "cruel neutrality" posts, I was struck by one commenter's "armchair analysis... of the character AA plays on her blog" — back in September 2008. Blake said:

I think MM is close to right [that Althouse is a Democrat and wants the Democratic Party to succeed], but I don't think that, even as a Democrat, AA identifies all that strongly with her party.

We can see that with her frequent mention of the sacrifice of feminism at the, uh, hands of Bill Clinton.

I think we see there that her identification as a feminist (as she defines it) is far stronger than party affiliation. Minimally, we see a level of integrity and respect for logic that prevents her from lauding Democrats when they do the things they've attacked Republicans for.

Still, she believes in things she associates with the Democrats like social justice (witness the fracas with the Libertarians [link]). She believes, perhaps hesitantly, that race has a non-zero weight in making her decision.

And we might guess that there's a certain, almost sarcastic identification with the person of her youth, that hippie art student who wouldn't bother with A Man For All Seasons or listen to square music, man. This character is obviously a Democrat, even if her future incarnation is surely too sophisticated to boil down politics into "Democrat Good. Republican Evil."

In that context, "cruel neutrality" wasn't ever about being 50-50, something the more strident here have missed. It simply meant that this character was going to go about her business as she always has, and not close her mind to the possibility of voting one way or the other.

Democrat has always been her starting point; but just as Kerry proved unworthy of her 2004 vote, Obama could prove unworthy of her 2008 vote.

The cruelty part comes in playing Devil's Advocate with her own comfort zone. As MM says, she's inclined to vote for Obama, but she won't give him a free pass. She's not the hippie true-believer any more.

This drives the hyper-partisans nuts, of course, since they need every observation to be balanced by a tu quoque.

As for the performance art/traffic angle, my take is slightly different:

If any of you are familiar with Loudon Wainwright III, you know that he writes all these songs about, essentially, himself. Ultimately, however, and by his own confession, the self that sings about isn't really him, but a more dramatic and interesting version of him.

That's sort-of how I see Althouse. There's certainly a motivation to drive traffic, but only within the parameters of what amuses the real Althouse.

5 cents please.

Ha ha. I'll leave it to you to think about how much of that really feels true to me now... other than to say the phrase that jumped out was "there's a certain, almost sarcastic identification with the person of her youth, that hippie art student...." And I haven't followed Loudon Wainwright III since those days, when — some of you will know what I'm talking about — I went to see him at The Ark.

"Some liberal writer at the Huffington Post was excited to find out that I’ve been talking to Wisconsinites about how enthusiastically the entertainment media spread a 'business is bad' message."

Writes Senator Ron Johnson.

[The Huffington Post writer, Ryan Grim] seems to get hung up on the way I mentioned “The Lego Movie,” a children’s movie “in which the bad guy is a heartless businessman intent on destroying the world for profit. ‘That's done for a reason,’ Johnson said. ‘They're starting that propaganda, and it's insidious.’”...

[Grim] can’t seem to figure out why I or anyone else would say this about “The Lego Movie,” and he insinuates some kind of conspiracy. Actually, it’s pretty simple: I read a great piece in the Wall Street Journal in which an entrepreneur pointed out that the plot revolved around “the evil exploits of its villain, President Business.”..

The strange thing isn’t that a kids’ movie was anti-business, it is that someone claiming to be a journalist never encountered the idea before.

I got to that via a Capital Times ("Your progressive voice") article titled "Russ Feingold vs. Ron Johnson, Round One: Everything is not awesome."

"Russ Feingold is traveling to all 72 of Wisconsin counties so he can listen to and act on the concerns of working families from all corners of the state," said campaign manager Tom Russell in an email. "That’s what Wisconsin families expect from their senator. If Ron Johnson and his rich special interest buddies want to waste their millions complaining about 'The Lego Movie' and buying weird, angry billboards, they are welcome to keep doing it."

The Lego jab is a reference to comments Johnson made last week to WisPolitics.com after addressing the Milwaukee Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

The supposedly weird billboard — put up in Milwaukee by the National Republican Senatorial Committee — says "Welcome back to Wisconsin, Russ/It's been a while" and shows Feingold with a map of California and some palm trees.

"The one other Wisconsin politician with numbers like Feingold’s in recent years was former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson at the outset of his own 2012 Senate race."

"Like Feingold, Thompson had been out of partisan politics for several years, making him a less polarizing figure. Like Feingold, he scored well with independents and did unusually well with voters in the opposing party."

But in Thompson’s case, his popularity and crossover appeal didn’t survive the polarizing brawl of the 2012 election, which he lost to Baldwin.

“Thompson started at plus 18,” says [Marquette pollster Charles] Franklin, referring to the difference between his positive and negative rating. “But he finished at minus 14. It’s a powerful example of how a campaign can change a politician’s image with the voters in the state.”

"It's awfully unusual to see how dependent Democrats are in relying on former losing candidates as their standard-bearers in 2016."

"Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, Pennsylvania's Joe Sestak, Indiana's Baron Hill, and Ohio's Ted Strickland all ran underwhelming campaigns in losing office in 2010—and are looking to return to politics six years later. Party officials are courting former Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina to make a comeback bid, despite mediocre favorability ratings and the fact that she lost a race just months ago that most had expected her to win. All told, more than half of the Democrats' Senate challengers in 2016 are comeback candidates.... [T]he reliance on former failures is a direct result of the party having no one else to turn to.... Without Feingold in Wisconsin, the party's only logical option would be Rep. Ron Kind, who has regularly passed up opportunities for a promotion. Former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett already lost to Gov. Scott Walker twice, and businesswoman Mary Burke disappointed as a first-time gubernatorial candidate last year."

From "Democrats' Vanishing Future/Hillary Clinton is not the only Democratic comeback candidate on the 2016 ticket. Senate Democrats are betting on the past to rebuild their party for the future."

Politicians call each other politicians.

Ron Johnson: "Russ Feingold is a career politician. He's addicted to it. He just can't stand being away from it, and so he's just got to announce."

Russ Feingold: "He's shown time and again that he's just a partisan ideologue who doesn't listen to the concerns of Wisconsinites, only the concerns of corporate special interests and his multimillionaire crowd."

Link.

"I'm Russ Feingold. We need to get started fixing all this."

Russ Feingold wants his Senate seat back from Ron Johnson.

"The top 10 Senate races of 2016, ranked."

By Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post. Wisconsin is #2:

Assuming [former Senator Russ] Feingold runs -- and we assume he does -- Sen. Ron Johnson (R) is in deep trouble. The only two polls conducted in this race show Feingold with leads of nine and 16 points, which is a very tough place for any incumbent to start. Republicans' best hope may be that Feingold ran an atrocious campaign against Johnson -- when the Democrat was the incumbent -- in 2010, and maybe he will do the same again this time. (Previous ranking: 3)

Do you remember what was "atrocious" about Feingold's campaign in 2010? I don't. I had to go back into my archive to see what I noticed at the time. I found this post about an early October debate between Feingold and Johnson, where both candidates were asked how close they were to be the beliefs of the Tea Party: "Watch Russ Feingold confidently assert that he represents Tea Party values."

Going back into September, I see that Feingold decided to distance himself from the Democrats. He had an ad that showed him eating alone because he had no friends in Washington. And when President Obama came to Madison to do a huge rally, it was questionable whether Feingold would even show up:

The media had predicted Feingold wouldn’t show up at the event, suggesting he didn’t want to be tied to the increasingly unpopular Obama. You wouldn’t know it from his passionate speech. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. President,” he booms, “you are my friend!”

 Atrocious?

NYT: "Scott Walker’s Electoral Record Is Less Impressive Than It Looks."

The headline for this Nate Cohn column at the NYT intriguingly assumes we're already seeing something about Scott Walker, but I think the basis for the debunking is that Walker himself keeps pointing out that a blue state, Wisconsin, has elected him governor 3 times in 4 years.

Cohn has a chart comparing Walker to other candidates for governor in 2010 and 2014, the years of Walker's regular elections. (Walker also had to win in June 2012, midway through his first term, because there was a recall election.)

In neighboring and politically similar Iowa, the Republican Terry Branstad won election and re-election by a far wider margin than Mr. Walker.

To the east, in neighboring Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder won by a similar margin in a more Democratic state, even though he also picked a fight with labor.

To the south, a Republican candidate for governor won the dark-blue state of Illinois.

Farther away, Republicans won Ohio by a huge margin and carried states more Democratic than Wisconsin, like New Mexico, Maryland, Maine and Massachusetts.

That is, it might not be anything so special about Walker. People in blue states might just have been hankering for Republican governance in 2010 and 2014.

Cohn branches out to senatorial preferences:

There’s even a case that Mr. Walker didn’t have the best Republican performance in Wisconsin. Ron Johnson, a self-funded political novice, managed to defeat an incumbent, Russ Feingold, by a five-point margin in 2010. Despite that showing, some analysts believe Mr. Johnson is the single most vulnerable senator of the 2016 cycle.

That is, people were really leaning Republican in 2010, and you can't predict that 2016 will be another election year like that. What was going on with that 2010 senatorial election in Wisconsin? Why did Ron Johnson have "the best Republican performance in Wisconsin"? I think that was "a vote against what the Democrats have done with Congress," which is what I said on Election Day 2010. I guess in 2016, Feingold will have a "miss me yet?" argument against what the Republicans have done with Congress. But 2016, unlike 2010, is a presidential election, and our fixation on the presidency will keep us from thinking too much about Congress.

Which brings us back to Cohn. He observes that all 3 of Walker's victories came in non-presidential years, where Republicans get the advantage of lower turnout from the younger people who tend more toward Democrats. That is, Wisconsin is and remains a blue state, where Walker should lose, but elections are skewed in the off years.

"The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice."

"Unannounced changes have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law," writes Adam Liptak in the NYT.

[A]side from announcing the abstract proposition that revisions are possible, the court almost never notes when a change has been made, much less specifies what it was. And many changes do not seem merely typographical or formal.

Four legal publishers are granted access to “change pages” that show all revisions. Those documents are not made public, and the court refused to provide copies to The New York Times.

The final and authoritative versions of decisions, some published five years after they were announced, do not, moreover, always fully supplant the original ones. Otherwise reliable Internet resources and even the court’s own website at times still post older versions....

A sentence in a 2003 concurrence from Justice O’Connor in a gay rights decision, Lawrence v. Texas, has been deleted from the official record. She had said Justice Scalia “apparently agrees” that a Texas law making gay sex a crime could not be reconciled with the court’s equal protection principles.

Lower court judges debated the statement, and law professors used it in teaching the case. The statement continues to appear in Internet archives like Findlaw and Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.

This prominent article should force the Supreme Court to make these "change pages" publicly available. To privilege a few commercial publishers is especially shameful.

It's interesting that the Court feels free to change opinions in significant ways. Perhaps those of us who comment on new cases should focus quite intensely on getting particular sentences or arguments rewritten. We should regard the new cases as a proposed draft and keep litigating. As Russ Feingold once said: "This game's not over until we win."

IN THE COMMENTS: KLDAVIS said:

You don't need access to the change pages, just a copy of Adobe Acrobat.
1) Open slip opinion PDF.
2) Open final opinion PDF.
3) Run the file compare tool.
4) Obtain report of character for character differences between the two files.

So places like Findlaw and Legal Information Institute should be doing this routinely. Maybe someone could do a blog that calls attention to interesting things like this. I suspect most of it is really boring.

"Did Russ Feingold Just End a War?"

Headline at Politco. Excerpt:

Still, as Feingold stumbled his way through the muddy, steep terrain, the [Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park] apparently reminded him of the Midwest, and he later mused about the bright tourist prospects for Congo should the country become more stable. Wildlife could be brought back. “We did that in Wisconsin,” he pointed out. “There had been elks, and one state senator said, ‘Let’s reintroduce elks.’ So they did, and now they’re all over the place.”

A slice of Wisconsin politics.

I framed this screenshot from the lead article at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel webpage:



Meade sent me that link and highlighted the quote: "A few dozen protesters gathered in the rotunda, and their shouts were at times barely audible inside the Assembly chamber during the address."

Wistful echoes of 2 years ago, when thousands of protesters jammed the Capitol and banged drums and chanted for weeks on end.

Meanwhile, in the sidebar over there:

Feingold calls for legislation to rid election campaigns of corruption

And I call for peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

That second sidebar link — "Man arrested at Capitol had earlier run-in with police" — refers to something that is also in the Scott Walker article: "In one surprise at the Capitol Tuesday, police arrested a 20-year-old Milwaukee man for entering the building with what he claimed were Molotov cocktails in his backpack.... So far, however, no evidence has turned up that Smith knew about Walker's speech or was targeting it specifically."

Random Molotov-cockery, not necessarily Scott-Walker-related.