Steven Taylor, one of the few self-identified “conservative” bloggers I actually respect — well, OK, the only one I respect — asks of the Ryan budget plan — WTF does the GOP intend to do with it? Are they actually thinking of trying to pass it? Are they crazy?

Remember: we know that some attendees of Tea Party rallies have brandished signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.* Further, many Republicans ran for office in 2010 by campaigning on the notion that the PPACA was damaging to Medicare (for example: Coates Ad: Obama Forcing Seniors into “Government Run Healthcare” and Blunt Ad Complains of Cutting Medicare…to Support “Government-Run Health Care”).

Remember also (and more importantly): the public overwhelmingly opposes Medicare cuts: “76% of respondents oppose cutting Medicare (30% find it “unacceptable” and 46% find it “totally unacceptable”)” (see link for details on the given poll—which replicates a consistent result in poll after poll on this topic).

So again: will the GOP actually go to the mattresses for this plan?

Let me give you my utterly unsupported guess as to what’s going on with Ryan and his budget — Ryan’s plan actually has been rattling around for several months, under the title “Roadmap for America’s Future.” And it got mentioned a lot in GOP talking points, although until recently you had to wade into the fine print on your own initiative to understand what the plan actually provides.

My impression all along has been that the GOP kept bringing it up not because they were all in love with Ryan’s ideas — although destroying Medicare is always a plus for them — but because it was the closest thing the GOP had to a concrete deficit-reduction proposal. So, for most of them, it was a prop. It was a stack of paper they could wave around and claim to be a plan that would solve everyone’s problems while they carped ceaselessly on whatever it was President Obama was doing.

Ryan himself — possibly not the sharpest pencil in the box — may not have understood it was the appearance of a plan, not the plan itself, that had value to the GOP. So a couple of weeks ago, from his position as chair of the House Budget Committee, he submitted the thing as a serious proposal.

Given Ryan’s timing, he might have thought that popular support in Washington for his ideas would cause Congress to drop other budget bills in progress and adopt his budget instead. And given the pundit-world swoon that followed, one suspects that the Puppet Masters were behind the release of the budget and had put out a general order to the puppets to start swooning.

One thing to keep in mind about the Puppet Masters is that most of them became rich and powerful because they inherited more money than God. And while they may possess a large degree of shrewdness, it’s a myopic kind of shrewdness. I suspect their “smarts” have serious limits. They may have imagined they could use their influence to get some version of the Ryan budget passed into law. And it may have just dawned on them over the past couple of days that they made a huge miscalculation. This would account for the over-the-top hysteria in right-wing media — if Daddy ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

President Obama’s decision to stay behind the scenes until Ryan threw his pitch may turn out to be one of the smartest moves he ever made. If the Dems play this right — please — the Ryan budget could become the Mother of All Wedge Issues and an albatross to hang around the neck of every Republican running in 2012.

See also: Paul Krugman, “Who’s Serious Now?”

Update: What makes anyone think the President didn’t know full well the microphone was on? This is exactly the kind of thing the President needs to be saying to everyone, loudly and often.

Update: Ryan and his fellow travelers think the President was being mean to them in his speech last week.

They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.

“What came to my mind was: Why did he invite us?” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just a wasted opportunity.”

The situation was all the more perplexing because Obama has to work with these guys: Camp is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, responsible for trade, taxes and urgent legislation to raise the legal limit on government borrowing. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) chairs the House Republican Conference. And Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is House Budget Committee chairman and the author of the spending blueprint Obama lacerated as “deeply pessimistic” during his 44-minute address.

Unbelievable. I’m starting to think Ryan really is a clueless wonder. See also Matt Yglesias.

Wow, Republicans must be really worried that the Ryan budget essentially handed President Obama a huge campaign weapon to use against them. Their reaction to the President’s budget speech is utterly off the wall. A sampling: the Wall Street Journal called the speech “toxic” and “divisive”; Charles Krauthammer called it “a disgrace“; Karl Rove described “President Obama’s wild rhetorical gyrations” and then predicted the budget debate will help Republicans, which is Rovian for “OMG we’ve got to bury this in mud before anybody sees it.”

There’s enough hysteria and hyperbole coming out of the Wall Street Journal alone to re-float the Titanic. What’s coming from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh could keep the space shuttle program going ten more years and possibly fuel a manned Mars landing. This is terror, people. The Powers That Be on the Right must have suddenly realized they really did overplay their hand and possibly gave away the 2012 election.

David Frum, while still insanely advocating lower tax rates for everybody, acknowledges that the Ryan proposals are probably unsalable to the public and were a huge gift to President Obama.

“Whatever you do, don’t serve to his backhand.”

“Don’t be nervous. I have the new Ryan serve. It’s bold!”

“Trust me on this. Don’t serve to his backhand.”

Thomp. Wham.

And on top of everything else, the CBO says the recent budget deal only cuts this year’s deficit by $352 million, not $38 billion. To clarify, the deal does cut billions from the budget deficit, but much of the cuts won’t be apparent this year. For example, money appropriated for water-and-sewer grants probably wouldn’t have been spent this year anyway, so cutting it from the budget won’t make a difference this year. (See Steve M and Zandar.)

Now the baggers are screaming hysterically that Republicans had better not approve that budget. However, I’m betting the baggers will be ignored, because the GOP will want to change the subject from budgets. Watch them go all out against some liberal interest group next week as a distraction.

Update: Nice analysis of the President’s speech.

I’m glad to say the budget speech met my criteria from the last post. Here’s a transcript if you missed it. I like that he called out the Ryan plan –

Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

The fact is, their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. As Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. And this is not a vision of the America I know.

I especially liked this part –

In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again.

“I refuse to renew them again” — I hope he realizes he’s going to be held to that.

Paul Krugman said he was mostly pleased with the speech and said he could live with it, although he added –

I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no — better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire.

This is the big joke on all of us — with all of the talk of sacrifice and what not, the truth is that if Congress does absolutely nothing for the next few years, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, this would close the budget gap by 40 percent over the next 20 years. All by itself.

Some of the bashbots are using this to argue that the President shouldn’t address the deficit at all; I think that would be politically stupid. And I don’t think Obama wants to eliminate the tax cuts on the middle class, not only because of politics, but because this is not the time to slow consumer spending.

Krugman also notes that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that the President’s proposal is still too weighted toward budget cuts instead of revenue increases. The President is vague about where some of these cuts will come, but defense is on the table.

There are lots of good comments already, but I was taken with this one by Hendrik Hertzberg. It begins:

One of the mysteries of the Obama Presidency has been Obama’s inability—or disinclination, I’m not sure which—to give sustained emotional sustenance to a certain slice of his supporters. I don’t mean the “Democratic base,” especially the institutional “interest group” base. And I don’t mean the disillusioned left, which is easily, almost perpetually disillusioned because it has such an ample supply of illusions. (A lot of lefties, notwithstanding their scorn for “the system,” seem to have an implicit naive faith in the workability of the mechanisms of American governance. Hence their readiness to blame the disappointments of the Administration’s first two years mainly on Obama’s alleged moral or character failings—cowardice, spinelessness, insincerity, duplicity, what have you.) Mainly, I guess, the slice I’m talking about is of people like me: liberals who continue to respect and admire Obama; who fully appreciate the disaster he inherited and the horrendous difficulty of enacting a coherent agenda even when your own party “controls” both Houses of Congress; who think his substantive record is pretty good under the circumstances; who dislike some of the distasteful compromises he has made but aren’t sure we wouldn’t have done the same in his shoes (etc.—you get the idea); but who are puzzled that our eloquent, writerly President seems to have done so little to educate the public about his own vision and to contrast it with that of the Republican right—which is to say, the Republicans.

I’m keeping that bit in parentheses about the illusions of liberals and repeating it for all the Obamabashbots. But I agree with the part about not educating the public. I think that may be the President’s biggest failing.

Hertzberg gave the speech high marks, even comparing it to FDR’s fireside chats. Clive Crooks, on the other hand, found the speech “a waste of breath.” But Crooks seems to take the Catfood Commission seriously, so … so much for Crooks. His opinion is a waste of keyboarding.

I also agree with Steve M. that Glenn Greenwald is, um, confused. I’m sorry, but I’ve had it up to here with the hysteria that Obama is actually succeeding by losing to the Right deliberately, because it was the plan all along. See Hendrik Hertzberg above.

See also Ezra Klein.

There are all kinds of rumors flying around about what the President will say in his budget speech tonight. Naturally, he is already being criticized for what people assume he will say even before he has said it.

That said, I think there are three points he must make –

• Social Security is not adding anything to the budget deficit, and cutting Social Security won’t reduce the budget deficit.
• He’s sticking to the plans for Medicare already written into the Affordable Care Act.
• It’s insane to think we can reduce the budget deficit without also raising revenue. The Bush tax cuts on the wealthy must end.

Beyond that, I agree with Joan Walsh –

In the long term, however, as I’ve argued before, Obama has failed to project and execute a vision of Democratic Party policy and values that’s as bold as the challenges the nation faces, marked by Gilded Age levels of economic inequality, as well as economic suffering surpassed only by the Great Depression. Both those periods gave us “big bangs” of social change, in the words of Jacob Hacker; this era has not. So far it produced a healthcare reform plan that’s laudable for putting a stake in the ground toward universal coverage, but whose compromises with the GOP and the insurance industry could ultimately unravel it. Now people are worried that Obama will compromise on two signature programs of great Democratic presidents: Social Security under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Medicare under Lyndon Baines Johnson. I hope he doesn’t do that Wednesday, and I also hope he lays out some broad vision of social justice that begins to reverse the trends of the last 30 years. (Leaking that he’ll be calling for tax hikes on the rich is a little bit encouraging.) He could provide new reasons for people to support the Democratic Party: a progressive vision of fairness and equity that’s up to the challenge of the times.

On the other hand, a lackluster speech that is mostly about reasonable compromise may give him positive overnight poll numbers but no long-lasting support. So let’s see what he goes for.

Please read this post by the BooMan. It explains a lot of what I’ve been saying for a long time. And it takes us back to the futility of perpetually bashing Barack Obama for not breaking out of old the status quo.

We’ve got a status quo that even a president can’t break out of, folks. It’s bigger than him. We could bring back FDR himself, and in the current political climate, he’d be just as hogtied.

I’m not saying that President Obama is above criticism; not at all. I’m saying that we’re never going to get the president we want in the current political climate. Even a candidate blazing with the most fiery passions of populist economic progressivism and liberal values would be reduced to cutting draconian deals over abortion and tax cuts even to implement a few mildly progressive tweaks.

So, perpetually screaming that Obama has sold us all out or is no better than Bush is pointless and infantile. Grow up and face reality. It’s the system, stupid.

The BooMan writes,

The truth is that our government is set up to frustrate change. Our election laws and our media landscape create a lopsided political playing-field where those who already have huge amounts of money can pretty much guarantee that they continue to get more of it and everyone else gets less. We can make arguments. We can try to move the Overton Window, but what is actually achievable in Washington DC is extremely limited. There really isn’t much sense in making a lot of promises that we can’t keep. The only times the Democrats have been able to make breakthroughs have been brief interludes when we had enormous majorities. Right now, we have a small majority in the Senate and we don’t control the House. Basically, in this situation, almost nothing can be accomplished, and even less can be accomplished on our terms. This is the context within which the president must perform. …

… I stopped being very idealistic when I finally got around to making myself understand our system of government. I don’t get disappointed by a whole lot because my expectations are so low. I see a real threat out there. I see a threat to our way of life and to all humanity, and it stares me in the face every single day. That threat isn’t coming from Barack Obama or the Democratic Party. It’s coming from the other side of the aisle. And insofar as the Democrats are failing to meet the challenge (and they are failing) the real culprit is deep and structural and ingrained in our system and in our laws.

You may have noticed that the right is engaged in this fight on a structural level. They go after the people who register voters. They pass laws making it harder to vote. They attack the unions. They attack MoveOn.org. They go after anyone in the media, be it Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, Phil Donahue, or Dan Rather who expresses any skepticism about the right. They built their own cable news station and took over the radio spectrum. They make it so corporations can give unlimited money anonymously. They are coming after us with real aggression, trying to make it impossible for even middle-of-the-road Bill Clinton-style Democrats to get elected in this country. If we want to defend ourselves and ever see real progressive change in this country, we have to fight on this structural stuff. In the meantime, we’re playing defense. And we can’t do much more than that.

So, I’m obviously troubled and concerned about our country and the future, but I am pretty clear-sighted about what our limitations are and why we have to settle for so little. Our problems are not one man’s fault. One man cannot fix them. But we also need to remember that we have one man standing between where we are now and an immeasurably worse situation. I think about that every day, too.

I will say it plain — any liberal seriously thinking about backing a primary challenge to Obama or a third party challenge to Democrats in in 2012 needs to haul his head out of his ass, and fast. If the goal is to make progressive change possible in the U.S., we need new grand strategy that involves attacking the systemic barriers to change.

Elections are important, too. But electing progressive candidates and sending them to Washington, and expecting them to change the system for us, is a little like hiring one knight after another to slay a knight-eating dragon. The result is a well-fed dragon. What else were you expecting?
‘
I know some of you will start screaming about how we still need to throw all the bums out and send a whole new crew to Washington. OK, go ahead and send a new crew to Washington, and watch them all turn into dragon chow. And if we could magically create a brand new progressive third party to replace the Democrats, in a matter of months they would be indistinguishable from Democrats. Dragon Chow.

The question is, how to we break down the system? It has to happen from both the inside and outside, I think. Change from the inside means continuing to support the more progressive Democrats. But change from the outside requires popular support. Instead of complaining about Obama’s pandering to the mushy middle, we need to work on the mushy middle.

For example, Steve Benen writes that Paul Ryan’s constituents in Wisconsin are not happy with his plans for changing Medicare. However,

As Greg Sargent explained, “These folks are worried about doing away with Medicare as we know it, but they are grappling with whether or not this will be necessary to put the nation on firmer fiscal footing.”

Right. Reading the piece, it seems these folks want to do the right thing. They’re uncomfortable with an extreme overhaul of Medicare, but they’re willing to listen to what’s “absolutely necessary.”

But the point is, the privatization of Medicare isn’t “necessary” at all. It won’t even lower health care costs. Paul Ryan’s plan is ostensibly about debt reduction, but even that’s a charade — he’s going after entitlements and other domestic priorities while slashing tax rates for the rich.

I doubt very many of Ryan’s constituents are hearing the facts about the Ryan plan. How do we reach them? Some progressives always argue that “average” voters are idiots and we can’t expect them to know what they’re voting on. But if that’s true, why are we even trying to preserve a representative republic? The basis of the system we say we are trying to preserve is based on the notion that We, the People, are in this together and making decisions collectively.

In the U.S. there always seems to be an Idiot Block that amounts to one-fourth to one-third of voters. But that leaves us with a lot of voters who don’t focus on politics much but who could be educated if we could reach them. So how do we reach them? And what else can we do to break the system? That’s the discussion we ought to be having on the blogosphere, not whether Obama should be “primaried.”

Update: This is what we need to build on.

My web hosting service tells me it will shut down for maintenance for about four hours overnight, so if you can’t read this, that’s why.

Carry on.

At the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus writes about the Paul Ryan budget proposal and states what ought to be obvious:

[Ryan] has made it clear that if you’re serious about cutting the federal deficit, you have to make a choice: low taxes or guaranteed Medicare coverage. You can’t have both.

That may come as unwelcome news to millions of Republican voters, including “tea party” adherents who helped Ryan’s GOP win its majority in the House. Polls have shown that most tea party folks are just like everyone else: They want lower taxes and they want to keep their benefits.

McManus assumes that the Ryan plan really would shrink the deficit. I suppose it might, in the same way that I could save myself lots of work time by simply not working. But the CBO analysis shows that the Ryan proposal actually would increase the debt. The only result the Ryan plan is bound to achieve is a significant erosion in the quality of life for all but the wealthiest Americans.

I want Republicans to be called the “free lunch and a pony” party, because they have persuaded so many Americans they can have as much government as they need without paying for it.

But if they want Medicare, free powerchairs and all, they have to pay for it. If they want air travel to be as safe as possible, they have to pay for FTA regulations and inspections. If they want national parks, disease and epidemic control, and bridges that don’t collapse while you’re driving on them, they have to pay for these things. This should not be that difficult to understand.

McManus also makes a good point when he writes that Ryan’s plan for privatizing Medicare amounts to “Obamacare for the old.” Like the much-derided “Obamacare,” Ryan’s idea amounts to government assistance for buying private insurance. What, no free market solution?

Meanwhile, President Obama — who can be rightly criticized for staying out of the budget fight for too long — is going to present his own proposal that includes tax increases on the wealthy. We’ll see.

See also: “Conservative Economists Criticize ‘Off-the-Deep-End’ Republican Budget”

Angry Black Lady speaks for me.

You see, on Wednesday I wrote a rant about the looming irrelevancy of the Professional Left aka firebaggers aka Obamabashbots. It was one in a series of screeds I have written about the destructive tactics of these self-appointed leaders of the left and their firebagger minions. It was also part of a collection of screeds written by liberals of all colors, each of whom views the attack dog tactics of the Professional Left (and the resulting rancor among the Professional Left Commentariat) as damaging to not only the President, but also the country. …

… Due to the growing sense that places like FireDogLake, Salon, and Daily Kos seemed more invested in endlessly criticizing the president than promoting a useful discussion about the ways in which liberals could advance their policy goals, people who were tired of surrounding themselves with nothing but negative commentary decided to branch off and form their own blogs. In these smaller communities, it is not considered a character flaw to express one’s support for the president. In these smaller communities, one does not have to qualify every expression of support for the president with “but I don’t agree with everything that he does.”

It is in these smaller communities that those of us who know how to walk and chew gum at the same time are able to support the president generally, while not supporting each of his policies specifically. It is in these smaller communities that people who, ironically, refuse to see everything in “black and white” are comfortable with infinite shades of gray.

Perhaps it is because of the smaller communities that have been formed over the last year that minorities who typically are ignored until we become convenient for political strategy have found our voice.

To be honest, I no longer feel connected to the Left Blogosphere community. Some of the rifts date back to the 2008 Dem primaries, when the “smart” people decided that only Hillary Clinton had a chance of winning the general election, and that those of us who preferred Barack Obama were “naive.” Or “emotional.” Or some such. This may provide a clue why so many of the same “smart” people morphed into Obamabashbots (love that).

These days, on some of the “big” sites, one may not say anything even mildly supportive of President Obama without being derided as an “Obamabot.” We may differ on which side the “bots” are on, however.

Angry Black Lady goes on to talk about the way some of the self-appointed spokespeople of the Left Blogosphere dismiss the concerns and opinions of us lesser folk who don’t get the ad revenue they do. I still haven’t gotten over the way financially comfortable Jane Hamsher, who has survived breast cancer because she had access to state of the art medical care, was so eager to kill the Affordable Care Act because it fell short of the ideal. If that Act hadn’t passed as it was, it’s insane to assume that Congress would have cranked out more progressive legislation before the new Congress took over. Killing the bill would have amounted to depriving millions of people of any hope of access to health care, possibly for many years.

When you’re the one who’s drowning, you really don’t appreciate the lifeguards wandering off to look for a better lifebuoy than the one they have at hand.

When I went to bed last night the shutdown was still looming. I can’t think of when I’ve seen the word “loom” used in so many headlines at once, in fact. So today I see there is a deal. So who blinked?

The short answer is “everyone,” since Dems already had given away a lot more than they should have. But I see this morning that the loony wing of the loony party is angry about the deal and threatening to vote against it, which is a relief. If the baggers don’t like the final bill, it can’t be a total disaster.

Funding for Planned Parenthood is preserved, and they’re angry, because punishing Planned Parenthood for performing abortions is more important to them than running the federal government. NPR and PBS were spared. I see also that the incredibly childish rider that would have blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from actually protecting the environment is out. The Dems have agreed to funding a study that would look at the economic impact of environmental regulations. I hope this study also looks at the economic impact of no environmental regulations, which I suspect would be much higher, long term.

NPR reports that the President has been more involved in the budget process than he appeared to be.

In public, Obama tried to keep it at arm’s length.

“I shouldn’t have to oversee a process in which Congress deals with last year’s budget,” Obama said as the time got short this week.

But in fact he was involved up to his neck.

It was Obama’s veto threat that made clear he would not accept the scope of spending cuts Republicans wanted. It was Obama who said he would accept no more short-term bills to keep the government afloat for a couple weeks at a time unless there was a broader deal in hand. And it was Obama who kept saying it was time for leaders to act like grown-ups.

The White House said his strategy was to stay behind the scenes, work the phones and let his senior aides do the negotiating. That hard-to-see engagement provided a huge opening for Republicans to question his leadership. And it led to rumblings from frustrated lawmakers in his own Democratic Party who wanted Obama to openly attack the cuts Republicans wanted.

I don’t think this is the smartest strategy politically, since it plays into the perception that the President is not really in charge of anything. But that’s what they’re doing.

John Nichols has a must-read column on the bare-assed attempt to steal the election vote discrepancies in Wisconsin. After pointing out the obvious — that if the clerk had been a Democrat and the “found” votes had favored a liberal candidate, we’d be hearing a different tune from a lot of people — he writes,

The Kloppenburg campaign has demanded “a full explanation of how and why these 14,315 votes from an entire City were missed.” As part of the search for that explanation, the campaign plans to file open records requests for all relevant documentation related to the reporting of election results in Waukesha County, as well as to the discovery and reporting of the errors announced by the County.”

The open records highlight concerns about the credibility of Nickolaus — whose secretive and suspicious activities led the Waukesha County Board’s executive committee order an audit of the clerk’s use of election equipment and her controversial approaches to counting and tabulating votes. …

… The circumstance lends legitimacy to the call by the advocacy group Citizens Action of Wisconsin for “an immediate federal investigation and immediate impoundment of all computer equipment, ballots, and other relevant evidence needed to verify a fair vote count in Waukesha County.“ Citizen Action says this investigation should include an accounting of all communications by “Kathy Nickolaus and anyone in the Waukesha clerk’s office with all outside actors, and all interested parties to the election dispute.”

It also demands a full recount, no matter what the ultimate margin of victory or defeat. Whether David Prosser or JoAnne Kloppenburg is elected, the only way that the high court will retain even a shred of credibility is if every ballot is recounted, every tabulation is reviewed and every citizen is certain that this election was legitimate.

What’s likely to happen is that Scott Walker will have the votes “investigated” by county officials that he controls. A federal investigation is warranted.

The claim is that Nickolaus failed to report 14,000 votes from Brookfield City. But in one of the posts I linked to yesterday, it was documented that on election night there were reports that Brookfield City had given Prosser 11,000 votes. Nickolaus appears to be trying to count some of the same votes twice.

Nichols added this detail –

Nickolaus claims that it was “human error” that caused her to “lose” the Brookfield results on her personal computer where she had secreted away the data. Yet, she apparently knew of the “mistake” for 29 hours before reporting it and then handed the information off to conservative bloggers and talk-radio personalities.

There is no way a known partisan would have missed those votes. She would have been watching the vote tallies like a hawk. I don’t think there’s any question these “found” votes were fabricated by Nickolaus in an attempt to steal the election.

David Dayan writes at Firedoglake:

As it turns out, this is not the first time something has gone askew in Waukesha County. Check this out from 2006. A primary for an Assembly seat had results shift on her mid-stream in that race, too. And certainly the process in the county, where Kathy Nickolaus keeps all the tallying on her home computer, is a bit unusual. Not to mention the fact that she sat on the revelation of the missing votes in Brookfield for 29 hours before revealing it. Nickolaus, incidentally, worked for the Assembly Republican caucus at a time when David Prosser was the Speaker of the Assembly, i.e. her boss.

The difference between the 2006 incident and today is that Waukesha does not use touch-screen voting systems any longer. There is a paper record of all of these ballots. And so, as a double-check given the highly unusual nature of the glitch, all of those ballots should be impounded and counted.

Who wants to bet that the paper record will be consumed in a fire that will start with an electrical short in Nickolaus’s personal computer?

Update: I’ve been looking for a conservative blogger with enough integrity to admit that the “found” vote episode at least warrants some suspicion. I have not found one. This include Ann Althouse, who earlier this week was pushing every rumor of Democratic voter fraud as hard as she could. But she has expressed no incredulity whatsoever over the circumstances of the “found” votes. Not that Althouse’s utter partisan hypocrisy should surprise anyone.