A clerk in conservative Waukesha County claims to have discovered more than 7,000 votes for David Prosser, which if true would reverse the recent election results. (Waukesha is one of the three “dark red” counties in the southeast corner of Wisconsin.)

Karoli at Crooks and Liars calls bullshit, saying the “new” numbers were reported before. Chris Bowers reports for Daily Kos that this same clerk has a history of suspicious behavior. See also Andy Kroll at Mother Jones.

Apparently the GOP is trying to preemptively pin shutting down the government on the Democrats. The story is that the Dems are trying to force a shutdown because this would make Republicans look bad.

But the teabaggers did not get the memo. This clip features rallying baggers shouting “shut it down! shut it down!”

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It’s not clear to me that a shutdown would play into Dems’ hands they way it did in the Clinton Administration, but that’s mostly because Big Bill played the GOP like a fiddle, and President Obama just doesn’t have the same skills. Otherwise — historically, most government shutdowns have been brief and/or occurred at a time when the effects were minimal, such as federal holidays. A prolonged shutdown right now possibly would delay tax refund checks, among other things, and I think people would notice.

And even the Dems ought to be able to tie Paul Ryan’s Medicare-killing budget to the GOP and their inability to compromise.

Meanwhile, likely Republican voters think that Donald Trump is presidential material. Seriously. Not only do baggers not have a clue; they’re too dumb to recognize a clue unless it comes in a Parker Brothers board game box.

On to Wisconsin — rightie bloggers already are spreading rumors of voter fraud to explain yesterday’s Wisconsin election results. The weird thing about this claim is that it occurred in a county (Ozaukee) that went overwhelmingly for Prosser. Ozaukee was one of the three strongest pro-Prosser counties in the state, in fact. So if the allegations of ballot shredding are true, why wouldn’t fingers be pointed at Prosser’s people, not Kloppenburg’s?

Oh, right. They’re wingnuts. Never mind.

Finally, Gov. Scott Walker is blaming those alien beings in Madison for his guy’s apparent loss yesterday.

“You’ve got a world driven by Madison, and a world driven by everybody else out across the majority of the rest of the state of Wisconsin,” Walker said at a press conference in the Capitol.

However, a look at actual results by county tell a different tale. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

I’ve been following results in the Wisconsin judge’s race. Every news story says something slightly different, but as of right this minute I understand there is only one precinct left in the state to count. The progressive favorite JoAnne Kloppenburg is ahead by somewhere between 200 and 300 votes. However, the uncounted precint is in a county that went narrowly for the troglodyte favorite, David Prosser. So it’s too close to call, and there will almost certainly be a recount.

[Update: Kloppenburg wins by less than 250 votes; recount is a near certainty.]

Meanwhile — remember yesterday, when all the serious people were talking about how serious the serious Republican budget? Get this –

On Monday and Tuesday, politicians and commentators were practically falling over themselves to praise Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget proposal as “serious” and “courageous”, even in cases where they disagreed with it on policy terms. Whatever you think of his policy positions, the argument went, give the man credit for telling it like it is and grappling with the hard numbers. But after a day or two of looking at the numbers, it turns out a lot of his assumptions and predictions are completely preposterous. Not just in the sense of the normal padding and optimistic assumptions that most budgets include. But really preposterous. Like 2.8% unemployment? Really curious what all the Ryan-o-philes are going to say about these numbers. Check out our report. Really must read.

Republicans proposing a budget –

See also “CBO: GOP Budget Would Increase Debt, Then Stick It To Medicare Patients.”

Update: Glenn goes bye-bye. I’m sure he’ll pop up somewhere else, though. But where? He might do well on the TLC lineup, between “My Strange Addiction” and “Sister Wives.”

Update: See also “Paul Ryan’s Multiple Unicorns“

Beware when wingnuts use the word “serious.” When they say it, it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

For example, a “serious” foreign policy is one that sees war as the principal foreign policy option. A political leader is not “serious” until he threatens to nuke Tehran.

Now we see that “serious” domestic policy means feeding the old and poor to Soylent Green factories so that the rich and the corporations can keep their taxes low.

The Republican’s new budget eliminates the Medicare program. They don’t come out and say it, but that’s what it does. They’re just going to scrap Medicare and replace it with what they’re calling a “premium support plan.” As I understand it (a lot of details aren’t public yet), they will stop reimbursing doctors and hospitals for services and simply subsidize some part of seniors’ insurance, purchased from private health care companies. Basically, they want to privatize Medicare.

Even better, increases in the amounts of the subsidies will be tied to increases in GDP. So if health care costs rise faster than GDP — which has been the case for the past few years — the seniors will make up the difference out of their own pockets..

And since they’re scrapping “Obamacare,” there will be no restrictions on what those private insurance companies can pull on their customers. Grandma needs chemotherapy? Sorry; the CEO wants gilded bathroom fixtures this month. Grandma has to do without.

Paul Krugman says “[S]avings will come entirely from limiting the vouchers to below the rate of rise in health care costs; in effect, they will come from denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums.” Hey, if Grandma had wanted to live longer, she should have eaten more fiber. Back when she still had teeth, of course.

From The Economist:

Mr Ryan’s plan ends the guarantee that all American seniors will have health insurance. The Medicare system we’ve had in place for the past 45 years promises that once you reach 65, you will be covered by a government-financed health-insurance plan. Mr Ryan’s plan promises that once you reach 65, you will receive a voucher for an amount that he thinks ought to be enough for individuals to purchase a private health-insurance plan. … If that voucher isn’t worth enough for some particular senior to buy insurance, and that particular senior isn’t wealthy enough to top off the coverage, or is a bit forgetful and neglects to purchase insurance, there’s no guarantee that that person will be insured. It’s up to you; you carry the risk.

Ezra explains the details better than I can. The budget would also destroy Medicaid by turning it into a block grant program for states, meaning that Haley Barbour could use it to remodel his mansion while the Mississippi infant mortality rate continued to climb.

I’m putting aside the horrific nature of the protests in Afghanistan order to focus on the domestic moral and legal issues the Terry Jones case has dredged up. I’ve already condemned this violence, which doesn’t stop assholes from selectively editing my earlier post to make it seem I did not.

But the question of Jones’s relative guilt or innocence is not as black-and-white as some people make it out to be. It’s true that Jones did not “make” anyone riot and commit murder. And there are no excuses for murders by mob.

But what he did do, as Professor Cole explains, was hand Afghanis who are hostile to foreign troops on their soil an invaluable propaganda tool. “[T]his issue allows some of them to organize to protest the over 100,000 US troops in their country, which is really what they are objecting to,” he explained. And in earlier wars, aiding the enemy’s propaganda efforts really could get you into serious trouble (think Tokyo Rose).

In Schenck v. United States (1919) the Supreme Court held unanimously that people opposed to U.S. involvement in World War I did not have a right to distribute leaflets that advocated draft resistance. For the record, I disagree with this decision, but I’m tossing it out to show a precedent for what Jones did and how it was handled in an earlier time.

In Schenck, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said,

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

As I’ve said before, I think what Jones did is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater. No, he didn’t shout that people should trample each other on the way to the exits, but he had been warned shouting fire could incite people to trample each other on the way to the exits, so to speak, and he shouted anyway.

I understand that the Schenk “clear and present danger” test has been since revised to the “imminent lawless action” test, meaning that government may not censor speech that promotes violence or lawlessness in the abstract, but only if the speech is likely to cause imminent and specific lawlessness.

I think it could be argued that what Jones did was akin to this. Even though he hadn’t explicitly advocate lawlessness and murder, he had been sternly warned before by many people that his Koran burning stunt could have horrific consequences and possibly put troops in danger, and he did it anyway.

Earlier generations took putting troops in danger very seriously. That’s one of the reasons the World War II generation reacted so strongly to anti-war activism during the Vietnam era, btw. They may not have been crazy about the War in Vietnam, but it shocked them to their foundations that people (who included me, btw) were publicly speaking out against an American military action at all. Back in the day, that wouldn’t have happened.

And I’d like to point out that righties born long after the fall of Saigon still hate and condemn Jane Fonda for undermining the war effort back then. But she was within her rights, like it or not.

However — the right to express an opinion without government censorship is nearly absolute in the U.S. Freedom of speech is one of the few values Left and Right appear to agree on; I say “appear to,” because conservatives persist in introducing amendments to the Constitution prohibiting the burning of American flags. But in principle it’s something we agree on.

So what’s to be done with Terry Jones, who has found a way to draw attention to himself by doing something he had been told would have horrific consequences? After all, he only expressed an opinion. He has a right. On the other hand, his speech is detrimental to whatever it is we are trying to accomplish in Afghanistan. He’s undermining a U.S. war effort; even Gen. David Petraeus has said so.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham spoke up and said something to the effect of “freedom of speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Righties in particular reacted harshly to this and are preparing to rally for Jones’s absolute right to free speech. These are some of the same people who are trying to hold Van Jones “accountable” for some opinions he expressed after 9/11, mind you. So let’s not kid ourselves they care about freedom of speech per se.

But again, what’s to be done about Jones? I’m opposed to government censorship. It would be nice if the Right showed some, um, consistency and condemned him as much as they have condemned Jane Fonda. But I’m not holding my breath over that.

What I do long for is for family members of any troops or UN personnel killed in the recent riots to sock Jones with the mother of all wrongful death suits. I don’t know if it would stand up in court, but I’d like to see someone try.

By now you’ve heard that violent mobs in Afghanistan have slaughtered several people in retaliation for the burning of a Q’ran by the not reverent Terry Jones of the hilariously misnamed Dove World Outreach Center in Florida.

How disgusted am I? Let me count the ways …

I can’t think of a proper word for randomly slaughtering westerners because of what some whackjob in Florida did to a book. Evil, unjust, barbaric, inexcusable. If we were talking about some Stone Age tribe living in isolation in the Amazon somewhere I might just chalk it up to ignorance, but nobody else gets off the hook for this. If one is educated enough to know that the earth is not flat, one should be able to understand that not all westerners are to blame for the actions of one.

Of course, our native Islamophobes like Pam Geller and Peter King are no less bigoted. Lizard brains, the lot of them.

And once again demonstrating that he doesn’t know the Sermon on the Mount from the Yellow Pages, the not reverend Jones is demanding retribution for the slaughter that his actions touched off. After all kinds of people begged him to not act out and burn a Q’ran because it would set back whatever it is his country is doing in Afghanistan, this jerk burns a Q’ran anyway. It’s beyond disgusting.

At least one rightie blogger — I’m sure there are more — is saying that Jones is not responsible for the massacre. And I understand the argument; rational people don’t kill other, innocent, people, because they share some kind of loose racial or national association with assholes who did something insulting to one’s religion.

At the same time, however, rational people don’t go ahead and pull some stupid publicity stunt after it’s been exhaustively explained to them that the consequences could be genuinely horrific and harmful to their country.

In other words, if we hadn’t already been through this with Jones, it might have been argued that he didn’t realize what the consequences of his acts might be. But he was told.

In America, Jones’s right to burn any book he wants to burn is pretty much absolute. Even if 99.9 percent of his fellow countrypersons want to smack him for what he did, we can’t do it without getting jail time. This may be incomprehensible to many people living in the Middle East, and they don’t seem to be in a mood to listen to explanations. We can only hope there are some cooler heads among the Afghanis, and that the cooler heads may prevail.

But Jones is likely to continue to burn Q’rans as long as he can get attention for doing so. Perhaps the argument could be made that Jones’s stunt amounts to yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, and he could be placed under some restraining order to burn no more Q’rans. That would likely set off more Q’ran burning by other dimwits in protest of the violation of Jones’s rights, however, so even that could backfire.

Sometimes we really are all at the mercy of the stupid and sociopathic among us.

Anyway — I’m no expert in Islam, but my understanding is that the mob violence in Afghanistan really isn’t justified by anything Muhammad taught. And Jones apparently uses the Gospel as toilet paper. So don’t blame Jesus or Muhammad for this. And in the absence of religion, a true fanatic will always find something else to be fanatic about.

See also: “This attack is different.”