Joanne Kloppenburg

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus just announced that she forgot to report votes from the City of Brookfield on election night, giving Justice David Prosser an additional 7,381 vote edge, ending any free recount possibilities, and giving Prosser the election.

The scenario, given the cast of characters, requires one to suspend disbelief to accept it as true.

Nickolaus, a highly partisan Republican who formerly worked in the Republican Assembly caucus, has been under fire for insisting on keeping voting records in her own personal computer rather than using a more sophisticated system most of the rest of Wisconsin uses.

Who brings us the news?  Not a legitimate media outlet, but Christian Schneider, an operative of the right-wing Wisconsin Public Research Institute.  The first "breaking ne

The official vote count isn't even in yet and Republican apologists are coming out of the woodwork intimating that Democrats stole the election for JoAnne Kloppenburg. Their arguments are highly specualtive, inaccurate and -- most important -- all tired shibboleths we've heard before, and which have been dragged out before by Wisconsin Republicans insistent about implementing their vote-suppression I.D. measure. Callers to right-wing talk shows make unsupported claims -- for instance, that a box of ballots went missing in one jurisidiction -- and the national blogs dutifully report it as a suspicious reality.

I won't belabor you with further examples, except this one, from the conservative Daily Caller. The entire article is typical of the hand-wringing and sly, perception-influence operation that is already underway:

Couldn't resist using that line from Milwaukee Labor Press Editor Dom Noth, who contrasts the behavior of the two Supreme Court candidates on a long election night, and concludes that the adult is currently 200 votes ahead.

Read it here.

A new commercial by a mysterious group supporting David Prosser is spending more than a million dollars in a week to saturate Wisconsin airwaves with commercials featuring a victim who was sexually abused by a pedophile priest.

 Talk radio's Charlie Sykes thinks it's a game-changer.  But it may be the last nail in the Prosser campaign's coffin.

The commercial features Troy Merryfield, who, with his brother, were victims of Father John Feeney, a Green Bay priest.  The family told Prosser, then the district attorney, but he decided not to prosecute or even report the abuse to police, instead agreeing with the Catholic bishop to have Feeney transferred to another parish -- where he abused other children.

The case is highlighted in a Greater Wisconsin Committee commercial.