Me? I don’t cry right away. It takes me a couple days. Like today. Wednesday was just surreal, emotionless, flat, shadowless. It was literally like the world had no shadows or shape. It was two dimensional, like the media I was immersed in.

I read this on Democratic Underground:

I’ll bet Walker actually lost yesterday, but the Democrats were too clueless to catch him stuffing ballot boxes. At least some Wisconsin counties vote on DeBold machines. It would be no trick at all to invent 50,000 votes spread through fifteen friendly counties, and steal the election.

What I thought was odd was the day of the election, TV clips showed “PerpWalker” voting, seeming unusually unconfident, stating he was “cautiously optimistic.” This was not his normal, cocky, confident self. It appeared there was something going on beneath the surface. There are only two explanations I can come up with:

1) He really was being cautious about his confidence. He understood the great grassroots groundswell against him, of the roughly one million people who signed the petition for his recall. He really was afraid of being recalled, and being “cautiously optimistic” was a way of him not getting his hopes too high. He could have been authentically scared, and even though Koch & Co. had it all planned out, they let him believe it was going to be very, very close.

2) It was all an act. He knew the fix was in, the paper trail-less touch-screen Diebold machines hacked in his favor. (I’d like to see a breakdown of which counties used the above mentioned voting method and which used the optical scanners which leave a paper trail. My county, Dane, uses the latter, and it was deep, deep blue.) In this scenario, Koch & Pals let him in on it, and Koached him to act straight-faced for the obligatory “candidate goes to the polls” media shot.

This is why I suspect the person who wrote the snippet from the Democratic Underground post may be right. Tea Party Repubs did not want a repeat of the Kloppenburg/Prosser fiasco “oh look, Kathy Nichlaus just found 14,000 ballots!” of last year. They wanted a fast, decisive win that didn’t look suspicious. Instead, they rigged it so it was so decisive it could only have been faked. Not even Republican voters believed it would be that much of a margin. After all, exit polling showed Obama leading Romney 51 to 44, a difference of 13 points. That’s just too much of a disconnect to jive with Walker’s 6 point win over Barrett.

One thing that really pisses me off is not enough was brought up before the recall by either Barrett, the TV Media, or even the Twitterverse about the Deer Czar. This totally screws Wisconsin hunters who currently pay $24 a year license to hunt. Under this regime, that would be raised to $750-$1000 or more. This will directly affect many Wisconsinites, probably a majority of whom voted for Walker. Did they even realize this is happening?

I’m not a hunter, but when the choice is keeping a $24/a year Wisconsin tradition alive, thinning the deer herd to prevent them from painful starvation and car collisions vs. hunting them behind fences on private land at prices reserved only for the wealthy, the choice is pretty simple.

To paraphrase the old statement:

First they came for the Unions,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t in a union.

Then they came for Badger Care,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t on Badger Care.

Then they came for the Equal Pay Law,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Woman.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.