Too many bureaucrats being paid too much – and its not just that they make a lot of money. By simply existing and paying union dues – which go almost entirely to Democrats – we’ve got a massive, well-funded lobby always in favor of more spending and higher taxes.

Cutting back government is vital in all respects – to balance our budget; to pay off our debt; to restore our liberty; to free up our economy. Big Government must go.

From Pundit Press:

…For some reason one of the counties in the state is destroying ballots that ‘were not counted’ yesterday. Apparently this is a very bizarre and egregious move.

There is now a call for an injunction to preserve the ‘discarded’ ballots:

I have filed a Wisconsin Open records request with the City of Mequon demanding any ballot submitted but not cast in yesterday’s election, including any remnant of a shredded ballot. We have received reports Mequon poll workers destroyed submitted ballots before poll closing time, demanding a driver’s license number from the absentee voter….

More to come on this, I’m sure…

A pretty slick plan, actually – Rich Lowry explains at NRO’s The Corner:

…Boehner has rallied House Republicans behind a short-term, one-week CR that will cut another $12 billion and fund the military for the rest of the year. This move shows Republicans are aware of the first rule of a shutdown fight — don’t get blamed for the shutdown.

The short-term measure is going to put Harry Reid and the White House in a tight spot. By putting the ball in their court, it puts them in the position of making the affirmative decision to shut the government and do it while turning away a bill to fund the military. Also, in the context of a $1.5 trillion deficit, $12 billion seems piddling and — together with the prior $10 billion of cuts — it still falls short of the $33 billion Democrats have agreed to. If they reject the bill anyway, it’s going to make it easier to blame them for a shutdown; if they accept, Republicans will have gotten $22 billion in cuts even before a final deal…

That could be a way to do it – keep up the CRs but each time select a must-pass element to fund something for the rest of the year, throw in a ten or twenty billion in cuts and defy Reid to not hold a vote, or Obama to veto. The Democrats, of course, are quite happy with either an open-ended CR or, better, just some papering over the cracks deal to carry us through until 9/30/11. They really don’t want a shut down and, naturally, don’t want any real cuts. Time to force matters, and this might do it.

Keep in mind this is a tricky business – we very much don’t want to get actually blamed by the public for a shut down (Democrats and the MSM will, of course, blame us no matter what…but what they say is not, these days, necessarily what the people will agree to). This tactic by the GOP might force the Democrat to either clearly take the blame, or agree to at least do some more cuts…and then be faced with it, again. That, in turn, might slowly force them back and get them to agree to some real cuts…and, of course, the whole fight right now just leads up to the budget battle for FY 2012.

We’ll see how this comes out, but I’m cautiously optimistic that the GOP is starting to think about what they want to do and how to get it.

Pelosi opens mouth, again; another lie comes out.

Liberal cruelty and ignorance.

A review of CBO analysis of Ryan’s budget proposal. The good news? Ryan gets us to a debt to GDP of 10%, while other budget proposals might saddle us with 344%. The bad news? Some of the assumptions might not be entirely realistic. Bottom line: Ryan’s proposal is still by far the best out there.

More analysis of China’s impending melt down. I agree with Mish on this – I think China is in for a hard landing.

Supreme Court rules that tax credits for parents at religious schools are Constitutional – this could be a watershed in education reform. You see, its not a matter of appropriating funds for schools and then passing it out…just a matter of allowing parents to take a tax credit for all or part of the money they pay in tuition. This is an open door, now for school choice.

For all you youngsters out there who missed out on the glories of the Carter Administration, Obama has decided to take us down memory lane – from the Washington Post:

Inflation is back, with higher prices for food and fuel hammering American consumers, and this time it really hurts.

It’s not just that prices are rising — it’s that wages aren’t.

Previous bouts of inflation have usually meant a wage-price spiral, as pay and prices chase each other ever upward. But now paychecks are falling further and further behind. In the past three months, consumer prices have been rising at a 5.7 percent annual rate while average weekly wages have barely budged, increasing at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent…

Other sources I’ve seen indicate we’ve had better than 8% inflation so far this year – but, even nearly 6% is bad enough when your wages are flat or falling. A gigantic squeeze is being put on working Americans – the poor will get by ok on welfare, the rich won’t hardly notice it…the rest of us will feel this and its going to hurt a lot.

Many reasons are given for this state of affairs, but it can really be boiled down to two things:

1. Lack of production in the United States. We don’t create wealth like we used to. As I keep endlessly yammering on about (and will keep doing so until everyone agrees with me, because I’m right about this) we don’t make, mine and grow enough of our own stuff. If we don’t produce more – if, that is, we don’t create ever larger amounts of wealth – then it is impossible to have rising wages.

2. The Federal Reserve has gone on binge after binge of money printing. Here’s your example of what this has done – for all my adult life, the Canadian and Australian dollars have been worth a fraction of the US dollar…now, both are worth more than the US dollar. It isn’t so much that Australia and Canada are doing so much better, but that we’ve obliterated the value of the dollar by making trillions of them without any new wealth to back them up. As dollars decline in value, producers of goods – which, as I’ve noted, ain’t us any more – demand more and more dollars for their goods…and, so, inflation.

And when you combine stagnation with inflation, you get “stagflation”; a word first coined during the Carter Administration as people tried to figure out how we could have what Keynes said was impossible – high inflation and a stagnant economy. All that money printing by the Fed and borrowing by Uncle Sam were supposed to stimulate the economy by inflating the value of things. Guess what? It didn’t work. Just as it has never worked before and never can work…money is a store of value, not a thing of value, itself. There can be only as much money as there is value in an economy…have more money than value, and money will become worth less. This is just common sense – and thus it entirely escapes most economists and all liberals.

The GOP spending plan gets us on the road to resolving the government borrowing as well as encouraging wealth creation – that will allow wealth to be produced and wages to rise. The other part of the equation – Fed money printing – is a bit harder to fix. Really, it depends on Ben Bernanke – who seems convinced that it will actually work and who shows no real sign of ending it for good. While wealth creation will help tame inflation in and of itself, until we get back to sound money, inflation will remain – and will continue to deform economic decisions, leading to less wealth creation than there otherwise would be.

As usual, these days, the cure is to get rid of Obama as well as his Democrats and then reform (or, better, abolish) the Federal Reserve. There is no need, in a sense, to “fix” the economy – all you need do is get out of the way and stop distorting things with government borrowing and money printing. There is, unfortunately, little chance we’ll actually do any of this until Obama is gone…and, so, to work for 2012.

This is really starting to worry me:

I mean, come on! Where is my party? We’re supposed to be stupid. We’re supposed to shoot ourselves in the foot. Often, in the past, we’ve all wondered if candidates for GOP leadership should be taken to a ranch to see if they could locate the balls on a bull…and now they’ve come out with two slick, hard-hitting, fun ads in a row? This just isn’t possible.

Its gotta be space invaders…the aliens feel sorry for us and so they’ve replaced our GOP leadership with androids.

Ah, well, as long as we win next year…

So far, its a nail biter – with 9% reporting, Prosser leads by a bit less than 4,000 votes.

You can follow it on Twitter – someone there says that Feingold won 71% in Dane County, with Koppenberg currently getting 65% so far…if true, then Prosser may be in good shape.

UPDATE: 12% in, Prosser’s lead now at 5,321 votes.

UPDATE II: Yikes! 17% in, Prosser’s lead down to 1,476

UPDATE III: 76% reporting, Prosser’s lead now at 6,793; statistical dead heat; look for a recount no matter who winds up in the lead.

UPDATE IV: Bad news – with 78% reporting, union-tool Kloppenberg had gone in to the lead by 7,183.

UPDATE V: It gets worse – with 81% reporting, Klop’s lead now at 17,741. Unclear if any strong Prosser areas have yet to report…clearly a lot of Klop places just turned up.

UPDATE VI: Hot Air reports still a couple strong GOP counties to report.

UPDATE VII: Calling it for Kloppenberg; 84% reporting and she’s up by 35,000. A stinging rebuke to the GOP – but it took an all-out effort just to get a narrow win in an off-off year election. Meanwhile, of course, the GOP still does actually control the Wisconsin government. Uh, maybe not…88% reporting, Klop’s only up a bit more than 5k….90% reporting, Klop’s lead now 1,676

(Gotta admit, this is turning out to be quite exciting for a political junkie)

UPDATE VIII: As my mother would have put it in one of her more irreverent moments, “tighter than a nun’s corset”. 92% reporting, Prosser has a 591 vote lead.

UPDATE IX: 97% reporting, Prosser up 4,671.

UPDATE X: The reporting total has been stuck at 97% for a while; vote totals have gone up and Prosser still maintains a slight lead of 1,684. Clearly, this is going to a re-count.

Here’s what I like about this – the left went flat out after Prosser. They outspent the right by a huge amount and engaged in the most slanderous campaign imaginable (actually accusing Prosser of being in favor of pedophiles). The left brought in the troops and did all they could…meanwhile, the under-funded but genuinely grassroots right went toe to toe with the left in what is still a blue State and, at the very worst, fought them to a photo finish. This shows that there is no ground safe for the left…even in places where they have been dominant for generations, we can fight them. Come what may out of this election, I am highly encouraged by the prospects.

UPDATE XI: 98% in, Prosser up by 2,003 votes. I’d like to stay up and see it go to 100%, but I do have to work tomorrow. Night all!

From Politico:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s parody of Obama’s 2012 campaign, released Friday, now has 665,000 views on YouTube.

Obama’s real launch video, released yesterday: Just 168,000.

YouTube’s metrics tend to lag a bit, but the numbers suggest that — energy-wise — we’re in 2010, not 2008.

The bloom is most definitely off the rose. Of course, the Obamatons of the left will eventually drive viewership of the Obama video higher…but this does show that the “enthusiasm gap” of 2010 is still very real.

So much for any good thoughts you might have had about the Egyptian revolution – from ynet:

Former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who had previously announced his intetions to run for the presidency of Egypt, said Monday that “if Israel attacked Gaza we would declare war against the Zionist regime.”…

And, liberals, this was the man you loved back in the day – it was El Baradei who put out the lies which you believed about Iran’s nuclear program. He suckered you, entirely. All along, he was just an enemy playing a political game…doing what he could to help the Islamists and weaken the United States.

More importantly, he is the man who stands a good chance of becoming Egypt’s next President – and he is choosing to burnish his image with Egyptian voters by thumping his chest over the Islamist bogeyman, Israel. Do understand that when he says “Zioniist regime” he is falling completely in to Islamo-fascism…that is how they term Israel; using the term as a means of entirely de-legitimizing Israel’s right to exist.

This is the very swift end of a dream. Any theories which had that Egypt would emerge as a democracy and as a civilizing influence are dashed. Egypt will go through a period of Islamo-fascism…how long remains to be seen. The bad news is that Iran proves it can go on for 32 years…

From NRO’s The Corner:

House Republicans are preparing a third short-term spending resolution in the event that a long-term compromise cannot be reached with Senate Democrats and the White House before April 8, GOP aides confirm. That scenario suddenly looks a lot more likely after a tense back-and-forth Monday between leaders on both sides of the debate. The measure would last for one week, cut $12 billion in domestic discretionary spending, but would include funding for the Defense Department until the end of the current fiscal year (September 30).

GOP leaders are also distributing pamphlets instructing members on how to prepare for a government shutdown, making sure they are ready for all possible scenarios…

I have to say that the idea of a third stop-gap doesn’t appeal to me, at all. The Democrats are entirely in campaign mode right now – all their actions are geared towards winning advantage for 2012. They hope to get the GOP to engage in endless budget debates, with the eventual thought being that the people will be turned off and start to lose any faith at all in the GOP…and thus open the door up for a Democrat come-back next year (at least to the extent of re-electing Obama). Force them in to a box – no more continuing resolutions: agree to the final budget, cuts and all, or shut down the government.

The GOP is still fearful that a government shut down will make people angry with the GOP – as I’ve said before, the memories of 1995 die hard. But, as I’ve also said, this isn’t 1995. The people have utter contempt for the government right now…shutting it down will both be popular, as an event, and also be an excellent tool to beat up Democrats with. The story isn’t “oh, my, how will granny get her SS check” but, “goodness, what a bunch of creeps those Democrats are – shutting down the government to protect cowboy poetry/Planned Parenthood funding/insert idiotic spending measure here”. The people are on our side – but only as long as the GOP is on the people’s side. If people start to perceive that the GOP is simply afraid (or, worse, actually cutting deals with the Big Government types), then the people will abandon the GOP.

Fight it out right now – and keep the government shut down until October 1st, if that is what it takes to get the Democrats to agree to spending cuts. The people will sustain us in this fight, if we’ll just agree to have it.

UPDATE: The Plan is unveiled.