Hooray for the people of Wisconsin who are finally getting a clue about just how much they have been manipulated and lied to by politicians for whom they had previously voted. Assistant Attorney General Joanne Kloppenburg won over incumbent state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser.
Naturally there will be recount. With good luck finally going to the true Americans, Kloppenburg's win will hold.
There seems to always be a straw that finally breaks the camel's back. Scott Walker seems to have been that for Wisconsin politics. Those governors who followed Walker to try to break the back of the unions are also having great difficulty.
Ohio's union rights battle is headed for a November referendum. Some of these high handed Governors might just learn that the people are not game pieces but, rather, real people who represent our society at large. Elected officials are supposed to represent those people, not big money as they are currently seeming to do.
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It now appears that the Kloppenburg victory was due to human error. The final tally has incumbent justice David Prosser winning by over 7,000 votes, rendering any recount talk moot. See:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/04/08/Found-votes-leapfrog-GOP-judge-over-rival/UPI-13581302251400/
This election has less impact on the Wisconsin public pension crisis than often assumed. Public pensions are not held to the same standards as private pensions. In particular, the states can delay funding their pensions for years, and are allowed to assume unrealistically high rates of returns on investments. See
http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/WP1031-%20NJ%20Pensions.pdf
These sloppy accounting rules are catching up on the states. To be honest, these states cannot afford their obligations to both their pensioners and their bondholders. There is no "nice" way out of the fact that these states made promises that they cannot possibly keep. Gov. Walker has been harshly criticized for cutting back public worker benefits. But why doesn't the even more draconian cuts proposed by New York Gov Cuomo get anywhere near the same level of protests? See this N.Y. Times piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/nyregion/07cuomo.html
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