Showdown At The O-Koch Corral

Tick, tick, tick, tick….

(Field Judge raises starter’s pistol to air)

…tick, tick — BOOM! 8:00pm! Polls closed!

Pundits, start your jawbones!

Rachel’s showing some poll with a MOE of 4%. Its CURLY factor is not given.

CURLY factor? Help plz kthx.

(BTW: Rachel Maddow studied at Tree. In my major, actually. There’s about a full year’s worth of statistics in that major. The lack of CURLY (whatever that is) is probably an oversight.)

Oh, Jon Erpenbach — smoooooth.

Early result: MSNBC projected to WIN the election night music race.

I shouldn’t repeat myself, but I can’t resist:

One dollar, one vote. It’s the American way.

@Walking Still: That’s definitely a thread for some Wednesday Morning Quarterbacking. If anybody can make any sense over who spent what by then. Old pals of mine at a goo-goo group in Madison will crunch those numbers until they bleed.

Early numbers don’t look so hot — healthy leads for all but one GOPer, with the easiest mark on the board only losing by four points. Still early though, but the Maalox is beginning to flow over at Dem HQ, if I have my guess.

The AP Numbers Page is broken down by county. Which is just about as inscrutable as the overall number. Don’t know where the pockets of pain and pleasure are.

Incidentally: tonight is the one night, of all nights, to drink Miller Lite without irony. Union made, right in Milwaukee.

Mmmmm…. solidarity! [slobbering]

Over at the Great Orange Satan, the number crunchers, comparing numbers from the Kloppenburg/Prosser (erm) fight back over the Supreme Court seat back in June suggest that the numbers look rather poor. Developing.

Halfway home in two northern districts show the GOPers with a sizable spread to their favor. A clean sweep is not on the cards, I’d wager.

[ADD: those two seats are likely gone. The county-by-county on those show the race breaking hard to the GOP.]

John Nichols of the Nation (good Wisconsin boy) trying to put lipstick on this pig. I’m not sold.

I’m switching to last night’s Time Warner Conan, with special guest Time Warner Piers. Did someone at Corporate demand some whitewashing?

DEVELOPING: Milwaukee County precincts are breaking hard for the Dem, and are starting to come in. That one might be tight as a tick when it comes down to the end.

@chicago bureau: Five’s a real win. What’s a symbolic win?

The northern Wisconsin seats are gone. The Dems have to find five thousand votes (each) with a quarter or a third of the precincts left to report. Not happening. GOP is two to the good — the margin of error (the real one, not a polling one) is getting tighter for the Democrats.

Big, big pop for the Dem in the Milwaukee seat. She now leads — if that goes, the Dems just might… might get there tonight.

@nojo: These are all rock-red seats. Winning one is a major victory. But the real number is four, which ensures complete safety for a flipped chamber.

Note: the GOPer in Milwaukee — Alberta Darling (noted sister: Manitoba Nice) — is the chair of the Joint Finance Committee, which largely drove the anti-union provision like a wagon train. She’s losing at the moment. That would be a major scalp.

I have to go to bed. It’s either that or take a razor longways to my wrists and get in a nice hot bath.

AP calls those two northern seats for the reigning, defending, light-middleweight champions of the Right. So that’s official.

The central Wisconsin seat is trending towards the incumbent, with a fifth of the precincts left to go. The window is almost closed for flipping the State Senate. [ADD: What is left in that district, makes me think that the GOPer will hang on, just barely.]

@chicago bureau: Ah. Four. Right.

So three — an even split, if not legislatively decisive — would still be respectable. Two or less, and it doesn’t matter how red the districts are: This will be viewed as a rejection of unions and progressives.

And the news gets worse in central Wisconsin. The Dem needs 3000 votes with 14% left to count. Stick a fork in that one. [NOW: 4000 with 6% left. Moments away from a call.]

So the Dems need all three races that are still competitive to break their way.

@nojo: There’s going to be so much spin on this, every umpire in the United States is going to want to sniff the ball to see just how much Vaseline is on it.

The 18th District is gone for the GOP. No call from the AP, but there aren’t 4000 votes in 6 precincts. There just aren’t.

So the GOP is now dormie — 3 up, 3 to play.

Big Orange Satan suggests that the La Crosse seat is likely a Dem gain. Don’t see anything to suggest otherwise. So that’s one for the good guys, at least.

Over by Lake Winnebago, the GOPer just took a slight lead — the entire county of Fond du Lac just came in.

La Crosse seat inching towards a call — the GOPer is down 3000 with 20% left in play.

AP: GOP hold in Central Wisconsin is a result. Finally. The Dems have it all to do, now.

I know this is counterproductive, but it almost would have been worth watching Ed Schultz just to see his face rubbed in it.

@nojo: His make-up staff have done that already. Two nights running — he has looked positively hideous.

Dem gain in La Crosse is now a result. So they’re on the board.

Dem in Milwaukee is brewing up a win, bucking the trend in a GOP district. (I could say that the GOPer better pack it in, but the Packers are in Green Bay, not Milwaukee.)

Srsly: Dem up 5000 votes with more than half in. But Milwaukee is almost all in, and Waukesha (they of the 7000 missing ballots in June) is still out. [And just like that — the GOPer closes hard, to within a thousand.]

TJ/Benedick, darling, I owe you an e-mail…just busy up in here.

The way it looks now is that those last two districts will have numbers come in a large wave, one way or the other. Sudden death time, truly.

MSNBC is sourcing a former AG who lost her post after getting hooked up on an OWI charge, while driving from one campaign spot to another. Which, to be honest, is a very Wisconsin way to go. Anyway: she says the Lake Winnebago seat is a likely Dem gain. But that Milwaukee seat is looking very, very tenuous right now.

One HUGE caveat — there are two Dems up on a recall challenge next week. One of them, up by de U.P. (yah), looks like a very shaky, shaky prospect. So even if the Dems get three, it’s shakier than a trailer under a tornado watch.

(Sorry — my inner Dan Rather is coming out.)

The Dem is up 1200 with 3 precincts left in the Lake Winnebago seat. That might be home now.

So it’s all to play for now in Milwaukee and some viciously-red suburban counties.

And Lake Winnebago is a Dem gain — RESULT.

One district left.

@chicago bureau: So, cut to the chase…did they do it?

@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: My guess? A close miss — that Milwaukee seat still has the Dem up 1200 votes, but there are some ruby-red precincts still out, which may enough to cover the current spread and the Milwaukee County precincts still to come in.

@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: One way or another, placenames like Fond du Lac, Lake Winnebago and Winnikaupeehu will be changed by legislative fiat to Smithville, Jonestown and Skeeter’s Holler – you know, like real America.

Twitterstan is reporting that Waukesha County (Dubya Country, missing votes last time, etc.) won’t report for another hour. Anybody got a pack of cards?

@Nabisco: I respectfully dissent — those Frenchy, Indian-sounding names are in a district which the Dems picked off.

MSNBC heads are already starting to beat the whole “Waukesha is cooking the books” drum. Boring.

(For viewers playing at home — it’s WAH-keh-SHAH. I screwed that up in my first week in Wisconsin and was rapidly corrected.)

@chicago bureau:

Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire? After all, the candidate from Manchuria hasn’t checked in yet.

Waukesha is almost all in, and Darling now leads by just shy of 3000 votes. It’s down to Milwaukee County now, but it’s now a likely defeat for the Democrat. ALSO: the DPW is now calling for an investigation of the Waukesha election heads. This is going to be weird.

Darling is now ahead by 2,700. Fat lady time?

@Walking Still: All signs point to yes. There’ll be enough juice with this Waukesha debacle (the second in as many months) to rile up the die-hard, Code Pink types. But it’s sound and fury.

The Dem in the Milwaukee-area race needs to find 4000 votes out of those Milwaukee County districts to have a realistic shot at this. Doubtful at best.

I will say that the 12 Milwaukee County precincts have been out longer than all but one of the Waukesha precincts. But there isn’t the same baying for the head of Milwaukee County types.

ADD: the head of the DPW is now in on the vote-tampering thing. I don’t think he’d make such a statement if the numbers left out there were coming in on his side enough to reverse the current lead for the GOPer.

MSNBC is flailing, hard, on this Waukesha thing. Their votes are in (except for one town). They’ve been in for about a half-hour now. It’s a bit much.

Milwaukee County’s coming in, and the Dem only picks up another 1000 votes. It hasn’t registered on AP yet, but — if this is true — that’s game. And it’s outside the free-recount zone, too.

The GOP hangs on to the Wisconsin State Senate — barely.

With that, I’m outta here. Night.

@chicago bureau: Yeoman’s work – I tip my offshore hat to you, CB.

On another front, Lefty has yet to report back in after a baseball game broke out at her Dead show tonight. It was a 6-0 beatdown of the Buccos by her Gints (rhymes with ‘mints’, hard ‘g’).

That means Milwaukee also picked up more ground in the NL Central, in keeping with the electoral thread.

I found a musical director for Stinque.com:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3vWpgQ4v_A&feature=related

@FlyingChainSaw: He lives down the road.

@chicago bureau: Bravo. You boldly went.

@FlyingChainSaw: Lick the Gods! Ride the Snake!

Sorry. Inside joke.

@FlyingChainSaw: Brilliant. And on a crappy Ovation guitar too.

@FlyingChainSaw: What he said, except I didn’t notice the git-tar. The hat momentarily distracted me from the man boob/rib cage/skin roll or whatthefuck. The sunglasses are a great disguise.

Seriously, more power to him. I hope I’m on YouTube playing my shitty epiphone topless and tatted up sporting my stunna shades and pirate hat when I’m his age — I’m thinking next year. I’ll stop shaving now.

@nojo: @Dodgerblue: @JNOV:

I am completely serious. We need to hunt this guy down and give him the Talibunny musical libretto and see what he can do. This guy is a god.

@FlyingChainSaw: Do it! I think he’s awesome!

@FlyingChainSaw: I am totally on board. I also think we could assemble a far better backup crew for him on the choruses than he currently has.

Have you read the New Yorker piece on Bachmann TurnHerOver Drive? She’s got a more extensively documented history of crazee than the Talibunny could ever hope for, plus hubby Marcus seems to be screaming out loud that he has teh gay. Part of me really really wants her to go far in the primaries.

How bad was Wisconsin? Fifty minutes into Rachel, and she hasn’t mentioned it. Meanwhile, the Daily Show is promising an Ed Spectacular tonight.

UPDATE: Brief segment and out.

@FlyingChainSaw: Umm, our very own Benedick HRH KFC has been working on the Talibunny musical for months, nay, for years, complete with angry/dancing villagers.

@Nabisco: I think I just need to move to a foreign country like some around here (ahem!), and then I’d have a more entertaining time popping the popcorn and watching to see whether Crazee Eyes or Guv Good Hair provides the best primary entertainment. I just need to get 7,000 miles away. Anybody want to invest in a coffee shop in Wellington with me? Or a winery? It just takes dropping a certain amount of change and we’d be Kiwis like that.

@SanFranLefty: Should one of the crazees outplay Barry in 2012, we will officially fall off the ‘recovering expat’ wagon I dragged us onto in 2006. Right now I’m a “dry expat”, which basically means all the travel, funny currencies and mangled foreign languages, but none of the federal tax breaks.

ADD: send me a business plan. Srsly. I assume they have decent schools in Hobbitland.

@SanFranLefty: Guy came in a couple of weeks ago to get some stuff from his father’s library appraised. He and his wife were selling everything and moving to NZ with their two kids. He’s a software engineer, she’s a pediatrician. Too bad Mr Cyn hated the way things are done in the wine business down there.

@SanFranLefty: Great. Benedick lives near him. I have a good feeling about this.

@Mistress Cynica: I thought Mr. Cyn was in Oz. To get all SAT-y on you — and as someone who has spent significant time in all four locales — Oz is to NZ as Texas is to Oregon/NorCal. Don’t let Mr. Cyn’s surreal whackadoodle time in Oz sour y’all on the entire area.

@Nabisco: I want to franchise this place or this place.

My true plan, which you would appreciate, is to open an authentic Tex-Mex restaurant somewhere in the Land of the Kiwis. The catch, which has been pointed out to me by restauranteurs in the US and residents in N Zed, is that given the country is an island surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, it’s a tad hard to import from Mexico the back-of-the-house talent that you find at every taqueria and restaurant from Seattle to New Orleans. The second catch is that no food service company imports jalapenos or black beans into the south island or the southern part of the north island. That, of course, is another business opportunity – to be the Goya Foods importer for all of Kiwi-land.

@FlyingChainSaw: Your thoughts on NZ business opportunities?

@SanFranLefty: Advertising, tech and high end agriculture. Things are better now than when I was working there and the wine industry has matured. The whites were in good shape but the reds were a little rough. Have you considered Dunedin, by the way?

@SanFranLefty: One of the big problems Mr Cyn has with their winemaking is the mechanization of the process. Because of the lack of “back-of-the-house talent” to pick the grapes, they harvest by machine and sort by machine. He strongly prefers the by-hand approach used here, but it’s not financially feasible there.

@Nabisco: I was on the road to Navajoland over the past couple of days, but I appreciated CB’s election night coverage. Could not bear to watch MSNBC, so I had it on Top Shot and Stinque while getting a client presentation together.