Waukeshocker! After Tuesday's painfully close, still undecided Supreme Court race between JoAnne Kloppenburg and David Prosser, Republicans warned that partisan election officials in certain municipalities might conveniently find bushels of extra uncounted votes after the fact.
It has come to pass -- but the extra votes were found in deep-red Waukesha County, represnting the entire city of Brookfield, and give GOP favorite David Prosser a probably insurmountable 50.2%/48.8% lead. Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus's policy of storing election returns on a personal computer in her office with no backup
was criticized last August. Nate Silver says
the new numbers look reasonable.
posted by escabeche
on Apr 7, 2011 -
255 comments
“No, no. Academia is now part of the real world. Everything goes.” Just before dawn, on August 24, 1970, Dwight and Karl Armstrong, Leo Burt, and David Fine
parked a van outside Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin. The van was filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, and
when it blew, it killed
Robert Fassnacht, a young physicist working through the night. The Army Mathematics Research Center, the bombing's target, was untouched. The bombers, known as the "New Year's Gang," went underground, and enthusiasm for the radical movement in Madison was permanently dampened.
The University of Wisconsin collection of transcribed interviews about the Sterling Hall Bombing.
[more inside]
posted by escabeche
on Aug 21, 2010 -
32 comments
Prophetic Pictures from Menominie, Wisconsin. In 1905, high school senior Albert Hansen took photogaphs of his graduating classmates at Menominie HS. Not as they were -- but as they believed, or hoped, or feared they would be in the decades to come.
Dorothy M. Jesse was going to be a mathematician, and
Fred Quilling a pharmacist.
Alice M. Tilleson would be a prominent socialite, whose "eccentric ideas with reference to danger, force her to cling to that old fashioned vehicle, the automobile, instead of the new wheel-less aerial motor car." William C. Klatt, a future physician,
would operate on disembodied heads. And Hansen himself
was destined for the hobo's life. The Wisconsin Historical Society has
the whole collection available online, together with the text from the yearbook and the truth, as best the Society could learn, of how the graduates' actual future compared with prophecy. (Spoiler: Fred Quilling really did become a pharmacist.) Just one of the many remarkable collections at
Wisconsin Historical Images.
posted by escabeche
on Feb 7, 2010 -
25 comments
What's a Coastie? Two University of Wisconsin undergrads record and post to YouTube an ode to
"Coasties," out-of-state students who live in expensive off-campus apartments, wear Spandex tights with Uggs, spend their parents' money on designer handbags and Starbucks, and -- oh yeah, like 15% of their classmates but only 1 in 200 Wisconsin natives,
are Jews.
Controversy ensues.
posted by escabeche
on Dec 24, 2009 -
143 comments
The partial veto , enshrined in the Wisconsin Constitution since 1930, gives the governor the power to veto only a portion of a bill passed by the legislature. Since then, governors, both Republican and Democratic, have gotten
increasingly creative about its application -- vetoing the word "not" to reverse the meaning of a bill, vetoing digits out of numbers to reduce appropriations, even vetoing individual letters from words in order to create new text,
Humument-style. (This last power, the so-called "Vanna White" veto, was removed by Constitutional amendment in 1990.) Another attempt to strip the governor of the partial veto has just
failed. Doesn't it sound like fun to be governor of Wisconsin?
Try it yourself.
posted by escabeche
on Mar 12, 2007 -
33 comments
