Whoopee!

Walker Wins!!!

Mr. Walker had 53% of the vote to 46% for his opponent, Tom Barrett, the Democratic mayor of Milwaukee, with 99% of the state’s precincts reporting. Turnout was heavy across the state.

Did tea party put Scott Walker over the top in Wisconsin recall?

The tea party movement flexed its muscle in Wisconsin, as Gov. Scott Walker handily won a recall vote on Tuesday. Thirty-six percent of voters said they support the movement – and almost all went for Walker.

“While Occupiers and union protesters got the ink, the tea party dropped the placards and picked up clipboards, phones and got out the vote,” writes former tea party activist Dana Loesch, a conservative talk show host, on Breitbart.com. Adds former US Education Secretary Bill Bennett, writing on CNN.com: “The untold story of the Wisconsin saga may be the resurgence of the tea party.”

A quiet but potent force

As Mr. Bennett suggests, the tea party didn’t get mentioned much in this election. That was partly due to a self-imposed quietude after the brand was tarnished in the congressional debt battles of 2011. But it was also true that the role of the tea party was overshadowed by the stakes for public-sector unions, for whom the defeat at the polls may become a Waterloo moment – a stunning abdication of bargaining rights in the state where public-sector unions were born in 1959.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury — author of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and many more literary classics — died this morning in Los Angeles, at the age of 91.