Rapture This

It doesn't appear the world is ending today, after all. So we have things to discuss on a rainy Saturday morning:

• The recount is over in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and David Prosser still won. That doesn't mean that JoAnne Kloppenburg is going away quietly, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. She has until May 31 to decide whether to challenge the results in court. While there's no reason to believe she will prevail, that's not the endgame. The hope is that the court case will drag on long enough to deny Prosser from reassuming his seat at the beginning of the next court term in August, which would make it easier to stop, at least temporarily, the initiatives that Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican legislature have passed. In effect, it's the same strategy that the Clock Tower 14 used in fleeing the state -- delay, delay and hopefully run out the clock on any reforms.
• Meanwhile in St. Paul, the budget issues took a backseat to the invocation of Bradlee Dean, who seeemed to enjoy his 15 minutes of fame even though it caused the Republicans a lot of heartburn. I could tell Dean screwed up because when the story was introduced on the local news last night, the reporter referred to the firebrand minister as "one Bradlee Dean." If you are referred to as "one ________," that's a bad sign. In the end, I don't suspect Dean helped the causes he believes in very much. But that's another post.
• As for the other legislative issues, it's now clear that Mark Dayton is going to veto everything that the lege sends up, because he wants to spend, spend, spend. We're going to get a special session and, eventually, a governmental shutdown that does things like close state parks while the St. Paul bureaucrats continue to draw their salaries. This is tiresome stuff but has to play out, because we love our kabuki around here. I suspect the lege is going to win most of what they want in the end, because raising taxes is going to be a tough sell. This is all highly predictable stuff, which is the primary reason that I haven't been spending a lot of time reading the tea leaves in St. Paul this year.