TRUST ME! I'M AN EXPERT!

After the ballots in that Wisconsin judicial election were counted, Fox Nation and The Wall Street Journal went into instant "Eeek! Voter fraud"! mode. Today it's the Daily Caller, which tells us, "Election fraud allegations fly in close Wisconsin Supreme Court race." I haven't made my way through the article, but I just want to note that the Caller isn't telling you a few things about its lead witness:

Wisconsin citizens and election experts are questioning the veracity of the state's Supreme Court race, which the Associated Press reports left-wing legal activist JoAnne Kloppenburg won by 204 votes over Justice David Prosser, out of the more than 1.4 million votes.

On an estimated more than 10,000 ballots in Dane County, Wisconsin, where the state capital Madison is, voters selected only a pick in the Supreme Court race, while leaving even the hotly contested mayoral and county executive choices blank. That raises red flags for election experts like Scott St. Clair of the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank....

First of all, St. Clair brings no special knowledge of Wisconsin to the table -- the think tank with which he's affiliated (actually called the Evergreen Freedom Foundation) is based in Olympia, Washington, focusing mostly on local issues (like cutting the state's minimum wage). "Investigative journalist" St. Clair writes libertarian-leaning articles, many of them about ferries (no, really), for a little-read local site called Crosscut.com. (He's also a Sarah Palin fan.) So when he declares that he doesn't know why voters would vote in a judicial election and not vote for mayor, he's overlooking the fact that the judicial election is a proxy war in the major political battle of this moment, both statewide and nationally, while the mayor's race was between two candidates who are both liberal Democrats and both opponents of Scott Walker. And that "hotly contested" county executive race? It was expected to be a Democratic blowout, and the expected happened.

Did I mention what Scott St. Clair does in his spare time? He posts comments at Seattle-area blogs, many of them under the name Piper Scott. The name has meaning to him:

Do these comments suggest that St. Clair is a guy you can trust to assess data accurately? Well, how much confidence does this one give you?

Here's something that baffles me...When alarmists say this, that or the other is the warmest "on record" what does that mean??? Only that it's the warmest since somebody started writing this stuff down. Could things have been warmer prior to that...like over thousands and thousands of years??? And could not other factors contribute??

Or this one?

I've never contended that history offers neet parallels. What it offers are themes and lessons mostly lost to those under 40 who have no sense of perspective and who continue to see themselves as unique and apart from both the inexorable force of history and its compelling drive. Typical of youth, they think the rules of the road don't apply to them, so they refuse to heed the wisdom of their elders about speed limits and left turns, thus ending up having to call home with "bad news about the car..."

Boys don't learn to drive until they've totalled two cars each. Girls, being smarter than boys, only total one.

Yes, folks -- drivers in America, on average, wreck 1.5 cars before becoming licensed. It's a fact! You could look it up!

St. Clair also portrays a hero of his, Winston Churchill, as an opponent of socialized medicine -- which is entirely at odds with the facts.

There's the Caller's first "expert." I'll leave it to others to tell us about the rest.