"More than a million petitions were submitted this month to force a recall election for Gov. Scott Walker."

So says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a sidebar to its article, published yesterday, about Scott Walker's "hero's reception" at the Conservative Political Action Conference last night.

First of all, the petitions were submitted last month, but more importantly, there's no way "more than a million petitions were submitted." There's a claim that the petitions contain more than a million signatures, but there are multiple signatures per petition, and the calculation that there are more than a million signatures is based on the assumption that there are an average of 6+ signatures per petition.

[A]ccording to the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board we do know 152,336 Scott Walker recall petition pages were turned in two weeks ago.

152,336 is a lot less than "more than a million." But even if the Journal Sentinel had said "signatures" instead of "petitions," it should not have flatly stated "more than a million petitions were submitted." We have yet to see an accurate count of the number of signatures. And that's quite apart from the question of duplicate/fake/ineligible signatures.

The number of claimed signatures is high presumably to make Walker supporters give up on trying to prove that there aren't enough signatures. Now, perhaps they should give up — not because it's hopeless, but because the Walker opponents don't have a good candidate to field. It's quite bizarre, all the work they've done campaigning for blank-to-be-filled-in-later. And if the candidate is Kathleen Falk, Walker's already showing us how effective he will be against her:

"She's basically saying she's bought and paid for by the unions. I mean even the other Democrats are hesitant to say that they're going to veto something," Walker said....

Read the article at that last link for background on the veto demand, the pledge, and the endorsement. But back to the first link, the "hero's welcome" article about Walker's CPAC speech:

"When we prevail [in the recall election], it will send a powerful message to every politician in America, that if you stand up and do the right thing, if you tackle the tough challenges, if you make the tough choices, there will be men and women in every state and every part of this country who will stand up shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm with you," he said....

"Collective bargaining is not a right. In the public sector, collective bargaining is an expensive entitlement."...

Introducing the governor, [National GOP chairman Reince Priebus] said of the Wisconsin fight: "The public union bosses are angry and refuse to go down without a fight. They're pulling out every trick in the book, because after all, hornets are always angriest when you try to destroy their nests."

(Mixed metaphor: Hornets don't have books.)

ADDED: Here's video of 2 and a half minutes of the speech.