The most important thing Gov. Scott Walker said in his long interview with Greta Van Susteren.

Here's the whole interview — video and transcript — with a lot of detail about last year's protests and the upcoming recall election. But I want to highlight this:

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, I think this is going to be a very fascinating recall.... [I]t's going to send a big message one way or the other to this country of how Wisconsin, a swing state, is likely or maybe will vote come November.

WALKER: Well, and it's political both about what happens in November in the presidential and even a key U.S. Senate race. I think it's even more important. I think long term, it sets the table for whether it's me and other governors or even people like my friend Paul Ryan and the courageous things he's trying to do in Washington.

When we prevail, it will send a powerful, powerful message that when people complain about politicians who don't have the courage to stand up, the guts to take on the tough issues, our election will show, when we win, that you know what? Voters do want people to take on the tough issues. They do want people to stand up for the taxpayers. They won't — people to turn away the special interests, and I think that's what we'll show.

When we prevail... Is that overconfident or do we all pretty much know that Walker is going to win? The recall — Walker seems to know — is giving him a big opportunity to explain and promote his policies and to present himself as especially courageous in taking a uncompromising position.  A win in the recall election will be a tremendous vindication — a vindication which he could not have achieved without the delicious opportunity that is the recall.

And what Walker is also saying here is that it will in a much more general way say to all politicians that they should be forceful and not moderate and wishy-washy. A Walker win in the recall is something that ought to be read as justifying what fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan is doing in Congress.

And by the way, the GOP presidential candidates are swooping into the state now. I'm eager to see how Santorum, Romney, Gingrich, and Paul deal with the specific place that is Wisconsin.

What will happen to all the left-wing comedians after all the attention to Limbaugh's "slut" controversy?

Here's Greta Van Susteren kicking up a storm about Louis C.K. being the headliner at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner. Apparently, Louis C.K. has said some rather nasty things about a woman named Sarah Palin.

Meanwhile, Gloria Allred thinks Rush Limbaugh should be prosecuted for his ill-received prostitution metaphor.

UPDATE: Louis C.K. pulls out. Now they have a big opportunity to get someone totally inoffensive and bore the pants off everyone. Can I say "pants"? Is that okay in nambypamby America?

The gesture Cain made that, he says, brought a complaint about sexual harassment.

On Greta Van Susteren's show, he spoke of an employee in her late 30s or early 40s who accused him of sexual harassment:

"She was in my office one day, and I made a gesture saying -- and I was standing close to her -- and I made a gesture saying you are the same height as my wife.  And I brought my hand up to my chin saying, 'My wife comes up to my chin.'"  At that point, Cain gestured with his flattened palm near his chin.  "And that was put in there [the complaint] as something that made her uncomfortable," Cain said, "something that was in the sexual harassment charge."

Supposedly, the woman and her lawyer asked for a "huge" settlement, but she got very little, just enough to induce her to terminate the lawsuit.

Rush Limbaugh's reaction today:

Now, we don't have any evidence of ice packs on a busted lip as we had with Juanita Broaddrick and Bill Clinton.  Yeah, Bill Clinton and Juanita Broaddrick, "Hey babe, you better put some ice on that, you're bleeding at the lip."  We don't have any of that.  This story appears to me to be a close relative of the hit job that the Washington Post is doing on Marco Rubio.  It's not a news story.  This is gutter partisan politics, and it's the politics of minority conservative personal destruction, is what you've got here.  Rubio and Cain unfit to lead, don't you see. We cannot have a black Republican running for the office of president.  We can't have one elected.  We can't have an Hispanic.

The left owns those two groups, and those two groups are gonna forever be minorities. Those groups cannot ever be seen to be self-sufficient or rising above, on their own. Those two groups are owned -- lock, stock, and barrel -- by the Democrat Party and anything good that happens to any black or Hispanic in American politics can only happen via the Democrat Party....

This is how the mainstream media keeps the Republican Party in check: They're scared to death of this kind of thing happening to them. Pure and simple. It's also why (I'm just predicting) you're not going to see too many people in the official Republican establishment rise up to Herman Cain's defense. You know, if this exact circumstance (as I just mentioned) had happened in a conservative publication, not only would the Democrats and the media be going after the women -- as James Carville did and others during the Clinton years -- they'd be going after the reporters. They'd be going after the publication. Anybody who had anything to do with the story, it would be search-and-destroy. Our side will not do that.

Greta Van Susteren asks if anyone is demanding that Justices Prosser and Bradley step down.

"Are any of the newspaper asking for them to step down? People have very serious disputes and their whole lives depend on decisions on the Supreme Court, and this isn't fair to the people. Are newspaper editors saying they got to go?"

The answer from her guest, Jason Stein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

You are right this is sort of funny, but no joke. One thing that I've heard the time when this all came out Governor Walker talked about the possibility of having an appointed rather than elected court. And that didn't go anywhere. It didn't seem like that proposal -- seems like it would be dead on arrival in our legislature. But certainly there's been a number of people saying, look, this can't go on. Something has got to change.

Total failure to answer the question!

Should Prosser and/or Bradley resign?
	Yes. Both.
	Yes. Bradley.
	Yes. Prosser.
	Yes. Prosser, Bradley, and at least one more.
	Yes. They should all resign!
	No. Keep them all. Move on.
pollcode.com free polls

By the way, I'm hearing a rumor that Justice Crooks might resign. I don't know what that's about, but I was just reading about the 1995 election that originally brought Justice Bradley to the court. She defeated none other than Patrick Crooks in that election, and Crooks (who later won election, in 1996), was the conservative in the race, with the backing of Gov. Tommy Thompson and many Republicans. Bradley had the liberal backing, including the AFL-CIO. Both candidates portrayed themselves as "strict constructionists," and Bradley emphasized judicial independence and the importance of keeping the judiciary above politics. Crooks criticized her for her unwillingness to talk about how she would decide even cases that had been decided in the past. (Sorry for the absence of links there. I'm reading old newspaper articles, and they are not up on line.)

Crooks — who now votes in a bloc with Chief Justice Abrahamson and Justice Bradley, reaching liberal outcomes — called himself "the conservative for the court." When Bradley cited judicial ethics as her reason for refusing to address the issues, he said, after he lost: "I think it's unfortunate we didn't have a chance to show there was a clear, ideological difference between the two of us... It's important for the public to have a sense of candidates' judicial philosophy and how they go about making decisions." Bradley, by contrast, said she won because she refrained from labeling herself and Crooks did not. She said: "I think people ended up not wanting those kinds of conservative labels in a Supreme Court race... You have to be careful not to politicize the court."

A mere 3 years after joining the court, in 1999, Crooks considered resigning. He told the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the problem was the “way Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson is running the court.... abusing her position by micromanaging the court system, making unilateral decisions on administrative matters that should come to the full court, and jeopardizing the court’s neutrality by awarding grants to groups with lobbyists and social agendas."

Crooks, you may remember, was the only justice who was not present for the "chokehold" incident. He had gone home for the day. On another occasion — in 2008, when Justice Bradley allegedly hit Justice Gableman in the head for calling the Chief "Shirley" — Crooks was — allegedly — reading the horoscopes. Crooks was born May 16, 1938. That makes him a Taurus. It says here: "Can you take the day off? Now is the perfect time to do just that. If you’re locked in for some level of responsibility, you can still make the most of your freewheeling energy by creating a party atmosphere." So... no announcement today, probably.

ADDED: From the investigative file (and relevant to Crooks's attitude toward the recent incident):

Justice Crooks said early in his tenure as Supreme Court Justice, he recalls a meeting in which Justice Prosser had called him a "viper" in an aggressive manner. Justice Crooks believed it was sometime around the fall of 1999 when Chief Justice Abrahamson was running for re-election for supreme court. Justice Crooks said he was not supporting her re-election at the time, and Justice Prosser was. It was during a meeting with the other Justices that Justice Crooks stated he was not going to support the Chief Justice's re-election. Justice Prosser had stood up and aggressively called him a "viper" during that meeting because he was not supporting the Chief Justice.  Justice Crooks recalled Justice Prosser had walked out of the room, and slammed the door hard enough to cause the glass to vibrate.    Justice Crooks said he had never forgotten that incident, and believes since then things have been either just as aggressive from Justice Prosser, and in some cases they have escalated.

Justice Prosser: "I like to think that I have survived a nuclear firestorm of criticism and attack and smear."

"So as far as I'm concerned if these results hold up I will be the winner. My opponent has the right to call for a recount and have the state pay for that recount if it is within a certain level. But, if you get up over 7,000 votes that's serious business, that's not likely to be overcome."

He was on Fox News talking to Greta Van Susteren last night.

Looking for that, I ran across this Crooks and Liars post, dated April 5th, complaining about Prosser appearing on Greta's show the night before the election. The blogger, John Amato, states a principle of ethics that you know damned well he wouldn't apply generally. Keep in mind that both Prosser and Kloppenburg were invited onto the show, and Kloppenburg declined. Here's Amato:

I think it's inappropriate and unethical for Fox News to have candidates for public office on the night before an election, because it's a clear attempt to manipulate the election results. Prosser gets to throw bricks at Kloppenburg for free -- including defending himself on accusations that he failed to prosecute a child-abusing priest...

Greta brought up the dirty story of Prosser calling the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin court a "bitch' and threatening to "destroy her". Watch how [Greta] phrases the events. Calling the Chief Justice a bitch is not as bad as having somebody snitch on you. ya know. It was all a TRAP to ensnare him! Right.

So... Prosser got a chance to defend himself from the vicious attacks, and no one was there to push back from the attack side, because Kloppenburg didn't have the nerve to enter the scary enemy territory that is the Greta Van Susteren show. And in Amato's view that is "inappropriate and unethical." Ridiculous.

Who said you're going to jail if you don't buy health insurance?

Surely, not anybody on Fox News!

VIDEO: Here's the right video.

Sorry, I had the wrong video before. I did not want to link to the video that way, at TNR, precisely because TNR displayed a Media Matters video without the embedding code. I hate when websites do that. They take video MM collected and use it in a way designed to force the link that I have now given them. I would have been happy to link to them, because that's where I found the video, if they had been properly generous to Media Matters and shown the embedding code. So I went to Media Matters to find the code myself... and found the wrong video, which made me write a post that didn't make a whole lot of sense. You have no idea how irritating that is to me.

ADDED: At that TNR link, Jonathan Chait not only has the video without embedding code, he also says "watch this fantastic video from HuffPo's Ben Craw (via Media Matters)" without any links to Ben Craw or Media Matters. It's easy enough to retaliate against TNR by dispensing with the usual "via" links when blogging about something you've found through them.

Sarah Palin on Hillary Clinton: "She helped shatter glass ceilings left and right."

Link.

Hey, Sarah! The ceiling is the thing there on top. Left and right... we call those things there walls.

ADDED: The link was wrong. AND: Here's the transcript:

VAN SUSTEREN: Have you ever talked to Senator Clinton?

PALIN: Have not, but I'm going to call her tomorrow.

VAN SUSTEREN: You are?

PALIN: Yes.

VAN SUSTEREN: What are you going to tell her?

PALIN: Yes. I'm going to tell her, More power to you. You — I've got a lot of respect for what she has accomplished. And she — you know, I feel like she certainly — having gone before me, she helped shatter glass ceilings left and right. And yes, that one is still there above Hillary, above me, above every woman.

But she certainly cracked it a lot. And I have respect for what she was able to accomplish. Still disagree on a lot of the policies that she would adopt if she were to have been elected, but just understanding what she went through also, and that life-work balance that no doubt she's had to strike all these years. I have a lot of respect for that.

Video here. Go to 4:04.

Greta Van Susteren interviews Sarah Palin.

You can watch it all here. It was a relaxing, friendly interview. I noticed:

1. Palin thinks bloggers probably live in their mother's basement and wear pajamas ... at least the bloggers who said maybe Trig was not her baby.

2. She worked terribly hard concocting some sausage and cheese food for the camera.

3. She thinks well of herself and ill of the media.

4. She had nothing at all to do with any of those clothes you've heard talk about, they were foisted on her, and she prefers her own clothes.

5. In Alaska, they have a diverse economy including cabbages as large as basketballs, and Greta would like you to know that in Wisconsin, the pumpkins are very large. That is, the 2 women got into competitive vegetables.