Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Friday, December 7th, 2018.

I'm John Pudhor, it's the editor of commentary, the 70-odd year old monthly of intellectual analysis, political

property and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective. We invite you to join us at commentarymagazine.com

where we give you a few free reads and ask you to subscribe 1995 for a digital subscription, 2995 for an all-access subscription,

including our beautiful monthly magazine in your mailbox 11 times a year with me as always,

senior editor Abe Greenwald Hyab, Hi John, associate editor Noah Rothman, Hi Noah, Hi John, and social commentary columnist Christine Rosen,

Hi Christine. Hi John. So the two big bubbling political controversies of the week, one involves the shenanigans and

hijinks surrounding the absentee ballots in a congressional race in North Carolina that looks likely,

the results of which look likely to be overturned in a new election started because somebody was essentially collecting absentee ballots

and possibly insufficient numbers fraudulently fooling around with them to make the results of the election suspicious.

And the other, and I think arguably more shockingly annoying and horrifying to journalists and liberals who are going crazy over it,

is the efforts in the state of Wisconsin to limit or change the structure of state government, limiting the powers of the governor

by a Republican legislature because the governorship, the Republicans lost the governorship and a democratic governor is coming in.

And so the Republicans in Madison are working feverishly to limit some aspects of the governor's authority.

And this is seen as a coup and a shocking dereliction of incredibly partisan blah blah blah blah blah.

And the reason I say blah blah blah blah blah, is I now going to turn to our own Noah Rothman who has written one of the best blog posts of the year called the Wisconsin coup that wasn't.

And Noah, please take center stage and tell us what is actually going on here and why there are.

It's either that the people who are going crazy over this do not know their history, even their most recent history or being disingenuous.

Thanks very much for that kind introduction. Yes, so you made a really good point there that there's sort of a conflation of what's happening in North Carolina, which is really genuinely sorted from what we see it looks like actual election fraud has been perpetrated here.

And just something that's a little taughtry, which is the conduct of a lame duck session, a very active lame duck session in Wisconsin and Michigan.

And what we're seeing what is happening is you said is some legislation is being put forward to prohibit, for example, voting and to disallow the governor to ban guns in the capital building or unilaterally withdraw from a state challenge to Obamacare without legislative consent curtailed the powers of the AG stuff like that.

I mean, it's an effort to contain and constrict and the incoming Democratic administration, which is a little.

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