Congratulations, Senator Baldwin!

What? Don't be shocked by the title. After all, if the mainstream news can call Scott Walker's victory before people are even finished voting, I should be able to call Tammy Baldwin's before they start voting.

And this is Baldwin's election to lose right now.

Over the past several months, Baldwin has been able to rack up quite the war chest and do nothing but run a couple of positive campaign ads focusing on the important issues.

Meanwhile, the four candidates vying to be the GOP nominee for the senate seat has not been doing much more than showing exactly why they shouldn't be the next senator. They haven't done much more than try to pretend they're more conservative than the others and then sling mud at each other while complaining that the others are being negative. It's gotten to the point where a thinking person can't take any of them seriously.

Let's take a quick look at each of these four stooges:

Mark Neumann

Neumann is one of the two true conservatives. He's greedy and a raging anti-homosexual fascist. He's dumping a lot of his own wealth into the race, which is not inconsiderable, in an effort to buy the seat.

But his expenditures also come with a dwindling return.

He is not running a very effective campaign. For example, he's running an ad where he states he knows that church is important and starts talking about how he met his wife. The gist of the ad is that he is a good anti-abortion type of Christian, but it really comes across as that he was trolling his church for dates when he was ten years old.

Despite flooding the airwaves with ads, it appears that Neumann is coming in a distant third. The reason for this is that he is considered a pariah among many of the tea-bagging conservatives. Neumann's sin was not only running against Scott Walker during the 2010 primary, but also telling the truth about Walker and his inability to lead, which we are seeing today. But for Neumann to dare to even utter this out loud is the equivalent of heresy. He's lucky he doesn't get stoned for having done that.

Some people are still sniveling about Neumann's audacity of trying to do the right thing. Perhaps that's why Neumann is now running an ad with the theme of "Gee, if I only knew how great Walker was, I wouldn't have run."

Note to Mark: Trust your instincts. Walker will be going down and taking a hell of a lot of people with him.

What I find hilarious is while the TEA Party Express has endorsed Neumann and is taking their song and dance around the state, the local teahadists are scrambling to denounce their fellow teabaggers. Apparently even the big money bags that are trying to buy are elections are torn on who to back.

Tommy Thompson

TOMMY!! is the penultimate politician. Thompson will tell you whatever you want to hear, whether it's true or not. Want your taxes cut? Thompson's your man, even though he will raise them. Want spending cuts? Thompson will promise you that, even though he will increase spending. Are you against the Affordable Healthcare Act? So is Tommy, when he's not endorsing it, that is.

Tommy is also very savvy on how to turn a buck. He took his position as former governor and former Secretary of Health and used it to get hooked up with all sorts of companies, and their lobbyists. There's little doubt that one of the reasons Tommy is even running is that he wants to increase his name value and rake in the bucks.

The other reason is, of course, to feed his gargantuan ego with a lot of publicity and attention which he constantly seeks.

Tommy has a pretty decent chance on getting the nomination next week, but not because of who his is or who he claims to be, but just because of name recognition. This is causing some people to have a log of angst and screaming "Caveat emptor!"

Eric Hovde

Eric Hovde has dreams of being the next Ron Johnson, meaning he wants to be another multimillionaire who got all of his money with the help of the government and now wants to use that money to buy his seat in the Senate on the pretense that he wants to end the graft that made him rich. Right.

While that might be how Hovde wants to portray himself, that's not the way he is coming across. His negativity and hypocrisy is turning a lot of people off and what should have been his race to buy is slipping through his fingers.

In reality, Hovde is like one of those spoiled frat boys in a Grade B teen movie who thinks the world owes him just because he's rich and good looking. And just like the movies, it turns out his character is a spoiled little brat that whines like mad when he's asked to take some responsibility for what he's done or hasn't done, like voting.

Hovde, like Thompson and RoJo, only want the seat to help stack the deck even more in his favor so that he can increase his wealth. The poor darling can't be expected to make it on the paltry few millions of dollars he has.

Jeff Fitzgerald

Jeff Fitzgerald is like the lost child in this race. Even though he won the popularity vote in the state GOP convention, he has not been able to parlay that into support or campaign donations.

Bruce Murphy thinks it's because he's not serious about being a candidate for the US Senate, but is rather just setting the stage for him to become a lobbyist, where the pay is much more lucrative.

I think another factor is that the only thing Fitzgerald has got to run on his the way he hitched his wagon to Scott Walker's. His latest ad, which I heard for the first time this week, brags about, among other things, weakening gun laws and the castle doctrine. That might not be something he'd want to run with the week after the horrific mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek. Not only that, but people are starting to finally catch on that the Walker/Fitzgerald plan is not working on bringing jobs to the state. While Walker and his supporters were able to buy the recall election, this shows that the Republican snake oil has a bitter taste to it.

All that Fitzgerald has been able to do with his ill-conceived plan is to make himself completely irrelevant and only remembered as long as the programming integrity of his entry in Ballotpedia remains intact.

With the polarity and in-fighting of this race, whoever the surviving candidate is will be a bloodied, damaged man who already spent millions of his own dollars that they were going to need for the general election. And WISGOP won't see the coming together to support the winner that they will need. The candidates' egos won't allow it, nor will the divisiveness this race as caused among the faithful.

The only way that this person is going to beat Tammy Baldwin is if he has the election bought and/or stolen for him. And even then, I don't think they will be able to overcome the Democrats' backlash as well as their own side's self-anathema.

So, again, congratulations Senator Baldwin!