If the notion of wielding the IRS as a weapon against political enemies or wiretapping the Associated Press does not bother you; if the NSA's pervasive eavesdropping or Barack Obama's lawless presidency does not make you nuts, what happened in Wisconsin will seem like, well, just a walk in the park.
If all that winds your crank, though, and you wonder what America would look like if some liberal Democrats had their way, take a moment and read David French's "Wisconsin's Shame: 'I Thought It Was a Home Invasion," in the National Review.
As I read it, recalling images a few years ago of angry union protestors in the Badger State chanting, "This is what democracy looks like," I laughed aloud. What happened in Wisconsin, more aptly, is what leftist thuggery looks like.
While the National Review did yeoman's work on the story, it mostly has been ignored by the compliantly liberal mainstream media for the past five years. That will change as the presidential contest heats up and they target Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a contender. The Wall Street Journal and a few others, it must be noted, did incredible work on the story, unraveling the excesses, the unfathomable constitutional abuses, peeling back the secrecy that cloaked a lawless state hounding law-abiding American citizens.
Their supposed crimes? A relationship to Walker, advocacy for conservative reform or supporting Wisconsin's Act 10, the "Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill." Its passage curbed public-employee union benefits and changed collective-bargaining rules, triggering tectonic jolts on the left -- along with unsuccessful recall efforts targeting several lawmakers and Walker.
French pieces together the frightening story of an unrestrained government, corrupt police, rubber-stamp judges and partisan prosecutors who, using constitutionally questionable and reprehensible so-called John Doe proceedings -- with their legal roots in Wisconsin territorial law -- could investigate private citizens at will and secretly, based on mere suspicion rather than probable cause.
It is about police smashing their way into homes in the middle of the night, confiscating personal possessions never to return them, and sometimes taunting the terrified families, warning them not to tell anyone. The victims lived under comprehensive secrecy orders.
What happened there was "giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives," French reports. It amounted to "lawfare," a process where legal doctrines and processes are abused to "accomplish through sheer harassment and attrition what can't be accomplished through legitimate ... means ...," he says.
"For dozens of conservatives, the years since Scott Walker's first election as governor of Wisconsin transformed the state — known for pro-football championships, good cheese, and a population with a reputation for being unfailingly polite — into a place where conservatives have faced early-morning raids, multi-year secretive criminal investigations, slanderous and selective leaks to sympathetic media, and intrusive electronic snooping," French writes.
All that finally is heading for a climax in the Wisconsin and U.S. supreme courts, leaving behind heaps of private and political rubble.
Perhaps most striking to me, the sinister abuses of Wisconsin's John Doe law, almost unbelievably, are the grotesque legacy of a political party that has morphed in modern times from producing political giants such as John F. Kennedy to spawning the likes of Barack "If-you-like-your-doctor" Obama.
French's piece is unsettling and well worth a read.
Budget cutting doesn't apply to wildlife
Being only about $18 trillion in the red, it is completely understandable how the federal government could believe it can afford to field a team of hunters and meat salvagers in May to remote Kagalaska Island in the Aleutians.
The idea is for them to whack caribou that reportedly swam the few hundred yards from Adak to Kagalaska and now threaten that Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge island's vegetation.
Nobody, it turns out, is even sure there are caribou there, how many there might be, where they are or how long it will take. All we know is the feds do not want them there and do want to relocate them.
Meanwhile, Gov. Bill Walker -- running a state facing perhaps a $4 billion budget deficit -- is ordering, despite recommendations to the contrary, the capture and relocation of a sow and four cubs in Anchorage rather than knocking them off, the less expensive and more sensible option.
In either instance, it is dough we do not have. Go figure.
Government is government, I suppose, and it never really is broke as long as somebody is working.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communications.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.