Gunpowder plot explodes in Madison

Make no mistake that the events of the past few weeks in Madison, Wisconsin will go down in the history books alongside such precursors to great upheavals as the Boston Massacre and Harpers Ferry. Only five weeks after Jared Loughner’s shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others elicited calls for a new civility in American politics, Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators fled Madison, lighting a fuse that now threatens old greasy rags accumulated for decades in the garages, basements, and tool sheds of American civics and government. Rather than work within the procedural rules of Wisconsin’s elected body, these senators...