As is the case with any extended crisis, the Wisconsin stalemate has begun to create its own vernacular.  Previously familiar terms and phrases are used in foreign contexts. 

Elizabeth Coggs, the new Democratic state representative for the 10th Assembly District in Milwaukee, is against the Voter ID proposal because, she told me today, many poorer residents of her central city district don’t have IDs and would be disenfranchised if one is now required to cast a ballot.

Peter Barca, a usually levelheaded Democrat, articulated what has been wrong with state government.

You will have to forgive me, you see I’m in the ideas business and, as such, I have a fair amount of disdain for politics.

The street that Mr. T. Quiles lives on with his family on the west side of Milwaukee literally dead-ends into the playground of Luther Burbank School.

As the US implements the transformation of General Motors into “Government Motors,” and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) raise government investment and entanglement in the private sector to historic new levels, the question on everyone’s mind is “will it work?”   Oddly enough, clues to the answer of that question may come from an unexpected place:  Iraq.