Young voters carried more political weight in Wisconsin than in virtually any other state in the Nov. 7 midterm elections.

Voters age 18-29 made up 17% of the Wisconsin electorate - more than anywhere else except Montana (also 17%). Nationally, young voters made up between 12% and 13% of the electorate.

"We lost all these college-town seats," Janesville congressman Paul Ryan said. "The marriage amendment clearly complicated the turnout situation, which did not play to our benefit in many ways."

"Stripped naked in a small prison cell with nothing except a toilet; forced to sleep on a concrete floor or slab; denied any human contact; fed nothing but 'nutri-loaf'; and given just a modicum of toilet paper - four squares - only a few times. Although this might sound like a stay at a Soviet gulag in the 1930s, it is, according to the claims in this case, Wisconsin in 2002."

So begins the decision of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the latest case involving the brutal and irresponsible mistreatment of inmates at Wisconsin's Supermax prison. The decision opens the next chapter in the debate about the Supermax debacle, as it charges the federal district court in Green Bay with the responsibility of determining whether abuses described in a lawsuit against the state occurred.

Once the facts of those abuses have been established - as will likely be the case - then the 7th Circuit has made it clear that it will sanction the state of Wisconsin for treating inmates at the Boscobel prison in a manner that violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Wisconsin officials ought not wait until the state is so sanctioned. It is long past time to end the use of gulag-style isolation and deprivation punishments. The lead should come from Gov. Jim Doyle. And it should come immediately.

No, that’s not a quote from some conservative who thinks our public infrastructure constitutes a “tax hell”. It’s from a Circuit Court ruling about Eighth Amendment violations in Wisconsin’s Supermax prison:

In a stinging 14-page decision, the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals questioned whether the treatment of inmates at the Boscobel prison violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Writing for the three-judge panel, Judge Terence Evans described that treatment in the starkest terms.

“Stripped naked in a small prison cell with nothing except a toilet; forced to sleep on a concrete floor or slab; denied any human contact; fed nothing but ‘nutri-loaf;’ and given just a modicum of toilet papers - four squares - only a few times. Although this might sound like a stay at a Soviet gulag in the 1930s, it is, according to the claims in this case, Wisconsin in 2002,” Evans wrote in the opening paragraph of his decision.

The court did not rule on the facts of the case, sending that portion back to be decided by a federal district court in Green Bay. But the judges said that if those facts are true, then the prison violated inmate Nathan Gillis’ rights.

Some conservatives, upon seeing a file photo of a different part of the prison, decided that the photograph was prima facie evidence against any sort of barbarism or cruelty. See no evil, hear no evil.

Do conservatives really think being stripped naked and forced to wallow in your own feces is a just and legitimate punishment worthy of a liberal democracy? Or do they merely view inmates as somehow less than human, deserving no rights, having no expectation of common decency, and accorded no protections under their Constitution?

If you have to lock some people up for the rest of their lives (and such is an unfortunate fact of life in a civilized society), it costs you nothing to be polite.

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who regularly advises President Bush on Iraq, said today that a full military victory was no longer possible there. He thus joined a growing number of leading conservatives openly challenging the administration’s conduct of the war and positive forecasts for it.

“If you mean, by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” Mr. Kissinger told BBC News.

In Washington, a leading Republican supporter of the war, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said American troops in Iraq were “fighting and dying for a failed policy.”