According to this Office of Justice Assistance report, 415,543 arrests were made in 2008, equivalent to roughly 7% of Wisconsin's 5.6 million population. About 100,000 of those arrests were of juveniles.

Based on legislation proposed by Reps. Sheila Harsdorf and Ann Hraychuck, law enforcement officials would be required to collect DNA at every one of these arrests.

Here are some of the crimes that one can be arrested for that Harsdorf and Hraychuck would require DNA collection for: murder, rape, robbery aggravated assault, arson, drug possession and sale.

So far, so good. These all are crimes that you would expect DNA to be useful in helping to convict or exonerate the person arrested.

Here are some more crimes that law enforcement would be required to collect DNA upon arrest: forgery, fraud, vandalism, weapon law violation, gambling, DWI, liquor law violations, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, family offenses, runaways.

Hmm. Your 15 year old gets busted for cutting class or staying out too late and breaking your town's curfew and suddenly the state's collecting her DNA. Or you get into an argument with your neighbor, someone calls the cops, and you're required to provide DNA. Or you're driving home after happy hour and get pulled over for speeding. Suddenly you're being booked for drunk driving and giving a DNA sample.

Setting aside the fact that this is an unnecessary privacy violation, the sheer volume of collecting and managing these samples poses serious financial and staffing challenges.

Van Hollen's DOJ couldn't keep track of all the DNA samples they currently have. How are they going to manage over 400,000 samples? Can the WI crime labs even handle such a volume?

I can see police, DOJ and crime lab budgets growing as I write.

I guess this is good news for those seeking jobs in law enforcement. Not so good news for tax payers.

In one breath Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark is calling for tax cuts and a smaller government and in the next he's calling for the collection of DNA before a person is even charged with a crime.

More from the Illusory Tenant here.

So all those drunk frat boys, high school pickpockets, trespassers and happy hour goers who drive home better make sure they don't get caught. Whether they're guilty or not, their DNA will belong to the government if Sheriff Clark gets his way.

Remember last year when Sheldon Wasserman got called out by Alberta Darling for reneging on Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform "No New Taxes" pledge and everyone was like “Duh, Sheldon, you shouldn’t have signed that stupid P.O.S. pledge in the first place!”?

Thankfully some people, like Gov. Doyle, aren’t insane enough to put their signature next to anything masterminded by Mr. Norquist. Especially when that “thing” is designating Feb. 6 Ronald Reagan Day.

The right wing and the Alliance Defense Fund are back at it. 

Please read this from the Coalition to Protect Women's Health & Safety -- critical information about reproductive freedom and efforts by the right wing to stop women from accessing safe and legal reproductive services:

In the most recent edition of The Milwaukee Magazine, former news director of WTMJ radio in Milwaukee Dan Shelley exposes hyper-right-wing radio host Charlie Sykes (and others like him) for what they are—angry right-wing puppets that “exploit the fears and perceived victimization of…conservative-leaning listeners.”

Shelley explains how these right-wing blowhards use scare tactics, carefully screened phone calls, meticulously framed arguments and talking points from the Bush White House to scapegoat progressives of all stripes. When Ronald Reagan used line item veto, it was a great way to reign in “liberal” spending; when Bill Clinton used it, it was an egregious violation of the separation of powers. Dick Cheney’s top aide Scooter Libby, when convicted of perjury, was a victim of an over-zealous prosecutor. Bill Clinton’s heinous crime that led to his impeachment? Perjury.

In a development that should surprise no one, the lame-duck Bush Administration continues its refusal to comply with Federal records retention laws that require the White House to save and archive all electronic communication. And worst of all, no one knows how many emails are missing, or how we can get them.

A recent inquiry into the archiving process of the National Archives and Records Administration led by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has turned up an incomplete and sorely-lacking plan that raises serious questions about just how many email the Bush Administration is hiding, and the limited avenues the American people have to recovering those messages.

According to the plan, obtained by the Raw Story, the Archives are planning for “50-100 times the volume of electronic materials and formats not previously dealt with.” Fine. We all understand that email and other e-communications have exploded during the Bush years, and such difficulties should be planned for.

But further on in the report, the Archives says it is "confident that it has the ability to ingest the Bush emails, [but] the timing of this ingestion is dependent on the completion of any ongoing restoration project for the MS Exchange emails undertaken by the EOP."

Little known fact: the Bush Administration totally dismantled the Automated Records Management Systems (ARMS) almost IMMEDIATELY after taking office, and implemented a new program utilizing MS Exchange, which has proven to be unreliable as between 5-10 million emails have been deleted from the White House servers. Are we ever going to see those emails or what’s in them? Maybe we’ll get an inside-the-Beltway look at the attorney firing scandal. Or maybe we’ll see who was talking to who about the war in Iraq and Abu Ghraib. Or maybe, if the lamest-duck-we’ve-ever-had Bush Administration have their way, those messages will be lost forever in cyberspace…

The Bush Administration being secretive and unwilling to comply with simple open records requirements? I’m not surprised and you shouldn’t be either.

Unfortunately Wisconsin enshrined discrimination against gay families in its constitution in 2006. But that didn’t stop hundreds of Wisconsinites all across the state from protesting California’s passage of Proposition 8. Over the weekend people in Wisconsin stood in solidarity with others all across the country demanding equality for gay and lesbian families.

While reading the accounts of some of the protests over the weekend, I also came across a very telling piece in the Boston Globe today. Massachusetts is one of the only states in the nation that allows same-sex couples to get married. Although those that oppose equality claimed that the sky would fall and that the institution of marriage would collapse, the Globe piece reports that the very opposite is true.

Even though the State of Massachusetts is often maligned by conservatives for lacking “traditional” values, it has long ranked as having one of the lowest divorce rates in the country. Some 5 years after the state sanctioned gay marriage, it still has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. Not exactly the disaster for marriage that the extreme right chants about every time the subject is broached.

The Globe piece also shows that attitudes of people living in Massachusetts have drastically changed toward gay marriage as they have been exposed to it over the past five years. In 2004 only 42 percent of the people in Massachusetts approved of gay marriage, while today a full 59 percent approve.

Proposition 8 has rightly become a rallying cry for the advocates of full equality. While the fight against such discrimination continues, the State of Massachusetts should also be held up as an example. An example of equality actually enriching the institution of marriage, not tearing it apart. An example of how tolerance can overcome even the most deep seated fear.