On a Saturday morning in late January, Russ Feingold descended a tight path in the hilly forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park to look for gorillas. The former Democratic senator from Wisconsin wore a long-sleeved safari shirt over a blue polo, a coiled bracelet to repel mosquitos, a surgical mask to protect the gorillas from human germs and two pairs of socks, with his zip-off cargo pants tucked into the outer pair to keep out ants. Aside from the cool touch of Ray-Ban aviators, it was the sort of outfit Chevy Chase might have sported if Hollywood had ever gotten around to making National Lampoon’s African Vacation.

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Feingold is 61 now, and his hair has grayed a touch since 2010, when, after 18 years in the Senate, he was beaten in his reelection campaign by Ron Johnson, a millionaire Tea Partier. Feingold had lost some weight on this trip, his seventh to the region since last June, when Secretary of State John Kerry named him U.S. special envoy to the Great Lakes region and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—or “SEGL” as his staff call him, pronouncing it like “Siegel.” (“It’s perfect—a Jewish name,” Feingold said.) His mission: to end the civil war that has long engulfed the region.

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And in taking on eastern Congo, one of the most violent places on Earth, Feingold could hardly have chosen a more dead-end assignment. The conflict there dates back to 1994, when Hutu génocidaires fleeing Rwanda set up camps across the border in what was then Zaire. Rwanda then led an invasion that ended Congolese President Mobutu Sese Seko’s 31 years of dictatorial rule but also turned the newly renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo into a nightmarish battleground of foreign armies and militant groups. Although Congo’s civil war formally ended in 2003, armed rebellion has continued ever since, especially in the two eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country is the U.N.’s largest and most expensive, employing 20,000 troops at a cost of $1.5 billion a year.One 2010 study estimated that 48 women were raped in Congo every hour, and a U.N. official called it “the rape capital of the world.” Estimates of the conflict’s death toll range in the millions.

Feingold’s assignment came just as a new group of rebels, trained and equipped by Rwanda, was gaining strength in the east and even threatening to take Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. Since last summer, Feingold has undertaken a dizzying round of talks in at least eight different African capitals, cajoling leaders face to face, negotiating with skittish rebels late into the night and strategizing with fellow diplomats, all in a very uphill effort to stop a long-running conflict in a region littered with failed peace deals. “Without a doubt,” he said over coffee a few hours after the gorilla trek, “this is one of the favorite things I’ve ever done in my life.”

Wis. Gov. Scott Walker used a controversial veto tool to deprive some public sector workers of their pensions. When he signed the budget bill into law on June 26, Walker altered a section that dealt with how public employees are vested into the state retirement system. By crossing out 116 consecutive words and then drastically altering the meaning of the subsequent clause, Walker made it so that state employees are no longer vested in the pension system until they have worked for the state for five years, instead of being partially vested immediately. This kind of veto in Wisconsin has been called the “Vanna White Veto” or the “Frankenstein Veto.”

The voters in Wisconsin approved an amendment to the state’s constitution back in 2009 to prevent abuses by governors wielding a wild veto pen. It prohibited governors from “creating a new sentence by combining parts of two or more sentences” of any bill or from creating a new word by “rejecting individual letters in the words” of the bill.

But look what Walker did to Section 1156k of the budget bill. That section originally set up five tiers of partial vesting for employees working for the state for less than five years. But with creative deletions, Walker got rid of all five tiers.

The final clause originally read: “If the participant has at least 4 years of creditable service, but less than 5 years of creditable service, the annuity amount under par. (e) shall be reduced by 10 percent.” Walker changed that to read: “If the participant has less than 5 years of creditable service, the annuity amount under par. (e) shall be 0.”

Federal safety regulators received more than 260 complaints over the last 11 years about General Motors vehicles that suddenly turned off while being driven, but they declined to investigate the problem, which G.M. now says is linked to 13 deaths and requires the recall of more than 1.6 million cars worldwide.

A New York Times analysis of consumer complaints submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that since February 2003 it received an average of two complaints a month about potentially dangerous shutdowns, but it repeatedly responded that there was not enough evidence of a problem to warrant a safety investigation. The complaints — the most recent of which was filed on Thursday — involved six G.M. models that the automaker is now recalling because of defective ignition switches that can shut off engines and power systems and disable air bags. G.M. said the first recall notices were mailed on Friday to the owners of the vehicles.

Many of the complaints detailed frightening scenes in which moving cars suddenly stalled at high speeds, on highways, in the middle of city traffic, and while crossing railroad tracks. A number of the complaints warned of catastrophic consequences if something was not done. “When the vehicle shuts down, it gives no warning, it just does it,” wrote one driver of a 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt. “I drive my car to and from work praying that it won’t shut down on me while on the freeway.”

Another driver wrote of the same model: “Engine stops while driving — cannot steer nor brake so controlling the car to a safe stop is very dangerous.”

In an October 2010 email from Scott Walker's campaign manager, Keith Gilkes, to Kelly Rindfleish, Gilkes praised then Milwaukee Health and Human Services Director Geri Lyday, saying, "I feel like she is getting more done in a couple of months than what Corey Hoze and Lisa Marks couldn’t get done at all."

Corey Hoze and Lisa Marks were the previous directors of Milwaukee HHS and were central figugres in the sexual assault scandal at Milwaukee County Mental Health (MCMH) Complex. The two faced criticism for many of the decisions that led up to the sexual assaults, with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel pointing-out that neither Hoze or Marks had mental health or hospital adminstration backgrounds before Walker appointed them to lead the HHS.

Despite calling Hoze and Marks incompetant, however, Gilkes as Governor Walker's Chief of Staff, appointed Hoze to the board that oversees the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) and Marks as Administrator to the DOA's Division of Housing. In the announcement of the appointement of Hoze, Walker described Hoze as "exceptionally qualified."

Since its inception, the newly created WEDC, for which Hoze continues to serve as chair of the Contracts Committee, has been widely criticized for gross mismanagement. WISN reported that a "blistering" audit of WEDC by the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau said, "Gov. Scott Walker's premier job creation agency repeatedly broke state law in its first year of operation, failed to adequately track money it awarded for economic development projects and sometimes gave money to ineligible recipients."

YES, WE HAVE NO BAD ACTORS: Conservative speakers let slip coordination between Walker campaign & third-party issue groups

"How did we do it in Wisconsin?” (Priebus) asked Saturday morning. “The simplest way I can tell you is we had total and complete unity between the state party, quite frankly, Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party groups, the Grandsons of Liberty. The (Glenn Beck-instigated) 9/12ers were involved. It was a total and complete agreement that nobody cared who got the credit, that everyone was going to run down the tracks together.”

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2. More important, Americans For Prosperity is among groups believed to be the subject of the current John Doe investigation into whether such clearly political organizations illegally coordinated with the Walker campaign. Based on the Salon report, it sure sounds like Walker and the rest of that "intrepid group" of activists were pretty friendly -- same-room, same-meeting friendly! According to Priebus, all conservative interests were in "total and complete agreement." He would know, since he took a hands-on role in Wisconsin election campaigning. Moreover, according to Priebus all the groups ran "down the tracks together." That's for sure; they railroaded opponents at high speed, using tremendous amounts of expensive advertising.

Remember, "independent" third-party "educational" groups are not supposed to go near the campaigns of candidates for public office or strategize with them, especially candidates they indirectly support through their "non-campaign" advertising. Yeah, if I were a John Doe investigator, I'd be grabbing a complete set of the CPAC forum transcripts.