The Associated Press is reporting New charges filed against lawmaker’s son. The charges against Rep. Saunders’ son, Andrew, are being amended to include causing a death while driving under the influence of alcohol and reckless homicide. He had been charged last month with a felony count of leaving the scene of a fatal accident.
SB 267 – Agricultural Nuisance Actions
I guess I need to take back my earlier statement about Sen. Jackman’s bills being herniated and accomplishing little. This one is short and makes a substantive change. Engrossed Version, Senate Bill 0267 Agricultural nuisance actions.
This amends a section of the code apparently designed to protect agricultural areas from nuisance suits when suburbia moves into the agricultral area. Under current law, an agricultural or industrial operation is not a nuisance if: 1) it has been in continuous operation for at least a year; 2) there is no significant change in the hours of operation; 3) there is no significant change in the type of operation; and 4) the operation would not have been a nuisance at the time the operation began at the locality.
Senator Jackman’s amendment to the law repeals the requirement that the hours remain substantially the same and defines the “no significant change” requirement so that a change in the size, ownership, or to a different type of agricultural use does not constitute a “significant change”. So, presumably under the new law, converting from a small, locally owned, odor-free agricultural operation in business between 8 and 5 to a huge operation owned by an out of state corporation belching out noxious odors 24 hours per day would not consitute a “significant change”. Nice. Passed 55-40.
Probation
A couple of probation related Senate bills passed the House: Senate Bill 0098 Probation revocation. Permits a judge to order execution of all or part
of a probationer’s suspended sentence if the probationer violates a condition of probation. (Current law only permits the court to order execution of all of the probationer’s suspended sentence.) Passed 95-1.
Meanwhile, SB 101 regarding modification of the terms of probation also passed 95-1. Permits a court to hold a new probation hearing and modify a probationer’s conditions of probation at any time during the probationary period. Requires the court to notify the probationer of the hearing.
For those of you keeping score, Representative Fry (D-Mishawaka) voted “nay” on both of them for some reason.
SB 89 – Agricultural Equipment
Engrossed Version, Senate Bill 0089 Agricultural Equipment. Maybe I’m misremembering and being unfair, but it seems to me that Sen. Jackman’s bills have a tendency to be a hundred sections long and accomplish very little. I think maybe it’s not him but some folks over at one of the agriculture groups for whom he carries water. Thinking back 7 years ago or so, I recall a bill that was drafted up by the group — wish I could remember who it was — but I kept calling over to the contact people I’d been given and telling them the many ways in which their proposed draft sucked and telling them what needed to be changed. (Not dictating policy mind you, just telling them how to clean up the language.) Problem was, they didn’t have me dealing with a decision maker. Just a person who took my call and hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t authorize changes because she didn’t understand the legislation and, from her perspective, it was cast in stone just the way the lobbyists had drafted it.
Anyway, I couldn’t say whether this bill evolved in the same way. It’s long and it’s boring and it tinkers with a lot of definitions for reasons that aren’t obvious to me and it passed the House 98-0.
Bauer’s Back
According to the Indy Star, Rep. Bauer is back after surgery and hospitalization for diverticulosis. Looks like he’s not exactly trying to mend fences:
Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels lashed out at House Democrats following their floor boycott, saying they had “car bombed” Indiana’s drive for growth and reform for political reasons. He mostly blamed Bauer, calling him a “throwback politician” who had put party over jobs and reform.
Daniels has not apologized for the remarks, but Bauer said today that he forgave him anyway.
“It’s a freshman saying that, and I think when you’re a freshman you sometimes overreact,” Bauer said, adding that the prolonged boycott might have been prevented had Daniels talked to Bauer that day.
“But I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a greater understanding of prayer, and it’s good to forgive and I forgive him,” Bauer said. “But I do think that kind of language doesn’t belong in a deliberative setting, because people actually die in car bombs.”
Journal Gazette on Home Rule & More
In an editorial entitled, Desperately seeking home rule, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette complains about the lack of home rule (i.e. local control over local government) in Indiana.
State legislators, in fact, keep local officials on the tightest of leashes, particularly when it comes to financing local government. Counties do have the power to enact a local income tax, for example, but only a maximum of 1 percent, and then by a convoluted voting procedure. When the City Council asked the legislature to give the council the power to add additional members, the state lawmakers refused to even consider the idea because the council had voted “only†6-3 to seek the change.
The point out that legislation introduced by Sen. Kenley would allow counties that must raises taxes the option of raising property or income taxes. They also point out that, in seeking home rule, local politicians are constrained in how vocal they can be precisely because of the short leash they’re straining against. If they are too vocal, the state legislators have the ability to yank their chain, so to speak. The editorial goes on to praise SB 638 that would allow counties to consolidate townships. It also endorses SB 242 as a necessary measure if the legislature insists on passing the Voter ID bill. SB 242 would require all full-serve state license branches to be open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the day before Election Day to issue driver’s licenses and state ID cards. The editorial describes SB 483, the voter ID bill, as “unnecessary legislation meant to solve an unproven problem that will discourage some people from voting.”
Muncie Star Press on Andy Saunders
This is kind of old news, published on March 19, but I missed it. The Muncie Star Press had an article entitled: Rush County judge named to Saunders case. According to the article, the Henry County judges recused themselves because of their relationship with Representative Tom Saunders, father of Andrew Saunders, who is charged with leaving the scene of a hit & run accident that resulted in the death of Thomas Jackman. Rush Circuit Court Judge Barbara Arnold Harcourt will preside.
Other information I had not seen before was in the article.
Jackman, 56 and an avid walker, died Feb. 5 after he was struck by a vehicle while walking in front of the Marsh supermarket on South 14th Street in New Castle. Court reports indicate Jackman’s body was found 47 feet south of the point of impact. He was alive when another motorist noticed him next to the road. He died hours after the crash at an Indianapolis hospital.
Andrew Saunders was at the Elks Lodge in New Castle the evening of Feb. 4, and authorities have reviewed a videotape from the bar that allegedly shows him consuming 10 drinks during his almost-eight-hour stay at the bar. He also ate dinner at the lodge that night.
The Political Blogosphere
For the wonky and the navel gazers, there is The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog (PDF Document) which takes a look at patterns amongst Left & Right bloggers, how they link, who they link to, what they discuss, and what their sources are.
McLaughlin Group images
Some graphics from the McLaughlin Group that really do a good job of summarizing why most Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction:
Bankruptcy & the American Dream
Walter Kirn for the New York Times writes a column entitled Magazine > The Way We Live Now: Broke” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/magazine/27WWLN.html?pagewanted=print&position=”> Broke. He describes the new bankruptcy bill as follows:
The unhappy ending is going bust, of course, and thanks to an almost certain new federal law that the president has vowed to sign, this ending is set to grow unhappier still — at least for a significant percentage of the one million to one and a half million Americans who file for bankruptcy protection every year and will, as early as this autumn, find it much harder to wipe clean their books and get back on their economic feet. For the credit-card issuers and consumer-finance companies whose well-financed lobbyists backed the bill (whose central provision requires bankrupt debtors with incomes exceeding their statewide median incomes to settle for long-term repayment plans), the results should prove more gratifying.
(I disagree with his assessment here. I don’t think this is going to result in much more income for the credit card companies. I suspect the administrative costs of keeping the accounts open through the bankruptcy will eat up most of the blood they are able to squeeze out of the turnips.)
In any event, Mr. Kirn describes the many ways in which Americans are urged to spend, spend, spend, and then, once they reach rock bottom financially, “Suddenly the same figures that urged the debtor to shop until he dropped surround his fallen body like hissing Puritans out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne fable. Garbed in steeple hats and bursting with pointed apothegms about pennies saved and rainy days, they close in with their red-hot branding irons and mark his flesh with a shy scarlet ”B,” after which they type it on a screen connected to every computer in America.”
————–
Meanwhile, Mary Deibel and Lance Gay for the Scripps Howard News Service have an article entitled Studies Find it’s getting harder and harder to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
According to the article:
Trend-watchers looking for changes in family fortunes have turned to the 40-year Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed the finances of more than 5,000 American families and their 65,000 members for three generations. Economists often break down income and wealth into quintiles, or one-fifth blocks of the population.
Following these families, economists Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that income mobility has declined since the 1960s. Families’ ability to move to a higher level declined in the 1980s and 1990s.
Two-wage-earner families were a major source of financial advancement starting in the late 1960s, the researchers found: “While a working wife was not necessary for a family to move ahead, having one definitely helped.â€
. . .
Frank Stafford, a University of Michigan economist who oversees the panel-study program, isn’t surprised by the pessimism expressed toward the future by Scripps poll participants. “Our data show the extended dependency of children into their 30s is a real phenomenon, and these people are reflecting that real concern,†he said.When it comes to moving up the wealth ladder, American University economist Thomas Hertz reports in “Rags, Riches and Race†that opportunity is hard to come by:
– Some 37 percent of children born to the richest 20 percent of panel-study families stayed on top.
– About 42 percent born to the poorest 20 percent wound up at the bottom where they started, and another 24 percent moved up just one rung.
– Only 6 percent of the poorest made it to the top fifth of wealth.
. . .
Despite a culture raised on the American dream, success stories may be more fiction than fact, according to sociologists Robert Perrucci, Earl Wysong and David Wright. Their work on parent-child financial changes since the 1970s concludes that your position on the class scale depends on who you and your family know and where you were educated.“There is not very much class mobility in the United States, and there never has been,†said Wright, a Wichita State University professor. “What mobility has existed has been mostly for the people who are affluent, the people who have resources to become richer.â€
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 653
- 654
- 655
- 656
- 657
- …
- 686
- Next Page »