Writing for the National Journal Magazine, Jonathan Rauch has an interesting analysis of Naomi Cahn and June Carbone’s book Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture.

The book’s take on the cultural divide between Red States and Blue States is summarized as: “In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families.” The expectation in red states is that people will have children early and the parents will grow into their responsibilities. The expectation in blue states is that people will wait to have families until their education and financial situation is more secure.

You can do a good job of predicting how a state will vote in national elections by looking at its population’s average age at first marriage and childbirth.

Six of the seven states with the lowest divorce rates in 2007, and all seven with the lowest teen birthrates in 2006, voted blue in both elections. Six of the seven states with the highest divorce rates in 2007, and five of the seven with the highest teen birthrates, voted red. It’s as if family strictures undermine family structures.

The suggestion is that the blue state approach split from the red state approach with the advent of birth control and the information economy with its influx of women into the workforce. This short-circuited two major factors that contributed to the red state approach: #1 Sex causes babies; and #2 A man could get a low-skill job that paid sufficiently to support a family.

I don’t know if it’s a cause or merely another symptom, but what came to my mind when reading this analysis was “red” versus “blue” is, at root, a difference in attitude about life’s purpose. (And, yes, these are all generalizations.) Is life about self-realization and maximizing personal happiness or is it about fulfilling duties without much regard for whether doing so brings any particular joy to a person’s life.

My upbringing was a mix, I suppose. There was rarely, if ever, any particular discussion about the morality of premarital sex, but it was abundantly clear that having kids out of wedlock was a Bad Idea and, even more, that having kids at the expense of your education was not recommended. So, in that sense, I had a Blue State upbringing. On the other hand, there was not a lot of indication that a job was something primarily intended to bring you personal joy. You should try to do something you liked, of course, but that was somewhat incidental. The point of a job was to make money, and you need money to meet your obligations. Education was of paramount importance in my house, but not necessarily for its own sake. Rather, a better educated person has more varied and lucrative career options. From the time I was six years old or so, I wanted to be a lawyer, which fit the bill nicely. I’m not sure what sort of reception I would have gotten had I declared a desire to get a master’s degree in order to become a poet. (And, now that I’m writing about it, I realize I could be jumbling things up a bit since different parents might have been emphasizing different things.)

Anyway, I tend to think that red state sensibilities regard the blue state tendency to defer responsibility while getting an education and deciding what you want to do with your life as so much mamby-pamby, child coddling hippy bullshit. You learn real wisdom and values through struggle, hard work, and satisfaction of duties. Blue state sensibilities suggest that the red state approach is authoritarian and backward. And, now I’m really stretching and generalizing, but I wonder if a lot of it hinges on how one views God and the afterlife. If this life is all you get, then the red state approach seems horribly misguided – if you don’t enjoy this life, then you’re pretty much wasting everything you’ll ever have.

On the other hand, if this (relatively short) life is merely a proving ground for the eternal afterlife, seeking instant gratification now at the expense of the hereafter is remarkably stupid.

In any event, it sounds like the authors have taken a credible stab at trying to explain why red states vocally put more emphasis on sexual morality and the family as an institution and, yet, blue states pretty routinely have a lower incidence of divorce and teen childbirth.

I am in the debt collection business. About a year ago, I came across a guy who liked to file these pleadings filled with jargon jammed together in a sort of pseudolegal word salad. I pushed along, got my judgment, he went to jail shortly thereafter on an unrelated matter, and I closed my file. I didn’t give him a whole lot of thought; the world has a lot of crazy people, and in my business, I see more than my fair share. But, then, last week, I got more pseudolegal word salad from a different person, and started to investigate.

What I’ve been seeing is apparently called “Redemption” among its practitioners. The “tell” that you’re in this particular rabbit hole is bizarre, completely out of context references to UCC-1 financing statements. If you try to follow explanations of what this is about from proponents, you’ll just get a headache. Mercifully, a guy named Mark Pitcavage distilled the theory – at least what they were saying about 10 years ago. Pitcavage is apparently a historian of sorts with respect to militia and other right wing extremist groups.

The basic idea, so far as there is coherence to it, relies on the dissolution of the Union following Southern secession; creation of a sort of government corporation which, via the 14th Amendment, created ‘citizens’ as a sort of involuntary asset. The Federal Government secretly went bankrupt in 1933 and then pledged the labor of all citizens by depositing their birth certificates with the Department of Commerce.

Fortunately, this servitude (and many other debts!) can be resisted by filing a UCC financing statement as to one’s person and all of one’s possessions. This has something to do with — and honestly, I lose the thread here — the notion that every person is sort of bifurcated into a strawman and a real person. The strawman is the thing that’s enslaved collateral pledged to government servitude. The ‘real person’ is independent of that obligation. By filing the UCC financing statement against the strawman and all of the person’s present and future possessions, the real person becomes a creditor with a security interest in the strawman and possessions. The filing turns you from “U.S. Citizen” to an “American Sovereign of the Republic of the United States.”

Apparently the UCC filing is supposed to create a superior security interest to and probably nullifies debts alleged by your ordinary creditors and even claims by the U.S. Government such as taxes and traffic tickets. Oh, and in any case, currency issued by the U.S. Government isn’t “real money” which matters . . . somehow. Again, I lose the thread, but it has something to do with silver and gold. (And, to give you a glimpse of my rich mental life, this prompted a vision of the snowman from Rudolph as a militia member singing “Silver & Gold.”)

Poking around, I see that this is a matter of at least passing discussion among Ron Paul supporters. Some in that discussion thread were posting links to why this was a load of bunk and, rationally, asking for examples of where this has worked. Ever. Some were responding by dismissing any contradictory source as unreliable. And others were promoting the idea, obviously trying to sell some kind of “system.”

The practical upshot of this seems to be that practitioners will spend money on “redemption systems.” The more nefarious ones will file various kinds of bogus paperwork, liens and IRS notices of various kinds, that harasses government officials and creditors. And the more or less innocent dupes will walk into a shitstorm when they try to talk about this stuff in court.

It highlights an important feature of the law. In a lot of ways, the law is a fiction of consensus. Let’s suppose for a moment that these folks are “right” about what the law “really” is, in some Platonic sense. Being “right” doesn’t matter at all if judges, lawyers, lawmakers, law enforcement officers, and most of your fellow citizens don’t believe you are right. Without that consensus, the law is just words and papers unless and until a sufficient number of people, more or less voluntarily, agree to conform their actions to the words on that paper.

Anyway, with higher levels of economic stress and greater levels of anti-government activity, it will be interesting to see if I encounter more of these kinds of “Redemption” filings.

I saw some talking head on the cable teevee news making a specious comparison between health insurance and auto insurance. If we just treated health insurance more like auto insurance, he said, we’d have more competition in the health insurance market. We’d have little lizards on the television marketing insurance to us at low, low prices.

Problem is that our bodies are not cars and our policy goals with health insurance are different than those for auto insurance. By and large, we’re content to let people suck it up and go without a car if they can’t afford one (or if they can’t afford to insure it). It’s less common for us to tell people to suck it up and die if they can’t afford to keep their bodies in working order.

And that leads to the second point. As a policy matter, I don’t think we’ve ever decided whether we want people insured against accidents or the unexpected or for maintenance (or, probably, a little of both.) If the person doesn’t change the oil and the car breaks down, well that’s just what you get dummy. Change the damn oil. If someone has a lemon of a car – and it’s known to be a lemon – an insurance company isn’t going to insure against repairs. The person is expected to repair it at his or her own expense, buy another car that’s not a money pit, or do without.

You can’t do that with your body. We don’t have a lot of sympathy for the folks who don’t change the oil – they don’t exercise, they eat junk, they smoke, and they sit on the couch. Just like a car, you’re body is going to break down. But, even for these folks, we’re not quite willing to just let them die if they can’t afford the inevitable repairs.

We’re more sympathetic to those who bought a lemon – their bodies develop problems through no real fault of the owner. Some defects are unknown and unknowable in advance, but others can probably be calculated with sufficient information, genetic testing perhaps. If an insurer can determine that a potential insured is probably a lemon in advance, can we really expect them to insure against future maintenance that’s not so much unknown risk as strong probability?

With health insurance, we haven’t really decided whether we are spreading the danger of unknown risks (who is going to get hit by a careless driver? We know it’s somebody, we just don’t know who exactly). Or, are we spreading the cost of health care from the unhealthy to the healthy. Or, are we spreading the cost of health care from the poor to the rich?

The spreading and managing of risks, the impact of which can be estimated at the group level but the individual level of which is unknown, is typically what “insurance” is. The other policy choices – having the healthy subsidize the unhealthy or the rich subsidize the poor strike me as different animals even if they are perfectly valid policies. But, I think we have to know exactly what we’re trying to accomplish before we can design a system that is effective in meeting our goals.

If you can’t drink a lobbyist’s whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don’t belong in politics.—Jesse Unruh (1922-1987), Speaker of California State Assembly

Steve Buyer (IN-04), however, isn’t notable for voting against them. Then again, I suppose, I haven’t heard much about him drinking their whiskey or sleeping with their women, so maybe it’s a package deal. Buyer figured prominently in a USA Today story about lobbyist largesse when it comes to politicians’ pet foundations.

Amgen, a biotech giant, donated generously to the Frontier Foundation, a non-profit agency whose president is, or at least was, Buyer’s daughter. Its secretary/treasurer is his campaign manager. The charity’s mailing address is the same as Buyer’s campaign office. Frontier’s purpose is ostensibly to provide college scholarships. In a stunning coincidence, Buyer is on the House panel that regulates the drug industry.

Buyer, who has worked on health policy in Congress for years, helped kill a provision in 2007 opposed by drug companies and broadcasters that would have imposed a three-year ban on advertising new drugs, congressional records show. Consumer advocates, including the Consumers Union, pushed the measure, arguing that aggressive drug pitches unduly sway patients to seek treatment from drugs before their safety records have been established.

During debate by a Commerce subcommittee, Buyer co-sponsored an amendment that stripped the advertising ban from a larger bill overhauling the Food and Drug Administration.

In an interview, Buyer said “there is no connection” between his legislative actions and donations to the foundation. “I’m not an officer. I’m not a board director,” he said of his role in the non-profit. “Do I help the foundation? Yes, I do. Do I help other charity groups? Yes, I do.”

Correlation does not equal causation, but when you see one, you start looking for the other. We’re at least up to the “appearance of impropriety” level but probably short of proof of any actual impropriety.

A commenter to the related story in the Lafayette Journal & Courier (I’m not sure how to link directly to the story) suggests that the Frontier Foundation does not, in fact, provide much in the way of scholarship support. The Foundation’s 2007 return is here.

If I’m reading the return correctly, and I hasten to add that I’m no accountant, the Foundation used 16% of its assets ($44,000) for exempt charitable purposes — presumably scholarship(s). I was able to obtain some information about the scholarship at nonprofit expert.com:

Frontier Foundation, Inc.
Contact: Stephanie Mattix, Secy.-Treas.
200 N. Main St.
Monticello, IN 47960-2131
Telephone: (574) 870-4565

Scholarship awards to graduating seniors at Indiana high schools with a
2.75 GPA or better, planning to enter college, university, or vocational
school; some giving for human services.

That mailing address, as I mentioned, is the same mailing address as listed for the Buyer for Congress campaign office. Buyer’s previous rhetorical question and answer should, therefore, be amended:

“Do I help provide office space to the foundation? Yes, I do. Do I help provide office space to other charity groups? Yes, I do. [Indiscernible mumbling]”

A 2003 faxed copy of the scholarship application is attached to the 2007 tax return. It indicates that two scholarships would be given out each year, one to a male and one to a female. The scholarship is worth $10,000 if the recipient pledges “to stay in Indiana for one year” and $20,000 if the recipient pledges to stay for two years.

But, Part XV of the return, where I expected to read information about grants and contributions paid during the year, listed none. I presume without knowing, though, that the foundation went ahead and gave out a couple of scholarships. I don’t suppose anyone has seen any Frontier Foundation press releases?

Pharmaceutical companies (and telecomm companies) however, appear very interested in the well being of Indiana high school seniors with a 2.75 gpa or better (for 2007):

Merck $15,000
Astra Zenica $15,000
Amgen $25,000
Eli Lilly $25,000
Healthnet $25,000
Pharma $75,000

T-Mobile $25,000
AT&T $10,000
Nat’l Association of Broadcasters $25,000

Meanwhile, the Foundation had to spend $25,000 on “travel for fundraising.” Now, I think it would be a crying shame if a politician and/or his friends, family, and well-wishers had to travel to some inconvenient place — preferably warm, sunny, and golf course friendly — just to raise money for some C+ high school students.

Steve Buyer is far from the only politician with captive charities to whom lobbyists donate generously. But, he’s my representative, and he figured prominently in the USA Today story. This highlights how difficult it is to shine a spotlight on the cozy relationships between lobbyists and politicians. And, for the record, I don’t want to demonize lobbyists. They have a shady reputation and, to a large extent, a good number of them have earned it. But, they have a legitimate purpose.

Politicians need information about the things they seek to govern. Representatives from the groups who are directly concerned can provide that information. Ideally, all stakeholders are providing the politician with information so the politician can make an informed decision. The problem comes when the politician comes to value the information from one or a limited number of lobbyists based on criteria other than the quality of their information — say because he likes to talk to you about donations to your favorite foundation while you’re on your favorite golf course. When that happens, ordinary citizens, or even honest but disfavored lobbies, start figuring they can’t get a fair shake. That’s not healthy for our democratic institutions.

And now for something completely different. Rep. Buyer’s rant about smoking lettuce (that’s not a typo) is The Daily Show’s Moment of Zen:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Moment of Zen – Smoking Lettuce
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Some fine thoughts about growing up by Harl over at Canthook. (Also, he has a pin-up picture of the recently departed Betty Page; something that’s always welcome in my book.)

I’m not going to make any real sense of them here or now (not sure I could), but I have some thoughts kicking around in my head about choices as we grow up; alternate potential history paths; and the telescoping of our range of potential options as we choose and age. Harl’s post touches on some of that. “As we age, we make choices. We close doors. We eliminate options. It’s called growing up[.]”

I haven’t been thinking about it in a normative sense, really. That is to say, I haven’t been depressed about my choices — in fact, I think I’ve made some good choices in my life that have really done some good things for me — but, rather, I have been watching my kids grow and think about how wide open it all is when we are born. Then we and those around us make choices every step of the way, as we must, and those potential realities become narrower. But, they also become more likely. Initially, the slightest breeze can blow you to one course or another. Later on, it probably takes a gale force wind to knock you off course.

With these sorts of thoughts bouncing around, I read Neal Stephenson’s latest story, “Anathem.” One of the notions considered in the story — and any butchery of this concept should be attributed to my lack of understanding, not the book — is that each potential choice or result where more than one was possible results in a new cosmos where each choice materialized. Our understanding of quantum physics, and the many worlds interpretation, apparently suggests that this is more than just “what if” fantasy.

One interesting (to me) thing that comes out of this sort of thinking is that, even if there is a God, there are certain principles that even He probably could not get around while creating a world — for example that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line or that the pythagorean theorem is going to govern the relative lengths of the legs of a right triangle. In other words, some things are going to be “universal” through all possible worlds.

Like I said, these things are sort of a mish-mash of the kinds of things bouncing around in my head; probably showing how untidy my mind is more than enlightening anyone about anything in particular. But, Harl’s post prompted me into riff mode.

I wrote this for a diary at Daily Kos and am reposting it here. The fact that it was a non-Indiana audience is the reason for all the background material that might seem odd for consumption here.

Lake County Indiana, the second most populous Indiana county in the northwestern corner near Chicago, has been the location of a vigorous legal battle concerning early voting sites. Today, yesterday a trial court authorized early voting (pdf) at additional voting centers in Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond; and ordered that votes cast prior to the decision at these sites be counted.

Indiana allows in-person early voting as a matter of state law at the offices of the clerk of the county’s circuit court. Typically this means at the county seat. In Lake County, this happens to be the city of Crown Point. Indiana law allows county election boards to authorize additional satellite voting sites but only if it is done by unanimous vote. However, there is potential ambiguity in Lake County due to the presence of courts and offices of the circuit court clerk in cities other than Crown Point.

Prior History
Initially only Crown Point had an early voting site in the Lake County government center there. On September 23, the Lake County election board voted, along party lines, to also allow voting in Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago. The Republican members claimed that it required a unanimous decision of the election board to open voting in those offices. The Republicans on the election board who voted against opening up the offices declined to explain their vote but cried foul when the election board moved ahead with the voting sites for the more Democratically inclined Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond.

They filed suit in the county’s superior court (with a Republican friendly judge) when the statute pretty clearly states that the county’s circuit court (with a less Republican friendly judge) has jurisdiction. The superior court issued an order temporarily blocking the voting centers. Since then, the case has bounced from superior court to federal court to the circuit court to the Indiana supreme court.

The Republicans filed suit in the Lake County Superior Court requesting that the voting centers be enjoined. Superior Court judge Calvin Hawkins granted a temporary restraining order preventing the early voting in those largely Democratic cities. The Democrats removed the case to the federal court. In the meantime, a group of Democrats filed their own suit in the Lake County Circuit Court requesting that it enter an order requiring the vote centers to be open.

The federal court kicked the Superior case back down to the Superior judge. The circuit court entered an order requiring the centers to remain open. The superior court declined to intervene until the Indiana Supreme Court could take a look at the case.

The Indiana Supreme Court entered an order consolidating the circuit and superior court cases and putting them both back in the superior court. The Supreme Court specifically did not rule on whether the superior court had jurisdiction or on the merits of the case. It set forth an expedited procedure for the parties to exercise their right to an automatic change of the judge if they so desired. They did so desire, and Judge Diane Kavadias Schneider a Superior Court judge based in Hammond was selected as special judge.

The Opinion

The Indiana Law Blog has posted the opinion allowing voting at the satellite voting centers to continue and declaring that the votes previously cast at the site shall be counted.

The court entered 75 conclusions of fact concerning the operation of the satellite voting centers and concluded generally that it was the policy of Indiana to facilitate the ability of its citizens to vote and that the equities under the standards for granting injunctive relief (likelihood of success on the merits, harm of granting injunctive relief versus harm of denying it) weighed in favor of those seeking to keep the vote centers open.

Relevant statutes interpreted by the court are IC 3-11-10-26, IC 3-11-10-26.3, and IC 3-6-5.2-9

IC 3-11-10-26.3 allows satellite voting sites to be opened upon unanimous vote of the election board. This, the court held, did not happen. However, the court determined that there was ambiguity in IC 3-11-10-26(a)(1) which says:

As an alternative to voting by mail, a voter is entitled to cast an absentee ballot before an absentee voter board . . . in the office of the circuit court clerk (or board of elections and registration in a county subject to IC 3-6-5.2).

Lake County is a county subject to IC 3-6-5.2. However, the court determined that this provision could be interpreted to mean that a Lake County voter was entitled to cast a vote in the office of the circuit court clerk or the board of elections and registration, but not both. Hammond, Gary, and East Chicago are also have court facilities with offices of the clerk of the Lake County Circuit & Superior Courts and that is where the early voting is taking place. Therefore, the voting can be characterized as taking place under IC 3-11-10-26.3(a)(1) at the Circuit Court Clerk’s office and not under IC 3-11-10-26.3(a)(2) concerning satellite voting which requires a unanimous vote of the election board.

The court finds that resolving the ambiguity of the statute in favor of allowing voting in these areas is appropriate in light of Indiana’s policy for encouraging voting access to its citizens, in light of Constitutional considerations based on allowing easy access to voting in Crown Point and not Hammond, East Chicago, and Gary; particularly in light of the disparate income, access to transportation, and racial make up in those areas; and in the absence of any evidence of voter fraud or that the procedures put in place in those areas would lead to such fraud.

I particularly enjoyed this passage:

Curley Plaintiffs’ allegations of “vote dilution” have no merit because the votes of Mr. Curley and Mr. Brown will in no way be “diluted” by the casting of early ballots of other validly registered voters, any more than if they had cast those ballots on election day. The casting of ballots by other lawfully registered voters within the relevant jurisdiction is democracy, not vote dilution.

(emphasis in original).

Demographics
To give some idea of the numbers involved, Lake County, Indiana has a population of about 500,000, making it Indiana’s second largest county (after Marion County (Indianapolis)). Overall, the racial makeup of the county is 66.72% White, 25.33% Black or African American, 0.28% Native American, 0.82% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 4.96% from other races, and 1.85% from two or more races. 12.20% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. However, for Crown Point, with a population of about 20,000, about 95% of the population is white. Meanwhile, Hammond has a population of 85,000 people, of whom 62% are white (non-Hispanic), 21% are Hispanic, and 15% are black. East Chicago has a population of 32,000 people of whom 12% are white (non-Hispanic), 51% Hispanic, and 36% black. Finally, Gary has a population of 102,000 people, of whom 84% are black, 12% are white, and 5% are Hispanic.

Lake County’s 500,000 people represent approximately 8% of Indiana’s total population and, as such, its vote can be expected to play a significant part in determining the fate of Indiana’s 11 electoral votes. In addition, it has a substantial black population, and it is very much in Chicago’s sphere of influence. As such, it can be expected to break heavily for Senator Obama. For low income citizens without good access to transportation, having to travel to Crown Point from one of the other cities represents a significant impediment. Early voting is an important tool to alleviate long lines for an insufficient number of voting machines, a phenomenon which seems to be more pronounced in low income urban areas. Given how close Indiana seems to be in the polls as between Obama and McCain, the availability of early voting in Lake County could very well be a determining factor in how those electoral votes are cast.