The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a report about a woman who is accused of welfare fraud. The woman apparently claimed that her children were living with her and, as a result, collected $17,000 in food stamps and Medicaid benefits she wouldn’t have otherwise received.

From my perspective as a debt collector lawyer – not exactly the least biased of perspectives – I think there is a lot of this going on; particularly with disability, TANF, and Section 8 Housing. I have spoken casually to township trustees – responsible for administering local poor relief – and they tend to be aware of fraud for these programs. They can deny the poor relief under their control, but can’t do much with the state administered programs.

Maybe part of the problem is that news websites are running Internet polls as “news.” But, according to a Time Magazine Internet poll run in the wake of Walter Cronkite’s death, Jon Stewart is the most trusted man in news. To the extent it’s accurate – and I wouldn’t be surprised if a scientific poll came back with similar results – I think it’s because Stewart is the nation’s court jester.

The jester has always been the person in the best position to speak truth to power. On the other hand, it bears mentioning that the traditional news media has done a lousy job. The cheerleading during the run up to the Iraq War was an eye-opening period for me. I’m sure I’m missing some fine reporting, but during that period, from the mainstream media, I remember the reporters from Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) and Chris Matthews doing critical reporting on the administration’s claims. The New York Times was prominently running Judith Miller ra-ra pieces and the rest of the news media was dutifully regurgitating administration claims.

The pretense of objectivity has crippled news reporting in a lot of cases – at least in the way it’s mostly practiced these days. It basically consists of quoting people on opposite sides of some arbitrarily chosen point on an issue. “Moon is made of cheese, some say. Others disagree.” The extra digging necessary to provide readers with something approximating the objective truth is harder work, will piss off those on the wrong side of an issue, and won’t sell any more advertising. So, you get superficial coverage of important issues, more coverage of fluff issues, and, ultimately, teleprompter readers who can’t earn the level of respect given to a basic cable comedy channel host.

I’ve posted previously about Roseland which, for me, is Indiana’s archetype for a dysfunctional community. Southport seems to be moving into that territory.

Police are resigning in droves; the mayor is spending thousands on civil litigation; and council members are resisting the mayor in part over a rift about whether to open city meetings with a prayer.

The council apparently isn’t approving payment of claims for legal fees because they don’t like that the mayor is pursuing legal action against a man who intentionally disrupted council business.

Council Harrison went on to explain her disagreement with payment of this claim for legal services rendered and her specific disagreement that city resources were used to pursue action against Southport citizen, Charles Lynch for unreasonable disruption of council meetings, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She further expressed an intention to continue delaying payment for these services ignoring that such delay could lead to increased expenses required to defend against non-payment of services claims.

Lynch, you might recall, is the man who took it upon himself to loudly disrupt the Council’s moment of silence because he apparently figured he should be able to pray out loud any time, anywhere, and particularly at a secular government function.

Lynch was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct Monday after praying aloud during an official “moment of silence’’ during the City Council meeting, bringing to a boiling point an issue that has divided Southport since January. At the onset of the meeting, Mayor Rob Thoman read a statement warning against disorderly conduct and stated that anyone who talked out of turn would be in violation, according to an incident report from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.During a moment of silence, Larry Tunget, wife of former Mayor Nannette Tunget, began reading a prayer out loud.Lynch also began reciting the prayer. When Thoman asked Lynch to be quiet, he began to pray louder, according to the report. Lynch then was asked to leave the meeting. He refused and grabbed a chair, prompting Southport Assistant Chief Mark Myers to forcibly pry Lynch’s hands from the chair, according to the report.Lynch continued to resist Myers, according to the report, and refused to place his hands behind his back. He eventually was removed from the building and handcuffed.

The mayor reportedly isn’t worried about the police resignations because he has more applications on his desk right now. Others don’t seem worried because Marion County is providing police services. I wonder if folks will take a close look at Southport wonder if that particular unit of government is providing them with any indispensable services at all.

Earlier today, the inimitable Mike Kole suggested that “it is inherently unjust to require someone else to pay for another’s expenses- for any reason.” This, in turn, brought to mind my Mom’s timeless admonition that “life isn’t fair.”

So, we’re talking about health care. At the moment, we have a system that flat doesn’t work very well. As a group, we pay more dollars toward health care and get worse outcomes than countries who have taken a more honestly socialized approach to paying for medicine. I’ve said it before, but I’ll mention it again, that health care doesn’t seem to respond well to market forces. For starters, you’re often effectively negotiating with a gun to your head. Even if you could get all the data, assessing it is a specialized skill and average citizens can’t effectively analyze the information for themselves. And, brother, you aren’t getting all the data. Call up your local hospital and ask them if you could, pretty please, get a copy of their charge master. That won’t happen. Lack of transparency, lack of knowledge, and lack of negotiating leverage puts sand in the gears of the market machinery. It’s just not very good at allocating resources efficiently in this situation.

O.k., so the current system sucks. Can’t the government screw it up even worse? All things are possible, but we do trust these people with nuclear weapons, perhaps a little faith is warranted.

Back to Mr. Kole’s proposition – it’s just not fair to take from one person to pay for the needs of another. And here is where my utilitarian impulses really go to war with my libertarian impulses. As I age, for some reason, the utilitarian is winning most of the ties. Utilitarianism, at its root, is the idea that the “right” course of action is that which will result in the greatest good for the greatest number. This isn’t necessarily at odds with libertarianism in a good many situations because, it seems, simply letting people alone to go about their business — so long as it doesn’t break the bones or pick the pockets of someone else — *does* result in the greatest good for the greatest number.

To me, therefore, liberty is a means, not an end in itself. The extreme example is suggesting that the government has no business imposing speed limits or rules about stopping and going on red and green lights respectively. Sometimes liberty has to be restrained in the interest of a well-ordered society in a way that tends to maximize the well-being of its citizens. That said, there is plenty of haggling to be done over the point at which order should yield to liberty. We — at least those of us outside of the private prison industry — don’t want to be a nation of prisoners, no matter how orderly a place that might be.

But what about taking my money to pay for someone else’s health care? Isn’t that unfair? Maybe. But, it’s unfair that some people contract diseases through no fault of their own. It’s unfair that people who live near heavy industrial plants have more respiratory problems than those who do not. It’s unfair that some people are not born to families who can give them educational resources that give them an edge in earning power when they grow up. It’s unfair that some people are born smarter than others. Life is rife with inequities. If we can fix some of them, but choose not to, we’d probably better have a reason. Economic inequality, to an extent, powers our economic engine. People working for their lives and people working to chase dreams of riches can be very industrious; particularly when compared to people who won’t fall behind if they don’t work hard and won’t get ahead if they do work hard. And the industriousness achieved through the carrot of wealth and the stick of poverty tends to result in increased prosperity overall.

I can even see calling for society to turn its back on the obese, diabetic smoker who ignored opportunities and information telling him to eat right, exercise, and stop smoking while choosing not to work and pissing away his resources on cigarettes, booze, and electronics instead of saving or paying for health care. Even if this strawman were representative of those who are sick without health care in this country, we could only save money if we steeled ourselves to simply letting such people die. Letting their health deteriorate with lack of care until they ultimately wandered into an emergency room on death’s door and then providing them with catastrophic health care services would end up being more expensive than providing care at some earlier stage.

In any case, I don’t think this is representative of the kind of people who can’t afford health care. The human body can fail a person in an amazing variety of ways. And I have my suspicion that environmental factors — namely the pollutants we breathe and processed chemicals we eat and drink — are leading to ever more exotic breakdowns. Other countries have shown that these risks can be managed without turning those countries into unlivable hellholes. We’re Americans. Maybe we can get the job done too.

“Back in the 1970s we didn’t have the space shuttle to get all excited about. We had to settle for men walking on the crummy moon.”

It has been 40 years since a graduate from a Tippecanoe County school first walked on the moon. It’s hard to overstate the achievement. Zach Wendling quoted Megan McCardle with a good one: “The most magnificent single feat our little tribe of East African Plains Apes has ever managed.”

It’s a counter-example to those who claim that government can never do anything. Whether it was worth the price is obviously a policy debate reasonable people can have. I think it was. As a people, more than our basic needs for food and shelter are necessary. We need to dream and have aspirations. And getting to the moon was a dilly of an aspiration.

It’s tough for me not to draw parallels between the space program and European voyages of exploration. What I hoped for is that NASA was running a Prince Henry the Navigator kind of operation. At the moment, however, it looks more like Leif Ericson’s flirtations with Vinland.

One question I remember from history class was the one of why the Norse didn’t end up colonizing North America. They simply didn’t have the population, technology, or other resources necessary to sustain the effort. Prince Henry, on the other hand, devoted a substantial amount of resources on behalf of Portugal to explore the African coast and ultimately find a route around Africa to the Pacific. Eventually they had Dias rounding the Cape of Good Hope, da Gama making it to India, and Portugal benefiting from the spice trade for years to come. The European gold rush that followed has shaped the world to this day.

It may be that we don’t have the resources to sustain space exploration. It may be that there is no outer space equivalent to the profits from the spice trade. But, I’ve always been of the mind that we ought to figure out the whole space colonization thing so that, when we inevitably screw up this planet irretrievably, the human race has some options.

The Elkhart Truth has a strong and well written editorial defending its decision to print a wedding announcement for the son of an Elkhart family and another man who were getting married in Iowa. Bilerico documents some of the ensuing batshittery (Mr. Browning’s term) from right wing groups generally, and Rep. Jackie Walroski specifically.

From the Truth editorial:

We published an announcement Sunday that two men, one a former Elkhart resident, plan to marry this month in Iowa. For more than 48 hours, readers barely uttered a word. We received four e-mails — two against, one for and one that misspelled “disgusting” — two phone calls, and no letters to the editor and roughly 10 comments on eTruth.com.

Readers either didn’t notice the announcement among the other engagements Sunday or they made their peace with it. No big deal. That is, until a pair of family advocacy groups, abetted by a local AM radio station, organized a protest against The Truth.

People wrote and called from throughout Indiana. Many expressed their sincere belief that homosexuality is a sin and that marriage is between a man and a woman. Others quoted straight from the Fred Phelps playbook, excoriating “fags” and “perverts.”

The truth seems to be that there isn’t a large group of people who actually oppose gay marriage strongly enough to do anything about it. Plenty of folks have opinions, but, by and large, if their day-to-day lives aren’t affected, it’s not keeping them up at nights. There is, however, a loud and well-organized subset of the population who will raise holy hell over reporting the news of this marriage. After being dormant for a period of time, the machine kicked into gear. I’m happy the Truth didn’t feel the need to buckle under the barrage.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it seems worth repeating. Growing up, I believed myself to be anti-gay. This was nothing more than ignorant bigotry on my part. I hadn’t met anyone I knew to be gay. (I have come to learn that I knew several gay people, as it turns out.) In college, I finally met someone who was openly gay. He seemed like a good guy, and I realized I had no good reason to treat him any differently than anyone else, so my opinions quickly changed.

Similarly, not too long ago, I was uncomfortable with the notion of same-sex marriage for no particularly good reasons. The more it got discussed, the more I recognized that refusing to legalize same-sex marriage is unjustified discrimination.

Unexamined, opposition to same-sex marriage seems reasonable, but as soon as purported justifications are advanced, they seem to fall pretty quickly. “Because the Bible says so” doesn’t carry a lot of water — we eat a lot of shell fish and no longer require menstruating women to go to the edge of the village, among other things. Following any injunctions against homosexuality while rejecting the injunction against shell fish, for example, requires further explanation. The “we want to promote human reproduction” relied upon by the Indiana Supreme Court when upholding the local variation of the “Defense of Marriage Act,” also seems disingenuous. There is no effort at all to limit marriage to fertile heterosexual couples. Etcetera.

To me, therefore, opposition to same-sex marriage seems like an emotional, largely unreasoned, position. I’d be happy to examine any other rationales that are out there, but the two I mentioned are the ones I see most often. Anyway, good on the Elkhart Truth for its stance on wedding announcements.

John Tuohy, writing for the Indy Star, has an article about Lawrence Township Schoolboard member Adam Goldstein’s adventures in law enforcement. Allegations are that, when his wife was being ticketed on the 4th of July for something to do with operation of their boat at Geist Reservoir, he repeatedly told them he was a Fortville police officer.

He told them the same thing at 2:20 a.m. in the morning in the Geist Marina parking lot. He had gone back home, gotten a Fortville uniform and a Crown Vic cruiser. Trouble is, he’s a reserve officer in training. Or at least was. Now, instead of a ticket, he has been fired from whatever status he had with the police force, has the potential to be removed as a school board member, and is being charged with impersonating a public servant, a felony; two counts of drunken driving; misleading a police officer; and public intoxication. Whoops.

The Court of Appeals has issued a decision affirming a trial court’s dismissal of a township assessor’s challenge to the General Assembly’s decision to transfer township assessor duties to the county assessor. I haven’t read the whole thing and most likely won’t unless some paying work requires it, but the meat of the case seems to be the township assessor’s contention that the Indiana Constitution prohibits the elimination of the township assessor position during the assessor’s elected term of office.

Article 6, section 3 provides:

Section 3. Such other county and township officers as may be necessary, shall be elected, or appointed, in such manner as may be prescribed by law.

Article 15, sections 2 and 3 provide:

Section 2. When the duration of any office is not provided for by this Constitution, it may be declared by law; and, if not so declared, such office shall be held during the pleasure of the authority making the appointment. But the General Assembly shall not create any office, the tenure of which shall be longer than four years.

Section 3. Whenever it is provided in this Constitution, or in any law which may be hereafter passed, that any officer, other than a member of the General Assembly, shall hold his office for any given term, the same shall be construed to mean, that such officer shall hold his office for such term, and until his successor shall have been elected and qualified.

The assessor’s argument seems to be that, because township officers are mentioned in the Constitution under Art 6, sec. 3, the General Assembly is prohibited from terminating the position in the middle of an elected term. The Court of Appeals disagreed, stating that because there was no Constitutional obligation to have a township assessor and because the existence of the position was entirely dependent on statutory creation of that office, the General Assembly necessarily had the authority to terminate the position at its discretion.

I’m back in Indiana after a nice week in South Dakota. I highly recommend the Black Hills as a vacation spot – particularly if you have little kids. There is just a ridiculous amount to do. I will, however, have to make better arrangements for the traveling. My natural inclination is just to keep driving and driving and driving until the job is done. But, that takes a toll after 1,000 miles or so. It just seems wrong, somehow, to pay a hotel $100 or so to skip the best driving time of the day – then start driving again during the day when you have to stop every couple of hours for meals and whatnot. But, with the kids to look after, the following day is kind of tough – they are reasonably well rested, and I am not.

On July 7th, I capped off the day ditching the kids and going fishing with my buddy. I have little to no experience fishing, but after this week, I can certainly see the attraction. The nature of the activity has an addictive quality. And, I mean that literally. It gives you variable positive reinforcement which is generally a pretty effective way of inducing behavior.

The beers we were catching were bigger than the fish. We released the fish. The beers weren’t so lucky.

Yesterday, we started the long drive home. We took I-90 from Rapid City to Albert Lea, MN, stopping at Wall Drug, Al’s Oasis, and the Corn Palace along the way.

Wall Drug

Mitchell Corn Palace

By dinner time, in Jackson, Minnesota, we had not quite reached the half way point in the drive.

The kids caught some sleep on the road.

I was not as well rested.

Not sure how much I’ll be posting this week. The family is on a trip to South Dakota. I made them hang around Crawfordsville as I took care of some court hearings and then we made a 17 hour trip from there to Rapid City, South Dakota. Unfortunately, the logistics caused me — once again — to pass by the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD and Wall Drug in the middle of the night. This is about the 3rd time that’s happened. One of these days, I’ll drive South Dakota in the daylight. Maybe on the way home.

But, on the upside, this effectively gives me an extra day of vacation. Because stopping at a hotel in the middle of the trip isn’t just 6 – 8 hours of sleep; it’s also winding down and getting up and getting packed again. Then it’s getting breakfast. Then, it’s getting lunch a few hours later. That probably would have been pleasant except that, as it turns out, Mount Rushmore does its fireworks on July 3, which is one of our goals. So, maybe I can dawdle a little bit on the way back. I’m not sure how many of those all-night road trips I have left in the tank.