I’m paraphrasing, but Governor Daniels has apparently suggested to the Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana that ignoring federal regulations, to the extent possible, can reduce construction costs for I-69.

Speaking Monday to a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana in Evansville, Daniels said the Indiana Department of Transportation estimate released last week could be trimmed by bypassing some federal highway construction standards.

“Throw away the rule book to the extent the feds will let you do it,” Daniels said he told INDOT officials.

Not like those standards are there for a reason or anything.

As Indy Star columnist, Matt Tully, put it when he went to a Hancock County Young Republicans meeting, “is there anyone here not running in the Fifth District?” The Associated Press has an article on John McGoff’s decision to challenge Dan Burton once again in the Republican primary. Despite being outspent 3 to 1, McGoff apparently made a pretty good run of it in 2008. In addition to McGoff, former state Rep. Luke Messer of Shelbyville and Brose McVey, a former sacrificial candidate to Julia Carson in 2002, have announced their intention to run. Also, state representative Mike Murphy looks to be considering a run as well.

Burton, for his part, is allegedly waking up from what must have been an eight-year coma:

Frankly, the new era of big government, which has quickly yoked America with inconceivable debt and higher taxes, is Congressman Burton’s real challenge, and he’ll continue working alongside fellow conservatives to defend taxpayers and revive our nation’s economy[.]

With Obama having visited Notre Dame while a Supreme Court judicial nomination is looming, the subject of abortion has been much in the news. Buzzcut over at Blue County in a Red State has been commenting frequently on our “abortionist in chief.” John Brownson at In the Agora offers unhappy words for Notre Dame as well.

My position is that I don’t support throwing women in jail for not carrying their pregnancy to term or otherwise outlawing or criminalizing abortions because I don’t view the life being carried by the woman as being fully human. Rather, I view it as being potentially human, much like sperm and human eggs, albeit further down the line. As such, the woman’s right to make decisions about her body trump any “right” the potential human might have to grow in her body.

And, let’s be clear, the argument is not whether we “like” abortions or “don’t like” abortions. This isn’t a policy discussion on the desirability of eugenics. Rather, the argument is about whether the government should intervene by outlawing abortions to impose a particular view of when a developing organism becomes endowed with human rights.

As I have posted here in the past and in a comment to one of Buzzcut’s posts:

If someone thinks abortion is murder in the same way killing a 5 year old is murder, then I don’t see how anyone can refrain from stopping that murder, violently if necessary.

If there were people openly and systematically butchering children in elementary schools, I wouldn’t be able to confine my opposition to words and peaceful protest if the government allowed it and did nothing. I would have to attempt to stop the murder with force, if necessary.

And, I think the lack of violent resistance demonstrates quite clearly that, at some level, pro-lifers understand that fetuses, zygotes, and blastocysts are less than fully human.

The board that runs South Bend’s buses has agreed to accept an atheist group’s ad that says “You can be good without God.” A similar ad was rejected for Bloomington’s buses and is the subject of a lawsuit by the ACLU of Indiana.

The ad was rejected by Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation because, as its policy reads, “Statements of position in support of or in opposition to controversial public issues shall not be accepted.”

I didn’t realize it was controversial that one could be good without believing in God. To me, the acid test is whether or not the Bloomington bus system (or any other bus system that faces this advertising decision in the future) permits religious messages at all. My sense is that the real controversy isn’t whether one can be good without God. The real controversy is that atheism has a stigma about it, and allowing them to say something positive about their beliefs is uncomfortable for people. If the Wiccans wanted to advertise about how the earth sustains us or if Satanists wanted to advertise about how one should believe in one’s self, I suspect they would experience similar resistance. It’s not the particular message that’s objectionable — rather it’s the body of beliefs underlying the message.

Robert Draper, writing for GQ Magazine, has a disturbing report about the defense briefings Donald Rumsfeld provided to George Bush. (Slide show with briefings here; Story by Draper here.) The briefings are striking for their slick, triumphant military themed photographs coupled with Bible verses.

Frank Rich has some related commentary in the New York Times.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Rich says that Rumsfeld, not typically given to displays of piety, was cynically playing on Bush’s sense of religion. He was also playing with fire since this would magnify the Muslim world’s sense that Bush was prosecuting a holy war.

Angela Mapes Turner, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, reports that Indiana ranked among the top five states in terms of erroneously denying or terminating food stamp benefits.

The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration’s “negative error rate,” which measures such denials, averaged more than 12 percent during the last fiscal year of October 2007 to September 2008.
. . .
An error rate of slightly more than 12 percent means about 75,000 people could have had their aid improperly denied or terminated. The error rate the previous fiscal year was 5.9 percent.

The worsening error rates coincide with the rollout of the state’s modernized welfare program, which was introduced in 12 counties in October 2007. That month, the error rate was less than 4 percent; at the end of 2007, it was nearly 7 percent.
. . .
Not only were food stamp applications doled out less accurately, but applications were also being processed more slowly.

Let’s say you were a balanced budget minded governor. Let’s further say you were ideologically opposed to or indifferent to a social welfare program you didn’t actually have the legal authority to gut. A bureaucracy that consistently erred in favor of denied or delayed benefits sure would come in handy. As a buddy of mine would put it, “I’m not sayin’ . . .; I’m just sayin’.”

In the past couple of days, the teacher “qualified immunity” law got a lot of press. The idea is that teachers can impose good faith discipline without worry about being sued for their efforts. I mentioned in the past that I didn’t think the bill did much of anything in terms of providing legal protection. It only protects teachers for “reasonable” discipline imposed in good faith. This strikes me as not different from a plain vanilla negligence standard. In other words, the standard hasn’t been raised for holding a teacher liable.

I think I missed the real point of the legislation. It “requires the attorney general and the state superintendent of public instruction to publicize annually to teachers that the attorney general may defend suits against teachers.” I think this is, in reality, a union busting bill. I recall back when Amy was a teacher one of the teachers union’s big selling points was that they would defend the teachers against law suits. This will blunt that selling point. And, I think the big tell is that the attorney general is required to publicize the potential for representation. The attorney general represents government employees in a variety of contexts. I am unaware of a requirement in those contexts that the fact of potential representation be publicized.

Maybe I’m just too cynical.

What I object to more than torture itself is the bureaucracy of torture. You can conjure up scenarios where I’d probably be willing to turn a blind eye to torture or forgive the torturer. But these situations will be extremely rare and far between. I don’t think you could conjure up scenarios where I would agree that torture needs a bureaucracy to support it.

The way it should work is to keep torture illegal and prosecutable. If someone finds themselves in one of those extraordinary situations where it is necessary to save the world or whatever other doomsday scenarios have been painted for its justification, then those brave, patriotic souls should go ahead and do what needs to be done. Then they should explain themselves and count on the safety-valves of the criminal justice system to do their thing — prosecutorial discretion, jury nullification, and/or a pardon. We count on our heroes to risk their lives in defense of the country but think they’ll balk when facing, not death, but potential prosecution?

There is no need to clutter up our anti-torture position with piles of red tape in order to deal with the exceptional, rare circumstances where torture may be justified. The bureaucracy is only necessary if we are seeking to make such procedures routine, unremarkable, and without consequences encouraging practitioners to be as certain as possible that it is necessary. That’s a Bad Idea.