The Hoosier Pundit has a good run down of the maneuvering in the Attorney General’s race following Steve Carter’s sudden announcement that he wasn’t going to stand for re-election.

I just wanted to mention the existence of the Hoosier Environmental Council and its website

Vision
We aim to set a new path for Indiana, where the people of our state embrace practices and policies that dramatically reduce the footprint of industry, commerce and agriculture on the environment. Following this path, Indiana will ascend to new heights in our public health, economic well-being, and in our preservation of nature for generations to come.

Mission
We aim to address Indiana’s environmental challenges through education and advocacy. We are guided by science, inspired by the ties between nature and humanity, and led to success through partnerships.

About Us

The Hoosier Environmental Council, founded in 1983, is Indiana`s largest state-wide environmental organization. HEC has been a leader in bringing visibility to such serious environmental challenges as mercury pollution and power plant waste. Over its twenty-five years, HEC has also succeeded in translating its educational efforts into environmental gains, with forest, groundwater and lake protection as part of its legacy.

I’m glad there are folks out there fighting the good fight. Industry brings immediate, obvious gain — even more so when industry is able to externalize some of its costs, such as pollution. The value of environmental preservation is more subtle. Industry, profitable as it can be, will always have its champions. Fighting for the environment is not as immediately lucrative, so it takes a little more to get people to advocate on behalf of the benefits we all enjoy by not having our environment destroyed. When both sides are evenly matched, perhaps we can develop policies that strike a good balance.

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When it comes to reporting on foreign affairs, the Christian Science Monitor routinely provides excellent coverage. Today, Sam Dagher has an article entitled “Sadr City braces for fresh street battles.”

The usual teeming traffic in Sadr City, Baghdad’s Shiite enclave, vanished Wednesday. Buses stopped running and shops closed. Only the intrepid motorist or occasional scurrying resident ventured out on streets patrolled by Moqtada al-Sadr’s militiamen and marked by burning tires and roadblocks.

Residents and Mahdi Army militants alike appeared to be bracing for a coming battle, guarding against US and Iraqi forces advancing to stop the rockets allegedly fired from Sadr City that hit the Green Zone again Wednesday for the third day since Sunday.

Although it’s in Basra, the oil-rich southern city, where the Mahdi Army and Iraqi forces were locked in a bitter fight for a second day, killing at least 55, many in Baghdad fear that clash will trigger a new battle in Mr. Sadr’s Baghdad stronghold. Already there were reports by US-funded Al Hurra TV, citing hospital sources, that at least 20 people have been killed and 140 wounded in sporadic clashes in Sadr City since Tuesday.

Now, in a place where the US has done battle many times before, a sense of siege and helplessness has replaced some of the flickers of optimism that emerged over the past few months as a result of improved security made possible by the US surge and the Mahdi Army’s seven-month cease-fire, which now looks to be shattered.

Yesterday, Daghr had an article entitled “Across Iraq, battles erupt with Mahdi Army.” Part of the success attributed here in the U.S. to “The Surge” (i.e. troop increases) were attributable to the cooperation of Moqtada al-Sadr and his “Mahdi Army.” Unfortunately, al-Sadr is apparently an unreliable person with whom to do business. A lot of spokespeople for the U.S. government are blaming the recent uprising on Iran. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has squandered its credibility and is known to have some elements itching for a fight with Iran. So, even if they’re being honest this time, it will be tough to get the public in the U.S. up for escalating war efforts to include Iran.

The Iraqi government apparently initiated an operation in Basra, ostensibly to crack down on lawless elements in the city. If I’m following the article correctly, al Sadr is claiming that the crack down is an effort by some of his Shiite rivals in the Iraqi government to neutralize his power. In response, al Sadr and his supporters threatened a campaign of “protests and civil disobedience” throughout the country.

Sadr’s influence was felt throughout Baghdad Tuesday, highlighting the risk that the fight in Basra may spread to the capital, home to a large segment of his supporters. On Tuesday, witnesses reported that gun battles broke out in the capital’s Sadr City district between the militia and rivals from the Badr Organization, which is part of Maliki’s ruling Shiite coalition.
. . .
On Tuesday, all shops in the Mahdi Army stronghold neighborhoods – Bayiaa, Iskan, Shuala, and Washash – were shuttered. Leaflets saying “No, no to America” were plastered on each storefront. Anti-American banners hung right next to Iraqi government checkpoints.

Several people interviewed in the Amel neighborhood said they were forced by militiamen to return home when they tried to go to work this morning. “This is anarchy,” says Ali al-Yasseri.

An earlier article by Daghr on March 19 reported on the potential unraveling of the cease fire with the Mahdi Army.

Underscoring the fissures within the Mahdi Army, Mr. Mahamadawi says the confusion about the freeze arose on March 8 when Sadr, who last appeared in public in May 2007, responded in a statement to a question from one of his followers about the legitimacy of self-defense by saying: “I sympathize with those killed while defending themselves and their loved ones during [government] raids.”

My sense is that the security situation in Iraq is more complicated than pre-World War I Europe with its interlocking self-defense agreements that led to a world conflagration after an arch-duke was assassinated by a Bosnian terrorist — a bunch of people who don’t trust each other, more or less spoiling for a fight at any provocation.

Robert Reich has a column in The American Prospect arguing that “tough love” from the government is only for the little people. When it looked like the mortgage failures were mostly just grinding up middle and low income borrowers, the Bush administration basically said, “tough, you shouldn’t have signed up for the loan if you couldn’t afford it.”

Letting children bear the consequences of their risky behavior – what some parents call “tough love” — is equally applicable adults, and conservatives have made something of a fetish out of it.

Months ago, when the president announced a paltry plan to help out a few of the millions of homeowners who got caught in the sub-prime loan mess, he reiterated the credo: “It’s not government’s job to bail out … those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could not afford.” Days ago, when he endorsed the giant Fed bailout of Wall Street, the president signaled it was government’s job to bail out big bankers who had made decisions to buy and sell risky securities they knew (or should have known) they could not afford.

It’s true that people tend to be less cautious when they know they’ll be bailed out. Economists call this “moral hazard.” But even when they’re being reasonably careful, people cannot always assess risks accurately. Many of the mostly poor home buyers who got into trouble did NOT in fact know they couldn’t afford the mortgage payments they were signing on to. The banks and mortgage lenders that pulled out all the stops to persuade them to the contrary were in a far better position to know; after all, they had lots of experience at this game. So did the credit-rating agencies that gave these loans solid credit ratings, as did the financiers who bundled them with less-risky loans and sold them to other financial institutions, and the hedge fund managers who quietly tucked them into their portfolios.

When it looked like a bunch of Wall Street types were about to take it in the shorts, however, it was time for a bailout; something that’s certainly not unique in this country: See, e.g., Chrysler-1979, Savings & Loan-1989; LTCM-1998; Airlines-2001. I like to call it socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

Government exists to soften the edges of a world that, in its absence, would lead to lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. There is a good argument to be made that these sorts of bailouts, even if they do directly benefit the well-to-do, prevent market collapses that would ultimately be disastrous for people who are less well-off. But, if we accept this argument for policy purposes, at the least we should disregard those who get sanctimonious about the unalloyed glories of the free market and the infallibility of the invisible hand.

There is a quote from Lincoln about Democracy that is so dead-on that I’m surprised that I had not heard it before or hadn’t remembered it if I had:

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

It is the duty of a democracy’s citizens to refuse enslavement and mastery alike. Oddly, enslavement seems to be tougher to resist. All too many are fearful enough to sacrifice liberty in a quest for the illusion of security.

Contrary to some who have said that a pharmacist couldn’t or wouldn’t refuse to fill birth control prescriptions on religious grounds, apparently it can and does happen. In Washington State, a pharmacist was sanctioned in just such a case.

According to court records, Noesen was working as a substitute pharmacist at a Menomonie Kmart in 2002 when a University of Wisconsin-Stout student sought to refill her birth control prescription.

Noesen testified he advised the woman of his objection to the use of contraception and refused to fill the prescription or tell her how or where she could get it refilled.

The woman was able to get the prescription filled two days later but missed the first dose of the medication, court records said. She filed a complaint with the state Department of Regulation and Licensing.

Noesen, 34, of St. Paul, Minn., told regulators that he is a devout Roman Catholic and refused to refill the prescription or release it to another pharmacy because he didn’t want to commit a sin by “impairing the fertility of a human being.”

. . .

The Pharmacy Examining Board ruled in 2005 that Noesen failed to carry out his professional responsibility to get the woman’s prescription to someone else if he wouldn’t fill it himself.

The board reprimanded Noesen and ordered him to attend ethics classes. He was allowed to keep his license as long as he informs all future employers in writing that he won’t dispense birth control pills and outlines steps he will take to make sure a patient has access to medication.

. . .

A pharmacy should accommodate its pharmacists’ religious beliefs but it can’t leave “a patient high and dry,” Dupuis said.

Noesen said the discipline “critically devastated” his business as a traveling pharmacist because some pharmacies refused to hire him and he lost his liability insurance, court records said.

Seems about right. Disclose the information up front and let the invisible hand of the market determine the value for a pharmacist who will not fill prescriptions for birth control. I might go a bit further and require the pharmacy to put up a sign disclosing the hours during which it will not have a pharmacist on duty who will fill birth control prescriptions. Earlier this year, Senator Drozda proposed legislation that would have protected pharmacists like Noesen from adverse consequences for refusing to fill such a prescription.

In a sign that global warming is increasing, Connecticut has been used as the metric for describing the size of an ice shelf collapse in Antarctica. (h/t Oliver Willis)

Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about the size of Connecticut is “hanging by a thread,” the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday, blaming global warming.

“We are in for a lot more events like this,” said professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins ice shelf disintegrating on February 28, when he was looking at NASA satellite images.

In my experience, Rhode Island has traditionally been the global warming ice shelf metric.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to make light of global warming. It’s a huge issue about which the U.S., by and large, has its collective head stuck in the sand. Just noting the tendency of journalists to use small New England states in these stories.

I was amused by this editorial from the Evansville Courier Press that ran a few days ago. They took a courageous stance against Osama bin Laden, showing a devil-may-care attitude toward the powerful pro-bin Laden segment of their readership. They taunt him for being attention starved and offer him some advice: “Come down out of the mountains and show yourself. We can guarantee you the kind of reception you deserve.”

Tough guys. I’m all for killing bin Laden, given the chance, but this editorial is vaguely ridiculous. I can just imagine bin Laden, in his cave, getting his copy of the Evansville paper. “Oh, my; they are challenging my manhood. I will show them my toughness by doing exactly as they say.” Bin Laden will then be captured, and we’ll have the scribes of southwestern Indiana to thank.

Jim Shella posts “Questions for a Monday.” He has questions, I have answers:

Why is John McGoff attacking Dan Burton in his first ads? Shouldn’t he establish what he stands for first? Or, does he just stand for Anyone but Dan?

Because Dan’s negatives are so negative that even the most positive positives can’t compete. Lead with your strongest argument. With a primary challenge to a long time incumbent, I think you’re stuck with the fact that the race is going to be a referendum on the incumbent. If Dan’s adequate, voters are going to keep him, regardless of the qualities of the other guy. But, he’s not, so maybe they won’t.

Where’s Barack Obama?
St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.

-Will Sean Astin do a better job selling Hillary Clinton to Indiana voters than he did in a failed attempt at selling tax credits for filmmakers to the General Assembly?
No. But, I love Samwise anyway.

Remember when gubernatorial candidates were the biggest thing at Dyngus Day?
This and all questions/reports about Dyngus Day are just an excuse to have fun saying “Dyngus Day.”

Not too long ago, I had a friend, a long-time Christian, express some bewilderment about what bunnies and eggs had to do with Easter. My understanding is that it had to do with how Christianity came up through the ranks from a fringe, primarily Jewish, sect to one of the world’s major religions. By arranging major religious festivals in a way that was similar to those of other religions, it made attracting converts easier. Two of the most significant pagan times of the year are the winter solstice — the shortest day of the year, after which the days begin to get longer — and the vernal equinox — when spring begins and life begins to return after winter. Christmas and Easter line up roughly with these events.

Rabbits and eggs are fertility symbols; symbols of spring and the return of life. Here is a nice summary of some of the pagan roots of Easter. According to that site, the rites connected with the death and resurrection of the gods Tammuz, Osiris, and Adonis are the forerunners of the “Christian” Easter.

Spread the good news.