Judge Louis Rosenberg of the Marion Circuit Court entered an order reversing the Indiana Recount Commission, remanding it to the Recount Commission with instructions for them to declare Charlie White ineligible and to certify Vop Osili as the Secretary of State by virtue of him being the second highest vote recipient and only eligible candidate.

I literally have not read anything but the last paragraph of the decision because of work blowing up today.

The Evansville Press has an editorial entitled Non-solution enacted for a non-problem chiding the U.S. House for tackling a non-issue. It seems to be a variation on the saying that, “where there is no solution, there is no problem.”

Give the House Republicans a non-issue, a bill that is going nowhere and that addresses a nonexistent problem and you’ve got a tough bunch of lawmakers on your hands.

Wasting the taxpayers’ money and their own time, the House recently voted 268-to-150 to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating farm dust. The weakness in the GOP scheme is that the EPA has no such regulations, is not proposing any such rules and has no plans to.

Apparently this did provide some rich opportunity for a lot of chest thumping and anti-EPA bloviating. Nothing like creating a strawman and burning him down. Kind of like the War on the War on Christmas.

Rep. Diana DeGette had a good comment:

“This session of Congress has felt to many of us like a trip into Alice’s Wonderland,” Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said during closing debate. “While our nation struggles with a devastating economy, we do nothing about jobs or getting Americans back to work. Instead, we repeatedly fall down the rabbit hole of extreme legislation, and now with this [bill] … it seems that we’re even having tea with the Cheshire cat.

“To paraphrase our friend the Cheshire Cat, ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.’ … [The bill] is a mad solution to an imaginary problem,” she added.

Apparently the House Republicans rejected an amendment that would require a report on how many jobs were created by this legislation.

Cory Schouten, writing for the Indiana Business Journal, has an eye opening article about the long history of sweetheart dealings between well connected and recently indicted real estate broker John Bales.

He kept making fat commissions on real estate deals for the state despite concerns being raised by managerial level state employees who seem to have recognized that the state’s best interests were not being served. Bales was not shy about bludgeoning people with his connections in the Governor’s office, the state Republican party, or the law firm of Barnes & Thornburg that seems get mentioned in these stories more than statistical probability would suggest.

A lot of the people who let a guy like Bales to operate will be the same ones advocating “right to work” because of a professed love of neutral market forces and a distaste for special privileges when enjoyed by unions. But, the true test of their philosophy is how they react when it’s a friend of a friend making big money, rubbing elbows with the right people at cocktail parties, and spreading around campaign contributions.

Pam Tharp, writing for the Richmond Palladium Item has an article about legislation being introduced by Sen. Leising (SB 83) and, apparently, Sen. Skinner. It mandates cursive writing as part of the school curriculum. The interests in having cursive taught by schools that is so compelling it justifies Indianapolis imposing the will of the State government?

Kids need to know how to write in cursive to read the original Constitution. Cursive is “just as important as mathematics and science.” State intervention is necessary to prevent local budgetary concerns causing a cut in cursive education in favor of science and math.

If that’s the best they can come up with by way of explanation, I’m more convinced than ever that cursive is as timeless as buggy driving.

Innocent until proven guilty and all of that, but I’m always happy to see crony dealings like this one prosecuted. It’s easy to believe that working hard and playing by the rules is for chumps. And, it may be. Yet, because I keep going the chump route, it’s nice to see the connected types take a bath every once in awhile.

In this case, the allegations are that a broker got a deal with the State to find space in Elkhart County for a DCS office. The broker, in connection with a couple of attorneys and companies they controlled, obtained a building, then leased it to the State. The plan was then to flip the building, increased in value because of the long term lease with the State; though that part of the plan seems to have run into some problems.

The contract with the State said that the broker and his attorney weren’t supposed to have any interest in the leased property — for pretty obvious conflict of interest reasons. The other attorney seems to have taken money from the broker to purchase the building in question.

The part where I guess we might be waiting for another shoe to drop is that former Marion County Prosecutor — friend of Ponzi schemer Tim Durham and criminal defense attorney for our forgetful Secretary of State — was given a 50% ownership stake in the building without putting up any money of his own as a “finder’s fee” for alerting the other attorney to the fact that DCS was seeking rental space. Brizzi was not one of the people named in the recent indictment.

Fred Clark at the Slacktivist has a good post about Rick Perry’s horrible ad and what it does to public perception of evangelicals.

The short version is that Perry offers lies about the current state of religion in the country (e.g. students are, in fact, able to pray and celebrate Christmas at school — Perry falsely says that they cannot.) Perry does this in order to appeal to the persecution complex among a certain set of religious primary voters. Fred Clark acknowledges that evangelicals aren’t monolithic and aren’t all like Rick Perry – but that they advance the perception that evangelicals are like Perry when he pretends to speak for that set of believers and is not rejected in any public way.

Indiana was admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816; 195 years ago today. By way of comparison, Dick Lugar has been the State’s senator for only about 17% of that time. 17%, of course, is the amount by which the sales tax was raised in 2008. From the 2008 gubernatorial campaign and the fledgling non-campaign Presidential campaign, we learned that taxes were not raised under Daniels watch. By extension, we know that Sen. Lugar hasn’t really been Senator at all. My point? You got me. I don’t have one. Happy birthday, Indiana!

Very strong opinion column by Ed Eiler, the retiring superintendent of the Lafayette School Corporation. The column is not so easily dismissed by his association with public schools because he has already announced his retirement.

He makes a number of important points about vouchers. Among them:

#Students and parents already have choices:

The issue isn’t about choice. The issue is about whether taxpayer dollars should pay for the choice parents make when the choice is made for a religious purpose or on the pretext of a religious purpose to avoid association with children of different socio-economic status or race and done to seek an enclave where beliefs are not questioned, challenged or tested, merely talked about and not practiced.

#This is not about healthy, strengthening competition because that kind of competition is not possible in the absence of a level playing field:

As to competition, education is a blend of collaboration, cooperation and healthy competition. Competition can be destructive, corrupting and harmful, especially if the competition is unfair. If every school was compelled to accept every child regardless of academic ability, socio-economic status, race, ability to speak English or religion, public schools would welcome the competition.

#He also discusses how the money supporting the PR efforts of the voucher system is tied to a financial incentive to make more money due to the tax credits associated with charter schools. I confess to ignorance about this financial angle and didn’t entirely follow.

The entire column is worth reading.

Responding to Sheila Kennedy’s blog post entitled, “Why Do Gun Rights Trump All Other Rights?” I left a comment that I thought I’d go ahead and re-post here:

I think the reasoning usually advanced, when proponents bother explaining at all, is that the Second Amendment is the right upon which all the rest depend — sort of a revenge fantasy where the government is intent on taking away free speech rights, the right to trial by jury, and all the rest; but then a brave group of citizens throws off the yoke of tyranny with their trusty firearms.

But, given the seeming lack of interest in, say, defending the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures; I have a hard time seeing Second Amendment triumphalists rousing themselves to protect too many of the other rights.

For many, I think it’s an extension of the culture war mixed in with some gender issues. Guns (at least the right kinds of guns) are manlier, more rural, speak of a simpler time – they are John Wayne and NASCAR. (Not sure what Second Amendment enthusiasts have to say about gangsta rappers with their AKs.)

In any case, Amendments like the First, Fourth, and Sixth are dependent on words and lawyers and craftiness you know in your heart are wrong but can’t quite articulate why.

Good article from Philip Brasher, writing for the Gannett News Service, on the issue of federal farm subsidies. Apparently the farm bill – or at least key parts of it — were going to get stuffed into the “supercommittee” process and hidden from the light of day.

The most vocal critics of government spending in Congress are often right on board with the farm bill. It has money flowing to the right kinds of people – big agribusiness and rural voters who tend to vote for Republicans. The farm bill is a good way to determine who is actually against big government and government spending; and whose opposition to government spending is merely pretext for opposing government money going to the wrong sorts of people.

As to the supercommittee process, the article reports:

Committee leaders and many farm groups had embraced the idea of enacting the bill as part of the supercommittee process because that would have protected the agricultural programs from attack by urban lawmakers, who think farm bills unfairly promote industrial-scale agriculture, and tea party conservatives, who don’t like farm subsidies in general. Under rules for the supercommittee process, the House and Senate would have had to vote on any plan the committee recommended without being able to make any changes, including in the farm provisions.
. . .
Leaders of the National Farmers Union and the American Farm Bureau Federation, groups that often diverge on farm policy, say it will be a good idea for lawmakers to rethink key portions of the bill that the committee leaders were writing. Farm Bureau, the more market-oriented of the two organizations, doesn’t like a proposed revenue-protection program that corn, wheat and soybean farmers wanted. The program removes so much risk from planting decisions that it will discourage growers from responding to market signals, the Farm Bureau says. Under the way that program was designed, growers could get a government check anytime their revenue falls more than 13 percent below their average, shielding producers from drops in commodity prices and crop yields.

The National Farmers Union, meanwhile, is unhappy with the way an optional price-guarantee program was designed. The price guarantees are skewed in favor of rice growers and other farmers who backed the program. Rice growers would get payments when the price of their crop is under $13.98 per hundred pounds, a level that exceeds forecast market prices for the next several years. For many other commodities, the guarantees were set well under market prices. The imbalance was intentional; rice growers don’t believe they would benefit from the revenue-based subsidies.