A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Underage Drinking

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I saw a headline to the effect that a bunch of Ball State students got arrested for underage drinking. Just wondering if we should dial down the drinking age or if we think that making kids sneak their drinking for awhile builds character somehow.

In my house, growing up, drinking in high school was a hanging offense (unless you asked Mom or Dad and drank with them – a glass of wine at age 16 or 17 was o.k. under direct supervision.) Once you hit college, drinking was pretty well taken for granted. Part of this might have been that we lived right next to the Ohio state line where, when my older brothers and sister turned 18, it was legal.

So, put me in the lower the drinking age to 18 camp.

Running

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Back in February, I hurt my foot running (fracture of a metatarsal, I think – never went to a doctor, so I’m not entirely sure); then, I just got lazy. So, I went 6 months without running a whole lot. The past couple of weeks I’ve been gearing up again; and it’s a little like starting from scratch.

Having reached a certain level of conditioning and lost it is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it’s easier to work through a certain level of exhaustion because, from past experience, you know it will get easier. On the other hand, it’s annoying because you know how much ground you have left to make up.

Today was a good run – I went 4 miles and felt pretty good throughout. I needed that because the previous two runs (a 3 miler yesterday and a 4 miler last Sunday) were awful. I suspected that the heat was mostly to blame, but a couple in a row makes you start to wonder if maybe you’re not further out of shape than you thought. It was about 10 degrees cooler this morning, and I ran faster and with negative splits. So, all is well. Long term, I’m planning on running a half marathon in Las Vegas in December. But, I should probably get something a little sooner scheduled for better motivation. The Indy Monumental is a good one.

But, I’m intrigued by a 15k trail run on the Wabash Heritage Trail — the event also has 5k, half marathon, and marathon distances. Last year, as I recall, I had considered the same event, but one thing or another cropped up; and, as it turned out, the weather was awful. (Parts of the trail can get awfully soupy when it starts to rain.)

Render Unto Caesar

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Ed Brayton passes along a Wall Street Journal report on an extremely generous interpretation of the tax break for parsonages. Apparently a $400,000 second home was tax exempt in the case of Phil Driscoll’s home in Cleveland, Tennessee.

Mr. Driscoll, who won the Tax Court ruling, leads Mighty Horn Ministries of Greensboro, Ga., which had income of more than $6 million from 2005 to 2009, according to tax filings.

Mr. Driscoll turned to the ministry after a popular music career that included playing a trumpet solo on the last “Ed Sullivan Show” in 1971 and composing for Joe Cocker and the band Blood, Sweat and Tears.

In 2005, a federal grand jury accused him of diverting ministry funds for personal expenses. Prosecutors said he used ministry funds from 1996 to 1999 for luxury cars, funeral bills for his mother and other personal items.

The report also mentions the $6.2 million home of Kenneth Copeland.

Philosophically, I question the propriety of offering tax breaks to any religion simply for being a religion. More appropriate would be tax breaks commensurate with the charitable works performed, regardless of whether the works were religiously motivated or otherwise. But, as a practical matter, I can’t get too worked up about what I believe to be the typical situation – church groups of modest means that put aside some property to house their minister who is not lavishly compensated.

But the Copelands and, I suppose, the Driscolls of the world make it clear that such breaks can be abused to where it looks like corrective action is necessary. If the tax code needs to keep the exemption, we should probably further complicate it by specifying one house per congregation and set a dollar limit of some sort.

Hunter: Poverty as Depravity

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Per Hunter, it’s like Jesus said:

[T]he poor are poor because they lack virtue. If they were virtuous, after all, they would not be poor: QED.

[A]ny help to the poor will only coddle them. They should attend church, and feed their souls; if they are virtuous, God will feed them himself. Poor people get divorced, but rich people do not. Poor people are ignorant: if God truly loved them, he would pay for their education (because of course the rest of us should not.) Poor people are not hard workers, unlike the better off: any layabout can pick crops for ten hours a day. Poor people tend to be born out of wedlock, which makes them bastards, which makes them impure.

Above all, poor people are depraved, and should certainly not have their lives made more comfortable and sustainable at our expense. If they cannot feed themselves, they should die. If their children need medical care but the poor have not saved enough money for it, those children should die. If they cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, if they cannot stay in school instead of giving it up in order to earn enough money to eat, if they cannot go to Harvard like the rest of us and educate themselves, damn them, then they are not worth saving. We should tell them to work harder, we should tell them to go to church, and we should tell them to stop getting divorces: after that, our hands are tied.

Clearly, poverty is righteous punishment for immoral behavior, and it would be presumptuous of humans to interfere.

In seriousness, a lot of times, moral behavior is economically advantageous behavior. We should encourage people to be diligent and industrious. But, that’s not the whole story and that’s not the end of the story. Sometimes, people are in financial trouble for reasons that are not immoral. And, just because you can plausibly fix the blame on the person for their own condition, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are justified or even sensible in washing your hands of them.

Taibbi: Obama Administration Selling Out Cheap on Mortgage Crisis Wrongdoing

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Matt Taibbi is reporting that the Obama administration is attempting to negotiate a resolution to potential liability on the part of major banks for their wrongdoing leading up to the mortgage crisis. According to Taibbi, compared to the damage caused, the settlement amount looks to be cheap. Standing in the way is New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman.

This second camp has all gotten together, put their heads together, and cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.

The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.
. . .
But New York’s Schneiderman, who earlier this year launched an investigation into the securitization practices of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other companies, is screwing up this whole arrangement. Until he lies down, the banks don’t have a deal. They need the certainty of having all 50 states and the federal government on board, or else it’s not worth paying anybody off. To quote the immortal Tony Montana, “How do I know you’re the last cop I’m gonna have to grease?” They need all the dirty cops on board, or else the whole enterprise is FUBAR.

Taibbi describes some of the subsidiary things the banks are accused of (e.g. robo-signing perjury, MERS-related tax evasion) but identifies the central crime as dressing up junk bonds as AAA rated investments.

The banks lent money to corrupt companies like Countrywide, who made masses of bad loans and immediately sold them back to the banks. The banks in turn hid the crappiness of these loans via certain poorly-understood nuances in the securitization process – this is almost certainly where Scheniderman’s investigators are looking – before hawking the resultant securities as AAA-rated gold to fools in places like the Florida state pension fund.

Taibbi figures Obama’s motive in this to be fat campaign contributions if he can make the foreclosure mess go away for the banks.

Gannett Loses First Amendment Suit Against Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association

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I don’t have time at the moment to read the entire case, but it might be of interest to some readers of this blog. The Seventh Circuit upheld judgment against Gannett and in favor of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) on a First Amendment Claim.

The WIAA required a license to stream post-season tournament events. Gannett said that, because WIAA is a government entity, a license couldn’t be required because of First Amendment restrictions.

Gannett’s theory that coverage and broadcast are identical is both analytically flawed[.] Simply put, streaming or broadcasting an event is not the same thing as reporting on or describing it. In addition, Gannett overlooks the importance of the distinction between state-as-regulator and state-as- proprietor, which in turn leads it to fail to appreciate the fact that tournament games are a performance product of WIAA that it has the right to control.

Filed Under: Law

Barnes v. State Study Committee

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Today at 1:00 p.m., the General Assembly’s “Barnes v. State” subcommittee will hold a hearing at 1:00 p.m. in room 431 of the State House. The purpose of the committee is to consider a legislative response to the Indiana Supreme Court’s decision in Barnes v. State (pdf) which held, in effect, you can’t use force against a police officer just because you think he is wrongfully entering your property. (See my prior entry here.)

At common law, a person had the right to resist, using reasonable force, the unlawful entry of police into one’s home. The Indiana Supreme Court decided, in effect, times have changed since the old days, and the costs outweigh the benefits in our modern times. In the bad old days, the king’s men could abduct you, hold you indefinitely, and torture you. And, if you did get out of the dungeon, you had no recourse against the king. Today, you have a right to bail, speedy trial, a probable cause hearing, etc., and you can sue the government for false imprisonment and other violations. With those protections, the dangers are reduced, and make the dangers on that side of the scale less than the dangers you get when you allow people in tense situations to make snap legal decisions about whether police action is lawful and use force to resist the police.

Not mentioned in this decision, but quite possibly on the judges’ minds, was the prospect of everyone who used force against the police making up some unlawful entry story in retrospect and making violence against the police a more viable alternative for criminals.

It looks like this is the subcommittee’s second meeting. The first was on June 29. Today, their agenda is to consider draft language and select a next meeting date. If anything, I’d suggest that they authorize resistance where there is imminent risk of significant physical harm. What I’d want to avoid is encouraging criminals to resist now, make up reasons for resisting later; particularly where citizens acting lawfully could gain redress by having a court or some neutral party sort it out later without encouraging violence in what could often be a tense, rapidly developing situation.

More on Your Client is Evil; Pay Me

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So, now we have our first class action on the State Fair accident. Gary Welsh at Advance Indiana has some good thoughts on the press release by Cohen & Mallad.

Cohen & Malad says it is waiving its fees against the state so “more of these limited funds can go towards covering the real economic losses of those affected by this tragedy.” The applicable word here is “affected” as opposed to injured. Yeah, I was deeply affected watching the twin towers live on TV come crashing down after two jet airliners were crashed into them by terrorists, but I didn’t suffer the real injuries of those who lost loved ones or suffered life-threatening injuries from the terrorist attack. By seeking recovery for the thousands of people who merely witnessed the tragic event, this lawsuit actually harms the real victims–the dead, the injured and their surviving loved ones.

The firm seems to be trying to sweep up the litigation in this, not just for those actually, physically injured, but also for those who just, more or less, had a bad day because they saw some bad stuff. What was it, 10 days ago?

The Midwesterner on Anti-Fed Rhetoric

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Richard Longworth, the Midwesterner, takes Ron Paul and Rick Perry to task for their anti-Fed rhetoric. In particular, Mr. Longworth recalls his experience with a mid-size farmer in the 80s. Boom had gone to bust – small farmers without a lot of debt who had second jobs survived as did big farmers growing fat off of subsidies. It was the mid-sized farmer that got crushed. The farmer he recalls in particular was desperate; and therefore susceptible to snake-oil salesmen who preyed on the desperate:

As night fell outside on the leveraged fields, we sat at his kitchen table and he brought out document after document, article after article, learned paper after learned paper, proving that he didn’t owe the money after all, that it was all a Washington scam perpetrated by the Federal Reserve Bank. He would take it to court, he said, and he would win.

Of course, he never had a chance. But he, like many other farmers, had been convinced by far-right “consultants” that the act of Congress which created the Federal Reserve system in 1913 was unconstitutional. According to this reasoning, all the Fed’s actions, including its creation of the U.S. currency, also are unconstitutional. Hence, the dollar is an illegal currency. This farmer’s debts, of course, were denominated in dollars. Therefore, the debts were illegal and didn’t have to be paid. He was in the clear. Or so he thought.

I never heard what happened to him. I assume he lost the farm. Other farmers like him took the constitutional argument to court, and invariably lost. Some of the so-called consultants peddling this snake oil went to prison.

His discussion of these far right “consultants,” such as the Posse Comitatus, and their challenges to government legitimacy reminds me of the folks I ran across pushing the Redemption theory to claim they were not responsible for their debts and that the courts had no jurisdiction over them:

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.

Agree or disagree with policy, but to a greater or lesser extent, this business about the legitimacy of the Fed or (or the IRS or whatever) is ridiculous. Maybe it’s all just good fun for Rick Perry to accuse the Fed of a capital crime for exercising a power specifically granted to it by Congress and to threaten to treat Ben Bernanke roughly down in Texas. But, with people in such dire financial straights, perhaps they won’t recognize that Perry is just a trash talking blowhard. (And, for the sake of “balance,” if any politicians on the Left are questioning the legitimacy of government institutions and trash talking, they should knock it off as well.)

From where I sit, it feels like there is not a huge distance between Ron Paul on the one hand and Posse Comitatus, Sovereign Citizens, and the Redemption Movement on the other side.

Richmond Attempting Spousal Health Insurance Carve Out

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Health insurance and medical care loom so large in our lives today. Maybe I’m just projecting – but I don’t think so; I think a good chunk of the population spends some non-trivial amount of time worrying about this issue. Prices on insurance keep rising; prices on medical care keep rising; and, it seems like – actual health consequences aside – we’re Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; only instead of the pit of hell, it’s financial ruin.

Their foot shall slide in due time. Deuteronomy 32:35.

Anyway, the latest waymarker on this forced march is reflected in the City of Richmond’s efforts to grapple with its budget. Its proposal:

The city of Richmond’s administration plans to carve out spouses from health insurance coverage for city employees for the 2012 budget.

City director of human resources Sue Roberson told the Richmond Common Council that that is the administration’s plan in moving forward with preparation of next year’s budget.

. . .

The plan would combat increases in health insurance costs for the city that are expected to climb by 21 percent in 2012.

Among other things, we need to disassociate health care from employment. It’s bad for employers and, I think, it’s bad for employees. It’s probably bad for the economy as well if, for example, employees that could better use their skills elsewhere or go out on their own as entrepreneurs are discouraged from doing so because they are chained to health care benefits their employers increasingly begrudge them.