A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

The Evansville Courier Press sees the need to provide health insurance to children. That’s good. The Evansville Courier Press seems to be holding both the Democrats and the Republicans equally to blame for failure of the SCHIP bill that would have accomplished this goal. That’s stupid. First of all, it needs to be made abundantly clear this wasn’t a Republican and Democratic schism. Plenty of Republicans were in support of this version of the SCHIP bill. The Evansville Courier Press says that the Democrats need to go back to work and prepare a compromise bill. They fail to mention that this was a compromise bill.

This wasn’t R v. D. This was supporters of a children’s health insurance policy versus the President’s men. And The President’s Men haven’t come up with a convincing explanation of why they opposed this version. They complained about the expense, and it’s nice for legislators to be mindful of expenses, but The President’s Men are willing to spend plenty of money for other purposes — Iraq being the waster in chief of American treasure. So they need to explain why Iraq and not children’s health. Congressman Pete Stark used intemperate language to put this choice in harsh relief.

You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.

Rather than address the substance of this statement, the Courier Press instead blanches at its harshness and uses it as an excuse to blame each side equally. This tendency of the news media to cast blame equally is degrading our political discourse more than over the top language like Starks. In the name of objectivity, newspapers have a tendency to say Side A says, “X” and Side B says “Y,” rarely trying to enlighten readers as to where the truth might be. I wouldn’t be surprised one day to see reporting to the effect of Incumbent Smith says the sky is green, Challenger Jones disagrees.

And so, you get milquetoast editorials like the one in the Evansville Courier Press that casts blame equally, regardless of the actual culpability of each side. Now here is an editorial:

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.

Maybe Pete Stark was familiar with the abolitionist editorials of William Lloyd Garrison.

Harper & Dad

Yeah, I know, she’s dressed up like a ladybug. But, shh, don’t tell Harper. She thinks she’s a butterfly and, frankly, she gets a little cranky when someone tries to tell her otherwise.

Dispatches from the Culture War brings us H.L. Mencken’s Creed. I’d never seen this before, but it’s fairly powerful, imho:

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty…

I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech…

I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

I believe in the reality of progress.

I – But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

Obviously Mencken could go too far at times. As the Clarence Darrow said to the Mencken character in Inherit the Wind:

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

David Kennedy, reviews Paul Krugman’s book, “The Conscience of a Liberal” and doesn’t think much of it, but he concedes a few of Krugman’s points.

In our time, Krugman argues, the malefactors of megawealth have triumphed. He recites the now-familiar data that the wealthiest 0.01 percent of Americans are seven times richer than they were three decades ago, while the inflation-adjusted income of most American households has barely nudged upward. Chief executives who typically earned 30 times more than their average employee in the 1970s now take home more than 300 times as much. The American plutocracy, Krugman concludes, “have become rich enough to buy themselves a party” — and readers are left in no doubt which party we’re talking about.

But Krugman the anti-economist does not believe that growing economic inequality incubated modern political conservatism. In his view, the “arrow of causation” points the other way: political change, cunningly engineered by “radicals of the right,” has spawned egregious economic disparity, as well as a toxic level of partisanship. Ever the iconoclast, Krugman says “this strongly suggests that institutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income — and that the impersonal market forces matter less — than Economics 101 might lead you to believe.” In short, it’s the politics, stupid.

. . .

That assorted wing nuts have pretty much managed to hijack the Republican Party in recent years is scarcely in doubt. That the market is at least occasionally fallible is also not at issue. Nor is it deniable that the New Deal rendered the lives of millions of Americans more secure, and that they have become markedly less so in recent decades. A tidal wave of risk-shifting — from defined-benefit to defined-contribution retirement plans, and from employer-financed to individually-paid health care insurance, to cite but two examples — has set millions of American families anxiously adrift on a sea of uncertainty. Krugman’s chapter on the imperative need for health care reform is the best in this book, a rueful reminder of the kind of skilled and accessible economic analysis of which he is capable, and how little of it is on display here.

Burning a CIA operative to get revenge against her husband and to try to avoid political accountability for lies leading up to war has negative real-world consequences. Who knew?

CBS News has confirmed, in advance of a 60 Minutes interview with outed CIA agent Valerie Plame to be run this Sunday, that Plame “was involved in operations to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.”

“Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons,” Plame told 60 Minutes. Plame also indicated that her outing in 2003 had caused grave damage to CIA operations, saying, “All the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases” to see where she had gone and who she had met with.

The economy is booming, or so Bush administration apologists have told me, and yet, according to AP business writer, Anne D’Innocenzio, living paycheck-to-paycheck is getting harder. At the end of the day (or end of the week, I suppose), it doesn’t matter how well the economy is doing if your paycheck buys less than it used to.

The calculus of living paycheck to paycheck in America is getting harder. What used to last four days might last half that long now. Pay the gas bill, but skip breakfast. Eat less for lunch so the kids can have a healthy dinner.

Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It’s starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc.

Food pantries, which distribute foodstuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing a surge of new people seeking their help.

Good for my collection business, I suppose. Sucks for America though.