A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Colin Woodard, writing for The Christian Science Monitor, has an interesting article entitled As a land thaws, so do Greenland’s aspirations for independence. Greenland is a mostly self-ruled colony of Denmark. (CIA World Factbook entry on Greenland). Negotiations are underway between Greenland and Denmark as to their relationship, but those have recently stalled on questions over ownership of the island’s oil and mineral wealth. Global warming is making these resources increasingly accessible and the world market for those resources is increasing. Denmark wants to maintain its current right to 50% of the royalties. Greenland wants a bigger share.

Apparently the United States’ voracious appetite for oil is making Greenland inclined to keep close ties of one sort or another with Denmark:

“As everyone else gets more and more desperate for this commodity, you don’t want to have it and be a very, very small, very, very independent country, very, very far from anything else,” he says. “My personal view is if Greenland finds oil, that is the end of the idea of independence.”

Aqqaluk Lynge, head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council’s Greenland chapter, agrees. “We are afraid that the United States will take over Greenland if the Danes get out,” he says. “If Americans can take Iraq, then why not Greenland?”

Indeed, sources say that even if Greenland becomes independent – an event supporters see as at least a decade away – it will keep very close ties to Denmark, in large part out of fears of US hegemony.
. . .
Svend Auken, a veteran Danish politician and former energy minister, says the Greenlanders are right to be concerned. “In the long run, the ideal would be for them to be recognized as an independent state in the United Nations, but in close contact with Denmark,” retaining the Danish queen, currency, and defense cooperation, he says. Otherwise, “they will be very dependent on the Americans and they know the welfare society and wages wouldn’t be on the same Scandinavian level.”

Paul Krugman had a column in the New York Times entitled Gore Derangement Syndrome speculating on the reasons that Al Gore drives so many on the right to the brink of insanity:

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

Krugman goes on to explain the detrimental effect that accepting certain basic facts about climate change would have on GOP dogma. It seems odd to me that, more and more over the past 10 or 15 years, on the national level, the choice between R & D is becoming basically a choice between faith-based policies and fact-based policies.

Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Courier, is reporting that the Senate Commission on State Tax and Financing Policy will not issue a final recommendation. The panel has been studying the property tax issue all summer. It is not unusual for summer study committees to not issue final recommendations, though perhaps in this case – given the high level of interest – one would be expected. The panel is formally made up of 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats. Even without a formal recommendation, the study still probably had value. A lot of good information came out over the course of the study and that will be useful in analyzing any plans that are proposed this coming session. I wonder if the Republicans may have been afraid of stepping on the toes of Governor Daniels by approving and publicizing their plan before he announced his own or afraid of providing an excuse for Eric Miller to get mad again when the legislators act responsibly and propose a tax plan that might actually work.

Via a lot of places, but I’ll just pick Taking Down Words, the Times of Northwest Indiana tells the tale of Christina Pearson, age 20, who was made to undertake “four trips to two branches and calls to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ Indianapolis headquarters in two days before Christina was able to get her ID card.”

The problem was that Christina has Down Syndrome and, consequently, does not happen to have the items on the list of approved documents the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles requires for a citizen to get a State ID. The communication for the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Dennis Rosenbrough explained that BMV staff is under very strict orders to accept only the approved laundry list of documents before issuing a State ID. Says Rosenbrough, “It’s very important for all states to issue the IDs in a very careful way. This is not unusual to Indiana in any stretch of the imagination.” It is my understanding that the federal government has become involved in issuance of State identification, ostensibly for national security reasons; so, he’s probably right that strict control over issuance of identification is not unique to Indiana. What is unique to Indiana, however, is the requirement that a citizen have one of these strictly controlled pieces of identification as a prerequisite to exercising that citizen’s constitutional right to vote.

Steve Bonney has been awarded the Environmentalist of the Year Award by the Hoosier Environmental Council. Bonney was the lead plaintiff in the law suit opposing the sale of the Toll Road. Obviously the suit was not successful, but I sure appreciate his efforts.

One of the Lafayette area’s biggest festivals is going on this weekend: The Feast of the Hunter’s Moon. It is a celebration of the annual gathering that used to take place between the French and Native Americans at Fort Ouiatenon, about 4 miles southwest of West Lafayette on the Wabash River. The festival began in the late 60s as a class project of a high school history teacher. Since then, it’s grown to an event so big that it has to be scheduled around Purdue’s home football games — the local roads and hotels can’t accommodate both. Today is day two of the the event’s 40th annual occurrence.

The Lafayette Journal and Courier has some coverage and pictures from yesterday. The feast features period re-enactors and food and the like in an effort to take you back to the 18th century and give you an idea of the history of the place.