A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

(H/t Reverent & Free), Leo Morris at Opening Arguments writes:

[I]t does little good to keep going back and playing the “what if” game about Iraq. We are where we are, and it’s easy to see who in the debate has America’s national security in mind and who is mostly interested in something else.

Hogwash. The notion that “we are where we are” (and never mind how we got here) has the potential to do a great deal of harm in the long term. We need to determine exactly what went wrong and why and who is responsible so that false mythologies don’t grow that allow us to get into this mess again. It seems to me that part of the reason we got into Iraq was because people were able to harbor “stabbed in the back” theories of why we lost Viet Nam without getting laughed out of the room. Had we learned, instead, that “if you get in the middle of a civil war, you lose” perhaps we wouldn’t have been so quick to get the middle of a Sunni/Shiite conflict contained only by the brutality of Saddam Hussein. Another lesson would be the seemingly simple lesson of holes: If you find yourself in one, stop digging.

Ken Kusmer, writing for the Associated Press has an article entitled $1M fraud stuns S. Ind. school system. The article says that Switzerland County School Corporation treasurer, Ann Geyman, has been fired for embezzling around a million dollars. The Switzerland County School budget has an annual budget of about $15 million. She apparently told the school attorney and the superintendent that she and her husband had money problems and, in particular, her husband had a gambling problem. Ms. Geyman offered her resignation, but the school board found it more appropriate to reject the resignation and fire her.

Just, for what it’s worth, the Grand Victoria casino in Rising Sun, Indiana is only about 23 miles away from Vevay, IN where the school corporation is based.

Thought I’d post a little primer on what the phrase “Rule of Law” means. It gets bandied about quite a bit but doesn’t get explained very often. I’ll go with the first line of the Wikipedia entry:

The rule of law is the principle that governmental authority is legitimately exercised only in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws adopted and enforced in accordance with established procedure.

I’ll also go ahead and throw in my half-remembered recollection of Alvin Toffler’s description of law as “potential violence.” The government has asserted a monopoly on violence and it has been crystallized into a body of law which dictates when and how that force can be used. That we are a “government of laws, not men” means that we have attempted to create a bulwark against arbitrary and self-serving use of force by individuals.

When you think of laws as “potential violence,” it becomes much clearer why legal authority must only be used in accord with legal constraints. If the wielder of power exceeds those constraints, he or she stops acting as a representative of our government of laws and starts acting as an individual. An individual wielding the potential violence of the United States government, free of legal constraints, is a frightening prospect.

With that in mind, concepts like the Unitary Executive are a little frightening. That particular piece of hogwash posits that Article II of the Constitution puts strict limits on the ability of the Congress to regulate activities of executive branch agencies — the net result of the theory being to put a substantial amount of unregulated “potential violence” into the hands of the individual who happens to occupy the Office of the President at a given time.

From a reader:

As the reader said: Did anyone tell him about the pay cut?

John Cole has a post entitled The Reaction to Immigration which I enjoyed.

I really have not paid too much attention to the immigration bill, and anything with the handprints of Kennedy and Bush is probably something that is flawed in so many ways it is hard to count, but I have to admit, what I am really enjoying is the reaction from the 28%ers. Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett are going to explode any time now, and Michelle Malkin is equally volcanic (really, just go to the top and scroll). Their readers and echo chorus are in a predictable lather, as well.

Bush and the last few congresses have betrayed every principle conservatives ever stood for, and these folks were there with pom-poms the whole ride, degrading the debate and attacking anyone who dared to disagree with Bush. These are the folks who pushed Schiavo, these are the folks who said little to nothing over the hideous bankruptcy bill, these are the folks who told us all to STFU and let Bush lead us in the debacle in Iraq, these are the folks who insist that torture and invasive surveillance are first order conservative principles. I could list 100 more things, but why bother?

And now their ox has been gored, and they are freaking out.

Immigration doesn’t get me too excited, probably because I haven’t been personally been harmed to any great extent and because the immigrants I have met very often seem to be stand up people. If they have violated the law, it strikes me as being closer to the traffic violation end of the spectrum and further from the violent crime side of things. It’s malum prohibitum and not malum in se. It seems like a practical problem with practical, negotiable solutions. But, I suspect the core of the 28% of folks who still support Bush don’t see it this way. I think it’s an emotional issue for them and the fact that they’re being betrayed by their Commander in Chief stings them bitterly.