Dave Bangert, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has a good column discussing the issue of military hardware in the possession of local police forces. West Lafayette has, most notably, a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle (MRAP).

The column was unsurprisingly prompted by the news and images coming out of Ferguson, MO where the available evidence so far suggests the police are behaving badly. And the images coming out of that community are full of police in riot gear with military grade hardware. But, to date, the primary damage has come from a fairly ordinary sidearm wielded by the police officer who killed Mike Brown.

The use of scary looking tools in Ferguson has done the police more harm than good. So far as I know, the actual uses of force employed by the police in Missouri have been fairly conventional. The deployment of high tech, menacing, military grade (I’m not sure exactly what this term means, but it’s been employed a lot) hardware has been mostly for show. I don’t know that the police have actually used capabilities that wouldn’t have been available to them 35 years ago.

On the other hand, the optically menacing display is feeding the narrative of jack-booted thugs run amok with its center-piece being the shooting of Mike Brown in the manner described by witnesses sympathetic to Brown and hostile to the police. If the Ferguson police have their own, less inflammatory narrative where the shooting was justified, it is being drowned out through a combination of police silence, horrible optics, and probably a healthy dose of good old fashioned being in the wrong.

As for West Lafayette and other communities, I think the relationship between the police and the communities they serve is going to be far more important than the particulars of the hardware available to the police forces. It’s critical to have a police force that is drawn from and active in the community being policed. We are fortunate to have that in Tippecanoe County. St. Louis County and Ferguson, not so much.

Rachel Morello, writing for State Impact Indiana, has a story on the State’s report on school bullying. Consisting of about 9,400 reported incidents:

Data collected by the Indiana Department of Education shows 44 percent of cases reported during the 2013-14 academic year were verbal and 21 percent physical. The rest involved written or electronic threats, as well as social relational issues.

Eric Weddle, writing for the Indianapolis Star, also had a story on the subject.

The data collected is an initial step. It’s tough to make too much of it right now, but the report creates something of a baseline. Lack of any reported bullying might be a red flag that schools are not being observant or forthcoming. Bullying is not easily defined, but the State took a stab at it:

Overt, unwanted, repeated acts or gestures, including verbal or written communications, that create an objectively hostile school environment for targeted students that place them in reasonable fear or harm or affects their mental health or school performance.

I know I had some difficulties as a kid. Being a scrawny, academically oriented boy doesn’t exactly endear you to some of the bigger, less-academically oriented boys who (more often than not) had chaotic home lives to deal with. (Bringing to mind Warren Zevon’s line, “You know, the Sheriff’s got his problems too. He will surely take them out on you.”) And, I recall being on the giving end for at least one kid who became a target among the boys because he seemed to have a much greater affinity for the girls in the class than the boys. (Years later, I sought him out on Facebook and apologized — he didn’t seem to remember me, so there is a good chance my behaving poorly was more of a minor problem for him).

What I don’t get is the hue and cry from parents who apparently think maintaining civility in schools is going to soften up their kids. You want your kid to be tough? Let him treat you the way you’d apparently have him act in school. Maybe let his siblings beat him around if that’s what you’re into. Leave it at home though. Getting my books dumped, getting my arm punched repeatedly, and being harassed for using 5 syllable words didn’t make me a better person. It turned me into a vengeful trial attorney. I think we can all agree we don’t need any more of that.

In no particular order:

I went running with my 10 year old son yesterday. As we were chatting, he mentioned that you shouldn’t trust the news too much because they liked to exaggerate. He was thinking mostly of TV news. I shared with him the notion that, “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.”

CBS is terminating its affiliation with WISH-TV, channel 8 and beginning one with WTTV, channel 4 beginning January 1, 2015. If WISH-TV can reboot Sammy Terry and Cowboy Bob and somehow broadcast all of the Purdue and IU basketball games (including the Farm Bureau tuba kid and Martha the mop lady intros), I think they’d be fine.

Rumor has it that the Indy Star is laying off a lot of people today. My opinion is that the long term future of news organizations is going to be investigating and reporting on local issues. Those are things that can’t effectively be outsourced or replaced otherwise. Going for short term gain by replacing those more expensive functions with cheap content like opinion or news wire reports is going to erode the long term viability of the organization because that stuff is replaceable.

Norm Ornstein, not known as a liberal wishing ill for the Republican Party, thinks the Grand Old Party is in the midst of an existential struggle between bedrock conservatives and radicals. (h/t Sheila Kennedy). It caught my eye because I’ve seen variants of a lot of these make their way into proposed Indiana legislation:

That the Texas Legislature should “ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify” federal laws it doesn’t like.

That when it comes to “unelected bureaucrats” (meaning, Hertzberg notes, almost the entire federal workforce), Congress should “defund and abolish these positions.”

That all federal “enforcement activities” in Texas “must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county.” (That would leave the FBI, air marshals, immigration officials, DEA personnel, and so on subordinate to the Texas versions of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.)

That “the Voting Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized.”

That the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank.

That governments at all levels should “ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or ‘climate justice’ initiatives.”

That “all adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without penalty for refusing a vaccine.

That “no level of government shall regulate either the ownership or possession of firearms.” (Period, no exceptions.)

That seems to be the current struggle going on. Ornstein notes that the Republicans was being fractured from the left at the beginning of the 1900s with guys like Teddy Roosevelt and Robert La Follette pushing Progressive policies, and the Democrats being pulled from the left a little earlier than that with William Jennings Bryan running around with his Cross of Gold speeches and whatnot; and again in the late 60s and early 70s with the McGovern wing briefly taking hold.

Ornstein finds the roots of the Republicans’ current challenge in the strategies and tactics of New Gingrich:

Clinton’s election in 1992 moved the Democrats firmly to the center on previously divisive issues like welfare and crime. But it also provided the impetus for the forces that have led to the current Republican problem. These forces were built in part around insurgent Newt Gingrich’s plans to overturn the Democratic 38-year hegemony in Congress, and in part around a ruthlessly pragmatic decision by GOP leaders and political strategists to hamper the popular Clinton by delegitimizing him and using the post-Watergate flowering of independent counsels to push for multiple crippling investigations of wrongdoing (to be sure, he gave them a little help along the way). No one was more adroit at using ethics investigations to demonize opponents than Newt. In 1994, Gingrich recruited a passel of more radical candidates for Congress, who ran on a path to overturn most of the welfare state and who themselves demonized Congress and Washington. At a time of rising populist anger—and some disillusionment on the left with Clinton—the approach worked like a charm, giving the GOP its first majority in the House in 40 years, and changing the face of Congress for decades to come.

For the current struggle, Ornstein sees a push back against the radicalism but doesn’t foresee the return of the kind of problem-solving conservatism he’d like to see. Instead he says:

It is a measure of the nature of this intra-party struggle that the mainstream is now on the hard right, and that it is close to apostasy to say that Obama is legitimate, that climate change is real, that background checks on guns are desirable, or even that the Common Core is a good idea.

One thing this piece reminds us of, simply by recounting some of the history, is that trajectory lines are not constants. A lot of the current dismay and dissatisfaction about government comes from drawing a line between the way things were and they way they are now and simply projecting that line to the future. But there will be an inflection point. Things change, they always do. Often, but not always, for the better.

Sen. Long has a guest column in the Journal & Courier about his participation in efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution through the untested state convention process rather than through the process initiated by Congress that has been used for every Constitutional amendment to date.

There is a growing national awareness, and corresponding excitement, over a state-led effort to propose amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
. . .
The Founders feared that without this provision, states could never be assured of protection from the threat to their sovereign rights by an over-reaching federal government.

He then raises the specter of trampled upon states rights, a fearful national debt, and waves away fears of a runaway convention.

I suppose that when you’re messing around with the guts and inner workings of the Republic, it’s appropriate to raise fearful images of tyranny. But, for starters, the “trampled upon” states rights are over stated. I haven’t noted Indiana being ground down by the boot heel of Washington. I’ve seen political parties who control state-level government having different policy preferences than political parties who control federal-level government and resulting squabbles from often venal politicians and lobbyists.

Once again, Sen. Long speaks to organizing the process, a vague description of the problem, and an almost non-existent indication as to the solutions he has in mind. Debt’s a problem? Why do I feel like extracting some extra portion of the nation’s GDP to those citizens who have been more successful in appropriating it to themselves in order to pay the nation’s bills isn’t on Sen. Long’s mind?

But, interestingly, I recently found out that Sen. Long’s side of things, Citizens for Self-Governance, isn’t the only state convention organizing effort afoot. There is also the Wolf-PAC effort. Rather than debt, states-rights, and allegations of federal tyranny; the Wolf-PAC is calling for a state led convention in order to pass an amendment that would permit campaign finance regulations and overturn Supreme Court decisions that overturned campaign finance regulations.

Would Long’s group be willing to join forces with Wolf-PAC in order to get the necessary number of states?

In any case, I don’t think any of us should get behind these efforts unless we have a very good idea of the policy solutions the organizers want to propose. I haven’t seen that out of Sen. Long’s group. Give me sample amendment language you anticipate supporting. If it has to be tweaked later, fine. But we shouldn’t be buying a pig-in-a-poke.