I think this is a positive development, but I also think there will be a backlash as more of this goes on. Robert King has an article in the Indy Star entitled “Religious skeptics believe their voices will be heard.”

The article notes the bus-ad campaign about how it’s possible to be good without God; a northern Indianapolis billboard asking people to “imagine no religion;” and a local conference examining the Bible and Quran with an eye toward showing that they’re works of fiction in many cases.

I don’t think a lot of talk is going to convince anyone to abandon their religion. Faith is emotional, not rational. Contrary evidence can always be swept away with miracles. But that’s not really the point – or shouldn’t be in my opinion. Rather, I think there are a lot of people who don’t act on faith, who don’t really believe. But they have been largely voiceless. There is a taboo in our society against admitting you don’t really believe Jesus was an immortal God-Man or that Mary conceived a child without having sex or some of the other magical events in the Bible. Somehow doing so has been tantamount to proclaiming yourself devious, immoral, and perverse.

The pernicious effect of tying morality to religion in the public mind has been to cede perception of having the moral high ground to charlatans like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, giving people like them more influence over public policy than their ideas really merit on their own. Hopefully the more the non-religious feel comfortable being open about their opinions on issues of faith, the less morality will be conflated with religion. And, if that happens, perhaps those making public policy proposals based on morality will have to show that their proposals are actually moral instead of simply pretending to know the mind of Jesus and telling everyone else to fall in line or go to hell.

What will hurt the non-religious in this respect, however, is a sneering contempt for religion. Many people truly believe in any number of different gods. And history is littered with extraordinary efforts made to honor even more, mostly forgotten gods. People will not suddenly abandon their beliefs because some know-it-all builds a strong, rational case against religion. We can’t really judge people on their beliefs but only on their actions. If a belief in Jesus prompts a person to help the poor and become pillars of the community, then we should admire them whatever their motivation. And if a belief in Jesus prompts a person to be hateful to people who don’t share their beliefs, we should reject them — the same as if the same acts were committed by someone who does not believe in any supernatural beings.

Like I said before (and Zach Wendling was kind enough to notice), “one should never speed through a municipality with no obvious source of income.”

This appears to be especially true in Jericho, Arkansas. This is the small town where the police shot the fire chief in a court room while the chief was contesting some traffic tickets.

“You can’t even get them to answer a call because normally they’re writing tickets,” said Thomas Martin, chief investigator for the Crittenden County Sheriff’s Department. “They’re not providing a service to the citizens.”

Now the police chief has disbanded his force “until things calm down,” a judge has voided all outstanding police-issued citations and sheriff’s deputies are asking where all the money from the tickets went. With 174 residents, the city can keep seven police officers on its rolls but missed payments on police and fire department vehicles and saw its last business close its doors a few weeks ago.
. . .
“You can’t even buy a loaf of bread, but we’ve got seven police officers,” said former resident Larry Harris, who left town because he said the police harassment became unbearable.

Sheriff’s deputies patrolled Jericho until the 1990s, when the city received grant money to start its own police force, Martin said.

Police often camped out in the department’s two cruisers along the highway that runs through town, waiting for drivers who failed to slow down when they reached the 45 mph zone ringing Jericho. Residents say the ticketing got out of hand.

“When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway,” 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

The Sheriff’s Department is trying to figure out where the money went, the Prosecutor has declined to press charges against the officer who shot the fire chief, city hall is closed. I’m getting flashes of Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane.

One thing I like about doing this blog is that it helps me recall what I was thinking about a particular issue over the years. I went back and took a look at my 9/11 posts. None of them is too inspiring:

The 2005 one is the best of the lot. I described how I felt back in 2001. It’s easy to forget the emotion surrounding that period of time – the sorrow, the unity.

I recall the day of the attacks, getting started on work when one of the people who works in my office said what she’d seen on television before heading out. Immediately I was on the Internet, details were sketchy. As the day progressed, rumors were rampant — I recall stories about a car bomb outside the Supreme Court, for example. The local gas station jacked up prices. I remember crying just a little bit on the way home that night. Americans were united. In fact, most of the world was united in condemning the acts. The most touching example, for me, was some African tribe sending us a herd of cattle or somesuch. Clearly, they needed the herd more than we ever could. But, it was a very gracious gesture from those who have very little to America, which has so very much.

But, even by 2005, 9/11 had been so overused that I felt like reaching to make sure I still had my wallet whenever someone invoked the day as a reason for anything.

In 2006, I was apparently on vacation and didn’t write anything. In 2007, I examined the metaphor of “War on Terror.”

A War on al-Qaeda could be won. A War on the nation-states from whence the terrorists came (Saudi Arabia & Egypt, primarily) could be won. A War on those who finance al-Qaeda could be won. But, to purport to have a “war” on terror or terrorism is as foolish as having a “war” on poverty.

And,
2008 was simply a suggestion to commemorate the dead and condemn the religious zealots.

From here on out, it should be interesting to see how commemoration of the day evolves. The Bush administration – in office at the time of the attacks and most shameless in exploiting the tragedy – is gone. Supporters of the Bush administration are much less likely, now that the Obama administration is in place, to use the tragedy as an excuse to blunt criticism of the government and encourage unity under the government despite political differences. For its part, the Obama administration has, so far anyway, left in place more of the legacy of post-9/11 politics than I’m happy with – the Patriot Act is still largely intact; Iraq is still costing lives and money; Guantanamo is still open. (But, it’s moving in a direction I’m more happy with than the Bush administration or a hypothetical McCain administration.)

In four or eight years when the Obama administration leaves, and the day is 12 or 16 years in the past, I suspect the power of the day – regardless of who is in office then – will have lost much of its power.

Whatever it turns into, it won’t be what I’d hoped for shortly after the event. At the time, I had vague notions that the day would unite us as a people and set us on a project that was big and noble and hard. We’d look back upon the moment and know that was when we had been called upon to be great. We would be sad and proud at the same time. I don’t know what that project would have been. Obviously our leaders at the time didn’t have that scope of imagination either.

Craig notices that there may have been some hypocrisy and fear stoking in our recent political past. Perhaps presently as well.

I’m just pissed off that 9/11 has been used so cynically as a symbol and is so inextricably linked in my mind with the obviously stupid road to Iraq that I no longer know how to feel about the event. I want to be filled with righteous indignation against terrorists and sorrow for our people who were murdered. But, I know those were the very sentiments that were exploited for political gain and to take us into Iraq. I suppose a more personal and severe dynamic happens in the personal lives of those who end up emotionally stunted, choosing to feel nothing at all.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com crunched some numbers and has estimated the level of support in Congressional Districts, particularly Blue Dog districts.

For Indiana, the numbers come down like this (bold = Blue Dog districts, italic = districts opposing the public option):

IN-01 (Visclosky): 69% for, 25% against.
IN-02 (Donnelly): 56% for, 35% against.
IN-03 (Souder): 40% for, 49% against.
IN-04 (Buyer): 38% for, 50% against.
IN-05 (Burton): 31% for, 57% against
IN-06 (Pence): 47% for, 43% against
IN-07 (Carson): 83% for, 13% against
IN-08 (Ellsworth): 49% for, 41% against.
IN-09 (Hill): 52% for, 39% against.

David Leonhardt reports on a Census Bureau Report indicating that “the typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago.”

Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.

In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise.
. . .
It’s a combination of two trends. One, economic growth in the current decade has been slower than in any decade since before World War II. Two, inequality has risen sharply, so much of the bounty from our growth has gone to a relatively small slice of the population.

I watched the President’s speech last night, and so I have health care on my mind. One important issue he touched on was insurance security. I’ve heard statistics bandied about that 80% of people are happy with their own insurers. What I haven’t seen is a break down of what segment of those people have actually had to rely on their insurer for coverage of something serious.

The scam, when it’s perpetrated, works something like this: the insurer collects premiums from the “insured” for a good long time. Then, when it’s time to pay up on the policy, the insurer either looks for loopholes in its policy not to cover the particular service or it digs into health insurance applications to find a pre-existing condition — whether related to the current health problem or not — and deny coverage on that basis. In either case, the insurance you were paying for is illusory. Another ploy is to keep demanding more and different paperwork until something gets missed, run out the clock for the “proper” submission of a claim, and then deny coverage on that basis.

A market doesn’t work when the benefits being sold are illusory — the consumer doesn’t know up front, before he or she gets sick, that one insurer is charging $400 per month for insurance that won’t actually pay for any big ticket items while the other is charging $500 per month for insurance that does. The second one is obviously the better value, but the consumer won’t know that until he or she is already sick and it’s too late to bargain for insurance.

One approach, it seems to me, would help in this regard is to require insurers to offer a basket of basic health insurance for a flat price in such a way that potential consumers could make an apples-to-apples comparison where it’s clear what is covered and what is not. They would have to offer this product to all comers or, at the least, they would have – say – 90 days to terminate contracts based on pre-existing conditions. This would combat abuses related to rescinding contracts only after the insured gets sick.

If I had recently held a press conference telling the General Assembly how to do its redistricting job, people would have ignored me — and rightly so. You see, it’s not my job. If I had spent $110,000 of my firm’s money to generate redistricting maps, my law partner would have been pissed. You see, it’s not my job.

But, I am — to my great misfortune, I’m sure — not Todd Rokita. Secretary of State Rokita spent $60,000 in state money to have redistricting maps created and $50,000 on a website. (I think he got taken on the web site design – the site itself didn’t seem to be worth much, let alone $50k and, for what it’s worth, the first link I clicked on, was broken. “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.”)

Mr. Rokita says that he wants to keep politics out of redistricting. An admirable goal, at least in the abstract, but again, “not his job.” IC 4-5 sets forth the general duties of the Secretary of State, though specific duties must be assigned to the office by the General Assembly elsewhere in the Indiana Code, because under the general provisions, the Secretary of State is little more than a notary public and record keeper. This highlights Mr. Rokita’s main difficulty – he is coming to the end of his term and his assigned duties don’t allow him to do a great deal of note that will help him get elected to his next position, whatever it is he plans on running for.

Leadership in the General Assembly seems to agree that Mr. Rokita is doing someone else’s job:

“I don’t think it’s his business,” said Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, R-Fort Wayne. “The secretary of state has overstepped his bounds.”

“Our constitution says this is clearly a legislative function,” said House Minority Leader Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, “and not a function of the secretary of state’s office or any other administrative office.”

I’d be interested to see how the appropriations worked on Mr. Rokita’s project. $110,000 isn’t nothing. Lots of local governments would certainly like to have that amount of money floating around for discretionary projects.

Because Abdul is so shy, retiring, and reticent about self-promotion, I thought I’d give him a little congratulations on his 5 years on the air at WXNT and link to an Indy Star article about his accomplishment.

Politically, I disagree with him as often as not, but I can’t disagree with this bit of philosophy (from the Indy Star article):

Shabazz is a self-described fiscal conservative and social libertarian. He said he speaks from a “thoughtful conservative” point of view, tending to not be so polarizing.

“I prefer you like me because you like me.”

“It’s OK to disagree as long as we are civil to each other,” he said. “Just have a sense of humor, do your homework, be humane, and people have got no place (else) to go.”