(H/t Advance Indiana) Evan Bayh’s wife has enriched the family for years by serving on corporate boards. As Gary Welsh points out, it seems unlikely at best that she would have been such a popular board member if her husband wasn’t Senator Bayh.

The Indianapolis Star points out a direct and probably irreconcilable conflict on one of the more critical matters that will be coming before the United States Senate.

Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh’s vote could prove critical as Congress debates health-care reform later this year. Yet, Bayh has a clear personal interest in the financial stability of one of the key players in that debate — Indianapolis-based WellPoint, the nation’s largest commercial health insurer.

Bayh’s ties to WellPoint could hardly be more direct for a sitting senator. His wife, Susan, as a member of the company’s board of directors, earned compensation valued at $327,000 from WellPoint last year.

The Bayhs deny that a little thing like $327k could cause a conflict, apparently because the folks at Wellpoint don’t speak directly to the Senator. I like to think I’m a high-minded individual, but three hundred and twenty seven thousand non-verbal cues might tend to influence my thinking a little bit. And, if we get to the appearance of impropriety standard, Bayh basically has to avoid ever doing anything beneficial for the insurance industry.

It is not uncommon on Memorial Day to hear that we should remember those who fought and died to keep us free. Of course, it is entirely appropriate to honor those men and women. But, limiting those to be honored in this fashion seems unduly restrictive. As Harl Delos points out, wars aren’t fought by those who start them. So, in my mind, we should also honor those who did not fight and die to keep us free, but for the hubris or mistakes of our leaders. In a way, laying down your life for your country in a misguided cause is a greater sacrifice than doing so to protect your country. For those soldiers, love of country is unconditional, and we should remember and thank them for their service and sacrifice as well.

National Review has an article about Governor Daniels. I can’t get to the article, so I’m not linking to it. But, the cover has a picture of him with “The Blade” underneath. How does he keep that moniker after his performance at the Office of Management and Budget for the Bush administration while that administration was squandering the Clinton era surplus and ballooning the deficit horribly? According to Wikipedia, during his 2001-2003 tenure, a $236 billion surplus turned into a $400 billion deficit. Sure, his personal preferences ultimately wouldn’t carry the day if George W. Bush, his boss, wanted something else. But, even if he was some sort of tragic figure, heroically struggling against forces larger than himself, at the least he should still have to lose his macho nickname by way of sacrifice and be called “The Paper Tiger” or something that recognizes his ineffectiveness at that post.

Doghouse Riley shreds an abortion column by William Saletan in a post I highly recommend. He points out that one aspect to the abortion debate is that the premises of the “pro-life” crowd are rarely challenged. In fact, that’s so much the case, that I have a hard time finding a label other than “pro-life” that doesn’t sound odd for lack of use: “anti-reproductive freedom, pro-state-control-of-the-uterus crowd.”

And, he leaves us with a fact about which I had not been aware:

Here’s an experiment for you. Go among the Holiest of Holies and the Demiest of Demagogues and try to tell them that Abortion was perfectly legal, openly practiced, even advertised, until after the Civil War. See what diversity of opinion you get then. Were you aware of that yourself?

No, in fact I was not. Now I am.

Following up on a post from a week or so ago, Representative Jacque Clements (R-Frankfort), along with Nikish Software Corp., has been sued by Clinton County. Nikish, a company that sells tax software, has had its contract terminated by Clinton County and has apparently been butting heads with the county over issues related to transitioning from Nikish to another software vendor.

Rep. Clements has been accused by the county of being overly involved with Nikish and another tax software vendor, Manatron, while she was the Clinton County Auditor. From the Frankfort Times article, I believe Nikish was a company that branched off from Manatron.

According to the suit, Nikish’s software “is in violation of numerous Indiana state law requirements for property tax software.”

The document also accuses Clements on several levels, including while she served as county auditor beginning in 2004.

“…(She) also served as either a consultant or employee of defendant Nikish,” the report states, “while at the same time serving as either a consultant or employee of a competitor … Manatron.”
. . .
[Clinton County Attorney, Ted] Johnson later clarified his comments in an e-mail sent to The Times.

“The attachment (with documentation) shows that Clements was still working for Manatron — which had a contract for tax billing software with Clinton County until December 2007,” he stated.
. . .
Specifically, Clements allegedly “took steps” to convince the county to convert to Nikish as its software provider when the company formed after branching away from Manatron.

She reportedly stated Manatron would charge $231,000 for software services — compared to the $5,000 actual figure.

Further, she allegedly negotiated with Nikish herself and declined to inform the county the two companies were prepared to enter litigation over rights to the software. Manatron alleged Nikish had no rights to the data.

After entering the contract, Clements allegedly paid Nikish in excess of the figures in the contract and without the assistance of MIS Director Bill Clinton.

I’m paraphrasing, but Governor Daniels has apparently suggested to the Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana that ignoring federal regulations, to the extent possible, can reduce construction costs for I-69.

Speaking Monday to a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana in Evansville, Daniels said the Indiana Department of Transportation estimate released last week could be trimmed by bypassing some federal highway construction standards.

“Throw away the rule book to the extent the feds will let you do it,” Daniels said he told INDOT officials.

Not like those standards are there for a reason or anything.

As Indy Star columnist, Matt Tully, put it when he went to a Hancock County Young Republicans meeting, “is there anyone here not running in the Fifth District?” The Associated Press has an article on John McGoff’s decision to challenge Dan Burton once again in the Republican primary. Despite being outspent 3 to 1, McGoff apparently made a pretty good run of it in 2008. In addition to McGoff, former state Rep. Luke Messer of Shelbyville and Brose McVey, a former sacrificial candidate to Julia Carson in 2002, have announced their intention to run. Also, state representative Mike Murphy looks to be considering a run as well.

Burton, for his part, is allegedly waking up from what must have been an eight-year coma:

Frankly, the new era of big government, which has quickly yoked America with inconceivable debt and higher taxes, is Congressman Burton’s real challenge, and he’ll continue working alongside fellow conservatives to defend taxpayers and revive our nation’s economy[.]

With Obama having visited Notre Dame while a Supreme Court judicial nomination is looming, the subject of abortion has been much in the news. Buzzcut over at Blue County in a Red State has been commenting frequently on our “abortionist in chief.” John Brownson at In the Agora offers unhappy words for Notre Dame as well.

My position is that I don’t support throwing women in jail for not carrying their pregnancy to term or otherwise outlawing or criminalizing abortions because I don’t view the life being carried by the woman as being fully human. Rather, I view it as being potentially human, much like sperm and human eggs, albeit further down the line. As such, the woman’s right to make decisions about her body trump any “right” the potential human might have to grow in her body.

And, let’s be clear, the argument is not whether we “like” abortions or “don’t like” abortions. This isn’t a policy discussion on the desirability of eugenics. Rather, the argument is about whether the government should intervene by outlawing abortions to impose a particular view of when a developing organism becomes endowed with human rights.

As I have posted here in the past and in a comment to one of Buzzcut’s posts:

If someone thinks abortion is murder in the same way killing a 5 year old is murder, then I don’t see how anyone can refrain from stopping that murder, violently if necessary.

If there were people openly and systematically butchering children in elementary schools, I wouldn’t be able to confine my opposition to words and peaceful protest if the government allowed it and did nothing. I would have to attempt to stop the murder with force, if necessary.

And, I think the lack of violent resistance demonstrates quite clearly that, at some level, pro-lifers understand that fetuses, zygotes, and blastocysts are less than fully human.

The board that runs South Bend’s buses has agreed to accept an atheist group’s ad that says “You can be good without God.” A similar ad was rejected for Bloomington’s buses and is the subject of a lawsuit by the ACLU of Indiana.

The ad was rejected by Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation because, as its policy reads, “Statements of position in support of or in opposition to controversial public issues shall not be accepted.”

I didn’t realize it was controversial that one could be good without believing in God. To me, the acid test is whether or not the Bloomington bus system (or any other bus system that faces this advertising decision in the future) permits religious messages at all. My sense is that the real controversy isn’t whether one can be good without God. The real controversy is that atheism has a stigma about it, and allowing them to say something positive about their beliefs is uncomfortable for people. If the Wiccans wanted to advertise about how the earth sustains us or if Satanists wanted to advertise about how one should believe in one’s self, I suspect they would experience similar resistance. It’s not the particular message that’s objectionable — rather it’s the body of beliefs underlying the message.

Robert Draper, writing for GQ Magazine, has a disturbing report about the defense briefings Donald Rumsfeld provided to George Bush. (Slide show with briefings here; Story by Draper here.) The briefings are striking for their slick, triumphant military themed photographs coupled with Bible verses.

Frank Rich has some related commentary in the New York Times.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Rich says that Rumsfeld, not typically given to displays of piety, was cynically playing on Bush’s sense of religion. He was also playing with fire since this would magnify the Muslim world’s sense that Bush was prosecuting a holy war.