Angela Mapes Turner, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, reports that Indiana ranked among the top five states in terms of erroneously denying or terminating food stamp benefits.

The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration’s “negative error rate,” which measures such denials, averaged more than 12 percent during the last fiscal year of October 2007 to September 2008.
. . .
An error rate of slightly more than 12 percent means about 75,000 people could have had their aid improperly denied or terminated. The error rate the previous fiscal year was 5.9 percent.

The worsening error rates coincide with the rollout of the state’s modernized welfare program, which was introduced in 12 counties in October 2007. That month, the error rate was less than 4 percent; at the end of 2007, it was nearly 7 percent.
. . .
Not only were food stamp applications doled out less accurately, but applications were also being processed more slowly.

Let’s say you were a balanced budget minded governor. Let’s further say you were ideologically opposed to or indifferent to a social welfare program you didn’t actually have the legal authority to gut. A bureaucracy that consistently erred in favor of denied or delayed benefits sure would come in handy. As a buddy of mine would put it, “I’m not sayin’ . . .; I’m just sayin’.”

In the past couple of days, the teacher “qualified immunity” law got a lot of press. The idea is that teachers can impose good faith discipline without worry about being sued for their efforts. I mentioned in the past that I didn’t think the bill did much of anything in terms of providing legal protection. It only protects teachers for “reasonable” discipline imposed in good faith. This strikes me as not different from a plain vanilla negligence standard. In other words, the standard hasn’t been raised for holding a teacher liable.

I think I missed the real point of the legislation. It “requires the attorney general and the state superintendent of public instruction to publicize annually to teachers that the attorney general may defend suits against teachers.” I think this is, in reality, a union busting bill. I recall back when Amy was a teacher one of the teachers union’s big selling points was that they would defend the teachers against law suits. This will blunt that selling point. And, I think the big tell is that the attorney general is required to publicize the potential for representation. The attorney general represents government employees in a variety of contexts. I am unaware of a requirement in those contexts that the fact of potential representation be publicized.

Maybe I’m just too cynical.

What I object to more than torture itself is the bureaucracy of torture. You can conjure up scenarios where I’d probably be willing to turn a blind eye to torture or forgive the torturer. But these situations will be extremely rare and far between. I don’t think you could conjure up scenarios where I would agree that torture needs a bureaucracy to support it.

The way it should work is to keep torture illegal and prosecutable. If someone finds themselves in one of those extraordinary situations where it is necessary to save the world or whatever other doomsday scenarios have been painted for its justification, then those brave, patriotic souls should go ahead and do what needs to be done. Then they should explain themselves and count on the safety-valves of the criminal justice system to do their thing — prosecutorial discretion, jury nullification, and/or a pardon. We count on our heroes to risk their lives in defense of the country but think they’ll balk when facing, not death, but potential prosecution?

There is no need to clutter up our anti-torture position with piles of red tape in order to deal with the exceptional, rare circumstances where torture may be justified. The bureaucracy is only necessary if we are seeking to make such procedures routine, unremarkable, and without consequences encouraging practitioners to be as certain as possible that it is necessary. That’s a Bad Idea.

Marcia Dunn, reporting for the Associated Press, has an article on the Hubble Space Telescope repairs that are underway. NASA astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis are in orbit and have secured the space telescope. Now the astronauts can begin to make various repairs the telescope needs after 19 years in orbit. The repairs almost didn’t happen. NASA was going to allow the telescope to fall into disrepair until it had a change of heart in 2006.

To learn more about Hubble, I would recommend Phil Plait’s “Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble” at the Bad Astronomy Blog. (For even more geekery, you can follow Astronaut Mike Massimino on Twitter.) Hubble has enabled us to see stars 1/ten billionth as bright as what we can see with the naked eye. This, in turn, has led to scientific break throughs. For example, (per Wikipedia) it has allowed us to calculate the rate of expansion of the universe.

Scientific advances often go hand-in-hand with technological advances. It’s probably no accident that Western science began to take off around the same time as telescopes and microscopes were invented in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. (It also helped that Constantinople was threatened and conquered by the Turks leading to a lot of books and scholars fleeing to the West.) Since then, we’ve been off to the races. The difference between the past 450 years as compared to the 450 years that preceded is staggering. In Europe, the year 1100 probably looked quite a bit like the year 1550. But, clearly a time traveler from 1550 wouldn’t know what to make of the year 2000. The Hubble Space Telescope is part of this process. I’m frankly happy to live in such a time. All too often, it’s easy to lose site of how far humans have progressed –for all our failures– in such a short period of time.

The Post-Tribune has an editorial entitled “Daniels turning IDEM into a rubber stamp.” It is prompted by Gov. Daniels hiring of longtime coal industry lobbyist David Joest as the new attorney for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. Says the Post Tribune:

First, Daniels is applying the lessons he learned from his mentor, George W. Bush, who regularly made Department of Interior appointments from a roster of pollution industry lobbyists.

Second, Daniels is systematically turning IDEM into a rubber stamp for industry, operating under the archaic and disproven belief that jobs are solely important and environment is solely not important.

One of the main problems with not enforcing environmental standards (aside from, you know, the degraded environment) is that failing to enforce such standards causes the market to send the wrong signals. Pollution is a cost of manufacturing. But, when environmental standards are not enforced, it is a cost that is not reflected in the price of the product. Where price does not reflect costs, the marketplace is not operating at its most rational. With coal pollution, for example, the breathers of polluted air and the drinkers of polluted water and the travelers through a despoiled countryside are, in effect, subsidizing the manufacturers and purchasers of coal-produced energy. Subsidies are sometimes necessary for other reasons, but generally speaking, they aren’t good business.

Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner is half of the Becker-Posner blog. Their conversation at the moment has to do with the state of conservatism. Judge Posner has some unkind things to say about the current state of intellectual conservatism. But, the upside for this way of thinking is that it had largely succeeded by the time it fizzled out. Friedman and Buckley were replaced, most recently, by Sarah Palin and “Joe” the “Plumber.”

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

I’ve bolded my favorite bit of that passage. “Substituting will for intellect.” To me, this immediately calls to mind that conversation Ron Suskind had with a Bush aide:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

And, really, there is probably a lot of that willing rather than analyzing to be found in the roots of the recent economic collapse. The Masters of the Universe (Wall Street edition) sought to impose their will for fun and profit, reality be damned. But, as Ms. Rand (along with others before her) pointed out, “A” = “A,” and eventually reality has a way of crashing the party.

News out of the People’s Republic of Texas (or whatever Rick Perry and the secessionists are calling it these days) is that a 7-year-old boy died Saturday morning after a Liberty County couple opened fire on him and three other alleged trespassers. The picture of the property in the story reinforces so many stereotypes, it’s amazing. First – the Confederate Flag is flying. Whenever you see a symbol of Treason in Support of Slavery, you know good things are going to happen. Next – the sign: “Trespassers will be shot. Survivers will be reshot!! Smile I will.”

There appears to have been a family outing on a nearby river. The families parked on a county road in a subdivision near Dayton, Texas where the men of the families were, apparently, committing the heinous crime (time honored though it may be) of peeing next to the road in the dark. Sheila Muhs, property owner, ordered the group to get their vehicles off the property then opened fire and blew out the windows of the vehicles. They boy was killed. His 5 year old sister and father were injured but not killed.

In fairness, Indiana is not without its share of idiots misusing guns to hurt kids. The Indiana case, at least, was a bit of potentially lethal celebration. In most ways, that’s more forgivable than the callously reckless acts of a selfish, misanthropic asshole which seems to be the Texas situation.

Speaking of misanthropy, I really hate people some days.

Today I ran into a fellow lawyer from the area. One of his ongoing humanitarian efforts is in conjunction with the St. Mary Haiti Ministry. St. Mary’s in Lafayette was “twinned” with Pendus, an area in the mountains of Haiti about 120 miles from Port-au-Prince. Turns out, the project has a website, so I thought I would give it a mention. One of the things that struck me was how much good they are able to do for not that much money. So, if you are interested in such things, click through and see what they are doing.