Local politics in The Region have always been opaque to me. I just shrug my shoulders, assume corruption, and pay more attention to other parts of the state. I first became aware of Bob Pastrick in the context of his support as a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton.

Apparently Mr. Pastrick, former mayor of East Chicago, is the defendant in a civil racketeering trial scheduled to begin in May.

The lawsuit claims that Pastrick and former aides Timothy Raykovich and James Fife used more than $24 million of city money for paving projects to buy votes in the 1999 Democratic primary election.

Pastrick was mayor for 32 years. He left office after the Indiana Supreme Court in 2004 found his campaign tainted with corruption and ordered a rerun of the 2003 Democratic primary.

C-span’s historian Presidential Rankings are out for 2009. George W. Bush, the newest addition to the pantheon, hits the charts at #36, nudging out Millard Fillmore for that spot. Herbert Hoover is two above him at #34. The top three, as you would expect, are Lincoln, Washington, and FDR.

Rounding out the top ten are Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Jefferson, Eisenhower, Wilson, and Reagan. Kennedy and Reagan in particular, seem to benefit from the nostalgia of the living. In another 50 years or so, I doubt either will fare so well. Jefferson, Jackson, Madison, and Monroe should probably be higher in my opinion — Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe probably more for what they did before assuming the Presidency than for their actual term of office, so maybe I’m just not thinking in terms of the correct criteria.

So, the stimulus bill passed. I don’t know if it will work, probably nobody does. I am hopeful. And, certainly, if we have to spend piles of money, I’d prefer that money be in the form of bridges and roads in the United States as opposed to craters in the Iraqi desert and disappearing pallets of money in Baghdad. My preference would be to go back in time, require bank regulators to regulate and also require that loan risks be better tethered to the people originating those loans so that the bubble didn’t get so far out of hand. But, that’s not going to happen.

Very few Republicans voted for the stimulus. And, politically, there was probably very little upside for them to do so. If it works well, they probably won’t get any credit. But, they could have staged things a little better. Boehner was telling House Republicans to vote against the thing before Obama went in and talked to them. As a practical matter, the biggest downside they face is the potential that constituents might regard “tax cuts” and “no” as insufficient responses to the current economic crisis.

Now, I wonder how many conservatives and libertarians (and anyone else, I suppose) are opposed to this sort of spending for pragmatic reasons and how many for ideological reasons. By which I mean, let’s say for the sake of argument that large scale government spending enhanced the well-being of a substantial majority of the population while leaving the already well-to-do remainder earning a comfortable but not a lavish income. Let’s further hypothesize that the government intervention curbed the excessive crashes and booms of the market while leaving a vibrant, growing productive economy. Would conservatives and/or libertarians support such a system? In other words, I know that plenty of folks oppose government intervention such as that in the stimulus bill for the very practical reason that they don’t believe it will work as well as the government doing little to nothing.

But for how many is unfettered or almost unfettered liberty and lack of government intervention and end to itself; even if the price of liberty is increased human misery?

I’m not framing this question as a foregone conclusion, by the way. This question or echoes of it are present in Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of “The Brothers Karamazov” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” for starters.

In any event, John Cole figures that, politically, this was not a good move by the Republicans and explains why.

I honestly have never seen a party go so far out of their way to marginalize themselves, and folks who study groupthink are going to look at the last few months as a veritable gold mine. Why the Republicans have decided to, in the middle of numerous crises, ignore the outcome of an election and run headlong against a popular new President into opposition for opposition sake is beyond me.

And look, there are very legitimate reasons to oppose the stimulus bill. . . .
Additionally, spending that kind of money shouldn’t be easy, and an opposition that didn’t spend every day running around yelling ‘No’ and ‘Tax cuts’ probably could have built a more effective case against the stimulus bill. Sadly, that would have required counter proposals and arguments that didn’t start and end with tax cuts. But it is the way the Republicans are going about opposition that is so ridiculous. Their unified vote is so transparently just political gamesmanship, especially when you consider that immediately after the vote, Republicans were issuing press releases touting the benefits of the bill for their district.

Deanna Martin, writing for the Associated Press, has an article on Lawrence Central High School Teacher, Daniel Jackson, and his personal finance lessons. Seems like I could have done without my shop, cooking, art, or sewing classes for better education in personal finance. But, I don’t recall learning much of anything about mortgages, credit cards, checking accounts, utility bills or any of that nuts and bolts of running a household.

Soaring foreclosure rates and credit-card debt are spurring some states, including Indiana, to consider requiring personal finance classes to get a diploma, sparking criticism that parents should teach financial basics at home instead of schools packing life lessons into an already tight schedule.

God forbid schools teach life lessons. I’m not an advocate of the legislature micromanaging curriculum. I’m also not a huge fan of vocational courses — preferring instead the more general kind of thinking classes: science, math, english, literature. But money management is a lot more important than a lot of the crap I remember sitting through during my school years. For some reason, I remember getting stuck in two different 9 week classes of sewing. Those are hours of my life I’ll never get back. If schools are still forcing kids to take that kind of class, they need to ditch it and teach kids the basics of managing money.

In the course of debt collection, I don’t know how many crash courses I’ve had to give in the concept of interest.

Debtor: How much do I owe?
Me: $2,000.
Debtor: But it was only $1,500 when the judgment was entered.
Me: Yeah, but that was like 5 years ago.
Debtor: But I’ve been making payments and the balance never goes down.
Me: Your payments have generally been about $20 every 2 or 3 months and you haven’t made any payments in 6 months.
Debtor: But the balance hasn’t gone down at all, it has gone up.
Me: Every judgment in Indiana accrues interest at the rate of 8% per year.
Debtor: That’s not fair!
Me: Sure it is. First of all, my client isn’t a bank and didn’t agree to make you a loan. Second, interest just reflects the fact that money is more valuable now than it is later.
Debtor: Huh?
Me: Well, tell me this, would you rather have 100 bucks now or 100 bucks in ten years?
Debtor: Well, right now of course.
Me: There you go. All you have to do if you want to avoid more interest is pay the balance in full right now.

ProPublica has put up a summary of the spending included in the stimulus bill.

February 12, 1809 was a pretty good day for the world – Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born. The Lafayette Journal & Courier had an article on Darwin with a passage that caught my attention:

“I really believe that creationism and science are hand-in-hand,” said Chris Johns, principal of First Assembly Christian Academy in Lafayette. “Just as some who see science through Darwinism.”

. . .

“We do bring up both sides,” Johns said.

“We teach both sides — and quite honestly, we believe the creationism side.”

Johns said while students are taught God had a guiding hand in the world’s creation, as opposed to the big bang theory, it is not a rejection of science.

Evolution holds that the Earth is billions of years old and that all life, including humans, evolved from simple forms through a process of natural selection.

In particular, the not believing in the Big Bang thing caught my eye – and that’s because of a parenting issue with which I was presented a couple of weeks ago. I had told Cole, my 5 year old, about the Big Bang. A day or two later, he said he told his teacher about it and she told him “he wasn’t telling the truth.” Now, some of this is probably just a translation issue by the 5 year old. I don’t think his teacher called him a liar. But, I think she did try to tell him that the Big Bang Theory wasn’t true. A few days later, he said something like “God made all snowflakes different.” I was fairly abrupt in telling him that it wasn’t God that made the snowflakes, but rather a natural combination of cold and water. Nature is a wonder on its own, we don’t need to theorize a God to add to it. I haven’t raised a fuss with the teachers or the school because it’s a church where the pre-school is located. They said that religion wasn’t part of their curriculum, aside from a thank you song at snack time, but some teachers are apparently more into proselytizing than others. But, you go to a church, you get God. I get that.

Another thing about that passage that struck me was the conflation of the age of the earth with evolution. That strikes me more as a matter of geology than evolution. The Young Earthers are more perplexing to me than the anti-evolutioners. Wholesale rejection of science in the name of believing chapters of the Bible written from the oral traditions of bronze age shepherds is absolutely baffling to me.

So, anyway, 200 years ago Darwin was born, and he wrote a book that helped us better understand the world around us. That bent a lot of folks out of shape, but I’m happy he did it. Happy birthday Charles. Thoughts on Lincoln will have to wait.

The Lafayette Journal & Courier ran a story on the partial victory by the police officer defendants in a suit by a woman who was injured as police fired at a fleeing vehicle operated by the man who had abducted the woman and murdered the woman’s son.

The suit alleged that the police officers violated the woman’s constitutional rights and also that she was injured through their negligence. A federal judge granted the officers’ summary judgment motion on the constitutional claims — which are a federal matter — but declined jurisdiction on the remaining state claims and remanded those back to the state court. I represent the county and the county officers sued and, therefore, was briefly mentioned in the story. The federal judge’s opinion is here (pdf) . Among other things, the judge found:

“Here, the defendants were faced with a dangerous and violent felon, who had just broke into Ms. Browell’s residence and shot her son, and was attempted to resist arrest and flee the scene by driving erratically through the neighborhood[.]” . . .

“Clearly the officers were attempting to apprehend the likely armed Lile, a legitimate governmental interest, and not intending to harm Ms. Browell.”
. . .
Viewing the record in the light most favorable of Mrs. Browell, she simply cannot demonstrate that defendants violated her constitutional rights. To the contrary, the uncontested facts reveal that defendants’ use of force in attempted to subdue Mr. Lile, a fleeing felon who had shot and ultimately killed Ms. Browell’s son and held her unconsciously captive, was reasonable, and no jury could find otherwise.