Rachel E. Scheeley, writing for Richmond’s Palladium-Item, has an article on the 30th anniversary of the massacre at Jonestown. This is of special significance for Richmond and those in the area Jim Jones grew up in the region and graduated from Richmond High School. (Go Red Devils!)

On November 18, 1978, 900 people drank the Kool-aid (literally) containing cyanide at Jonestown, Guyana, and died. Jones was a religious leader who founded the People’s Temple which eventually relocated to Guyana. The trigger for the mass suicide was the Congressional investigation by California Representative Leo Ryan who was killed by cultists at an airstrip near Jonestown.

Back at Jonestown, Jim Jones encouraged his followers to take their own lives by accepting a cyanide-laced grape drink. Syringes were used to squirt the killing agent into the mouths of babies and children. Many people participated voluntarily, while others were intimidated or, like their leader Jim Jones, shot.

It has become known as the largest mass suicide in modern history, and although it took place thousands of miles way, the tragedy continues to reverberate in Wayne and Randolph counties.

Jim Jones was born in Crete, raised in Lynn and graduated from Richmond High School. His wife, Marceline Baldwin Jones, grew up in Richmond and still has family in the area.

Seems like whenever the background of a nutjob is being investigated, you’ll come across some variant of “nice boy, didn’t talk much.” Describing the life of young Jimmy Jones, the Palladium-Item says: “Some who knew the young Jimmy saw him as quiet and fairly well-behaved, interested in religion.”

It will come as some reassurance to those in the flock of frequent commenter Rev. AJB, also a religious leader and Richmond High School graduate, that I knew him as a young man and did not find him to be particularly quiet and certainly not well-behaved. So, probably it’s safe if he were to offer you Kool-Aid. But, I’d probably stick to the beer, if given a choice. (Though, I seem to recall a Pig’s Eye Pilsner of his, I had via his brother that was pretty awful.)

I had actually meant this to be a straight blog post about Jonestown and not a gratuitous hit piece on Rev. AJB; but I guess you go where the writing takes you.

I haven’t eaten there in 15 years, but I am still happy to see that Welliver’s in Hagerstown, Indiana will remain open. Apparently rumors of its demise were circulating. The restaurant offers an epic smorgasbord, and every so often, my family would trek from Richmond to Hagerstown to feast. It was what I picked for my 16th birthday dinner (I got to drive there!) and where myself and some of my fraternity brothers went as sort of a Last Supper as we were graduating from Miami.

So, if you’re looking for a place to eat in east-central Indiana, give it a try.

Rebecca S. Green, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an article entitled “Area Religion Class nets Suit.” The lawsuit concerns a program in Huntington County where elementary school kids are taken to a trailer outside of the school for religious instruction. The article doesn’t say, but the program is called “By the Book,” so my guess would be that this is Bible instruction. Kids who don’t want to (or whose parents don’t want them to) participate do not have to. Those kids stay in the classroom where they receive no school programming while the other kids are receiving the religious instruction.

To me, that last part is the key. The Supreme Court has determined that kids should be allowed to receive religious instruction off of school property during school hours if their parents want them to. In other words, as I understand it, parents who are really serious about religious instruction for their kids shouldn’t have to forgo religious education on account of mandatory attendance requirements. That’s all well and good, I suppose, for parents who are that dedicated to religion for their kids. However, stopping secular education for other kids in the public schools to accommodate these parents’ religious preferences strikes me as being beyond the pale.

The lawsuit also makes noises about school providing the religious trailer with electricity and school personnel escorting kids to the trailer, but those seem like side issues to me. The kids who are left behind shouldn’t have their instruction time reduced or their school day extended to accommodate religious instruction.

It wouldn’t matter to the federal Constitutional claim, but I wonder if IC 20-30-6-10 through 12 impose some restrictions that are not being observed by the school. Among other things, it requires that any “voluntary religious observance” be in addition to the regular school day.

I don’t have any time to do this subject justice, but the Court of Appeals has ruled that Republican Duke Bennett who won the 2007 Terre Haute mayoral election was ineligible to hold office and, therefore, his election was invalid. However, former mayor, Democrat Kevin Burke who Bennett replaced does not automatically get to be mayor because he did not win the election and voters were unaware of Bennett’s ineligibility when they cast their votes. Instead, the Court ruled that a vacancy exists, and a special election must now be conducted.

The Indiana Law Blog has more.

One bit of U.S. history that often gets neglected and which I know little about is the period between 1918-1920 when we had 8,000 soldiers in Siberia attempting to (as Robert Farley put it) strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle. We were in Siberia along with the British, French, and Japanese. A separate group of about 5,000 Americans also served concurrently in the Polar Bear Expedition in a separate, but similar effort. Both seemed to be poorly organized with unclear goals and insufficient resources resulting in a lot of soldiers struggling in the cold to no lasting effect.

William Carey has a blog entitled “In Siberia” that takes a look at the American Expeditionary Force Siberia based on the journals of his great-grandfather George C. Voegeli who took part in the effort. More confirmation to me that this Internet dealie is pretty cool.

The Annual Report of the General Assembly’s Administrative Rules Oversight Committee (pdf) has an interesting discussion of replacing the Administrative Law Judge system for adjudicating matters overseen by the state’s administrative agencies with a centralized “office of appeal.” The committee ultimately recommended against such a proposal because the people who testified before the committee were supportive of the current system.

The idea is, however, that a centralized office of appeal would allow for judges who are more independent of the agencies whose decisions they are reviewing. It’s hard to escape the feeling that an agency’s Administrative Law Judge might be biased toward the agency. A judge coming out of a completely different administrative department who reviews decisions from a variety of agencies would presumably have an easier time being independent.

However, the various people providing testimony to the committee seemed well satisfied by the ALJ system, saying that it allowed for judges with expertise in the particular administrative areas and a consistency of decisions. The witnesses were a lawyer who practiced frequently before the Office of Environmental Adjudication; a deputy director of the Department of Natural Resources; and the Chief Environmental Law Judge for the Office of Environmental Adjudication.

For my part, on the hand full of occasions when I have practiced in front of an administrative law judge, I have had mostly negative experiences when compared to my experiences with a wide variety of trial court judges. Admittedly, this could be mostly a matter of my lack of familiarity with this particular legal subculture — the codes of procedure only tell half the story in any of these settings. There are generally any number of unwritten rules that frequent players just know. (For example, traveling west central Indiana doing collections, every court does things just a little bit differently, and you just have to get to know the system.) In any case, the ALJs I have run across seemed to be inconsistently focused on technical rules. By which I mean, they almost make a fetish of some of the rules while casually ignoring others. And the game is figuring out which is which.

But, like I said, my experience here is limited — maybe 6 to 8 matters across 3 administrative agencies. Probably not a big enough sample to draw a conclusion.

Karl Kurtz, continuing his regional review of the election at the Thicket, takes a look at the Midwest. There is party balance in midwestern legislatures with, if my math is right, an 11-11 chamber split with Republicans controlling all of 4 states (the Dakotas, Kansas, and Missouri), the Democrats controlling all of 4 states (Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois), and a party split in 3 states (Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan.) Nebraska has a non-partisan thing going on.

With respect to Indiana:

The title of “ticket-splittingest” state probably belongs to Indiana (in competition with Vermont in the East). Sen. Barack Obama carried the state with 50 percent of the vote to Sen. McCain’s 49 percent by winning only 15 of 92 counties. But Republican Governor Mitch Daniels was reelected with 58 percent of the vote, winning 77 of the state’s 92 counties. Obama carried Indianapolis by 105,000 votes, but Daniels managed a 50,000 vote majority in that city. With all of this split-ticket voting at the top of the ballot, the net change in the Legislature was a gain of only one seat in the House for the Democrats. The Senate remains under Republican control by a 33-17 margin.

Sooner or later, I think wireless Internet connectivity is going to be fairly ubiquitous and generally treated like a utility. Richmond is making steps in that direction with the opening of a “free” wireless hot spot in the center of the city. (I put the word “free” in scare-quotes because, I recognize, nothing is free; just the method of payment shifts around.)

The Center City Wi-Fi District will provide free wireless Internet access to businesses, retailers, students, residents and visitors in an area encompassing the city’s central business district. Also included in the network are the Historic Depot District and the Old Richmond District.

The Wi-Fi initiative was made possible with the support of Summit Computers, Parallax Systems, Urban Enterprise Zone, Main Street Richmond Wayne County, and Belden Wire and Cable. The Center City Wi-Fi Network was designed and constructed by Parallax and Summit Computers.

It’s believed to be the largest free Wi-Fi hot spot in Indiana.

Howard Dean is stepping down as DNC chair. He has certainly left the Democratic Party much stronger than he found it. His main influence on the Democratic Party has been a commitment to a 50 state strategy and to being unapologetic about his party.

Under Terry McAuliffe, Tom Daschle, and the party machinery that preceded Dean, the Democrats were focused on a limited geographic area, on raising money from a limited number of big donors, and on trying to get people to ignore the fact that they weren’t Republicans. Dean had a more aggressive and populist approach which worked — with an assist, it must be said, by the shortcomings of Republican approaches coming to fruition.

Now, I see that McAuliffe has filed the papers necessary to set up a run for Governor of Virginia. Virginia is outside of my bailiwick, but I’m not a big fan of McAuliffe and suspect that Virginia can do better.