A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Memories

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It was the summer of 2000, I had slightly more hair, was recently wed, had moved into a new house, was about 8 months into my new job, and the country was fiscally pretty sound. And there was a Presidential election going on. Back in 2000 and again in 2004, I ran a mailing list with people across the political spectrum where we discussed politics generally and the Presidential campaign specifically.

In 2000, one of my main concerns was Bush’s proposed tax cuts. Most folks seemed to be doing pretty well financially — certainly I didn’t see a lot of people staggering under the tax burden of the Clinton years — and, after the better part of two decades of deficit spending (probably more like four decades), we were finally starting to head the other direction ever so slightly on the national debt. Based on this, Bush’s tax cuts seemed like a remarkably stupid idea to me. On the discussion list, some of the folks on the right started warning me about the dangers of paying the debt off too fast. Under Bush, we’d still go on paying down the debt as fast as was prudent. The tax cuts were a good idea because times were good. I was skeptical.

Of course, Bush immediately began following in the foot steps of his dad and Ronald Reagan by presiding over huge deficit spending. The economy sputtered a bit with the collapse of Enron and the like. And the wars came. The tax cuts remained in place. Times were too tough to raise taxes. Government spending continued unabated; got even larger. The deficits got bigger. The perils of paying down the debt too fast were forgotten.

Come to think of it, those guys kind of looted the joint. It was like a party that wasn’t much fun but still leaves you with a cheap wine hangover and a huge mess to clean up.

Top 25 innovations of all time

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Lawrence Husick’s top 25 innovations of all time. (H/t Opening Arguments) A lot more elaboration in the article, but here is the list:

25. Relativity/Quantum mechanics
24. Electromagnetism
23. Evolution/Natural Selection
22. Steam power
21. Water power
20. Concept of science (natural philosophy) /Scientific method
19. Moveable type
18. Fossil fuels
17. Specialization of labor
16. Paper
15. Wheel
14. Formal legal codes
13. Concept of money
12. Gods & religions as social institutions
11. Writing
10. Food preservation
9. Metallurgy
8. Ceramics & pottery
7. Farming
6. Clothing
5. Symbolic communication
4. Lever – simple machine
3. Inclined plane – simple machine
2. Fire
1. Speech

Objectivism Blinked

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Devilstower on Greenspan and the death of Randian Objectivism:

There’s something in Ayn Rand’s works that appeals to everyone at some point in their lives. Everyone wants to identify with the specialness of Dagny Taggart or Howard Roark or John Galt. Everyone feels, at some point in their lives, as if they are the true hub of the universe.

Then rational people grow the hell up and get over it. There’s no more substance to Rand’s objectivist view than there is in a child fantasizing about being a fairy princess, and even less to admire.

John Galt is dead. We can only hope he stays buried.

Yup. For me, my Rand phase was during the early 90s — coincided with the Gingrichian Republican Revolution, I suppose. It didn’t last very long, probably died by the time of the Clinton impeachment. By way of reference, my capital “L” Libertarian phase started earlier and ended later — maybe from 1990 to 2000.

Neither Libertarianism or Objectivism deal very well with externalities or market distortions that accompany large concentrations of wealth. (As to the latter, someone I know recently suggested an analogy to gravity, where chunks of it here and there lead to elegant, creative systems but a huge mass of it leads to a system-destroying black hole. I’ll have to think about that.)

The Growing Bailout Octopus

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John Dunbar of the Associated Press has an article entitled Bailout-money uses continue to shift. The massive bailout bill stampeded through Congress was originally about buying devalued mortgage-backed securities from tottering banks to unclog frozen credit markets. Then it was about using some of the money to buy stakes in banks.

But reports surfaced that bankers might instead use the money to buy other banks, pay dividends, give employees a raise and executives a bonus, or just sit on it. Insurance companies now want a piece; maybe automakers, too, even though Congress has approved $25 billion in low-interest loans for them.

Officials are even getting around to talking about helping a few mortgage-strapped homeowners. And, this passage makes me laugh:

As the crisis worsens, the government’s reaction keeps changing. Lawmakers in both parties are starting to gripe that the bailout is turning out to be far different from what the Bush administration sold to Congress.

As if this is the first go-round with the Bush administration. As Bush himself once said, “Fool me once shame on . . . . you? Fool me . . . . you can’t get fooled again.” Or, more appropriately, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Near as I can figure, the Bush administration has lied about anything it has ever done. If they gave me the time, I’d check my watch.

To make matters worse, the Bush administration is redacting copies of bailout contracts it releases to the public, hiding key information such as how much various firms are being compensated for providing bailout related services to the government. This feeds suspicion that the bailout is being used to transfer truckloads of cash to favored cronies.

Budgeting

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Just an idle thought, and perhaps such a resource is readily available. But, it occurs to me that it might be useful if the State or some other entity made a target household budget with “reasonable” expenditures for common categories, perhaps based on income. What should a family of x people spend on groceries in a given week? What portion of income is reasonable to allot to transportation? Health care? Heating? Clothing? Entertainment? Etc.

It might provide a useful planning tool that would let people know generally whether their expenditures are way out of line and will likely be able to find savings in that category or whether their expenditures are unremarkable for that category.

Politics these days

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Cracked.com has a fine article driving home the point that politics these days really aren’t much stupider than they always have been. Five Presidential Elections Even Dumber Than This One. The abbreviated list:

#5 Jefferson v. Adams (1800): Jefferson will bring prostitutes into the White House and wants murder and robbery taught in the schools. Adams will attack France.

#4 J.Q. Adams v. Jackson (1828): Jackson executed soldiers for no reason, his mom was a prostitute and his dad was a mulatto, and his wife is a bigamist.

#3 William Henry Harrison v. Van Buren (1840): Van Buren is an elitist who likes to bathe in the White House. Harrison, despite the mansion and whatnot, was a log cabin and hard cider kind of guy.

#2 Hayes v. Tilden (1876): Screw campaigning, we’ll just steal the damn thing. Hayes elected in the most corrupt election to date.

#1 James G. Blaine, “Continental Liar from the State of Maine” v. Grover “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa? Going to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha” Cleveland. The campaign slogans pretty much say it all.

A little advice

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Here is a little advice – not even legal advice, just common sense, I would think. Let’s say you are a Republican county election clerk. And, let’s say you have two employees who voted for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary. Now, here’s my advice: don’t leave letters on their desks referring to Obama as the “black Adolph Hitler.” If only I’d written this earlier, perhaps Jill Jackson, Johnson County election clerk, wouldn’t have made exactly that mistake. Could happen to anyone, I guess.

Early Voting in Lake County can continue

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I wrote this for a diary at Daily Kos and am reposting it here. The fact that it was a non-Indiana audience is the reason for all the background material that might seem odd for consumption here.

Lake County Indiana, the second most populous Indiana county in the northwestern corner near Chicago, has been the location of a vigorous legal battle concerning early voting sites. Today, yesterday a trial court authorized early voting (pdf) at additional voting centers in Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond; and ordered that votes cast prior to the decision at these sites be counted.

Indiana allows in-person early voting as a matter of state law at the offices of the clerk of the county’s circuit court. Typically this means at the county seat. In Lake County, this happens to be the city of Crown Point. Indiana law allows county election boards to authorize additional satellite voting sites but only if it is done by unanimous vote. However, there is potential ambiguity in Lake County due to the presence of courts and offices of the circuit court clerk in cities other than Crown Point.

Prior History
Initially only Crown Point had an early voting site in the Lake County government center there. On September 23, the Lake County election board voted, along party lines, to also allow voting in Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago. The Republican members claimed that it required a unanimous decision of the election board to open voting in those offices. The Republicans on the election board who voted against opening up the offices declined to explain their vote but cried foul when the election board moved ahead with the voting sites for the more Democratically inclined Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond.

They filed suit in the county’s superior court (with a Republican friendly judge) when the statute pretty clearly states that the county’s circuit court (with a less Republican friendly judge) has jurisdiction. The superior court issued an order temporarily blocking the voting centers. Since then, the case has bounced from superior court to federal court to the circuit court to the Indiana supreme court.

The Republicans filed suit in the Lake County Superior Court requesting that the voting centers be enjoined. Superior Court judge Calvin Hawkins granted a temporary restraining order preventing the early voting in those largely Democratic cities. The Democrats removed the case to the federal court. In the meantime, a group of Democrats filed their own suit in the Lake County Circuit Court requesting that it enter an order requiring the vote centers to be open.

The federal court kicked the Superior case back down to the Superior judge. The circuit court entered an order requiring the centers to remain open. The superior court declined to intervene until the Indiana Supreme Court could take a look at the case.

The Indiana Supreme Court entered an order consolidating the circuit and superior court cases and putting them both back in the superior court. The Supreme Court specifically did not rule on whether the superior court had jurisdiction or on the merits of the case. It set forth an expedited procedure for the parties to exercise their right to an automatic change of the judge if they so desired. They did so desire, and Judge Diane Kavadias Schneider a Superior Court judge based in Hammond was selected as special judge.

The Opinion

The Indiana Law Blog has posted the opinion allowing voting at the satellite voting centers to continue and declaring that the votes previously cast at the site shall be counted.

The court entered 75 conclusions of fact concerning the operation of the satellite voting centers and concluded generally that it was the policy of Indiana to facilitate the ability of its citizens to vote and that the equities under the standards for granting injunctive relief (likelihood of success on the merits, harm of granting injunctive relief versus harm of denying it) weighed in favor of those seeking to keep the vote centers open.

Relevant statutes interpreted by the court are IC 3-11-10-26, IC 3-11-10-26.3, and IC 3-6-5.2-9

IC 3-11-10-26.3 allows satellite voting sites to be opened upon unanimous vote of the election board. This, the court held, did not happen. However, the court determined that there was ambiguity in IC 3-11-10-26(a)(1) which says:

As an alternative to voting by mail, a voter is entitled to cast an absentee ballot before an absentee voter board . . . in the office of the circuit court clerk (or board of elections and registration in a county subject to IC 3-6-5.2).

Lake County is a county subject to IC 3-6-5.2. However, the court determined that this provision could be interpreted to mean that a Lake County voter was entitled to cast a vote in the office of the circuit court clerk or the board of elections and registration, but not both. Hammond, Gary, and East Chicago are also have court facilities with offices of the clerk of the Lake County Circuit & Superior Courts and that is where the early voting is taking place. Therefore, the voting can be characterized as taking place under IC 3-11-10-26.3(a)(1) at the Circuit Court Clerk’s office and not under IC 3-11-10-26.3(a)(2) concerning satellite voting which requires a unanimous vote of the election board.

The court finds that resolving the ambiguity of the statute in favor of allowing voting in these areas is appropriate in light of Indiana’s policy for encouraging voting access to its citizens, in light of Constitutional considerations based on allowing easy access to voting in Crown Point and not Hammond, East Chicago, and Gary; particularly in light of the disparate income, access to transportation, and racial make up in those areas; and in the absence of any evidence of voter fraud or that the procedures put in place in those areas would lead to such fraud.

I particularly enjoyed this passage:

Curley Plaintiffs’ allegations of “vote dilution” have no merit because the votes of Mr. Curley and Mr. Brown will in no way be “diluted” by the casting of early ballots of other validly registered voters, any more than if they had cast those ballots on election day. The casting of ballots by other lawfully registered voters within the relevant jurisdiction is democracy, not vote dilution.

(emphasis in original).

Demographics
To give some idea of the numbers involved, Lake County, Indiana has a population of about 500,000, making it Indiana’s second largest county (after Marion County (Indianapolis)). Overall, the racial makeup of the county is 66.72% White, 25.33% Black or African American, 0.28% Native American, 0.82% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 4.96% from other races, and 1.85% from two or more races. 12.20% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. However, for Crown Point, with a population of about 20,000, about 95% of the population is white. Meanwhile, Hammond has a population of 85,000 people, of whom 62% are white (non-Hispanic), 21% are Hispanic, and 15% are black. East Chicago has a population of 32,000 people of whom 12% are white (non-Hispanic), 51% Hispanic, and 36% black. Finally, Gary has a population of 102,000 people, of whom 84% are black, 12% are white, and 5% are Hispanic.

Lake County’s 500,000 people represent approximately 8% of Indiana’s total population and, as such, its vote can be expected to play a significant part in determining the fate of Indiana’s 11 electoral votes. In addition, it has a substantial black population, and it is very much in Chicago’s sphere of influence. As such, it can be expected to break heavily for Senator Obama. For low income citizens without good access to transportation, having to travel to Crown Point from one of the other cities represents a significant impediment. Early voting is an important tool to alleviate long lines for an insufficient number of voting machines, a phenomenon which seems to be more pronounced in low income urban areas. Given how close Indiana seems to be in the polls as between Obama and McCain, the availability of early voting in Lake County could very well be a determining factor in how those electoral votes are cast.