I was raised in the Puritan school of delayed gratification. And, to some extent, that is wise. Working hard, saving, etc. today makes for a better tomorrow. But, occasionally a stark reminder comes along to balance that with an appreciation of the present as well.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is reporting the sad news that John Okeson, former Clerk of Courts and member of the Daniels administration, has passed away. He was in his early 40s, had three children, and seemed to be in good shape, running and competing in triathlons. He entered the hospital with “flu-like” symptoms. My sympathy to his family and friends.

To the rest of us, plan for tomorrow, but enjoy today.

The future of Carroll County keeps looking bleaker and bleaker. Today, we learn that the Delphi plant of Chromcraft Revington is closing. (I believe at some point in the past, it was “Peters Revington”.)

As sales and profits continue to crumble, Chromcraft Revington Inc. this morning announced plans to close its manufacturing facility in Delphi – shifting that work to suppliers primarily located in Asia.

Furniture production at the plant will end on May 30. The company anticipates it will sell the manufacturing equipment used at the site on the city’s north side and convert the facility to a warehouse and distribution center.

Approximately 150 employees will lose their jobs.

Also in the news today for Carroll County:

• FEMA will not reimburse Carroll County clean up crews for about $130,000 in cleaning and manpower costs related to floods in January and February.
• The County’s financial adviser recommended that the county impose a local option income tax. (The financial adviser’s report cost $5,000). The State has told Carroll County to reduce its $6.8 million budget by $1.8 million.

Leo Morris links to a story that reports that the Millennial Generation is more or less o.k. — they’re cool with monogamy, marriage, and the U.S. Constitution.

In his comments, I pointed out:

Every generation is reviled as a bunch of degenerate, ungrateful slackers that aren’t worthy of worshiping the ground their parents walked on. Every generation then turns out to be more or less o.k. . . even if they do spawn another generation of degenerate, ungrateful slackers.

Even my own Generation X was subjected to this kind of treatment until we made the Internet AWESOME. You’re welcome.

Deroy Muroch, writing for Scripps Howard, has a column on how ridiculous farm subsidies are in the present conditions.

If America’s farmers faced economic ruin, one might argue seriously for the $286 billion in agricultural subsidies currently before Congress. But as today’s farmers enjoy sky-high incomes, this bill’s advocates soon may explode into laughter while pleading for the perennially doomed “family farm.”

In fact, agricultural prices, profits and property values all are up dramatically, some at all-time highs.
. . .
Since 2002’s $73.5 billion Republican-led agro-bailout, farm profits have rocketed 118.2 percent, from $40.1 billion to last year’s $87.5 billion.

Also, farmland prices have risen 78.5 percent since 2002.

Meanwhile, this bounty’s recipients usually are not the family farmers who inhabit our popular psyche. The legendary family farm is largely as quaint as Grant Wood’s 1930 painting “American Gothic.” While mom-and-pop farms remain, most U.S. agriculture involves corporate mega-farms rather than pitchforks, barns and overalls.

“Fifty-one percent of agricultural subsidies go to ‘commercial farmers,'” says the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl. “Commercial farmers have an average income of $200,000 and an average net worth of $2 million.”

Quarter of a trillion here for agri-welfare; half a trillion there for war in Iraq, pretty soon we’re talking about a lot of money in return for not much of anything.

I get the annoyance that judges have with cell phones. When they ring in the middle of a hearing, it’s disruptive. There is a Fort Wayne Journal Gazette article on a Fort Wayne attorney who forgot to leave his cell phone behind and apparently stashed the phone under a security desk instead of taking it back to his car. Or that’s my take on it, the article says:

Bloom slipped the phone under the security desk and abandoned it when security officers told him it couldn’t remain there, according to court documents.

Attorneys at the Allen County are apparently allowed to bring cell phones into the court house, but only if they have a county issued ID, which this attorney didn’t have.

He petitioned to have the phone back, but the judge, in an order, said:

should she give Bloom his phone back, it would be “patently unfair” to the others who had had their property confiscated and destroyed and would be unfair to attorneys who had already complied with the January 2007 court order banning phones, according to court documents.

I guess rules are rules, but in this case, it seems that there is an unbecoming slavishness to bureaucracy at work. They have the phone, he wants the phone, they’re going to destroy it rather than give it back, despite the fact that he jumped through a number of hoops to get it. The effort expended by the attorney pretty much assure that nobody’s going to go this route as a back-door way to store their phone at the security desk rather than leave it behind.

The Journal Gazette has an editorial urging reconsideration of how the ban is implemented.

The Hoosier Pundit has a good run down of the maneuvering in the Attorney General’s race following Steve Carter’s sudden announcement that he wasn’t going to stand for re-election.

I just wanted to mention the existence of the Hoosier Environmental Council and its website

Vision
We aim to set a new path for Indiana, where the people of our state embrace practices and policies that dramatically reduce the footprint of industry, commerce and agriculture on the environment. Following this path, Indiana will ascend to new heights in our public health, economic well-being, and in our preservation of nature for generations to come.

Mission
We aim to address Indiana’s environmental challenges through education and advocacy. We are guided by science, inspired by the ties between nature and humanity, and led to success through partnerships.

About Us

The Hoosier Environmental Council, founded in 1983, is Indiana`s largest state-wide environmental organization. HEC has been a leader in bringing visibility to such serious environmental challenges as mercury pollution and power plant waste. Over its twenty-five years, HEC has also succeeded in translating its educational efforts into environmental gains, with forest, groundwater and lake protection as part of its legacy.

I’m glad there are folks out there fighting the good fight. Industry brings immediate, obvious gain — even more so when industry is able to externalize some of its costs, such as pollution. The value of environmental preservation is more subtle. Industry, profitable as it can be, will always have its champions. Fighting for the environment is not as immediately lucrative, so it takes a little more to get people to advocate on behalf of the benefits we all enjoy by not having our environment destroyed. When both sides are evenly matched, perhaps we can develop policies that strike a good balance.

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When it comes to reporting on foreign affairs, the Christian Science Monitor routinely provides excellent coverage. Today, Sam Dagher has an article entitled “Sadr City braces for fresh street battles.”

The usual teeming traffic in Sadr City, Baghdad’s Shiite enclave, vanished Wednesday. Buses stopped running and shops closed. Only the intrepid motorist or occasional scurrying resident ventured out on streets patrolled by Moqtada al-Sadr’s militiamen and marked by burning tires and roadblocks.

Residents and Mahdi Army militants alike appeared to be bracing for a coming battle, guarding against US and Iraqi forces advancing to stop the rockets allegedly fired from Sadr City that hit the Green Zone again Wednesday for the third day since Sunday.

Although it’s in Basra, the oil-rich southern city, where the Mahdi Army and Iraqi forces were locked in a bitter fight for a second day, killing at least 55, many in Baghdad fear that clash will trigger a new battle in Mr. Sadr’s Baghdad stronghold. Already there were reports by US-funded Al Hurra TV, citing hospital sources, that at least 20 people have been killed and 140 wounded in sporadic clashes in Sadr City since Tuesday.

Now, in a place where the US has done battle many times before, a sense of siege and helplessness has replaced some of the flickers of optimism that emerged over the past few months as a result of improved security made possible by the US surge and the Mahdi Army’s seven-month cease-fire, which now looks to be shattered.

Yesterday, Daghr had an article entitled “Across Iraq, battles erupt with Mahdi Army.” Part of the success attributed here in the U.S. to “The Surge” (i.e. troop increases) were attributable to the cooperation of Moqtada al-Sadr and his “Mahdi Army.” Unfortunately, al-Sadr is apparently an unreliable person with whom to do business. A lot of spokespeople for the U.S. government are blaming the recent uprising on Iran. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has squandered its credibility and is known to have some elements itching for a fight with Iran. So, even if they’re being honest this time, it will be tough to get the public in the U.S. up for escalating war efforts to include Iran.

The Iraqi government apparently initiated an operation in Basra, ostensibly to crack down on lawless elements in the city. If I’m following the article correctly, al Sadr is claiming that the crack down is an effort by some of his Shiite rivals in the Iraqi government to neutralize his power. In response, al Sadr and his supporters threatened a campaign of “protests and civil disobedience” throughout the country.

Sadr’s influence was felt throughout Baghdad Tuesday, highlighting the risk that the fight in Basra may spread to the capital, home to a large segment of his supporters. On Tuesday, witnesses reported that gun battles broke out in the capital’s Sadr City district between the militia and rivals from the Badr Organization, which is part of Maliki’s ruling Shiite coalition.
. . .
On Tuesday, all shops in the Mahdi Army stronghold neighborhoods – Bayiaa, Iskan, Shuala, and Washash – were shuttered. Leaflets saying “No, no to America” were plastered on each storefront. Anti-American banners hung right next to Iraqi government checkpoints.

Several people interviewed in the Amel neighborhood said they were forced by militiamen to return home when they tried to go to work this morning. “This is anarchy,” says Ali al-Yasseri.

An earlier article by Daghr on March 19 reported on the potential unraveling of the cease fire with the Mahdi Army.

Underscoring the fissures within the Mahdi Army, Mr. Mahamadawi says the confusion about the freeze arose on March 8 when Sadr, who last appeared in public in May 2007, responded in a statement to a question from one of his followers about the legitimacy of self-defense by saying: “I sympathize with those killed while defending themselves and their loved ones during [government] raids.”

My sense is that the security situation in Iraq is more complicated than pre-World War I Europe with its interlocking self-defense agreements that led to a world conflagration after an arch-duke was assassinated by a Bosnian terrorist — a bunch of people who don’t trust each other, more or less spoiling for a fight at any provocation.

Robert Reich has a column in The American Prospect arguing that “tough love” from the government is only for the little people. When it looked like the mortgage failures were mostly just grinding up middle and low income borrowers, the Bush administration basically said, “tough, you shouldn’t have signed up for the loan if you couldn’t afford it.”

Letting children bear the consequences of their risky behavior – what some parents call “tough love” — is equally applicable adults, and conservatives have made something of a fetish out of it.

Months ago, when the president announced a paltry plan to help out a few of the millions of homeowners who got caught in the sub-prime loan mess, he reiterated the credo: “It’s not government’s job to bail out … those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could not afford.” Days ago, when he endorsed the giant Fed bailout of Wall Street, the president signaled it was government’s job to bail out big bankers who had made decisions to buy and sell risky securities they knew (or should have known) they could not afford.

It’s true that people tend to be less cautious when they know they’ll be bailed out. Economists call this “moral hazard.” But even when they’re being reasonably careful, people cannot always assess risks accurately. Many of the mostly poor home buyers who got into trouble did NOT in fact know they couldn’t afford the mortgage payments they were signing on to. The banks and mortgage lenders that pulled out all the stops to persuade them to the contrary were in a far better position to know; after all, they had lots of experience at this game. So did the credit-rating agencies that gave these loans solid credit ratings, as did the financiers who bundled them with less-risky loans and sold them to other financial institutions, and the hedge fund managers who quietly tucked them into their portfolios.

When it looked like a bunch of Wall Street types were about to take it in the shorts, however, it was time for a bailout; something that’s certainly not unique in this country: See, e.g., Chrysler-1979, Savings & Loan-1989; LTCM-1998; Airlines-2001. I like to call it socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

Government exists to soften the edges of a world that, in its absence, would lead to lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. There is a good argument to be made that these sorts of bailouts, even if they do directly benefit the well-to-do, prevent market collapses that would ultimately be disastrous for people who are less well-off. But, if we accept this argument for policy purposes, at the least we should disregard those who get sanctimonious about the unalloyed glories of the free market and the infallibility of the invisible hand.

There is a quote from Lincoln about Democracy that is so dead-on that I’m surprised that I had not heard it before or hadn’t remembered it if I had:

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

It is the duty of a democracy’s citizens to refuse enslavement and mastery alike. Oddly, enslavement seems to be tougher to resist. All too many are fearful enough to sacrifice liberty in a quest for the illusion of security.