A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

2007

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The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day always seems like a good time for reflection. But, reflecting on 2007, I’m finding it hard to get a sense of the year. It seems like it was *hard*. It’s a good bet I expended more energy. At work, we moved our offices, I shattered my previous billable hour totals, and I found myself exposed to a number of novel (to me) types of legal cases. At home, my two little kids got more active. I increased my ability to run from about 3 or 4 miles up to about 9 or 10 miles. And, for fun, I climbed some 14,000 foot mountains. No wonder I’m feeling a little wrung out just about now.

Here at the blog, I’ve entered something not too far shy of 900 blog posts. (All of the highest quality.) Some of the topics:

    SJR 7 – Marriage “protection”.
    Colts beat the Patriots in a thriller of an AFC Championship
    Gov. Daniels tried to privatize the lottery.
    Extreme weirdness continues in Roseland.
    Craig Fry’s budget shenanigans
    The exposure of Weathervane McCain.
    Several counties shifted from Central Time to Eastern Time
    Mitch & Mitch’s welfare privatization plan hit a federal snag
    In God We Trust plates challenged for being promoted over other specialty plates
    America’s health care system continued to suck
    Alberto Gonzalez got amnesia
    Tragedy at Virginia Tech – everyone used it to grind their favorite axe
    Todd Rokita suggested that blacks were like slaves to the Democratic party
    Lawmakers continued to think the budget was a Constitutional requirement and not just a Good Idea
    Imus was a racist
    Abstinence education continued to suck
    Years of shortsighted property tax policy started coming to a head
    Gas prices continued to climb
    Iraq continued to suck
    Reverent & Free went dark
    President Bush’s popularity dropped to new lows
    Jerry Falwell died
    The 2007 General Assembly was less contentious than predicted
    Terry Record got drunk in a strip club and killed Jimmy Cash
    The minimum wage increased
    Dick Lugar continued to talk a big game about Bush’s inadequacies in Iraq
    Tax Rage ™
    Anti-Wiccan Jurist named to Indiana Court of Appeals
    Foreclosures were high in Indiana.
    Subprime lenders hit a bit of a rough patch
    A majority of Republicans say they don’t believe the theory of evolution is true
    Efforts to shift taxes from property tax payers to income and sales tax payers gained momentum
    Scooter Libby lied to a grand jury, Evansville C&P cool with that, President Bush finds his pardon pen
    Gov. Daniels unilaterally made tax decisions that the legislature approved retroactively
    Video game addiction
    The DLGF jerked around local government
    Gov. Daniels disingenuously tried to blame local government spending for the property tax increases.
    Glenn Murphy has a fun way to wake up sleeping dudes
    Voter ID winds its way through the courts
    Sectarian Government prayer case thrown out on technicality
    Lots of legislators stepping down
    War continued to suck generally
    Gov. Daniels more popular than scurvy
    Dan Burton engages in meaningless spectacles of piety
    Steve Buyer gets a challenger
    Patriots revealed as cheaters
    Pacers continue to be model citizens
    Rishawn fired
    Ballard wins
    Monticello mayor convicted
    Bush continues to spend like a drunken sailor
    Richmond High School is a dropout factory
    Monday Night Football sucks worse than ever
    Bob Sanders hurts people
    Dumbledore is gay
    Hillary was inevitable until she wasn’t
    Cheney is worse than we thought
    Senator Long took over and did a pretty good job

Even after looking back at all of that, I still don’t have a good feel for how the year was as a whole. I’m still here. My bills are all paid. My wife and kids are healthy and appear to still like me. I’ll chalk it up as a win.

SB 34 – Central Time

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Sen. Charbonneau has introduced SB 34 which would require the Governor to petition the USDOT to put all of Indiana in the Central Time Zone. This will likely go exactly nowhere this session. This sort of language should have been in the original Daylight Saving Time bill (or all-Eastern language or a specification of the desired time zone division) so that local governments wouldn’t have spent the last 2.5 years trying to clean up the mess.

Since this won’t go anywhere, I’d like to see it turn into a study committee charged with developing a petition to put Indiana all in Central Time. Economically, I think it makes sense. As Horace Greeley said all those years ago, “head west young man.” Well, the U.S. has headed west and the center of population density is shifting ever westward. Being in the central time zone would also mean that Hoosiers share more business hours in common with more people in the U.S.

The General Assembly should develop the petition with input from the Governor. Just turning it over to the Governor and telling him to submit a petition is a recipe for futility if the Governor decides to half-ass the job.

HB 1047 – Local time zone public question

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Rep. Dembowski introduced HB 1047 which provides for a time zone public question on a county’s ballot. The procedure applies only to counties that are adjacent to the Eastern/Central time line. For the public question to get on a ballot, a petition must be submitted to the circuit court clerk of the county. The petition must have a number of signatures that is at least equal to 2% of the number of votes cast in the county in the most recent secretary of state race.

A public question would then be put on the ballot as follows:

Shall the county executive of ___________ (insert the name of the county) County petition the United States Department of Transportation to initiate proceedings under the Uniform Time Act of 1966 to hold hearings in the appropriate locations in this county on the issue of whether the county should be placed in the _______________ (insert the time zone the county is currently not located in) Time Zone?

If the public question is approved, then the county commissioners must adopt a petition requesting the USDOT to initiate time zone proceedings. Once all this is done, the county has to request approval from the Governor to proceed. The Governor apparently has unfettered discretion to approve or deny permission to proceed. If the Governor grants approval, then the County Commissioners must proceed with the petition.

This strikes me as more or less useless. Currently, county commissioners can apply to the USDOT to switch time zones – without the Governor’s permission and without any sort of public referendum. All the public referendum does is force the Commissioners to take some action. But, pursuing that action to its conclusion can still be blocked by the Governor. This provision primarily takes discretion away from the Commissioners and gives it to the Governor who, by the way (I believe), can petition the USDOT without this process already.

What is useful, I suppose, is finally obtaining solid information about people’s time preferences. All sides seems to make strong claims about what the people *really* want. It seems like whichever side is currently not getting what it wants suddenly wakes up and comes out of the woodwork to raise hell about the issue. Maybe a public question could at least give us some solid numbers. But, a state wide question would probably make more sense. Just make sure you keep the county-by-county returns so you could use that data if you wanted.

Study the study

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Bryan Corbin, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, has an article on legislative efforts with respect to the Shepard-Kernan local government restructuring plan;

A Southwestern Indiana lawmaker, Rep. Dave Crooks, is introducing a bill that would assign all 27 Kernan-Shepard recommendations to a summer study committee of the Legislature. There isn’t time during the Legislature’s 2008 short session to consider the Kernan-Shepard plan, Crooks said. But a summer study committee would be able to thoroughly explore the ideas in preparation for the 2009 session.

Meanwhile, Senator Mike Delph wants to leap before he looks too hard:

Sen. Mike Delph plans to introduce a bill containing portions of the Kernan-Shepard plan in the 2008 session.

“Whether we get all components of the bill done, that will be for the will of the Legislature. But we at least ought to introduce a vehicle to move forward a discussion of the costs of government,” Delph said.

A short session before a major election year where you have major property tax restructuring as the order of the day? That seems like a particularly bad time to push local government restructuring, particularly where you have only a relatively brief report as a blueprint. To my knowledge, nobody has actually run any numbers to determine how much these proposed changes will supposedly save in the way of tax dollars or what costs we might be looking at in terms of direct restructuring costs or indirect reductions in government services. And moving the restructuring in pieces also seems potentially questionable — you always run the risk of passing the easy stuff while the harder stuff gets defeated, leaving you with an incomplete mess that doesn’t do anybody much good.

Trucks and Traffic Congestion

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USA Today had a moderately interesting article on highway traffic congestion and semi-trucks. The trucker they interviewed objected to laws restricting semis to the right two lanes or lower speed limits for trucks than for passenger vehicles. I can see some merit to his objections — he says, for example, that when trucks are restricted to the right two lanes, they create a wall of trucks that prevent traffic from merging into or off of the highway. And, I think you’re probably always asking for a bit of trouble when you have vehicles traveling at significantly different rates of speed. But, his efforts to point the finger at drivers of passenger vehicles with cell phones seemed a little convenient. Most likely the problem is simply too many vehicles for the amount of road available. Building more roads never seems to solve the problem for very long.

For my part, I get annoyed with the vehicles that just live in the left lanes, regardless of whether they are traveling faster than the traffic in the right lanes or semis that are passing other semis with minimal speed differentials — meaning it takes a long time to complete the pass, and God forbid a hill get in the way during the middle of the pass. The problem with people living in the left lane seems especially prominent among mini-vans in Ohio for some reason.

Hillary’s experience

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Any Hillary Clinton supporters out there? I’m just wondering — and not disingenuously, I honestly don’t know — what the basis of her claims of superior foreign policy experience might be. I get the sense that I’m supposed to impute to Hillary the foreign policy experience of Bill. Now, I don’t doubt that Hillary Clinton was more active than most First Ladies in the presidency of her husband. However, I don’t think she gets credit for merely being around — I don’t want the surgeon’s wife trying an operation on me. So, if she is claiming foreign policy experience from her stint as First Lady and if she performed foreign policy tasks in the Bill Clinton White House, I’d like to know specifically what those are. Otherwise, I don’t think she gets any particular bonus points for having been First Lady.

Merry Christmas

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Merry Christmas to everyone out there. Highlights from Christmas morning at the Masson household:

1. Cole coming downstairs to find a drum set waiting for him under the Christmas tree. He was unwavering when anyone would ask him what he wanted from Santa: dinosaurs and drums. Our ears will pay for that moment of extreme joy, but my goodness, there won’t be very many moments like that.

2. A corollary to #1, but Cole saying, “Santa must not know whether I’ve been bad or good.” Clearly Cole is a harsher judge of his conduct than Santa is.

3. Amy’s excitement. I think she was more excited about Christmas morning than the kids.

4. Harper deliberately opening her presents. She’s only two, so it takes a lot of concentration. But, she was up to the task.

5. My disappearing civil liberties coffee mug! (Brought to me by George W. Bush and the Patriot Act.) It’s a mug with the Bill of Rights printed on it, and when you fill it with hot coffee, the text fades. My family has me pegged.

Clinton Impeachment: Nine Years Ago

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From dday at Daily Kos:

In December of 1998, the House of Representatives, through a bill authored by serial adulterer Henry Hyde, during a lame-duck session of Congress where Speaker and serial adulterer Newt Gingrich (who started up with a mistress while his wife was in the hospital with cancer) had to hand over his gavel to Ray LaHood, during a floor debate marred by the resignation of potential House Speaker candidate and serial adulterer Bob Livingston, voted to impeach the President of the United States for only the second time in American history. The count was 228-206 on the perjury charge, and 221-212 on obstruction of justice (two other counts failed).

That episode was fairly instrumental in getting me fed up with the national Republican party. I had been pretty happy about the GOP sweep in 1994, but by the end of 1998, I was livid with them for toying with the very serious business of impeachment. And it wasn’t because I was a devout Clinton supporter — I never voted for the man — it was because the Republicans were making a transparent power play on trumped up charges you knew they didn’t care about. Had a Republican committed the very same acts, there is no way on earth that Gingrich, Hyde, et al. would have lifted a finger in opposition.

Don’t call it a come back

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A new e-mail client based on the ancient (but excellent) e-mail client, Pine, has been released. I have an e-mail account that’s hosted on a Unix server and I use Pine to read that mail. It’s far and away my favorite e-mail client.

The computing and networking group at the University of Washington has released Alpine, an open-source e-mail client for the desktop and the web. It’s based on Pine, the ancient but rock solid text-based e-mail client also developed at UW.

You may remember Pine from your school’s computer lab, your dad’s old Windows 3.1 box or (if you’re like Epicenter’s Dylan Tweney) from when you last checked your mail. Though it’s been the choice of Unix power users for almost two decades, Pine is also remarkably easy to use and simple enough for just about anyone to pick up.

Part of my love has to do with the nature of having an account hosted on a remote server — I can get to it from anywhere, and I can keep it there. Using a pop mail server with the e-mail client on my desktop computer means that, once I’ve downloaded it, I’m going to have trouble if I want the mail when I’m at a different computer. The other part of my love is just the simplicity and speed of Pine. It’s all keyboard based, so I don’t have to reach for my mouse in the middle of typing something.