Via bilerico.com:

Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked.

Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us. I don’t know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn’t jibe with my version.

Barack Obama in a speech at the United Church of Christ national meeting.

Barack, I love you, but with all due respect, faith has been used as a wedge since the invention of wedges.

I took my three year old son on a train ride from Lafayette to Chicago and back. Intellecutally, I support the concept of mass transit. As a practical matter, I now understand why train travel isn’t very popular locally. Round trip, we spent about 8.5 hours on the train (and I won’t include the drive time from Union Station to my friend’s house in Naperville and back). For my son and I to get tickets was about $60. Since I already have and pay for a car anyway, the marginal cost for me to have simply driven to my friend’s house would have been (assuming 30 miles to the gallon and $3 per gallon) $30 and, round trip, door-to-door would have been about 5 hours. For the train experience, I paid twice the money and added 3.5 hours to my travel time.

Even so, it would have been an o.k. undertaking if not for the hour delay on the way up between Dyer, Indiana and Chicago. No explanation from Amtrak during the wait. Just stopped on the tracks for an hour. After the wait, word circulated that a big freight train was just completely blocking a yard we had to pass through. I get the sense that this kind of thing is not isolated. Fortunately, my son was quite well behaved. He got a little antsy toward the end of each train ride, but hey, he’s three.

All my bellyaching aside, I could see taking a train as an enjoyable experience if I was traveling without kids, for a reasonably long distance, and on a really loose time table. The coach seats were fairly comfortable — being able to walk around makes the train much more palatable than an airplane or the bus. If I could just wander off to the dining car and have a beer when I wanted or just hang out and read a book or a magazine, getting up periodically to stretch my legs on a trip where I was happy to get to the destination anytime during the day, the train could be relaxing and enjoyable. Still, that’s a pretty narrow subset of the population who has to get from Point A to Point B. So, something fairly dramatic would have to change before we see a shift from automobile travel to train travel. Maybe all of the subsidies for roads, cars, and gasoline get dumped and the cost of traveling in this fashion becomes prohibitive. Maybe, train travel somehow becomes more reliable and expeditious. Or, more likely I fear, nothing changes too dramatically and train travel remains unrealistic as a serious commuting option.

Seems like it was a dangerous day in area court houses today. The Indy Star has an article entitled Scuffle erupts after conviction with respect to an incident in Jeffersonville. After a verdict was rendered, a relative of the defendant fought with sheriff’s deputies in the hallway.

Meanwhile, in Lafayette, the Journal & Courier is reporting that a man was arrested after he allegedly attempted to throw an attorney over the fourth-floor railing. The suspect is a plaintiff in a civil case. He apparently attacked the attorney for one of the Defendants. The hearing today was held on the Defendants’ motion to enforce a mediation agreement wherein the Plaintiffs would dismiss their case in return for $42,000. The Plaintiffs apparently had second thoughts and attempted to back out of the agreement. The judge said that they couldn’t and, in addition, had to pay some of the Defendants’ attorneys fees.

So, today was a bad day, but all in all, I am a little surprised that more of that kind of thing doesn’t go on.

Back before I had kids, I enjoyed watching a good movie or two. The Journal & Courier put the American Film Institute’s Top 100 movies in a sidebar.
Oddly, I have watched only one of the top 10 — The Wizard of Oz. Of the remainder, I feel pretty silly for not having seen The Godfather. Also, I think I’d enjoy Raging Bull. The rest of the top 10, maybe, maybe not. I’ve put in bold the ones I’ve seen. In italics are ones that I haven’t seen, but want to. Even though I like movies quite a bit, apparently there are a ton of great ones I’ve not seen or only seen parts. Maybe my tastes are not very refined, though, because a lot of them just hold no interest for me.

The American Film Institute’s 2007 list of the top-100 American movies:
1. “Citizen Kane,” 1941.
2. “The Godfather,” 1972.
3. “Casablanca,” 1942.
4. “Raging Bull,” 1980.
5. “Singin’ in the Rain,” 1952.
6. “Gone With the Wind,” 1939.
7. “Lawrence of Arabia,” 1962.
8. “Schindler’s List,” 1993.
9. “Vertigo,” 1958.
10. “The Wizard of Oz,” 1939.

[Read more…]

Apparently in conjunction with an Associated Press article on the surge of subprime foreclosures, Dan Shaw has a story on foreclosures in Indiana.

Lenders in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan made 8.7 percent of the mortgage loans in the country, and those three states had 19.9 percent of the loans in foreclosure, the study says. Moreover, they had 15 percent of the foreclosures that were started in the first quarter of 2007.

The study cites the loss of manufacturing jobs in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan as an important cause behind the rising numbers. While some of those have been replaced by service jobs, they have not been as plentiful as the number lost. Nor has the pay equaled that found in manufacturing work, the study says.

I forget where I heard it, but someone was talking about “interest-only” mortgages and remarked, “Back in my day, we called that ‘rent.'”

Apparently the Congressional financial reports are out, because, scanning the headlines, I see a bunch of stories about the wealth of the various Congresscritters. This one by Gannett’s Maureen Groppe says that the total wealth of Indiana’s Congressional delegation dropped considerably with the loss of Chris Chocola and Mike Sodrel. Their replacements, Joe Donnelly and Baron Hill, respectively, don’t have anywhere near the wealth. The Bayhs’ considerable wealth stems from Evan’s wife’s position on an array of corporate boards. Dick Lugar’s primary asset is a million dollar home in Virginia.

Sylvia Smith has a similar story that focuses primarily on Evan Bayh and his wife’s aforementioned corporate income. She has another story focusing on Dan Burton and his real estate holdings in four states.

(Via Opening Arguments) Jonathan Clark Smith of Hanover College sheds more light on the origin of the term “Hoosier” in the June edition of the Indiana Magazine of History.

In the article, “Not Southern Scorn but Local Pride: The Origin of the Word Hoosier and Indiana’s River Culture,” Smith reports his discovery of two previously unnoticed references to the term in the newspapers of 1831. Both relate the word specifically to the then-hot political issue of river transportation and canal building. Reviewing other sources — including the first-known use of the term in a February 1831 letter — Smith concludes that Indiana’s nickname originated not as a derisive term for the state’s southern migrants but as an indication of local pride in those who sought to improve the state’s economy. Hoosiers were boatmen who made a living on Indiana’s canals and rivers and who, therefore, supported government-sponsored development of water transportation.

There is already a pretty good Wikipedia entry on the term and its origins.

Bloomberg has a very informative story on the federal deficit. The good news – it’s down almost a third from last year. The bad news – it’s still huge. Spending is still a record highs. Revenues have increased to offset some, but by no means all of that spending.

Military spending so far this fiscal year totaled $349.1 billion compared with $328.3 billion a year earlier. Spending on Medicare totaled $249.2 billion compared with $214.4 billion a year earlier. Spending on Social Security totaled $407.3 billion compared with $385.7 billion a year earlier.

Anybody know a good way to compare those numbers with the same categories of spending from 10 years ago, taking into account inflation, population growth, and the like?

A bit more from the Bloomberg piece:

Since the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, the budget deficit totaled $148.5 billion, down 35 percent from a shortfall of $227 billion a year earlier. For all of this year the shortfall could narrow to $150 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said May 4. That would be the smallest deficit this decade. In fiscal 1998-2001, the Treasury posted yearly budget surpluses.

I wonder where we could be in terms of fiscal stability had the path of optional war in Iraq not been chosen. Couldn’t have hurt things if the money spent in Iraq were applied to the deficit or, even better, to the accumulated national debt.

I got up this morning and scanned the headlines. Among other things, I learned that Noblesville is under a water emergency. So, when I went for a run, it was a little jarring to see several lawns being watered. To be clear, Lafayette is not under a water emergency, but still, as a guy who doesn’t especially like mowing his lawn, it seems odd to use a scarce resource in a way that is sure to create work for yourself. All, so what? Your grass will be green? I’ve been passively trying to kill my grass ever since I became a home owner. Grass is pretty durable stuff – it’ll survive a period of brownness. But, I suppose I’m in the minority on this one. Conservation by way of laziness and aesthetic indifference isn’t really a common Hoosier trait, I don’t suspect.