This Memorial Day Weekend, I drove to Akron, Ohio – the Midwest smelled like a barbecue. The state troopers were thick as flies on the Ohio Interstates. And, here is the peculiar thing. For some reason, Buckeyes are repelled by the right lane of their highways. I drove I-70 from Richmond to Columbus, then I-71 up to Akron. In a lot of spots, the Interstate is 3 lanes. A normal scenario was this – the middle lane occupied by one vehicle traveling at about 65 mph, the left lane occupied by a line of vehicles with the lead one traveling at about 66.5 mph, and the right lane empty. What’s a Hoosier to do on Indy-500 weekend? Go about 75 mph in the right hand lane, of course. (Making me a criminal-alien in the Buckeye state, I suppose.) The only problem is that some deviant would occasionally use the slow lane for going slow, throwing the whole thing off. It’s an annoying driving scenario that happens everywhere to some extent, but it always strikes me as being particularly bad in Ohio for some reason.

The South Bend Tribune has an article attacking tuition increases at all of Indiana’s major public universities over the next biennium:

Ivy Tech – 7.8%
University of Southern Indiana – 12%
Purdue – 9%
Indiana State – 11%
Ball State – 9.8%
I.U. – 10%

These hikes — all considerably above the overall cost-of-living growth — come after the Indiana General Assembly approved a $26 billion budget that met the needs of higher education better than any in recent years . .. In past years, state universities complained that the skinflint General Assembly left them no choice but to pass growing costs on to students and families. That excuse doesn’t wash this year. Yet the universities proceeded anyway to feed the phenomenon of “education inflation.” Every public university in Indiana has raised tuition way more than 100 percent in a decade.

There is a pretty good Wikipedia entry on college tuition costs.

So, what is it that’s changing about the college tuition equation that requires increases that well exceed inflation — cost of infrastructure? professors salaries? cost of the administrative bureaucracy? Is the per capital quality or quantity of any of these things increasing? Are taxpayers shouldering less of the educational burden; requiring more dollars to come out of individuals directly? (And, if so, where have the tax dollars been shifted?)

I haven’t the foggiest idea of the answers to any of these questions.

(H/t Reverent & Free), Leo Morris at Opening Arguments writes:

[I]t does little good to keep going back and playing the “what if” game about Iraq. We are where we are, and it’s easy to see who in the debate has America’s national security in mind and who is mostly interested in something else.

Hogwash. The notion that “we are where we are” (and never mind how we got here) has the potential to do a great deal of harm in the long term. We need to determine exactly what went wrong and why and who is responsible so that false mythologies don’t grow that allow us to get into this mess again. It seems to me that part of the reason we got into Iraq was because people were able to harbor “stabbed in the back” theories of why we lost Viet Nam without getting laughed out of the room. Had we learned, instead, that “if you get in the middle of a civil war, you lose” perhaps we wouldn’t have been so quick to get the middle of a Sunni/Shiite conflict contained only by the brutality of Saddam Hussein. Another lesson would be the seemingly simple lesson of holes: If you find yourself in one, stop digging.

Ken Kusmer, writing for the Associated Press has an article entitled $1M fraud stuns S. Ind. school system. The article says that Switzerland County School Corporation treasurer, Ann Geyman, has been fired for embezzling around a million dollars. The Switzerland County School budget has an annual budget of about $15 million. She apparently told the school attorney and the superintendent that she and her husband had money problems and, in particular, her husband had a gambling problem. Ms. Geyman offered her resignation, but the school board found it more appropriate to reject the resignation and fire her.

Just, for what it’s worth, the Grand Victoria casino in Rising Sun, Indiana is only about 23 miles away from Vevay, IN where the school corporation is based.

Thought I’d post a little primer on what the phrase “Rule of Law” means. It gets bandied about quite a bit but doesn’t get explained very often. I’ll go with the first line of the Wikipedia entry:

The rule of law is the principle that governmental authority is legitimately exercised only in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws adopted and enforced in accordance with established procedure.

I’ll also go ahead and throw in my half-remembered recollection of Alvin Toffler’s description of law as “potential violence.” The government has asserted a monopoly on violence and it has been crystallized into a body of law which dictates when and how that force can be used. That we are a “government of laws, not men” means that we have attempted to create a bulwark against arbitrary and self-serving use of force by individuals.

When you think of laws as “potential violence,” it becomes much clearer why legal authority must only be used in accord with legal constraints. If the wielder of power exceeds those constraints, he or she stops acting as a representative of our government of laws and starts acting as an individual. An individual wielding the potential violence of the United States government, free of legal constraints, is a frightening prospect.

With that in mind, concepts like the Unitary Executive are a little frightening. That particular piece of hogwash posits that Article II of the Constitution puts strict limits on the ability of the Congress to regulate activities of executive branch agencies — the net result of the theory being to put a substantial amount of unregulated “potential violence” into the hands of the individual who happens to occupy the Office of the President at a given time.

From a reader:

As the reader said: Did anyone tell him about the pay cut?

John Cole has a post entitled The Reaction to Immigration which I enjoyed.

I really have not paid too much attention to the immigration bill, and anything with the handprints of Kennedy and Bush is probably something that is flawed in so many ways it is hard to count, but I have to admit, what I am really enjoying is the reaction from the 28%ers. Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett are going to explode any time now, and Michelle Malkin is equally volcanic (really, just go to the top and scroll). Their readers and echo chorus are in a predictable lather, as well.

Bush and the last few congresses have betrayed every principle conservatives ever stood for, and these folks were there with pom-poms the whole ride, degrading the debate and attacking anyone who dared to disagree with Bush. These are the folks who pushed Schiavo, these are the folks who said little to nothing over the hideous bankruptcy bill, these are the folks who told us all to STFU and let Bush lead us in the debacle in Iraq, these are the folks who insist that torture and invasive surveillance are first order conservative principles. I could list 100 more things, but why bother?

And now their ox has been gored, and they are freaking out.

Immigration doesn’t get me too excited, probably because I haven’t been personally been harmed to any great extent and because the immigrants I have met very often seem to be stand up people. If they have violated the law, it strikes me as being closer to the traffic violation end of the spectrum and further from the violent crime side of things. It’s malum prohibitum and not malum in se. It seems like a practical problem with practical, negotiable solutions. But, I suspect the core of the 28% of folks who still support Bush don’t see it this way. I think it’s an emotional issue for them and the fact that they’re being betrayed by their Commander in Chief stings them bitterly.

I had been blissfully unaware of Jerry Falwell’s view on race and civil rights until a friend flagged this article by Max Blumenthal. Falwell was more of a piece of work than I had realized.

Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church.

. . .

Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”

His anti-abortion crusade came a little late in the game — in the early days, that was mainly the domain of Catholics. Anti-Vatican II Catholic, Paul Weyrich says that, initially, his attempt to enlist Falwell and other Southern evangelical leaders in a fight against “social ills” such as abortion, school prayer, and feminism fell on deaf ears.

“I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
. . .
In 1979, at Weyrich’s behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell’s organization hoisted the banner of the “pro-family” movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government’s attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right’s culture war would likely never have come into being. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

Did Falwell remain a racist? I have no idea. For all I know, it’s altogether possible that some of his best friends were black.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article entitled Libertarians to gather for convention. The Indiana Libertarian Convention will host Libertarians from several states Saturday. Mitch Harper will be the keynote speaker.

[Christine] Smith, 40, of Golden, Colo., [a Libertarian presidential candidate] said she thinks many people would identify themselves as Libertarians if they knew the party’s stances.

I used to think that, but now I’m not so sure. I think I am more sympathetic to the Libertarian Party than the average citizen, but I don’t consider myself a Libertarian. More of a small “l” libertarian, and I’m not at all a purist. First, maybe it’s the ballot access and debate access — decidedly skewed against the Libertarians, holding them back. But, I think maybe there is a structural impediment to any third party that flows from the winner-takes-all electoral college system we have in place for electing the President. Parliamentary systems seem to have greater room for third parties. For whatever reason, our democracy never has. Even when we had third parties, they were usually just replacing one of the two main parties. Republicans replaced the Whigs, for example. Maybe it would be helpful just to think of our parties as Party “A” and Party “B”. One of the parties probably represents your views better than the other. The best you can do is to influence the closest party to reflect as many of your views as possible and, hopefully, have as much influence as possible on the government.

Also, like I said, I’m not a purist as far as libertarian idealogy. I think that would put me on the fringes of Libertarian thinking. I tend to think there is a much greater need to act as a community than the typical Libertarian probably does. We’re social animals. Networked activity is a strategy that has given humans a leg up over other animals and has helped us achieve a pretty remarkable standard of living. I tend to agree with Hobbes that pure individualism amounts to a state of war: “every man against every man.”

It is a state where:

men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I don’t go so far as Hobbes as to think we need a “Leviathan” with absolute power to preserve a state of peace. There are checks on government power that are necessary and proper to preserve liberties. But, those checks aren’t absolute or unlimited. I’m sort of building a strawman here because, I expect that most Libertarians would agree that individual liberties aren’t absolute or unlimited. And, while I suspect that my view of individual liberties are more absolute and less limited than the view of the average citizen, I also suspect that I don’t go so far as most Libertarians.