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.

An article in Science Daily entitled US Continues To Lag On Health Care, According To New International Comparison:

The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations [Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the U.K.] on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes, in the third edition of a Commonwealth Fund report analyzing international health policy surveys. While the U.S. did well on some preventive care measures, the nation ranked at the bottom on measures of safe care and coordinated care.

Another new Commonwealth Fund report comparing health spending data in industrialized nations published today reveals that despite spending more than twice as much per capita on health care as other nations ($6,102 vs. $2,571 for the median of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] countries in 2004) the U.S. spends far less on health information technology–just 43 cents per capita, compared with about $192 per capita in the U.K.
. . .

* On measures of quality, the U.S. overall ranked 5th out of 6 countries. The U.S. ranked fifth in coordinated care, and last in patients reporting that they have a regular doctor (84% vs. 92%-97% in other countries).
* On access measures the U.S. ranked last overall, including last on timeliness of care: 61% of U.S. patients said it was somewhat or very difficult to get care on nights or weekends, compared with 25%-59% in other countries.
* On efficiency, the U.S. ranked last overall, including last on percent of patients who have visited the emergency room for conditions that could have been treated by a regular doctor if one had been available (26% vs. 6%-21% in other countries). The U.S. ranked fifth of six countries on primary care practices having “high clinical information functions,” defined as practices having at least 7 of 14 office practice information functions, including electronic records, electronic prescribing, computerized safety alerts, and patient reminders systems and registries (19% compared with 8%-87% in other countries).

Like I’ve said before, we’re already paying for universal health care, we’re just not getting it.

Today there is a story in the Journal and Courier reporting that “Cities Ranked & Rated” by Bert Sperling and Peter Sander has put Lafayette as #25 on the list of best places to live. They ranked “more than 400 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada.” Gainesville, FL is #1, Bellingham, WA is #2. Bloomington is down from #29 in 2004 to #86 this year. Carmel is #19 up from #79.

I don’t know about these rankings, necessarily, but I’ll just add my two cents that Lafayette is a very nice town.

The Hoosier Pundit has a post entitled Mitch Daniels: “A Long Step Toward a Dream of a Healthier Indiana”. He notes that Gov. Daniels signed the cigarette tax hike (linked to the health care plan for low income Hoosiers) and that smokers and business owners who will lose cigarette sales to Kentucky are not pleased. But then he goes on to say:

That anger has to be placed and weighed against the 140,000 Hoosiers that will be helped by the plan, and any Hoosier that quits smoking or doesn’t start because of it, particularly teenagers and youth.

Growing up, my parents were smokers. My wife’s parents were smokers. I’ve seen how tough it is to quit once the habit has been established. While a tax on addicts is, perhaps, problematic; I’ll go along with the Hoosier Pundit’s hope that it serves to deter smoking. And, if it doesn’t, perhaps their addiction can at least do some good in the form of providing health care to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it. (There may be a fair amount of overlap, of course.)

The Lafayette Journal & Courier has an article entitled price, demand boosting corn crop. Area farmers seem to be devoting about 15% of their crop to corn this year. Some of this, about 5%, is due to normal cyclical factors. (Last year soybeans were apparently the cyclically dominant crop.) However, prices are rising for corn, in part due to ethanol production demands.

When I read “more corn,” I’m a little concerned because I immediately think: 1) I’m not sure that corn-ethanol is the best (or even a very good) energy solution; and 2) I wonder if this will help increase the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diet. I haven’t made a study of either issue, so I don’t know how valid these concerns are. But, I am reminded of a book I heard about on NPR, in passing. As I understand it, the author sort of wrote about people from the perspective of corn. From corn’s perspective, we’ve been an invaluable servant in making corn one of the dominant species on the planet. Corn’s march toward world domination continues nicely.

Sylvia Smith, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a column entitled Bayh still running for vice president in which she theorizes that Evan Bayh is, and always was, running for Vice President. She suspects that Sen. Bayh ran full bore through December to show what he was capable of in terms of campaigning and fund raising and then shut his efforts down before he burned any bridges with any of the potential Presidential nominees.

Other than calling George H.W. Bush’s decision to select Dan Quayle as “bold,” (a number of other adjectives come more immediately to mind), the column strikes me as solid.

I have to confess, it’s a little difficult to focus on state politics or weighty matters of any kind when the weather is this nice. My wife, Amy, decided a bike and kiddie trailer for the bike would be a nice Mother’s Day present. So, that’s what she got. So far, I’ve gotten more use out of it than she has. I used it to take Cole to his swimming lesson on Saturday. On the way back, he fell asleep, and I figured he needed it, so I just kept pedaling. In addition to riding the 4 miles back to our subdivision from the YMCA, we hit pretty much every cul-de-sac in the neighborhood. Everybody was outside, and nearly everybody was in a good mood. Very pleasant. It ended up being about a 12 mile expedition. Saturday evening, we had some neighbors over, grilled some steaks, shrimp, and corn, and drank a few beers.

More bike riding today. Amy did some gardening which led to Cole playing in the sprinkler.

Harper, on the other hand, not so keen on the sprinkler.

(My apologies for the glare off of my fish-white belly. More sprinkler fun here.)

Amy ran about 7 miles. I hit the gym for a little while (among other things, I swam about 1/4 a mile — let’s just say I have vast room for improvement in this area.) More grilling this evening.

So, like I said, not a lot of political contemplation this weekend. Which, at the end of the day, I guess is sort of the goal. You want a government working well enough and a society prosperous enough that, when it comes along, you can simply sit back and enjoy some nice weather with your family and friends. As citizens, it’s our duty to not tune out all the time. But, this is Indiana. You have to take the nice weather where you find it.

Four large drinks indeed. That’s what State Dept. of Health attorney/blogger/former prosecutor/GOP activist Terry Record told police he had to drink before he ran a red light and cut Jimmy Cash’s truck in two. According to police, he had “at least 14 beers and six shots” in the 3.5 hours he was at Brad’s Brass Flamingo before getting into his car. Blood test results were between 0.15 and 0.17. His car was allegedly going 60 mph in a 35 mph zone.

Record was fired from his job with the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office but not charged after he lied about a hit and run accident involving a parked car in Broad Ripple in November. In December, he went to work with the Indiana State Department of Health but apparently did not disclose his brief stint with the prosecutor’s office.

According to his attorney, David E. Lewis, Record is “devastated for the victim’s family and for himself.”

You know, a .15 BAC strikes me as rather low for 14 beers and 6 shots in 3.5 hours. I don’t know how alcohol translates to BAC necessarily, but back in my college days, I engaged in some binge drinking from time to time. About once a year, my roommates and I would attempt to drink a case of beer. (The ill-advised “case chase”). One of my roommates drank a 6-pack in 11 minutes and came up about an ounce shy of drinking a 12 pack in an hour. So, I know whereof I speak. I can’t fathom the concerted effort it must take to drink 14 beers and 6 shots within the course of 210 minutes, presumably while also devoting attention to friends and strippers. (And drinking at a strip club isn’t cheap, by the way). All of this on a Sunday evening. Presumably with work scheduled for the next morning.

I don’t doubt that he was drunk and ran a red light and is completely liable for killing a man. But, unless he was a raging alcoholic, the specifics of his consumption don’t seem entirely credible to me. But, maybe my college drinking buddies and I were just lightweights.

Update The Indy Star is reporting that the judge has cut Record’s bail from $100,000 to $10,000. I think I just heard the explosion of the collective heads of the people who frequent the Indy Star’s comment threads.

The kids are circling so I doubt my ability to do any justice to this post, but I wanted to at least flag an opinion column by Republican-Libertarian politician-columnist Andrew Horning in the Evansville Courier Press. He starts off, in my opinion, well enough when he criticizes a new law (HB 1033) requiring weather radios in new trailers. He notes that the legislation doesn’t provide any obligations on trailer park owners or manufacturers or on owners of existing trailers. He says the burden is on the trailer owners. Actually, looking at the legislation, it applies to a person who “installs” a trailer home in a mobile home community after June 30, 2007. He also suggests that because these radios alert not only for bad weather in the area but also for Amber alerts and national alerts, most people turn them off as annoyances and they aren’t particularly effective. I don’t know the truth of that, but it sounds like a reasonable argument.

The problem is that he uses the deficiencies of this legislation as a springboard to range far afield, warning of big government and citing the dangers of Ruby Ridge and Waco as well as the vulnerability of an unarmed populace to the likes of the Virginia Tech rampager.

(Now my daughter is physically pulling me from the chair as I type. Perhaps she would like some attention. Perhaps more later.)

Update: Now that I’ve had a chance to look at the weather radio law a little bit, I think Mr. Horning is wrong on his assessment as to who is responsible for making sure these weather radios get put in the mobile home. He says:

The law doesn’t offer assistance of any kind. It simply makes it illegal to live in a new or relocated trailer that’s not equipped with an NOAA weather-alert radio.

The law doesn’t hold trailer builders, installers or park owners liable for anything. The law targets only trailer dwellers, a demographic already burdened by food and medical bills.

HB 1033 amends IC 25-23.7 which governs “Manufactured Home Installers.” The new law says this:

Sec. 6. (a) This section applies to a person that installs a manufactured home in a mobile home community after June 30, 2007.
(b) A person shall supply a weather radio inside each manufactured home that the person installs. [Required radio features omitted] . . .
(c) The supplying of a weather radio by a person who installs a manufactured home as required by this section does not subject the person to liability for the functionality of that weather radio.

The definitions of “installer” and “installation” are set forth in IC 25-23.7-2-3 & 4. IC 25-23.7-8-2 requires that installation of a manufactured home in a mobile home community be performed by a licensed manufactured home installer. Under IC 25-23.7-7, a violation could result in loss of a license or even be deemed a Class B misdemeanor.

So, I have to conclude that, while Horning might be right that this is an overly picky, nanny-state kind of law, he is wrong when he concludes that it is unenforceable or that the burden falls directly on the mobile home owner. The direct burden (which will presumably be passed along) falls on the installer who has a financial incentive to comply with the law.