When I was a kid, I tried a few times to use the ‘I forgot’ defense with my parents. It didn’t work too often. So, I was fairly impressed when President Reagan used it with such great effect with respect to the Iran-Contra matter. Unlike the Great Communicator, however, neither I nor Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appear to have Alzheimers.

Gonzales is facing the Senate Judiciary Committee asking questions about whether eight United States Attorneys were fired for political reasons. For example, it has been suggested that the United States Attorney for New Mexico was fired because he would not pursue politically timed and motivated corruption charges shortly before the election there. The reverse seems to have happened in Wisconsin where a U.S. Attorney was retained after pursuing a political corruption charge against Georgia Thompson so baseless the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals decided more or less on the spot to release the accused from incarceration, calling the evidence against her “beyond thin.”

This is part and parcel of the Bush administration’s electoral strategy. As McClatchy News article puts it:

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush’s popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

We heard echoes of this strategy in the state GOP’s successful efforts to pass strict Voter ID requirements for those voters who vote at the polls (not so much for absentee voters, as I recall) championed by Todd “blacks are Democratic Slaves” Rokita.

So back to Gonzales, caught with his hand in the political cookie jar, Gonzales had to explain some of this to the Senate. He went with the “I forgot” defense:

His performance clearly exasperated the committee members, who were angered as he invoked a faulty memory more than 50 times. Republicans did not hold back in going after one of their party’s own. Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, went so far as to call for Mr. Gonzales to resign, a demand made by only one other senator, Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

I’m not so interested in Mr. Gonzales’s resignation. I don’t see that the Bush administration has any real interest in appointing competent people to important posts. There is nothing to be done, really, but ride this out and turn over as many of the rocks as possible so people at least know the depth of incompetence.

Condolences to Sen. Tim Skinner. According to the Terre Haute TribStar, his 29 year old daughter was killed in a motor vehicle accident when her vehicle was rear-ended by a semi. Terrible. I can’t even imagine what that must be like for Sen. Skinner and his family.

So, I am now the Vice-President of our county’s Legal Aid Board of Directors. Glamorous, I know. But it’s a valuable organization — Tippecanoe County’s in particular, but also legal services for poorer people generally. As a debt collector, this kind of goes against my natural grain — it’s usually easier for me and my client when the debtor is unrepresented. But for society as a whole, it’s better when everybody gets fair representation. This isn’t just me being a dirty, commie hippie. The thing about the rule of law is that the masses have to buy into it for the system to work. I think Iraq is giving us a case study on what happens when you pass a bunch of laws that nobody feels compelled to obey. Force only goes so far. The system can only use a certain percentage of its available energy forcing compliance before the whole thing breaks down.

The poor don’t get nearly the quality of legal representation as do the rich. The legal system does not treat everybody equally. But, overall, the American legal system gets the job done. Mostly, it successfully assists the government in maintaining its monopoly on force and keeps us from resolving our differences through violence. And, institutions like legal aid are the nets that keep too many of the very poor from slipping through the cracks. If you truly do not have resources and if your problems are significant enough, usually you can get a lawyer to help you navigate through the legal system and keep the railroading to a minimum. And, my hat is off to the lawyers who handle these cases. They are not richly rewarded. The cases are often some of the most intractable — those cases where there is no way to make the situation “good.” All you can hope for, really, is to make the situation less bad. A lot of times we’re talking about home lives that are well and truly fubar, usually with innocent kids in the middle.

I’ll just close with a little pitch. If you have a few bucks to spare, you could do worse than to throw some of them the way of your local legal aid organization.

Update Not directly related, but it seemed relevant. Marked Hoosier posts on Indiana being #1 in volunteering. “The study, released this week by the corporation for national and community service indicates that in 2006, Indiana’s volunteers contributed more than four billion dollars to charities. That puts Indiana far ahead of other states.”

Nuvo has an article up entitled Kurt Vonnegut: the exit interview. Apparently at the end of the interview, Mr. Vonnegut suggested “I AM THE FATHER OF ANNA NICOLE SMITH’S BABY!” as the title of the article. Some interesting stuff in there. But, one bit I was really happy he mentioned involved his interest in architecture and seeing the city of Indianapolis grow and feeling that it was his city because his dad was an architect.

Well, there was stuff going on, heroic events. One was what used to be, and probably still is, the largest moving project in history. The headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company used to be brick. What they did was take the old brick building — with the operators in there saying, “Number please” and all that — and they put it through a quarter of a turn and moved it half a block!

Then they built the new headquarters, which my father designed. So, yeah, there was stuff going on and my family was doing it. That was a very special situation.

I have no idea if this is correct, but the way I heard it Bell Telephone’s quarter turn relocation project was undertaken so that the front door would no longer be on Meridian Street and their property taxes would go down.

Another good one:

One thing in the Middlewest: If you’re in my business you’re aware of the low opinion both coasts have of the midlands. And that is quite mistaken. New York would be a Kokomo if it weren’t for Middlewesterners coming there.

Ouch. (Sorry Kokomo).

Plenty more in the article; well worth the read.

The issues surrounding the “In God We Trust” plate have been well covered in the blogosphere. But, I had not seen the BMV state so explicitly that the “In God We Trust” plate was one of Indiana’s two “standard” plates. But, that is what the BMV is saying at the site designed for voting for Indiana’s next license plate.

I don’t like specialty plates generally. We have something like 30 of them, and it has gotten out of hand. I think we should have just one plate. It’s only a registration tag for a piece of personal property for goodness sake. However, if we do have so many specialty plates, I did not see any particular harm with having another one that said “In God We Trust.” I think it probably violates the First Amendment to some extent, but only in a very minor way. The violation was increased, however, by giving the “In God We Trust” plate preferential treatment by not requiring an extra fee be paid the way it is with other specialty plates. Now, I think state government has probably crossed a line by making a proclamation of faith in God the declaration on one of Indiana’s two standard license plates — plates that must be displayed on one’s vehicle as a condition of driving.

It’s not going to keep me up nights, but I think it is wrong. Unlike chocolate and peanut butter, Government and Religion simply are not two great tastes that taste great together. They’re more like ketchup and ice cream.

Advance Indiana has a powerful critique of the historical inaccuracies of Todd Rokita’s speech to a group of Daviess County Republicans. Apparently Mr. Rokita’s ignorance of the roles of the political parties in civil rights history is profound.

The House has adopted and referred to the Senate House Resolution 69, authored by Reps. Bauer and Porter which is a very nice tribute to the late Kurt Vonnegut. The resolution was drafted by DI-69, meaning the Legislative Service Agency’s highly accomplished counselor and Kurt Vonnegut afficianado, Tim Tyler, Esq. It has a summary of his history and accomplishments and concludes:

Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana the Senate concurring:

SECTION 1. That the Indiana General Assembly acknowledges the accomplishments of Indianapolis native son and Hoosier legend Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as a major figure in English literature for more than half a century and a grandmaster of contemporary American letters.

SECTION 2. That the Principal Clerk of the House of Representatives shall transmit a copy of this resolution to the family of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. And so it goes*

I am pretty open about the fact that I’m a geek. Here is another installment in that policy of openness. Growing up, I read Tolkien books repeatedly – in particular, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion. In my experience, a substantial portion of the population has read the first two on the list, but not very many have read the Silmarillion. But, let me be the first to stipulate that I am not really that hardcore where Tolkien is concerned. For example, I’ve read some of The History of Middle Earth but just in passing and only small parts.

Like I said, however, the Silmarillion was one I read repeatedly, probably 5 or 6 times. I’ve read it enough times to have a favorite passage. And, much to my surprise, as I was driving back to work after dropping my son off at preschool, somebody on the radio was reading that passage.

Turns out, Christopher Tolkien has used some of his father’s work to compile The Children of Húrin which is being released. The Children of Hurin expands upon the parts of the tale told in the Silmarillion about Hurin and his family, particularly Turin and the events surrounding his slaying of the dragon Glaurung (I’m a geek, I know!).

And, in case you care, as to the favorite passage in question, the set up is this. Hurin is, simply put, a bad ass. He is a leader of one of the enlightened tribes of men who have aligned themselves with the elves who are fighting Morgoth, the original Dark Lord to whom Sauron was a mere servant. He is fighting with his brother Huor and the elves in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. At some point, it becomes clear that the battle is lost. Hurin and Huor decide to make a stand in order to allow their friend, the elf-lord Turgon to skin out of there and get back to his fortress at Gondolin. Eventually, everyone else was dead or gone:

Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried: ‘Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!’ Seventy times he uttered that cry, but they took him at last alive, by the command of Morgoth, for the Orcs grappled him with their hands, which clung to him still though he hewed off their arms, and ever their numbers were renewed, until at last he fell buried beneath them. Then Gothmog bound him and dragged him to Angband with mockery. Thus ended the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, as the sun went down beyond the sea. Night fell in Hithlum, and there came a great storm of wind out of the West.

The scholar who was reading this passage on the radio explained about how Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories very much follow the “Northern” view of heroism as opposed to the Greek or Latin views. The Northern view is very fatalistic. There is no ultimate triumph. No matter what you do, you will die anyway and there is always another monster or another evil around the corner. But, you keep trying and fighting anyway. For whatever reason, as an adolescent boy, there was something very appealing about that view generally and about the Silmarillion and Hurin in particular. I don’t spend much time thinking about such things anymore — something about raising kids and paying a mortgage sort of pounds one into reality — but I still have fond memories.

I do not know how well this will work in my WordPress blog format, but I want to use this entry to chronicle the use of the Virginia Tech tragedy for an agenda. So, my intent will be to update it as I see a new one. So far, we have:

Anti-gun control – Josh Claybourn at In The Agora, with a link to Instapundit, says that Virginia Tech’s “gun free zone” regulations assisted the killer.

Pro-gun control – The New York Times calls for stricter gun control and, in a news article, notes that Virginia has some of the weakest gun control laws in the nation.

Anti-evolution and abortion – Answers in Genesis (h/t Dispatches from the Culture Wars) blames the shootings on an era where students are taught that plants, animals, and humans arose from natural processes and where abortions are allowed.

Public health – I have suggested that public mental health concerns should be just as much of the debate as gun control concerns. However, at this point, I think that “just as much” should be close to zero. The tragedy is too recent for us to make good public policy decisions based on the incident.

Iraq – Blue Herald says that Iraq has “2 Virginia Techs a day.”

Immigration – When it was thought that the shooter might be a Chinese national here on a student visa, Debbie Schlussel concluded that this was “yet another reason to stop letting in so many foreign students.”

Movies and video games – Dragon Quill says: “[T]he bottom line is that we have created a society in which violence is an acceptable way of dealing with problems. Movies and video games idealize violence. Stress and frustration is our way of life. Children grow up with little supervision, and with pressures on them that were unheard of even a few years ago. We’ve created a society that in many ways resembles a pressure cooker. And anybody who’s used one of those things knows, there has to be a valve to allow the steam to get out, or the entire pot will explode.”

UPDATES BELOW THE FOLD

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Indy Cornrows has a good entry on the Pacers loss to the Nets last night that officially put them out of playoff contention. First time in ten years they’ve missed the playoffs. Seems like they’ve been dying a slow death ever since The Brawl featuring Ron Artest a couple of years ago. Hopefully they’ll somehow begin to regroup and start a new chapter.