Holy crap. Virginia Tech Shooting Kills at Least 22.

At least 22 people were killed today, some of them students, and about two dozen more injured during shootings at Virginia Tech, some of them in a classroom, the police said. A gunman was also shot to death, officials said.
. . .
At 7:15 a.m., an emergency 911 call came in to University police department about a shooting at a campus building, West Ambler Johnston, a dormitory for about 900 freshman students. About two hours later it was followed by a second shooting at a classroom in a science and engineering building on the opposite end of campus, Norris Hall. The shooter died there, the police said.

“It didn’t stop for almost two or three minutes,” a junior from Fairfax named Josh told CNN. “It sounded like a handgun or something but it was many, many shots.”

Meanwhile, In The Agora seems to blame the tragedy on a gun ban at Virginia Tech. I’m a friend of the Second Amendment and think there is a certain utility in allowing citizens to meet force with force where necessary, but jeeze, wait until the bodies are cold.

Marcia Oddi’s Indiana Law Blog has sensitized me to this issue. The ILB ran a series of posts a while back on the subject of whether Indiana’s Constitution requires the General Assembly to pass a budget. It does not. And yet, year after year in article after article — particularly as the General Assembly is winding down in an odd-numbered year, you’ll see references to the budget as something that lawmakers are Constitutionally required to pass. It’s a great idea for them to do it. There would be hell to pay if they did not. But, near as I can figure, there is no legal requirement for them to do so.

So, where does Theodore Kim get his facts when he writes in the Indy Star:

Failing to pass a budget, which the state constitution requires, is the only issue that would oblige the legislature to meet beyond April.

His story does not require this assertion. The general thrust remains the same: there are a lot of knotty issues that the legislature has to untangle before they’re done. As a practical (as opposed to a legal) matter, the budget is the most important one of these. Thanks to the ILB, every time I hear a reporter or legislator talk about their Constitutional duty to pass a budget, it’s like needles on a blackboard. If someone can direct me to the constitutional provision that requires this, I’d appreciate it. Otherwise, it would be nice if reporters and lawmakers stopped perpetuating this myth.

[tags]budget myth[/tags]

Advance Indiana, quoting the Washington Times-Herald brings us the tin ear of Todd Rokita.

Rokita spent some time revisiting the party’s history, especially concerning the African-American vote. He said that African-Americans vote 90 percent Democrat and questioned why.

“How can that be?” Rokita said. “90 to 10. Who’s the master and who’s the slave in that relationship? How can that be healthy?”

Rokita went on to stress that the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, abolition, and the civil rights movement and they should be proud of their heritage. It’s the fault of the national media, however, that this heritage gets lost when folks think of the major political parties and race relations in America. No mention of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the defection of the Dixiecrats to the Republican Party, the almost total shift of the GOP center of gravity to the South, and really pretty much everything having to do with race and politics for the past 40 years. Nope, blacks vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats because of the national media and their slave-like relationship with the Democrats.

I don’t think Rokita meant anything bad by his statements. But I think his statements are disingenuous, patronizing, and a maybe a little naive.

Update Finfinito has an entry on the incident over at Blue Indiana. Rokita’s comments have been picked up by Kevin Rader of WTHR-13. Mr. Rader is requesting that Mr. Rokita provide an on-camera clarification.

Hunter at Daily Kos is, in my ever so humble opinion, one of the greatest columnists of our time. His latest offering is entitled Fall of the House of Imus. A few paragraphs:

You can never predict how these things will play out: as many others have mentioned before me, Imus or Rush or can say bigoted, vile, meanspirited stuff like this all the time, and never get seriously called on it once, and then there’s one particular incident that is just barely more egregious than most of the others, and it suddenly galvanizes the whole frame around that person, and all of a sudden there’s hell to pay where there wasn’t a mere week before. It is a strange, bizarre aspect of American political life, but it is a pattern that has become very commonplace. First inured, dull apathy; then sudden scandal; then reflection on the history past behavior that nobody could bother to cast their eyes upon for the months or years or decades leading up to the “big” event; then summary judgment.

America can’t deal with long histories of implicit racism, or borderline corruption, or just general, simmering unsavoriness: there is no hook there to attach the American attention span onto. It has to be a true pie-in-the-face moment, and when that moment happens, the tidal retribution that was built up from all the previous, apparently ignored incidents surges in all at once and buries the poor unsuspecting bastard.

Then we can point to the whole thing as a learning experience or something, and everyone feels a little good about themselves and a little sick about themselves, and we move on, and nobody but nobody is going to start wondering too seriously about all the other white radio hosts regularly making bigoted and sexist remarks, or the black ones either, because once Imus has been chastised the problem is momentarily solved, and we can go back to more pleasurable tasks of democracy, like talking in excited whispers about which dysfunctional, dull-eyed blot on the collective soul of humanity now can claim full cash ownership of Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter.

. . .

There was a period of time in the Eighties and Nineties when shock jocks ruled daytime television: pissed off white guys whose schtick was to foam just as unintelligably as their intentionally dysfunctional guests. Geraldo’s nose and O’Reilly’s ego owe a lot to that period, and even Rush was given a television program, which he used to typical Rush effect, and I still can’t hear the name Morton Downey Jr. without dying a little inside. But it got old. The entire genre became a bitter parody of what was already bitter parody to begin with, and America for the most part grew the hell up and moved the hell on.

Similarly, from that period to this, I half wonder whether there is a storm over the utterly enfranchised Imus now where there wasn’t before in large part because of the underlying anger and skepticism at the media in general that is pervading many, many of these discussions — the feeling, once again, that we’ve all been duped, and that these figures that appear on our television sets not only aren’t as smart as they keep telling us they are, but that in actual fact they’re pretty damn hollow, and pretty damn narcissistic, and pretty damn mean, and pretty damn dumb. Except this time, the media figures that America is angry at aren’t some low-class televised hangers on, it is the uppermost rungs of our discourse, the people who decide life and death and taxes and war. And Imus, we have been told, is one of their rulers? No, seriously — are we fucking kidding?

You can tell, viscerally, when the American public is collectively in a foul mood and looking for a little payback — it happened to the Republicans last November, an election of intended retribution pure and simple, but the anger at the media itself for many of the same faults has not been sated. It’s a broad-based anger that we’ve been taken advantage of, snookered by hollow people who have been leading America into directions that have been empty at best, and intentionally destructive at worst, and worst of all filling the airwaves with narcissistic self-promotion over how great they’ve been to do it.

Under this broader premise, Imus certainly isn’t the only gopher in this hole, he’s just the dumb bastard that happened to stuck his head out first?

I always quote far too much of any piece he’s written, but that’s just because I wish I’d written it myself.

The Associated Pressreports on a study demonstrating that students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not.

For its study, Mathematica looked at students in four abstinence programs around the country as well as students from the same communities who did not participate in the abstinence programs. The 2,057 youths came from big cities – Miami and Milwaukee – as well as rural communities – Powhatan, Va., and Clarksdale, Miss.

The students who participated in abstinence education did so for one to three years. Their average age was 11 to 12 when they entered the programs back in 1999.

Mathematica then did a follow up survey in late 2005 and early 2006. By that time, the average age for participants was about 16.5. Mathematica found that about half of the abstinence students and about half from the control group reported that they remained abstinent.

“I really do think it’s a two-part story. First, there is no evidence that the programs increased the rate of sexual abstinence,” said Chris Trenholm, a senior researcher at Mathematica who oversaw the study. “However, the second part of the story that I think is equally important is that we find no evidence that the programs increased the rate of unprotected sex.”

Unfortunately, I suspect that the most vocal proponents of abstinence as the Alpha and Omega of sex education are the least likely to pay attention to “science” and “empirical evidence.” They will simply stick their fingers in their ears, yell “la la la la,” and insist that what we really need is more of this program that doesn’t seem to have any effect at all.

Oh, hey, look. Those folks are already on the scene:

[Bush administration] officials said one lesson they learned from the study is that the abstinence message should be reinforced in subsequent years to truly affect behavior.

“This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccines. You can’t expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth’s high school career,” said Harry Wilson, the commissioner of the Family and Youth Services Bureau at the Administration for Children and Families.

Let’s just figure out what approaches lead us to children who 1) don’t get diseases; 2) don’t get pregnant; 3) have healthy sex lives as adults; and 4) preferably do not have sex too early. And I’d say those priorities are listed in roughly their proper order of importance.

It’s Friday night and . . . I’m a middle aged father of two little kids. So I’m doing nothing tonight. But I hope the rest of you are out whooping it up and having some fun. Maybe I’ll crack open one of my Samuel Smith Taddy Porters and live a little.

Karl Kurtz has a great article for harcore legislative junkies entitled The Golden Age of State Legislatures over at The Thicket at State Legislatures. He takes a look at the dramatic changes that took place in state legislatures toward the middle and later parts of the 18th century (that’s the 1700s, Holmes.)

A couple of interesting points:

In the years just before Independence, the British clamped down on the colonial assemblies. Parliament suspended the New York Assembly in 1766, and the royal governor did the same in Massachusetts in 1768. Prevented from performing their lawmaking function, colonial assembly members turned instead to building strong constituency ties says University of Virginia historian Peter Onuf. They took a key role in mobilizing popular opinion against the crown.
. . .
The first Pennsylvania constitution was radically democratic: all bills had to be published, and final passage of bills in the unicameral did not occur until a second vote was held by a new legislature following an annual election. This made the people of Pennsylvania, in effect, “a second branch of the legislature,” says Onuf.

The unicameral structure soon came under attack for too much concentration of power. Bicameralism was favored as a double representation of the people—one more way to protect their liberty and property rights—and Pennsylvania revised its constitution to add a second chamber and a popularly elected governor. By the end of the 18th century, all of the states had adopted bicameral legislatures, annual elections and popularly elected governors.

A number of bills are on their way to the Governor as a result of the House concurring with the Senate’s amendments. They are:

Bill No.:HB 1033 Digest: Weather radios in manufactured homes.
Authors/Coauthors: Hoy, Pierce, Welch, Crouch
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 528: Yeas 70, Nays 10
———————————————————————————————————–

Bill No.: HB 1037 Digest: Home energy assistance sales tax exemption.
Authors/Coauthors: Micon, Day, Crawford, Murphy
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 529: Yeas 84, Nays 0
———————————————————————————————————–

Bill No.: HB 1065 Digest: Special fuel tax exemption for certain biofuels.
Authors/Coauthors: Micon, Grubb, Koch
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 530: Yeas 85, Nays 0
———————————————————————————————————–

Bill No.: HB 1075 Digest: Individual development accounts.
Authors/Coauthors: Day, Murphy, Bardon, V. Smith, Porter
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 531: Yeas 87, Nays 0
———————————————————————————————————–

Bill No.: HB 1214 Digest: Landlord-tenant law.
Authors/Coauthors: Pierce, Micon, Koch
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 532: Yeas 84, Nays 0
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Bill No.: HB 1324 Digest: Valuable metal dealers.
Authors/Coauthors: Crooks, Lutz, Bardon, Klinker
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 533: Yeas 87, Nays 0
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Bill No.: HB 1335 Digest: Coal mining.
Authors/Coauthors: Stilwell, Battles, Davis, Bell
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 534: Yeas 86, Nays 0
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Bill No.: HB 1387 Digest: Animal cruelty.
Authors/Coauthors: L. Lawson, Bardon, Neese, Denbo
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 535: Yeas 85, Nays 0
———————————————————————————————————–

Bill No.: HB 1489 Digest: Cancellation of nonpermanent teacher contracts.
Authors/Coauthors: Cheney, Behning, Soliday, Cheatham
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 536: Yeas 85, Nays 0
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Bill No.: HB 1595 Digest: Northwestern Indiana regional planning commission.
Authors/Coauthors: Dobis
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 537: Yeas 87, Nays 1
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Bill No.: HB 1654 Digest: Sex crime victims and polygraph examinations.
Authors/Coauthors: Dembowski, Elrod, C. Brown, L. Lawson
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 538: Yeas 81, Nays 0
———————————————————————————————————–

Bill No.: HB 1693 Digest: Motor carriers.
Authors/Coauthors: Cochran, Kuzman
04/12/2007 H House concurred in Senate amendments; Roll Call 539: Yeas 87, Nays 0

The Associated Press ran an article entitled Bush aides use of GOP e-mail probed.

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

Oh come on. They’re not even trying anymore.

Congressional investigators looking into the administration’s firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the nongovernmental e-mail accounts in their sights because some White House aides used them to help plan the U.S. attorneys’ ouster. Democrats were questioning whether the use of the GOP-provided e-mail accounts was proof that the firings were political.

Democrats also have been asking if White House officials are purposely conducting sensitive official presidential business via nongovernmental accounts to get around a law requiring preservation – and eventual disclosure – of presidential records.

If the White House aides were using email accounts outside the White House, particularly from the RNC, I’d think that claims of executive privilege might be compromised. Executive privilege is well beyond my expertise, but if I were Sen. Leahy, I’d take a run at that potential weak spot in the stone wall.

Indiana native and author, Kurt Vonnegut died at age 84. Apparently he suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.