The House passed Senate Bill 103 banning serial meetings by members of governmental entities to skirt the public meeting laws. I know the bill is well-intentioned, but I dread having to explain this to the various county officials:

Provides, with certain exceptions, that members of the governing body who participate in a series of gatherings either in person or by electronic means (excluding electronic mail) violate the open door law if: (1) one of the gatherings is attended by at least three members but less than a quorum of the members of the governing body and the other gatherings include at least two members of the governing body (for the city -county council of a consolidated city, one of the gatherings must be attended by at least five members and the other gatherings must include at least three members); (2) the total sum of different members attending all gatherings at least equals a quorum of the governing body; (3) all the gatherings concern the same subject matter and are held within a period of not more than seven days; and (4) the gatherings are held for the purpose of taking official action on public business.

It reminds me a bit of a school room bit by John Cleese in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”:

Cleese (as teacher): Now, before I begin the lesson, will those of you who are playing in the match this afternoon move your clothes down onto the lower peg immediately after lunch, before you write your letter home, if you’re not getting your hair cut, unless you’ve got a younger brother who is going out this weekend as the guest of another boy, in which case, collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter after you’ve had your hair cut, and make sure he moves your clothes down onto the lower peg for you. Now,–

Student: Sir?

Teacher: Yes, Wymer?

Student: My younger brother’s going out with Dibble this weekend, sir, but I’m not having my hair cut today, sir.

PUPILS: [chuckling]
Student: So, do I move my clothes down, or–

Teacher: I do wish you’d listen, Wymer. It’s perfectly simple. If you’re not getting your hair cut, you don’t have to move your brother’s clothes down to the lower peg. You simply collect his note before lunch, after you’ve done your scripture prep, when you’ve written your letter home, before rest, move your own clothes onto the lower peg, greet the visitors, and report to Mr. Viney that you’ve had your chit signed.

Hunter at Daily Kos has a post entitled ‘Post’ Mortem. He discusses the ramifications for mainstream pundits in having been so utterly wrong about Iraq. Reporting, Hunter says, is the life blood of democracy and the product newspapers provide that is not so easily reproducible. Not so much with punditry.

Cynicism on the part of much of the intelligent public, and apparently very justifiable cynicism at that — that’s the problem. The reporting of fact remains vital, but the editorial pages, the punditry — the lifeblood of cable news, as it turns out — those things are made of weaker stuff. They don’t carry much weight, because they are by definition not designed to be very weighty. More to the point, those things are reproducible by others — the only thing the pundit press has going for it is credibility. If the credibility is gone, by, say, being pompously, arrogantly, and window-rattlingly wrong on the major issues of the day for an extended period of years on end, then the rest of it is as good as gone too.

. . .

None of this is meant to be a “the press is obsolete” speech. It isn’t obsolete, and it won’t be, and nobody wants it to be. Reporting is the immune system of a functioning democracy: it is not optional. The country needs it to survive. And there are a lot of good, hardnosed reporters out there demonstrating how it’s done, every day.

But punditry ain’t press. Punditry ain’t reporting, it shouldn’t be treated as such, and it is, as a “class”, deeply and profoundly broken. I’m not sure that it could ever not be broken, if it is designed as a mere outcropping of the political landscape itself, a place for political figures to winter over between government or partisan jobs. The notion of a pundit class, separate from the people but attached at the hip to the very class of power brokers that they cover — it is unsettling. It is corruptive from the get-go. I simply don’t see that as something even slightly worthy of the respect that we should give bona fide reporting, of the sort that has been getting rarer and rarer as the networks and newspapers seek to fill the holes of daily history with the cheapest possible fare: Mouth vs. Mouth, now in the editorial pages of your paper of choice and appearing on a dozen television channels, six times an hour on each.

(H/t Dispatches from the Culture Wars) George Will has a column entitled Wallpapering With Red Tape. In it, he takes a look at the curious case of interior designers attempting to use the government to limit access by competitors. As a lawyer, a member of a protected profession, I can’t wax too indignant. But, I figured I’d post a cite to the George Will column since I’ve noted the efforts of interior designers in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

Theodore Kim has an article in the Indy Star entitled Road-project blitz faces rising costs on the subject of the Toll Road privatization money and road construction. (The article kindly flagged for me by Paul O’Malley). There appears to be a clumsy effort at a hard sell to get the money spent sooner, rather than later.

But some lawmakers and construction industry experts aren’t so sure, fearing that fast-rising costs could overwhelm those investment gains and force an overhaul of the plan.

“All of that is a real concern, which makes us very interested in the Major Moves money that’s there and making sure it’s not diverted to other things,” said Dennis Faulkenberg, a lobbyist for the road-building industry.
. . .
Rising fuel and commodity prices already have significantly increased the cost of steel, bricks and asphalt, according to the Associated General Contractors of America. Highway and street construction costs overall have soared between 11 percent and 14 percent annually in each of the past three years, according to the contractors’ group.
. . .
Rep. Randy L. Borror, R-Fort Wayne, the lawmaker who sponsored the governor’s Major Moves legislation last year, said concern about rising costs argues for moving fast on the administration’s road-building efforts.

The longer the money remains in the bank, the higher costs escalate and the greater the temptation to tap into that money for other purposes.

“We wanted to get the money in the ground as quickly as possible,” he said. “I don’t want to hold on to this money.”

First of all, perhaps lawmakers should consider that fast-rising fuel costs are an argument for less road construction, not more. Second, arguments by current lawmakers and by road construction interests that we have to sink all of the money into roads right now seems a little self-serving. Motorists of northern Indiana are going to be paying the tab for this for the next 7 decades. Perhaps we shouldn’t be in an even greater hurry to spend their money.

[tags]privatization[/tags]

Head on over to Bats Left Throws Right for a deft evisceration of Peggy Noonan’s latest efforts to mythologize former President Reagan. If I could write half as well as Doghouse Riley, I’d be a pretty good writer.

Craig at Reverent & Free has a genius post that riffs on Rep. Mike Pence’s suggestion that the Iraq War is like football and the citizenry wants body counts from both sides to know who is winning and losing.

Craig offers a number of sporting analogies. Just a few of my favorites here:

Basketball – Your top guard made a “slam dunk” in the first quarter, but it was in the other team’s hoop. Since then both hoops have been destroyed. The other team’s coaches and starters are all either dead or in jail. Several hundred spectators have been injured by members of both teams. The ball occasionally explodes.

. . .

Fencing – You’ve lost a leg, but your opponent has lost two arms. You’re laying on top of him, but his saber is in your liver. The equipment manager stole $7 billion from you.

. . .

Hacky Sack – You have either killed or maimed all of the other players. Your violent behavior has left you with a broken arm and a seeping chest wound. There never was a hacky sack.

Josh Clayborn at In The Agora has a post discussing tricks that create the illusion of balancing the federal budget without actually doing it. The thrust of his post is to chide Taking Down Words for grilling Mitch Daniels, formerly Bush’s budget director, over his budgetary shenanigans but not, apparently reacting in kind to budgetary gimmicks Congressional Democrats are apparently proposing to use, according to a Washington Post article from Tuesday.

The intrablogospheric (yeah, I made that word up) food fight is not terribly interesting. But the discussion about balancing the budget is. Back when we were trying to decide whether to dive into the Iraqi bog, Mitch Daniels characterized the proposed war as “an affordable endeavour” and opined that an estimate that the war would cost between $100 and $200 billion as “very, very high.” The cost of the war is already north of the $200 billion mark and climbing. (Though, my favorite gross underestimation of the Iraq War was the Bush administration’s insistence that Iraq could be reconstructed at a maximum expense of $1.7 billion.)

The Washington Post article says that the Democrats are using tricks similar to those used by the Bush administration to create an illusory plan to balance the budget — chiefly ignoring the long-term costs of the war in Iraq and ignoring the need to fix the AMT tax. Bush’s proposed budget has $50 billion for Iraq in 2009 and nothing after that. The Democrats’ plan does the same thing.

At the moment, however, I don’t know that we can conclude that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans with respect to fiscal responsibility. Time will tell. We do know how the budget looked when Clinton and the Republican Congress became Bush and the Republican Congress in January 2001. The budget looked orders of magnitude better than it does now. We weren’t talking about taking 5 years to balance the budget. We were talking about actually reducing the national debt. There were some financial tricks involved with that as well — mostly involving how Social Security was accounted for — but nothing like the financial mess we’re in now, after 6 years of Bush and his enablers exploding the deficit.

As I wrote to Josh in response to his post, “Can’t we just balance the [expletive] budget already? Cut until it hurts. Raise taxes until it hurts. Let’s just right the ship. (Easier said than done. Politicians who followed this strategy would probably be run out on a rail — we get the government we deserve.) “

It’s officially spring now, as we pass the vernal equinox. Lafayette had a nice afternoon and evening, and after an absolutely brutal work day, the kids and wife being down in Indy today, I was able to run four or five miles and listen to some tunes on my iPod to unwind. Now I’m sitting on my back deck with a beer and a laptop. So, maybe it’s the endorphins, maybe it’s the nice day, or maybe it’s the alcohol that has me in an especially live and let live kind of mood.

But, now more than ever, I’m befuddled by the proponents of SJR 7 which would not only prevent same sex couples from getting married, but would also prevent a court from deciding that Indiana law requires an incident of marriage to be conferred upon an unmarried couple even if, and let’s be clear about this, the General Assembly passes a law requiring an incident of marriage to be conferred upon an unmarried couple.

What, exactly, is the evil that SJR 7 proponents are attempting to forestall with this kind of regulation? If it were only the marriage thing, I could almost understand it. The Church worked really hard to get a monopoly on marriage in the Middle Ages, and it’s a shame to see that monopoly eroded after less than a millenium.

But, this provision goes further. It stakes a claim on the entire bundle of rights encompassed by a marriage, and attempts to say that nothing in that bundle can be shared with unmarried couples. What’s wrong, in principle, with the legislature being able to pass a law –and equally important, the court being able to enforce a law that is passed– that confers estate planning or tax benefits, for example, upon unmarried couples; even if those benefits are currently reserved for married couples?

And, in my mind, what it comes down to, again and again, is that a particular stripe of conservative Christian really, really dislikes homosexuality, spending more energy worrying about and acting against that one form of perceived immorality more than practically all of the others combined. “The Bible tells me homosexuality is wrong” doesn’t really get us closer to an explanation of why this is. The Bible also tells me I’m not supposed to hug my wife while she’s menstruating (Leviticus 15:19-24), that I can own slaves as long as they’re from neighboring nations (Leviticus 25:44), that eating shellfish is an abomination (Leviticus 11:10 — abomination is also the term used for homosexuality), and that those who work on the Sabbath should be put to death (Exodus 35:2). By and large, those Biblical immoralities have been dismissed by just about everybody. So, the special passion about the immorality of homosexuality needs back up. What is the principled moral argument against homosexuality that requires this stripe of conservative Christian to spend amazing amounts of time and energy seeking to amend our state Constitution to make sure that gays don’t end up with any of the rights enjoyed by married people?

Lot’s of blogging on the House hearing on SJR 7, but I’ll just refer you to Advance Indiana, and bilerico.

The Associated Press has an article entitled Methadone clinic ban wins OK in House.

New methadone clinics would be banned temporarily in Indiana under legislation passed by the House on Monday.

The House voted 90-8 for the bill, which would place a moratorium on new clinics through Dec. 31, 2008, while the state studies whether regulations on them are sufficient.
. . .
Indiana has 13 clinics that administer methadone, a synthetic opiate that eases withdrawal pain for users of heroin or prescription painkillers such as OxyContin. The state approved two more clinics last year – one in Valparaiso and one in Indianapolis – after lawmakers partly lifted a previous moratorium that had banned new clinics for at least 10 years.
. . .
[Rep. Steve] Stemler said the state should step back and determine whether Indiana regulations are too lax.

Probably comparing apples and oranges here, but the story about methadone clinics, for some reason, struck me as similar to the debate about CAFOs, particularly as I read about the debate at a site called “Hoosier Ag Today” with Gary Truitt.

Apparently a bill requiring a moratorium on CAFOs is not going anywhere and even Phil Pflum’s HB 1197 which imposes a set back requirement faces tough sledding. Sen. Beverly Gard, chairperson of the Senate Energy and Environmental Affairs Committee says that the bill has too many loose ends to pass.

There are a number of CAFO bills going through the legislature, so who knows what we’ll end up with in the end. But, the approach to moratoria for CAFOs versus methadone clinics is interesting. The sense seems to be that methadone clinics ought to stop until we have proof that they aren’t too burdensome to the surrounding community whereas CAFOs ought to continue until we have proof that they are too burdensome to the surrounding community.