Via bilerico, Sen. Anita Bowser (D-Michigan City) has passed away at the age of 86 from breast cancer. Rest in Peace Senator.

I recently picked up a book entitled “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” by Daniel Dennett. He cited an interesting quote by Richard Dawkins:

[M]odern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Dennett goes on to address the response of theists that, be that as it may, there is a huge difference between believing in a Higher Power and not. Dennett’s suggests that, while most theists might call their idea of a Higher Power “God,” they mean entirely different things. Dennett compares this to saying that Lucy likes Rock [Hudson,] and Desi likes Rock [& Roll].” And then trying to say that there is something significant about Lucy and Desi both liking Rock. I don’t think theist definitions of “God” are quite that distinct, but I can go most of the way. The most I think we can say universally about the God/Higher Power of theists is that they believe in something that is outside nature. Any additional qualifications and you start having a God in which some theists do not believe. Make God some sort of super-being, for example, and you exclude all of those who believe God is some sort of ineffable essence.

For my part, if what we mean by “God” is something “beyond nature,” I can go so far as to say I’m agnostic. Agnostic means, “without knowlege.” I don’t see any real basis for believing that there is a human like superbeing who plucked out a rib and molded it into a woman, told Noah to build a boat, and had him put all of the animals except for the dinosaurs into it before flooding the earth. But, I can’t wrap my tiny little brain around the idea that all of the stuff that currently exists just simply “always existed.” (Then again, having a Higher Being that is a First Cause pretty much leads to the same question — where did the First Cause come from. We’ll just say “magic” and leave it at that for now.) So, I guess it’s fair to say I’m an atheist with respect to Poseidon and Baal and all of the Gods that no longer are the subjects of belief. I’m an atheist with respect to Jehovah and Jesus’ Dad and Allah and the other Gods who are currently having their period of belief. And, I’m agnostic with respect to the potential that there is/was a God/Higher Power that was a First Cause.

Just some random thoughts for a Sunday morning, I suppose.

I was amused by Gov. Daniels reaction to the Democratic budget bill that passed the House of Representatives. According to this story by Bryan Corbin writing for the Evansville Courier Press, Gov. Daniels reacted to the absence of any funding for I-69 in the budget bill by calling it “a friendly poke in the eye.”

Gov. Mitch Daniels reacted this morning to recent developments in the Democratic-controlled Indiana House, which passed a budget without funding Interstate 69 and also drained $60 million from the Major Moves fund to pay for local street projects instead of I-69.

Daniels termed it a “friendly poke in the eye” from House Democrats but said he does not believe they truly oppose I-69. He assumes they ultimately will fund it. Daniels appeared with Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, a Democrat.

I think Daniels’ reaction strikes pretty much the right tone. He lets it be known that he doesn’t like the absence of I-69 funding, but “it’s just business,” as they say.

Interesting story by Dan Stockman in Sunday’s Fort Wayne Journal Gazette entitled “Which price is right?” It’s a real estate shell game where a guy gets an option to buy a property from A, arranges a sale to B at a higher price, then B makes his mortgage payments by “selling” it back to the guy who doesn’t have his name on any sales documents. The parties involved swear up and down that it’s perfectly legitimate. All I know is that I’d be sweating an awful lot if I were one of the “B”s like they describe in the story with a million dollars in mortgages, trusting that I’ll be able to make the payments each month solely on the basis that the fellow who arranged the deal was a “really good guy.”

The Indiana Law Blog cites to a New York Times article about negotiating medical prices. “[M]edical care is often priced with the same maddening, arbitrary opacity as airline seats and hotel rooms.” The uninsured get charged the full sticker price. It’s very difficult to know what a medical procedure will cost before agreeing to get it done, and it’s very tough to determine what the fair market value of the procedure actually is.

House Bill 1047 HB 1047 – Disclosure of health care spending. Rep. Dickinson. Passed the House on Third Reading 51 to 46 along party lines.

Now here is a really interesting bill. It requires an applicant for or a recipient of medical assistance from the state to disclose the person’s employer or the employer of a person who provides them with support. If a particular employer gets listed on by 50 or more recipients of state medical assistance, the Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) has to include the employer in a report to the legislative council, along with information about how many of the employer’s employees are relying on state medical assistance and how much that assistance costs the state. In addition, an employer with more than 1,000 employees is required to disclose to the Department of Labor the total dollar amount the employer spent on health care benefits for employees during the previous calendar year, the percentage of the payroll spent on health care benefits, and the average amount spent per employee.

To me, the part of the bill seeking to identify the employers of recipients getting state medical assistance is more interesting than the health care expenditures of large employers. What percentage of people in Indiana work for an employer with over 1,000 employees? Will such reporting tell us much about health care for Hoosier workers generally?

But, identifying employers who, for whatever reason, have a non-trivial number of employees or employee families who still need medical assistance should tell us quite a bit about how beneficial a particular kind of job is to the community generally. For example, this sort of information could be useful when state or local government is deciding whether it is getting its money’s worth out of an incentive package.

Of course, it’s something of a band-aid for the larger problem. I don’t think it makes much sense for health care to be tied to employment in any case.

[tags]HB1047-2007, health care[/tags]

For whatever reason, an Elvis Costello lyric jumped to mind when I read, Bil Browning’s post entitled The politics of personal destruction. Following his leadership of a protest against SJR 7 which would amend the Constitution to prevent gay marriage and limit the potential rights of non-married couples, Bil was subjected to some troubling responses: Phone calls to his unlisted number telling him he was a sinner, he was going to burn in hell, and he should be run out of town. That, and someone busted out the window of his car in a way that looks a lot like it’s related to his advocacy for gay rights.

It’s this kind of thing that ratchets up my interest in gay rights. As a policy matter, I know what I think. But, I have no real visceral interest in the subject because it doesn’t really affect me much. But when a guy like Bil gets harrassed personally and privately for advocating his political views publicly, it puts a much less abstract face on the whole debate. Hang in there Bil.

Technorati Tags: SJR7-2007, civil rights

House Bill 1074 Earned income tax credit. Rep. Day. Repeals the expiration date (currently December 31, 2011) for the earned income tax credit, and increases the credit to 9% (from 6%) of the federal earned income tax credit. This bill passed 83 to 17.

Technorati Tags: HB1074-2007, taxation

The House unanimously passed House Bill 1044 amending the provisions related to the Purple Heart license plate. First of all, my obligatory comment that the legislature spends far too much time on license plates. I think there are 30 of them at this point.

This bill will expand eligibility to motorcycles in addition to passenger motor vehicles. It also makes an interesting change to the people who are eligible. Currently, an individual is eligible if “the person has received a Purple Heart decoration that is awarded to a person who suffers an injury while serving as a member of the armed forces of the United States.” Under the new law, eligibility would be limited to “an individual who has received a Purple Heart decoration that is awarded to an individual who is wounded in action against an enemy of the United States or as a result of an act of an enemy of the United States if the wound necessitates treatment by a medical officer.”

I don’t know whether, under this definition and under the military’s Purple Heart rules, there are those who have been awarded a Purple Heart who will be ineligible. To me, the way to draft the statute would be to say that an individual who has received a Purple Heart is eligible for the license plate, and leave it at that.

[tags]HB1044-2007, license plates[/tags]