In case anyone was wondering, the utter lack of posts have been due to my vacation to Muskegon, Michigan. Nice beach. The weather was pretty bad earlier in the week — nothing but rain for a couple of days. Yesterday and today have been pretty good. The kids have really enjoyed themselves. This morning, I did little besides build a sand citadel. Absolutely pointless work. I had a great time. The kids kept knocking down my towers as fast as I could build them. Hopefully I’ll have some good pictures to post later on.

A bit of awful irony in the news. Two police officers were killed near Perrysville, IN while on a cross-state bicycle ride as part of a fundraiser designed to raise money for families of fallen officers.

Gary Dudley, an Indiana State Police lieutenant from Indianapolis, and Gary Martin, the former Lake County Sheriff’s Department police chief, were killed when a freight truck smashed into their support vehicle on a four-lane highway near Perrysville, a farm town of 500 residents about five miles east of the Illinois border.

Just terrible.

Thanks to Paul O’Malley for flagging this one. Kevin Leininger has a story for the Fort Wayne News Sentinel on a ruling by the Indiana Economic Development Commission that Fort Wayne Newspapers, Inc. would receive a tax credit of only $250,000 compared to the $2.5 million that had been estimated.

The tax credit is the Community Revitalization Enhancement District credit which allows groups or individuals in a CRED district to claim an income tax credit of 25% of the “qualified” investment. The qualified investment in the case of the Fort Wayne Newspapers project was estiimated at about $10 million. Fort Wayne Deputy Director of Development Greg Leatherman speculated that perhaps the State concluded the press project would have happened somewhere in Fort Wayne with or without the CRED credit and, therefore, wasn’t a qualified investment for the most part.

The rest of the story discusses the potential negative effect that uncertainty of this sort may have for future investment since investors might not be able to accurately plan the benefit of the credit if they will actually get if they sink money into such a district.

The South Bend Tribune has an editorial on the subject of providing health care to uninsured or underinsured Hoosiers, particularly children.

Indiana can’t afford for residents who don’t have health insurance to go without medical care. Neither can the state afford for uninsured residents to depend on emergency rooms to receive routine medical care. Most of all, Indiana cannot afford for Hoosier children from low-income families to go without either health insurance coverage or medical care.

They are right. Implicit in that statement is the fact that this isn’t a choice between paying for their healthcare or not paying for it. When someone who can’t afford health care really needs it, they don’t typically do without. Instead they wait until the problem is really bad, then they go to an emergency room, and the public pays for it, one way or another. Often times the emergency room is publicly funded. In addition, health care for those who can pay is more expensive to subsidize service provided to those who cannot pay. The subsidies can even take less obvious forms. For example, Perry County passed an almost certainly illegal Certificate of Need ordinance designed to prevent competition to its County Hospital, allegedly because competition to that hospital would take paying customers away and hurt its ability to serve the uninsured and underinsured.

I think we’d be hard pressed to design a system that was more expensive and less efficient if we tried.

The South Bend Tribune endorses efforts by FSSA, Hoosier Healthwise manged care providers, and school systems to work together to set up professionally staffed in-school clinics. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it makes sense. If you want to make sure kids are getting proper health care, you go to where the kids are: the schools. On the other hand, it seems like yet another function laid on the shoulders of already burdened schools which will be a further distraction from schools actually being able to educate children while they are at school.

30% of Americans don’t know the year in which the 9/11 attacks occurred.

Doghouse Riley also has a piece that alludes to disparate news coverage. Instead of dead penguins versus murdered humans, he scrutinizes the coverage of “The First Little Columbine of Spring” wherein the pitchforks and torches were out for four Johnson County students, three of whom were special education students, one of the students’ fantasy about killing his principal and holding the school hostage. That story apparently got screaming headlines and press conferences.

Meanwhile, getting the back page treatment apparently, are allegations that members of the Center Grove High School football team held a freshman football player down while they struck and kicked him and one of the dropped his pants and rubbed his ass in the boy’s face before attempting to insert a metal rod into the boy’s rectum.

Mr. Riley concludes as follows:

We’ve had thirteen murders in Indianapolis in the last four days, and I didn’t expect this sort of thing to push that sort of thing off the front pages. What I do expect is that it be given the proper amount of attention given all the excitement last spring. Your kid and my kid are a lot more likely to be bullied at school than they are to be blown up by autistic pipe-bomb builders. But that’s not the way the newspapers think you see it.

This sort of media critique gets me to wondering how much more dangerous the world actually is than it was in years past. Are we afraid of the world as it is or are we afraid of the world as we read about it? Perception has a way of becoming reality, I suspect. As we become more afraid and surround ourselves with metal detectors and surveillance cameras, we become more distrustful of and isolated from each other. This distrust and isolation begets more antisocial behavior which begets more fear which begets more distrust and isolation.

That’s my theory anyway. FDR may have been on to something with that bit about fearing fear itself.

Hoosiers Ate My Brain has a good post on the “Indianapolis Crime Wave.” (From my perspective here in the sticks, however, 91 looks a lot like 70 or whatever the “normal” number of murders is in Indianapolis.) I was amused by her complaint about the evening news leading with dead penguins in a truck accident over murders of, say, humans. That’s McNews for you.

HAMB offers up some bullet points on the situation, including some thoughts on poverty, race relations, gentrification, heat, the Marion County prosecutor’s race, inaction by just about everyone, and some recommended reading.

More press for the candidacy of Libertarian Candidate Eric Schansberg in Indiana’s 9th Congressional District against Democrat Baron Hill and Republican Mike Sodrel. This story by David Mann in the Clark County News & Tribune gives a lot of ink to Prof. Schansberg’s positions rather than merely focusing on the horse race aspects of the race.

The short version.

Agriculture: End government subsidies to farmers.

Immigration: Crack down on illegal employment & secure the borders.

Gas prices: It’s supply & demand. OPEC has limited supply; India & China have increased demand; Democrats are on the wrong side of the issue by complaining about prices while inhibiting supply by adding environmental regulations and restricting drilling.

Horse race: Libertarians may draw young people away from the Democrats but also may draw fiscal conservatives away from the Republicans.

Quoth the Schansberg:

The Republicans are spending money like drunken sailors,” he said. “The Democrats are talking about silly stuff.

(For some reason this reminded me of the Animal House quote, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”)

(H/t Good Brownie) I’m a little lowbrow for this list, I think, but the top 50 in England’s Sunday Mail are:

1 Apocalypse Now 2 The Apartment 3 City of God 4 Chinatown 5 Sexy Beast 6 2001: A Space Odyssey 7 North by Northwest 8 A Bout de Souffle 9 Donnie Darko 10 Manhattan 11 Alien 12 Lost in Translation 13 The Shawshank Redemption 14 Lagaan: Once Upon A Time in India 15 Pulp Fiction 16 Touch of Evil 17 Walkabout 18 Black Narcissus 19 Boyzn the Hood 20 The Player 21 Come and See 22 Heavenly Creatures 23 A Night at the Opera 2 4 Erin Brockovich 25 Trainspotting 26 The Breakfast Club 27 Hero 28 Fanny and Alexander 29 Pink Flamingos 30 All About Eve 31 Scarface 32 Terminator 2 33 Three Colours: Blue 34 The Royal Tenen-baums 35 The Ladykillers 36 Fight Club 37 The Searchers 38 Mulholland Drive 39 The Ipcress File 40 The King of Comedy 41 Manhunter 42 Dawn of the Dead 43 Princess Mononoke 44 Raising Arizona 45 Cabaret 46 This Sporting Life 47 Brazil 48 Aguirre: The Wrath of God 49 Secrets and Lies 50 Badlands.

The ones in bold are ones I have seen. There are some in there I would have specifically excluded and I would have worked in a few films like Cool Hand Luke, Twelve Angry Men, and, of course, Starship Troopers.

Libertarian Eric Schansberg made a bit of a ripple in a poll by Louisville Courier Journal columnist Dale Moss, receiving 12% of the vote as a “write in”, or 72 of 656 respondents. The poll is unscientific and libertarians tend to be disproportionately represented online, so I suspect his support among the general public is somewhat less. Still, in a race between Baron Hill and Mike Sodrel that is likely to be extremely close, the Schansberg is likely to be a factor.

I predict both Sodrel and Hill will try to keep Schansberg out of any debates, but the greater his support is or is perceived to be, the more care they will have to take in order to avoid alienating those sympathetic to Schansberg who might, nevertheless, vote for Hill or Sodrel.