In yesterday’s News Sentinel, you’ll find an editorial entitled Saving money while rebuilding. It’s an unsigned editorial attributed to “The Lima News, Ohio Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News”. The first paragraph is:

One of the smartest things President Bush did to reduce recovery costs in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was to suspend Davis-Bacon Act rules in the hardest hit states. But Congress is frantically trying to overrule the president, which would add billions of dollars to the already staggering recovery costs.

Funny thing is that, this same language appears in a number of other unsigned editorials across the country. According to the blog Southern Studies, the editorials show up in California, Colorado, and North Carolina in papers owned by a company called “Freedom Communications, Inc.” Looks like the Lima News is also owned by Freedom Communications Inc.

So, I guess the News Sentinel’s biggest mistake here is not culling its newswire feeds very well. Unsigned editorials coming from far flung corporations with unknown loyalties ought not be passed off as the thinking of local editorial staffs.

Torpor Indy has an excellent post on the Human Development Index. (PDF) The jist: the U.S. ranks 10th in the list which is essentially a ranking of how good a country is for its citizens. Our 10th place showing is down from 3rd back in 1999. And Torpor Indy suspects we’re worse off than our 10th place showing suggests. The top 10: 1 Norway, 2 Iceland, 3 Australia, 4 Luxembourg, 5 Canada, 6 Sweden, 7 Switzerland, 8 Ireland, 9 Belgium, 10 United States.

A new blog entitled The Review of Indiana Blogs looks to be an effort that will knit the Indiana blogosphere together even more tightly. I think that’s a good thing. Maybe I just didn’t know where to look, but when I retooled Masson’s Blog about a year ago to focus on Indiana politics, it was tough to locate Hoosier-centric blogs focused on Indiana news, law, and politics. Certainly there were a few — probably a lot more than I came across. But over the year, I think an Indiana blogosphere has been developing.

Ultimately, I think this will enhance the public discourse in Indiana. With a gaggle of citizen journalists (I use the term loosely) to give the state political conversations some more momentum and flesh out the heavy lifting done by the Indy Star, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, and Evansville Courier Press, I think folks who care about such things will have a better idea of what the issues have been when election time rolls around.

The Indianapolis Star reports that the City has moved to shut down a charter school, Flanner House. The charter school received about $700,000 for students it couldn’t account for. The numbers are a bit odd to me — the Star says:

The letter said the school reported an enrollment of 168 for the 2004-05 school year, but 23 students took the standardized tests required under their charter, or contract.
School officials had explained the enrollment discrepancies by saying some students were incarcerated, on personal leave for family issues or pregnant and on medical leave.
Shrewsberry called those explanations irrelevant.
“A school cannot accept public funds for students who do not attend the school, regardless of the students’ reasons for not attending,” he said in his letter.

I don’t know if the contention is that the school could not prove that remaining 165 students attended the school, or if simply failing to take the standardized test is reason to prohibit funding for the student.

The school apparently had other problems with management, obtaining qualified teachers, and meeting payroll.

So, while this may not be greatly significant in the debate over vouchers, public schools, and alternative schooling methods, it is at least a cautionary tale.

Meanwhile, via the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, there is apparently a study out suggesting that the increase in pressure via No Child Left Behind on testing like ISTEP has not led to improved performance by students, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. If anything, the study shows, NCLB has a negative effect.

Not hard news, at all, but I enjoyed USA Today’s article on Crown Hill. It’s a neat cemetery with notable denizens including John Dillinger, President Benjamin Harrison, and James Whitcomb Riley.

Of course, it also has others of particular importance to me, including Manfield Ross Masson, Harriett Eva Masson, J. Edward Masson, and Pauline Masson (a/k/a Meemaw).

Blog Indiana — a site of which I had been unaware. It has a decent list of Indiana blogs along with maps of where the bloggers are located. A nice resource for the Hoosier-centric.

So, it’s been four years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Inevitably, this year 9/11 will draw comparisons to Hurricane Katrina. With respect to the property damage, 9/11 doesn’t hold a candle to Katrina. I suspect the death toll will end up being similar, though Katrina may end up with a higher body count. 9/11 carried a much greater sense of violation since it was perpetrated by malicious humans rather than by indifferent nature.

I recall the day of the attacks, getting started on work when one of the people who works in my office said what she’d seen on television before heading out. Immediately I was on the Internet, details were sketchy. As the day progressed, rumors were rampant — I recall stories about a car bomb outside the Supreme Court, for example. The local gas station jacked up prices. I remember crying just a little bit on the way home that night. Americans were united. In fact, most of the world was united in condemning the acts. The most touching example, for me, was some African tribe sending us a herd of cattle or somesuch. Clearly, they needed the herd more than we ever could. But, it was a very gracious gesture from those who have very little to America, which has so very much.

Since then, my feelings about 9/11 have changed. Some of it is just the passage of time. But, now I can’t think about 9/11 without associating it with the Bush administration who has rammed it down our throats at every chance and used it as an excuse for any policy it cared to pursue. My deliberate recollection of how I felt during and soon after the attacks is very different from my casual response when the term is brought up. Now, my knee-jerk reaction is an eye roll, because I have just come to expect that the person invoking 9/11 is doing so to forward their own agenda.

Being a history guy, and having heard 9/11 compared repeatedly to Pearl Harbor, it’s interesting to think about what we had accomplished between 12/7/41 and 12/7/45 versus what we’ve accomplished between 9/11/01 and 9/11/05. We’ve invaded Afghanistan, displaced the Taliban, and had some success in making Afghanistan a better place. Though that success seems to have stalled and I’m not sure how well we’re doing there in recent years. We have also, improbably, invaded Iraq, displaced it’s weak, secular dictator with essentially a state of chaos where radical Islamists seem to be gaining the upper hand. Certainly they are stronger in Iraq now than they were before we invaded. We don’t appear to have taken any action at all against Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the institutions in both countries that contributed to almost all of the 9/11 suiciders being from those countries. And, of course, Osama bin Laden is still at large.

During the World War II period, we had defeated two major powers (three if you include Italy — but Italy always seems like the red-headed Axis step child); Hitler was dead; we had demanded and received sacrifice from Americans but we had accomplished our mission and were headed to much better times than even those that had preceded the war.

Before Hurricane Katrina, it was pretty easy for administration apologists to just shrug that Terrorism is a more elusive and intractable enemy than the Japanese Empire or the German Reich. After the incompetence displayed in the wake of Katrina, particularly with respect to the personnel put in charge of major government agencies (“Brownie’s doing a great job”), it’s much easier to suspect that our problems in the War on Terror(ism/ists) have as much to do with incompetence as with the difficulty of the problem.

Maybe I’m to blame for my skepticism, cynicism, and politics, but my memory of 9/11 has been tainted. And it’s a shame.

An article in the Indianapolis Star on a dispute between residents of the West 86th Street area and Indianapolis Power and Light over IPL’s tree cutting policies.

The specifics of this case aren’t really that important to me. But, I have a personal interest in the law of utility tree cutting. A while back, I wrote this in response to a Muncie article about overzealous utility tree trimming approach:

The article discusses Indiana-Michigan Power’s new policy of clearing trees within 15 feet on either side of a three-phase power line and within 10 feet on either side of a single-phase line. Previously, the company would trim trees every 3 to 5 years.

The article doesn’t get into this, but my thought is that IMP and any other electric utility that behaves in this matter is asking for a fairly expensive class action suit — or at least a wave of individual suits. I guess it depends on how the utility’s easement is worded for a particular piece of property; but my understanding is that, by-and-large, the utility is only allowed to take action as is reasonably necessary to keep the line in good repair. Where trimming is an option, and the utility cuts a tree entirely without the consent of the property owner, it would seem to me that the utility is liable for the difference between the value of the trimmed tree and the value of the cut tree. Heck, maybe you could throw a claim at them for triple damages and attorney’s fees under IC 34-24-3.

I know that utilities get special treatment under the law a lot of times, but I went through the statutes awhile back when my electric utility was making noises about cutting down a bunch of my trees. I couldn’t find anything that let them simply clear cut through the easement with impunity. I pointed out the “reasonableness” provision of the easement, pointed out that the tips of my trees were at least 20 to 30 feet below the power lines, and indicated that they’d need a court order to cut my trees and they seem to have backed off. Maybe they’ll be back. So, if anyone knows how the law plays out in these situations, I’d love to hear about it.

I just tend to think that electric utilities are overstepping their easement rights. I know it’s easier for them if the world is paved, but I don’t think they have unfettered discretion even if the tree is below their power line.

I just wanted to post a thank you to my sister-in-law for designing my swanky new banner and to my wife for installing it. If it were up to me, this place would be margin to margin black text on white background. (Or, if I was feeling retro – green text on black background.) Fortunately, I’m surrounded by folks with better design sense than that.

The Muncie Star Press offers up Editorial: Sex scenes in games should worry parents.

Clamping an adults-only rating on a sexually explicit video game is like eating half a chocolate cake but putting it aside in favor of a lettuce salad: clearly, the damage has been done. Hundreds of calories have been consumed from the cake and, in the case of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, millions of copies have been sold and are already available to kids.

Cake and lettuce salad? O.k., if you say so. But, inane analogies aside, I’m just a little floored by the priorities here. Worrying about sex in a Grand Theft Auto game is a little like worrying about worrying about foul language in a snuff film. (So much for leaving inane analogies aside.)

What’s the message here? It’s o.k. for little Jimmy to carjack ice cream trucks, beat cops, and gun down whores, but you just have to draw the line at cartoon sex? Our relative comfort with violence compared to our national hysteria over sex never ceases to amaze me.