Innocent until proven guilty and all of that, but I’m always happy to see crony dealings like this one prosecuted. It’s easy to believe that working hard and playing by the rules is for chumps. And, it may be. Yet, because I keep going the chump route, it’s nice to see the connected types take a bath every once in awhile.

In this case, the allegations are that a broker got a deal with the State to find space in Elkhart County for a DCS office. The broker, in connection with a couple of attorneys and companies they controlled, obtained a building, then leased it to the State. The plan was then to flip the building, increased in value because of the long term lease with the State; though that part of the plan seems to have run into some problems.

The contract with the State said that the broker and his attorney weren’t supposed to have any interest in the leased property — for pretty obvious conflict of interest reasons. The other attorney seems to have taken money from the broker to purchase the building in question.

The part where I guess we might be waiting for another shoe to drop is that former Marion County Prosecutor — friend of Ponzi schemer Tim Durham and criminal defense attorney for our forgetful Secretary of State — was given a 50% ownership stake in the building without putting up any money of his own as a “finder’s fee” for alerting the other attorney to the fact that DCS was seeking rental space. Brizzi was not one of the people named in the recent indictment.

Fred Clark at the Slacktivist has a good post about Rick Perry’s horrible ad and what it does to public perception of evangelicals.

The short version is that Perry offers lies about the current state of religion in the country (e.g. students are, in fact, able to pray and celebrate Christmas at school — Perry falsely says that they cannot.) Perry does this in order to appeal to the persecution complex among a certain set of religious primary voters. Fred Clark acknowledges that evangelicals aren’t monolithic and aren’t all like Rick Perry – but that they advance the perception that evangelicals are like Perry when he pretends to speak for that set of believers and is not rejected in any public way.

Indiana was admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816; 195 years ago today. By way of comparison, Dick Lugar has been the State’s senator for only about 17% of that time. 17%, of course, is the amount by which the sales tax was raised in 2008. From the 2008 gubernatorial campaign and the fledgling non-campaign Presidential campaign, we learned that taxes were not raised under Daniels watch. By extension, we know that Sen. Lugar hasn’t really been Senator at all. My point? You got me. I don’t have one. Happy birthday, Indiana!

Very strong opinion column by Ed Eiler, the retiring superintendent of the Lafayette School Corporation. The column is not so easily dismissed by his association with public schools because he has already announced his retirement.

He makes a number of important points about vouchers. Among them:

#Students and parents already have choices:

The issue isn’t about choice. The issue is about whether taxpayer dollars should pay for the choice parents make when the choice is made for a religious purpose or on the pretext of a religious purpose to avoid association with children of different socio-economic status or race and done to seek an enclave where beliefs are not questioned, challenged or tested, merely talked about and not practiced.

#This is not about healthy, strengthening competition because that kind of competition is not possible in the absence of a level playing field:

As to competition, education is a blend of collaboration, cooperation and healthy competition. Competition can be destructive, corrupting and harmful, especially if the competition is unfair. If every school was compelled to accept every child regardless of academic ability, socio-economic status, race, ability to speak English or religion, public schools would welcome the competition.

#He also discusses how the money supporting the PR efforts of the voucher system is tied to a financial incentive to make more money due to the tax credits associated with charter schools. I confess to ignorance about this financial angle and didn’t entirely follow.

The entire column is worth reading.

Responding to Sheila Kennedy’s blog post entitled, “Why Do Gun Rights Trump All Other Rights?” I left a comment that I thought I’d go ahead and re-post here:

I think the reasoning usually advanced, when proponents bother explaining at all, is that the Second Amendment is the right upon which all the rest depend — sort of a revenge fantasy where the government is intent on taking away free speech rights, the right to trial by jury, and all the rest; but then a brave group of citizens throws off the yoke of tyranny with their trusty firearms.

But, given the seeming lack of interest in, say, defending the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures; I have a hard time seeing Second Amendment triumphalists rousing themselves to protect too many of the other rights.

For many, I think it’s an extension of the culture war mixed in with some gender issues. Guns (at least the right kinds of guns) are manlier, more rural, speak of a simpler time – they are John Wayne and NASCAR. (Not sure what Second Amendment enthusiasts have to say about gangsta rappers with their AKs.)

In any case, Amendments like the First, Fourth, and Sixth are dependent on words and lawyers and craftiness you know in your heart are wrong but can’t quite articulate why.

Good article from Philip Brasher, writing for the Gannett News Service, on the issue of federal farm subsidies. Apparently the farm bill – or at least key parts of it — were going to get stuffed into the “supercommittee” process and hidden from the light of day.

The most vocal critics of government spending in Congress are often right on board with the farm bill. It has money flowing to the right kinds of people – big agribusiness and rural voters who tend to vote for Republicans. The farm bill is a good way to determine who is actually against big government and government spending; and whose opposition to government spending is merely pretext for opposing government money going to the wrong sorts of people.

As to the supercommittee process, the article reports:

Committee leaders and many farm groups had embraced the idea of enacting the bill as part of the supercommittee process because that would have protected the agricultural programs from attack by urban lawmakers, who think farm bills unfairly promote industrial-scale agriculture, and tea party conservatives, who don’t like farm subsidies in general. Under rules for the supercommittee process, the House and Senate would have had to vote on any plan the committee recommended without being able to make any changes, including in the farm provisions.
. . .
Leaders of the National Farmers Union and the American Farm Bureau Federation, groups that often diverge on farm policy, say it will be a good idea for lawmakers to rethink key portions of the bill that the committee leaders were writing. Farm Bureau, the more market-oriented of the two organizations, doesn’t like a proposed revenue-protection program that corn, wheat and soybean farmers wanted. The program removes so much risk from planting decisions that it will discourage growers from responding to market signals, the Farm Bureau says. Under the way that program was designed, growers could get a government check anytime their revenue falls more than 13 percent below their average, shielding producers from drops in commodity prices and crop yields.

The National Farmers Union, meanwhile, is unhappy with the way an optional price-guarantee program was designed. The price guarantees are skewed in favor of rice growers and other farmers who backed the program. Rice growers would get payments when the price of their crop is under $13.98 per hundred pounds, a level that exceeds forecast market prices for the next several years. For many other commodities, the guarantees were set well under market prices. The imbalance was intentional; rice growers don’t believe they would benefit from the revenue-based subsidies.

Somehow I rarely link here to Doghouse Riley’s posts because I just assume everyone else is reading his stuff on a daily basis. Perhaps that is not the case. Say what you will about the content — I know plenty will disagree — but the man can write.

Anyway, yesterday’s offering was on Black Friday, an event for “folks in search of the illusive Unbelievable Deal on Some Consumer Crap Guaranteed To Make Their Miserable Lives Less Miserable.” The relentless hype of the day from local TV “news” comes in for particular criticism.

The day started as a relatively obscure statistic, got turned into a marketing opportunity, started getting reinforced by local news and now turns box stores across the country into Pamplona.

For my part, I’m somewhere between laughing and fighting in Gandhi’s stages of non-violent victory. (“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”) Aside from the fact that I don’t like spending money; I’m not knee-jerk anti-consumerism. I like gadgets as much or more than the next guy. But this Black Friday stuff boggles my mind. Burning a day off work to go jostle against crowds for the privilege of opening up my wallet and acquiring stuff that I could easily do without is not an appealing prospect.

Annually, we’re treated to Spirit of Christmas shopping tales involving violence, injury and, embracing this year’s theme, pepper spray. (Incidentally, I don’t think the violence is endemic; I think this is another case where violence and unruliness fits a certain news narrative and is, therefore, highlighted.) Commentators this year have noted that mobs and unsafe conditions seem just fine when the mobs are agitating to spend their money; but militarized police tactics are called for when the mobs are protesting the politics of money.

No real point to this other than to say I don’t like Black Friday, and you should go read what Doghouse has to say.

Kyle Stokes has a good post on some investigatory work being done to determine whether “For-Profit” colleges are doing their students any good or just saddling them with a large amount of debt.

I think some of the debate in that area is going to turn on what the primary value of college is supposed to be for young adults. In some ways, just having a diploma is the end result. The diploma gets you in the door for certain kinds of jobs; allowing you more and better opportunities for employment. A law degree can be like this in a lot of ways. There have been a number of stories out recently pointing out that law school is deficient in teaching students how to actually practice law. For example, unless you take a clinic of some sort (by no means mandatory) you’re unlikely to ever actually see how a court room works or get any tips on how to talk to a client; and you certainly are not getting information on how to run a small business. You might not even be asked to write a contract while you’re there. After getting out of law school; you are probably most qualified to be an appellate court judge since most of your time is focused on reading appellate court decisions.

But I digress. These days you can’t a license to practice law or find a law firm willing to hire you without a law degree. So, in that sense, the fact of the diploma itself is valuable. And, in the same sense, I think for-profit colleges serve that purpose.

But, the diploma is supposed to signify something. Another way of looking at colleges is that they actually improve your mind in some way that is merely denoted by the diploma — the diploma itself is an unimportant piece of paper. That seems to be where for-profit colleges fall short; but, I’m not sure how closely traditional college diplomas are correlated with turning out individuals whose mind has been improved in any particular fashion. Employers, I think, have some notion that this is what they are trying to screen for when requiring a diploma; but maybe they’re just screening out the riff-raff.

Don’t get me wrong; I fully intend my kids to go to college. I’m not sure they have any notion that stopping at high school is an option (and, in our house, it’s really not.) But, they have a Dad who is a nerd that is constantly evangelizing how cool it is to know stuff; so, hopefully, they’ll get the diploma that is useful in and of itself, but also one that will denote a great deal of learning.

The Indiana Law Blog has been doing a great job of covering the David Camm murder trial. Today, the ILB has a post on the subject of paying for these trials. Because of problems the first two go rounds, they’re headed for a third trial; this time with a special prosecutor.

So far, the trials have cost $3 million and the next one probably is not going to cost any less than $1 million. Floyd County says it’s keeping its head above water; but the County might have to dig into its Rainy Day Fund and/or Economic Development Income Tax.

I would think this kind of spending is particularly tough for county decision makers. It is easy, and mostly popular, to take a “let justice be done; though the heavens may fall” approach to prosecution, but at the end of the day, $4 million could do a county a lot of good if it were available for other purposes. If, just pulling numbers out of thin air, the guy was willing to plead to a 30 year sentence at a cost to the county of $100,000; is the extra benefit of a life sentence worth $3,900,000?