Apparently one of the issues in the Union County commissioner’s race is whether to construct a new jail and, if so, what kind. Jails, like so many other things in local government, are one of those things you’ll end up paying for one way or another. For local government, there are just too many other units of government that can issue mandates on your dime.

The legislature passes laws requiring incarceration of more people. Federal and state courts interpret state and local constitutions to require certain minimum conditions of confinement. If it gets too bad, a court can mandate the construction of additional jail space. Inmates can file lawsuits (and sometimes even win!) and be awarded damages by juries or judges if the conditions are inadequate. So, whether or not to spend money is definitely not entirely within local government control. Your pocket can get picked in a variety of ways, and the worse your jail is, the more likely that is going to be a significant involuntary expense.

The decision came down a few days ago, but the Associated Press has an article reacting to a federal district court in Wisconsin’s decision that that federal government conducting a National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. This, like injecting ‘under God’ into the Pledge of Allegiance is another one of those Cold War era gestures against godless Communism. Congress established it in 1952.

Personally, I wouldn’t have bothered with the lawsuit since I pay as much attention to the National Day of Prayer as to other National Days or weeks of this or that. But, once the suit was brought, the federal judge had to rule on it. And the fact is that there is no rational secular purpose for this government action.

Apparently abandoning his small government, fiscal conservative pose, Mike Pence had this to say:

“The American people believe in prayer. The American people believe that prayer changes things,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., as he urged the Obama administration use “all means at its disposal” to challenge the decision.

So, what exactly? The belief is so feeble that it needs a government prop? And, not only does the federal government need to engage in this non-essential activity, it needs to spend lots of money to defend it’s right to engage in this non-essential activity?

Nobody is stopping anybody from praying. This decision merely says that it’s not the federal government’s business to encourage or discourage you from doing so. The federal government has other things to do, and not enough time or resources with which to do it. And God, at least as I’ve heard him described, doesn’t require the assistance of the U.S. Government. As I’ve suggested before, these symbolic but mostly inconsequential mixes of government and religion strike me as the work of a vocal subset of religious people in the country trying to mark their territory.

Indiana’s Fifth Congressional District has just the substance free kind of political debate that everyone can enjoy. Wonkish debates about policy are for egghead elitists and are, therefore, best avoided.

Luke Messer, challenger to Dan Burton – a 28 year incumbent – revealed, one presumes with great sadness, that the actors pretending to support Burton in his campaign ads were not Hoosiers. They were Buckeyes. The horror!

The defense to this brouhaha seems to be, essentially: a) Burton doesn’t know what’s going on with his commercial; and b) it’s a common practice to pay actors to pretend they support you because your real supporters aren’t pretty enough; or are otherwise unpresentable on television; or something.

Aishah Hasnie, writing for WANE, has an article about incumbent U.S. Representative Mark Souder ducking debate requests from his third District Republican challenger, Bob Thomas.

“I do not believe that Bob is a credible candidate,” said Souder. “I believe when somebody is nominated by someobody, rather than self declared, that you have an obligation to debate.”

This, of course, is a more politically advantageous way of ducking a debate than saying something hewing closer to what some might call “reality”:

I do not believe I would win a debate. My long time incumbency comes primarily from a lack of serious primary challengers over the years and the heavily Republican district I represent. Nobody supports me with any real vigor, and, like an unwanted party guest, I have stayed long, long after I promised I’d leave. My record is not very good, and in a debate, I would probably stick my foot in my mouth. If I avoid debating, I can probably use the power of incumbency and paid media to weather this primary storm and then rely on party affiliation to beat Dr. Hayhurst in the general election.

(Full disclosure: I know not a thing about his challenger, Bob Thomas.)

It’s been 15 years since Timothy McVeigh, motivated by anti-government zealotry, murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City. His actions weren’t different in principle from those of Osama bin Laden. Both had their reasons. In a creative writing class, my teacher told the class that every bad guy pretty much has reasons for thinking that they aren’t bad. We’re all the protagonists in our own heads, and every protagonist has an internal story in which they are the good guy. I’m sure the same is true of guys like bin Laden and McVeigh

At the end of the day, the rest of us need to condemn the use of violence as a tool of policy, particularly by individuals or non-government entities. (We can argue about the legitimate uses of war by governments who hold or try to hold a monopoly on violence in their societies.)

So, I don’t have a lot of patience for people trying to minimize McVeigh and bin Laden. They’re both murderous bastards who deserve to die. (Mission Accomplished with McVeigh.) We can talk about the issues that concerned them in other contexts and try to understand them in an effort to minimize future problems. But McVeigh and bin Laden should be pariahs and those who sympathize with them should be marginalized.

Update: I just thought of another lesson from English class that seemed appropriate. At some point in college, we were reading >Catcher in the Rye (side note: I think Holden is a whiny little s.o.b.). My teacher highlighted a passage for us:

The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

I remember that passage really made me mad for some reason. I guess I felt like it robbed someone devoted to a cause of the potential for nobly going out in a blaze of glory or somesuch. Must be an adolescent thing. Because now I very much respect that statement. Dying for a cause, in a voluntary, violent way seems essentially lazy and ostentatious.

I don’t usually just throw up links, but that’s what I’m doing this morning because I read a couple of good pieces that other folks might find of particular interest.

The Urbanophile on immigrant revitalization of inner-ring suburbs. The discussion uses Pike Township and Greenwood in Indianapolis.

J. Bradford Delong on the nature of the SEC’s case against Goldman Sachs for civil fraud with a primer on the generally beneficial effects of economic transactions. (h/t Tipsy Teetotaler)

I was just clued in to a lefty blog run out of Notre Dame called Lefty’s Last Cry. Might be worth checking out.

Andy Gammill has an article in the Indy Star reporting on the dismal relations between (almost featured Creationist Evidence Speaker) State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett, and the state teacher’s union. They seem to be communicating primarily via inflammatory press releases.

This reminds me a bit of a lesson I learned about communication early on in my legal career (probably earlier – it’s no big secret). I was exchanging letters with another attorney that were becoming increasingly contentious. I was about to escalate with another letter when it occurred to me how stupid we were being. I picked up the phone and had a very cordial conversation, and we resolved the issue which wasn’t all that intractable. The immediacy of speaking to one another tends to put a limit on bellicosity. Speaking in person even moreso. It’s easy to be a Big Man via e-mail.

That said, Bennett does come off looking ridiculous in one particular noted by the article. The State is in the process of applying for a federal “Race to the Top” education grant where there is a pool of about $4.4 billion available to the states. He wants teacher’s union leaders to endorse a plan that he won’t let them see.

Bennett held several meetings with union leaders but declined to allow them to see the proposal for the federal grant, saying that other states might steal the more innovative ideas. Both unions were then asked to write letters of support — for a proposal they had not seen.

Reminds me of Nixon’s secret plan to win the Vietnam War. But, then, I’m a cynic.

Justin Mack, writing for the Journal & Courier, has an article about the tea party rally in Lafayette yesterday. Mostly they got together on the government-built footbridge and talked about freedom and stuff. But this caught my attention:

As hundreds of people placed both tea bags and loose-leaf tea into the box, a trumpet player played Taps while a copy of the U.S. Constitution was lowered into the Wabash River — an act that was to serve as a eulogy for the document.

That old Constitution has been killed more times than Rasputin. Long may she live.

Maureen Hayden, writing for Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., has a story about State Treasurer Richard Mourdock’s never ending battle with Indiana’s money in the Chrysler bankruptcy. (h/t to reader RG).

In a court filing that has received little public attention, attorneys for the Indiana state worker pension funds are asking a federal appeals court to vacate a bankruptcy court’s order that cleared the way for Chrysler to sell its assets to a purchasing group lead by Italian car maker Fiat, the U.S. government and the automakers union.

I’ll be getting a little out of my depth here, but they seem to be hanging their hat on the thin reed of a Munsingwearorder from the United States Supreme Court. Generally speaking, a Munsingwear order is issued when a case becomes moot before it can be subjected to appellate review. The idea is that the case is over, so the appellate courts aren’t allowed to review it, but you don’t want to have potentially bad law remain on the books simply because an appellate court doesn’t have a chance to offer correction to the lower court.

On December 14, 2009, the United States Supreme Court issued a brief order, stating:

On petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Motion of Washington Legal Foundation, et al. for leave to file a brief as amici curiae granted. Petition for writ of certiorari granted. Judgment vacated, and case remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit with instructions to dismiss the appeal as moot. See United States v. Munsingwear, Inc., 340 U.S. 36, 71 S.Ct. 104, 95 L.Ed. 36 (1950).

I haven’t gone over the Supreme Court briefs with any thoroughness, but the mootness argument seems to have been one made by the respondents and fought against by the petitioners (i.e. Indiana Pension Fund). In declaring the case moot, the Supreme Court seems to have found against Mourdock, but there was the additional factor of the Munsingwear rule.

With the Second Circuit appellate order cleared, the Indiana Pension Funds seem to have taken this as an opening to try to wade into the original bankruptcy order again. On March 8, 2010, the Indiana pensioners filed a petition for rehearing. An answer to that Petition was filed on April 9. I have not been able to locate a copy of the petition for rehearing. If the prior Second Circuit opinion was vacated by the Supreme Court, not because it was wrong, necessarily, but because the case was moot – no live issues were left to be resolved – then it strikes me as extraordinary to think that the Second Circuit would even have jurisdiction to rehear the case. Article III, sec. 2 of the United States Constitution limits the jurisdiction of federal courts to “cases or controversies.” The Supreme Court’s declaration that the case was moot seems to be a declaration that the case is dead – at least as to the issues covered by the Second Circuit’s ruling.

And, of course, there is the fundamental issue I’ve asked all along: there is no scenario under which the Indiana Pension funds would have recovered more money than they actually did. So why is the state treasurer pursuing this with such vigor and at such expense?

Prior blog entries on the issue:

Indiana Funds Request to Delay Chrysler Bankruptcy Denied

Indiana and the Chrysler Bankruptcy

Arguments in the Chrysler BK Appeal Today

More Chrysler Bankruptcy

Supreme Court Lifts Stay in Chrysler Bankruptcy; Mourdock’s Challenge Denied

Mourdock’s Challenge

Mourdock Loses Another Round in Quixotic Chrysler Challenge