A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

I was enjoying the evening by walking my dog and listening to the Nerdist podcast featuring Ken Marino, formerly of The State.

They were riffing on how much the media landscape has changed since the early/mid-90s when The State was on and Chris Hardwick was at TV. This hit home particularly because, for whatever reason, I’d been noodling around last night reading the Gilligan’s Island entry on Wikipedia and had earlier had a conversation about how I wasn’t too worried about my kids’ screen time in light of the fact that I had spent so much of my childhood watching dreck like Gilligan’s Island, Three’s Company, and whatever awfulness the three networks saw fit to cough up.

I don’t have a lot to offer besides “gee whiz,” but Gee Whiz! I’m sure media fracturing has caused all kinds of hardship and folks long for the good old days; but Lowest Common Denominator programming is no longer the beginning and end of media offerings.

My childhood was filled with the few syndication offerings from the big networks. Some of the basic cable offerings were emerging through my teen years. Cable really seemed to start exploding around my college years. Toward the end of law school was when the Internet was becoming a thing — my future wife and I bonded over a mutual love of the Internet. We would sometimes go to the computer lab and surf the web together. (What a date!) I remember being floored by Real Audio coming out during my first few years of work. Seems like I’ve been Christmas shopping over the Internet since probably 1998. And since then, there has been a deluge – Youtube, Pandora, Netflix, smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. And I’m certainly behind the curve if you compare me to kids with a lot more free time.

Is it a good thing? Bad thing? I’m sure there is good and bad with the media explosion. But, at this point, it hardly matters – it’s just something that has to be dealt with. Ride the wave and hope it doesn’t crash on you, I guess.

Edited to add: Looks like I goofed on my premise about the debt ceiling. It’s a spending bill Congress didn’t pass. I’m so conditioned to see that as the negotiating point. This doesn’t obviously reflect well on my reliability as an observer of federal politics. Maybe I’ll just repost this the next time the debt ceiling fight comes around.

So, Congress couldn’t come up with an agreement on how to raise the money it already spent, so the government has shut down. Or, rather, parts of it are shutting down. When a constituent starts grumbling about this or that government function not being performed, a lawmaker will inevitably say, “oh, it’s not that part of government I want defunded; it’s all of those [vague gesture] other parts of government that are wasteful.”

The most recent incident precipitating the shut down was the House Republicans passing a bill that tied continued payment of our creditors to Congress undoing health care reform. The Senate decided it couldn’t go along with that.

The news is full of opinions about “who will the public blame” for the shut down? The general public will blame the House Republicans. If the Senate Democrats demanded adoption of a single payer health care system in return for raising the debt ceiling and the House Republicans wouldn’t go along; the public would (rightly) blame the Senate Democrats. Congress has, for the better part of 4 decades, authorized spending in excess of the revenues it takes in. The status quo among Republicans and Democrats alike has been to raise the debt ceiling without much fuss. House Republicans are now routinely using the debt ceiling as a negotiating tactic to obtain concessions from political opponents who (rightly) view defaulting on our debts as an unmitigated disaster.

Again, this debt ceiling business isn’t like a family tightening its belt and deciding, for example, not to eat at restaurants. Rather, it’s more like going to the restaurant and deciding to skip out on the check. The way to go about resolving the debt problem is to identify those specific government functions whose costs outweigh the cots and eliminate them and to raise taxes sufficient to pay for the remainder. Skipping out on the check isn’t a solution. And threatening to skip out on the check unless your spouse does everything you want is just plain dysfunctional.

Jon Easter has a good blog post on Ernie Pyle. The impetus for the post is that IU is apparently contemplating a reorganization involving the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism wherein Ernie Pyle’s legacy will not be featured prominently.

Growing up, I’m not sure I ever heard much about Pyle. For me, World War II journalism pretty much began and ended with William Shirer. My first exposure to Pyle was walking by the Journalism school at IU en route to the law school. Seems like he’s the kind of guy that Indiana ought to feature as prominently as we can. Small town kid made good; hard working, compassionate, grounded, perceptive, successful in his field.

Easter observes that, even if the School of Journalism is reorganized to reflect changes in the media environment; there is still room to recognize Pyle.

Howard Greninger has an article for the Terre Haute Trib Star about timbers from the Wabash Erie Canal that were discovered submerged in a local lake and are being studied. Vigo County is hoping to use them in an educational park display but have to figure out how to do it without the timbers deteriorating – the water apparently helped preserve them.

The canal was open to Terre Haute by 1847. The culvert, which the timbers supported, was built around 1850. Some timbers for the platform are 20 inches wide.

Don Burden, architectural historian for Gray & Pipe, a member of the White Water Canal Trail Inc., in 2007 estimated that the trees used for the culvert were already 300 or more years old when they were cut for the canal.

Historical engineering documents showed the site was for culvert No. 151 of the Wabash and Erie Canal.

The Wabash and Erie Canal linked the Great Lakes to the Ohio river via artificial waterway. It was part of the Indiana Mammoth Internal Improvement Act that, in conjunction with the Panic of 1837, pretty well ruined Indiana’s finances. According to Wikipedia, however, the Wabash and Erie was the most successful of the canal projects in the state, though never to the extent anticipated.

Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has a very good article on a proposal being considered by the General Assembly’s pension oversight committee. I’m out of time to write much about it this morning, but wanted to throw up a link. It has to do with changing a pension option for new State retirees from more of a guaranteed return annuity to a privately managed fund where the employee bears the risk. I’m always a little stunned when the terms of compensation for employment can be changed after the fact. A lot of these employees have traded huge chunks of the only life they’ll get in anticipation of a secure pension.

Barb Berggoetz, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article about efforts by social conservative advocacy group, Advance America, to put pressure on lawmakers to pass the constitutional ban on marriage equality.

Advance America, a prominent conservative interest group supporting the proposed amendment, has asked legislators to answer a survey about their voting intentions by Wednesday.
. . .
[Eric] Miller, founder and executive director of Advance Ameri­ca, said in his Aug. 28 letter to legislators that he will compile the responses and “make them available to citizens around the state.”

The article goes into how the landscape and public opinion on gay marriage has changed since 2011 when the General Assembly last took up the issue.

The Evansville Courier Press has a couple of interesting editorials today. The first, and most enjoyable (because space is awesome), notes that Voyager 1 is still going despite what, by today’s standards, seems like primitive technology. The Voyager 1 space probe has entered interstellar space. “Its next space rendezvous will be with a dwarf star in the constellation Camelopardalis — in 40,000 years.” (As Bill Bryson pointed out, “Space” is aptly named.)

Voyager carries an eight-track tape recorder to store its data, has a computer that The New York Times calculates has a fraction of the memory of a low-end iPhone and sends data using a 23-watt transmitter, which the Times compares to a refrigerator light bulb.

The second discusses the fracturing of House Republicans this year over the federal debt situation. “House Republicans seem to have splintered into more factions than the Italian parliament, only slightly lighter on the histrionics.”

The factions described by the editorial are those who want to pass continuing resolutions to allow continued funding of the federal government with provisions that forbid funding the health care reforms passed by Congress some years ago. This would shut down the government as the President and the Senate would never go along with that. Closer to mainstream, other parts of the House (notably speaker Boehner) would like to tie the continuing resolutions to “tax reform” including “entitlement” cuts that most Democrats wouldn’t go for. This is a closer call but still looks to be a recipe for government shut down.

Politically, the calculus seems to involve whether the President would cave, how the public would react to a federal government shut down, and/or who would take the blame. Longer serving House Republicans still seem to be scarred by the stand off in the Clinton years where they took a beating when the government shut down and the House Republicans took the blame.

I think the dynamics have shifted somewhat since the Clinton years. Debt seems to be a bigger issue now than it was then. The problem the House Republicans face is that many of them opened the check book to George W. Bush and subsequently have opposed just about every initiative President Obama has favored. If those things weren’t true, they would have a better chance of taking a hard line on debt without looking like mere obstructionists. Also, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

The further lesson on spending we can take from Voyager 1, not that anyone in Congress is likely to take note, is not to be penny wise but pound foolish — some spending yields incredible returns on investment. Where are we dumping money unproductively and where are we refusing to spend money that would be very useful? That’s the kind of narrow bore spending discussions we should be having; but will not because it’s hard to get voters emotionally engaged with specific, detailed policy questions. Instead the discussions are more like “grr, debt bad” or “you monster, how could you vote to starve grandpa?”