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April 30, 2005

Even Better than Becker-Posner?

Holy cow! I stopped subscribing via RSS to TalkingPointsMemo when Josh Marshall went all-Social Security all the time (and when I had to start glancing at his archives to understand his...idiosyncratic classification of congressmen as "fainthearted" and so forth). But his new venture (TPMCafe, in a badly mixed metaphor) sounds really exciting, especially given the quality of its foreign affairs bloggers. Among the announced members is the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Anne-Marie Slaughter. If the other contributors are of this quality, then TPM Cafe will have a strong shot at being the best blog in the business.

Update: The link should finally work now. Sorry for the confusion; control+C doesn't appear to have five-nines reliability.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 07:35 AM | Comments (4)

It's A Good Thing Dirksen Sunk Fortas

The problem with the rising generation is that they haven't read the minutes of the last meeting. In other words, when someone says "Oh, but the Republicans filibustered Abe Fortas in 1968!" they're apt to also believe that this was somehow a bad thing and that Fortas was deserving of his seat. Far from it: Fortas was a close personal friend of Lyndon Johnson, and shared many of LBJ's beliefs about ethics and politics (which is to say he also thought the former had little to do with the latter). Given that Fortas was forced to resign the year after his nomination to be Chief Justice was sunk, I suspect that the Republicans--led by the Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen--were right to be suspicious. (Indeed, Fortas' appointment would have been a blow to the institution of the independent judiciary.)

Three points should be drawn out in addition to clarifying was Fortas was a bad, or at least questionable, nomination: First, in denying Fortas the Chief Justice's role, the Senate Republicans did not block Johnson from substantially altering the Court's composition. Fortas was already an Associate Justice. This is subtly but critically different from the situation that arises when the Democrats block President Bush from putting new judges on a circuit court. In that case, the Democrats are actually stopping the President from altering the ideological balance of power on the courts. In Fortas's case, however, that balance would have remained almost untouched.

Second, we should remember that the fact that the parliamentary maneuver existed and was used in the late Sixties doesn't necessarily make hypocrites of Republicans today. The filibuster today is slightly different (in particular, invoking cloture takes fewer votes and most contemporary "filibusters" don't require 24-hour-long Strom Thurmond-style speeches/) and also far, far more likely to be used today than in the past. The collegiality and comity of the upper chamber--always more myth than fact, but today mostly mythical--has vastly diminished, increasing the chance that the maneuver will be used.

Third, one may object to the legitimacy of an institution in principle but use it in practice. To take a trivial example, I don't believe that Manhattan businesses sending letters cross-town should be forced to subsidize Rural Free Delivery, but that doesn't mean that I abstain from using the mails in practice. More seriously, many Republicans don't believe in recall elections or popular referenda (or at least profess not to), but does that make Governor Schwarzenegger's election illegitimate?

There are risks to amending the filibuster--as Stuart Taylor of National Journal notes, the Republicans could lose their dominance over the issue--but there are risks to everything. And the institution of an independent judiciary is both partly chimerical and not necessarily desirable in itself--as the Democrats should know from their own party's history of proposed judicial reforms.

Update: Readers raise two objections: First, that nobody thinks as well of Justice Fortas as I assert, and second that the Fortas filibuster wasn't a filibuster. I will address the latter objection first. The Washington Post's description of the anti-Fortas tactics match the description of a filibuster perfectly. (When you start reading aloud from unrelated books to deny the floor to others, then you've departed from debate as a constructive process.) The objection that Fortas never had majority support (raised, among other places, here) conflicts with the account the nonpartisan Senate website provides--support for Fortas was always weak, but at the beginning LBJ thought he could get the votes for his two nominees (Fortas for Chief Justice and a replacement to take Fortas's seat as an associate justice). However, it is also likely that there was, at best, only a slim majority in favor of Fortas by the time the justice withdrew his name from consideration, and that there may well have been a majority of senators opposed to his elevation. However, the very choice of tactics the anti-Fortas forces adopted demonstrates their own estimate of the situation. As Norman Ornstein writes, "Why filibuster if you have the votes to block a nomination?"

The other objection is more puzzling to me. The main point of this post was to draw forward useful differences in analyzing the validity of the Fortas case as a precedent. I put forward four points, but readers have only addressed the first, and least significant. A quick Technorati search on abe fortas reveals that most sites using the case as a "talking point" are doing so in an extremely simplistic manner. Democrats and anti-nuclear option writers are either not aware of or not alerting their readers to the circumstances behind the Fortas nomination. Being charitable, I want to suppose that they are themselves either ignorant of these circumstances, or are instead convinced that Fortas should have been seated. The less charitable explanation is that these writers are leaving out these facts because it might highlight the difference between the obstruction currently ongoing in the Senate (arguably from both sides during different administrations). Such duplicity is hardly unknown to either party, but I choose to believe in the better angels of our nature.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 07:02 AM | Comments (18)

One Step Forward, One Step Back

The General Assembly ended its session yesterday by weakening the Indianapolis Works plan, scaling down Mayor Bart Peterson's ambitious project to complete the goals of UniGov. Instead of sapping the power of township officials--the representatives of a system of parochial government that's proven unable to adapt to the demands of urban civilization--the legislature instead ended up giving township officials a greater say in Peterson's plans to reform Marion County's government structure. (The Star sketched the details of the legislature's amendments in an editorial yesterday.) This means that any reforms that do go through will likely be patchwork and inefficient. It means, too, that Marion County taxpayers, like taxpayers across the state, will continue to support the wasteful, occasionally nepotistic, management styles of these officials.

On the other hand, the bill that had come to symbolize Governor Mitch Daniels's drive to make Indiana a business-friendly, efficient state passed, albeit at the last possible moment and at the greatest possible cost. Indiana will henceforth be on a standard time system, at least as soon as the governor signs the measure: All of the state will observe Daylight Savings Time, meaning that Evansville and Indianapolis will always be an hour apart instead of being in sync only half a year, like Persephone. Patrick Miller of Ball State University argues that the symbolic power of DST far outweighs its direct benefits.

The vote may cost Republican State Representative Troy Woodruff, of Vincennes, something tangible: His seat in the General Assembly. Woodruff reversed his "no" vote on the DST bill to counter the evident and bitter partisanship of the obstructionist Democratic minority in the lower chamber (as goes Congress, so goes the state legislature), reversing an earlier pledge to his constituents. Woodruff's margin in his district in the last election was only 188 votes, which allowed the onetime aide to Rep. John Hostettler (R, IN-8) to take his seat as a freshman member of the General Assembly. Silly as it sounds to outsiders, some of Woodruff's constituents are afraid they won't be able to manage the new time regime, despite the fact that the new bill will, objectively, eliminate confusion. If Woodruff loses his seat--likely to be one of only a handful contested at the next election--then the Republicans will face a tough time trying to maintain control of the lower chamber.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 06:38 AM | Comments (6)

ITA Weekend Web Digest -- 30 April 2005

• "Vaudeville's Brief, Shining Moment" [City Journal]: America's pop culture--and its habit of worrying about its pop culture--predate South Park and even The Jazz Singer. Vaudeville, however, was more than a light entertainment and the occasional target of scolds and nags: It was the training ground for a generation of entertainers. Together with its rural counterpart, the circuit Chatauquas of the early twentieth century (see, e.g., here and here), vaudeville broadened the horizons and raised the expectations of American audiences. (Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

• "Virginia is for (Homoracial, Heterosexual, Mentally Adequate) Lovers" [Reason]: Cato's David Boaz describes the history of a less-celebrated American institution: Discriminatory marriage laws. Those who think the definition of marriage has always been one man and one woman should read this article. When the state uses institutions like marriage to perpetuate narrow policy goals, the effects can be grotesque. (Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

  
  

Posted by ITA Staff at 06:21 AM | Comments (5)

April 29, 2005

Arbor Day

"The most beautiful thing about a tree is what you do after you cut it down."
--Rush Limbaugh

It's hard to be a Republican environmentalist because it's inevitable that one will occasionally butt up against ecological bromides. One of my favourite is the declaration that, "There are more trees in the U.S. today than there were ______ ago," where the blank can be filled with any time interval up to about a hundred years. This, of course, is proof that the environment is A-OK, and the huggers who want you to go plant a tree in your backyard should stop interfering with your weekend plans.

It's hard to know just how exactly to frame a "Yes, but . . . " answer in casual conversation, since the qualifiers are numerous. Thankfully, I write for a blog, where space is unlimited.

To begin with, this can be a true statement because the U.S. reached peak deforestation sometime in the 1920's. That is, over 90% of old-growth forests had been logged in the eastern U.S. It's hard to imagine forest cover doing anything but increasing, which it has thankfully been doing steadily for the past 80 years. But steadily does not mean rapidly, and current forest cover is about a quarter of total land area of the U.S.

Is that good enough? What is the ideal land cover for the U.S.? Should we go back to pre-colonial levels? Probably not, since we do need land for all the other spiffy uses we've come up with, like growing food. Essentially, there's no technical answer for how much forest we need, since that depends upon the priorities of the land owners, both public and private. Still, I'm sure everyone is happy that the figure stands at 24.7% rather than 0%, and that the figure is growing every year.

Not all forests are equal in environmental value, though. The forests we've created in the past 80 years are what we can broadly label "young growth" forests. (We'll here take the divide between young and old to be 200 years, though this of course blurs many seral stages among various communities). Young growth forests do lots of things we like; they control soil erosion, provide habitat, contribute to biodiversity, provide shade, and soak up Carbon. But they aren't as good as old growth forests in many respects, most notably in habitat. (We'll leave aside objections to tree plantations).

By definition, it takes a long time to get old growth forests -- at least another 120 years for the land that started to revert to forest in the 1920's. The usefulness (or value) of any such stands will also depends on some things perhaps beyond our control: the size and shape of the stands, how connected they are to other stands, the land uses surrounding those stands, and the protection of those stands from future logging. Again, how we meet these concerns depends largely on the priorities of the public and private owners. And again, I'm sure we'll be glad for whatever function we'll get out of our forests as they succeed into more mature series.

I'm not trying to be alarmist. On the contrary, things are getting better in terms of how much forest we have in the U.S. It's appropriate to quibble about competing priorities for how those forests are managed; though I think the bottom line is that reforestation will slow erosion (I'd say that biodiversity is less important than feeding ourselves). There are important questions about our forests, but to simplistically state that there are more forests today than X years ago is misleading.

Posted by Zach Wendling at 05:02 PM | Comments (8)

Actions speak louder than words

Liberals usually dispute that judicial activism is real or at least that their agenda is being advanced by it, but their attitude toward Bush's judicial nominees may betray that they actually know differently. In a recent commentary written in favor of the "nuclear option," Lowman S. Henry of the Lincoln Institute (a conservative organization in Pennsylvania) noted the following:

The acrimony over judicial appointments has reached a fever pitch precisely because Democrats have lost control of Congress, and likely the Presidency, for the foreseeable future. The judiciary is the last bastion of liberal power at the federal level, and Democrats are prepared to fight to the death to prevent the loss of the third branch of government as well.

After years of seeing "their" judges push their agenda through the courts based largely on personal philosophy (covered by Constitutional fig leaves), liberals understandably fear that the opposite will happen if judges with conservative personal philosophies are appointed. Recent battles over judicial nominations have closely resembled political campaigns--nominees' views on abortion, affirmative action, and the like have become the central issue rather than the nominees' fitness to interpret and apply the law. This does not bode well for a branch of government that is supposed to be independent from politics.

These lines of questioning would be irrelevant if we could trust judges to interpret the law without personal bias. That the Democrats are so concerned about judges' personal philosophies seems to indicate that they know just how far personal biases have invaded jurisprudence.

Posted by Eric Seymour at 08:55 AM | Comments (68)

ITA Daily Web Digest -- 29 April 2005

• "People Power Rattling Politics of Latin America" [Christian Science Monitor] Despite the continental scope of the title, protests in South America receive comparatively little attention in this article recounting recent events in Mexican politics. But the general theme--that power may have shifted from landed or armed elites in Latin America to the traditionally landless and powerless people of the former colonies--is interesting. (I'm oversimplifying a vastly more complicated class structure.) Americans need to remember there are more countries than Britain, China and the Middle East. (Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

• "Yao Nets Chinese Worker's Title" [Washington Post] The Post, whose China desk is one of the better sources for information on the changing society, reports on the recent awarding of the title of "model worker" to NBA star Yao Ming. The title used to be awarded only to the proletariats and peasants of Mao's time, and many Chinese find it odd that this symbolic celebration of the "working man" (a class identification with special resonance in Communist countries) has gone to a guy who slam dunks. (For a more political look, don't miss the Monitor's coverage of the visit of the Taiwanese KMT president to Beijing.) (Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

• "Survey Finds Many Have Poor Grasp of Economics" [New York Times] There's always something comic when the Times tries to explain the two matters it understands the least: economics and ordinary Americans. In this article, the Times notes that few Americans know the tying-your-shoe basics of political economy, but the author confuses "economics" with "knowing a lot of words." The survey remains troubling, even so. (Selected by Josh Claybourn.)

• "Pyroelectric crystal drives nuclear fusion at 'desktop' conditions" [Nature] Claims of "cold fusion" in the late 1980's proved to be infamously erroneous, leading to a great deal of skepticism about the "f-word" in physics. Nevertheless, in a remarkable achievement, a team of physicists appears to have induced nuclear fusion in a lab without the use of a huge, energy-guzzling accelerator. The reaction, however, is not self-sustaining and therefore not useful for energy production. The technical description of their project is here. (Selected by Eric Seymour.)

• "Bill Passed to Require Drivers to Move Over" [WTLV]: Like most people from the Midwest, aka, "normal" drivers, I'm always astounded by the behaviour of motorists in Florida, where there is no fixed speed limit for any one car or lane. This turns their highways into a sometimes exciting and always frustrating game of Pole Position, where the veteran racers are extremely veteran. I doubt this legislation will work, but I wish them luck. (Selected by Zach Wendling).

Posted by ITA Staff at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2005

The End of Radio Talk?

Not quite. But following along on the theme of the post below that, in politics, interest is more important on a day-to-day level than discourse or ideology, it's interesting to pass along this post by Ann Althouse which theorizes that the explanation for the steep decline in talk show ratings is that people are sick of talking about politics. Althouse's post is based in part upon this Washington Post article, which recounts among other bits of data that the liberal Air America affiliate in the nation's capital has ratings as low or lower than 0.1 per cent of the listening audience--literally too low to be reliably counted.

Besides, as she points out, "the debate about Social Security was mind-numbing." Indeed it is--I confess that I stopped paying attention in about 2002, after I realized that a) my generation is screwed on a generational-accounting benefits, b) my generation doesn't vote, and so c) my generation will always be screwed in any "reform" plan. (Grayhairs vote, you see.) Similarly, on the filibuster--another tiresome issue--the intensity of my position is based more on fatigue and irritation than reason (although I do have several reasons): Why should any tactic that historically has been the tool of wilfully obstructive and harmful minorities be maintained? (In Indiana politics, I would venture, the equivalent is, of course, DST.)

I realize there are debates about these issues, but frankly I care more about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, and I don't care a twentieth as much about them as I care about the position papers of obscure Irish language revival groups ninety years ago.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

In America, God is a Republican, and Other Truisms

On the Daily Show recently, Stephen Colbert offered this description of the political beliefs of God: In America, God is a Republican; in Britain, He's a Tory; in France, a Gaullist; and in Mexico, He votes PRI. Ironically, Colbert remarked, in Sweden the Almighty is registered as a Social Democrat, which, he mused, might explain why Swedes kill themselves so frequently.

Colbert's taxonomy is, actually, remarkably clever: One of the best predictors of how French and British citizens will vote, as I recall, really is how frequently they attend church--not for nothing is it said that the Church of England is the Tory party at prayer. French Catholics, likewise, will not vote for French Communists. (It is this kind of nerdish grad-school humor that gives the Daily Show the edge over all other fake news shows.)

This is not a post about religion, but rather the tendency of political activists, professionals, and aficionados to associate themselves with those they perceive to be their kindred spirits in other countries.

I used to feel this way, although I haven't really ever since Helmut Kohl lost in Germany and especially not since Mrs. Thatcher was ousted in England (not, for Mrs. Thatcher, the U.K.). Since then, I have tended to support only incumbent parties, on the selfish basis that it is easier for me to remember the name of the Italian Prime Minister if he stays in office for longer than six weeks at a stretch. (This was a big problem in Italian politics pre-Berlusconi.) I have real reasons for this, of course--in many of the countries I care most about, a change in regime is apt to bring to power countries whose foreign policies I find distasteful, as happened when the KMT lost in Taiwan and the younger generation of Korean politicians triumphed in South Korea.

The country whose political parties have the deepest bonds of affection with American politicos and commentators is, of course, the U.K. Who should American conservatives support in the British elections? I have written lukewarmly of the British Labour Party in its new, post-Kinnock form, while other conservative partisans look to less profound reasons to prefer Blair. Ideologically, I find more to approve of in the Labour government as realized (often, of course, against the wishes of its core voters and backbenchers) than in the current Conservative Party under Michael Howard, which is reactionary in the worst Buchananite sense (though without the anti-gay bigotry).

But why do I care? Why, indeed, does anyone care? Foreign policy, it seems to me, is the only thing an American should really have a forceful opinion about in regards to other countries' leaders, as long as their domestic politics don't threaten our interests. And foreign policy, as practiced by respectable nations (the ones that have the settled, stable political party systems that give rise to these feelings of transnational political kinship), is the least partisan part of foreign policy.

Europeans, of course, live cheek-by-jowl with their fellow continentals, and so I can understand a member of the Partido Popular tending to support the Christian Democrats or a French Socialist cheering the parties allied with Romano Prodi. European integration only formalizes the links that have long existed, especially in working-class politics: It is not for nothing that one of the anthems of socialism is called "L'Internationale."

Americans, though, have no such real immediate interest in the domestic affairs of other nations. To confine myself to British examples: I have no experience with the National Health; I do not pay a council tax; I vastly prefer the American tertiary educational system to the Oxford "tute"; and my political thought on the issue of regional devolution is confined to a mushy, Thatcherite and Churchillian belief that "There will always be an England" equates to "There will always be an England ruling a United Kingdom." In other words, I have no basis on an experiential or even, really, a bookish level to prefer one party's specific policies over another, especially in these days when the trade unions and international Communism are dead.

These warm and ill-defined friendly feelings toward various political parties spontaneously emerge everywhere in the commentariat. Leftists in Europe always favor labour movements or other practioners of "resistance" politics, no matter how cruel they are in power or out; conservatives in America are willing to tolerate authoritarian governments abroad, so long as they only lock up peasants and leave American tourists unmolested. These are extreme cases, of course, but I think a moment's reflection will suffice to translate them into First World norms. (Or even Third World norms, unless you've forgotten how we all spontaneously rallied around Yushchenko.)

Why are these feelings generated? It is because the principal preoccupation of political scriveners is ideology divorced from reality. Writing is an exercise in abstraction, but professional politics is a constant grappling with the concrete. We should not, therefore, be surprised when Western observers return from this or that country to find that the local government is either the herald of a new golden age or the beginning of a gulag era, depending on the ideological beliefs of the observer. In democratic political terms, writers will focus less on the day-to-day and intensely local issues that the electorate considers and more on the party platforms and explicit statements of the candidates.

We should know better from reading, say, the Guardian's coverage of the American election. Foreign observers, lacking the long experience with a wide experience of subgroups in a country, will always miss the most important events in a campaign, or fail to recognize their significance. Why should we expect our own predictions to be any different, especially given that our own ideas and experiences are drawn from our lives in the States, an environment so unique as to be sui generis?

So it is that we should be wary of choosing sides in other countries' politics, unless to oppose a Chavez or support an Aquino. We will likely not know what we're talking about otherwise.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 05:50 PM | Comments (3)

Family Guy Preview

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, to view a leaked preview copy of Family Guy Season Four Episode 1. The show--which premieres in its new season this Sunday--is a masterpiece of satire and surreal comedy. Like South Park (but without the overt linguistic vulgarity), the show can sometimes come across as offensive to certain groups willing to be offended, but is, in reality, nothing more than pure essence of humor. Originally canceled by Fox (referred to in the first moments of the show), Seth MacFarlane's animated comic series was brought back after selling 3.5 million copies on DVD and developing a massive fan base among, ahem, males aged 18-34.

The first episode chronicles Peter and Lois Griffin's second honeymoon, which involves stealing Mel Gibson's print of Passion of the Christ 2 ("starring Chris Tucker and...the guy from the first one"). Stewie and Brian (that is, the baby and the dog) take over as parents for Chris and Meg. Not as successful as the best of the first three seasons (in particular, the absence of Quagmire and Cleveland was a disappointment), nevertheless the show's return is a welcome sign that we are nearly back to normalcy.

Holowatch Blog suggests this could be clever marketing on the part of Fox--specifically, a type of "viral marketing" that's all the rage among the avante-garde of the advertising commissars. It may well be. But if the result of this is that I get to see the show early, then neither I nor other fans of MacFarlane's vision will feel tremendously manipulated.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:57 AM | Comments (5)

ITA Daily Web Digest -- 28 April 2005

ITA's writers point out the articles they've found most interesting today.

• "New Gaps In Controlling the Spread of Nuclear Arms" [Christian Science Monitor]: The Monitor reviews the current state of nonproliferation and finds it troubling. Sure, Libya's given up its WMD program and Iraq is no longer a potential proliferator--but what about Iran, Pakistan, and worst of all North Korea? And what's China's role in all of this? (Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

• "Playing the Faith Card" [Reason]: Columnist Cathy Young flays the superstition of the religious Right that opposition to certain judicial nominees is tantamount to anti-Christian bias.(Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

• ""A Short History of the Chinese Restaurant" [Slate]: Exactly what it says it is, this article describes a museum exhibit in New York and reveals why it is that Chinese restaurants are quintessentially American. (Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

  "The 'Virtue' of Lust?" [Christianity Today]: W. Jay Wood reviews the philosophy of Simon Blackburn, a Wheaton professor and author of the book simply titled Lust. Blackburn makes an unabashed defense of what what many consider sin. (Selected by Joshua Claybourn.)

Posted by ITA Staff at 12:00 AM | Comments (3)

April 27, 2005

The Weather, The Bible, and Bad Science

The weather is famously the only safe topic for discussion, especially in the islands where I now live. One Indianapolis television station, however, appears bent on blocking this last harbor from those of us who from time to time seek refuge from tempestuous ideological debates. A friend passes along this link to a promo for "Weather and the Bible," a program that will run on Indianapolis's RTV6 tomorrow at six o'clock. According to the promo, the show "will feature the work of Hoosier astrophysicist and Christian college professor Donald DeYoung, who applies meteorological and physical science from a creationist point of view." Further, "DeYoung will explain new research that he says shows how biblical events like the great flood are factually accurate."

It is times like these that I want to weep, or at least reread Mencken's obituary for William Jennings Bryan. Are we never to be free of this intellectual deadweight? Or could we at least jeer it instead of giving it prominence?

DeYoung, according to an online biography, teaches physics at Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, a school whose admissions requirements list a "commitment [to] the spiritual standards and the proper Christian conduct" before giving the SAT and GPA numbers that the college looks for in its applicants. Among the courses listed in the catalog of the department DeYoung chairs are "Theories on Origins" ("A survey of origin theories with emphasis on creation/evolution") and--frighteningly--"Methods of Teaching Sciences in the Secondary School" ("A study of the curriculum and methods of teaching sciences on the secondary level").

DeYoung has carved out a niche for himself doing what he'll do tomorrow on Indianapolis's airwaves: Providing a slanted and utterly unrepresentative view of modern science, one that rejects the contributions of most of the past century of physics and of even longer in biology. He has an audience, apparently: one forum, apparently for Christian homeschoolers, recommends his books (with the creepy disclaimer that the poster does not "vouch for the theology" in these books; theology, of course, being a key part of science). Among these books is Weather and the Bible; I presume this will be the source text for tomorrow's exposition.

DeYoung publishes semi-frequnetly in Creation Research Society Quarterly, sponsored by the Creation Research Society, described by TalkOrigins as a society that places more emphasis on the "creation" than the "research" bit. As TalkOrigins points out, the CRS (not to be confused in any way with the Congressional Research Service, which is chock-full of brilliant analysts) requires its members to literally sign up to a four-point creed that pledges them to, essentially, missionary work while at the same time preventing them from undertaking research that might challenge the literally accuracy of every--or, rather, any--word of the Bible. (Which Bible in which language from which era is left unmentioned.)

Among the many articles Creation Research Society Quarterly publishes are another seeking to prove that dinosaur eggs were laid during a worldwide flood. Three of DeYoung's articles are online: "Is the Sun an Age Indicator?", Toward a Creationist Astronomy", and "Dark Matter."

I know--barely--enough popular science and more than enough about research methods and argumentation to critique the latter two pieces. They are not good. "Toward a Creationist Astronomy" starts from the entirely accurate statement that "It is noted that very little discussion of stellar evolution has been conducted from a creationist perspective" and continues to argue that, since creation scientists already have alternate models for biology and physics that are "Biblically correct," it's time for creation scientists to get cracking. Yet there is no actual argument presented in the 4,500 words of the essay, other than to rebut the amazingly facile claims of previous creation science "researchers." In fact, DeYoung and his co-author end by stating only that they intend to continue working, and that their task is "daunting." It certainly is: One wonders how to force the speed of light, galactic observations, and the Hubble Constant into a model of the Universe that requires everything to be only 6,000 years old--or, alternatively, one in which only the Earth, alone in all the Universe, was created 6,000 years ago.

DeYoung's other article, "Dark Matter," tries to use the existence of dark matter to open a door for creation physics. Among the points DeYoung raises in the article is that physics relies too much on random chance--in his explanation--to Why is it that galaxies move? DeYoung replies: "The Creator may simply have placed these clusters throughout space much as we see them, with random galaxy velocities." We are a long way indeed from the Western scientific tradition that includes Newton, of whom Pope famously said:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light.

There is a very long distance to travel between "The Creator said so" and F_g = G*[(m₁ * m ₂)/r²] .

The paper builds up, via distractions such as the one above, to its soaring conclusion:

What then is dark matter? I have suggested that dark matter exists within galaxies, if not elsewhere. We have considered various physical micro and macro-size possibilities. But there is another option. Perhaps the dark matter we seek is in reality the unseen hand of the Creator. We know from Colossians 1: 17 that God in some way holds all things together. Therefore at some point, physical reality must mesh with the spiritual. And that point may lie in the unexplicable problems of modern science.

It so happens that dark matter is one of the very few astrophysical topics I have ever written on, and my view of the field--as related by its practitioners--is rather more complicated. (Read both DeYoung's articles and mine.) Practicing physicists regard dark matter--and dark energy--as a major challenge to their theory, but they actually design experiments to test theories.

DeYoung operates without such troublesome constraints. And his rather thin bibliography (not much longer, as a matter of fact, than the research that went into my article) demonstrates that he is similarly untroubled by the scholar's usual burden of keeping up with developments in the field. He cites a very small handful of professional publications, but the articles are hardly referred to in the text--were they to be taken out, the only effect on his argument would be to reduce his bibliography to the small number of (old) textbooks and publications by other creation science "researchers" that back up the bulk of his argument.

So this is a thumbnail sketch of the man granted a platform to address Indianapolis television viewers. It is incidents like this that should serve to remind fans of Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as "the best which has been thought and said in the world" that the marketplace is a terribly inefficient mechanism for guaranteeing the triumph of truth.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 05:37 PM | Comments (22)

ITA Daily Web Digest

ITA's writers point out the articles they've found most interesting today.

• "Life After Darth" [Wired]: A biographical sketch of George Lucas presenting a revisionist view of the "high concept" director's career. Who knew that Darth Lucas really wanted to make bad art films? (Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

• "All God's Children Got Values" [Dissent]: Philosopher Michael Walzer argues that it's the Left, not the "values Right," that's been reduced to morals posturing. But Walzer, writing in one of the Left's premiere journals, takes the Bush administration and specifically neocons to task as well. (Selected by Paul Musgrave.)

• "Weapons Inspector Ends WMD Search in Iraq" [Associated Press]: Following on the heels of Charles Duelfer's report concluding the same, the CIA's top weapons hunter in Iraq said his search for weapons of mass destruction "has been exhausted" without finding any. (Selected by Joshua Claybourn.)

• "Nuke the Filibuster" [LA Times]: While Republicans and Democrats seemingly flip flop on filibuster positions to suit their interests, the LA Times retains their intellectual honesty and continues their support of ending the filibuster. Interestingly, the Times supports a universal repeal: "But the Senate shouldn't stop with filibusters over judges. It should strive to nuke the filibuster for all legislative purposes." (Selected by Joshua Claybourn.)

• "Bush: Build Oil Refineries at Ex-Military Bases" [Reuters]: After failing to solve the problem overnight by pleading with the House of Fraud, Bush announces that high gas prices are "not going to be fixed overnight." But apparently letting oil companies bypass pesky regulations and build on old military bases will help. Of course, this must be at the behest of Big Oil, who control the WH these days, right? "A top independent oil refiner, Valero Energy Corp. said expanding its current fleet of refineries makes better economic sense than building new refineries at closed military bases." (Selected by Zach Wendling)

• "Brosnan 'will stay on as 007'" [The Mirror]: Dame Dench spills the beans. Brosnan will continue to help EON run the franchise into the ground with the next installment: Casino Royale. This after years of rumours of who would replace him, some of them inexplicably bizarre: Orlando Bloom? Cuba Gooding, Jr.? I'm still hoping for Lazenby look-alike Clive Owens. (Selected by Zach Wendling)

Posted by ITA Staff at 06:52 AM | Comments (4)

Google Print: Now in Beta

Search inside books.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 06:11 AM | Comments (1)

April 26, 2005

Schools, Language and Competition

Today's Indianapolis Star brings the news that Lawrence Township schools are striking a blow for parochialism by eliminating a sixth-grade foreign language program. True, the school board would protest that they had no choice but to cut the program, and at least they've preserved the courses beginning in the seventh grade, but on the other hand the township's students have also lost the services of a Latin teacher.

Were epic histories written of such matters, this would go down as a Waterloo for those students in Lawrence Township's schools who wanted to learn foreign languages. The very worst time to begin language instruction would come when students are fidgety, bored, distracted by social and physical changes, and just past the time when their brains are flexible enough to pick up the phonemic and grammatical structures of different languages without too much trouble. In other words, about seventh grade.

It escapes me why American--and Irish and British--schools persist in at once proclaiming the benefits of foreign languages and 'globalization' generally whilst simultaneously making it as difficult as possible for their students to learn those languages. I find it similarly incomprehensible that anyone actually listened to the philistines who threw Latin out of the curriculum; most of my skill in diction and grammar stems from my three years learning the Roman tongue. (It has also come in handy as a way to amaze friends and professors by coining neologisms and--badly--translating Roman ruins.) Latin may not help you get a job at the factory, but neither will English literature or calculus, and anyway the factory's moved to Mexico, thence to Korea, and finally to Shanghai.

It really is stunning how ignorant of other languages and cultures Americans are. True, ignorance of other cultures is not a uniquely American problem: Most of the rest of the world thinks that "New York City" and "Los Angeles" are typical examples of the civilization of the United States. But at least they can be ignorant in such a manner because they know enough English to read the New York Times or watch American films, whereas Americans are trapped in a monolingual cage. Given the predominant position of the United States in the world, such ignorance is troubling; were we to drive our cars with the same degree of care we manage global affairs, we--the entire U.S. citizenry--would be guilty of negligence and possibly manslaughter.

I offer here a revealing anecdote: In Shanghai, I was reliably informed, it is no longer enough to speak Shanghai dialect, Mandarin, and English, but ambitious job-seekers also need to speak French, German, Korean or Japanese. (Not in that order.) Also from my own experience, I can attest to the enthusiasm with which Chinese third-graders speak English (better, in fact, than I speak Mandarin, although that's a low bar). And every language you learn makes it easier to learn another language.

Yet in the States languages are treated by school administrators and legislators as something extra to the educational enterprise. And they are supported and reinforced in their belief by the wrongheaded attitude of voters who have no interest in rendering value for tax dollars, voters who would rather pay a low tax to provide their fellow citizens with a crummy education than a marginally higher tax to give the rising generation a lifelong advantage. Justifying this attitude is the false concept of "competitveness." I agree with Milton Friedman's analysis of the public schools, and I generally support--in principle--efforts to voucherize schools and thereby introduce real competition.

To understand why sixth graders in Lawrence Township can't learn languages until next year, then, we have to understand the low-tax, low-service ideology that justifies such decisions and precludes the possibility of intelligent management of the school systems by adopting a scorched-earth, "starve the beast" mentality. (Those who adopt this attitude, I should note, are typically either those with the resources to escape the public system, with a religious or ideological prejudice against the very instituiton of government-funded and -managed schools, or without the formal education to understand the benefits of superior schooling.)

The true test of competitiveness, in fact, is not always with the local market. If any measure of competitiveness should be applied, it is the success that children have after they graduate from high school and become either nominally independent adults or students in higher education. Success in this market is the product of many variables, of which funding is only one, but it is a market in which the products of Hoosier schools are not known for their outstanding successes. (That being said, the specific proposals of the Daniels administration appear to me to be necessary in order to redress certain longstanding structural problems in school financing.)

The problems that confront us now are not the problems of a competitive market. Nor is the public apt to support a fully privatized market in education in the next, oh, never. And while I remain aware of the problems teachers' unions and inefficient administrations cause (indeed, given that I have never attended any schools but public schools, I am remarkably well aware of these problems), I am not willing to support the quest for the will-o'-wisp ideal of a private market with the resulting stunting of the educational development of American children.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 05:33 PM | Comments (12)

Township Governance in Indiana: The Need for Reform

(See previous entries on township governance here, here, here, here, here and here.)

RiShawn Biddle of the Indianapolis Star updates his earlier post on township governance in Marion County to respond to critics of the original draft. Biddle notes this column in the Star by a local Indianapolis politician who argues that IndyWorks, Mayor Bart Peterson's plan to streamline Indianapolis and Marion County's government structure in part by consolidating townships, is flawed because the plan only merges townships into two large units.

Whether the author of the op-ed believes that it would be better for the townships to be eliminated altogether or for the status quo to be maintained isn't entirely clear. One suspects it's the latter, as the easiest way for reactionaries to maintain their position is to enlist the perfect as an ally in the fight against the good. And that appears to be the only purpose of the editorial: To note the areas that the Peterson plan won't fix.

No, Mayor Peterson's plan won't let the City-County Council use township funds for UniGov purposes. Nor will it eliminate all the township assessors, trustees and advisory boards already present in the county. Nor will it guarantee the absolute incorruptibility of township governments.

But those flaws are secondary to the major question, which is--as it has been for at least ninety years, and possibly even longer--"Should townships survive in their present form?" And the answer continues to be "No."

Fixing townships will not, in the words of a very young Herman B Wells, give us bigger sidewalks and better beers. As Biddle notes, though, in Marion County township consolidation will allow for more efficient provision of certain emergency services. Moreover, I would argue that the simple consolidation of the townships into two intuitively-defined areas (roughly the "city" and the "county") will help in a number of ways.

First, all other things being equal, the total going expenditure of township government will have to be lower, if for no other reason that there will be fewer officials, offices, and family members to hire.

Second, and as a consequence, Marion County townships will almost certainly fare better on measures of efficiency after the township consolidation simply because there will be less overhead.

Third, and to answer a common objection, it will be the case that there will be enhanced accountability for township-level governments post-Indy Works. The writer states: "Instead of nine locally elected and accountable trustees, you will have two larger bureaucracies with several branch offices. Does experience suggest that larger, less publicly accountable bureaucracies are better at fiscal management?" Yes. The problems of township fiscal accountability in Marion County's townships, which are simply the best-documented problems in the state, are a result of the difficulty of voters' holding township officials to account. It is easy to fix the blame (fairly or--sometimes--unfairly) for problems in municipal governance on a democratically-elected official: The tribulations of every mayor, and to a lesser extent the municipal council, are reported in the newspaper, and nearly every voter at least knows the mayor's name.

But if the municipal buck stops in the mayor's office, where does it stop at the township level? Township politics fall below a newspaper's eye level, and there is no local accountability mechanism to make these affairs truly public. Further, few voters will have the knowledge necessary to judge the competence of township officials from their own experience (especially given the narrow clientele which the township trustee serves).

Nine townships are too many for the media and the voters to keep an eye on. Two, however, is a much more manageable number. (Zero, I suspect, might be even better, but unfortunately no pressure group exists to serve the public interest in general as opposed to the interests of specific public servants.)

A study commission on townships is needed to give an imprimatur to sorely-needed reforms. However, it is difficult to see what lessons could be drawn from the experiences of other counties in the state that would be applicable to Marion County's unique situation. All the lessons we could draw are immediately obvious, and have been amply publicized in the Star and other sources.

The legislature can consider the general question of township governance in Indiana by a study commission. But there's no reason to hold up these specific reforms for two more years.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 05:03 PM | Comments (2)

The Rich and Poor

For you always have the poor with you. . .

I've written numerous times before that the problem with the word "poor" is that it's extremely relative. One generation's "poor" is another's "wealthy." Yesterday Jane Galt explained it quite well:

By the standards of, say, 1920, every single one of us, even welfare mothers, is rich. Every single one of us has enough food that we never need to go to bed with our stomachs crying out to be filled. Every single one of us has running water--running hot water--and bathtubs and indoor toilets to put the water into. We have stoves that do not need to be carefully tended to keep the fire going. We have central heat. We have cars or public transportation to take us wherever we want to go for a trivial sum. Almost every poor person in America has a color television, offering free entertainment 24 hours a day, and most of them can afford to buy cable to go along with it. We are so wealthy that even a welfare mother can afford to let her children stay in school until they graduate--indeed, so wealthy that a once-unbiquitous dramatic scene, the child vowing to drop out of school in order to help the family out, has entirely dropped out of the literary canon. The average middle class man of 1920 would have regarded all but the most hopelessly drug addled or mentally ill street people as wealthy beyond dreams of avarice.

She's right, of course, and it has enormous implications for efforts to "help the poor." The "poor" is simply a word for society's lowest ranking members in terms of material wealth, and someone will always rank below average, even as humanity's wealth continues to skyrocket. I'm reminded of the old joke about a politician worrying "Half of our school children are reading below average!"

The issue is often simply greed. The Williams might have all the material comforts a human family needs, but they want to keep up with the Jones'. I don't mean to ignore the truly needy, like the homeless, because that isn't my intent. Besides, the vice runs just as heavily, if not more, in the upper class. If you stop to think about it, deeply and truly, you'll find that you often get no pleasure out of having money, only out of having more of it than the next person. As you might expect, the great C.S. Lewis has something to say about all of this:

"We say that people are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest."

Lewis talks about it in terms of pride, and I'm speaking in terms of greed. They're essentially the same thing, though, just different sides of the same coin. Pride is taking pleasure in being ahead, greed is discontent over being behind. Often the problem is not that some are dangerously far behind, but that we're jealous of others doing so well.

Others blogging the topic: The Listless Lawyer, dustbury.com, and Peaktalk.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 01:04 AM | Comments (24)

April 25, 2005

Why We Learn

One of the signs that someone has turned off their critical faculties--or is hoping you've turned yours off--is when they cease relating concepts to first principles and relate them to slogans instead.

This Christian Science Monitor article offers a fine example. In the course of an interesting, if unfocused and overly given to multicultural mush, discussion of how schools should treat kids who are "quiet," the Monitor quotes one expert as saying that these kids shouldn't be punished or corrected for refusing to join in the verbal fray:

In fact, she says, the qualities that many quieter children express - thoughtfulness, studiousness, conscientiousness - are among those most needed for the complex problem-solving required by today's information-oriented economy.

What? Neither can I understand how "studiousness" is a competitive advantage in more than a handful of fields (frankly, friendliness and creativity appear to be leading the pack) nor can I understand why considerations of economic competitiveness have any role to play in this debate at all.

Kids are robust, and most of them will grow up fine, assuming that they aren't scarred for life by the age-old imbecilities of traditional sources or the brand-new insanities of pop psychiatry (or, occasionally, highbrow psychoanalysis, as with the generation of mothers told that they were to blame for their child's autism). But for experts and loudmouths generally, it still sounds good to point to the economy as a justification for the policy du jour they're advocating.

Some of the policies advocated in the piece, I should note, will embarrass kids--and, incidentally, trample over their native cultures--or leave them bleeding when the SAT, LSAT and GRE reading comprehension sections cut into them. One English teacher no longer asks her students to identify the main characters in the piece, for instance, but instead asks them to say whether they've ever been in a similar situation as the main character--sidestepping the occasionally interesting character of who the main characters are, while at the same time reducing literature to another piece of the modern therapy-confessional complex. The same teacher also brags about another innovation of hers:

"Kids are receptive if the teacher sets a social code," she says. "I have this little Asian girl who speaks so quietly I can hardly hear her. And every time she speaks up I go, 'Wow - Lindy's talking so we can hear her!' And we all clap, and the kids totally get it."

Had any of my high school teachers ever done anything like this, we would have had a lot more kids walking around in black trenchcoats. (Yes, this teacher is from California.)

For more on introversion, Jonathan Rauch has written the definitive article on bitempermental relations.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 06:28 PM | Comments (2)

Townships in Indiana

RiShawn Biddle adds another chapter to the continuing saga of Malfeasance in Township Governance. (Note to Expresso, the Indianapolis Star's blog: Sorry not to mention this earlier, but permalinks would be useful.)

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 05:52 PM | Comments (2)

More Conservatives Defending the Judiciary

It's nice to see some of the more decent and consistent conservatives going after Tom DeLay, James Dobson and the rest of the folks going after judges with a meat cleaver. The latest to do so are Ted Olson and Charles Krauthammer. Olson represented President Bush before the Supreme Court in the election case in 2000 and then served as his Solicitor General when he took office. He is also thought to be on the short list of candidates for a future Supreme Court nomination. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he said:

It is time to take a deep breath, step back, and inject a little perspective into the recent heated rhetoric about judges and the courts. We might start by getting a firm grip on the reality that our independent judiciary is the most respected branch of our government, and the envy of the world...

Calls to investigate judges who have made unpopular decisions are particularly misguided, and if actually pursued, would undermine the independence that is vital to the integrity of judicial systems. If a judge's decisions are corrupt or tainted, there are lawful recourses (prosecution or impeachment); but congressional interrogations of life-tenured judges, presumably under oath, as to why a particular decision was rendered, would constitute interference with - and intimidation of - the judicial process. And there is no logical stopping point once this power is exercised.

Krauthammer's column in the Washington Post criticizes DeLay both for his threats and his views in the Schiavo case. He refers to the "flailing, sometimes delirious attacks on the judiciary mounted by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and others in the wake of the Terri Schiavo case."

DeLay is threatening judges involved in that case with unspecified retribution. He said that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy should be held "accountable" for using international law in deciding a recent (death penalty) case. He wants congressional hearings to reinterpret the "good behavior" clause of lifetime judicial tenure to make good behavior mean not what it has meant for two centuries -- honesty and propriety -- but good constitutional behavior. Do we really want Congress deciding that?

DeLay is wrong about the Schiavo case. I think the law was a bad law, but the trial judge applied it properly. I think the judge assessed the medical evidence incorrectly, but that is a matter of interpretation, not of judicial impropriety or denial of due process. There is nothing here with which to threaten this judge or the judicial system.

But at least DeLay was coherent. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) wandered somewhere off the Pacific Coast Highway when, on the Senate floor, he suggested a connection between "some recent episodes of courthouse violence" and judicial activism -- as if courtroom gunmen are disappointed scholars who kill in the name of Borkian originalism. Even worse was a Washington meeting of over-the-top activists led by Phyllis Schlafly that issued a manifesto for the restoration of God to our constitutional system.

Let us have a bit of sanity here. One of the glories of American democracy is the independence of the judiciary. The deference and reverence it enjoys are priceless assets. The Supreme Court is the only institution that could have ended the Bush-Gore fiasco of 2000 with the immediacy, finality and, yes, legitimacy that it did. (True, liberals, who for half a century employed judicial fiat to enact their political agenda, have been whining for five years about this particular judicial exercise. But the critical point is that, whine or not, the ruling was accepted as law.) Moreover, and more generally, judicial independence and supremacy are necessary checks on the tyranny of popular majorities.

He goes on to list some of the rulings he disagrees with and he makes pointed criticisms of them. But that is all the more important in this situation because it points out that one can criticize judges - I often do so myself - without attempting to break down the separation of powers so crucial to our constitutional system. Judges are not immune to criticism. But to be taken seriously, two things are needed. First, the criticisms must be valid and warranted. In the case of the right's relentless attacks on Judge Greer, they are as unjustifed as Harry Reid's equally "flailing, sometimes delirious" attacks on Clarence Thomas. And it cannot cross the line into attempts to intrude on the court's authority and punish judges for making decisions one doesn't like.

Posted by at 12:25 PM | Comments (10)

Caesar's Bath

ITA friends Ed Brayton, John Coleman, and Radley Balko have all engaged in "Caesar's Bath meme," and it seems like something ITA's readers might enjoy. Here's the text:

Behold, the Caesar's Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can't really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), "Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice."

Leave your five in the comments.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 12:34 AM | Comments (23)

The Genographic Project

The National Geographic Society, IBM, geneticist Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Family Foundation have teamed up to launch the Genographic Project, "a five-year effort to understand the human journey - where we came from and how we got to where we live today." While you might normally yawn at such cliche projects, this one has a unique funding angle that makes you part of the research. The project invites you to purchase a "Public Participation Kit" with the tools necessary to swab your cheek for a DNA sample. Then you can log on to the project's website to track the results.

This is not a genealogy test and you won't learn about your great grandparents. You will learn, however, of your deep ancestry, the ancient genetic journeys and physical travels of your distant relatives.

Sounds quite interesting, and from what I can gather they do a good job protecting anonymity.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2005

God Made All Things Except Steve

A pleasantly snarkish post from Slacktivist on the reason why God neglected to create Steve. Thanks to Brad DeLong and apologies to all the Steves out there. (Yeah, even that one.)

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 01:06 PM | Comments (6)

It's so easy! Happy go lucky!

Similar to the phenomenon in the 1950s and 1960s when television was preoccupied with the pressing questions of domestic affairs in Chez Ricardo and the ethical use of witchcraft to aid your husband's career even as Khruschev and company plotted, in these days when North Korea is preparing a nuclear test, Iran is tinkering with its bombs, Pakistan continues to be a potential ground zero for an Islamist coup or an Indian bomb, and insurgents fight on in Iraq, ITA is happy to remember a simpler time when we all understood the power of green leaves. (English translation here.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2005

Trippin'

Rich celebrities glorify poverty in MTV's latest endeavor.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 11:40 PM | Comments (4)

One Hand Washes the Other

The formation of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation was announced on Thursday at the National Press Club, according to this announcement. The JAACD, headed by staunch conservative Don Feder, says it will work to expose and combat "anti-Christian prejudice in Hollywood, the news media, politics, government and the courts." Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any news accounts of the press conference, nor does JAACD have a web site that I've been able to find.

To some, this may seem to be a bizaare organization. However, American Jews and Evangelicals (the group of Christians most likely to complain of anti-Christian prejudice in America), have been allies for quite awhile now. Not only do both groups strongly support the state of Israel, but they often find themselves on the same side of social issues (Jewish pop culture critic Michael Medved has been mistaken for a fundamentalist Christian).

The formation of JAACD seems to signal a public recognition by a some conservative Jews that what is good for conservative Christians is good for them as well. (For an example of an evangelical Christian organization that is pro-Israel, see the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry.)

Posted by Eric Seymour at 02:13 PM | Comments (24)

April 22, 2005

Monsters

Pardon my PASWO blogging. Terrorists claiming to be members of the Islamic Army in Iraq shot down a civilian helicopter and videotaped the gruesom scene. The helicopter carried six Americans, three Bulgarians and two Fijians. The pilot, Lyubomir Kostov, is seen as the sole survivor. I will not attempt to describe the manner in which he was murdered. It is available here. If your stomach is weak, the written account is here.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 03:13 PM | Comments (19)

Death of the Estate Tax

As I gear up for my eight hour income tax exam with 8-10 hour study days, I don't feel guilty for taking a few moments away from it to address the potential repeal of the Estate Tax. Many people have trotted out the expected hysterics over it all, but I'm struck by the extreme level of ignorance surrounding the mechanics of the tax, even by journalists charged with reporting it. Most notably Matthew Yglesias has this reaction over the repeal: "F*** the small businessman." But as Mindles H. Dreck points out, the Small Business Council of America does just that:

BETHESDA, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 14, 2005--The Small Business Council of America ("SBCA") warned today in testimony before the Subcommittee on Tax, Finance and Exports of the Committee on Small Business of the House of Representatives that more small business owners would be hurt if the estate tax were to be permanently repealed in 2010, than if the law were frozen in 2009. "Proponents of repeal tout the benefits of estate tax repeal to the small business owner when, in fact, repeal will actually harm most small business owners because of the loss in the step-up in basis," said Paula Calimafde, Chair of the SBCA.

The New York Times writes, "Repeal would shield the estates of the very wealthiest Americans from the tax." It does not, and understanding this "step-up basis" that the SBCA referred to is key to understanding why Yglesias and the NYT are wrong. In many cases, capital gains will now be taxed higher for the beneficiary thanks to a new higher basis. Dreck explains this sufficiently well, so be sure to read it. Repealing the estate tax is not an automatic positive for the wealthy, and it's certainly not automatically good for small businesses.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 12:38 PM | Comments (3)

April 21, 2005

We told you so (part 1 of ??)

When Democrats selected Howard* Dean as their party's national chairman, many Republicans were giddy with anticipation over the potential for more embarassing moments like the infamous post-Iowa caucus scream. Democrats responded that Republicans were actually afraid of Dean's political skills and grassroots know-how.

Who was right? Well right now there are a lot of Republicans who aren't sure whether to laugh or cry foul at Dean's impression (at a fundraiser for the Minnesota ACLU**) of Rush Limbaugh snorting cocaine, as reported by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. I heard the audio on The O'Reilly Factor tonight***, and I can tell you it was a completely juvenile little act. Entirely sophomoric. In other words, exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from certain talk-radio hosts.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not shedding any tears for Limbaugh. He's done his share of mocking figures on the left. But is that the sort of behavior we should expect from a national political leader? Can you imagine if the chair of the RNC back in the late 90's had, at a public appearance, done an impression of Bill Clinton being "serviced" by an intern while seated at his Oval Office desk?

It should be possible to tell the difference between political leaders and pundits, the latter being entertainers who make money directly by tickling the partisan sensibilities of their audiences.

*I'm greatly tempted to call him "Howie," but I think I'll not stoop to playing that game of belitting one's opponents by referring to them with cutesy nicknames.

**Has there been any doubt for the last 12 years that the ACLU is just as wholly integrated into the Democratic party as right-to-life groups are into the GOP?

***I know, I know. I just watch it for the entertainment value if I'm eating dinner late. Really!

Posted by Eric Seymour at 09:32 PM | Comments (21)

To Serve and Protect...Sometimes

Radley Balko relates a couple tales of horrible "service" he recently received at the hands of state and local officials. I think we've all been there at least once. There are good cops and helpful civil servants out there--they even (I hope) outnumber the ones who abuse their power--but it sure is easy to get cynical.

Meanwhile, I found this a bit interesting:

Bizarrely, the city of Alexandria won't mail or fax a copy of [an accident] report to you. You have to go pick it up in person. I know because I called. Twice. And both times they told me I'd need to get in [sic] in person.

Hmm... Perhaps they're trying to protect that most cherished of libertarian rights--the right to privacy. It's your Constitutional right, you know! (I jest, of course. Anyone who had to endure this nightmare has earned my deepest sympathies.)

Posted by Eric Seymour at 04:05 PM | Comments (3)

Lileks on Benedict XVI

A friend alerted me to Lileks' comments about the new Bishop of Rome. As usual, his commentary is both insightful and entertaining.

Posted by Eric Seymour at 08:30 AM | Comments (19)

April 20, 2005

Shameless family promotion

Here's the promotional website I designed for my cousin Brian Claybourn, an NFL hopeful. The Billszone Draft Guide profiles him as one the nation's top punters.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 04:59 PM | Comments (4)

A More Troubling Backyard Experiment

Following up on Eric's mention of the Eagle Scout who tried (and failed) to build a backyard nuclear reactor (a good thing Chairman Mao never heard about that), here's an article from The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about three physics students who tried--and succeeded--to build a nuclear bomb.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 02:30 PM | Comments (1)

Video offerings

Part of being a real Netizen is keeping tabs on the latest multimedia genius the web has to offer. The best recent example must surely be Prangstgrup's video selection, particularly the Lecture Musical and Library Musical. New Life Christian's Baby Got Book came close, but the Columbia students with Prangstgrup still held the crown.

Now comes a group of students from Clemson who call themselves Rogue Dawg productions. I first discovered them about a year ago through a spoof they did on William Hung's failed American Idol bid. That video, their first, might still be their finest. They recently entered the American Idol Music Video contest and lost with a subpar video. Their other videos are better, but I'm still going with Prangstgrup as the best internet-based video makers. Leave other suggestions in the comments if you have any.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 02:00 PM | Comments (1)

The backyard nuclear reactor

Since it's a slow day here at ITA, I thought I'd bring to you the fascinating story of David Hahn, a 17-year-old aspiring Eagle Scout whose Atomic Energy merit badge led him to attempt to build a nuclear reactor in a potting shed behind his mother's house. The story was originally reported by Ken Silverstein in a Harper's Magazine article, and later expanded by Mr. Silverstein into the book The Radioactive Boy Scout.

David was an extraordinarily inventive young man. His scientific adventures read like an episode of "MacGyver"--turning ordinary items into powerful (and often dangerous) scientific instruments. His attempt to build a breeder reactor in fact fell woefully short of being effective, yet was effective enough to create some serious hazards to himself and others. In a day when commercially-sold chemistry sets contain nothing of much interest due to legal liability concerns, David's home-made experiments are remarkable. Here's an excerpt from a review of the book last fall in Chemical & Engineering News (sorry, access for subscribers only):

[David] tested his putative neutron gun by aiming it at a small block of paraffin next to his Geiger counter. The rapid clicking indicated to him that he was successful. However, it was much more likely that he was only observing X-rays emitted by the ²⁴¹Am.

He crudely extracted thorium from the thorium dioxide in the lantern mantles by heating the dioxide with lithium he'd removed from lithium batteries. He then began to assemble his reactor in the potting shed behind his house.

In the next days and weeks, he made regular measurements of the reactor's radioactivity to see if the thorium was absorbing neutrons. Before long, he found that the readings were increasing regularly. He was now convinced that his model was working. But the increases were very likely due to the fact that he had purified the thorium from its radioactive daughters, which were just growing back in.

When the radioactivity kept on growing over the following weeks, however, he finally became worried, thinking his reactor was running away. He set about disassembling his handiwork, for he thought that he had accomplished what he had set out to do, and he did not want to hurt anyone.

The entire Harper's Magazine article is worth your time and is comprehensible, I think, to anyone regardless of scientific background. I'll leave you with a quote that aptly sums up David's scientific investigations, by David's scoutmaster's wife, Barbara Auito: "The typical kid [working on the merit badge] would have gone to a doctor's office and asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor."

Posted by Eric Seymour at 12:48 PM | Comments (3)

April 19, 2005

Pop Music Recommendation

A dismayingly high number of our readers will like this (we've been aiming for the Ashlee Simpson demographic) and so I thought I'd pass along a link to the poppy, 80s-esque song "Binary Girl" by the Mathematicianss. Find it here.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 07:32 PM | Comments (2)

Judicial Review as Constitutional Mandate

Via Randy Barnett at VC, there is a new paper at SSRN from John Yoo and Sai Prakash, entitled The Origins of Judicial Review. This was the subject of much discussion recently in posts by me and by Josh Claybourn. It began with me criticizing Tom Delay for his absurd statement that, "The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them," a statement which clearly indicates that Delay is opposed to judicial review itself, not merely to decisions he disagrees with. In doing so, he is offering up a blatantly anti-Constitutional argument. As I pointed out in response, he is flat wrong - the reason we have judicial review is because Article III of the Constitution was intended precisely for the purpose of establishing judicial review. Barnett himself agrees, saying,

Given the state of the historical record, it now amazes me that anyone can still argue that judicial review was made up by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison.

You can find a longer exposition of Barnett's position on this in his SSRN paper, The Original Meaning of the Judicial Power. Yoo and Prakash go deeper than Barnett in examining the historical record regarding judicial review and they make much the same argument that I made in the previous threads, that not one of the founding fathers, including those who opposed judicial review, argued that Article III did not require it:

[N]o scholar has been able to cite any Federalist or Anti-Federalist who declared that the Constitution did not permit judicial review of federal legislation...

[N]o scholar to date has identified even one participant in the ratification fight who argued that the Constitution did not authorize judicial review of federal statutes. This silence in the fact of the numerous comments on the other side is revealing.

It certainly is. Combine that with Hamilton's clear statements in Federalist 78 and there is simply no doubt that Article III included the power of judicial review. The fact that people like Tom Delay use the rhetoric of "originalism" incessantly while attempting to excise judicial review, which Hamilton considered so important that without it all of the declarations of the rights of citizens found in our founding document "would amount to nothing", only shows the utter intellectual bankruptcy of their position and their total lack of understanding of constitutional doctrine.

Posted by at 05:55 PM | Comments (30)

The government made me fat!

The US Department of Agriculture today announced the replacement of the "food pyramid" nutritional guide with 12 new triangular guides, each for a different age group and lifestyle. (The guides should be available at MyPyramid.gov, although the web site seems to be having problems right now, possibly due to high traffic.) Frankly, I couldn't care less. Generally, people know they should eat more fruits and vegetables and less red meat and fried foods. Changing the way in which the official health nags convey this message isn't likely to have much of an impact.

What I found interesting, however, was a story written yesterday in anticipation of the new guide, which included an accusation that the old pyramid was partly at fault for America's obesity epidemic because it recommended carb-laden breads & cereals as the largest food group. The accusation was made (surprise, surprise) by South Beach diet creator Dr. Arthur Agatston. But it is ridiculous for several reasons.

First, how many overweight and/or obese individuals do you think got that way by faithfully obeying the USDA's nutritional guidelines? Second, eating carbs does not make you fat, just as eating fat does not make you fat. Eating more calories than your body uses is what makes you gain weight. Atkins works primarily because it is a heuristic. It's easier to reduce one's calorie intake by putting a whole category of food off-limits than by eating less of all the foods you are accustomed to. (But, hey, if it works for you, far be it from me to dissuade you.)

Anyway, you can add this "food pyramid" nonsense to the ever-growing list of examples where the public tends to rely on the government to take care of them, and looks everywhere but to their own behavior when things go wrong.

Posted by Eric Seymour at 12:52 PM | Comments (2)

New Pope Chosen--Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI

more to come from AP

Updates: Gene Weingarten, the humorist at the Washington Post, summed up the non-Catholic, liberal-to-moderate reaction when he declared to the participants in his online chat this afternoon "OMIGOD IT'S RATZINGER!!!" Earlier, the Post's news story had been predicing that Ratzinger was out, because of his decidedly conservative tendencies. It appears that the appointment power of the late pope has preserved his theological preferences.

Jason Kuznicki briefs us on two previous popes named Benedict.

Additional Updates: Red-State.Com offers a brief explanation of some potential impacts on the American Church. National Catholic Reporter gives a loooong look at Ratzinger, written in 1999, before anyone took the possibility of his succeeding JPII seriously. As always, Lileks has a good sum-up of the reaction of the Rightwing Media (non-kook division): "The selection of Ratzinger was initially heartening, simply because he made the right people apoplectic. I’m still astonished that some can see a conservative elevated to the papacy and think: a man of tradition? As Pope? How could this be?" (Lileks and Weingarten, by the way, are friends--Weingarten outs Lileks as a hypochondriac of massive proportions in his first book.)

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 12:14 PM | Comments (1)

The French Have a Word For It

Zach's link below is to a blog named "papabile," Italian for "capable of being pope." The Italian language is surprisingly rich, and difficult to translate: gelato, for instance, is usually rendered as "ice cream" in English, though it has as much relation to ice cream as a Maserati to a Mercury.

In other papal vocabulary-building news, I wanted to share the word papolatrie from France. To judge from news coverage recently, it is a disease to which the global media is particularly susceptible.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

There's a Blog for Everything

I doubt we'll be doing the play-by-play on the Conclave at the Vatican here in The Agora, but for those of you who are truly junkies, you can go to, I kid you not, a blog about the election of the new Bishop of Rome: papabile.blogspot.com. (via Boar's Head Tavern) They've been going since Easter.

Not being in the Roman Church, I don't have a horse in this race. But in so far as the Bishop of Rome has indirect effects on all of Christendom, I suppose I'd like to see a conservative pontiff . . . though I don't particularly like Ratzinger, the reported frontrunner.

Addendum: Yet another blog: Virtual Conclave.

Posted by Zach Wendling at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)

April 18, 2005

NKOTB

The Indianapolis Star has debuted a new blog for its opinion staff. Of course, they haven't quite got the hang of it yet:

• Nobody has yet referred to George Bush as "Chimpy" or "Hitler."
• Nobody has called the Democrats "obstructionist" or Ann Coulter "well-read."
• Number of references to The Fountainhead: Zero.
• Number of pop-culture references used as headlines: Also zero.

We trust they will become more like the rest of the blogosphere soon.

Update: They have now acquired their first "git-tuff" commenters (from left and right, it appears). Yes, there's nothing like the death of an innocent to advance your rhetorical purposes...especially for people with pseudonyms.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 02:06 PM | Comments (6)

"The Roads to Serfdom"

In addition to the article on New York's subways cited in the post below, I also want to point out Theodore Dalrymple's "The Roads to Serfdom" in this quarter's City Journal. All of Dalrymple is worth your attention, and this piece demonstrates why (even if it is a bit unfair to Orwell, whose 1984 clearly showed that he understood the dangers of central control, even if The Lion and The Unicorn was a bit pink).

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:55 AM | Comments (6)

Dirigisme and Stubborn Individualism

The best twenty minutes you will spend today is reading "The Use of Knowledge in Society", F.A. Hayek's 1945 article on why central planning at the macroeconomic level will always encounter difficulties and will fail in the long run. (For those of you with JSTOR access, the original is available from American Economic Review Vol. 35 No. 4, 519-530.)

The basis of Hayek's argument against central planning as an economic tool is the difficulty of aggregating all the essential knowledge to formulate plans. A long excerpt is worthwhile:

[T]he knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources--if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

As Hayek explains, 'central planning' means planning done by one person or group, while the market is a means of fostering decentralized planning, in which individuals act upon their own knowledge of their interests and local conditions. It is precisely this sort of knowledge--local knowledge, including concepts from individual preferences to on-the-job learning--that is so difficult for the central planner to discern and utilize. And, as Hayek points out, this knowledge is not subordinate to the knowledge made explicit in statistical reports and textbooks; often, indeed, the relationship is the reverse.

Today's Washington Post runs an article inadvertently vindicating Hayek. The government, when deciding where to place highways and so forth, relies upon models of traffic flow that assume that the morning commute is more predictable and stable than the evening commute (when people are apt to tack on errands to their daily routine, and so vary their time for returning home). But it turns out that the American commuter isn't playing according to the rules of the model. Behind the changes in commuting pattern: The power of the latte.

A government researcher with the Department of Transportation has determined that increased variation in commuters' routines is positively correlated--and plausibly caused by--a shift in preferences favoring breakfast fast-food restaurants and coffeehouses such as Starbucks. The company, with a better knowledge of local conditions, has long since adapted to the demand, the Post reports:

Restaurants catering to the breakfast crowd usually make sure they're on the right side of the street for the morning traffic flow. In some cases, Starbucks will have two locations across the street from each other to accommodate traffic patterns in both directions, company spokesman Alan Hilowitz said.

But the government is less sanguine about the changes: "How do we predict future travel when commercial and social interactions like this can surprise us?" one Transportation Department employee asks the Post.

The plaint of the central planner, like the cry of the loon, pierces the morning.

This is, of course, a serious matter. It is difficult for roadways to be allocated through market mechanisms--libertarian fantasies aside, how exactly are we going to get freeways built without some sort of government? (Eco-libertarians are free to point out that we might not need those highways, anyway, but I'm sceptical.) Government interference in the transportation sector, of course, causes problems: City Journal has an excellent article on the history and future of New York City's subways and suburban rail lines that implicates politics in the underfunding and poor condition of the MTA's most visible assets. The major problem, she diagnoses, has been the politically-fixed mandate for too-low fares to sustain the subway lines. A journey that costs $3 to $4, for instance, is priced at a "mere" $1.30. (I should note, though, that author Nicole Gelinas is practically alone among observers--who aren't paid by the Labour Government--in praising the Blairite policy of partially privatising the Underground.)

This is a conundrum. Government won't get out of the way--politically, at least, there's no chance of it--and government can't provide an optimal solution to the mess it's created.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:37 AM | Comments (7)

A Note on Jurisprudence

Those of ITA's readers who enjoy jurisprudential debates have been sated in recent days. To punctuate the current lull in the discussion--a semicolon more than a period, I think--I offere these thoughts from the Fafblog:

Everything old is new again!...The Supreme Court announces that precedent is stuffy and old. From now on they will write from their hearts! Their decision in McGinnis v. United Cornbread is a collection of relatively well-received free-verse poetry.

More, from Fafnir.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

Where else but the brain? Part two

I'd like to revisit the attempt I made a little while ago to open some dialogue regarding how the discoveries of modern brain science might plausibly be reconciled with a belief in the soul, and the possible consequences such a reconciliation might have for our decisions regarding a number of difficult issues. I made the mistake of using the Schiavo case as my jumping off point, and as a result the discussion almost immediately centered itself around the particulars of that case, which was not my intention; I would much rather get a sense for exactly what our readers believe about the brain, the mind, the soul, and the relations between these three things, whatever they might be. In this post, therefore, I'm going to revisit my argument, and then examine the impact it might have on the moral issue of biomedical cloning.

As I argued in that piece, the most reasonable way to define the boundaries of human life is by using the condition of the brain as a reference point. One is human inasmuch as one has a functioning human brain. This position is not intrinsically opposed to belief in the soul; in fact, for the remainder of this post I'm going to assume that the soul exists, some sort of extra-dimensional ghostly substance that contains your essence, and which will live on after your death. Nevertheless, even given the existence of this mysterious non-matter, we need to account for the fact that damage to the brain can cause the erasure of particular cognitive functions; for example, patients with damage to particular parts of the visual areas of the brain are rendered unable to detect movement, or see colors. The only even remotely philosophically satisfying way to account for this is to suggest, as Descartes did, that the soul communicates with the brain somehow, and that any functions lost as one's brain is destroyed will be restored to you when you move on to your next station in life, or meta-life.

That's all well and good, you might respond, but when does the soul actually fuse with the brain? There is no obvious point in the development of the fetus when the brain makes a quantum leap from mere automaton to functioning human; instead, the neural connections are gradually extended and pruned as the brain grows. I have no satisfactory answer to this question, and as a result I'm simply going to say that at some point, between when the fetus has no brain (up to about 21 days) and when the fetus is fully developed, the soul somehow makes contact with the organism and it becomes a person. Up to that point, no matter how much our senses may be fooled into thinking that the fetus resembles a person, it is a soulless clump of matter. When, at the end of life, the cerebral cortex no longer functions, the soul has already left the body; again, though, it's impossible to say when exactly that might happen. (I should mention, to be honest, that I do not actually believe the soul exists, and am merely laying out this argument for the purpose of discussion.)

It turns out that, if you agree with the argument that I just laid out, logic dictates that biomedical cloning should be unobjectionable. The subject of cloning is fraught with misunderstandings, and as a result I'm going to lay out a few basic facts before I proceed. There are two main types of cloning, reproductive and biomedical. During reproductive cloning, an egg is first removed from a woman. The nucleus is then taken out of the egg, and a somatic cell is placed into the enucleated egg. The egg grows into a blastocyst; this blastocyst is implanted into a woman, and it eventually grows into a full-fledged human being. During biomedical cloning, the egg is enucleated, a somatic cell is placed inside the egg, and a blastocyst develops, but the blastocyst is discarded before it can mature any further, after it has been harvested for stem cells.

Reproductive cloning is clearly objectionable. Not only do the products of reproductive cloning face health risks such as premature aging and other problems, but they are also, well, "products." Some basic instinct tells us that human beings should be born, not made, and as such nearly everyone finds this variety of cloning morally repugnant. During biomedical cloning, however, the only casualties are 14-day-old blastocysts which contain as of yet literally no brain. Is a blastocyst really morally equivalent to a full-grown human being? If an organism without a brain is destroyed, can a soul possibly be destroyed along with it?

One comment rebuttal to this argument is the potentiality argument; that a blastocyst could, if implanted inside a mother, become a human being. For my first response, I'm going to borrow from the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, who gave a talk at the University of California in San Diego that spawned much of this post. Home Depot has the materials for 30 houses. If it burned to the ground, would you lament that 30 houses burned down, or that Home Depot was incinerated? Second, it would be fairly trivial to insert instructions into the blastocyst's genetic code instructing it to automatically self-destruct after 14 days. Such a blastocyst could not ever be a human being; would this be less objectionable? Finally, a very large percentage of normal fertilizations (30-80%) spontaneously abort. Are we really to believe that God destroys more than half of the souls he creates before they literally see the light of day?

Given that In the Agora's readers come from a wide variety of ideological backgrounds, I would be very interested to know if this moral stance could be acceptable to most of you or, barring that, how it could be altered to accommodate both the scientific evidence and the moral and spiritual currents running through our society.

Posted by Adam Tierney at 03:23 AM | Comments (18)

April 17, 2005

Township Government in Marion County

The Indianapolis Star today reminds its readers that one part of Mayor Bart Peterson's "Indianapolis Works!" plan is long overdue: The consolidation of township governments in Marion County. As the Star summarizes the problems: Township governments are inefficient, unsupervised, nepotistic, and wasteful.

I have written before about township government in Indiana (here, here, here and here) and my reaction, like that of nearly everyone (save, principally, township officials and employees) to this layer of local government is exactly the same as the Star's.

It has long been recognized that large parts of Indiana's constitution need a serious overhaul (see this pamphlet, for instance; many of its concerns have only recently been addressed). Township government is perhaps not the most urgent area where reform is needed, but it is certainly in the top five--or even the top three. In the urban counties and the suburban ones, it is nearly a superfluous level of government; even in the most rural counties, where the other layers of government are weakest, it is almost so unneeded or (alternatively) so grossly inefficient (or even corrupt) that any other scheme of government we could devise could do the job better.

Why do townships survive? Like nearly all instances of a minor or medium damage to the public good enduring across generations and legislative sessions, it is because of the enduring interest of one particular class of highly-organized and energetic citizens. In this case, it is those same township assessors, trustees, trustee-assessors and their employees and dependents. (Often, these two categories are combined in township offices.) Few in Indiana know or care about their townships; those who know townships best--the poor and the landowning--have a complicated, and not necessarily disadvantageous, relationship with their townships. Major landowners, in particular, are likely to reach cozy arrangements with their township assessor in certain townships. And because of this widespread ignorance, there is no real call for reform.

It has taken a fiscal crisis for Indianapolis, alone among Indiana's local governments, to ask the legislature for major changes to the structure of local government. Peterson's plan is not quite perfect, but it is close to being an ideal model for other localities (Monroe, for instance) where one city dominates the rest of the county. In rural or suburban counties, it is likely that a different method of reform will be useful in order to ensure the delivery of needed services. But Indiana will be able to look to the rest of the Union--almost, in fact, the entire country--to find suitable models for reform.

Townships linger on, nearly two hundred years old by now, and fifty years at least past doing anything useful that couldn't be done more efficiently by other units of government, actual or potential. Rarely does a state have a chance to peaceably legislate out of existence one of the special interests that dominate their discussion. This is such an occasion. It is too late for Indiana's citizens to ask for such a sweeping change this year--but there is still one session left before an election to hold legislators to account.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 06:26 PM | Comments (14)

ITA in the News

Today The Indianapolis Star ran a hefty feature spread on blogs and was kind enough to include In the Agora in an article titled "Several young men with Hoosier ties write for online journals." It gives a few sentences of biographical information about each of ITA's contributors, and then briefly features ITA's friend and neighbor Radley Balko. A nice layout with screen shots is available in print and online, too.

Other Star articles on blogging today include "Use common sense to filter information found on blogs," and "The new way to get the news." The Star plans to launch Expresso on Monday, a blog of opinion from the Star's editorial board and columnists. Meanwhile the Fox News Watch panel discusses citizen journalism and how newspapers are beginning to turn to bloggers for stories (Real Player required).

Update: Ed writes: "[h]opefully this will boost readership." While I do think that'd be great, the mainstream media has long recognized ITA's contributors and the traffic benefits are negligible. For instance in November the Indianapolis Star ran an even larger feature on blogs with my old personal site and included a large color photo. <