Leo Morris, Editorial Page Editor of The News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Indiana
Our place in history is secure:
History will record the Indiana and North Carolina primaries as the events that secured the 2008 Democratic nomination for Barack Obama—and put the final nails in the coffin of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
This article and a lot like it try to figure out “what went wrong” for Clinton. Most of them overlook the two most obvious: 1. A lot of people intensely dislike Clinton. 2. Obama ain’t Clinton.
Finally, after all the frivolous lawsuits we’ve had, here’s an important one:
A Florida man has sued the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, seeking recognition of 10 men he says served as president before George Washington.
Samuel Klos of Palm Beach argues that the men who headed the government under the Constitution of 1777, or the Articles of Confederation, deserve the same attention as Washington and his successors, the Tampa Tribune reported.
To tell you the truth, sometimes I think we’d have been better off if we’d kept the Articles of Confederation.
You think it’s awful that white-collar criminals are treated more gently than ordinary lawbreakers? Well, you ought to love this:
A federal judge sentenced 72-year-old Norman Schmidt last week to a mind-bending 330-year prison sentence after he was found guilty last May of a laundry list of conspiracy and fraud charges. Barring a scientific breakthrough in cryogenic technology, Schmidt will spend the rest of his days behind bars.
[. . .]
Judges now focus more on the offense—and less on the offender—when sentencing white-collar convicts. As a result, they effectively tally up the amount of losses and number of victims to calculate a punishment, Berman says.
The math did not work out well for Schmidt.
According to the Department of Justice, hundreds of investors gave Schmidt tens of millions of dollars. Schmidt and others said they would invest the money and promised monthly returns of between 2 and 200 percent.
But instead, Schmidt and others used the money for different purposes.
As one of the commenters notes, maybe Schmidt should have just started killing the witnesses. He probably wouldn’t have gotten any more time than he did for the fraud.
Didn’t realize the economy was quite this bad:
The pressures of a weak economy — concerns about job security and rising prices for gas, food, home heating oil and other goods and services — are causing many gamblers to cancel or reduce the number of casino trips. Those who go are gambling less money than in the past: At the traditional gambling Meccas of Atlantic City and Las Vegas, and in other states, casino revenue is down. Employees are being laid off, and there’s concern about future growth.
Gallon of milk or gallon of gas? Pay the rent or take one more trip to Vegas? Life is tough.
The cell phone I had just before the current one had a glitch. If I didn’t retrieve my voice mail in exactly the right way, I had to listen to all the saved voice mails before the phone would deliver the new ones.
A few days after my mother died, I experienced that glitch, and it was her voice I heard, a brief message that said something like, “Just checking in. Call me when you get home.” We had a brief phone conversation every day in the last months of her life. Sometimes she called me early, while I was still on the way home with the phone turned off, and she would leave a message. I’d forgotten I had saved a few of them.
It was startling, even eerie, hearing the voice of someone whose death I was still trying to cope with. But it was comforting, too. This wasn’t just a photograph or a fading letter. It was the actual sound of her, which had been such a big part of my life. I could close my eyes and almost imagine her sitting there next to me. Over the next year and a half, whenever I went through a bad spell of missing her, I’d listen to the saved messages and regain a sense of my mother.
Then my cell starting acting up. It held a charge for less and less time and finally wouldn’t even take a charge. I took it to the phone store and had it checked — there was something wrong with the connection. They weren’t even able to retrieve and transfer my contact list. So I got a new phone and went home with it and my sick old phone. It still has a charge left — of a few seconds to a couple of minutes. I can probably listen to my mother’s voice one more time, but then it will be gone forever. So the phone just rests on a shelf, that connection to my past trapped inside and unheard.
I know you don’t need me to tell you this, but it’s something we all need to remind ourselves of periodically: With everybody we love, every time could be the last time. Every time we talk to them. Every time we see them. Every time we touch them. Every time we sit across the table from them or have a brief phone conversation with them. The hardware will fail, and the software will be lost, and you’ll just be left with a fading memory on the shelf.
The greatest failing in life is to not pay attention when we have a chance to pay attention. Sunday is Mother’s Day. If you stil have the chance, pay attention.
John McCain, responding to a reporter asking him about the famous comment by fellow Republican Thad Cochran, that the idea of someone with such a temper being president send a chill down his spine, said he does get angry — about corruption and runaway spending in Washington.
“You know something, the American people are angry, too, and they’re not going to take it anymore,” he said.
If he really had a temper problem, McCain said, he would not have been able to work with fellow senators such as Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat; Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat; and his friend Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee who now is an Independent.
Nice try, but McCain is talking about two different kinds of anger. People who are angry about things like corruption and spending are as much intellectually angry as they are emotionally angry. The anger comes and goes with the specifics of the issues of the day. Then there’s the kind of quick-trigger anger associated with people known to have a hot temper, people like Bobby Knight and, it is said, John McCain. Such anger isn’t really about anything. It’s part of the person’s personality. It may erput at any moment and may or may not be justified by ambient circumstances. It’s the unpredictability that sends a chill down the spine.
It’s almost possible to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton, the way everybody is joining the “Get out of here now!” brigade:
It ain’t over ’til it’s over, but a growing number of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s closest friends now think it’s really over.
A veil of gloom descended on Clinton’s campaign Wednesday, with people close to her questioning how long the former first lady could — or should — remain in the race following a surprisingly thin Indiana win and blowout loss in North Carolina on Tuesday.
I actually heard one halfway funny line on “Good Morning America” today. Hillary is vowing she’s in it to win, the reporter said, “defying the pundits, the politicians and high school math.”
The news from Myanmar Burma just keeps getting worse. As many as 100,000 may be dead, and the thugs who run the place are putting up all kinds of roadblocks for a world that wants to help:
But the U.S. ambassador to Bangkok said later the United States was still waiting for approval from Myanmar.
Kouchner suggested on Wednesday invoking a U.N. “responsibility to protect” to deliver aid without the junta’s approval, but France’s bid to make the Security Council take a stand was rebuffed.
The United Nations recognised the concept in 2005 to protect civilians when their governments could or would not do so, even if this meant intervention that violated national sovereignty.
Don’t you sometimes wonder if we gave up too hastily on assassination as a foreign policy option?
A member of another misunerstood and put-upon minority (only 10 million Americans out of more than 300 million) asks for our understanding:
Please don’t try to convince us that being vegetarian is somehow wrong. If you’re concerned for my health, that’s very nice, though you can rest assured that I’m in shipshape. If you want to have an amiable tête-à-tête about vegetarianism, that’s great. But if you insist on being the aggressive blowhard who takes meatlessness as a personal insult and rails about what fools we all are, you’re only going to persuade me that you’re a dickhead. When someone says he’s Catholic, you probably don’t start the stump speech about how God is a lie created to enslave the ignorant masses, and it’s equally offensive to berate an herbivore. I know you think we’re crazy. That’s neat. But seeing as I’ve endured the hassle of being a vegetarian for several years now, perhaps I’ve given this a little thought.
Actually, I’m not all that unsympathetic. Most of the neoPuritans’ efforts to get sin out of the world — smoking bans, anti-drinking campaigns, anti-sex and -gambling screeds — will fail. It’s part of human nature to succumb to human weakness. But I think vegetarinaism will be the norm somewhere in the human future (and this comes from a dedicated prime-rib loving, pork-chop chomping fiend). There is something fundamentally creepy about surviving by eating (in the words of the admirable vegetarian and musician Arlo Guthrie) “the burnt, dead flesh of other animals.” As scientists and nutritionists get more adept at producing better-tasting and equally nutritious meat substitutes, the number of vegetarians will continue to grow.
A Dartmouth professor feels the heat and flees the intellectual kitchen:
Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.
The louts! They argued with her ideas. Anyone who’d question French narrative theory deserves to be sued.
The march of progress in the Mideast:
The ulema in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province have declared that use of mobile phones by women is haram, or forbidden in Islam. The Urdu-language newspaper Roznama Khabrain reported that the imam of Jama Masjid Hazrat Umar Farooq made the announcement during his Friday sermon.
Aren’t allies wonderful?
Now this is chutzpah:
CARMEL, Ind. — Sponsors of a proposal to provide City Council members up to $18,000 in city-funded health benefits are withdrawing the ordinance after hearing strong public outcry against it this week.
[. . .]
As written, the ordinance would have made City Council members eligible for medical, dental and vision insurance plans through the city’s employee health-care account, which has a balance of about $2 million. The city funds 86 percent of the account, while employees pay 14 percent a year.
A council member could have received up to $18,000 on a city plan that includes family coverage — the same benefit offered to full-time, but not part-time, city employees.
Hey, politicians always say in interviews they run for office because they want to “give back to the community.” These guys were obviously just trying to get the give-back ball rolling.
Word to the wise, all you politicos: Beware of the bus.
This humble mode of transportation has become an unstoppable serial killer this presidential season, metaphorically speaking. Hardly a week goes by without someone reviving the cliche of the 2008 campaign — that a former ally of a candidate has been thrown under a bus.
I’m sorry to say I found myself using the phrase in an editorial instead of coming up with something different, such as, “Obama has just defenestrated Wright” or thrown him down the manhole or set fire to his shoes or anything else.
They’re just now figuring this out?
Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money.
The double shot of bad news had one veteran Republican House member worrying aloud that the party’s electoral woes — brought into sharp focus by Woody Jenkins’ loss to Don Cazayoux in Louisiana on Saturday — have the House Republican Conference splitting apart in “everybody for himself” mode.
I know what Republicans and conservatives should stand for, but I have no idea what these clowns stand for. That’s the problem, isn’t it? And going into an “everybody for himself” mode will just compound the problem.
From what I heard, this really didn’t happen all that much, for all the bluster about how serious Democrats were going to be about it:
Voters in some polling sites are being challenged when asking for ballots, based on whether they’re switching parties from previous elections.
Secretary of State Todd Rokita says in Indiana’s open primary, you can be challenged, but you still have whatever ballot you want. Those who get challenged should be offered a form to sign and then handed the ballot requested.
Which party will get the majority of your votes in the next general election? Gee, don’t know, haven’t thought it through yet. Which party got the majority of your votes in the last general election. None of your business — that’s why it’s a secret ballot. Challenge over!
A law that is unenforceable is not just stupid. It’s destructive. Dump it.
Headline of the week:
Filling Coastal Zones With People Complicates Hurricane Evacuation
Those darn people. They complicate everything, don’t they?
Curse those diabolical Republican legislators! They passed that voter ID law to keep minorities and old folks from voting for Democrats the way God intended them to. And just look at what happened:
More than 1.6 million votes were cast Tuesday in the Democratic and GOP presidential races with nearly all precincts reporting, according to unofficial tallies by The Associated Press. That smashed the 1992 primary turnout of a little more than 1 million votes.
Well, there were these 12 Roman Catholic nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, who were turned away, even though a fellow member of the Saint Mary’s Convent was the polling inspector. But they had been told repeatedly they would need photo IDS, didn’t get them and tried to vote anyway without them. And, as all the critics of the law point out, it’s undercut by the fact that a photo ID isn’t needed to vote absentee, so the nuns could have voted that way.
But never mind how things actually went. It’s the principle of the thing! Reality doesn’t count.
Former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall Derringer gets a nice Washington Post byline. With a little help from former Mayor Paul Helmke, she takes a run at defining Indiana’s brand of conservatism:
In other states, they say, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’” said Paul Helmke, executive director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and the former three-term mayor of Fort Wayne. “In Indiana, we wait until it’s broken, falling down and lying on the ground rusting. Then we fix it.” Maybe.
Indiana is, in many ways, the most conservative state in the country, stubbornly resistant to change of any sort.
I think they’re right about the basic nature of Indiana’s conservatism, which is just, simply, opposition to change. (I might argue that such “stubborn” resistance to change is a necessary counterbalance to the current rabid impulse to change for no good reason, but, come to think it, I have, extensively, so never mind.) The terms “conservative” and “liberal” have become so intertwined with our political conversation that we’ve lost their more basic meanings of husbandry (as in conserving what’s good in our traditions) and generosity (as in being liberal with our praise). Too bad.
I would quibble a little with a later observation that people in Indiana “aren’t as libertarian as other conservatives.” But “other conservatives” aren’t that libertarian, either; there’s a lot of tension between those two philosophies. And Hoosiers at least have the foundation of libertarianism, which is “leave me the hell alone.” They just need enough of a communitarian spirit to also say, “And as a matter of fact, leave us all the hell alone,” but perhaps that is a bridge too far.
With all the talk about “the primary that finally matters,” I was expecting a big crowd at my polling place. But when I stopped by to vote just before 8, it wasn’t that busy. There was a steady trickle of people, but no lines. And my polling place is one of those bundled three-precinct sites. I do hope we hit 50 percent turnout. If we don’t hit it for this election, with all the publicity it’s gotten, we’re not likely to ever again.
A reminder of just how far we’ve come:
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.
Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.
“I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble - and believed in love,” Fortune told The Associated Press.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.
Members of Gen Y are said to think in much less racial terms than previous generations, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest this is so. A lot of it has to do with what they’ve experienced in their lifetimes and what they haven’t experienced as well. Miscegenation laws were once commin in the United States, and it’s still startling to realize they weren’t declared unconstitutional until 1967. It’s at least one measure of progress that kids today consider the very idea of forbidding cross-racial marriages preposterous.
No, this is not a joke:
You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the “dignity” of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called “plant rights” is being seriously debated.
A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring “account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.” No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” is enough to short circuit the brain.
A “clear majority” of the panel adopted what it called a “biocentric” moral view, meaning that “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.”
And you thought radical environmentalism had gone about as far as it could. It’s OK to make fun of them, but these people are as serious as can be and have more supporters than we probably want to think about.
Those darn Catholics, refusing to stay in their herd where they belong:
There is no one such thing as a Catholic voter,” said Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Notre Dame, who attended the event in South Bend and is a member of Obama’s national steering committee of Catholic advisers.
Catholics, who account for about 18 percent of the population of Indiana and a quarter of the national electorate, are much more diverse in the United States than they are often portrayed, Kaveny said.
But we can’t do our political analyses if we can’t rely on group identity! Every Soccer Mom has to vote like every other Soccer Mom. A blue-collar beer-drinker has to be true to his own! Reagan Democrats aren’t allowed to behave independently! If we let this get out of hand, people will insist on being treated as individuals, for heaven’s sake, allowed to think and act any old way they please. Then where would we be?
So that’s why we like Indiana Jones — he’s just like us:
It’s been 19 years since Indy literally rode off into the sunset in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” but like Marion, could anyone doubt that the world’s most famous tomb raider would come back into our lives one day?
For 27 years, Indy has stood as one of cinema’s ultimate Everyman heroes, a poster boy for the idea that there are some good men you can never, ever keep down.
“He’s a real guy. He’s just like us,” said George Lucas, who dreamed up the character and re-teams with director Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford as Indy for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” due out May 22.
“He makes lots of mistakes,” Lucas said. “He kind of goofs up. He has the same kind of thinking that we have. He’s beat up all the time. It’s like he’s not a superhero. He’s just an average Joe that’s always in over his head that somehow seems to get through it.”
Wow. An average Joe and a real guy. Can he do a shot and a beer? Does he bowl? Indiana Jones for president!
Oh, well. Easy come, easy go:
It’s been fun for all of us news and political junkies to see Indiana so involved in this year’s primary because it may be another 40 years before it happens again (unless, of course, we move toward a rotating, regional primary — a move we would support).
Sadly, though, by Wednesday, the Obama and Clinton folks will be gone and it’s unlikely they will return to Indiana with such a strong presence by the November election.
I can see it now. It’s the beginning of fall, and there is a nip in the air. All we have to look forward to is a normal old election just like all the others. Hillary and Barack and Bill and Chelsea and Michele never call anymore. They don’t write — not even a postcard. Wasn’t this true love after all?
We turn on the TV for the evening news, and Indiana is never mentioned, unless there’s a flood somewhere or one of our politcians does or says something spectacularly stupid. We’re not the “state that matters” anymore, or the “make or break state” or the “tiebreaker state” or the “showdown state.” We’re back to being just Indiana, land of corn and basketball and the Indianapolis 500. We’ll have to drink our shots and beers and cling to our guns and churches in obscurity once more.
All we can hope for now is that Hillary wins the nomination and picks Evan for veep. Psst, Evan, repeat after me: p-o-t-a-t-o-e.
