Mark Souder and His Part-time Lover

What happened to Mark Souder--or, more appropriately, what Mark Souder did to himself--is what Malcolm would probably refer to as "chickens coming home to roost." He is just another politician who has made his living moralizing to others while living his own life in accordance with a separate (lower) standard of personal virtue. I am not personally offended by his affair because I think a man's (or woman's) personal life is his own business. He set himself up for this, and be it Karma or poetic justice, he got what he deserved.

The reason why I'm commenting isn't about his sexual hypocrisy, though. (Notice, for example, I don't blog about outted anti-gay conservatives caught with men. Most of us pretty much expect that any more.) Outside of having been my Congressman in my last years in Fort Wayne, Mark Souder was the #1 drug warrior in Congress. All of his braying nonsense about morality, abstinence and what have you take a backseat to his amoral stance of imposing his anti-drug crusade at the point of a gun:

One of the reasons why then-Speaker Dennis Hastert originally appointed me to the Homeland Security Committee was to pressure Congress and the Executive Branch not to forget about our duty to fight illegal drugs in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Although Democrats now control Congress, in my position as the Republican leader of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism, I am continuing to insist that we include battling narco-terrorism as a critical part of our homeland security efforts. Like child and spousal abuse, we will never completely eradicate illegal drug use, but we have a moral obligation to fight this battle.

Narco-terror isn't different from any other kind of terror, save the fact that its driven by profit from the prohibition of drugs. The overzealous war on commerce that Souder and his ilk wage upon American citizens, third world farmers, and nearly every type of person in between, helps fund global terrorism while deploying state-sanctioned terror into people's homes. There are alternative solutions, of course, but his high and mighty morality--blind to the immoral outcomes of his preferred policies--pressed him into waging war against his own country.

I don't care that he shtupped a "part-time" staffer. But, for the good of the country, I'm glad he did and was forced out of office by it.

Mood Music Monday

Had to replace some old music that got lost between iPods and PCs.

I was running through my recent purchases on my new player (yeah, I know--but it beats getting sued like my friend did.) and this came on over my lunch break. This song makes me think of my last day at IU my freshman year. Three or four guys on our dorm floor had acoustic guitars and we all sat in the floor lounge for a going-away meeting and the 25 of us or so sang this song together. I'm sure it didn't sound half as good as I remember it, though I remember being surprised by how bad we weren't.

Enjoy.



And remember kids, always back up your music.

Guns Save Lives...In My (Old) Neighborhood

This is the neighborhood I grew up in:

A suspected armed robber lost a gun battle with a clerk at the Belmont Beverage store at the intersection of East Tillman Road and Lafayette Street on Wednesday afternoon, police said.

The unidentified man lay dead in the middle of East Tillman Road outside the store where police said he was fatally shot about 2:30 p.m.

“The perpetrator was armed with a handgun, which was recovered at the scene,” said police spokesman Officer Michael Joyner.

A store clerk was shot in the leg by the suspect and was in fair condition Wednesday night; he was expected to be released today, according to police.

That's right--robbing a liquor store in broad daylight. If you click to the story and look at the pictures, you'll notice that that particular liquor store's front is clear glass and easily seen from the road. Cops patrol around there, but there is no way they'd respond in time except out of pure luck.

And it isn't as if this is an isolated incident:

Michael Beckman, who said he moved into the neighborhood in May of 2007, also wasn't surprised. He recalled that a clerk fatally shot a would-be robber Sept. 12, 2007, at the nearby VIP Video store at 7504 S. Anthony Blvd., and said the liquor store was robbed twice last summer.

If the Brady Center and their ilk had their way, it could very well be the two clerks that would be dead instead of the two thugs who threatened the lives of people who were just trying earn an honest living.

Point Guard-in-Chief

I don't often watch the late night talk shows anymore. If I do happen to have them on, as I did the other night, I watch Letterman.

I happened to be watching this week when Don Rickles was on and he made a joke that bombed:

[Rickles] was absolutely killing the audience on David Letterman's show the other night with his trademark scorched-earth put-downs. Rickles seemed at the top of his game -- until he tried to tell a joke about the new president-elect. Not even a well-timed rimshot from the band could have saved him.

It was just a quick bit in which he imagined Obama, faced with his first international crisis, telling his advisers he couldn't be interrupted because he was busy playing basketball.

Yeah. And?

Apparently, people got uncomfortable when an old white guy mentions our first black president in the same sentence as "basketball."

I don't read entertainment news because, well, its vapid and soul-sucking, so I don't know what kind of attention this seeming faux pas has been getting. But it certainly was enough to get an op-ed in the Washington Post today.

If President-elect Obama had not campaigned as a basketball player, or put up videos of him playing basketball on his campaign's YouTube site, or talked about basketball being his "first love", I could see a certain amount of "Oh no he didn't just say that" directed at Rickles. But Obama repeatedly played up his b-ball skillz as a reason to vote for him--especially in places like Indiana. (The night before the election, ESPN played this interview where Obama talks about the wisdom of his coach whom he favorably compares to Bobby Knight. This is my best guess as to how he won the once unquestionably red Hoosier state.*)

I can understand the sensitivity of the Letterman audience that led them to think that the boundary-pushing comic may have gone too far, but he didn't. Funny? Perhaps not. But Rickles is not a racist and his joke wasn't either.

Lighten up, America. It is still ok to poke fun at people--even if they're black.

*And just in case you're wondering, that's a joke too.

Indiana: BLUE state?

Here's something I never thought I would see (unless Evan Bayh won the nomination):


Thanks to fellow Hoosier native and IU alum Radley for the map.

Mildred Loving, R.I.P.

I really don't want this blog to become an obituary column, but I can't very well let the passing of Mildred Loving go by unmentioned.

Mildred Jeter, a black woman, married Richard Loving, a white man. Their ground-breaking case, Loving v. Virginia, challenged and overturned anti-miscegenation laws in at least 17 states, including my home state of Indiana -- which one of my friends recently referred to as "the South's middle finger."

Indeed.

As a product of a bi-racial marriage, I owe my existence to this decision. I grew up in the 1980s when my school system was still attempting to desegregate; while my parents tried to shield me from it, I had to endure cruel jokes and treatment from other kids and their parents because I was a "half-breed"; and to this day, when I date a white woman, I still have to ask how her parents are going to take my race. (You may be surprised how often it is actually a problem.) Yet, all that pales in comparison to what happened to Mildred and Richard (from a statement released by Mildred last year on the 40th anniversary of the decision):

We didn’t get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn’t allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

My mother hinted at problems my parents encountered when they were together in public back in the 70s, but I don't know what they went through. I'm sure it was pretty nasty...I know for a fact that her father's side of the family still doesn't know I'm black. I've never even met them. I assumed they were all dead until just a few years before my mother died. Even then, she wouldn't introduce me to them. (I've been told they wouldn't approve.)

Well, thanks to Mildred Jeter Loving, people like me have become more accepted in society and people like my parents can live together without fearing the police barging into their homes and arresting them for being who they are and loving each other.

Mildred Loving, R.I.P.

Indiana: Home of the Status Quo

Very much like Garth in Wayne's World, many people from my home state of Indiana are saying "We fear change!"

Change, it seems, may not carry quite the same political magic in this state as it has elsewhere.

“We hold onto a lot of traditional values,” said Brian L. Thomas, 39, as he bought a cup of coffee along the courthouse square here on Wednesday. “Saying you’re ready to change is probably not the best or only thing you would want to say around these parts. Frankly, we want it to be like it used to be.”

Ah. Like any good journalist, the author of this story had to find someone who will use stereotypical anachronistic colloquialisms like "around these parts" -- I'm honestly surprised the man didn't explicitly call the past the "good ol' days." (Which, might I add, were not so good for certain people in the Hoosier State.)

All that aside, there is something to be said for keeping things the way they are. My friend and former colleague Michael Moynihan had an excellent piece over at reason yesterday addressing Obama's comments on religion and guns and how that might reflect on the candidate's elitism:

...Barack Obama thinks that, whether they know it or not, the gun-toting plebes of America are in desperate need of "change."

I don't think Michael is too far off the mark here...and I think this may hurt Obama's chances in the Indiana primary, given Hoosiers' predilection for guns and God.