Ind. Governor Mitch Daniels. Image via Wikipedia

It’s nothing new to note that there is division among Republicans these days — between cooler heads whose focus is primarily fiscal, and extreme social conservatives, whose obsession with guns, gays and abortion has eclipsed their need for reasoned policy, whose ideas have found apotheosis in charismatic illiterates like Sarah Palin.

Nowhere is that division more clearly illustrated than right here in Indiana over recent comments made by Governor Mitch Daniels. At issue: a single word among 8,300 in an extensive article about the governor by Andrew Ferguson for the Weekly Standard, published Monday:

[Daniels] says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved. Daniels is pro-life himself, and he gets high marks from conservative religious groups in his state. He serves as an elder at the Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, in inner-city Indianapolis, which he’s attended for 50 years. In 1998, with a few other couples from Tabernacle and a nearby Baptist congregation, he and his wife founded a “Christ-centered” school, The Oaks Academy, in a downtown neighborhood the local cops called “Dodge City.” [...] His social-conservative credentials are solid.

But about that truce .  .  .

“He might be one guy who could get away with it,” said Curt Smith, head of the Indiana Family Institute, who’s known Daniels since the 1980s. “He has a deep faith, he’s totally pro-life, and he walks the talk.”

Despite Daniels’ social conservative bona fides, the word “truce” was like blood in the water for some. Former Arkansas Governor and Fox News host-come-lately, Mike Huckabee, was among the first to jump in, accusing Daniels of using the “issue of life and traditional marriage” as “bargaining chips.”

That’s not necessarily surprising, or all that meaningful: Daniels could prove a formidable opponent for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 should he decide to run; so for Huckabee, this is politics as usual. But other social conservatives weren’t long in taking Huckabee’s bait — cementing the controversy while proving themselves gullible and near-sighted. James Antle, at The American Spectator, argued Daniels was “contemplat(ing) … unconditional surrender.” The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins has likewise said the”‘truce’ was nothing more than surrender.”

If Huckabee’s criticism feels slightly disingenuous, it probably is. His is a timeless and tiresome tactic: One suspects he’s deliberately missing the real point to manufacture a phony point of contention where, really, there probably isn’t one.

It’s more telling that Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the new Tea Party-backed darling of the breathless far right, has waded into this one as well.

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To his credit, he seems also to be walking the conservative walk.

As reported today by conservative Washington Post blogger David Weigel, Pence apparently approached Rep. Mark Souder about rumors of Souder’s now widely known infidelities, after having been asked about them by a journalist last Wednesday, May 12.

Instead of a wink-and-a-nudge, Pence followed up with Souder directly, encouraged him to resign, then promptly reported him to the House Ethics Committee just in case:

“In response to a general media inquiry, Mr. Pence confronted Mr. Souder on Thursday. Mr. Souder confessed to an affair, but did not mention that it was with a part-time staff member. It was not until Sunday evening that Mr. Souder called Mr. Pence to inform him that the affair was with a part-time staff member. Mr. Pence encouraged Mr. Souder to resign immediately and notified ethics on Monday.”

So Pence reported the scandal as soon as he got the full details; Souder resigned the next day.

Give credit where it’s due: Even if I don’t agree with most of Pence’s policy positions — on issues like health care reform, for example — I respect his actions. It’s nice to see a politician act according to his principles.

Conservatives like Pence — like most conservatives — have valid ideas. And the foundation of a strong democracy is the compromise that arises from opposition. For my part, I’m much more interested in engaging someone who speaks and acts from conviction, not from cold, political cynicism.

Would that we saw a little more of this from other Republicans today, so many of whom are too terrified of Limbaugh-led, tea party backlash to participate constructively in the people’s governance.

WellPoint Inc. said that as of May 1 it would expedite health care reforms and stop dropping health care coverage for customers after they get sick, responding to pressure from Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration.

The health insurer announced its decision Tuesday after Democrats from three U.S. House committees earlier in the day wrote to seven health insurance executives urging them to immediately stop the practice, known as rescission. A separate letter from 57 Democrats was directed at WellPoint alone.

via WellPoint says will stop dropping patients after May 1 | Business Insurance.

As you’ll recall from last week, a Reuters investigation revealed that WellPoint, the country’s largest insurer based on enrollment, was dropping women who contracted breast cancer. WellPoint, which is based in my hometown of Indianapolis, had received millions in tax credits and forgivable loans by the state in order to expand its local operations.

That amounts to our having indirectly paid for such outrageous malfeasance, and I have argued that nothing short of a criminal investigation by Greg Zoeller, the state’s attorney general, should be acceptable.

Zoeller was at the ready when more than a dozen states attorneys general banded together to sue the federal government for what they claim is an unconstitutional basis of Obama’s health care reform package.

But brace yourself: Zoeller and his Republican cohorts on the state and federal level had nothing to do with pushing for the change. According to the Reuters report, it was all U.S. House Democrats.

Hats off to Reuters for literally saving lives — by forcing the hand of the powerful to protect the relatively powerless. And hats off to Democrats for putting pressure in the right places.

Republicans, this isn’t a political issue. This concerns the health and lives of responsible, premium-paying Americans, who relied — as they were told they could by you and countless lobbyists — on our private health insurance system. If you want more credibility in debates like these, you’ll learn to at least jump in where the lines between good and evil are drawn in fat, red ink.

Image by Tim Waclawski via Flickr

Remember those phony attack ads by the “Independent Women’s Forum” that told women they could wait months for breast cancer treatment if health care reform was passed?

Seems that WellPoint, America’s largest insurer, has already been making sure that women go untreated under the same system the IWF was fighting to preserve.

According to a scathing investigative report by Reuters, the Indianapolis-based insurer has been dropping women from their health plans when they contract breast cancer:

Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.

They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.

Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. [...] Insurance companies have used the practice, known as “rescission,” for years. [...] But WellPoint also has specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies, federal investigators told Reuters.

Exclusive: WellPoint routinely targets breast cancer patients | Reuters.

Still feel like arguing for the status quo, tea-baggers? Still wanna overturn Obamacare, Mr. Governor? Mr. Attorney General?

The real kick in the pants, of course, is that you’ve been paying for WellPoint’s egregious malfeasance all the while.

Last month, I took a look at Wellpoint because of its anti-reform lobbying efforts. To wit, the company reportedly spent $1.2 million on lobbying the federal government in the fourth quarter of 2009 alone — pretty much the high point (or low-point, looked at differently) of the health care reform debate.

Perfectly fine for a company to lobby in its own best interests, right? Not when you’re using my tax dollars it isn’t: In 2006, WellPoint received a $3 million tax credit from the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC), a government agency, and was promised $5 million in forgivable loans, as a reward for expanding its Indianapolis operations.

What that meant was that if you lived in Indiana, your tax dollars, regardless of how you felt about health care reform, were indirectly funding the already well-moneyed campaign against it.

And guess what? The same math applies here.

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Need we look any further than the attack ad mounted earlier this year by California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina — the so-called “demon sheep” ad?

But I’ll hand it to Indiana’s conservatives for this clever ad attacking Democrat Brad Ellsworth, who’s running for Evan Bayh’s seat in the US Senate. Taking that fantastic Google Superbowl Ad as its starting point, the folks over at FrugalHoosiers put together this video short:

I happen to like Ellsworth, because I think he’s the kind of Democrat Hoosiers can love. He’s moderate enough to create appeal among Indiana’s fiscal conservatives (he’s skeptical of cap-and-trade, for example). And he has a deep law-and-order background that plays well with Midwestern audiences, having served for 24 years in the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s office, where he spent several years as the elected Sheriff.

But it’s a clever ad. And, honestly, what I most admire about it, is that it doesn’t go further than it has to. No mushroom clouds, no swastikas, no demon sheep. In other words, no status quo.

That said, it’s also slightly disorienting. The conservative idea of “clever” usually sounds more like “drill, baby, drill,” tired jokes about Chappaquiddick or rote regurgitation of hillbilly catch phrases like “you can keep the change.”

Suddenly, subtlety. What’s going on here?

Image via Wikipedia

The Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), an independent unit of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has released its list of the top corporate air polluters in the United States.

No big surprise that Oil, Steel and Chemicals dominate the top 20. But look what else makes the upper tier: ADM, an agriculture company that makes ethanol and biodiesel, ostensibly giving lie to the idea that biofuels are “green”;  and Kodak. (I would have been less surprised 15 years ago, when people still processed film and prints chemically — but today?)

And, topping the entire list — worse than steel, worse than oil? A foreign-based pharmaceutical company.

• 1. Bayer Group
• 2. ExxonMobil
• 3. Sunoco
• 4. E.I. du Pont de Nemours
• 5. ArcelorMittal
• 6. Steel Dynamics Inc.
• 7. Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM)
• 8. Ford Motor Co.
• 9. Eastman Kodak Co.
• 10. Koch Industries
• 11. ConocoPhillips
• 12. Valero Energy Corp.
• 13. General Electric Co.
• 14. AK Steel Holding
• 15. Dow Chemical Co.
• 16. Alcoa Inc.
• 17. Duke Energy
• 18. BASF
• 19. United States Steel Corp.
• 20. Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG)

On a local level, guess which state is home to many of the country’s worst-of-the-worst?

The group’s “Toxic 100″ includes too many companies with operations in my home state of Indiana to list here. But, of the top 20, no fewer than 12 make the cut in the Hoosier state.

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[With N. Dakota having just joined, as well, there are now 15 AG's involved in the Florida-led lawsuit, in addition to a similar suit from in Virgina.]

Still, for anyone who’s followed the trajectory of Indiana politics over the last half year, the move was hardly a surprise. In truth, the suit was a long time coming. Zoeller probably couldn’t have stopped it if he’d wanted to.

Why, exactly, was the Hoosier state — the blue-dog state that gave you Evan Bayh, and voted for Obama in 2008 — so anxious to join the fray?

Look no further than the office of Governor Mitch Daniels. His Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) is a centerpiece of progressive conservative lawmaking that showcased the best parts of Daniels’ political mantra – that personal and fiscal responsibility are crucial components of successful social welfare.

Assuming Obamacare isn’t overturned, HIP will be rendered obsolete come 2014, when some half-a-million more Hoosiers are placed on Medicaid. That’s bad news for Daniels — who some think (despite repeated denials) may be planning a run for the White House in 2012.

HIP is relatively small, covering about 50,000 Hoosiers, compared to about 561,000 who remain uninsured.  But the plan has its merits, to be sure, and Daniels is right to tout them. Based upon sliding-scale health savings accounts, the plan does, indeed, incorporate notions of personal responsibility, while offering decent subsidies and decent coverage. It’s also abundantly paid for. A 44-cent cigarette tax — most of which flows directly into a HIP fund — has actually created a significant surplus.

Understandably, Daniels would prefer to see his piece de resistance expanded, rather than replaced. But the governor’s recent moves pose a potential threat to the health of thousands of Hoosiers.

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Once upon a time, I interviewed a college-aged kid for a rather high-profile article. There came a point where I had to ask a somewhat uncomfortable question — a follow-up by e-mail, at my editor’s request — and the kid completely flipped out. You know, the way college-aged kids today flip out: There were some ALL CAPS, some cursing, a total lack of punctuation, and at the end, the words, “Ugh. im annoyed now.”

Had I followed the impulse of my lesser angels, I would have rewritten a few graphs to be nasty. I didn’t, not because I’m such a great guy (though I am an all right guy), but because I, unlike him, was able to take a step behind my private / professional wall, analyze the situation from there, and proceed accordingly.

I explained to him that I wasn’t attacking him personally, that I was giving him a chance to set the record straight regarding the accusations of others that were already swirling around the blogosphere. We came to an understanding.

At 31, I would like to think I’m not so over the hill. But the lack of boundaries and decorum totally floored me. It occurred to me what a different place this kid and I were coming from — how much easier it tends to be for me to relate and communicate with someone, say, 20 to 30 years older than I, than with someone a decade or less younger.

I’m just old enough not to have had a cell phone most of college. I researched college papers at the library. At 20, a free Hotmail account felt like a big deal.

But technology moves so fast that a mere half-generation later, here was a kid who had grown up blogging and vlogging about his life since he was a child — someone for whom more traditional privacy walls had all but crumbled.

Concomitant with that erosion of privacy, it seems, is a heightened awareness of the self in relation to others. Like pretty much everyone his age, this guy had likely spent high school blogging about his life, tweeting and updating his Facebook status, renewing his profile photo. His was a world that centered upon constantly updating the world about what he was doing, what he was feeling.

A DSM-IV-certified narcissist? I’m not sure it matters any more — or, if it does, I’m not convinced the old boundaries are as meaningful, or as applicable as they were just a few years ago.

That said, according to a joint study from San Diego State University and the University of South Alabama, narcissism, as more traditionally defined, is on the rise among college aged Americans.

As reported by Josh Clark, at Discovery News:

The study, led by SDSU psychologist Jean Twenge, sought to settle a hot debate in psychology over mixed results of studies examining the prevalence of narcissistic personality traits among tens of thousands of American college students. These traits include an unfounded sense of entitlement and overly high self-regard.

[...]Some researchers believe that the current credit bubble plaguing the American economy and the global financial crisis are the result of the risky decision-making and sense of entitlement associated with narcissism. As the number of narcissists grows, the United States could experience even more social problems as a result.

“What this means is that we have generations of people entering the workforce that expect special treatment, are demanding of others and making risky decisions — ones that could be quite costly when you consider recent business fiascoes,” says Amy Brunell, an Ohio State researcher unaffiliated with the study.

via Narcissism Epidemic Spreads Among College Students : Discovery News.

Indeed, to dovetail to the second graph cited above, talk about narcissism seems to be everywhere today. Mark Jaffe, who owns a high-end headhunting firm, wrote recently that the biggest threat to our economy is our egos. We’re angry, not depressed about our misfortunes right now. Angry, because, as he puts it:

… we always want and feel that we deserve the absolute best of what anyone else has. Maybe what’s hurting most right now is the hangover resulting from an epidemic bender of self-esteem. Feeling warm and squishy about oneself may not be such a great destination after all. Somewhere along the way we adopted smugness as a symbol of affluence. Yet we know intuitively that misery and squalor have always been the springboards to real accomplishment.

via The Biggest Threat to the Economy? Your Ego | Personal Success | BNET.

Steven Johnson has famously — and convincingly — argued in his book, “Everything Bad is Good For You,” that popular culture and technology today are making us smarter. To that, I’ll add, completely empirically, that it also seems to be making us more tolerant, better-informed about the world, and, perhaps, better critically and politically engaged with our surroundings.

But I wonder what it’s costing us? Or, as I pen yet another first-person, news-ish story, what it’s costing me.

Dude, the rapture sure is gonna suck. Image via Wikipedia

With all the news about apocalyptic militias lately, I’m reminded of how much I love RaptureReady.com.

I really do.

Where else can you find…

• Photos of the mansions you’ll receive in heaven (although I, apparently, can expect a pile of crumbling stones)
• A time line documenting rock n’ roll’s long highway to hell
• An “Israel Watch” blog (“Israel is the key to all end-time prophecy”)
• And an entire section dedicated to “Information for those left behind.” (Articles in this section include “Oops! Guess I wasn’t ready,” and a memorandum addressed to “everyone else,” from “those who have vanished,” re. “the truth about what happened.”)

Good stuff, all of it.

But the reason I keep coming back is the Rapture Index. If you haven’t seen it, or if it’s been a while, it’s worth checking out now. And I mean right now. Because, apparently, the world is pretty much set to blow.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Rapture Index, loosely described, is a catalog of 45 different categories, each of which acts as a prophetic indicator for to those who believe  the rapture is imminent. Each category is rated from good to bad (1 to 5) and added up to a single score that indicates how close to perdition guys like me are.

Categories include:

• False Christs
• Interest Rates
• Gog (Russia)
• Liberalism
• Inflation
• And many more…

When the rapture comes, believers say, everyone who accepts Jesus as his personal savior will vanish into thin air to be gathered into heaven, while everyone else — those “left behind” — will remain stuck on earth, where all sorts of nasty stuff is supposed to happen.

What kind of nasty stuff, you ask? Oh, nothing big: just the rule of total chaos, the ascendancy of the anti-Christ, a “sytematic genocide against the Jewish race that will make Hitler’s Holocaust look mild by comparison,” asteroids, earthquakes, tidal waves, heart attacks, and “millions upon millions” of deaths at god’s hand.

As you can see, it’s worth it to keep track of where we’re headed. And apparently, the end is nigh.

Turns out that not since 2003, when the Iraq war began, has the Rapture Index been so high: with a score of 171, we are well above the threshold of 160 that places us into the worst category –  labeled simply,  “fasten your seat belts.”

I hadn’t checked out the index for a while. But something about today’s poisonous political climate, and the recent round-up of nine Hutaree militia members for plotting to murder local law enforcement officers, made me suspect as much. With all the Obama-as-anti-Christ talk (some of which can be found at RaptureReady’s “Mr. Anti-Christ evil pageant”),  and reports over the last year that gun-buying and militia activity are on the rise, I suppose it was only a matter of time before end-times talk reached this fevered pitch.

Reasons for the high score, ostensibly updated yesterday, include the bank bailout, 10% unemployment, the Chilean earthquake, a proliferation of books about 2012 (there’s even a “Complete Idiot’s Guide”), and the recent subway bombing in Moscow.

Conspicuously absent: the rise in American militia activity, the increase in gun sales.

That said, I’ve checked out the index for years, and it’s notoriously slow to integrate current affairs. No mention of health care reform? Popegate? “Don’t ask don’t tell”? The potential for the Hadron particle collider to unlock the secrets of creation?

How high is it gonna climb when those get factored in?

I don’t know how many people keep up with the Rapture Index. But I can’t help but wonder if members of the Hutaree militia, from Michigan, aren’t among them. Clearly, they aren’t the only ones who believe we’re hastening toward the end times.

Let’s hope these phony prophecies don’t hasten the self-fufilling kind.

I’m not sure which is worse: incidents like these, in which we see an alleged “uptick” in Indiana residents who, in protest of Obamacare, have declared their homes “embassies” and themselves “sovereign citizens” (thus, exempt from paying taxes, and, presumably, from using paved roads) …

… or news stories that don’t qualify what an “uptick” actually means. Especially given the fact that, by the story’s own acknowledgment, “about 10 people every month ask the state to put a seal on a document so that they can claim freedom from taxes.”

Whether this is a trend or just media-driven wishful thinking, either way it’s getting pretty poisonous out there. The long, ugly road we’ve traveled to get meaningful health care reform seems only to have gotten uglier — even dangerous — given the derision, destruction and death threats we’ve seen materialize from the opposition.

The road, one fears, could be headed for the edge of a cliff.

But while congressional Republicans and Democrats attempt to outdo each other in political haymaking, citizens in my home state of Indiana, and their elected leaders, would do well not to fan the flames. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Case in point is Governor Mitch Daniels’ recent announcement that he would immediately suspend enrollment in the state’s Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP). As reported by the Associated Press, as many as 40,000 Hoosiers are on the HIP waiting list, hoping for health care.

Even if the federal changes cost Indiana more, as Daniels fears (and indications are it won’t), we won’t really know for several years, when Obamacare is fully implemented. In the meantime, it’s hard not to interpret this as a scare tactic. It may be good politics for a governor contemplating the national stage for 2012. But it needlessly stokes the fire here at home by possibly denying coverage to those who need it.

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