Dairy worker dies in manure lagoon in rural Bluffton, Indiana:

An Indiana conservation officer says 23-year-old Nicholas Cruz had been cleaning out a cattle lot at Sunny Park Dairy and dumping manure into the lagoon Friday morning when he apparently lost control of the skid loader.

Link(Pal-Item).

It is officially over, Obama picks CAFO proponent Tom Vilsack of Iowa for Agriculture:

Iowa Ex-Governor Picked for Agriculture Secretary (NYT)

More:

Why Obama Might Be Terrible « Whiskey Burn

Daily Kos: Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You

Feeding factory farms with your taxes | Twin Cities Daily Planet …

Report finds ‘no practical difference’ between charter, traditional schools (Star Press). So that is the headline, and the push will go to the legislature next, seeking to freeze any new charter schools.

The opponents will take this report to mean that charter’s have proven to be a flop - no increase in performance. However, this take misses the real point of the charter school experiment.

Charter schools get about 1/2 the money that traditional public schools get. Why? All public schools get the per pupil money (so many dollars per student per day, etc), but Charter schools do not get the “building money” which means they have to provide the education and the infrastructure out of the per pupil money

The question is not “can smaller charter schools improve student performance.” The question is, what happens when you give smaller school groups half the public money, and send them off. The answer, at least under this report, is they can match the fully funded public schools.

A short note. I get most of my news these days through my Google Reader - everything important has a feed or its not really important . . .

When this headline came across, I swear I though it was from my Onion feed, but I was wrong:

IDEM dissolves Office of Enforcement (IBJ)

From the Associated Press piece:

Indiana’s efforts to redefine serious environmental violations are drawing fire from critics, who say the state is endangering people’s health by requiring that a violator cause actual harm or threaten the environment before facing penalties. The new definition, which has yet to take effect, comes as the state Department of Environmental Management is dissolving its Office of Enforcement and moving those employees into different departments.

Managers will also be involved in the decision making process on enforcement:

The revised policy also gives managers more discretion over when companies will face prosecution and penalties and says top managers, including the commissioner, can authorize compliance staff to deviate from the policy on a case-by-case basis.

Well, not much time for blogging these days - - - but to update the Aides Task Force story I covered previously, William Selkirk was finally convicted and sentenced on the Fayette County criminal charges. The entry from the court, reported on Doxpop, reads as follows:

Sentencing - State appears by Bette Jones; Defendant appears with David Butsch; Def is convicted of Forgery, C Felony; Credit Card Fraud, D Felony & Check Deception, an A Misdemeanor;Def sentenced to 6 yrs on Forgery concurrent to 2 yrs on Credit Card Fraud concurrent to 1 yr on Check Deception; $164 Court Costs A Judgment of restitution entered against def payble to C & P Engineering in the amount of $2,792.72;IPUF$50 MPUF$20,ADM FEE $$100. 40 hours comm service Sentence to be served on Home Detention.

This entry was for a sentencing that, reportedly occurred on November 21st. The entry inputted into Doxpop this morning.

From reading it, I think I know what it means - He was convicted of 2 felonies and sentenced to a total term of 2 years in prison. However, I don’t understand the final phrase “to be served on Home Detention.” Does this mean that the entire 2 year term is on home detention?