The Post-Tribune, while offering the opinion that Mitch Daniels has been a decent governor for Indiana, finds his environmental record to be very bad, noting that Gov. Daniels has done the following:
Since Daniels came into office, under the direction of Easterly and his boss, Indiana has:
* Closed the [...]
(H/t Chris Spangle and Josh Gillespie) The Onion gets in on the Patriots-love.
Patriots Lead Colts at Halftime
INDIANAPOLIS—At the time of this writing the New England Patriots, playing on the road against an undefeated Indianapolis team, are headed into halftime with an all-but-insurmountable 24-14 lead.
Barring an almost [...]
Indianapolis Public Schools seems to be itching for a lawsuit based on its Internet policy (pdf) (via Dispatches from the Culture Wars and a number of other sites). The Freedom from Religion Foundation is calling them on it. The policy includes in the list of blocked categories:
Alternative [...]
Today is the Great American Smokeout 2009, the American Cancer Society’s annual effort to get smokers to quit for a day in the hopes that it will convince and enable them to quit permanently.
Hoosiers need this program more than most. Per capita, Indiana has the second greatest [...]
Organization Day was today, and the first few bills of the Indiana General Assembly have been introduced. In the Senate, there was one bill:
SB 23 on unemployment contribution rates was introduced by Senator Hershman and co-authored by Senators Kenley, Kruse, and Charbonneau. It delays from January 1, 2010, [...]
This is just going to be a drive-by post, since I haven’t thought it through and probably don’t have the expertise to think it through if I tried. But, it seems to me that health care financing has both a risk management component and an entitlement component. Maybe we need [...]
Maureen Groppe, writing for Gannett News Service, has an article about Judge Hamilton’s nomination to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Conservatives are stalling a vote on his nomination. One case he has gotten particular grief about is his ruling that sectarian prayer could not be part of [...]
Today is Organization Day at the State House. Legislators meet for a day to perform mostly ceremonial functions and then don’t typically return until January when they get to work. Organization Day always struck me as being a little like the first day of school – any divisions between [...]
Good has defeated evil, Frodo has dropped the Ring in the Cracks of Doom, Aragorn has claimed his crown, and none of it would have been possible if Sauron hadn’t stupidly decided to go for it on 4th & 2 at his own 28 instead of punting.
And Collinsworth is [...]
Bill Engle, writing for the Palladium-Item has an article with Richmond-area lawmakers reacting to a newspaper sponsored proposal concerning lobbying reform (Speaker of the House, Pat Bauer had some lobbying reform proposals recently as well, I’m not sure if that’s related to this newspaper push):
# Prohibit legislators from [...]
I tell friends from elsewhere that, despite what they may have heard, Hoosiers aren’t a bunch of rubes. Then, I see things like the report that Indiana is passed only by West Virginia in percentage of adult smokers. At 26.1%, we have more smokers than Kentucky. In this day [...]
Over the past few years, the Colts have stood up to the Patriots well enough that I realized I’ve gone from simply hating the Patriots to loving hating the Patriots. In honor of the occasion, here is one of xtrarant’s Colts/Pats propaganda posters from a few year’s back:
[...]
Today one of my friends, with whom I do not see eye-to-eye politically, posted a complaint about trying Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. His complaint was that our criminal justice system was not meant for war criminals. Also [...]
Just a heads up for those interested in such things and who had not yet heard. CBS News will apparently be airing an investigative piece on Rep. Buyer’s Frontier Foundation tonight.
The short version is that the Frontier Foundation, ostensibly a charity to provide scholarships to Hoosier students, got [...]
Indiana’s Painfully Objective Political Analysis goes to the credit-where-credit-is-due file to extend some praise for Gov. Daniels. Go read the entire post, but the Governor deserves some credit for not being knee-jerk anti-Muslim and for recognizing that the pretense of water based casinos is a little bit ridiculous.
On [...]
It’s Veteran’s Day, a grim, solemn holiday in my mind. We owe our soldiers, past and present, a debt of gratitude for the service they have provided and the sacrifices they have made. But I suggest that we should use the holiday less to celebrate the sacrifices they have made, [...]
In a move that made conservative heads explode and liberals more celebratory than the occasion maybe deserved, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a health care reform bill. This leaves a long road ahead requiring a bill to get past Joe Lieberman in the Senate and then requiring a conference [...]
Casimir Pulaski became a citizen yesterday after President Obama signed a bill being pushed by Dennis Kucinich making Pulaski a U.S. Citizen, 230 years after his death. Pulaski was a Polish noble who came to the U.S. to fight and die for the Revolution. Indiana’s own Pulaski County [...]
I think I spend too much reading the news. It’s really kind of a sideshow to real life in a lot of ways. Reading about the latest health peril for my kids probably tells me less about the risks to my kids than paying attention to what they eat, for [...]
(Image from a painting displayed at the Riverview Community Bank).
Matt Taibbi’s latest pounds on Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths speaking at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London:
“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” Goldman’s Griffiths [...]
Jeff Wiehe, writing for the Journal Gazette, has an interesting story about a woman who died in the county jail after being arrested for DUI. Her BAC was .33 and she apparently had significant problems with alcohol. Much of the story addresses complaints by her family out of Tennessee [...]
There looks to be a new blog out there looking at Indiana political issues from a lefty persuasion. Looks solid so far. It’s called “A Loyal Opposition.”
[...]Joe Flower has a good post explaining why free market competition fails in health care. Go read the whole thing, but the short version:
Medical demand is wildly random but tends to be absolute. There is little way to predict who, specifically, will need most kinds of medical [...]
Rick Yencer of the Muncie Star Press has an article about the Muncie City Council’s efforts to impose a $6 traffic ticket surcharge to help pay for police salaries.
For the record, I think it’s a bad idea to inject a profit motive into the machinery of the criminal [...]
Disclaimer: I don’t have any expertise in the subject matter. Further disclaimer: I’ve never let that stop me before.
Eric Bradner has an article about state secretary of public instruction, Tony Bennett’s, proposal to reduce instructional education for teacher licensure in favor of substantive education requirements. In other words, [...]
The Associated Press has a story about a study with an eye-popping statistic:
Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood.
. . .
For a family of four to be eligible, their annual take-home [...]
Rep. Ed Delaney was attacked last night and is currently recovering at the hospital. The person accused of the attack is an attorney about my age named Augustus Mendenhall. Delaney was apparently lured to a meeting with Mendenhall in Carmel at Catherine Dr. near 131st Street under false [...]
Back on Eastern Standard Time. God’s time. (Or, you know, at least what I got used to growing up.)
[...]I’ve been hearing a lot from Todd Rokita on the radio lately. Clearly these aren’t campaign ads because they are airing with public money. And that would be wrong. Ergo, they aren’t campaign ads. iPOPA flags one of the ads that really made my ear perk up. I forgot [...]
