Hoosier lore

Sylvia Smith had an interesting column in Sunday's JG about how many kids are unfit for military service, and I found myself agreeing with much of it.

As a veteran nearing the age when getting medical care will likely be a regular activity, I'm very interested in the back and forth between 3rd District congressional candidates Bob Thomas and Mark Souder over VA hospitals. As Thomas tells it, Souder didn't care all that much about the local hospital until a veterans' group put pressure on him. The way Souder sees it, Thomas wants to close all the hospitals and callously put veterans in a "Medicaid-like system."

Noble County police were trying to serve Thomas Hovis Jr. with an arrest warrant on drug charges. As they arrived at the house he was staying at, Hovis ran to a nearby outbuilding. They surrounded the building, ordered him out and then fired tear gas, which apparently did not persuade him to leave. And then:

  When officers entered the building, they found Hovis standing up to his neck in a manure pit under the floor. After officers removed Hovis from the pit, he reportedly began fighting with officers, and was Tased, police said.

In this day and age, when anybody can be with anybody else without fear of embarrassment or recrimination, it's odd to see a story about two people who kept their marriage secret for five years. But that's what Mishawaka Schools Superintendent R. Steven Mills and Joann Shaw, the district's director of literacy programs, did, and for the most old-fashioned of reasons, that people should not supervise people they are married to and people in supervisory positions know this very well.

A letter to the editor from a Jeffersonville woman takes on Indiana's attorney general over health care:

As a citizen of the United States and resident of Indiana, I am surprised that the Attorney General of the State of Indiana, Greg Zoeller, would even entertain filing a lawsuit. His reasoning is based on the constitutionally of health care reform.

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett and the leadership of the Indiana State Teachers Association are making Washington Democrats and Republicans look like dope-smoking old hippies singing kumbaya around the campfire:

Indiana will bow out of the federal Race to the Top competition after a highly public feud between public schools chief Tony Bennett and the state's teachers' unions.

[. . .]

OK, now this is funny:

Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.

In a severe economic downturn, everybody has to make sacrifices. But not everybody deals with it equally. There's the civil, gracious way:

John Dickerson, executive director of Arc of Indiana, says the recent announcement of nearly $90 million in state funding cuts to services for people with developmental disabilities is a call to action. The cuts can spur much-needed change in the delivery and oversight of those services.

To address Indiana's "undereducation" problem (just 16.5 percent of adults between 25 and 64 have a bachelor's degree), Gov. Mitch Daniels has asked more of the state's colleges and universities to offer three-year degree programs (only Ball State and Manchester now do):

We're a little slow in Indiana. Lake Superior State University put the annoying "staycation" on its list of banished words last year, but we're just starting to savor its use here. Folks at the Indiana Dunes report that the phenomenon helped boost visitors to 1.1. million last year, a 64 percent increase over 2005.