It's a fair question: Is Sen. Richard Lugar still a Hoosier?
Greg Wright, an Indianapolis resident and Certified Fraud Examiner, filed a formal election fraud complaint with the Indiana Secretary of State on Wednesday against Senator Richard Lugar and his wife, Charlene Lugar.
Almost everybody in the Republican field has had a shot at the "not Romney" poll surge. The newest guessing game seems to be over who's next, Rick Santorum or Jon Huntsman. Dick Armey, former House majority leader and leading conservative activist, gives the nod to Santorum:
Those pushing for a right-to-work law in Indiana are making the high unemployment rate the centerpiece of their argument. But now there is a dispute about the rate iteself:
Indiana's unemployment rate crept up to 9 percent in October, up from 8.9 percent the month before. The national rate dropped from 9.1 percent to 9 percent over that same period. These are the numbers most folks are used to hearing when reading official tallies of the struggling economy.
We wouldn't know anything about that here, would we?
Reading Kevin Leininger's column today on the possibility of a countywide smoking sort of took me back in time:
Smoking foes aren't overly interested in civics, of course. Tobacco Free Allen County, for example, claims it wants to protect workers and cites statistics purporting to show that 1,240 Hoosiers die from secondhand smoke every year and that fine-particle air pollution in Fort Wayne declined 94 percent after Council's ban took effect.
One more indication the coming short session of the General Assembly won't be as peaceful as some might hope:
Two Indiana Republicans want welfare recipients to pass drug tests before they can receive benefits.
[. . .]
Sen. Richard Lugar's campaign sent out a press release quoting "a respected budget analyst" on Indiana Week in Review (see YouTube video below) saying that opponent Richard Mourdock's "clueless budget plan" is "just too goofy for words." It also quotes this column by Jack Colwell of the South Bend Tribune:
The Journal Gazette turns in a standard-issue civics lesson editorial lamenting the record-low 26 percent turnout in this year's city election. The piece goes through the usual list of possisble turnout inhibitors (the negative mayoral campaign, apathy and cynicism, the too-complex main issue of municipal finance, civic burnout) before concluding that nothing can probably be done in the end and delivering the final lecture to recalcitrant voters:
Tracy Warner contemplates the Occupy movement and the conflict between First Amendment rights and setting a precedent of not enforcing the rules: "Still, at least in Fort Wayne, the Occupiers don't seem to be causing trouble or costing much money, so it seems their First Amendment rights should prevail." He then dips into the magic bag of historical analogy and comes up with the Boston Tea Party, wondering what would have happened if that event from almost 238 years ago had been denounced as the Occupi
Herman Cain's lawyer, on the claim that the candidate had a 13-year-affair:
