Politics and other nightmares

Lincoln Plowman is a former Indianapolis police officer and City-County Council member who could get up to 30 years in prison after being convicted of bribery and extortion. He was taped in conversations with an undercover FBI agent accepting more than $5,000 in cash and requesting a $1,000 campaign contribution to help plan a strip club downtown.

Dropout Nation is a blog covering the public education reform movement, edited by RiShawn Biddle, formerly an editorial writer for the Indianapolis Star. A recent post -- written by Biddle -- takes off on the Indianapolis school system ("The worst school district in the Midwest outside of Detroit" -- ouch) as a way to promote the importance of mayoral control of school systems as a reform strategy:

Indiana school boards are sensitive to criticism that superintendents make too much money. So, it is reported in an examination by the Evansville newspaper,  they don't even report the full compensation package earned by the school chiefs:

Proof in a snarky Politico column of Ramesh Ponnuru's assertion that the mainstream media 1) don't really understand conservative arguments and, 2) Don't really understand the Constitution:

Welcome to Black Friday 2011, the new "you can't do anything without making a political statement" milestone. If you decide to stay home just to avoid the mad frenzy, you could also be accused of supporing the "Occupy Black Friday" movement, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street that seeks to shake us out of our materialistic stupor or something ("hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits").

For the "ignorance is bliss" file, this is really sad. Don't know, don't wanna know, just let the government take care of it:

The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

Just when you think you're so jaded and world-weary that nothing that can happen in politics can possibly startle you anymore, along comes Tamara Scott, new Iowa co-chair of Michele Bachmann's presidential campaign:

I think it might be a little premature to cite this article as evidence of the coming death of the mall, but if you want to test out the idea, just visit Glenbrook a few times between now and Christmas:

The "well, duh" research of the week:

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - A statewide survey suggests that Indiana's rural residents are more likely than their urban counterparts to be prepared for a disaster.

Researchers at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis surveyed more than 2,000 Indiana residents in a joint project with Indiana Department of Homeland Security.

Never mind all that supercommittee budget-reduction nonsense; let's talk about something really important. No, just to stop the myth before it becomes firmly entrenched, Congress did not declare pizza a vegetable:

This is not a fight over pizza. It is, instead, a fight about tomato paste. Specifically, it's a fight about how much of the product counts as one serving of vegetables.