Politics and other nightmares

Woman's work:

Even without Senate and congressional seats up for grabs, 2011 could turn out to be a landmark election year for Indiana women.

Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Gary could get their first women mayors in the Nov. 8 elections, breaking a political glass ceiling that has been slow to shatter.

When the city election candidates came for their editorial board interviews, I sat down with them afterwards to shoot short videos. It's nothing fancy, just the candidates sitting in the room where we interviewed them, answering five questions each. We shared the questions with the candidates at the start of the interview, so the answers they gave were based on having known the questions for half an hour to 45 minutes. I edited the videos so that instead of just seeing one candidate after another, you can see them in their individual races, each answering each question in turn.

Here's a nice, long article that ably presents the other side of the argument from what you'll usually read here. Say what you will about the New Deal, writes Michael Hiltzik, but American gained a great many benefits from it, and how many Americans would really want to do without them?

Aw, c'mon, Rick, a big, tough old boy like you, used to the down-and-dirty world of Texas politics, is feeling overwhelmed by a little national exposure?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he won't dispute his wife's assertion he's been "brutalized and beaten up and chewed up" in the presidential campaign.

Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Eugene White wanted to make the point that public schools have it tougher than private schools because they have to take all comers. He's now taking heat for the way he put it:

Advocacy groups are asking for an apology from the superintendent of the state's largest school district after he referred to children as "blind, crippled, crazy."

This article about Richard Lugar in Foreign Policy is called "Twilight of the Wise Man," which should tell you just what a flattering portrait it is. But its effect may be to increase the very disdain for Lugar the writer is lamenting. It talks about how happy Lugar was to be a foreign policy mentor to a young Sen.

Is this a case of the cure being worse than the disease? Larges flocks of birds, especially those messy, awful starlings and crows,  like to congregate in large flocks in downtown Indianapolis during fall and winter. And they aren't going to take it:

This is an interesting point of view:

Secretary of State Charlie White is kind of flailing around in his efforts to defend himself against charges he committed voter fraud by using his ex-wife's address to vote in the May 2010 primary. He seems to have settled on a strategy of "Everybody's doing it, so why are you picking on me?" First, he tried unsuccessfully to get Allen County Prosecutor Karen Richards to investigate Dan Sigler, one of the two special prosecutors in White's case, for vote fraud.

I'm not sure I can ever get over Romneycare, at least unless he explains it a lot better than he has. Just take a gander at this clip, showing Mitt heaping praise on Ted Kennedy as one of the "parents" of Massachusetts' universal health care efforts:

This Ted Kennedy lovefest footage from the 2006 bill-signing ceremony for the health care law is probably not what Romney wants GOP primary voters to have in mind when they enter a polling place or caucus meeting.