The county plans to tighten the rules on tattoos and body piercings:
Operators of Fort Wayne tattoo and piercing parlors will need to buy an annual license from the health department costing $295 and each artist at the establishment will need an artist license that will cost $65 a year. No one under the age of 18 will be allowed to perform tattooing or body piercing.
I did not know Indiana had this distinction;
On the table was a proposal to set a monetary threshold for what would constitute a felony theft that carries prison time. According to the commission's researchers, Indiana is the only state in the nation that has no threshold, meaning a prosecutor can charge a suspect with a felony theft, no matter how big or small the value of the item stolen.
The nanny state is alive and well in Philadelphia:
South Bend Tribune political columnist Jack Colwell doesn't think much of the Tea Party types who are saying mean things about Richard Lugar:
The TV attacks are paid for by the Club for Growth, a national conservative organization seeking to defeat Republicans it deems not sufficiently right-wing and replace them with more doctrinaire conservatives.
[. . .]
Reason magazine's blog reports that our nation's crack security forces are protecting us all from the scourge of rogue lemonade stands.
Police in Georgia have shut down a lemonade stand run by three girls trying to save up for a trip to a water park, saying they didn't have a business license or the required permits.
Here's an editorial from yesterday's Journal Gazette that I found especially unsatisfying. The great bulk of it is merely a rehashing of the recent news story about new studies showing that global climate change and bacteria are endangering Indiana beaches -- details piled on details. OK, I get it -- our beaches are getting hotter and diritier. What do you want me to do about it?
We don't get to that until the penultimate sentence, this lonely little exhortation:
The BBC has a profile of Carmel, Ind., calling it the "roundabout capital of America" (the mayor boasts of replacing 78 sets of traffic lights with roundabouts) and suggesting that America is well on the way to embracing "the free-floating British circular." This offends a writer for the Village Voice, who says this is like tryying to force the metric system on Americans:
This is just telling members of Congress what they want to hear:
Ratings agency Moody's on Monday suggested the United States should eliminate its statutory limit on government debt to reduce uncertainty among bond holders.
The United States is one of the few countries where Congress sets a ceiling on government debt, which creates "periodic uncertainty" over the government's ability to meet its obligations, Moody's said in a report.
Reaction to President Obama's "don't call my bluff" warning is today's proof that we live in parallel universes. First, Charles Krauthammer:
President Obama is demanding a big long-term budget deal. He won't sign anything less, he warns, asking, “If not now, when?”
I think government offices should file their financial documents on time. And it's reasonable to have stiff penalties for those that don't. But I'm not sure it would be wise to give so much power to a state agency full of bureaucrats:
The State Board of Accounts is considering a controversial rule that would allow the agency to remove public officials from office if they fail to provide legally required financial documents.
