Politics and other nightmares

Earth Hour this year, when everybody is supposed to turn everything off in "a symbolic statement on reducing atmosphere-heating pollution," is set for 8:30 p.m. Saturday. And some places, like Notre Dame, are going to extend the pointless gesture to the whole weekend. The golden Dome and -- not kidding here -- Touchdown Jesus -- will be dark for 60 hours:

It's a bad sign that the question is even posed, isn't it?

Is South Bend a dying city?

Thursday a group called the Young Professionals Network sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of St. Joseph County had a chance to weigh in. They also got to learn about what's being done to move the city forward.

The Congressional Budget Office seems enthusiastic about the idea of taxing us for our total vehicle miles traveled (VMT). The more you drive, the more you pay. That would require metering, which should worry any sane person:

It's nice to know Indiana is better managed fiscally than most states. But we don't shine in every category. When it comes to how well our state pensions are funded, we are in the bottom 10 of all states, funded at just 63 percent.

Come up with your own crappy pun for this:

Mayor Jim Suttle went to Washington Tuesday flush with ideas for how federal officials could help cities like Omaha pay for multibillion-dollar sewer projects.

Among the items on his brainstorming list: a proposal for a 10-cent federal tax on every roll of toilet paper you buy.

Intellectual purity may be satisfying, but it's not necessarily effective:

Every ideological stripe has those people.  There are people who argue that Obama isn't a true progressive because of X, or that so-and-so isn't a true conservative because of Y.  The difference isn't in the existence of these people, but the percentages of these people.  Libertarians seem to have a higher percentage than most other groups, and this may be why we are so ineffective.

War:

We are at war, incoming NEA executive director John Stocks told the unions board of directors last month, outlining a plan to keep NEA from joining the private sector industrial unions in a slow, steady decline into irrelevancy to anyone outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Here's a misstep from the "make government smaller and less costly" guy:

Something for the open-border advocates to consider:

A  potentially explosive admission by federal prosecutors in the pending sentencing of Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane in a San Antonio federal courtroom could aid the case of border states looking to take the initiative to stem the flood of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S.

This ad by Democrats explaining why they walked out -- Mitch Daniels made us do it! -- is running only in the Indianapolis market, too, but that's no reason we can't benefit from its cool, calm logic: