The recent session of the General Assembly wasn't just about bitter partisanship over a new, two-year budget, although it certainly seemed that way at times. Hoosier lawmakers also spent 29 hours of the session -- yes, someone actually added up the time -- on resolutions, those "back-patting measures with no actual impact." Sugar cream pie was named the official state pie. Gary native Michael Jackson was memorialized.
I was almost halfway through this article from the Indiana Daily Student when I started thinking, "Oh, come on, this can't be true!" Then I finally went back to the top and saw the note identifying it as satire for the Radish, a humor page published by the IDS at the end of each school section:
The list of new diseases to worry about just keeps growing:
Cases of nausea, headaches, insomnia and other ills have become common enough in states with wind farms that they've been given a name: "wind turbine syndrome."
You have to admire tenacity in someone:
Authorities said an 86-year-old woman charged with shoplifting wrinkle cream and other items from a Chicago grocery store has been arrested 61 times since 1956. Ella Orko was arrested Sunday afternoon on the North Side after she allegedly stuffed $252 worth of groceries into her pants, including cosmetics, salmon, batteries and instant coffee.
When is pork not pork? The president speaks in Elkhart County and brags about how the Recovery Act was passed without any "earmarks or pork-barrel spending," then later tells the audience how much of the $2.4 billion in grants Indiana will get:
At least the audience is consistent--no applause for the opposition to pork barrel, but tons of applause for the pork-by-another-name that will be sent to Indiana.
A city this size isn't going to have an Al Sharpton or a Jesse Jackson to keep the racial-resentment pot boiling, but we can always count on City Counilman Glynn Hines to play the race card. Last fall, Hynes went public with his "lack of trust" in the Henry administration because it wasn't diverse enough to suit him.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - Indiana University students will hold mock murder trials this month based on the Shakespeare tragedies "Hamlet" and "Macbeth."
The trials are part of a "Shakespeare and the Law" class offered through IU's Intensive Freshman Seminars . . .
When I was in high school, there was a Coke machine in the student newspaper office where I spent a lot of my time (the Food Police had not been formed yet), and I am convinced the
I know many will be disappointed in this news, but she wasn't a very good judge anyway, always going by her emotions instead of dispassionately studying who had the best technique as established by music critics throughout history:
"American Idol" principals disentangled themselves from the wreckage the morning after judge Paula Abdul lobbed a grenade into the middle of the show in the form of a tweet saying she wasn't coming back.
At a children's racing carnival in Australia, swimmers in the past have competed for a team, not for themselves, because of, you guessed it, adults worried about their precious self-esteem. But this year, there will be competitive events as well. Guess why:
Nearly 300 children have registered for individual events at the carnival.
Government is teasing us with piecemeal bailouts. We can get out of our mortgage difficulties, trade in that old clunker for a cash bonus, perhaps soon get health "insurance" for pre-existing conditions. Why not go all out and just give us Whole Life Bailouts? Oops, looks like somebody else already thought of that:
Young adults, hit disproportionately hard in the current recession, are asking Congress for targeted aid to help them recover.
[. . .]
U.S. Rep. Mike Pence apprently had a lot of applause lines during a recent town hall meeting in Muncie, including this one:
The time has come for America to build 100 new nuclear power plants in the next 20 years.
Beware of alleys, where bad things can happen:
SOUTH BEND — Police say a man who went to the hospital Wednesday morning with a gunshot wound accidentally shot himself.
The 21-year-old man told police he had stopped to urinate in an alley between Vassar and Humboldt streets just before 3:30 a.m., when his gun accidentally discharged.
So, you're hurrying to prevent one accidental discharge when you cause another. Sometimes, you just can't win, huh?
The headline on the story says, "Nude, intoxicated man tough to nab, cops say." Yeah, that's been my experience, too. It took up to 10 police officers to nab the 18-year-old man in question, who had started several fights in a campground and who continued struggling "despite being bitten by a police dog and hit several times with a stun gun."
The IRS has released data on 2007 income taxes, and, among other interesting pieces of information:
In 2007, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 40.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 22.8 percent of adjusted gross income. Both of those figures—share of income and share of taxes paid—are significantly higher than they were in 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI) and paid 36.9 percent of federal individual income taxes.
This has to be the quote of the week. It's from Police Chief Rusty York, explaining the 180-day suspension of FWPD Officer Thomas Andrews for "engaging in sexual activity" while on duty. York noted that the encounter with a woman was consensual and that Andrews didn't abuse his police authority to get sex. Furthermore:
So how's that stimulus package working out for you, Elkhart?
Benjamin Zycher, who refuses to be very ashamed of himself because gaming the system is the obvious response to half-baked government ideas, decided he wanted to get in on the economics-for-lunkheads cash-for-clunkers program:
Alas, the rules specify that the big, powerful, safe truck that I want does not qualify.
Do as Congress says, not as Congress does:
Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies.
