I like the governor, but he gets on my nerves sometimes:
Gov. Mitch Daniels is urging Hoosiers to lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks.Daniels is drafting Pam Smith of Martinsville, who represented Indiana on the latest season of NBC's "The Biggest Loser," and George McGinnis, a former Indiana Pacer and chairman of the Governor's Council for Physical Fitness, to help him with the challenge.
The mayor wants to build downtown. The school system wants up to $1 billion. The General Assembly is in session, and all-day kindergarten for more than $100 million a year is just the start of its plans. At times like these, government spending feels like water in my basement that's already at the top stair. And I've had to give up on finding somebody that actuallly wants to bail out the water. My choices these days are somebody who wants to add to it a cup at a time or somebody who wants to add to it a gallon at a time.
Headline of the year so far: Indiana's outdoors vanishing quickly. Funny, last time I looked, it was right where I left it. I open my door, and there it is. Even if I just wanted to hide the outdoors, never mind trying to get rid of it, where would I put it? If you read the story, of course, you get a better sense of what is going on here:
Indianapolis Star Editor Dennis Ryerson walks us through a journalism ethical dilemma. The family of a missing woman calls a news conference to reveal the identify of a man who was seen with the woman on the day she disappeared and also the identity of another person believed to have introduced the man to the woman. The police have shown no interest in this man as a possible suspect. Ryerson:
There is this, on the opinions of Hoosiers:
Consistent with the 2003-2005 surveys, a majority of residents rated schools highly: 65 percent of respondents rated schools in their district as excellent or good and 56 percent gave such ratings for overall state education.
And there is this, reality:
I think one of my blog goals this year will be to write about stories that give, at best, a superficial view of reality or, at worst, a distorted one, because they use numbers incorrectly or incompletely. Journalists are mostly innumerate, with neither the inclination nor the ability to convey a sense of proportion. We just don't do math.
I would like to thank the "key legislators" who are watching out for me and really seem to care about my well-being:
Concerned about new casinos that could be more like buildings than boats, several key legislators want to review whether state regulators are stretching what Indiana's gambling law allows.
Indiana lawmakers return in January -- one variation of headline in many newspapers and on many Web sites in the last couple of weeks.
"No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session." -- attributed to Benjamin Franklin.
I've written enough about the need for us to move on from the time-zone issue, and every time I do, I get calls and mail from people who don't want to let it go. But let me say an unkind word or two about the rederendum, which we should be thankful Indiana uses only sparingly rather than promiscuously as California and some other states do:
Barack Obama is saying nothing, but doing so eloquently, he is "humble in all the right places," and he is just exotic enough at a time when people are sick and tired of all the same old faces. So says columnist Froma Harrop, who compares the senator to a couple of Hoosiers:
