Hoosier lore

In a culture where sound bites define presidential campaigns, what's more natural than debate by billboard?

Indianapolis, Indiana) "Would Jesus discriminate?''

I have my doubts about this:

Indiana legislators make a base salary of $11,600, but when expense payments and per diems are figured in, no member makes less than $31,000, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. There has been no increase in base pay since 1985.

I believe that is much too low for the amount of work many of these people do.

And I think this is just flat-out wrong:

Every time the ACLU does something halfway sensible than makes me inclined to applaud it, it turns around and goes off the deep end. It's now helping two state prison inmates file a class-action suit on behalf of the other 20,000 Indiana state prisoners to overturn -- get this -- a new policy that bars magazines and other printed materials that depict nudity or sexual conduct.

OK, Indiana is back in the black. But, as even the governor acknowledges, that was not achieved without a gimmick or two:

Daniels warned that the state still has work to do. Most notably, it still owes more than $600 million in back payments to universities, public schools and local governments. Those payments were delayed to help lawmakers save money in past years, and only a fraction of the revenue has been repaid.

For all of you who don't think fireworks are dangerous:

Police are seeking help in finding the person who shot and killed a 26-year-old Indianapolis man found dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

James Hudson, 2600 block of Guilford Avenue, was found in his Near-Northside home Wednesday. He had been shot five times.

One criticism of Indiana's new self-defense law, eliminating the need to retreat before using deadly force, is that it will lead too many people to shoot first and worry about it later. If most of the people with guns were as quick to take the law into their own hands as these people, there might be a problem:

Two people who helped place a man under citizen's arrest when he strayed onto the wrong property found themselves in jail.

It used to be easy for anti-establishment rock stars (who manage to stay anti-establishment while making millions from it, by the way): Just support the liberal. It's apparently a little tougher these days, now that Iraq has beome THE issue, as we see in this account of John Mellencamp's ire:

Potential presidential candidate Evan Bayh says this about Democrats and Iraq:

. . . the Democratic Party has "a diversity of views ... about what to do in Iraq," which may have muddled the party's stance.

OK, I'm convinced. I am for accountability in education, but you can now count me among those who think we're so obsessed with testing students that we don't have the time to teach them anything or, more important, give them the desire to learn. We have the state ready to release massive amounts of data:

Most people aren't paying attention to this. I think it's going to be a big deal, but I have no clue how it's going to turn out:

Indiana started taking applications Monday for statewide video franchises, upending the decades-old system by which each locality decided which cable company or companies could operate on its turf.