A new dawn in the dark world of Terre Haute politics!
It wasn't quite Shakespeare, but Duke Bennett gave an audience their two hours worth at Harmony Hall Tuesday evening.
Mayor Bennett hosted the third of about 15 planned summits in the theater on North Lafayette Avenue for the 12 Points community, offering an hourlong PowerPoint presentation followed by an hour of open discussion with the 50-plus member audience.
The federal government keeps raising the standards for schools, which means more and more schools will fail to meet the standards. A reasonable query:
That raises questions of whether otherwise good schools are held to unreasonable standards or whether those standards will push schools to achieve more than they thought they could.
Perhaps a clue to the answer can be found in the standards themselves:
Does anybody else see anything mildly comical about this?
State officials are questioning plans by tax activists to dump a crate of tea bags into the Wabash River in protest of excessive government spending.
A spokeswoman for the state's environmental agency said that throwing tea into the Wabash, or any river, could hurt aquatic life by depleting the water of oxygen.
Omigod, who knew?
Unpredictable gas prices have sent car shoppers turning to small, fuel-efficient vehicles, but a crash study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is warning that saving money at the pump could come at a greater cost in the event of an accident.
Hey, Larry, are you one a them "Texas nuts" getting "riled up" to "dangerous levels?
I've written about "smart growth" movement before. That's the notion that "sprawl," which I would define as the byproduct of people living the way they choose to live, but which is now considered by Those Who Know Better For Us as a great evil, or, as they put it, "no longer in the long-term interest of our cities, existing suburbs, small towns, rural communities, or wilderness areas. Though supportive of growth, communities are questioning the economic costs of abandoning infrastructure in the city, only to rebuild it further out.
A couple of dispatches from the economic-development front. The city could get a new hotel near Glenbrook:
Despite the challenging economy, a 6-million dollar hotel could be coming to the Glenbrook Mall area in Fort Wayne.
A Valparaiso-based company wants to situate an 89-room Towneplace Suites hotel next to an ice rink facility that's slated to be constructed over the summer months.
City Council President Tom Smith has gone and spoiled everything by peeking behind the curtain of the government expansion stimulus program (you'll have to watch the video to seem him saying it):
There will be money coming in to schools and police departments to help hire new people to do certain programs. But when that money runs out . . . they're calling that job creation, becasue the local taxpayers will keep funding those new positions.
It's nice to run across an editorial page cartoon occasionally that isn't strictly political. This is the one we have in today's paper. I don't know why it's funny, but it made me laugh out loud.
A brave government employee stands up for his rights:
BINGHAMTON - A Broome County employee confined by bosses to the Department of Social Services' building during the April 3 massacre at the nearby American Civic Association wants to be paid for his lunch hour.
The employee made a formal complaint last week to Broome's Personnel Department, confirmed Michael Klein, the director.
