Politics and other nightmares

Every primary election, the voter turnout gets lower and lower and everybody says how awful and whatever can we do about it, then we all forget about it until the next abysmal time. The turnout here was about 13 percent if you factor out the registrations considered inactive, about 11 percent if you don't. That's typical. They did try something in Richmond this time around, letting voters have a choice of where to cast their ballots instead of confining them to a precinct machine, and having the polls open for a whole week instead of just on Tuesday.

The fall from grace in Washington of one of Indiana's own raises an interesting issue:

Last election, I forgot about the fact that they were putting multiple precincts in the same location and didn't get around to voting until I got off work. A lot of other people had put it off, too, so I was stuck in line for almost an hour. Today, I stopped on the way to work, and I was in and out in a couple of minutes. So do yourself a favor and vote early. Go now, in fact, to beat the lunch crowd. Hurry, hurry!

The Indianapolis Star's Dan Carpenter tries to push about every guilt button there is to make us understand what bad people we are for resenting illegal immigration (based, he says, "less on a purist reverence for the rule of law than on peculiarities of the people breaking it" -- so take that, all you racist nativists):

We've just come off one of the biggest nanny-state sessions of the General Assembly in recent memory (buckle up!), and the Indianapolis Star clearly wants more:

In today's "anything goes" atmosphere, newspapers are suddenly getting fussy about protecting people's privacy?

Last evening, I happened to see a Matt Kelty TV ad and a Nelson Peters one about an hour apart, and something struck me about them. Maybe someone with some political campaign savvy can tell me how accurate my impression was. TV political ads can be used to highlight the candidates' good points, but they can also be used to misdirect us a little, and it seemed to me this was going on in the ads.

In 18 states, municipalities have taken to augmenting their budgets by charging a fee when police or fire departments respond to an accident. This amounts to double billing, since we already pay for those services through our taxes (yeah, OK, I know the same thing happens with public transportation and a few other things). If you were worrying that the same thing might happen here, you can stop:

Former Fort Wayne Mayor and current Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke, speaking at the Rotary Club yesterday:

Political action is also needed. Helmke has criticized Republican officials and said he will do the same with the Democratic-led Congress if it chooses to ignore the country's gun problem.

Democrats never did much believe in individual liberty. Now that the Republican mainstream is just as much enchanted with the power of government, there isn't much to choose from: