Mitch Daniels is exercising his prerogative as governor to tell the federal Department of Transportation his opinion of proposed time-zone changes. But DOT spokesman Robert Johnson puts the issue in perspective (or Daniels in his place, depending on your view):
Supply your own sarcastic comments about this one. I merely note it and pass it along:
"There is no question that obesity is the underlying cause. We have identified a new problem . . ."
Uh-huh.
And the winner, at 77 million: Mao. Communists really were coldblooded monsters, and Ronald Reagan was talking about only a part of it when he (accurately) described the Evil Empire. More about the hideous math involved.
Considering the silly White House ritual on Thanksgiving turkeys, I think President Bush should have pardoned the Christmas tree and sent it to live out its final days in a forest somewhere, or at least somebody's back yard.
Now that we've got the blogosphere going, the word nerds at Lake Superior State want to ban the word, and all our blog-related vocabulary. Of course, they also want to ban Blue States/Red States, Flip-Flopping, Battleground States, Enemy Combatants, Pockets of Resistance and Erectile Dysfunction, so what would we blog journal pontificate about anyway?
Pete Rose is baseball's career hits leader, and no one who ever saw him play can doubt he put his heart and soul into the game. He is also a compulsive gambler who violated clearly understood rules about betting on his own team. Now, his eligibility for the Hall of Fame has expired, and I have mixed feelings about it. It seems overly judgmental to leave him out considering some of the cretins who are in halls of fame in other sports; isn't the idea to reward excellence?
OK, guess I have to take back my snide comment about Canadians. In a time when Americans are being lectured about the need to understand other countries and cultures, it's refreshing to read something by someone trying to understand Americans:
My most general sense remains, that it's the world that is going to hell, and America that is the last tenuous bastion of sanity. The spirit of anti-Americanism that is abroad, is part of the disease. It is not a cure for anything.
I think we're at our "Walter Cronkite says we can't win" moment with the press and Iraq. I watched the news shows on Sunday, and it was pretty clear that most of them, especially the roundtable on "Meet the Press," have already accepted that the war is a lost cause. The mainstream media have never been particulary interested in why we might be there and certainly not in reporting any news that might make the case for war. But what if they're wrong?
I shouldn't complain too much about these stupid holiday gift cards, since I've given them myself a time or two. But $18.48 billion on gift cards this year, up 6.6 percent from 2004? Doesn't that just scream, "I'm too self-centered to know what you want and too lazy to try to find out"?
Embarrassing? Well, I guess so:
For more than a year, the shirts and pants worn by agents and inspectors with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have been made in Mexico.
You'd think they could have them made here by, you know, all those illegal immigrants. Oh, and this just in: Bush to focus on illegal immigration. About time.
I really worry about those Canadians sometimes:
"The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, "The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."
These days, we're so used to miraculous discoveries coming at breakneck speed that we tend to forget what heroic undertakings they once involved. Reading about the "Vicorian Internet," note especially the lengths they went to in Australia to be involved:
By 1870, a submarine cable was heading towards Australia. It seemed likely that it would come ashore at the northern port of Darwin from where it might connect around the coast to Queensland and New South Wales.
Happy 80th birthday to the Grand Ole Opry, an American institution with a bigger Indiana connection than you might realize. Still a lot of good country music out there, even if it has drifted too far from its hillbilly roots and become another part of the corporate music culture. The good news -- a lot of country stars are starting their own labels; maybe that will re-energize the music.
Columnist George Will notices Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence and wonders if Indiana represents the wave of the future:
There is more to limited government than limiting its spending, but there will be nothing limited about government unless its spending is strenuously limited.
I like my clutter. It keeps me anchored in the real world whenever I'm in danger of disappearing into the Ivory Tower of esoteric debate. Of course the clutter sometimes overwhelms me, at which point it becomes trash. I like my trash. I like the idea that I can leave it outside the house and someone will pick it up and take it away and fling it into a hole in the ground and cover it up. It's the natural order of things.
Kathleen Parker takes us through the moral ambiguities involved in single parenthood and reaches the correct conclusion that:
When we celebrate single motherhood, as we have since Murphy Brown made out-of-wedlock birth a glam option for busy women, we can hardly pucker in disapproval when the next generation doesn't know any better.
All you women who like the prison-tattoo look -- in Canada, at least, the likelihood of your honey being diseased (in body, if not in mind) has gone down.
Oh, please, stop it, stop it, stop it. This is not:
What began as an attempt to make time in Indiana a little less confusing has done the exact opposite, Hoosiers on both sides of the issue said Monday at the last of four federal time zone hearings.
This is just Hoosiers being Hoosiers. It will pass. Or not.
Do we unfairly treat male sex offenders more harshly than female ones? Advance Indiana, citing a case from Hamilton County, thinks so:
That teen-agers are having sex with one another is no surprise. That one of the teen-agers can be charged with a felony and, if found guilty, sentenced to jail time and required to register as a sex offender, may come as a surprise to many.
