The law and the jungle

Probably not what the child-care specialists mean when they say fathers ought to spend time doing things with their sons:

A father and son have been found guilty of molesting a young girl in Jackson County.

You probably thought the General Assembly just wasted its time this year on trivialities such as the budget and public education. But our lawmakers took up a really serious lack in the law and did something about it:

There was a time when you didn't know what to expect when pulling up to a building with a "Massage" sign in the window.

Guns don't kill people, the "gun culture" kills people:

Most of the stuff I've read about "Public Enemies" makes it sound either like another Hollywood romanticization of criminal thugs or a boring biopic without much character or depth. But Roger Ebert liked it a lot more than most of the other critics seemed to:

Good grief. In an MSNBC/Elkhart Truth tearjerker, we read in the first four paragraphs about how hard the recession is on Angel Rodriguez. Finally, in the fifth paragraph, they get around to telling us what we'd already begun to suspect:

"Us illegals, we don't have unemployment," said Rodriguez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico City. "If I had unemployment, I wouldn't have had to give up the trailer."

If Hoosiers had voted for Jill Long for governor instead of Mitch Daniels, this man would have been our lieutenant governor:

Dennie Oxley Jr., a former state legislator and last year's Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, avoided arrest on alcohol-related charges early Friday by telling police he was serving in the General Assembly, according an Indianapolis Police report.

The opening Wednesday of "Public Enemy," the new movie with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, seems to be renewing Hoosiers' fascination with the romanticism of Depression-era gansgters. This AP story captures the flavor:

Common sense breaks out at the Supreme Court:

Arizona school officials violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old girl when they strip-searched her on the suspicion she might be hiding ibuprofen in her underwear, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The decision put school districts on notice that such searches are "categorically distinct" from other efforts to combat illegal drugs.

It's nice to learn that public officials in northwest Indiana still take their civic responsibilities seriously:

Former Mayor Robert A. Pastrick owes East Chicago damages totaling somewhere between $3 and $108,998,876.30, say attorneys in the landmark civil racketeering case against the legendary Northwest Indiana political boss.

Two Muslim inmates in the Terre Haute federal prison are getting some help from the ACLU:

Two Muslim inmates held in a special unit at the federal prison in Terre Haute say they aren't allowed to pray in groups as often as their religion commands and have asked a federal judge to ease worship limits imposed by the Bureau of Prisons.

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