Democratic City Councilman Tom Hayhurst officially kicked off his challenge of 3rd District Rep. Mark Souder yesterday (he will have Primary opposition, but that's a mere technicality).
Democratic City Councilman Tom Hayhurst officially kicked off his challenge of 3rd District Rep. Mark Souder yesterday (he will have Primary opposition, but that's a mere technicality).
Happy Valentine's Day!
So this poor chump of a 12-year-old in suburban Chicago brings powdered sugar to school "for a science project." Another kid asks him if it's cocaine, and he says "sure," then adds quickly that he's just kidding. He's arrested anyway, and charged with a felony for "possessing a look-alike drug." Zero tolerance strikes again.
I don't have Reggie Hayes' basketball knowledge, but his assessment of Indiana University head coach Mike Davis -- that he will be gone and should be gone after this season -- strikes me as the right one.
A lot of area Democrats have high hopes for Fort Wayne City Councilman Tom Hayhurst in his bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Mark Souder. But the 3rd District has become a pretty strong Republican enclave. Safe? Maybe not, but three Republican-held districts are said to be up for grabs, and the 3rd isn't one of them.
It's nice to know there are people on the lookout for crime:
The Indiana Gaming Commission is turning to people who understand the gaming industry's financial intricacies to keep watch for vice on the state's riverboat casinos.
The commission's executive director, Ernest Yelton, said that building a new breed of enforcement agents means
They want to find vice on a riverboat casino? How about the casino operation itself?
Sure, mistakes can go unnoticed, but a $400 million house? Are humans now conditioned never to question the computer readouts?
Here's one of my embarrassing little secrets: I could make a meal out of McDonald's french fries, and have on more than one occasion. My second part-time job in high school (after being a theater usher, cleaning wads of chewing gum out of the sand-filled ashtrays, if you want to know how long ago it was) was at a McDonald's, the one at Jefferson and Harrison before they tore it down for the new one at Jefferson and Harrison before the city made them move to Jefferson and Fairfield to make way for the expanded Grand Wayne Center.
OK, enough of this nonsense -- rioting and burning and killing people over cartoons? I think it's time to quit pussyfootin' around and send in someone to clean the mess up and make certain overly sensitve people understand that actions have consequences. Say uncle, fundamentalist fanatics.
Quit yer whinin', kids, nobody's buying it. The most fascinating thing about this poll of parents about their children's homework is that they don't think the load is too heavy, even though they believe the kids do more homework than the kids say they actually do:
I think I wrote recently that the problem isn't with the specific things the Bush administration is doing with wiretaps; they're specifically targeted at legitimate terrorism worries. The problem is that with a new kind of war, which might not have an identifiable end, whatever civil liberties we agree to give up might be gone forever. Read this account of data-mining and try to decide if it's a logical response to the world we live in now or a scary escalation of the continued erosion of our privacy.
Jeffrey Fraser, the Carroll student you might remember from the book-parody issue, has a new blog, which you can find here. He says it will cover community news stories and "feature investigative journalism while fairly presenting each side of the debate." One of his first posts is about student activism at area schools that might have been spurred "by a particular satire."
Quite a few new local blogs have sprung up recently. Sometime next week, I'll redo my blog roll and provide links.
I'm linking to this Carolyn Hax column partly because the first letter is from "Frustrated in Indiana," which shouldn't surprise anybody; there's a lot of seething resentment out there in sexually dysfunctuional Hoosierland. But I also really like Hax's columns. The advice column was a tired, worn-out format until she came along with a fresh perspective and bushels of common sense.
Some people will say "In God We Trust" license plates would violate the separation of church and state, and others will argue that they will help express religious values in a culture increasingly hostile to them. Considering the way some people drive out there, I'd say it was a simple statement of fact.
Smaller government? Spending reform? What if we try to clamp down on junkets -- $1 billion over five years? Love this one:
Was it necessary to send a whopping 200 HHS employees to a Netherlands "International Symposium on Night and Shiftwork"? Wouldn't it have saved us all time and money if the HHS researchers traveled to a nearby 7-11 or nursing home instead?
Wow. Staying off drugs -- what a great job. $40 a week might not sound like much, but I'll volunteer to stay off drugs for $35. If the price is right, I'll also stay off vodka, parimutuel betting, pipe smoking, beastiality, foot fetishism and watching "American Idol." I knew I'd eventually find a way to give up the 9-to-5 grind.
A colleague asked if I was going to blog about the Bush-bashing by the "mourners" at the Coretta Scot King funeral, since it was so over the top and unseemly. Obviously, yes. But I don't have much to add to all the commentary at hundreds of other sites, both nationally and locally.
I'm afraid I agree with the grocery & convenience store guy on this one:
But Joe Lackey, president of the Indiana Grocery and Convenience Store Association called the bill "absurd" because it unfairly singles out grocery and convenience stores for additional regulations.
Speaking of changes in the way we learn things, this is just so cool:
Here is one way the new media are changing the way we learn about things.
Suicide has always been one of those subjects the press tiptoes around. If someone killed himself at noon on Main Street, the thinking was, that was news. If he did it in the privacy of his home, that was a quiet family tragedy we did not want to intrude upon. Sometimes "newsworthiness" factors came into play -- the victim was a public figure, for example, or had been involved in public events. But there was a dividing line, and a sense that suicide was a delicate subject.
