Another privatization story, not from Indiana this time:
The head of a European investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe said Tuesday there was evidence the United States outsourced torture to other countries and it was likely European governments knew about it.
What I want to know is: Did we hand it off to just any old country that asked, or did we put it out for competitive bid?
Indiana Parley is reporting that President Bush will speak at Bethel College in Mishawaka on Feb. 23.
I saw two stories in the morning paper on different pages that would have been more interesting if they had been put side by side. The bigger story, on Page 1, talked about the impasse between Glenbrook and county officials on the mall's tax value:
A court-ordered reassessment of properties in 2002 increased the mall's tax value from less than $50 million to $114.7 million. The move also increased annual property taxes for the mall by $1.4 million, to $2.3 million. [. . . ] According to the original appeal, Glenbrook argued its value should be $38.8 million.
If you're just getting sick and tired of this violent, fascist country and long for the calmer life of a peace-loving paradise, you can escape to Canada, jus like your uncle did back in the Vietnam days. Well, maybe not . . .
I don't know what we're all so worried about. The future of the world seems to be in darn good hands:
The four-day World Economic Forum that began in the 1970s as a place to discuss new management techniques has evolved into an eclectic mix of highbrow futurology, ethical debate and a fair bit of schmoozing.
[...]
Hooray for the City Council (or, more precisely, the five Republicans on it) for beating back the Richard administration's attempt to get $1.25 million more out of taxpayers. Considering the billions and billions we read about in stories of the federal and even state government, it's a piddling amount. But it's a small victory for taxpayers who sometimes wonder if there's anybody left in government who still realizes it's the public's money that's being spent. A spark of old-fashioned conservatism still exists here.
Holy cow: According to the Beer Institute, beer has an annual "economic impact" in Indiana of $2.36 billion a year. That group has an incentive to make the figure seem as big as possible, but, still, that's a lot of suds. Never mind all these other silly economic-development ideas like downtown hotels and football teams and luring new companies. Let's just put a place on every corner where we can buy beer. Oh, wait, we've done that. Then maybe we should do the reverse of Gov.
Gosh, I wish a Fort Wayne gal would win the Miss Indiana pageant so I could write a gushy editorial like this one:
"We're very excited that one of our own has accomplished this," said Noblesville Mayor John Ditslear, who participated in a mock interview with Guilkey to prepare her for judges' questions just weeks before she left for the pageant Jan. 10. Guilkey had about 100 supporters with her in Las Vegas, and thousands more of us rooting at home.
House Bill 1383, which would limit aid to illegal immigrants, is going to get a lot of grief from the "let's just accept that these undocumented workers are here and help them adjust" crowd. Advance Indiana, for example, goes so far as to equate the effort to "the KKK of the 1920s. Back then the targets were Catholics, Eastern Europeans, Jews and blacks.
Even free-market believers predisposed to like the idea of the privatization of government services can get a little skittish when we start talking about something so long associated with the public sector, like roads. And, naturally, people who are against privatization on general principle will think of lots of reasons to oppose Gov. Mitch Daniels' plans to lease the Indiana Toll Road for nearly $4 billion and 75 years.
This article by radio commentator and blogger Hugh Hewitt is a thought-provoking look at my profession. It includes:
1. Something I agree with -- the facts that the "mainstream media" or whatever we want to call that conglomeration is full of leftist bias and that those charged with providing fresh blood (such as the Columbia School of Journalism) don't have a clue and so can't do anything about the problem.
Anybody who has ever had an argument with someone of a different political persuasion knows this is true:
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.
On Monday, I had an editorial in the paper putting forth a proposed plan for consolidation of city and county government. We've been chewing this issue over for decades, and nobody had taken that simple step of drafting an actual proposal to argue about. Now, it seems like others have had the same idea. I've heard that both the Northeast Indiana Corporate Council and representatives of City and County Councils have been drafting proposals and that all three are similar.
Further thoughts on the case of expelled Carroll student Jeff Fraser.
Well, this ought to kick the toll-road-sale debate up several notches. Indiana got a bid from Australia's Macquarie Infrastructure Group, and it's huge -- $3.8 billion:
The bid [...] marks the most a U.S. municipality has ever been offered for any asset, according to state officials.
``It's unprecedented,'' said Charles Schalliol, Governor Mitch Daniels's budget director, in a telephone interview. ``This is a blowout bid for the state.''
[...]
Reading this story about a bad law student who became a bad lawyer, I was reminded of the old joke: What do you call someone who graduated last in his medical class? Answer: Doctor. Of course, bad doctors can just kill one person at a time. Not all bad lawyers end up in where this poor guy did; many of them are responsible for the developing law of the land, which can screw up generation after generation.
Now that we've convinced girls that they can be anything they want to be and that education is the key, what are we going to do about the boys?
While we're all so busy trying to knock down Bill of Rights-violation gophers, King Kong is rounding the corner and headed straight for us:
The government wants a list all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week — a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases.
I only half believe Condy Rice when she keeps saying she won't run for president. So George W. Bush's credibility when he insists that Laura would never run for Senate is, well, less than half. Love this line, though:
"I'm pretty certain, when I married her she didn't like politics or politicians," Bush said.
She must have gotten over at least one of those.
Crisis in public education? What crisis in public education?
WASHINGTON - More than half of students at four-year colleges — and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges — lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.
