First he'll quit, then he won't, then he might again. Mark Souder is the Bret Favre of politics:
Congressman Mark Souder has filed to run for a 9th term in Congress.
Souder told us Monday this may be his final term but he wants to see a number of projects through including the VA Hospital.
"May be" his last term. Believe it when I see it.
Oh, yeah, and Probert B. Parker, too.
Does that convey typographically that I was annoyed by the coverage of their deaths? Well, I was peeved, anyway. In fact, I had a near Mother Teresa moment. She and Princess Diana, recall, died within days of each other in 1997, and the coverage seemed stunningly lopsided. Oh, dear God, Di has been taken from us! How can any of us cope with our grief? She can never be replaced! The world mourns! Oh, yeah, and some nun expired. Worked with the poor or something.
Republican Mike Sodrel has decided to enter Indiana's 9th District congressional race, so there'll be a fifth straight matchup between Sodrel and incumbent Democrat Baron Hill. Hill is up 3-1 in the first four races, and in his favor this time is the fact that President Obama carried Indiana for the first time since LBJ.
Is she trying to scare me, or what?
The Muncie Star Press says Mike Pence is a nice conservative lad who should be careful about reaching beyond his grasp:
Could Pence be a strong candidate? We think it's possible, but history is not on his side.
Many have run for president while serving in the House, but the chances of winning are not good.
Sometimes I might seem a litle gloomy, but I'm a cockeyed optimist compared to some people today. Time magazine calls the oughts the "decade from hell" ("This decade was as awful as any peacetime decade in the nation's entire history") and Americans rate the current decade as the "worst in 50 years":
As noted earlier here, former Gov. Joe Kernan is returning to Vietnam for the first time since his release from a POW camp there. Guess old warriors can't help the urge to revisit the battlegrounds of their youth:
It's been 40 years since John Eckenrode was suspended from the University of Notre Dame for a sit-in during the Vietnam War, but he still remembers where he stood that day.
Joe Kernan is still one of the classiest guys around. He had planned to go on a trade mission to Vietnam when he was lieutenant governor, but the trip fell through, and he says he's always wanted to go back to the country where he fought and was held as a prisoner of war for 11 months. Now a trip is on:
Tour stops will include the site where Kernan's plane was shot down and the preserved portion of the prison referred to by Americans held there, including Sen. John McCain, as the Hanoi Hilton.
DePauw University professor Kevin Howley didn't think much of media coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall -- a "myopic and narcissistic view of history" by a bunch of celebrity reporters "waxing nostalgic" about their own role in history:
President George W. Bush seems to regert the $700 billion Wall Street bailout:
I went against my free-market instincts and approved a temporary government intervention to unfreeze the credit markets so that we could avoid a major global depression.
Damage done, apology too little and too late. And without mentioning Barack Obama by name, Bush rails against the big government he was only too happy to participate in himself:
