Hoosier lore

It looks as if there's an outside chance the short session of the General Assembly won't be derailed by a contentious debate on intelligent design. Even some Republicans who might be inclined by philosophical predisposition to support including ID in science classrooms, such as Bill Friend and Brian Bosma, seem to have a good conservative aversion to the state dictating local education issues.

Anyone who has been following this site and a few others knows the local blogosphere has gone to a new level, from observation and criticism to original reporting. One of these days, probably soon, someone is going to start doing something like this, which a lot of blogs will then link to and add to and jump off from, and then we will be at the next level, a local blog version of a wire service.

TODAY'S UPDATE

The sex researchers at Indiana University are at it again. I don't know if this survey is a knock against Hoosier men or rural men or just the lethal combination of the two, but it's kind of scary:

Condom use errors, such as putting it on wrong or wearing one only part of the time, were frequently reported during a recent survey of rural Indiana men.

How dumb do you have to be to put it on wrong?

Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma has appointed Rep. Phil Hinkle, R-Indianapolis, and Rep. Jim Buck, R-Kokomo, to lead a group that will study and possibly make recommendations for a general framework that would allow "local communities could develop a consolidation plan and then put it before residents in the form of a voter referendum." (From the Evansville Courier Press via Masson's Blog)

An Indiana man, Steve Wallace, has lost the lawsuit claiming he wrote the Britney Spears hit "Sometimes." Believe it or not, I'm not a Spears fan, so I went online to see what all the fuss was about. Here are the lyrics to "Sometimes," including the refrain:

I did a post last week disagreeing with a state legislator's intention to make disorderly conduct at military funerals a felony, rather than a misdemeanor in line with most other disorderly conduct charges. As despicable as such protests are, making them felonies, I thought, would amount to unequal treatment under the law. That brought a response from Steve Towsley (original post and comments here), who argued that:

Joshua Claybourn is a law student who authors the Indiana Barrister blog out of Evansville; I've quoted him in editorials and here on issues such as government consolidation. He's also one of the founders of the In The Agora blog, which has been doing some tornado reporting. It's truer all the time: If you're not checking out the news online, you're going to be missing something.

Opponents of Indiana's tax amnesty plan have been gleefully observing that the state was behind in reaching its revenue goals, apparently without taking into account that, in every other state where amnesty has been offered, a great many tax delinquents waited until the last minute to take advantage of the offer. The same thing held true here, and the state has reached its goal, with several days of the amnesty offer still to go. And by the way:

Indiana isn't the only state whose legislature is being challenged for invoking the name of Jesus:

"As a matter of historical fact, the exact prayers given in the first Congress explicitly referred to Jesus Christ," according to a 50-page legal brief the county filed Tuesday.

Northeast Indiana's U.S. Rep. Mike Pence has become a star of the small-government-conservative movement. Now he's among those championing private property rights. I don't think we could do much better than having him as House Majority Leader.