Category: Indiana Writers Group

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. “I have always been a believer in truth. Palliatives are harmful.  One must have the courage to face reality. Without that courage, life is meaningless.  The people who do us the most harm are the people who shield us from reality.” — Agatha Christie, Murder in Retrospect, p.150 When President Donald…

by Leo Morris A reader commenting on my column about nimrods from Podunk emailed that he appreciates a little context with his news, “a concept that seems to be an endangered species.” Numbers are just numbers, he wrote. “Data should always be presented in context. Context can make the difference between truth/fact and honesty.” Anecdotes…

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always…

POST-RIOT LIFE in our town is divided into the factions that a historian predicted more than 70 years ago, and we will be lucky to survive when they finally clash. Granted, nobody reads Arnold Toynbee any more. He is a bit thick, as British scholars tend to be, but his 10-volume magisterial study of the rise and fall of more…

by Mark Franke John Adams is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Founding Fathers; he gets no respect. That is an exaggeration but not by much. He was, at the same time, one the most intellectual of the Founding Fathers and no doubt the most ill-tempered. It seems he just couldn’t help being irascible, given to…

by Leo Morris Sooner or later, every political columnist quotes George Santayana, and this is my week. If you have a problem with that, then go back to Podunk with the other nimrods. That was probably a bad way to begin. Some readers might take offense. Let me start over. “Podunk” was a common insult…

by Paul Harvey and Lisa Conyers Our book, “Welfare for the Rich,” is designed to inform Americans — especially taxpayers who are footing most of the bill — about the massive movement of money from millions of middle- and lower-income Americans to much wealthier people and corporations that do not need and should not be…

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answering…

“It was the legislature that passed the Emergency Management and Disaster law, which gives the governor broad power to take action to protect public health during emergencies. And if a global pandemic that has infected millions of people globally and killed 150,000 in this country in four months’ time is not an emergency, what is?”…

by Mark Franke We have all heard enough of the progressive-liberal mantra that the rich don’t pay their fair share. Proposals for millionaire taxes, which somehow always seem to hit hardest on the middle class, are a dime a dozen . . . provided they are on someone else’s dime. Okay, but look at several recent…