Category: Indiana Writers Group

For release Feb. 15 and thereafter (656 words) According to U.S News & World Report, it is one of the nation’s best large high schools. During the 2010-11 school year, 66 percent of its students passed both math and English assessments. In 2009-10, 30 percent of its graduates passed an Advanced Placement exam, double the…

My daughter’s ballet master opens every season with a little speech. She tells the young women that her academy recognizes two types of dancers: those who love to be seen dancing and those who love to dance. She wants only the latter. Leadership, if not dancing, is a critical issue in an election year. If…

For immediate release (622 words). Will we ever know the cost of “the Game” to the taxpaying citizens of Indianapolis? We ask the question because, even the day after, we are getting confusing reports in the media about the dollars involved. A couple of weeks ago we got a statement from the Capital Improvement Board…

For immediate release (590 words). As a political strategists in battle-wearing Wisconsin watching union protesters threaten to block the Super Bowl spotlight in my homestate of Indiana, I could not help but think there had to have been a better way to make the Right-to-Work argument. A maxim of war is that you, not your…

For immediate release (659 words). Mitt Romney pays lower tax rates than a teacher? Warren Buffett pays less than his secretary? Really? It’s not meant to happen that way. Our federal income-tax code is supposed to be “progressive”: those with higher incomes should pay higher rates. How does this work? First, exempted income — through…

There was more, more, just inside the door In the store, in the store. There was more, much more, just inside the door In the corner grocery store. — Raffi, “The Corner Grocery Store Song” He was what we once called an ordinary American, a poor man’s capitalist growing up in an iconic corner grocery…

For release Feb. 1 and thereafter. (678 words) Merriam-Webster defines wishful thinking as “the attribution of reality to what one wishes to be true or the tenuous justification of what one wants to believe.” It’s an apt description for folks clamoring to spend hundreds of millions on a Central Indiana mass-transit plan. We can pump…

Listening to our officeholders, insecure to the point of panic, make their recurrent promises to “fight” for us, I realize that my annual Veteran’s Day column is two months late. The date always slips by me, the holiday being understated to the point of ephemera in my politically correct corner of suburbia. That’s not entirely…

Watching Gov. Mitch Daniels last night deliver his response to the State of the Union, the mind jumped ahead to Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012. The hunches of my wife and my optometrist have proved out. Barack Obama has won reelection. How, though, did it happen? In a column written after the South Carolina primary, Pat…

For immediate release (587 words) Here is an exercise in junior-high math. It takes 100 workers 100 days to make a locomotive. The workers are paid $100 per day. What are the labor costs of the locomotive? Answer:  $1 million. Here is a more advanced problem. Suppose another set of workers are paid $200 a…