Category: Indiana Writers Group

by Leo Morris When the coal started running low at the mine my father worked in, he considered several options. The one he decided on was to relocate from Kentucky to Fort Wayne, which had two major advantages. It was large enough to have plenty of employment opportunities not involving coal mines, and his sister…

Stopping and Frisking Saves Lives AS COMPLICATED as democracy is, you can clearly see it working in Marion County. You can tell by the high murder rate. Marion voters, the reasons for which they are quite proud, have decided to elect a mayor and prosecuting attorney who demonstrate their social compassion by abiding homicide. Not…

By Mark Franke One trend at the national level is the proliferation of law judges in the federal agencies. They can streamline adjudication of legitimate citizen and taxpayer issues so there is some value added. The problem is that often these cases involve fines and penalties imposed by the agency whose hearing officer is ruling…

Yes, You Live in Corruption “Nothing happens until the right people own the land.”— anonymous THE MOST BASIC economic statistic is how many are coming and how many are going. So how do you explain that Indiana is now second only to Illinois in the number of people skedaddling. The national moving company Atlas says that…

by Leo Morris I have always been proud to be a Hoosier, proclaiming it boldly even to coastal snobs who almost think of it as a confession of mental deficiency. I was not born in Indiana, but I was raised enough here to have adopted its values as my own – hard work, thrift, loyalty,…

By Mark Franke Is This the Government We Deserve? “You get the government you deserve.” Thomas Jefferson I don’t have a Ph.D. in political science but one is hardly needed to realize something is seriously wrong with the current state of our government. It isn’t that the President commits oral gaffe after gaffe or that…

By Richard McGowan, Ph.D. A person once wrote, “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.” Besides strong socialists, who would agree with that statement? Despite his statements about millionaires and billionaires, Bernie Sanders would not likely agree to the abolition of private property. He himself…

It’s a Dunder-Mifflin World “There is beauty in ordinary things; isn’t that kind of the point?” — Pam in the last line of “The Office.” OVERCAST, FRIGID JANUARY is a good month for reruns and deep thoughts, or at least as deep as one’s thinking mechanism allows. Here’s one: Maybe the politicians aren’t to blame; maybe…

by Leo Morris As another Indiana legislative session begins, there is an interesting dynamic at work. Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, proposing his final two-year budget as a lame duck, is laying out an ambitious and in some ways historic spending plan. He endorses hundreds of millions more for such things as education, public health, economic…

The Congressional Trapeze THE PROVOST of my daughter’s college quipped there is only one thing that is exactly as it seems, professional wrestling. I would add two others, the trapeze and Congress. Reading the news of the attempt to name a new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, I found myself thinking of the Flying Wallendas, the…