WHAT IF A CABINET-LEVEL APPOINTEE in the Indiana governor’s office made “radical, homophobic and racially divisive” comments when she was in her late 20s?  In today’s media environment, there would be serious inquiries, right? Well, not apparently if that person fills a historic post as the state’s first “chief equity, inclusion and opportunity officer.” All of that was in a report last week from REAL News Michiana, a blog out of South Bend. The reporter, Clifton French, tells us that…

by Leo Morris Man’s best friends are becoming more and more helpful. They have been trained to sniff out bombs and drugs and lost hikers and long-buried bodies. Now, there are dogs that can smell COVID-19. When they detect the virus, they simply sit down by the carrier, and that person can then be whisked off to quarantine hell. Wouldn’t it be nice, I have wondered, if a dog could be trained to smell out…

As a service to the membership, we will provide regular updates on the concern expressed yesterday by MSNBC host Joy Reid that if aliens ever attacked earth it might be because humans had failed to fight climate change. We realize there is a lot to unpack there but that’s it, that’s the news alert.

Let’s see if you can remember when Gov. Eric Holcomb said this: “With the radical left now in control of Washington, your governor is your last line of defense, As governor, I will defend your right to be free of socialism and tyranny. Your Second Amendment right to keep your family safe and your freedom of speech and religious liberty. Our state needs a leader with the courage to do what’s right, not what’s politically…

by Leo Morris I noticed in a couple of recent news reports that Indiana has been made safe again for the bald eagle, which is a simple piece of good news worth celebrating in this era riven by an angry partisan divide and political revenge disguised as a plea for unity. The eagle, a bird that nests exclusively in North America, was once plentiful but nearly extinct nationwide by the mid-20th century and nowhere to be…

HERE IS A PROPOSAL to help bring us back together after this week’s bizarre inauguration. It involves restraint and precision in the use of our words, something that George Orwell encouraged in his “Politics and the English Language.” “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,”…

by Leo Morris There will come a day of reckoning. No matter how often that is said about the reckless abandon with which Washington keeps adding to the national debt, officials keep printing and borrowing so they can keep spending money they do not have. And they will keep doing it until Stein’s Law kicks in: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And it’s likely to be an abrupt stop, a horrendous…

INDIANA SEN. TODD YOUNG in a widely circulated column this week unpacked some Lincolnesque but tired bromides on his way to addressing the calamity that is America. We are not enemies but friends and fellow Americans, he instructs. That and we should do less shouting and more listening. The senator’s little homily, though, hid a personal concern, one to be examined in a moment. First, we may indeed all be “Americans” in an ever-expanding sense of citizenship or in the halcyon vision of a speech writer. But there…

by Leo Morris I participated in a PBS TV show last week – three General Assembly watchers and a host doing our annual legislative preview session – and it was a little unsettling. Because of the pandemic, only two participants were in-studio – properly distanced, of course – and two of us chimed in remotely via teleconferencing. The video I saw of the others in their little Zoom computer windows was live, but the sound…

“There is nothing that will give power to the (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) to require hiring, firing and promotion to meet a racial ‘quota.”’ — Sen. Hubert Humphrey in promising that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would lead only to nondiscrimination and not to social engineering.  INDIANA COMPANIES that want to be listed on at least one of the New York stock exchanges will want to check the chromosome arrangements and melanin levels in their board rooms. East Coast lunacy is…