Please welcome Gary Varvel’s work to our membership distribution list. Varvel joins Andrea Neal, Leo Morris and Craig Ladwig in our group of award-winning Indiana journalists. “Gary Varvel’s Views,” is a one-stop shop of his political cartoons plus links to supportive commentary including selected work from The Indiana Policy Review. Members of the foundation can sign up for it all here. Varvel is a Christian, a conservative, a cartoonist and a speaker “in that order.” He was…

by Leo Morris With Veterans Day coming up, it’s time to demand that the U.S. military truly create a welcoming environment for all who wish to serve in the defense of this country. Efforts have been made to accommodate women, religious and ethnic minorities, gays, transgenders, even non-citizens. But the feelings of one of the largest and longest suffering minorities have been all but ignored. To understand the problem, consider these instructions for how to…

by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. When I teach about “personal discrimination” I often use the example of bigotry against the number 13. You’ve probably heard that some people have the strange religious belief that 13 has supernatural powers. Owners of tall buildings have succumbed to this bigotry by getting rid of the 13th floor. Well, not eliminating the entire floor, but pretending that it doesn’t exist by adjusting the numbers on elevators and office doors. (The…

by Terry Smith The early definition of “reparations” was simply “war debts.” It consisted of war losers paying the cost of waging war to war winners. As they say, “To the victor go the spoils.” Citizens in their individual capacity did not participate in the flow of reparations. The transfer of wealth was from one nation-state to another nation-state. The more recent and enlarged definition includes “restitution or atonement for damages inflicted.” As it applies…

by Leo Morris There is distressing news from Indiana University. In the Daily Student newspaper, the headline tells the sad story: “Forty years have passed since IU sported a mascot.” The university is one of only three of the 14 schools in the Big Ten conference, along with Michigan and Illinois, to have no mascot. No Purdue Pete or Brutus Buckeye or Herbie Husker to growl and prowl the sidelines, impossibly big heads always seeming…

“If we’re going to turn our local governments into investment banks, we’ll need to find smarter people to run them.” — a Fort Wayne manufacturer IT IS WHAT you hear most, and should trouble you the most: “I don’t know about the financing but I love what’s going on downtown.” In Indiana, that might be said about a new sports stadium, or a riverfront walk, or a convention center, or an entertainment venue, or a…

by Leo Morris Municipal elections are coming up in Indiana, and it’s hard not to be cynical about them. In my city of Fort Wayne, participation in odd-year balloting has been plummeting. In 2003, just above 30 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. In 2011, it was only 26.21 percent, and in 2015 it was 22.49 percent. It might well sink to a new low of 20 percent this year. It’s much the…

Love Denied, Schooling Begins For immediate release (click on mug shot for high-resolution copy). by Leo Morris The story seemed to pop up then fade in less than a day, which was warp speed even in today’s social-media-driven news cycles. And it was pretty tame stuff, considering how normality is sliding into the abyss from both sides of the great divide these days. Still, there was something weirdly compelling about it. Fifth-grade teachers at Riverside…

AN EDITOR FRIEND, forced to watch close-up the death throes of our hometown newspaper, offered a fresh perspective on the threadbare issue of journalism’s demise. She thinks it has to do with confusing compliments with subscriptions. We ran out of publishers able to provide an adult presence, she might say. That’s when yuppie editors began flooding the front page with soft feature stories and cute takes on vaguely topical issues, all of which were hits with…

by Leo Morris A line from a Bob Dylan song keeps going through my head: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” That describes well my year as a high school sophomore, a member of that cohort, which, with a perfectly balanced mix of arrogance and ignorance, knows absolutely everything worth knowing and is eager to share it if only the world will admit its failures and seek our…