by Andrea Neal A wave of high-tech creativity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries cemented Fort Wayne’s reputation as the Silicon Valley of its day. Some innovation highlights: Jenney Arc Lights illuminated League Park in Fort Wayne in 1883 for one of the earliest baseball games played at night. A self-measuring pump mechanism, devised in 1885 by Sylvanus Bowser, paved the way for today’s do-it-yourself gas pumps. The 1921 Horton electric washing machine freed…

  (For the use of the membership only; not for publication, duplication or quotation.) AT THIS WEEK’S council meeting in my city, during open comments at the end of the session right before they take out the flag, a question was asked: Did the administration have any information to share on the Mideast immigrants whom the mayor had invited to resettle here? The sound you heard was a pin dropping. For to merely ask the question…

Members: The author is a former legislator and councilman now an instructor at the Keith Busse School of Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne. This is adapted from testimony he presented this week to the Fort Wayne City Council, the first in the state to take up the new option of exempting business personal property taxes. The measure, written and introduced by Councilman Jason Arp, was defeating 5-3. by Mitch…

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE government-can-work-magic stories — a parks department repurposes an old municipal dump into a new golf course. Shazam! Happy citizens playing cheap golf, manicured greens and fairways instead of smelly sludge and trash. The problem, government being government, is that a new municipal golf course is run, well, like an old municipal dump. Unaccountability and the resulting oversights and miscalculations end up costing somebody — taxpayers — a lot of money.…

by Andrea Neal Chief Justice Earl Warren gets most of the credit, and rightly so, for the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregated schools. But were it not for a Hoosier — Justice Sherman Minton of Floyd County — the Brown case would not have even been before the Supreme Court at that time. In 1952, prior to Warren’s appointment, the court had to decide whether or not…

“In an all-Navy message published Tuesday, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Robert Burke said a three-pronged training approach will equip senior leaders and rank-and-file personnel for the changes (to open transgender service).” — military.com, Sept. 16, 2016 HAVING BREAKFAST one Sunday off U.S. 931 in Kokomo, reading about NFL players protesting Western Civilization, I was witness to one of those micro-events that runs counter to the popular narrative. It was a group of veterans on…

by Martina Webster We should educate people on the tax-rate formula every chance we get. The more who understand the concept, the better the dialog on government spending. For starters, could giving up a tax exemption lower your taxes? Consider that it is time for the Legislature to designate something other than the Homestead Credit as the marker for the benefit a property owner gets with the 1-percent property tax cap. Let me explain: Tax…

by Andrea Neal Though many might be tempted to confer the honor on Benjamin Harrison, Wendell L. Willkie is the only native Hoosier ever nominated for president by a major political party. Harrison was from North Bend, Ohio. Born and raised in Elwood, Willkie was the Republican standard bearer in 1940, securing the nomination on the sixth ballot at the party’s national convention. As of the first ballot, Willkie was in third place behind Thomas…

by Tom Huston A description of Donald Trump’s child-care plan in the Weekly Standard is a perfect example of why I believe so much of what passes for conservative thinking these days is totally irrelevant to the real world. Trump’s tax deduction for child-care costs would be available to a taxpayer with taxable income of up to $250,000 for single filers and $500,000 for a joint return. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist…

by James E. McClure, Ph.D., and T. Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. In a 2011 article, “Too Many Rhinestones,” Professors T. Norman Van Cott and the late Clarence Deitsch examined Ball State University’s (BSU) grade-inflation problem. After comparing grade distributions and grade-point averages (GPAs) from fall 1990 and fall 2009 in principles-level courses, they found that BSU was no exception to the nationwide trend of ever more A’s and B’s, fewer D’s and F’s and higher…