by JASON ARP I left my recent city council meeting disgusted, having participated in the process of reviewing the compliance of businesses with their abatement agreements. State law requires us to grill companies unable to meet the hiring objectives set forth in their application for the abatement. This ludicrous abatement process is only a symptom; punishing capital formation and production is the bigger problem. But let’s stay on the topic of abatement. State law defines…

These bicentennial essays are available in book form from Indiana Historical Society Press. “Road Trip – A Pocket History of Indiana” can be ordered online at shop.indianahistory.org. by Andrea Neal Two decades after Elwood Haynes drove his newfangled horseless buggy down a Kokomo street, cars had become all the rage in Indiana. “From the beginning, Hoosiers loved cars,” historian James H. Madison writes in “Hoosiers – A New History of Indiana.” They loved driving them,…

For the use of the membership only (577 words). THINGS ARE UPSIDE DOWN, or at least very, very strange — mostly in Indianapolis. The new tea shop on Fountain Square allows stray cats to roam freely among the tables. And this weekend the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors will hear from both the Dalai Lama and Lady Gaga. And something else is topsy turvy — and throughout Indiana. City Councils are grilling…

For the use of the membership only (619 words). by Craig Ladwig The Associated Press last week sent out an analysis under the headline “Indiana Minorities Don’t Have Proportional Representation.” The editors there imagine they are doing readers a service by alerting them to the supposed bigotry of the democratic process. The AP suggests that it is in itself bad that Latinos make up almost 7 percent of the state’s population but less than 1…

WE STILL NEED HELP getting an important event off the ground and on our calendar. We are asking you to sponsor our post-election seminar with a $150 donation. We hope to leave behind the posture of a national presidential election and turn toward the duties and responsibilities of individual citizens in a constitutional republic. Please make your tax-exempt donation by clicking HERE. The seminar is part of our attempt as a foundation to become better prepared for a…

(For the use of the membership only.) “May you live in interesting times.” — Chinese curse   HAVE YOU NOTICED anything different about your Republican friends? Your co-workers? The market researchers tell us that they are more “engaged” politically. That may be a nice way of saying more opinionated. This is good, or eventually so. The problem is that most of the newly engaged are grabbing hold of issues that have been banging around for…

by TOM HUSTON The candidates each sent out a fund-raising email on Monday and the difference in emphasis was stark: Hillary: “We cannot demonize Muslim people.” Trump: “We are going to make America safe again.” ISIS EMPHASIZES soft targets and encourages “lone wolf” (falsely identified as “self-radicalized”) or small units, easy to organize and hard to detect operations. This is a uniquely difficult profile for the security services to contend with. Electronic surveillance of international…

by Andrea Neal During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan took Indiana by storm. Ninety years later Hoosiers still struggle to grasp why. The secretive brotherhood launched its Indiana recruitment efforts in Evansville in 1920. Within four years, Hoosier Klansmen numbered 250,000 and represented every corner of the state. “Members included ministers, mayors, shopkeepers and factory workers, mostly ordinary people from the wide middle of society,” says historian James H. Madison in Hoosiers – A…

(For the use of the membership only; not for publication, duplication or quotation.) “We have two parties here, and only two. One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party. I’m very proud to be a member of the stupid party. Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.” — the late M. Stanton Evans, the Indianapolis Star ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, it is…

by Judge Dan Heath In June of 2012, while doing research on another matter on the website for the National Center for State Courts, I happened upon a number of articles dealing with the concept of business courts. I was intrigued by the idea because throughout some 16 years on the bench at that time, I had conducted some fairly complex business and complex litigation cases, especially in the area of business fraud and securities…