HAS THE TRUTH become just a detail? The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette recently stepped over the line of protected opinion into either purposeful deception or self-serving carelessness. Discussing vouchers, a July 2 editorial was set under the shock-and-awe headline, “Evidence Casts Doubt on Voucher Education.” It said that a local educator wasn’t surprised by a study “showing that voucher students who transferred from Indiana public schools to private schools lost ground in math achievement.” Fortunately, the study, by Mark Berends of the University of Notre Dame…

by David Penticuff Loren Matthes, a partner at Umbaugh and Associates, spoke at a Wednesday at our local council meeting about the financial predicament of our city. In calm fashion, for the first time in a year and a half of working on our city’s budget problems, an Umbaugh official spoke in public about our mess. She explained that Tax Increment  Financing, an economic product that Umbaugh facilitates for a fee to local municipalities, was…

Misdirection — it is what makes a magician successful. The specific idea is to attract attention away from what is really going on. In a magic show its use is completely necessary and certainly approved, not so much when it is used in presenting news stories. The Indianapolis Star recently gave us a front-page story headlined, “Pence emails to cost state $100K.” The story itself was by-lined by two reporters, but we don’t know who wrote the headline. The difference in approach makes…

by Cmdr. John Pickerill There has been discussion recently over a possible wind farm in my county. Residents close to the proposed turbine towers are concerned about the health effects, about disrupted rural landscape and about what it will do to their property values. Some are suggesting that newly proposed countywide zoning would have excluded the turbines or minimized any harm. They are wrong. Both a former county councilman and the mayor brought up a relevant point in separate articles for the local newspaper:…

by Craig Ladwig Looking over the raw data of contributions to a typical Indiana mayor, you are struck by the massive amounts coming from those involved in construction, architecture, engineering, etc. It is not an encouraging experience. For that is how progress is defined today. It is not in an increase in middle-class expendable income, and certainly not in happiness or even security. Rather, it is in commanding the building of new things, steel and…

 by Andrea Neal After Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill penned an op-ed article urging state lawmakers to resist the push for legal marijuana, he faced predictable outrage from a lobbying group that will say almost anything to sway public opinion to its side. Predictable because the pro-marijuana faction mastered – years ago – a public relations strategy based on immediate repudiation of claims that marijuana is harmful to individual users or society in general. The…

THE FATES OF INDIANA AND ILLINOIS could merge, literally, bailing the one out of a financial mess and filling a power vacuum in the other. Some think it a joke, but after watching the experts at my city’s public hearing testify in favor of a multimillion dollar (cost yet to be determined) riverfront development along our chocolate-colored, high-embanked and oddly pungent waterway I’m not so sure. John Kass, a Chicago Tribune columnist, reports that similar…

  IT TOOK AN OUTSTATE EDITOR, Dan Carden of the Northwest Indiana Times, to compile the 45 different tax increases approved this year by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. And he tells us his count does not include allowing the Natural Resources Commission to increase 25 different fees or include a variety of increases for gaming and corporate securities. In all, there is cause to reassess why you registered with the GOP in the first place. But it would…

Talking Points • Indiana Doubles Down on Warm Beer — I don’t see this fight over liquor laws as a case study in cronyism. Here we have competing economic interests of approximately equal economic power fighting over public policy in an open forum subject to close public scrutiny. The author ignores the fact that large corporate-grocery, convenience- and drug-store interests are just as generous with their campaign contributions as the liquor-store owners. In my view this…

READING RECENT REMARKS on the state economy by the president of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, you are right to be troubled, even take offense. Was he saying that the problem with Indiana is Indianans? “It is evident that a lack of (skilled) workers, unhealthy lifestyle choices and limited Indiana-based funding to grow promising companies is keeping the state from realizing its full potential,”  he was quoted as saying by the Goshen News. That can be…