by Leo Morris I still take the Sunday New York Times, though God knows why; I never actually read it anymore. Its motto should probably be changed to “All the news that fits one side of the narrative.” The newspaper has taken sides in the ongoing cultural-political war, and I don’t want to subject myself to its abdication of journalistic integrity. I still stumble across its online stories on occasion, however, and I saw one last…

by Leo Morris When Ann Jarvis died on May 9, 1905, her daughter, Anna Reeves Jarvis, began a campaign to honor her mother as a way of celebrating all moms as a group. On May 12, 1907, she held a memorial service at her late mother’s church in Grafton, W. Va. Within five years, almost every state observed the day, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson made the second Sunday in May a national holiday. But Anna…

“At the very moment our adversaries were certain we would pull apart and fail, we came together. United. With light and hope, we summoned new strength and new resolve.” — Joe Biden’s address to Congress, April 28, 2021 by Mark Franke Joe Biden has officially completed his first 100 days in office, an artificial but important benchmark to judge a new presidency. It is a yardstick to grade the new president’s legislative success under the assumption…

“Hogsett Announces ‘Reimagining’ of Public Safety through New York University Partnership.” — headline in the Indianapolis Star, Jan. 15, 2020 EARLY IN MY JOURNALISM CAREER my path crossed that of a city councilman who represented a district with a crime problem. People were coming to church and finding dead bodies in the parking lot and that sort of thing. An election was upcoming and the councilman had scheduled a meeting with our editorial board. The conversation soon got…

by Leo Morris One of my favorite jokes involves an election in a mythical town in which there are 1,000 Christian voters and 250 Jewish voters. There is an election for mayor featuring a Christian candidate and a Jewish candidate, who get, respectively, 1,000 votes and 250 votes. “Boy,” says one Christian voter to another after the results are announced, “those Jews sure stick together, don’t they?” That’s just a silly, throwaway gag, but there…

By Margaret Menge The media reported that the reason the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was pulled was because just six women out of 7 million people who got the shot had a blood clot. I don’t think this is true. If you look in the VAERS database where health-care providers, patients and families report possible side effects, you’ll see many disturbing cases just in Indiana, including a man in his 50s who apparently had a…

by Nathan Collins As the effects of COVID-19 begin to diminish, a new rallying cry is beginning to echo throughout the nation. The Biden administration and the media establishment are promoting the idea that Americans should willingly relinquish sovereignty over personal health choices. If that were not enough, Americans are also being encouraged to participate in a potential electronic vaccine tracking system — a “vaccine passport.” Proponents have indicated that access to daily activities such…

by Mark Franke It was the fall of 1988 and my entire family was together. The conversation turned to the upcoming presidential election between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis.  My father held forth on what he believed, which tracked quite consistently with that year’s Republican platform. So I asked him if he were voting for Bush. Of course not; he would be voting for Dukakis because the Democrats stood for “the little man.”…

by Leo Morris Tick, tick, tick. It’s 100 seconds till midnight. Scared yet? I guess we’re supposed to be. That’s the current time on the Doomsday Clock, which was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a group of University of Chicago scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to help develop the world’s first atomic weapons. “Midnight” is when the world ends, or at least life as we know it ceases…

THIS IS A BIT UNCOMFORTABLE. I am going to laud the performance of a professional politician. And in full disclosure, he is a longtime friend to some of us here. Nonetheless, it has to be don Close observers of the political scene have noticed something different about Jim Banks. Unlike the rest of Indiana’s congressional delegation, his emails and posts actually include useful information independent of any political aspirations, indeed some of it counter to that. It is…