by Leo Morris Her name was Judy – no point in making up a protect-her-privacy name for her at this point. She was a year behind me in high school – a junior when I was a senior – so our paths did not cross that often. But a few subjects were taught without regard to class distinction, so we had the same speech class. It’s not enough to say she was pretty. To a…

“This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” — the character Jackie Brown in the 1971 novel “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” by George Higgins. IF YOU WANT your Indiana city to prosper these next few years, there is something you can do. Write your councilman, your party chairman, the prosecuting attorney or anyone else you deem in charge. Tell them you don’t want to be treated “equally.”  Wait, don’t get upset, the word no longer…

by Mark Franke When did we as Americans plunge into the abyss of demonizing everyone with whom we disagree? It wasn’t this way for the first 30 years of my life. Some of the most fulfilling times of my undergraduate days were spent debating philosophy, religion and politics with friends of what was then the left wing. At least that beat spending time at the library. We would fight it out at student government meetings and then…

by Margaret Menge The question of who owns voting machines and the software they run on has resurfaced since the Nov. 3 election with the Trump campaign pointing fingers at Smartmatic, which was started by three Venezuelans. One company that has escaped scrutiny thus far is Hart InterCivic, the third-largest maker of voting machines in the United States, which makes the voting machines used in seven Indiana counties: Cass, Gibson, Harrison, Monroe, Ohio, Washington and Wayne,…

by Leo Morris It’s such a perfect little story to illustrate this awful, awful year of the pandemic, cities overtaken by anarchy and an election from hell. A deer jumped through a window into an empty classroom at Blackhawk Middle School in Fort Wayne. After trashing the room for 45 minutes, the deer jumped back through the window and ran away. Spokeswoman Krista Stockman said that while the situation was surprising, “it’s 2020.” It’s 2020.…

THE INDIANA GOP is celebrating that the Party’s Black and Hispanic vote increased slightly Nov. 3. The leadership, however, might have stopped patting itself on the back long enough to join a lawsuit seeking to ensure that those Black and Hispanic votes will matter. Indiana was not among 10 states that filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn a partisan ruling that extended the deadline for mail-in ballots.  Neighboring Kentucky gets it. “What happens in other states…

by Leo Morris I’m taking a break from brooding over the latest COVID-19 surge and cursing the chaos of the presidential race so I can properly mourn the passing of longtime “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek. And, of course, obsess over who will be chosen to replace him. “Please, please, please,” I texted my sister (and she replied to concur), “don’t let it be Ken Jennings.” I wouldn’t say my sister and I are fanatics of…

by Leo Morris After Joe Biden was projected the winner of the presidential election, I read many variations of this sentiment, written by Frank Rich in New York Magazine: “The good news that comes with the potential Biden presidency is that there will be an honest and decent man in the White House, buttressed by a professional and at least nominally bipartisan triage team, who will try to undo the damage.  “. . . Most of…

TO BE CLEAR, the concern here is with Hoosier Republican representation, and the most conservative of it at that. Modern Democrats can be assumed to be venal, and Joe Biden, who has proclaimed himself president, is as good an example as you will find. But in Indiana, the land of the ever-so-conservatively postured Dan Coats and Eric Holcomb, there is no shortage of Republicans who claim to be “fighting” for our liberty and against the Bidens of the world. Indeed,…

WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS in the hands of lawyers and partisan election officials we have the time to ponder the relative silence of the Hoosier congressional delegation, our direct and only line to Washington. In that regard, consider this, a statement on the week’s events from Claremont’s the American Mind: “If Republicans let this happen without pushing to ensure all applicable laws were and are now being followed they can forget about winning contested states and therefore…