by Leo Morris I noticed in a couple of recent news reports that Indiana has been made safe again for the bald eagle, which is a simple piece of good news worth celebrating in this era riven by an angry partisan divide and political revenge disguised as a plea for unity. The eagle, a bird that nests exclusively in North America, was once plentiful but nearly extinct nationwide by the mid-20th century and nowhere to be…

HERE IS A PROPOSAL to help bring us back together after this week’s bizarre inauguration. It involves restraint and precision in the use of our words, something that George Orwell encouraged in his “Politics and the English Language.” “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,”…

by Leo Morris There will come a day of reckoning. No matter how often that is said about the reckless abandon with which Washington keeps adding to the national debt, officials keep printing and borrowing so they can keep spending money they do not have. And they will keep doing it until Stein’s Law kicks in: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And it’s likely to be an abrupt stop, a horrendous…

INDIANA SEN. TODD YOUNG in a widely circulated column this week unpacked some Lincolnesque but tired bromides on his way to addressing the calamity that is America. We are not enemies but friends and fellow Americans, he instructs. That and we should do less shouting and more listening. The senator’s little homily, though, hid a personal concern, one to be examined in a moment. First, we may indeed all be “Americans” in an ever-expanding sense of citizenship or in the halcyon vision of a speech writer. But there…

by Leo Morris I participated in a PBS TV show last week – three General Assembly watchers and a host doing our annual legislative preview session – and it was a little unsettling. Because of the pandemic, only two participants were in-studio – properly distanced, of course – and two of us chimed in remotely via teleconferencing. The video I saw of the others in their little Zoom computer windows was live, but the sound…

“There is nothing that will give power to the (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) to require hiring, firing and promotion to meet a racial ‘quota.”’ — Sen. Hubert Humphrey in promising that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would lead only to nondiscrimination and not to social engineering.  INDIANA COMPANIES that want to be listed on at least one of the New York stock exchanges will want to check the chromosome arrangements and melanin levels in their board rooms. East Coast lunacy is…

by Mark Franke Dark. Depressing. Frightening. These are just a few of the adjectives people are using to describe 2020 as it passes into a bad memory for all of us. Most, though, will follow with a more positive statement about what 2021 is expected to bring. Perhaps this incipient optimism reflects the rolling out of a vaccine which we all hope will be effective at a nearly 100 percent rate. Or maybe it is just…

by Leo Morris I apologize, but this is the time of year when I must do my annual beating-a-dead-horse ritual of imploring the Indiana General Assembly to go to every-other-year sessions. The so-called “short” session was originally supposed to just involve a brief review of potential problems in the two-year budget. But it has become as active as the long session, so Hoosiers get twice the new government initiatives, which means twice the bureaucracy, twice…

by Mark Franke I am not going to resolve in 2021 to exercise more or lose weight. Sure, I need to do both those things and will work on them, but I won’t take the cheap way out and declare them to be my New Year resolutions. They are too easy to make and even easier to break. Rather, I am looking inward at my character and resolve to focus on those positive aspects which ought…

ALTHOUGH THE DEBATE is over as to whether equality should be “of opportunity” or “of results” (we lost), there are doubts that still nag. The bullet points below reflect our random thoughts denying the winning side’s promise of a better society: • There is a rise of diversity “officers” at every level from elementary school to university. We are told that the school board of prestigious Park Tudor in Indianapolis hired one even though the school is 20 percent “minority.”…