by T. Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. In discussions of international trade, the pervasive mindset is that exports are a positive entry in a country’s “economic well-being” ledger, while imports are a negative entry in the ledger. In other words, exports are intrinsically “good” and imports intrinsically “bad.” Who hasn’t heard that imports “destroy” jobs while exports “create” jobs? Likewise for imports being “dumped” on Americans. Ditto for imports being likened to “invading foreign armies.” In…

by Leo Morris Earlier this month, I came across this Tweet from a liberalish Lafayette attorney whose blog I have followed for a few years: “I didn’t watch the Senate debate. I do know that Trump is an incessant liar with bad ideas. Joe Donnelly will vote against him sometimes & Mike Braun never will. No need to get into the weeds on this one.” That sounds curiously similar to my reasoning in the presidential…

by John F. Gaski, Ph.D. “There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear . . .” — Buffalo Springfield, 1967  Or maybe it is clear. The Buffalo Springfield observation may not be so applicable half a century later.  Every major leftist movement the world has ever seen has been brutally totalitarian by nature. Occasionally this degree of extremism arises elsewhere along the ideological spectrum, such as the current phenomenon of Islamo-fascism, but…

by Leo Morris For a free society to function properly, its citizens must have an ongoing conversation about the important issues of the day. And that conversation must be rational and fact-based if citizens are to continue giving their informed consent to be governed. That is the vital role of the press. Its duty is to identify public challenges and opportunities and supply all the facts that can be mustered to serve the necessary debates…

by Mark Franke Now that we are finally past the hyperbole, embarrassment and downright nastiness of the Kavanaugh confirmation in what used to be the venerable U. S. Senate, perhaps we can step back and take a dispassionate review of why this was so important. First, let’s look at the results of several opinion polls that came out during the debate. Most showed that Brett Kavanaugh had the lowest positive numbers in history, well below…

IT WAS the briefest of things. The viewer thought about pinching himself to see whether it had been a dream, a particularly sweet one. The referees had stopped play during the Monday Night game, and it wasn’t to penalize one or another of the teams for a violation of an inscrutable pass-interference rule. Nor was it for one of the commercial breaks that stretches 11 minutes of actual play action into more than three hours of…

by Leo Morris No matter how old I get, I seem to keep finding opportunities to appreciate all the challenges my parents faced in their lives. A few years ago, for example, I learned from my sister that the family trip to the Fort Wayne airport to put me on the plane to Vietnam was not entirely the sedate, ordinary occasion I remember. After I departed, the car stayed in the parking lot for several…

by Mark Franke I suffer from nostalgia, a psychosis for which there is no known cure. My specter is the 1950s, the decade of my childhood. Other than my rose-colored memories, growing dimmer by the year, I see today only the remnants of that best of all times. Fairs are one of them. I grew up in southern Allen County at a time when the Bluffton Street Fair in Wells County was one of the…

by Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. Suppose you live and work in Indianapolis. Your employer informs you that it wants to transfer you to San Francisco. One of your first concerns is likely to be: “Hey, what about my salary? The cost of living is really high out there, isn’t it?” Anticipating such a reaction, your boss assures you that your salary will be bumped up based on the difference in your cost of living for…

by Leo Morris I write these columns a week ahead of time. There is a selfish reason for that practice – always having a column in the bank means I don’t have deadline panic every time I sit down at the keyboard. But there is also a beneficial effect, I think. The delay forces me to look beyond the unfolding updates of developing stories and at least try to find something more meaningful to say.…