There was more, more, just inside the door In the store, in the store. There was more, much more, just inside the door In the corner grocery store. — Raffi, “The Corner Grocery Store Song” He was what we once called an ordinary American, a poor man’s capitalist growing up in an iconic corner grocery where his mother managed the cash register in front, his dad cut meat in back and he and his sister…

For release Feb. 1 and thereafter. (678 words) Merriam-Webster defines wishful thinking as “the attribution of reality to what one wishes to be true or the tenuous justification of what one wants to believe.” It’s an apt description for folks clamoring to spend hundreds of millions on a Central Indiana mass-transit plan. We can pump in more money, create faster bus routes, build a commuter rail system and construct a light rail line. But the…

Listening to our officeholders, insecure to the point of panic, make their recurrent promises to “fight” for us, I realize that my annual Veteran’s Day column is two months late. The date always slips by me, the holiday being understated to the point of ephemera in my politically correct corner of suburbia. That’s not entirely true. I always get a “Happy Veterans’ Day” from my wife and children, which brings a near tear and is…

Watching Gov. Mitch Daniels last night deliver his response to the State of the Union, the mind jumped ahead to Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012. The hunches of my wife and my optometrist have proved out. Barack Obama has won reelection. How, though, did it happen? In a column written after the South Carolina primary, Pat Buchanan had predicted a replay of 1964 and the San Francisco Cow Palace — a wonderful message but a horrible…

For immediate release (587 words) Here is an exercise in junior-high math. It takes 100 workers 100 days to make a locomotive. The workers are paid $100 per day. What are the labor costs of the locomotive? Answer:  $1 million. Here is a more advanced problem. Suppose another set of workers are paid $200 a day. Construct a story where it is actually cheaper to use the high-wage workers to make the locomotive. Easy. If…

For immediate release (678 words with optional cuts) “The truth? You can’t handle the truth.” — Jack Nicholson as Marine Col. Nathan Jessup on the witness stand in “A Few Good Men.” Perhaps politicians believe we can’t “handle the truth” about the costs of building and public works projects. They rarely put all the facts and figures on the table from the start. We are forced into the role of cynics, negativists and obstructionists, suspecting…

We have been looking for something on the front page of our morning newspaper. It is a headline, a story, that is journalism’s equivalent of the archaeology’s “Cambrian explosion” — a point of view that accounts for all points of view. We have dug deep but have come up empty even though our search has expanded to the newspaper’s web pages. It has become a game played with increasing seriousness over our morning cup of…

For release Jan. 18 and thereafter (670 words) Purdue University’s decision to convert to a year-round trimester system is good for students, good for parents and long-run will be good for taxpayers. The only downside is that it may take 10 years to fully implement. Other state universities should take note. Few taxpayer resources are wasted as egregiously as university campuses in summer. It makes no sense to idle dormitories, classrooms and laboratories when there’s…

State Rep. Jeff Espich Chairman, Appropriations Committee The Indiana Statehouse Dear Chairman Espich: Ellen DeGeneres had a funny bit ready for her acceptance speech at last night’s People’s Choice Awards. She read from a list of “peoples” that she expressly wanted to “un-thank” — a nasty letter-writer from Topeka, Kan., a fourth-grade detractor on her school bus (“you know who you are”). It is time to apply this perverse thinking to your House committee, Representative…

For immediate release (659 words). Goldberg, Rube (1883–1970) U.S. cartoonist; creator of the comic strip character Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts (an inventor of complex mechanical devices to achieve simple tasks). It wasn’t mentioned in his State of the State message, but Gov. Daniels will leave for his successor a frustratingly complex and under-performing pension-management system. That is so even though at first glance the contents of the 2011 annual reports issued by the Indiana Public…