Thus far, the saddest bill proposed in the General Assembly allows Hoosier local governments to seek bankruptcy and management by a state-appointed agent. This bill is a back-door confession that the state’s 30-year war on local governments has succeeded.
I am a product of the public school system in Fort Wayne. Not charter schools. Not parochial schools. Not private schools. Not home schooling.
I love it because it I allow it to suck me in like a farm kind seeing the big-city lights for the first time. I loathe it because it is becoming too much like the NFL.
I’m sure we’ll get used to having a speaker of the House who weeps a lot. That would be John Boehner, the new guy.
Over the past three years, American politics has been dominated by a liberal fantasy and a conservative freakout.
Given where we are, the tax-cut deal with the Republicans was the best President Barack Obama could do since raising taxes in a recession would not have been a good idea and the Republicans had the votes to prevent it.
Former President Jimmy Carter is putting the out in outspokenness.
As a one-time NFL lawyer who has closely followed sports labor relations for 35 years, I am often asked about the chances of Indianapolis’ losing the 2012 Super Bowl.
When the Indiana General Assembly reconvened earlier this month, legislators were greeted by a huge cadre of lobbyists all wanting the same thing: their attention and support for whatever issue the lobbyist is pushing.
The real gift in the 2010 election is that the Republican landslide was nationwide and resulted in Republican majorities in legislatures all over the country. Why was this so important? It’s map-drawing time.
Democrats couldn’t get away from Barack Obama during the 2010 election cycle. The national mood fueled by frustration over high unemployment and the continued recession, along with opposition to health care reform, carried their opponents into office.
Many voters I talked with wanted to send a wakeup call to politicians of both parties that they should heed the words of Jim Carville to then-candidate Bill Clinton in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Wayne Seybold is well-known as an Olympic ice skater. He is also earning a reputation as an innovative two-term mayor of his hometown of Marion. But few Hoosiers are aware of his role as global trade warrior.
Recent reform measures—aimed at blaming teachers’ unions for all that ails public schools—claim that negotiated agreements are a large part of student achievement problems. Yet research shows that Indiana students fare better in school corporations where teachers have the right to collectively bargain.
Too often, teacher contracts have put the interests of adults above the interests of students. Adults have all the power.
Gov. Mitch Daniels’ upcoming State of the State speech will be the seventh time he has addressed a joint session of the General Assembly, and it’s likely the one that will define his mark on Indiana for years to come.
You can’t successfully govern Indiana with a divide-and-conquer approach. We’re nice people, and we don’t like to be yelled at.
The root of Mitch Daniels’ success can be boiled down to an adherence to three simple concepts: lower taxes, a smaller government and more personal freedom.
If you voted for any Marion County judges in the last several years, you wasted your time. And the county wasted whatever it costs to put the judicial candidates on the ballot.
In the next 10 to 20 years, it will be impossible to tout our region as a world-class center of innovation and entrepreneurship without meaningfully addressing transit.
