Local Opinion

As someone with libertarian instincts, I’ve always considered traffic regulations to be the quintessence of the law’s potential.

I hadn’t planned to write about health care today, but as I sat at at the keyboard, the strain of the last two weeks kicked in: the doctors, the tests, the waiting, the nurses, the hospital, the lack of sleep.

As they reached the halfway point of the 2023 legislative session, the members of the Indiana General Assembly made their priorities clear.

It’s been more than a decade since two boys high school basketball teams in our area advanced to the Indiana High School Athletic Association regionals during the same season. Columbus North and Jennings County both broke long sectional droughts to bring fans titles.

From: Jim Daube, Indiana American Legion Department Commander

If you are a parent, I’m sure you have had the experience of seeing your child laying on the ground crying hysterically over what appears to be nothing. “Show me where it hurts,” is often the command that most effectively breaks through the noise. Amazingly, more often than not, nothing hurts at all.

We have to give the Indiana General Assembly credit for trying to do the right thing and eliminate school textbook fees. Doing so would provide a little relief to parents having to stretch their dollars these days, and it also would relieve some bookkeeping and collection headaches for local schools.

To hear our local lawmakers, you’d think they were school librarians’ pals for backing a law that could put them in jail for doing their jobs. It’s as if they haven’t read a bill they support.

Iowa in 1976 was a different time. An obscure former governor from Georgia was attracting a tiny fraction of the crowd when he dropped into Jim Albright’s house in Cedar Rapids two months before the 1976 Iowa caucuses. He wore the kind of fat tie that hasn’t been fashionable for decades and a bright Ipana smile that even then seemed a trifle unsettling, and repeated that performance — small groups, big smile — with remarks that were refreshing in the wake of the Watergate scandal but seem irredeemably treacly today.

I really love it when a philanthropic initiative quietly comes full circle and creates something good that may not even be known or understood by the people who are impacted! We have a local example of that full circle to celebrate.