Someone got through the website and spammed ads for various products. From what I can tell, the products were footwear and nothing related to a fetish.
Added by Mark Small on August 29, 2014 at 2:18pm — No Comments
One could say I was “wired” to be a lawyer.
When I was five ro six I watched television shows about trials. “Perry Mason” seemed like a joke, relative to law. Other shows seemed more realistic. When high-profile cases took place, with their sketch-artists’ renditions of that day’s events—the trial of the Chicago Eight, then Seven, is a good example—I listened to the details.
When I shopped for colleges, I did so largely with the idea of a major that would feed into law…
Added by Mark Small on August 23, 2014 at 6:23am — No Comments
What would the city and people of Indianapolis do without the Colts® and the Pacers®?
The past couple of months I have expressed paranoia about those franchises’ owners. If they detect any “spare” change rattling about in the City’s coffers, there appears a new need for monies for one or another of the teams.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has been shown the books of YOUR Indiana Pacers®. The Pacers® had built for them a new arena in 1999, now called Bankers Life® …
Added by Mark Small on August 20, 2014 at 6:28am — 1 Comment
In the early 1960s, Indianapolis had more than one daily newspaper. Writers from the Indianapolis Times won a few Pulitzers before the paper shut down in 1965. The Indianapolis Star was a decent paper, although very conservative for my tastes. Still, the reporters covered local stories well, and tried to act as a check on local corruption and local politicians. The sports section was pretty good, too. On Sundays that section was thick with good coverage of major sports and, each May, the…
ContinueAdded by Mark Small on August 19, 2014 at 6:48am — No Comments
The indictment of Texas Governor Rick Perry is as woeful as Congressional Republicans’ threat of a lawsuit against President Obama. At first I wrote “silly,” but changed the adjective, because the criminal action in Texas and the civil action in (presumably) a United States District Court waste public resources and open balance-of-powers questions to litigation.
First, a word about the Texas situation. I do not like Governor Perry. I consider myself to be left-wing, if that term…
Added by Mark Small on August 18, 2014 at 6:25am — No Comments
Sorry, Mayor Gregory "I've Never Met a Tax Raise I Couldn't Okay or a Well-connected Donor I Couldn't Benefit" Ballard and his coterie of campaign contributors will not be on Civil Discourse Now. Instead, two guests today have studied the cronyism that is YOUR Indianapolis city political system for several years.
Pat Andrews, who blogs at “Had Enough Indy?” and Gary Welsh, of “Advance Indiana” will be our guests when we stream live today from The Sinking Ship, 4923 North…
ContinueAdded by Mark Small on August 16, 2014 at 5:30am — No Comments
I was wakened about 3 a.m. The voice came from the kitchen. I rose, closed the bedroom door quietly behind me, and started to reach for the wall switch. Simultaneously I noticed a strange glow of sufficient strength to find my way, and a voice hiss, “Lights stay out.”
The latter annoyed me. “This is my house.”
“Not while Hizzoner’s in it, it ain’t,” the voice hissed in a familiar accent.
In May I wrote about a seance I had arranged. With corruption so rife in…
Added by Mark Small on August 14, 2014 at 6:02am — No Comments
Apparently Mayor Ballard, before he leaves office, wants to commit Indianapolis to as many long-term leases—if he cannot sell City assets cheap—as possible. His latest contract is with a New Jersey waste management corporation—we neither make these things up nor need to make them up. Okay, so the fictional Tony Soprano ran a waste management company in “The Sopranos.” Tony was an environmental sort of guy.
The pitch of Covanta, the company in question, is that they turn waste into…
Added by Mark Small on August 5, 2014 at 6:09am — 1 Comment
The column was below the fold, but still on page one of Sunday’s edition of what was a fairly good newspaper. The Indianapolis Star consists of a lot of ads (to make money in a time when many people read the stories the day before on the internet the paper prints the next day; such is technology), sections provided by McNew a/k/a USA Today, a few good articles, and, well, the rest.
Matthew Tully did not disappoint (if one anticipated he would provide his usual contribution to “the…
Added by Mark Small on August 4, 2014 at 6:30am — No Comments
Indianapolis needs a new building for its courts, jail, and police.
The Ballard administration has floated an idea. The City pays for construction, then hands over the keys to a foreign conglomerate and pays rent to that new landlord.
Wait—why would be build a structure, give the structure away (i.e., “sell” it for an absurdly low price), and pay rent to the entity to which it was given?
Here are possible reasons:
1) The entity that will charge rent and make…
Added by Mark Small on August 3, 2014 at 6:26am — No Comments
On “Property Lines” at the IBJ, a blog by Scott Olson announced: “A local developer plans to build a five-story office building on the site of a closed American Legion post in Broad Ripple. At 85 feet, the ambitious project would be the tallest in the village, even topping by 10 feet Browning Investment, Inc.’s proposed retail-and-apartment development on College Avenue near the Central Canal.”
Olson continues: “The Broad Ripple Village Association’s [BRVA] land-use and…
Added by Mark Small on August 1, 2014 at 6:16am — 1 Comment
Republican candidate for the United States Senate in Iowa, Joni Ernst—who has run a TV ad in which she fires a handgun in a practice range, a metaphor on how “tough” she would be if elected—has been the subject of a story on The Daily Beast. There the candidate was shown speaing on September 13, 2013, at “a forum held by the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition” in which Ernst said, among other things, Congress should not pass laws “that the states would consider nullifying” and “we’ve…
ContinueAdded by Mark Small on July 30, 2014 at 6:10am — No Comments
Matthew Tully’s column in the Sunday edition of the shell of the former Indianapolis Star depressed me.
I was not depressed about his recitation of aspects of crime in Broad Ripple. I have been depressed about crime here for a while. His reference to a person’s smartphone app showing red over the Broad Ripple area—“indicating [Broad Ripple’]s depressing crime statistics. That, he said, is what potential home buyers will see”—did not surprise me. Crime has been on the uprise…
Added by Mark Small on July 28, 2014 at 6:30am — 1 Comment
Today’s Show will stream from Perk Up, 6536 Cornell Avenue, in Broad Ripple. We shall discuss whether there should be a constitutional convention, and the impact were such a convention to be held. Fellow host Matt Stone and I welcome three guest panelists for this conversation.
Paul Mannweiler is former speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives. He received his bachelor’s degree from IU and his JD from Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis. He has written a couple of…
Added by Mark Small on July 26, 2014 at 6:16am — No Comments
People want simple solutions to complex problems. Simple solutions reassure. If solutions are too complex, people lost interest.
Ignorance tends to instill fear. Fear can lead to violence.
People speak of the “Founders” of this country, and oftentimes use “Founders” to refer to the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia. I disagree with application of “Founders” to the convention delegates. A “founder” is one who “founds or establishes.” The…
Added by Mark Small on July 25, 2014 at 6:31am — No Comments
On Saturday, July 23, we shall, from 11 am to 1 pm, discuss the idea advanced by some today to hold a constitutional convention, under Article V of the Constitution.
What type of document would such a convention today produce, as compared to the document produced by the Framers in 1787.
For a document that established the structure of our government, the Constitution is short, even with the Bill of Rights, adopted after the Convention, are added.
Could today’s…
Added by Mark Small on July 23, 2014 at 6:07am — No Comments
A gentleman knocked on the side door this evening. He had a padded sort of clipboard in one hand, wore a shirt with a patch of a logo for "Protection One." He said "we" are following up on Broad Ripple residents, like me, who had attended a meeting last spring and who expressed satisfaction with our home security systems. He asked if my name is Mark, if our home security system was the same as the decals in our windows, and if we are satisfied with our home system. I told him our security…
ContinueAdded by Mark Small on July 22, 2014 at 9:05pm — No Comments
In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson made a strong case that the Soviet Union had placed intermediate-range ballistic missiles—with ranges sufficient to hit targets, such as New York City and Washington, D.C.—in Cuba. The Ambassador used photographs taken from U-2 spy planes to show what was on an island only 90 miles or so from the tip of Florida. In regard to a response from the Soviet Union’s ambassador, Stevenson…
ContinueAdded by Mark Small on July 21, 2014 at 6:18am — No Comments
In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson made a strong case that the Soviet Union had placed intermediate-range ballistic missiles—with ranges sufficient to hit targets, such as New York City and Washington, D.C.—in Cuba. The Ambassador used photographs taken from U-2 spy planes to show what was on an island only 90 miles or so from the tip of Florida. In regard to a response from the Soviet Union’s ambassador, Stevenson…
ContinueAdded by Mark Small on July 21, 2014 at 6:18am — No Comments
Big studio movies—films that play in cineplexes and were produced with big budgets—are the primary fare for moviegoers. Four of the top five films at the box office last week make on shudder at the level of intellectual content of such works. First was “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.” The first part of the original string of “Planet of the Apes” films, with Charlton (“Get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape—and you can take away my gun when you pry off the fingers of my cold dead…
ContinueAdded by Mark Small on July 18, 2014 at 6:17am — No Comments
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