With Mike Pence seemingly convinced that he's going to personally save the Republican Party, it's worth remembering some of the reasons that the Republican Party was summarily rejected by voters last year.
All of this excitement at the legislature, and we're not even in an election year.
Kind of makes you wonder what next year will be like, eh?
One hint of what's to come can be found in the statements made by Governor Mitch Daniels yesterday, as he seemed to lay the groundwork for a renewed fight over local government reform.
"I hope we make more forward progress next year," he said. "We'll be back with local government reform."
It wasn't clear whether Daniels would back the same proposals he pushed this year, many of which came under intense fire from legislators in both parties.
"We'll have to talk about exactly which aspects, and visit with proponents, visit with adversaries, see if we can find a way to move forward there," he said.
With portions of the Guv's plan consisting of consolidating rural school districts and dismantling traditional local government, it remains to be seen whether Daniels can improve on his horrid track record of marketing these reforms across the state. He faced just as much criticism from the right as anywhere else this year, and winning over rural conservatives may be the biggest hurdle of all.
State Sen. Marlin Stutzman is currently the only Republican candidate in the not-so-crowded field looking to take on Senator Evan Bayh next year. And if the fundraising pitch he made via email last night is any indication, he's going to be fun to watch over the next year or so.
Here are some of my favorite snippets:
Senator Bayh's votes for the banking bailout, against the nomination of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts from Indiana, and other votes, are the most recent, in a long list of signs that he has been out of touch with real Hoosier values for too long
You're leading off with a vote against John Roberts? I would ask how many people still care about that vote, but the more appropriate question is whether anyone ever did.
The future of our beloved nation is at stake, and there are those who are willing to bankrupt our nation by using broken socialistic policies, instead of using the proven American principles that have made us the greatest nation on earth.
Little known fact: if you say "socialistic" three times fast and click your heals...nothing actually happens. But you were going to sound like an absolute idiot saying it once, so why not go all out?
For God and Country,
Marlin Stutzman
Best. Ending. Ever.
Marlin Stutzman is like the crazy uncle who everyone loves. You wouldn't trust the guy to take your dog for a walk, but he guarantees at least one decent story out of the holiday get-togethers.
My favorite part of the fledgling Stutzman campaign isn't his hilariously cartoonish rhetoric, though. No, the best addition to this total package of wackiness has to be the campaign logo, which as near as I can tell, is a not-so-subtle allusion to one of those "socialistic" figureheads we've been hearing so much about.
President of what, you ask? Yeah, he's just that delusional:
Indiana Republican Mike Pence, a rising leader in the U.S. House who has been mentioned as a presidential prospect, plans to visit Iowa on July 24, state GOP leaders said Monday.
Pence is the House Republican Conference chairman, the third-ranking member of the minority caucus. He plans to visit the Cedar Rapids area, although details of his schedule have not been announced.
As I noted to the person who sent this story my way, who other than Mike Pence has been mentioning Mike Pence as a presidential candidate?
With the news of a budget compromise came news of an apparently agreed-upon fix for the fiscal woes of the Capitol Improvement Board. And once again, it looks like Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard didn't get anything he wanted.
State lawmakers late Monday ignored Mayor Greg Ballard's calls for fewer spending cuts for the Capital Improvement Board and granted him only one of the three tax increases he sought this year to plug the agency's projected $47 million deficit.
[...]
Ballard initially endorsed Daniels' plan but changed his mind last week, saying that after the city "dug deeper" into the CIB's spending, he was "uncomfortable" with how deep those cuts were. Instead, he proposed $12 million in spending reductions, including the $10 million already identified by the CIB.
Robert Vane, Ballard's deputy chief of staff, declined comment late Monday, saying his office would not address the issue until after a final vote on the proposal.
Ballard has changed his mind roughly two-hundred times since this process began, taking the interesting strategy of simply agreeing with every single idea floated, one after the other. I think Vane may finally be on to something by just keeping the guy locked in his office, especially now that it appears the Mayor's Office has absolutely no political capital left at the Statehouse.
It's really unbelievable how little power Ballard now has in these negotiations. It certainly wouldn't be unusual if he were the mayor of some small town across the state, but as the chief executive of Indiana's largest city, you'd think he'd be able to at least have his presence be felt in the process.
With all parties involve striking a positive tone on the likelihood of an afternoon or early evening vote on the so-called compromise budget proposal, details have emerged on the major concessions both sides offered up to get a workable deal on the table. Niki Kelly of the Journal Gazettefills us in.
Senate Appropriations Chairman Luke Kenley, R-Noblesville, said the two sides agreed to put an additional $54 million into the school funding formula by cutting it elsewhere in the budget.
[...]
The budget also contains some important education policy decisions, and they generally lean to the GOP side.
For instance, there will be no cap on charter school growth as Democrats sought; there will be a small pilot program for online virtual charter schools and there will be a scholarship tax credit for those who donate to private school scholarships, though it was cut to $2.5 million a year.
Bauer and Kenley said higher education would see state operating cuts but would be authorized to use federal stimulus dollars to make up the difference.
And the compromise contains debt service for $333 million worth of new higher education capital projects - an effort House Democrats pushed as a way to create jobs for the struggling economy.
The school funding increases amount to roughly 1% the first year and 0.3% the second year.
Expect to see only a few Democrats join in voting for this budget, with the vast majority opposing the bill due to the inescapable budget cuts that will be forced upon many school districts across the state.
This time we get a story from Jeff Parrott of the South Bend Tribune, who looks at the potential candidacy of city controller Catherine Fanello.
Fanello, a Democrat who was a Vanderburgh County commissioner from 2001 through 2004, said she is considering a run for secretary of state, an office now held by Republican Todd Rokita. The office next comes up for election in November 2010, but Rokita is barred from running again because of the two-term limit.
"It's something that does interest me because I do appreciate fair and accurate elections, and I want to make sure we continue to have fair and accurate elections," Fanello said.
Establishing the committee lets her start to raise and spend money to weigh her potential for winning the office.
Two other candidates named in the article are Tom McKenna, a deputy chief of staff under Gov. Joe Kernan and former executive director of the Indiana Department of Commerce, and Vop Osili, an Indianapolis architect.
The House gaveled in for just a few moments earlier, and will be in recess until six-o-clock while caucuses commence and negotiations continue behind closed doors. For as dark and dreary as reports were over the weekend, today's slow leak of information seems positively cheery.
Legislators have agreed on the parameters of a new state budget but are still negotiating over the details, including how to fund K-12 education.
House Speaker B. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, said there is tentative agreement on a two-year budget which preserves $1 billion in state reserves. Democrats earlier had wanted only a one-year budget and had pushed for more of the state's bank account to be spent on current needs.
Bauer called the progress "slow." It is, he said, "one slug at a time, one punch at a time."
Senate Republican Luke Kenley also took a cautiously optimistic tone about a compromise bill. Expect a mad rush tonight to finalize details and print a proposal, if one emerges later this afternoon.
Via South Bend Tribune columnist Jack Colwell, we get his take on state treasurer Richard Mourdock:
Alas, that Hoosier politician who is a real clunker when it comes to saving automotive jobs can't be junked in the program. The clunker is Indiana's state treasurer, Richard Mourdock.
Both Donnelly and Upton point out that the treasurer's effort to kill the bankruptcy transaction that is bringing back Chrysler jobs could have led instead to liquidation of Chrysler - and also of General Motors, if the U.S. Supreme Court had agreed with the politically-motivated Mourdock attack on the Obama administration's efforts to keep Chrysler and GM in business.
Luckily, the inefficient clunker crashed in the Supreme Court. Mourdock's strange logic, through which Hoosier investors he sought to represent would have ended up with less money in liquidation than through the bankruptcy transaction, didn't prevail.
Mourdock, for his part, is talking about launching a new lawsuit against the federal government, potentially wasting millions more on his personal political whims.
Mitch Roob helped push the "modernization" of our Family and Social Services Administration, funneling millions toward the company he worked for prior to joining Mitch Daniels' team. After months of struggle and failure, he was promoted by the Guv to his current position as the head of Indiana's Economic Development Corporation.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same:
"If you want to give up your jobs to save polar bears, go ahead," said Indiana Secretary of Commerce Mitch Roob.
That's in response to the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which Roob said would "kill" all of Eastern Indiana. Yep, kill it dead.
I understand the opinions of those who are fearful of the immediate effect this legislation could have, and I don't fault the 'no' votes we've seen on both sides of the aisle. What I will say, though, is that President Bill Clinton's comments on the subject last weekend should give hope to those who see nothing but doom-and-gloom in climate change reform.
The number one thing we can do for all of you here in the construction business, for the money we have to spend on it, would be to retrofit every building in the country, starting with Indiana -- every public building, every school, every hospital, and then going down to all of the homes.
I think we ought to use our contacts with utilities to do this. But only two or three states permit the utilities to help finance it and banks have been reluctant to do it. I do this work all around the world, not just the Empire State Building. We're doing 660 elementary schools in Paris, France. And were working on it in lots of other places; we just announced 16 developments in 10 cities that are all private sector developments, all making money, commercial, residential, and mixed use. Every single one of them will produce more clean energy than it uses.
Don't tell me this can't be done. This would mobilize America for prosperity and manufacturing growth as nothing has since we mobilized for World War II and this time we don't have to kill anybody to bring America's economy back. This is what we ought to do.
Make no mistakes: the shutdown of our state government is not an issue to be taken lightly or brushed off as irrelevant. It would have a huge impact on the lives of thousands across the state, and send the political atmosphere in Indiana toward total toxicity.
That being said, am I the only one a little disgusted to see Governor Mitch Daniels touring the state with blame-fingers pointing wildly at Democrats while legislators continue to work out a budget proposal?
While Daniels warned of the consequences of not passing a budget, Bauer warned of the consequences of passing the wrong budget.
"Voting for the Senate's budget means the Indiana House supports closing classrooms and cutting jobs. I cannot support such a thing, and I am pretty sure that those sentiments are shared by many lawmakers," Bauer said in a statement.
Besides, he added, "we have time to get our work done."
One of the Senate's key fiscal leaders, Sen. Luke Kenley, R-Noblesville, said Friday he thinks legislators will pass a budget before their deadline.
Meanwhile, Daniels has seemed content to vilify House Democrats, apparently removed from the ongoing debate where the calm voice of mature leadership would probably be useful.
Oh, and he's taken to calling the Republican budget the "Senate Compromise."
Because nothing makes compromise easier than when the "compromise" is your idea, wholesale.
I went looking for the definitive statement on where Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard stands over the controversial bail-out of the city's Capitol Improvement Board. Thirty minutes later, I was so dizzy I had to sit down.
As it stands, Greg Ballard has managed to turn one of the most visible, powerful public offices in the state into one of the weakest, most irrelevant positions of power we've ever seen. He appears happy to simply agree with the last person who snags his ear, and the result has been a tragically hilarious array of positions of the CIB fix.
Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard told state lawmakers Friday that deep budget cuts suggested by Gov. Mitch Daniels won't work and that additional taxes and new fees are needed to bail out the financially ailing Capital Improvement Board.
Ballard's latest in a series of several proposals was a marked reversal from a plan he endorsed with Daniels three weeks ago.
[...]
"We really appreciate the governor's help; but as we dug deeper into the numbers, we thought we were left a little bit at risk," Ballard said. "We don't want to be back here in 2011 asking for more money."
(Read: You told us this was a good deal, but when my numbers guy went and looked at it the other day, we figured out you were fibbing!)
This just weeks after standing behind a podium nodding while Governor Mitch Daniels declared he would be seizing the CIB and claiming it as his own.
And just weeks after Ballard himself went to the Statehouse and declared he had a fix.
I'm not certain, but there has to be something about "clinical indecision" in the ol' Ballard Rules.
There's a lot going on right now in the state and elsewhere. Some say the General Assembly is hurtling toward a government shutdown. I've seen snippets from the latest Indiana Legislative Insight -- a really indispensable publication -- and Ed Feigenbaum seems to be striking a more hopeful tone.
Regardless, there certainly are a lot of unknowns.
On top of that, Mark Sanford looks to have been somewhat bailed out by the untimely death of Michael Jackson. The national leaders of the Republican Party are heading back to the drawing board in search of the newest new voice. Oh, and did I mention Michael Jackson has passed on? Also, Michael Jackson.
Unfortunately, I have an obligation at a legal clinic in Bloomington, and won't be back 'round the 'net until later this afternoon. As such, here's a true open thread to discuss the going-ons of the day. I've offered up a few videos to help prime the pump.
Great news out of South Bend, where Mayor Stephen Luecke has issued his first executive order after twelve years of holding office. And as many in the local community will no doubt agree, the wait was well worth it.
Mayor Stephen Luecke on Wednesday issued an executive order protecting city employees from job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
It was the mayor's first executive order in his 12 years in office.
The policy encourages city employees who believe they have experienced employment-related discrimination - whether it's because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or heterosexual - to report such incidents to the city's Division of Human Resources.
Well, at least he is being honest about what his true motivations are at this point:
The Indiana pension funds that went all the way to the Supreme Court to try to stop the sale of Chrysler to Italy's Fiat Auto (FIA.MI) might be back again. Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock is mulling a legal motion to get the nation's highest court to rule whether the sale-which was finalized in bankruptcy court on June 10-was valid.
[...]
Mourdock, who has already spent $2 million of Indiana's money in a failed fight to recover more cash, admits that he is also motivated by principle. Mourdock argues the government rushed the sale of Chrysler and used its influence to manipulate bankruptcy proceedings. He is also personally opposed to government ownership of business. "John Wayne never needed a bailout," Mourdock says. "Is it about money? Is it about principle? Is it about the law? Yes. It's about more than Chrysler and Indiana. When we see the law has no meaning, it sets a bad precedent."
Mourdock insists that he'll be able to recruit right-wing attorneys to represent the state free of charge, but with the state's Solicitor General committed to the case, we could see more taxpayer time and money down the tubes as Richard Mourdock fights for his ideology on our dime. And with legal experts agreeing that this could be more about stopping the GM proceedings than those revolving around Chrysler, it looks like Indiana taxpayers should get ready to foot the bill and throw good money after Mourdock's bad.
Those at the state Jefferson Jackson Day celebration on Saturday had no shortage of candidates to meet and greet, and that extends to the looming race to replace current Secretary of State Todd Rokita.
Thomas Langhorne of the Courier & Press takes a look at one rumored candidate in this morning's paper.
Democrat Catherine Fanello, former president of the Vanderburgh County Commissioners, is considering a bid for statewide office in 2010.
Fanello, now city controller in South Bend, Ind., confirmed Monday that she has formed Fanello for Indiana, an exploratory committee to weigh a possible bid for secretary of state. The office has been held by Republican Todd Rokita since 2003.
"I continue to have an interest in public service," Fanello said. "(Secretary of state) is an office that is the chief election officer of the state, and that's something that interests me very much, to continue to make sure that we have fair and accurate elections.
The other main contender making his presence felt on Saturday was Vop Osili, who seemed to be enjoying himself as he worked the room.
The truth is, government-run health insurance takes away citizens' freedom, forcing them to accept a government decree about intensely personal health decisions.
"A society is judged by the way that it treats its most vulnerable citizens. No person in America may be deprived of the right to life without due process of law and Terri Schiavo is no different. Terri Schiavo deserves to have her constitutional rights adjudicated by our federal courts and that right must not be infringed by any agency of government at any level.
"I commend the bipartisan efforts in Congress to save this woman's life and to preserve her right to seek legal review of her case in our federal courts. I especially commend the heart of our Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner for their willingness to intervene in this case on behalf of this woman's constitutional rights.
"While Congress has acted to render aid in this case, I will continue to work to pass the Incapacitated Persons Act that Congress considered this week to ensure that any American in Terri Schiavo's grave circumstances may have the assurance that they will have access to the federal courts."
The point being, Mike Pence has never been against government interference in health care decisions. Mike Pence didn't hesitate to insert his will into the hospital room of Terri Schiavo, and from what I can tell, he would do it again.
According to a column by Mary Ann Akers in the Washington Post, our own Dan Burton has once again fallen into the realm of paranoid fantasy.
Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) is still tilting at windmills, or large fruit as it were. Burton, whose infamous conspiracy theories during the Clinton years earned him the nickname "Watermelon Dan," is at it again.
Last night he tried to offer one of the wackier amendments to the legislative branch appropriations bill - a measure that would order a cost benefit analysis of building a transparent shield around the House chamber to protect members from getting killed.
"What this bill does is it would authorize a study to look at enclosing the chamber, the gallery chamber, with Plexiglas so that somebody can't throw a bomb down on the floor and kill a lot of us," Burton explained in testimony before the House Rules Committee.
That's right, our Indiana Dan wants to wrap the House gallery in Plexiglass to protect the members from mad genius bombers.
As some of you may recall, Indiana Dan is no stranger to nutty conspiracy theories. One of my favs, tho not often publicized, was a TV clip that showed how a terrorist could smuggle in a suitcase nuke. Honestly, it was almost a how-to-do-it for terrorists, assuming they could get a suitcase nuke in the first place.
This is just the latest in a series of incidents that led former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to call Burton an "embarassment" in 1998. And yet, wacky Indiana Dan is still around, goofy as ever.
Perhaps this is why Indiana Dan has 4 Republican primary challengers at last count? I wish that a well-funded Democrat would find his or her way into this race, but that seems unlikely.
It was a great evening with a jam-packed menu of Democratic leaders, and President Bill Clinton spoke for nearly an hour to cap off this year's exciting state JJ dinner. Of all the stories to emerge from last night's festivities, Eric Bradner's piece in this morning's Courier & Press is probably the most interesting.
Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel, attending a major Indiana Democratic fundraiser Saturday night at Indianapolis, was predictably coy about his political aspirations, but acknowledged he is considering a run for governor in 2012.
"It's something we will take a look at, yes," Weinzapfel said.
Weinzapfel hosted local-level party officials, major donors and others for a nearly two-hour meet-and-greet session in his own hospitality suite before the Indiana Democratic Party's annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner headlined by former President Bill Clinton.
It was, he said, "a chance to meet folks from throughout the state."
Weinzapfel was on the receiving end of some flowery words from supporters, but he wasn't the only one with friends in the room. As reported by Bradner, Roy Dominguez also had a hospitality suite, and just about every other rumored candidate was working the room at one point or another during the program.
Congressman Mike Pence thinks the example of Ronald Reagan should be followed in regards to Iran. So I guess President Obama should subvert the will of Congress and start selling weapons to Iran's military while funneling the funds to right-wing militias in Central America, then deny any knowledge of the activity once the public finds out.
I'm not sure how that would help, but I'm not a Congressman so what do I know?
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Marlin Stutzman is like the crazy uncle who everyone loves. You wouldn't trust the guy to take your dog for a walk, but he guarantees at least one decent story out of the holiday get-togethers.
