Tag: indiana

Location seed: Maxinkuckee Township, Indiana.

Maxinkuckee Township, Indiana – Google Docs

Maxinkuckee Township, Indiana

 

Located — unsurprisingly — on the eastern shore of Lake Maxinkuckee in North Indiana, this township (population 6,000)  harbors a dreadful secret. Starting in 1973, Maxinkuckee’s water supply was tampered with by agents of a nigh-obligatory sinister corporation (McKinley-Shreck Biological Solutions) for flagrantly illegal purposes.  The entire town was regularly dosed with an experimental, untested heart disease prevention drug that was absolutely not cleared by the FDA before it was indiscriminately tested on everyone.  No corner was left uncut. No safety precaution was not ignored.  All worries about possible side effects and unforeseen results were airily brushed away as meaningless.

Continue reading Location seed: Maxinkuckee Township, Indiana.

Ted Cruz talks to Trump protesters today in Indiana.

As choices go, it doesn’t get much starker than this, folks.

And I’m going to be honest: I found those protesters embarrassing. They know what they know, and it’s nothing more or nothing less than what they’ve been told, and while I’m sure that the fever will eventually break for them the rest of us may still have to live with the consequences. …If you live in Indiana, go vote for Ted Cruz tomorrow, folks. Pretty please, with sugar on top.

Sen. Dan Coats (R, Indiana) to retire at end of term.

A bit of a surprise, which hopefully doesn’t mean that the man is ill. I’ve certainly heard no rumors of scandal associated with Senator Coats, and you usually hear those things ahead of time; the Senator is in his early seventies, and has been in various federal public offices since the late Eighties, so possibly Dan Coats is simply ready to retire. Continue reading Sen. Dan Coats (R, Indiana) to retire at end of term.

RS at CPAC: Richard Mourdock (R CAND, IN-SEN PRI).

This particular interview with Richard – we’ve talked with him before about the race – is of interest for another reason: Dave Weigel of Slate happened to reference it in his day-in-the-life article about Richard Mourdock at CPAC.  I don’t have any actual beef with Weigel’s reporting of anything that I was involved with – I did ask those questions, more or less, and I was ready to get started on the entire interview rodeo – but it may prove instructive to see the difference between the interview, and the way Dave described it.  Nothing pernicious, but interesting.

Said interview is below:

…and Richard’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

RS Interview: Jackie Walorski (R CAND, IN-02 PRI)

This should have gone up last week, but illness intervened.  You may remember Jackie from last cycle: she came incredibly close to to defeating incumbent Joe Donnelly in IN-02.  Since then, redistricting has resulted in a more Republican-friendly street, and Donnelly has since announced that he’s retiring in order to lose this year’s Senate race.  We talked about that, a bit about what’s changed (and what hasn’t changed since 2010, and I ask her a ‘gotcha’ question!

Well, it’s a question with more teeth than you might think.

Jackie’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh What the Indiana/Amazon.com deal means – and doesn’t mean.

Came across this article via Hot Air on Indiana and Amazon.com coming to an agreement on collecting sales tax – short version; Amazon.com will start being liable for collecting sales tax in Indiana in 2014, or when federal legislation is passed, and not a moment before – and I was struck by the lack of information in it.  Specifically, on why Amazon.com was going along with this in the first place.  Generally speaking, Amazon.com‘s response to having individual states (they’re actually supportive of a federal program to straighten out state sales tax schemes) try to force it to collect sales tax is to refuse: it has a Supreme Court decision (Quill Corp v. North Dakota) that has established that companies do not need to collect states sales tax in states where they do not have a physical presence, and recent state legislative attempts to define ‘local online affiliates’ as ‘physical presence’ simply results in Amazon.com ending its affiliate programs in those states*.

So I looked it up… and it turns out that Amazon.com has a legitimate physical presence in Indiana (distribution centers); it had negotiated an agreement in 2007 with the state government to not be liable for collecting sales tax anyway.  Somebody sued over that, and Amazon.com has apparently decided that it might not win that particular lawsuit… so it made a deal where it will start being liable for sales tax collection a couple of years down the road.  All of which probably should have been in the story from the beginning, huh?

I shouldn’t complain: the inability of supposedly trained professionals to actually report the news has been a great personal boon to me and mine.  But it still bemuses, sometimes.

Moe Lane

Full disclosure: I am an Amazon.com Affiliate for Maryland.

*Except in New York, where they’re still fighting it in the courts.

Joe Donnelly (D, IN-02; D-CAND, IN-SEN) curiously quiet on Indiana voter fraud.

OK, this needs a little background: it recently came out that Indiana Democrats had forged multiple signatures on the 2008 primary nominating petitions for both Barack Obama and  Hillary Clinton.  The situation was sufficiently bad that former Democratic governor (and Clinton supporter) Joe Kernan had to come out and announce that no, that wasn’t his signature on the Obama petition; in other words, it’s bad enough that the Democrats are having to do damage control right now.  The designated fall guy is apparently going to be St. Joseph County Democratic Chair Butch Morgan; he resigned last night.  Morgan is claiming that he did nothing wrong, but he’s resigning anyway.

Now, why this is kind of interesting is because Morgan was also the Democratic chair for Indiana’s second Congressional district.  Which is – oddly enough! – a Red district with a Blue Congressman.  One who is running for Congress. Continue reading Joe Donnelly (D, IN-02; D-CAND, IN-SEN) curiously quiet on Indiana voter fraud.

Richard Mourdock’s valuable life lesson.

Do not let your campaign manager assault* a blogger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21GicLuaBdU&feature=player_embedded

Richard Mourdock (R) will be apologizing for this event (more details about the incident here) which took place after Right-blogger rebelpundit came up to the Indiana Senate candidate and started asking him some fairly direct questions about Mourdock’s willingness/reluctance to identify with the Tea Party.  The actual triggering moment was when rebelpundit asked a Fair Tax question, apparently; it was then that campaign manager Jim Holdren took a slap at the camera and called the blogger a tracker.

OK, this is important.  Let us say that rebelpundit was in fact a tracker – which is to say, that he was a guy with a camera whose job it was to make someone from the Other Side look bad by getting some embarrassing video footage.  Guess what?  If that had been true, then Mission Freaking Accomplished: and directly because of Holdren’s actions.  If you are an activist and you see a tracker, feel free to crack wise at them.  Feel free to ask them who they are, over and over again.  Feel free to get one of those pointing signs saying ‘FAKE’ and assign someone to follow him around.  But do not threaten and do not touch.  That it happened here demonstrates a lack of training that is in some ways more worrisome than the assault itself.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Continue reading Richard Mourdock’s valuable life lesson.