The picture of Timothy ‘Jake’ Laird stared out at me from page one of my morning paper–so terribly young, so much like the idealistic young criminal justice students in my classes. He was gunned down before he really had a chance to live, as much the victim of failed public policies as the man who pulled the trigger.
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Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance
Mr. Pence’s Planet
Indiana Congressman Mike Pence and I clearly occupy different planets. On May 19th, the Congressman issued a press release in which he answered the election-year question "Are we better off today than we were four years ago?" with a resounding yes.
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Flip-Flopping Along
A consistent adherence to one’s values–a demonstrated pattern of acting in accordance with core beliefs–is a highly regarded indicator of character, as it should be. But what does genuine consistency look like? If Emerson was right, and "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," how do we tell the difference between someone who has no strong beliefs and someone who is "foolishly consistent?"someone who doesn’t understand why principles may apply differently under different sets of facts?
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Who Pays the Piper?
In Merrie Olde England, so the story goes, there were pipers?lute players?who lived by their music. They would go to fairs or similar venues and perform, secure in the knowledge that they would be paid by one of the many who had enjoyed the pleasure of the dance. This is thought to be the origin of ?to pay the piper,? an adage that reminds us that if no one had come forward to pay the piper, the music would have stopped. This elementary rule of the market seems to have escaped the members of Indiana?s General Assembly.
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Talking Past Each Other
When he was eight or nine, my middle son asked me one of those questions that make a mother’s head hurt. "I say the sky is blue, and you say the sky is blue. But how do we know we are seeing the same color? What if what I call blue is really what you call orange, and we just both call it blue because that is the color we say the sky is?"
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