IndyStar.com: Dan Carpenter
Indiana's leading news source for all the top stories, local news, sports and weather.
Read this; it's about football
Anybody who willingly sat through half a Cleveland Browns game on television has pretty flimsy standing as a social critic. But I’ve got to tell you, we have gone plain football crazy in this town and country. Prior to last week’s...
She made life's work of peace
A cherished ally, exemplar and inspiration was snatched away by a sudden, shocking illness early this month. Mary Harter Mitchell was a professor nearly 30 years at Indiana University School of Law, Indianapolis; a devoted student at Christian...
Madness and mass suspicion
Welcome to the club, fellow Americans. When adherents to Islam feel compelled to issue public denunciations of violence by Muslims, and when non-Muslims demand — or dismiss — such responses, a common experience of this country’s...
When the people speak
You can disparage the turnout level and you can make an issue of ballot wording and campaign tactics, but you have to credit this community with remarkable acts of broad-mindedness in the two most recent elections. To the tune of about 80 percent in...
'And it didn't cost me a dime!'
A new report asserting that upwards of half of America’s children, and 90 percent of black youngsters, will be on food stamps at some time in their childhood speaks to the skewed nature of much political discourse in this country. In so many...
Looking back for progress
Good people who can’t agree on economics, religion or the citizenship of the president manage to find common ground when it comes to one tandem proposition: America’s schools are just not good enough, and they used to be so much better....
Public 'problem': people
If our current tribulation is indeed America’s worst economic failure since the Great Depression, then here’s an interesting coincidence: Labor union membership was in decline when the Great Depression hit, ascended afterward, and was in...
Public, private, pigskin
I’m sitting in a local restaurant on a Sunday morning, pondering a series of related news events of the previous week, when the waitress surprises me with another link. Not the sausage, already consumed with pleasure. The check. A total of...
Foes can't lose for winning
So the president is celebrating a “bipartisan” victory in the form of favorable committee action on a profoundly tame Senate health-care bill whose sole Republican affirmer warns she might think differently tomorrow. And the rest of the...
Obama's rave reviews
Boy, I’ll tell you. Sometimes I think Barack Obama couldn’t please some folks if he won the Nobel Peace Prize. What’s that you say? No! And how’d they take it? Not with what you’d call party-all-night exhilaration....
Uncivil tongues revisited
A few years ago, a representative of Palestinian interests in the United States wrote a newspaper op-ed piece that had to give pause to any thinking person regardless of his politics. Palestinians are chided routinely for not expressing their...
Health ills: Shall we overcome?
Alvin Poussaint, the noted African-American psychiatrist, Harvard professor and civil rights veteran, once told John Dittmer he didn’t understand why young foes of segregation targeted lunch counters. “They should have demonstrated...
What may the circle betoken?
This is such a small town we live in; and I mean that not just municipally, but metaphorically. Look, for example, at the health-care industry and the noisy charade we refer to as health-care “reform.” You have Bart Peterson, the former...
ACORN and dual standards
Last week, a former Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department detective was sentenced to 25 years in prison for conniving with two fellow officers in a series of thefts of drugs and money. Those three cops-turned-convicts were part of a spate of...
Mighty oaks of umbrage
Let’s not kid ourselves. ACORN has not made enemies because it is running a prostitution ring. ACORN did not become a prime-time guerrilla TV target because of vote fraud. ACORN did not take both barrels from Congress because it’s been...
Ugly truth behind 'You lie!'
I must say I never found 12 million to be all that scary or infuriating a figure. And now that it’s shrinking, forgive me for yawning out loud. As any vigilant citizen-sentry of our southern borders knows, we are talking about the prevailing...
Another pundit's treasure?
In principle, a journalist should keep the gates open to information and opinion from the farthest and darkest reaches of the Web universe. In practice, however, there will be some regular “contributors” who prove so boring, so kooky, so...
Dan Carpenter: Taking home-run swings
Political power and political showmanship were on full display in Indiana last week as two prominent elected officials confronted public institutions that were ripe for just such a thing. In the short run, state Sen. Luke Kenley fared better than his...
It's the Prez; hide the kids!
My dear parents, may they rest in peace, never would have dreamed of mainstream protests against a presidential speech to schoolchildren, even allowing for the policy plugs any chief executive would be wont to throw in. But then again, they...
May they feel our royal pain
The spectacle of Peyton Manning sharing a light moment with Gov. Mitch Daniels at the annual PeyBack Bowl, as displayed in a front-page picture in The Star a week or so ago, brought to mind the peculiar definition of charity in this state and town....
Better what? O, Canada!
Five years ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. conducted a poll to see whom Canadians deemed their greatest countryman or woman of all time. The winner? Pierre Trudeau? Wayne Gretzky? Oscar Peterson? Celine Dion? Nope. ’Twas the Rev. T.C....
Vision as Rx: Book holds hope
Is health care a human right to be protected in defiance of conventional economics, or a commodity to be won or lost according to the whims of the marketplace? It’s one of the less pretty aspects of the American health-care...
With enemies like these
On a given (composite) day, I can: Receive another batch of safe, sound mail from my friendly postal carrier. Read a newsletter from my U.S. senator, Richard Lugar, a graduate of the public high school just down the street. Take a phone call from my...
Let's put this ex-con to work
Defenders of Michael Vick are wont to talk about second chances, while his critics worry about another clich: that he might put it all behind him and move on. Neither camp has it right. Strictly speaking, second chances are for people who are taking...
Stepping forward, lightly
Racial progress in this country always has been measured in strides forward, half steps back, and vice versa. In the Obama era, it’s still not completely safe to come out openly hetero-chromatic. You remember that our first black president was...
When cador can't cure
The United States spends 16 percent of its wealth on health care, more than any other industrialized country, and we’re not getting our money’s worth. The oft-maligned health-care reform effort that failed in Congress in 1993 galvanized a...
Getting down with 'uppity'
In their mad scramble to make bouillabaisse out of the load of dead salmon the governor of Alaska has dumped on them, elite pundits on the right have laid her troubles in large part to her non-membership in the elite that supposedly constitutes the...
La-La's gangster rapport
I’ve always admired Johnny Depp as an actor, and he turns in another honest day’s work as Hoosier icon John Dillinger in “Public Enemies.” The problem with the portrayal is that Depp’s John Dillinger isn’t John...
Casualties of party warfare
Are you as tired as I am of state government as a spectator sport? Do you really care whether the governor is meaner or slicker than the House Speaker? Can you even name the players who are positioning themselves to run for president or governor...
There's no doubting Thomas
When I heard last week that the U.S. Supreme Court had voted 8-1 against dismantling the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I had no doubt who the dissenter was. The only African-American justice. The de facto successor to the late Thurgood Marshall. The man...
