Suit Filed Against Blue Indy

According to Advance Indiana, Marion County Auditor Julie Voorhies has filed a lawsuit against Blue Indy, LLC, the City of Indianapolis and Regions Bank to block payment of $6 million in Indy tax dollars to Blue Indy.

Now, this should be interesting given all the questions about this deal (from the lack of bids to the absence of UL certification for the charging stations...and more).

What's Pence Up to Now?

"Whatever one’s position on abortion, the use of tax dollars to support 'clinics' that offer no medical services — clinics that exist solely to lie to women in order to convince them to forego both abortion and contraception – is immoral."

Yes folks: our tone-deaf governor has inked a contract with Real Alternatives, which provides NO medical services, spending OUR TAX DOLLARS to promote a political agenda.

As the IBJ reported: "Gov. Mike Pence announced Monday that he will expand Indiana’s affiliation with a not-for-profit organization that counsels pregnant women against abortion and pushes abstinence as the only method of birth control."

Sheila Kennedy laments (that was her quote at the beginning of this post), you can't make this stuff up..

That "Craft Rye" Whiskey is From Where?

This is an old story, but still timely.

"Dozens of new brands are packaging whiskey bought in bulk from Indiana," writes Eric Felten in The Daily Beast.

Just can't trust those distillers...even if they're Hoosiers.

Read about the scam here: "Your ‘Craft’ Rye Whiskey Is Probably From a Factory Distillery in Indiana".

Indiana in the News Again

"When Planned Parenthood leaves town, bad things follow. Ask the county in Indiana that drove out its clinic, which happened to be the only place in the area that offered H.I.V. testing. That was in 2013; in March the governor announced a “public health emergency” due to the spike in H.I.V. cases."

From "The Fight for Unplanned Parenthood" by Gail Collins in The New York Times

Keep Saving Medicine Bottles for Malawi

"Anyone on prescription medicines finds themselves a bit uncomfortable when throwing away so many empty medicine bottles. It is obvious our landfills do not need these plastic containers! There is enough trash going into the landfills already," notes the Malawi Project.

"Save up a group of your containers.... Place them in boiling water until you are able to easily remove the labels, and the glue. Then box or bag them and send them to the Malawi Project."

Why? "It will help families in a third world country keep their medicines clean, out of reach of small children, and safe while they are being used."

Malawi Project Inc.
3314 Van Tassel Drive
Indianapolis, IN 46240

This is such an easy thing to do -- and the charity sponsoring it is right here in Indy!

Trash Slide this Week

Yep: trash collection will be a day late this week because of the Labor Day holiday.

There's no notice about it on the city's Department of Public Works Trash Collection website, FWIW.

Hmmm. Maybe all the problems with the roll out of the ill-starred Blue Indy initiative made them overlook this essential city service?

Toothless Watchdogs

"What happens when reporters, editors and their news organizations defer at every turn to the preferences of power? Short answer: Rot accumulates. Flaccid work becomes the norm. A slow, daily accretion of bad judgments, or refusals to judge independently, produces a weak institution that no longer understands its responsibilities, to say nothing of fulfilling them."

It's from a national story, but -- yes, that describes The Indianapolis Star these days.

Infrastructure problems pile up (streetlights anyone?) and the homicide rate soars, but Indy keeps shoveling millions at the Pacers, the Colts, Blue Indy -- the list goes on.

Having no watchdogs impacts all of us.