Indiana's Republican legislative leadership: "The one thing, however, that has always stuck in my throat is the devotion of the Mandarins to Crony Capitalism."

Wait -- this is Democratic Party crony capitalism. Oops.

An interesting perspective, and I enjoy Huston's use of the term "mandarins," a noun that originates in China, but has been adapted for wider, more humorous use.

6. an influential or powerful government official or bureaucrat.
7. a member of an elite or powerful group or class, as in intellectual or cultural milieus: the mandarins of the art world.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a train to Indy ready for boarding. Except I don't.

HUSTON: The Statehouse Mandarins push transportation tax, by Tom Charles Huston (CNHI Indiana)

The members of the General Assembly have barely warmed their seats and the fury is already reaching pitched levels on social media. It is over the proposal by the new Republican governor (washed into office by the Trump landslide) and the Republican legislative leadership (known affectionately as the Mandarins) to hike gasoline taxes and impose a number of new fees designed to raise an additional $1.2 billion a year for highway and bridge construction and maintenance ...

 ... I don’t like the mix of taxes the Legislature has fashioned, which in my view impose a disproportionate burden on lower-income Hoosiers, and I have opposed the continuing shift of the tax burden from businesses to individuals. On the other hand, with property tax relief I think the overall tax burden on Hoosiers is not excessive and in some instances is less than what is reasonably required for state and local governments to do the things that need to be done. This is certainly a minority view among those who generally share my political dispositions, but government exists to perform certain vital functions and doing so requires revenue and, thus, taxes.

Everyone has a view of what the budget priorities ought to be and whether some programs are beyond the scope of what our state government is required to do and accordingly should be eliminated. People of good will are going to differ on these matters, and my inclination has always been to cut my fellow conservative some slack on the details. The one thing, however, that has always stuck in my throat is the devotion of the Mandarins to Crony Capitalism. They are incorrigible, and even such common-sense fiscal conservatives (Mike Pence) once in office fall victim to the lure of picking winners and paying off special interests. It is one thing to pay your fair share of taxes; it something else entirely to have those taxes transferred into the pockets of Mel Simon, Jim Irsay and every corporate supplicant that hires a wired lobbyist.

The clothespin on Ron Grooms' nose is not removing RFRA's stench.

Governor Mike Pence "looked awful doing (RFRA)," but as the editorial board of Lafayette's newspaper reminds us, "But for all the justifiable grief piled on Pence in those two weeks, legislators deserve at least as much."

Yesterday our own Ron Grooms, who remained conspicuously silent as the GOP's RFRA-laden ka-ka first started hitting the fan -- and who has been doubling down on the disingenuousness ever since -- remained in a state of abject denial.

According to Grooms, who elevates abject cluelessness to a sort of epochal art form, "Hoosier Hospitality" remains alive and well in spite of his party's determination to smother it by means of New Age Nuremberg Laws.

Hoosier hospitality was on display for the whole country to see this weekend as Indianapolis hosted another successful Final Four. After the fierce debate over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it was good to see our state’s true character get some national media exposure.

Those on both sides of the RFRA debate were wrongly led to believe that it was going to change the state’s discrimination laws. While the criticism of the law was unwarranted, the economic harm that would’ve come to Indiana without a clarification of the RFRA was real. Hoosier employers were on the verge of losing clients and customers; our cities were poised to lose convention business; and the state’s AAA credit rating was in jeopardy, which would have cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Now that the General Assembly has acted to clarify the law, I hope people will begin to see that the RFRA is a victory for Hoosiers of all faiths. It doesn’t harm anyone. With passage of the RFRA, Indiana now joins some 30 other states in providing the highest level of legal protection for religious liberty.

The RFRA in its final form is a law that reflects Hoosier values. It recognizes our Constitutional right to free exercise of religion and follows the history of other states’ RFRA’s by specifying that the law doesn’t change discrimination laws one way or another.

Don't you see? That fecal matter Republicans smeared in our faces was perfume-scented lace, and the fact that we couldn't tell the difference was those bad outsiders misleading us -- I mean, it was their fault, and the experience was a positive, and now we all feel SOOO much better trooping off to the showers, don't we?

online.com/story/opinion/editorials/2015/04/03/editorial-rfras-supermajority-debacle/25242381/">After RFRA’s supermajority debacle (Lafayette Journal & Courier)

It’s hard to imagine Gov. Mike Pence handling the past two weeks any worse than he did.

He discounted the readily available signs that Senate Bill 101 — Indiana’s version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — came factory-installed with hints and allegations of discrimination against gay and lesbian Hoosiers. When those hints and allegations started turning into nixed development deals and nationwide boycotts — real deals about money, jobs and convention traffic — Pence blamed the media for smearing a law they misunderstood. He continued to listen to inside cronies with easily traceable ties to anti-gay agendas before giving in to adjustments on the law to save face — not to mention the state’s dwindling reputation.

And he looked awful doing it, wire to wire, from a hide-it-under-a-bushel, private signing of SB 101 on March 25 to Friday’s less ceremonious, but still closed-door signing of supplemental legislation intended to clarify that the law was not aimed at allowing businesses to refuse service of gays and lesbians.
Sneaking out a back door of the Statehouse and quietly leaving for Europe moments after House and Senate leaders brought him a fix to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — even as schools started arriving for the NCAA Tournament Final Four and a mega-weekend in downtown Indianapolis — didn’t help the perception problem much.

Then again, given the heat laid on by the NCAA, threatening it was open to pulling its headquarters from Indianapolis if the Statehouse couldn’t figure how to erase the perception of discrimination hanging off the new law, maybe it was best that Pence disappeared for the sake of clearing the slate before the nation converged for one of Indianapolis’ biggest weekends.

All in all, a terrible week for the governor. And an insufferable week for Indiana.

But for all the justifiable grief piled on Pence in those two weeks, legislators deserve at least as much.

Indiana House GOP omits agenda item as Rhonda Rhoads rushes forward with a muddy shovel.

Their own press release.

Their own pictograms.

At NAC: "This is bad law-making," but still, Rhonda Rhoads lends her name to HJR infamy.

Them angry white folks in the GOP are doing that shutdown thing again.

Anyone seen Mark Seabrook and Steve Bush lately, or have they already retreated to the command bunker?

This Week in ‘Nation’ History: Government Shutdown as Coup d’État, by Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation)

... Dramatizing the supposed precariousness of public services by forcing their arbitrary cessation makes it easier for conservatives to argue that the market alone should determine the proper distribution of wealth, goods, and services in American society. There is no smaller government than none at all. As the radical political philosopher Sheldon Wolin argued in a remarkable 1996 essay in The Nation, “Democracy and the Counterrevolution,” the effort “to stop or reconstitute government in order to extract sweeping policy concessions amounts to an attempted coup d’état.” Wolin’s brilliant essay reminds us how shutdowns and austerity economics fit within the broader Republican philosophy of governance—or lack thereof—and how that philosophy is antithetical to the defining principle of democracy: rule by the people.

Meanwhile, back home again in Indiana, the state Republican apparatus prepares to filibuster Obamacare to the ultimate detriment of its own people. That's leadership.

HOWEY: Obamacare, propaganda and statesmanship, by Brian Howey (N and T)

But Congressional Republicans are using their offices like political candidates do during campaigns. They have become fonts of propaganda, declaring that Obamacare has “failed” and is a “trainwreck.” This isn't an effort to help their constituents understand the new law. There has been little effort to “tweak” or even revise troubling segments of the law. Instead, they play to that 10 or 15 percent of their constituents who pose a threat in a May primary.

Howey sez: Indiana economic problems "local, not state problem."

It seems like we've been talking and writing about this for a very long time.

HOWEY: Indiana’s jobs problem may be local, not state, by Brian Howey (column in the News and Tribune)

— After 16 consecutive months of Indiana’s jobless rate above the national average — it’s 8.4 percent now, compared to 7.4 for the U.S. — the cold reality is that we have a problem with a quarter of a million Hoosiers chronically out of work.

Then came a Ball State University study showing Indiana’s per capita income has slipped from 30th in the nation to 40th with dozens of counties wallowing in wage levels in the 1990s and, some like my old home of Miami, in the 1970s range.

I wrote an analysis in which I noted that for almost the past nine years, we’ve had Republican governors who have made job creation and education reform top priorities, and yet we’ve been over 8 percent unemployment since early 2009.

At some point, a political reality comes into play, perhaps as early as 2014 and if this trend persists, by 2016. It used to be that a jobless rate over 7 percent would mean the boot from voters. Yet, Gov. Mitch Daniels left office with a 60 percent approval rating and President Obama was re-elected.

Gov. Mike Pence gets it. Speaking before the Indianapolis Kiwanis recently, he acknowledged, “There’s a great sense of optimism, there’s reason to be encouraged as Hoosiers, but this is a difficult time for too many in our state.”

At Hobart, Pence told local Realtors, “I want to see where the young people can graduate from high school and can have an industry certification or even an associates degree right that day.”

There was one interesting response to my analysis, and it came from Ball State University economics Prof. Michael Hicks.

“Indiana’s problem is not that the overall business climate for investment is poor [it is great] or that we have too few students graduating from college with the right degrees [they are] or that people outside Indiana don’t know how great these things are [they know],” he explained. “The problem is not statewide [we have 12 counties growing much faster than the nation as a whole]. These are just facts. I also don’t believe that the overall problem is one of rapid technological progress or any of the national [and hopefully transient] problems in labor markets.”

No, the problem here is much closer to home. It comes in your city or town.

Hicks explains: “This is a really a local, not state problem. Almost all our local economic policies target business investment, and masquerade as job creation efforts. We abate taxes, apply TIFs and woo businesses all over the state, but then the employees who receive middle-class wages [say $18 an hour or more] choose the nicest place to live within a 40-mile radius. So, we bring a nice factory to Muncie, and the employees all commute from Noblesville.”

The real problem here is that Indiana Republicans parade under the banners of Reaganism, of smaller government and one that stays out of our bedrooms and personal lives. But when our cities and towns seek what we call “local control” over tax options, legislative leaders politely listen, and then tell them to shove off.

And let me tell you, he's plenty mad.