Chris Hardie's Blog

Richmond, Indiana businessman Don Bates Jr. is running for election to the U.S. Senate.  It seems somewhat rare that a local person runs for national office, and as a participant in the local political blogging culture, I think that makes me obligated to comment, right? 
Bates has a campaign website, a Facebook page, a [...]

• Read the full post

Last night, Richmond, Indiana's City Council voted 5-4 to de-fund the Human Rights Commission, a local agency that investigates and addresses complaints of discrimination based on race, religion, color, gender, physical disability or national origin.  The budget for the agency was $74,150, an amount that is already down from other cuts in recent years.
The de-funding [...]

• Read the full post

Republican Congressman Joe Wilson has already apologized for his lack of civility in last night's joint session of Congress, after shouting "you lie!" at President Barack Obama during Obama's speech about health care reform. Wilson is unsurprisingly being raked over the coals by fellow politicians, the media, and indignant bloggers and Twitter users, but [...]

• Read the full post

Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth is one of the most important books ever written about food and the sustainability of the human species. It is at once deeply personal, overwhelmingly provocative, and academically sound as it calls into question all of the stories we have ever been told about where food comes from, what kind [...]

• Read the full post

At a local business networking event tonight, someone noted that they'd heard a rumor I might be getting involved in politics locally.  We had a good conversation about it, and I thought I'd use it as a jumping off point to share a little more about my own political aspirations.
Sometime during my college experience, I [...]

• Read the full post

Two lines stood out to me about President Obama's press conference opening remarks on the state of the U.S. economy:
...at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life.
I think this is not only [...]

• Read the full post

If you read today's Palladium-Item article detailing the recent attempts by Richmond's City Council to gain more representation on the Economic Development Corporation's board of directors, you might be a little confused. I certainly was.
On one hand, you've got the City painting a picture of being left out of the key parts of the [...]

• Read the full post

I haven't had the chance to blog lately, but here are some bits and pieces to chew on. First, some links:

Friday's episode of On the Media was excellent as usual, but did an especially good job of covering the strange way the 11 PM Eastern network television calling of the election works, cognitive dissonance [...]

• Read the full post

The most important words spoken last night, I think:
This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.
It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of [...]

• Read the full post

Flash mobs are large groups of people who assemble suddenly in a public place to perform an unexpected action, and then quickly disperse. For example, here's a mob hitting New York City:

Flash mobs are interesting to me for a few reasons:

• Read the full post