“READERS FORUM” NOVEMBER 15, 2018
We hope that today’s “READERS FORUMâ€Â will provoke honest and open dialogue concerning issues that we, as responsible citizens of this community, need to address in a rational and responsible way?Â
WHATS ON YOUR MIND TODAY?
Todays“Readers Poll†question is: Do you feel that elected officials should be allowed to award no-bid contracts to people who give contributions to their political campaigns?
If you would like to advertise on the CCO please contact us City-CountyObserver@live.com
Subcommittee Silently Makes Sexual Harassment Recommendations; Legislative Council Must Act
Subcommittee Silently Makes Sexual Harassment Recommendations; Legislative Council Must Act
A legislative subcommittee has quietly issued new recommendations for how Indiana’s Legislature should respond to complaints of sexual harassment by legislative employees, but it’s still unclear whether the Legislative Council will meet next week’s statutorily-mandated deadline to officially adopt the recommendations.
The Legislative Council’s Personnel Subcommittee has released a proposed report that includes two recommendations for ways in which the Legislature can improve its sexual harassment policies: amending legislative ethics rules and mandating training for legislators and members of the legislative ethics committees. The recommendations were developed pursuant to House Enrolled Act 1309, which required the subcommittee to develop sexual harassment prevention and investigation recommendations and the full council to approve those recommendations by Nov. 20.
In light of the #MeToo movement, HEA 1309 represented an initial legislative step toward curbing sexual harassment at the Indiana Statehouse. The bill, authored by Rep. Sharon Engleman, R-Georgetown, mandated that each legislator complete one hour of sexual harassment prevention training each year, as well mandating that the Personnel Subcommittee develop additional prevention and response recommendations.
According to the proposed report, the subcommittee “directed the Staff of the Legislative Services Agency (‘LSA’) to conduct background research related to sexual harassment prevention and prepare proposed policy language for review by the Subcommittee.†LSA’s research yielded four findings, including:
- “Legislators with oversight over legislative staff have existing policies that expressly prohibit sexual harassment of a legislative employee by a legislator and that include the processes and procedures for filing and investigating a complaint;â€
- The Indiana Constitution, House and Senate rules and state statute “protect employees, legislators, and other persons interacting with legislators from unlawful sexual conduct;â€
- Indiana Code section 2-2.2-3-9 “treats sexual harassment prevention instruction as an entirely separate subject from ethics instruction†and does not require additional training for members of the ethics committees, and;
- “The General Assembly has a legal duty to protect legislative employees from sexual harassment by legislators.â€
According to the report’s findings, the House and Senate employee handbooks prohibit sexual harassment and provide that reports of such harassment should be made to the chief of staff, chief counselor clerk of the House, and the immediate supervisor, majority chief of staff or secretary of the Senate. LSA and Indiana’s fourth legislative employer, the Indiana Lobbyist Registration Commission, include similar provisions in their personnel rules.
The subcommittee’s first recommendation would build on those existing policies by amending the language in the House and Senate codes of ethics to prescribe a clear reporting process. In the House, sexual harassment complaints would be made to the speaker, while Senate complaints would be made to the president pro tempore. If either the speaker or the president pro tem is the subject of the complaint, then a complainant would contact the majority caucus chair in the appropriate chamber.
The amended ethics rules would further explicitly define sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature by a member†that is made as a quid pro quo employment expectation or creates a hostile work environment. The proposed language would also explicitly prohibit retaliation for either filing a sexual harassment complaint or participating in a subsequent investigation and would require confidentiality for the complainant/victim “to the extent possible.â€
The House and Senate ethics committees would be permitted to investigate complaints made to the legislative leaders. The subcommittee report notes that current Indiana statute requires the ethics committees to base a finding of sexual harassment on “competent and substantial evidence,†and subcommittee members urge the Legislative Council to approve the continued use of that standard. The subcommittee also notes that while independent investigators may sometimes be beneficial, the decision to use an outside investigator falls within the discretion of the ethics committees.
Looking to the second recommendation, subcommittee members are urging the council to further amend I.C. 2-2.2-3-9 – the statute amended in 1309 – to merge the mandatory sexual harassment prevention training into the mandatory legislative ethics training. A proposed bill attached to the report would add language requiring that, “The ethics instruction required in this section must cover this article, the house and senate ethics rules, and other relevant statutes. Of the two (2) total hours of ethics instruction required between general elections, one (1) hour must be devoted to sexual harassment prevention instruction.â€
Further, the subcommittee is recommending that members of the ethics committees receive additional training “designed to assist them in their responsibilities.â€
“This training should focus, at a minimum, on how to end disrespectful conduct, how to handle complaints, the investigation process, anti-retaliation rules, and related matters,†the report says.
HEA 1309 also required that House Speaker Brian Bosma, former House Minority Leader Terry Goodin, former Senate President pro tem David Long and Senate Minority Leader Tim Lanane each appoint a legislator to serve on the subcommittee solely for the purpose of developing the sexual harassment recommendations. According to a Bosma spokeswoman, those four appointed legislators – Reps. Holli Sullivan and Cherrish Pryor and Sens. Liz Brown and Karen Tallian – met in executive session Nov. 7 and adopted the report.
Indiana Lawyer attempted to watch the Nov. 7 meeting via the General Assembly’s live stream, but was told that because the meeting was an executive session, it was not open to the public.
Bosma’s spokeswoman also said the Legislative Council has not yet set a date to consider the recommendations, and she did not comment on whether the eventual meeting will be held by the Nov. 20 deadline.
Commentary: So, You Say You Want To Start A Revolution?
INDIANAPOLIS – As they have so many times before, Americans went to the polls on a Tuesday in November.
Expectations ran high for this election – a rarity for a mid-term.
Exuberant Democrats predicted a blue wave.
President Donald Trump – always most alive during a battle – said he’d energized his base enough to build a red wall and preserve Republican majorities in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
So, what happened?
Did a blue wave swamp all the GOP barricades?
Not really.
Democrats captured the House, resoundingly, and made some gains in statehouses across the land, gathering governorships and control of state legislatures in some key places.
Was the election the Republican triumph President Trump said it was?
Nope.
The president campaigned hard in places that had been secure in his column two years ago. With the help of a generous Senate campaign map, he managed to avert disaster and hold onto the Senate.
Having both the House and Senate in Democrats’ control would mean no end of headaches for Trump, given his pugnacity and his aggressive disregard for the restraints of both propriety and law.
Thus, even as recounts continued in Florida, Arizona, possibly Georgia and elsewhere, both Republicans and Democrats across America found themselves saying:
Could have been better. Could have been worse.
That’s the way it so often is.
An election, like life, is often messier than we think it will be.
Because the results were messy, it has been easy for many people to miss perhaps the most important thing this election revealed.
We may be at the start of a revolution.
We focus a lot of attention on the divisions in America. That’s understandable because we are divided – divided in ways we haven’t seen since the 1960s and perhaps even since the 1860s.
Our public discourse ranges from acidic to toxic. Nastiness is now the norm.
And anger is the driving force in our political life.
This is true on both sides of the divide.
President Trump’s rise was nothing other than a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, his message little more than a snarl, his agenda as easy to understand as a raised middle finger. His supporters rallied to him because he gave voice to their grievances, their feeling that the game had been rigged not just so that they couldn’t win but that they couldn’t even survive for much longer.
As long as Trump speaks to their hurts, they won’t desert him, even if the tariffs he promotes pummel them and the market correction that seems in the offing wipes out what little they have in savings. From their point of view, he’s the only leader in a generation who has understood and expressed their sense of being abandoned, even betrayed, by their government and their country.
Even when he fails, they won’t punish him for trying.
Democrats have their own version of this drama.
They too have energized and, in some ways, enraged new constituencies demanding that their country, their government and, yes, their party change its ways and speak to their hunger for change. They too have looked to new and non-traditional faces – Beto O’Rourke, Stacy Abrams, Andrew Gillum, Jared Polis, etc. – for leadership, faces that embody their sense that they’ve been on the outside long enough.
The rise to these two outsider movements has thrown our politics into upheaval.
Both sides have brought new voters by the hundreds of thousands and even the millions into the process and crushed partisan calculations in the process. (That’s why pollsters now make prognostications at their peril.)
Much divides the outsiders in each of these parties – and they have many historic reasons to distrust and dislike each other.
But they both are driven by a conviction that their needs, their hopes and their dreams have been disregarded by a rigged system that has no respect for them as people or citizens. For that reason, they’ve both rebelled against the establishments in their own parties.
At the moment, they’re also fighting against each other.
What happens, though, if they figure out that they have at least one thing in common – a burning desire to kick down the locked door and take their place at the table?
FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits†WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
This article is posted by the City-County Observer.com without opinion, bias or editing.
Hadi Shrine Circus By Pat Sides
This image depicts the fourth annual Hadi Shrine Circus at the Coliseum in 1936, where a captivated crowd watches daring acrobats in action.
The circus performed at the Coliseum until 1956, when it moved to the new and much larger Roberts Stadium, its home for over the next fifty years. Circuses in America date back to colonial times, and Evansville has enjoyed them throughout most of its history.
The first arrived here by steamboat in the nineteenth century, and a “floating circus†performed at the riverfront as early as 1856. Before the Shrine Circus began in 1933, citizens enjoyed traveling acts that pitched their tents at various sites, including First Avenue at Morgan, Willard Library’s grounds, outer Lincoln Avenue, and Howell Park.
A SURGEON’S ODYSSEY BY DR RICHARD MOSS BOOK SIGNING AT BARNES AND NOBLE
WHEN
Thursday, November 15th @ 6:00 PM (Evansville time)
WHERE
 Barnes & Noble 624 Green River Road
It is my pleasure to invite you to a slideshow of my three-year journey through Asia as a Cancer Surgeon described in my latest book:
A Surgeon’s Odyssey. Q & A, general discussion, and book signing to follow.
I look forward to seeing you there!
 Q & A, general discussion, and book signing To follow.
We look forward to seeing you there!
https://www.amazon.com/Surgeon-s-Odyssey-Richard-Moss-
U OF E Men’s Basketball Home Opener Set For Tonight At 6 p.m.
After two games on the road, the University of Evansville men’s basketball team opens up the 2018-19 home slate on Thursday evening against Kentucky Wesleyan. The tip is at 6 p.m. inside the Ford Center.
UE gave it everything it had on Saturday, falling by a 91-85 final at Xavier. Six players finished in double figures, led by 20-point efforts from Shea Feehan and K.J. Riley. The Aces trailed by as many as 15 points in the first half but rallied to take the lead in the second half, but the Musketeers were able to hang on. Evansville converted 17 3-point attempts, tying the school record, which was set against Southern Illinois in 1997.
“Our guys feel good about what we were able to do and will look to strike first on Thursday,†Aces Head Coach Walter McCarty said. “With our offense, we have five guys out there who can be a playmaker. If guys are open, take the shot. Play with confidence and shoot the ball. To be able to make that many 3’s was great, I wish we would have made 3 or 4 more!â€
Takeaways from Xavier Â
– Evansville’s 17 3-pointers tied the single-game school mark
– The Aces had six players finish in double figures for the first time since November of 2014 against Earlham
– All eight players that saw the floor for UE grabbed a rebound and took at least one 3-pointer
– John Hall played 39 minutes while Shea Feehan and K.J. Riley played 38 apiece
– Hall set career marks in points, minutes, triples and assists while tying his mark with nine rebounds
– After turning the ball over 26 times in the opener, the Aces did much better, finishing with nine turnovers at XU
– Evan Kuhlman, playing 20 minutes from home, scored a career-high 12 points
– UE was credited with an assist on 20 out of 27 makes
One of the top scorers at the Division III level during his career, Shea Feehan showed that he can do it at any level as he completed the opening weekend with 16 points per game. He had a solid opener against the Fighting Illini, recording 12 points, 3 rebounds and 2 steals while going 4-8 from the floor. He upped his game at Xavier, setting his career mark with 20 points while shooting 6-of-15, 4-for-9 from outside and 4-5 from the line; he posted three assists and three rebounds. Feehan is the first UE player to average 16 PPG in his first two games with the program since Parrish Casebier averaged 18 PPG in his first two games in 1990; Casebier had 21 points at Miami Ohio before registering 15 at Ohio U.
An injury limited Marty Hill to just nine games last year, but he is healthy and playing at a high level in his senior campaign. Hill began the year with a career-high 13 points at Illinois and followed that up with 11 at Xavier. His top game last year was a 12-point outing against Oakland City.
Evansville attempted a total of 57 3-pointers in the first two games of the season, an average of 28.5 per game. In the game at Xavier, the Aces tied a school record with 17 made triples. Since 3-pointer was adopted by the NCAA in 1986, the most UE has averaged in a season was 21.5 in the 2004-05 campaign. Between 2003 and 2007, the Aces averaged at least 18.5 triples per game in each of that four season. In the other 28 seasons of playing with the 3-point line, the Aces never took more than 17.1 per game.
“They (KWC) shoot the long ball very well and have a lot of talent over there. It is most important that it is about us,†McCarty added. “We have to make them adapt to the way we want to play and make sure that we take care of our end – getting back in transition and controlling the tempo of the game.â€
USI To Celebrate Lighting A Tradition With Holiday Festivities
The University of Southern Indiana Student Alumni Association is set to host the 28th annual Lighting a Tradition at 6 p.m. Monday, November 19 on The Quad of the USI campus. The event is open to students, faculty, staff, retirees and the community.
The USI holiday season commences with the ceremonial lighting of thousands of synchronously twinkling holiday lights neatly strung through the trees surrounding The Quad at 6 p.m. Several former and a number of new traditions will take place at this year’s event, including train rides, cookie decorating, horse and carriage rides, photos with Santa, a hot chocolate bar and, new this year, a festive holiday carnival village.
At 5:30 p.m., guests can come early and visit the festive holiday carnival village in Rice Plaza, located just outside the University Center (UC). The event will include carnival games, giveaways and more. Train rides and horse and carriage rides will begin at 6:30 p.m. Guests can warm up in the UC with a hot chocolate, snap a picture with Santa or decorate holiday cookies.
This holiday season, the Student Alumni Association will be selling long sleeve Lighting a Tradition t-shirts the week before the event inside the UC. Shirts will be $17, and all profits will go to an Evansville charity. You can also stop by the Alumni Relations & Volunteer USI office to purchase a t-shirt The Student Alumni Association will also be accepting new or gently used hats and scarves to be donated at the event to a local shelter.
Lighting a Tradition is open to all who wish to celebrate the season. For additional information, contact Caylin Blockley, assistant director of Alumni Relations and Volunteer USI, at 812-465-1215 or cjblockley@usi.edu.