don't be like ballard: vote

it didn't seem right to post anything non–colts-related yesterday, especially after that close loss at the end. but it's a new day: the day before the election.

the hot rumor circulating the blogs this weekend is true: greg ballard did not vote back in 2003. the man wants to be mayor, but four years ago he couldn't even be arsed with voting for mayor. that really shows a commitment to the city and its problems, don't you think? i guess we'll see how many of his supporters decide to emulate their hero by staying home tomorrow, and how many one-up their man and actually vote.

but let me say this, my fellow hoosiers: if you're smart enough and plugged-in enough to be reading this blog, you should definitely get out there and vote. if for no other reason, do it so that when you run for future office, future wilson allens won't be able to dig up your voting record and leak it to the press.

in other happenings...

star editor dennis ryerson printed a column about the rishawn biddle situation. there's not much new in the column; even the apparent refusal to refer to biddle by name is not new. and while it addresses complaints about biddle's firing, it does not address the most important questions. namely, rishawn's ramblings apparently did not have to go through an editor before they got posted to expresso, as other star blogs do. why not? and how much responsibility does the star share for creating the environment where rishawn could post whatever nonsense he wanted without a filter, and for hiring an editorial writer who had previously been fired for shoddy work?

also, abdul has a post titled was rishawn wrong? if anything, abdul's post demonstrates exactly what was wrong about rishawn's post, as abdul is able to make pretty much the same argument as rishawn did, but without being offensive or pulling out his thesaurus of 19th century racial slurs.

in answer to abdul's question, i again have to say yes. black politicians face far more scrutiny than white politicians do, simply because they're black. there are tons of non-black politicians in indiana who behave horribly, but people don't group them together and wonder whether, for example, white politicians in lawrence reinforce stereotypes of white people as being rich, amoral, stuck-up assholes. plus, the fact that abdul himself can off the top of his head list a half-dozen black marion-county democrats who he has no problems with suggests that there isn't anything uniquely bad about black politicians or even marion county black politicians; there are simply fewer of them than white politicians and they get far more scrutiny.

beyond that, the rishawn saga has pretty much boiled over. it did hit the AP wire and a few national blogs, but for the most part didn't get a lot of national attention, and locally everyone has gone back to talking about the election. so things could've gone a lot worse for rishawn, but he's probably not breathing any sighs of relief, either.

update: i almost forgot... i wanted to mention the parallels between what i was saying about about black politicians facing more scrutiny and the recent national discussion about whether hillary clinton "played the gender card" recently. (of course, it doesn't matter whether hillary did play such a card, only whether the media decides she did, which they apparently have. but that's an unrelated point.)

black politicians face far more scrutiny than whites, but they can't easily acknowledge this in public or they get accused of playing the race card. similarly, part of the animus against hillary clearly is that she is a female, but she can't really come out and say that without the media freaking out. read garance's tapped post about what she calls "the secondary conversation" for more. ¶