Time Changed -- Curious Inklings

I enjoyed your thoughts on the daylight saving time clock changing.

Sadly, moving back to Kokomo won't help anymore. As of April 2006, the whole state of Indiana now observes daylight saving time with the rest of the country.

Unfortunately, it's still hard to figure out what time it is in Indiana. Indiana's legislators and governor, and the bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Transportation, saw fit to leave Indiana as the narrowest state split between two time zones. The next larger state split between two zones is about three times wider than Indiana. I believe Indiana is the only state originally well within the confines of a single time zone (central time) to be split into two zones by the federal government.

Most states have gone the other way. E.g., Ohio was originally split down the middle between eastern and central but now lies entirely in eastern.

Most of Indiana now lies in the eastern zone. If the Indianapolis clocks read noon at midday today, the sunrise would be 4:37 am and the sunset 7:23 pm. If we had sixty minutes of daylight shifted from morning to evening (the nominal goal of daylight saving time), sunrise/set today would be 5:37 am and 8:23 pm -- plenty of time for after-work chores and recreation before dusk at 9 pm. Instead, because of the lunacy of putting the majority of the state in the eastern zone, we get a sunrise/set of 6:20 am and 9:05 pm -- 102 minutes shifted from morning to evening -- and it doesn't really get dark until 9:30 to 10:00.

Bill Starr
Columbus, Indiana
Tue, 30 May 2006, 7:37 pm EDT

Time Changed -- Curious Inklings

Theodore Roosevelt on immigration

Timely words from the past for the U.S. today.

From More Liberty, 23 April 2006.

"The following is one of my favorite thoughts on the issue of immigration. It's from President Theodore Roosevelt in a letter to the American Defense Society in 1919, 10 years after his presidency."

--Lou Dobbs, CNN Commentator

"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...

There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

--Theodore Roosevelt, 1919

Congressman John J. Duncan, Jr.