CARMEL – Police stop a driver westbound on 96th Street in Hamilton County. They find less than an ounce of marijuana and this driver in arrested, complete with a stay in the county jail, facing thousands of dollars of legal bills, court costs, fines and a criminal record. Police stop an eastbound driver on 96th Street in Marion County. They find a doobie on the console. He is not arrested, faces no charges, legal bills, court costs or fines. That is the evolving state of marijuana prohibition in Indiana. It's like swiss cheese, with a big hole in the middle and others likely to form in college and border cities. Acting prosecutor Marion County Ryan Mears, then an unelected official, abruptly announced that his office will no longer prosecute marijuana possession cases of under one ounce, which was quickly reinforced by Sheriff Kerry Forestal. Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Chief Bryan Roach said his force would still make marijuana arrests. But after Mears dismissed nearly 150 possession cases, it's only a matter of time before the arrests stop. The cops I know aren't big fans of doing the paperwork, only to watch an offender go free.

MICHIGAN CITY – In the wake of the new terror afflicting our schools, our Walmarts, our malls, our nightclubs, it appears we no longer have members of Congress and senators. In the House, we have cephalopods, elected every two years. In the Senate, squids, elected every six. The cephalopod is of the political molluscan class, characterized by bilateral body symmetry and a prominent head known to quip “I approve of this message” and “I have an A rating from the NRA” and a set of muscular hydrostats, modified from the primitive molluscan foot. These creatures that haunt the U.S. Capitol, a variety of K Street salons and a very occasional Hoosier town hall do have abilities. They can open containers with screw caps or, like the Hawaiian bobtail squid, can bury themselves in the sand, leaving only their eyes exposed. Our congressional cephalopods need to grow spines. U.S. Rep. Jim Banks reacted to our American Bloody August (53 murdered by AR-15s in Texas and Ohio) by suggesting that the appropriate response to this ongoing domestic terror is to enforce the laws we already have. Somehow that seems not to be working, thoughts and prayers notwithstanding. U.S. Rep. Larry Bucshon suggested that background checks  – even expanded background checks that 90% of Americans want  – wouldn’t have prevented the mayhem in El Paso, Odessa, Midland and Dayton. Our Midland/Odessa mass shooter did flunk a background check, but then went on to acquire his weapon through a private-party sale. U.S. Rep. Greg Pence called himself a “staunch 2nd Amendment defendant,” but said in Muncie he is open to compromise, though he reminds us, “If you read the second part of the 2nd Amendment, it’s to protect us from the government.”

INDIANAPOLIS  – Perhaps on Tuesday, Aug. 20, we’ll find private citizen Dan Coats at Wrigley Field, taking in the Cubs-Giants game. Or, perhaps, he’ll wait for that day game on Aug. 23 against the Washington Nationals. We can hope that this Cubs fan, Hoosier patriot, who never lost an election, who was willing to walk away from the money-grubbing political swamp at least twice, will treat himself to a beer, a brat and sing “Take me out to the ballgame” soon.Dan Coats deserves it. But the trade-off for the rest of us is that of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” or the warning from David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” remake: “Be afraid, be very afraid." When Dan Coats leaves as director of national intelligence on Aug. 15, the last of the “grown-ups” from Donald Trump’s White House will be gone. Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster had been the “guard rails” for the unpredictable Trump, who presides over an administration filled by “acting” secretaries and directors. These actors now toil with a side-glance for every presidential whim. Screw up and, well, “You’re fired.” Supposedly taking Coats’ place will be U.S. Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas, a former small town mayor and district attorney who claims to have prosecuted terrorism cases, though there is no evidence that he did. He is a political defender of Trump, who has auditioned on Fox News, which is now the proving ground for economic advisors, United Nations ambassadors, and White House and Foggy Bottom communicators.

INDIANAPOLIS - Ross Perot famously said, “Eagles don’t flock. You have to find them one at a time.” It was a prescient comment from the first billionaire to run for president, coming a few years before Steve Forbes and some 34 years before Donald J. Trump. In late spring 1992, Perot actually led President George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton in the polls, giving us a glimpse of a populist movement with widespread traction. Writing then for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, I got a ground floor view of this movement which for several weeks prompted many of us to think he could actually win. The Perotistas had set up an office in a Fort Wayne strip mall. It was an utter beehive, with volunteers buzzing about, breaking Allen County into "zippies" (i.e., zip-codes) to organize a political movement. Aided by the fledgling radio talk star Rush Limbaugh, the Perotistas were ticked off about what they perceived to be bad trade deals like NAFTA, with Perot saying in his Texas nasal twang that the "giant sucking sound" we’d be hearing were jobs headed to Mexico.