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In this corner, John Livengood. In the other, Grant Monahan.
Whether Hoosiers can buy carryout beer on Sundays may well come down to who has the more powerful lobbying muscle: liquor stores or groceries and pharmacies.
The grocery and pharmacy retailers plan an all-out push for Sunday sales during next year’s legislative session. But liquor stores don’t see much advantage for them.
A Sunday sales fight would again pit the liquor stores against the retailers. For years, liquor store owners have fought to increase regulation over the retailers, who have largely been successful in resisting it.
Livengood is president of the Indiana Association of Beverage Retailers, the liquor store group. Monahan heads the Indiana Retail Council and is the spokesman for Hoosiers for Beverage Choices, which says it has gathered 13,000 names on an online petition seeking Sunday sales. Both are longtime veterans of legislative lobbying efforts.
Groceries and pharmacies are already staffed on Sundays, so any new revenue they would pick up on Sundays would come at little additional expense. Liquor stores would have to spend more on wages for Sunday staffing and might see Saturday night sales drop.
This could be one of the more interesting issues in the session that begins in January.
Supporters of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jill Long Thompson will gather at Las Lomas Mexican restaurant, 1535 N. Coliseum Blvd., to watch tonight’s debate involving Long Thompson, Gov. Mitch Daniels and Andrew Horning, the Libertarian candidate.
The debate will be shown live on WFWA-TV, Channel 39, at 8 p.m.
Daniels and Long Thompson are in a statistical dead heat for the governor’s office, a poll last week from the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis TV station WTHR showed. The poll showed Daniels leading 46 percent to 42 percent – with a 4 percent margin of error and 12 percent of poll respondents undecided.
A story on Time magazine’s Web site highlights Indiana’s newfound status as a potential toss-up state in the presidential election.
“The key factor driving the desire for political change here is economic pain – even in traditional Republican bastions like Elkhart County, in the state’s northeast corner, where the closure of several RV plants has pushed the unemployment rate to 9.3 percent,” the article says. “Even incumbent Republican governor Mitch Daniels is presenting himself as an agent of change. …
“McCain campaign’s structure here is comparatively weak. Rather than opening dedicated field offices, the campaign has bundled operations in county Republican headquarters that also manage outreach for Gov. Daniels’ re-election bid. In Perry County, and certainly much of the state, McCain is hardly visible against the ‘Farmers for Obama’ signs attached to scores of trees along two-lane roads. Or the barrage of Obama TV ads. Indiana Republicans proudly say they don’t need to pay for advertising because the Democrats are merely playing catch up.”
