Hoosiers: Indiana’s conservative Gov. Mike Pence gave Ted Cruz a tepid endorsement for president, just days before the state’s primary. Pence said, “I’m not against anybody, but I will be voting for Ted Cruz.” One of CNN’s analysts said, “I’ve seen more enthusiastic endorsements for Brussels sprouts.”

It may too little too late, anyway. Trump is up more than 5 percent in the Indiana polls and it’s already almost a mathematical impossibility for Cruz to win nomination on the first convention vote.

Cruz is fighting, though. He said in an interview, “The Trump campaign operates in a fact-free environment. They’re utterly divorced from reality.”

Trump has his eyes on a bigger target: Hillary Clinton. He tweeted yesterday, “Crooked Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most dishonest person to have ever run for the presidency, is also one of the all time great enablers!”

Permawar: The Pentagon says the US air strike on an Afghan hospital last October was not a war crime, but 16 members of the military are being disciplined for errors of judgment and violating the rules of engagement. A series of errors that included targeting the wrong building and incorrect orders resulted in the attack by a US AC-130 gunship that killed 42 people.

Thanks for the Meme-ories: The Chancellor of the University of California, Davis was suspended this past week pending an investigation on a variety of accusations, including that she squandered $175,000 to scrub internet searches of references to the University’s infamous pepper spray incident.

In 2011, university police Lt. John Pike was filmed spraying the faces of student protesters peacefully sitting on a walkway. Within hours, internet photo memes appeared featuring Pike inserted into famous images, pepper-spraying The Last Supper, the Continental Congress, the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, and the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

It happened during the watch of Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, who wanted the incident expunged from internet memory. But the images are still there and now, if you Google “UC Davis suspended,” up comes the name Linda Katehi.

The Obituary Page: Willie Williams, the first black chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who was appointed after the 1992 riots, died of pancreatic cancer at age 72. Williams was plucked from the Philadelphia PD to fix the LAPD, but he had a rough time. He was a black outsider in a department that at the time was racist and insular.

He didn’t help himself. He was discovered to have accepted free hotel rooms in Las Vegas because he was a big gambler. Unseemly behavior for a chief of police.

Strike Three: National League’s batting champion Dee Gordon drove in the tying run for the Florida Marlins’ Thursday night win over the Dodgers then woke up yesterday to an 80 games suspension for using performance enhancing drugs. Gordon hit .333 for the Marlins last year, 61 points better than his average with his previous team, the Dodgers. Needless to say, it was suspicious, but the team rewarded Gordon worth a five-year $50 million contract. Admitting guilt without actually admitting guilt, Gordon said in a statement, “Though I did not do so knowingly, I have been informed that test results showed I ingested something that contained prohibited substances.”

Gridiron Blues: The talk of football fans this week was the sudden fall of 6-5, 310 pound Mississippi lineman Laremy Tunsil from a potential #1 draft pick to #13, losing him millions of dollars in salary and bonuses.

Minutes before the draft began, someone who had hacked Tunsil’s social media posted a video of him smoking marijuana through a bong attached to a gas mask. Then they posted text messages of Tunsil asking a coach for money to help pay his mother’s bills. Tunsil admitted it was all true.

Last year an accused rapist was the #1 draft pick, but this year a dozen NFL teams appeared to be horrified that a college student smoked marijuana and was so impoverished that he needed money.

-30-